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Since the Russian military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine began in late February, there is a common misperception that the Western left is “split” over the conflict in its response.

Indeed, it is true there has been infighting within organizations such as the U.S.-based Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) between its “International Committee”—whose official statement rightly faulted NATO enlargement for “setting the stage” for Russia’s actions in Ukraine—and local branches of the group which released their own takes distancing themselves from the former.

Similar sectarian splinters have occurred among the U.S. Green Party over the issue with the Howie Hawkins-led wing on one side endorsing sending lethal aid to Ukraine and its peace action committee on the other.

However, all of them fell in line behind the corporate media in characterizing the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an “invasion” by Moscow to be condemned. For what the late Edward S. Herman called the “cruise missile Left,” the 14,000 ethnic Russians killed in Donbass by the Ukrainian army since 2014 are “unworthy victims,” as Herman and Noam Chomsky defined the notion in Manufacturing Consent. With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of the so-called left wing in the United States and Western Europe have gotten Ukraine totally wrong.

Edward S. Herman, co-author of Manufacturing Consent. [Source: rollingstone.com]

International relations scholar John Mearsheimer warned for years that NATO expansion threatened Moscow’s legitimate security interests and would likely lead to a hot war in Ukraine. Then again, Joe Biden himself acknowledged as much as a senator back in 1997.

Now that the U.S. president has openly called for regime change in Moscow, one wonders what new excuses NATO apologists will invent to maintain that the eastward encroachment on Russia’s borders is benevolent. Still, the source of the widespread misunderstanding today can be traced much further back in history—long before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.

In the lead-up to the escalation of hostilities, many on the Left made reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech formally recognizing the Novorussian republics. They pointed to Putin’s blaming the Soviet policy on the Ukrainian national question for the current crisis as evidence that the Russian head of state is a reactionary and, therefore, Moscow’s actions unjust.

A recent article in Jacobin magazine, the unofficial flagship publication of the Harringtonite reformist tendency in the U.S. [Michael Harrington was a social democrat who was anti-communist], continued this line of thought by distorting early Soviet history. In particular, the modestly self-professed “leading voice of the American left” sought to historically sever the ancestral relations between Russified communists in Donbass over a century ago from the latter-day militants in the Eastern Ukrainian republics.

Never mind that it was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the largest political opposition to Putin, which first proposed to the State Duma back in January that the Kremlin should recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

Russian Parliament in process of voting to approve recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk Republics—something first proposed by the Russian communists. [Source: euronews.com]

It is impossible to understand the struggle between the two countries and the Left’s misapprehension without putting it in the context of the former Soviet Union and its demise. Leaving aside his own politics, Putin’s assertion that the Bolsheviks carved up territory of the former Russian Empire to form a Ukrainian state is a historical fact.

That this controversial decision determined the course of the next century of events from the Second World War through Ukraine’s independence to the current flare-up is also valid.

To its credit, one of the legacies of the USSR and its ethnic federalism was that it greatly reduced the frequently violent conflicts between the more than 120 different oppressed nationalities of the old Tsarist autocracy. With that being said, it would be a disservice to the socialist movement in failing to recognize that mistakes were made by the Soviet leadership over the national question. More importantly, what many self-described leftists would like us to forget is that there were other prominent Marxists at the time who were at odds with Lenin over Ukraine’s right to statehood, chiefly among them Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

As the Slovene provocateur Slavoj Žižek once noted, it is a “historical irony” that Ukrainian nationalists have been tearing down statues of Lenin, considering that not only did the USSR redraw Ukraine’s borders and extend its territory several times—including the mostly Russian-speaking Crimea which was transferred by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 after nearly 200 years as Russian land—it was during the first decade of the Soviet era when Ukrainian culture, identity and language was revitalized and promoted by the state. Putin also called attention to this paradox when he mocked Kyiv’s “decommunization” laws, pointing out that, if it were not for communism, there would be no modern Ukraine.

Despite the fact that the mother tongue of most Ukrainians was Russian, the local dialect only began to be taught in schools when the Soviet education system was introduced. Having said that, the choice to establish a Ukrainian state did not come without considerable debate among the Marxist school beforehand.

Prior to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, there were many concerns among the Russian revolutionaries as to whether the calls for self-determination by the heterogenous demographics which composed the Tsarist Empire would make an eventual Soviet entity impossible to govern.

The Bolsheviks hoped to appease minority ethnic groups by formulating a policy which in principle offered autonomy and sovereignty but a form of national rights that did not take precedence over socialist internationalism—or as Lenin called it, a “voluntary union of nations.”

In The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, the Marxist revolutionary leader explained the policy of indigenization (korenizatsiya) or nativization which sought to integrate the many non-Russian nationalities into the Soviet system:

“The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly “unpleasant” for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own” nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.”

Soviet poster in Ukrainian on indigenization. [Source: lsvsx.livejournal.com]

Following the October Revolution, Luxemburg argued in her polemic that the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination should be on the condition that progressive orientations would be in control of the newly formed nation-states.

Lenin disagreed and upheld the position that the right to sovereignty should be unconditional, even if reactionary forces were to take power. Upon Moscow’s exit from World War I, the Baltic states gained their first period of independence and the Finnish Civil War resulted in a Red defeat.

Vladimir Lenin, left, Rosa Luxemburg, right. [Source: links.org.au]

Meanwhile, Luxemburg’s native Poland declared its autonomous status despite opposition from her own SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) faction on the basis of a commitment to proletarian internationalism. Part of her pragmatic reasoning was that the ex-Tsarist colonies were instantly pulled into imperialist orbit once they seceded, culminating in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.

Her 1918 essay on The Russian Revolution is more well-known for its criticism of the one-party rule of the Bolsheviks, but its third chapter examines the nationalities question:

“The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact that the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or—something which was really implicit in this slogan—the disintegration of Russia… One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. While they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the “right of self-determination” inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.”

In retrospect, whether or not Lenin’s stance was correct and Luxemburg’s wrong is a matter of debate, though the consensus seems to be the former on the left, particularly when applied to the many anti-colonial and national liberation struggles in the global south. So too is the matter of whether Ukraine had the right to become a separate country from Russia, albeit both Eastern Slavic nations along with Belarus evolved from the medieval Kievan Rus state and they are essentially the same ethnic group. Nevertheless, what is more pertinent is that Luxemburg was ominously accurate in her assessment of the particularly dangerous character of Ukrainian nationalism. After all, Lenin died in 1924 and did not live to witness the Great Patriotic War and Ukrainian collaboration with the Axis powers.

Ukrainians greet German soldiers in western Ukraine in 1941. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Then again, the early warning signs were all there in the many pogroms against tens of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians by Ukrainian ultra-rightists under the leadership of Symon Petliura who tried to create a racially homogenous state during the Soviet-Ukrainian War (1917-1921).

Historically, Ukraine’s independence movement began as part of the broader extremist coalition which became European fascism and its defeat only further radicalized its exiled right-wing émigrés during the interwar period, eventually leading to the founding in Vienna of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. A decade earlier, Luxemburg had forewarned that placation of Ukrainian ultranationalism would serve as a counterrevolutionary call to arms and fragment Ukraine:

“Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.”

Lenin remained unconvinced and proceeded with the policy. In hindsight, Luxemburg appears clairvoyant. Two decades later when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, many Ukrainians did not view the Wehrmacht as conquerors but liberators and more than a quarter of a million local quislings were recruited from ultranationalist organizations by the Third Reich to participate in the mass murder of Poles, Jews, Roma and other so-called undesirables.

Those same far-right terrorist forces under Stepan Bandera’s command in the OUN continued a violent insurgency against the Soviets during the Cold War with the covert support of Western intelligence agencies in Project AERODYNAMIC. Central Intelligence Agency documents verify that the CIA sponsored Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Bandera and Mykola Lebed in order to “exploit nationalist cultural and other dissident tendencies in Ukraine” and “exploit the minority nationality question in the Soviet Union.” A declassified CIA document from 1953 states:

“The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized.”

The Banderovtsi were ultimately defeated in the late 1950s but Ukraine was never truly de-Nazified, as Khrushchev made yet another disastrous blunder in allowing many Ukrainians deported during the Stalin years to repatriate while releasing others from imprisonment.

Right-wing nationalism and anti-Russian sentiment remained underground for several decades until its reappearance when the USSR dissolved and would later become one of the biggest factors in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the Maidan ten years later. [CIA agitation was also of course a factor].

Modern Ukraine itself had grown out of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, and Imperial Russia to become a multinational state with a significant minority population of Russian speakers.

When Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, the nationality question was kept under control by the fact that Soviet citizenship was not restricted by ethnic identity and all Ukrainians were citizens of the Soviet Union.

Immediately after Kyiv declared its independence in 1991, ethno-nationalism resurfaced just as it did in nearly every ex-communist country in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia to more than three decades of frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Once the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the West began to absorb all of its former signatories into NATO, reneging on the agreement made between Mikhail Gorbachev and then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker who promised that it would not move “one-inch to the east.”

Once Eastern European countries started to pursue integration into NATO and the European Union, Boris Yeltsin signaled that the Russian Federation’s long-term aspiration was to eventually join the alliance and superstate as well. Even in the first term of Putin’s incumbency, Moscow naively continued to hope that it could one day be accepted into the Atlanticist and European projects.

By 2004, NATO had acceded eleven additional countries since the end of the Cold War, but it was not until three years later, at the Munich Security Conference, when Putin finally challenged NATO’s continuous extension eastward and from that point on became a pariah in the West.

Even though Ukraine’s induction into the transatlantic alliance was opposed by France and Germany in 2008, the possibility of Kyiv’s eventual membership in the NATO bloc took center stage in souring relations with its neighbor. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up the rationale behind using Ukraine as a beachhead to attack Russia in his influential 1997 book The Grand Chessboard:

“Ukraine is a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country (means) Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

It all came to a head in 2014 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was thrust in the middle of the two competing spheres of influence. Faced with a choice between an EU Association Agreement which offered bilateral support in return for draconian austerity measures or a more favorable bailout loan from Russia, Yanukovych eventually accepted Putin’s offer.

Immediately, Western-backed mass protests in the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” began and within months he was removed in a parliamentary coup with Washington strategists handpicking his replacement. When it turned out that Brussels [EU} preferred the former professional boxer and current Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko to be his successor—instead of the U.S.’s choice—it was revealed in a controversial leaked phone call that Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, told U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, “Fuck the EU.”

Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt: “Fuck the EU.” [Source: eleventimezones.com]

This was not the only occasion when the former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney would divulge Washington’s dirty secrets. Speaking to the National Press Club inside the Beltway, Nuland bragged that the supposedly spontaneous pro-EU demonstrations in which she notoriously handed out cookies had actually been funded in part by the U.S. State Department. Or as then-President Obama put it, “we brokered a deal to a transition in power in Ukraine.”

Victoria Nuland with Pyatt behind her handing out cookies to Maidan Square demonstrators. [Source: csmonitor.com]

Yanukovych’s NATO-installed substitutes—former investment banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk and oligarchic chocolatier Petro Poroshenko—both advocated a nationalist agenda which included enacting legislation making Ukrainian the country’s sole official language and pressuring the Ukrainian Orthodox Church into severing ties with the Patriarch of Moscow. Current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has only deepened the stratification with the signing of indigenous people’s laws recognizing Crimean Tatars and other minorities at the exclusion of ethnic Russians.

These steps, along with the emboldening of neo-Nazism, divided the country on ethnic lines and set off the bloody conflict in Donbass which is native to a significant Russian ethnolinguistic community. Threatened by the Banderite regime’s discriminatory policies and genocidal neo-fascist militias, the people of Novorussia sought protection from the Motherland. Since then, Kyiv and the separatists both agreed to a ceasefire in the 2015 Minsk Agreements to which the post-Maidan regime has consistently failed to adhere.

With the peace process undermined by the far right—including the Azov battalion—and Western military aid, the likelihood of a resolution to the conflict dwindled. If there was ever to be an end to the ongoing ethnic cleansing and war crimes in the Donbass region, a Russian intervention became almost inevitable.

For eight years, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk lived through a perpetual state of war as the NATO powers refused to provide Moscow with any security guarantee that Ukraine would not re-nuclearize or become a member state.

In the meantime, the Western yellow press has portrayed a war driven by complex historical developments as a Manichean dichotomy of a Russian bear picking on its little brother. Without much distinction, many on the so-called Left has drawn a false equivalence between the two sides.

While Putin is certainly a conservative, there is a magnitude of difference between Moscow and Kyiv where in the former the Communist Party is the second-largest political organization which urged the Kremlin to recognize the pro-Russian breakaway oblasts, and the latter in which the Communist Party is banned and fascists openly serve in parliament.

It should be acknowledged that there are many parts of Putin’s historical analysis which are incorrect, starting with his sweeping statements concerning the formation of Ukraine and incognizance of the connection between revived ultranationalism and the reinstitution of free enterprise. However, rebuke of those errors means nothing coming from the Western Left which only lends tacit support to NATO when it turns reality on its head to portray the alliance’s confrontation with Moscow as an “inter-imperial rivalry.”

In order to understand why this is false, we should turn to Lenin who in 1920 reformulated the pre-industrial, traditional definition of imperialism into categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” nations:

“That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.”

In the context of U.S. global hegemony, the Russian Federation would definitely fall into the oppressed nation distinction and still occupies the geopolitical space once filled by the former Eastern Bloc when it supported the movements of Third World national liberation. Although post-Soviet Russia has undeniably returned to the international stage, it remains a relatively weak capitalist country since the neoliberal “shock therapy” of the 1990s.

Those suffering from Putin derangement syndrome selectively omit that the Russian statesman acknowledges that the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy and that Ukraine has only become the poorest country in Europe since the restoration of capitalism, during which, on the advice and encouragement of U.S. advisors, Russia’s most valuable assets and natural resources (which belonged to the Russian people) were privatized, plundered, and “sold” for virtually nothing to Yeltsin’s cronies, who became today’s oligarchs.

Oddly enough, modern Ukraine itself would never have been established if not for Lenin’s rethinking of imperialism and the Russian Empire as a “prison house of nationalities” which colonized and subjugated oppressed nations.

Motivated by colonial guilt over actions taken by the Tsars, the Bolsheviks partitioned new boundaries within the communist state so that marginalized groups could exercise self-rule. Putin takes issue with the Soviets because, when these lines were created, they permitted a large geographical distribution of Russian speakers who found themselves suddenly stateless as soon as the USSR crumbled. Yet the faux-Left which misrepresents his words fails to mention this part of the address and instead zeroes in on the Russian President’s criticism of Lenin and his claim that modern Ukraine was founded by the Bolsheviks arbitrarily without the permission of its inhabitants.

Admittedly, Putin does leave out many historical details in which multiple quasi-governments were declared during the Ukrainian War of Independence. These included the nationalist Ukrainian People’s Republic set up in Kyiv after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its follow-up the Second Hetmanate or “Ukrainian State,” and the Kharkiv-based Ukrainian Soviet Republic government in the east which appealed to Moscow for military support against its rivals.

However, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was not the only communist state-like formation at the time—there was also an Odessa Soviet Republic pseudo-state as well as a Donetsk Soviet Republic. This oversight makes Putin’s conclusion that the mostly Russian-populated Donetsk Basin was dictatorially added to Soviet Ukraine incomplete. In fact, historical records show that Lenin was at one point in favor of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic remaining independent from the Ukrainian SSR and respected its territorial integrity.

The option to incorporate the Donbass was only taken because the province did not wish to remain secluded and vulnerable after its previous occupation by Ukrainian nationalists in collaboration with the Central Powers.

The region was also an industrial hub and, without it, Soviet Ukraine would have been an agrarian-based society, so it was an economic as well as a political decision, not simply an autocratic decree by Lenin. As it happens, the present-day self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic considers itself the descendant to the short-lived proto-state of 1918.

1921 Soviet poster: “Donbass Is the Heart of Russia.” [Source: istorya.ru]

While there was no referendum to include Donbass in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks introduced the most democratic structures the one-time Tsarist territory had ever experienced in its history. Where Putin’s point would be more applicable as an instance when the Soviets did actually transfer Russophone territory without the consent of its people was when Khrushchev gifted the Crimean peninsula to his native Ukraine. Even so, it was not the abolition of the Crimean Autonomous Republic in 1954 that led to the current schism but the fall of the USSR which Putin fails to identify as the real cause of ethnic tensions between Galicia, or western Ukraine, and Donbass.

Above all, it was the removal of the Soviet policy of the “Friendship of Peoples” and the Soviet of Nationalities chamber which eliminated the guarantee of equal representation of minorities.

The reinstatement of the free market did not just make Ukraine impoverished as Putin concedes but was also what opened up political space for the Ukrainian ultranationalism of the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan which had been kept in check under communism. After all, few remember that, in March 1991, more than 70% of the Ukrainian population voted to preserve the Soviet confederation and to remain in one country with Russia before capitalism was forced upon them, an inconvenient truth to the narratives of both the West and Putin alike.

Putin’s nationalism often overlaps in interests with his communist political opponents in terms of geopolitics but just as frequently diverges. For example, he regards the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a national humiliation. While the peace agreement between the Bolsheviks and Central Powers did cede a large amount of Russian imperial land, the negotiations were supported by the majority of Russians as the communists rose to power on the slogan of “peace, bread and land” and had to deliver on their promise to the Russian people which the provisional government betrayed after the February Revolution. Moreover, much of the area that was surrendered was later regained following World War II, including the Baltic states which rejoined the USSR despite having previously been colonized by Tsardom.

Borders drawn up in 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. [Source: wikipedia.org]

And what is the tragedy of the execution of the Romanov family compared to the millions of Russian peasants who Nicholas II sent to their deaths in World War I? Putin seems to forget that the needless imperial bloodbath was what propelled the success of the Russian Revolution to begin with. The reigning Russian leader is also just as seemingly unaware that Lenin did not reject Russian nationalism outright as the mainstream Left critics of his speech. To distinguish Soviet patriotism from the reactionary monarchist Black Hundreds, Lenin wrote in On the National Pride of the Great Russians:

“Let us, Great-Russian Social-Democrats, also try to define our attitude to this ideological trend. It would be unseemly for us, representatives of a dominant nation in the far east of Europe and a goodly part of Asia, to forget the immense significance of the national question—especially in a country which has been rightly called the “prison of the peoples,” and particularly at a time when, in the far east of Europe and in Asia, capitalism is awakening to life and self-consciousness a number of “new” nations, large and small; at a moment when the tsarist monarchy has called up millions of Great Russians and non-Russians, so as to “solve” a number of national problems in accordance with the interests of the Council of the United Nobility and of the Guchkovs, Krestovnikovs, Dolgorukovs, Kutlers and Rodichevs.

Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists. We take pride in the resistance to these outrages put up from our midst, from the Great Russians; in that midst having produced Radishchev, the Decembrists and the revolutionary commoners of the seventies; in the Great-Russian working class having created, in 1905, a mighty revolutionary party of the masses; and in the Great-Russian peasantry having begun to turn towards democracy and set about overthrowing the clergy and the landed proprietors.”

Lenin distinguished what he considered socialist patriotism from bourgeois nationalism and its promotion by the Soviet state was not confined to the time after his death as it is widely portrayed. Constantly likening Putin to Stalin, the contemporary pseudo-left considers the post-Lenin period a revision of original Soviet federalism, when they fail to remember that Lenin supervised his Georgian-born Commissar of Nationalities in the writing of Marxism and the National Question where Stalin provided the Marxist-Leninist definition of ‘nation’ itself in unambiguous terms:

“A nation is a historically originated stable community of people, originated on the basis of a common language, common territory, joint economic life and common mental characteristics revealing themselves in a common culture.”

Regardless of whether, if Ukraine constitutes a real nation per se distinct from Russia, Putin deserves credit for delivering a thoughtful speech providing historical context, however imperfect, on its formation in order to communicate to the Russian people the reasons for the special operation, something Western leaders seldom if ever do to their constituents when they go to war.

It is little wonder why no corporate outlet would dare broadcast the speech in full, for it might remind Americans how incompetent their own politicians are. His remarks expanded upon a lengthy op-ed “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” authored last year which is worth examining as a companion piece.

[Source: ne-np.facebook.com]

While he may not fall on the left of the political spectrum, Putin’s Bonapartism arguably saved the Russian state from complete collapse by re-nationalizing the energy sector after the economic genocide of the Yeltsin era. This is the main reason the former KGB officer consistently polls at more than 70% approval in Russia, a figure that has only risen since the start of the intervention in Ukraine. It is true that Putin has many faults, but the misrepresentation of his words by the pro-NATO Left is more worthy of condemnation.

Rosa Luxemburg’s and Putin’s critiques of Lenin may be a century apart but they converge in one crucial respect. They both assert that the Russian revolutionary declaration that all nations have the right to self-determination was excessive. By endorsing self-determination, the Bolsheviks ensured the outcome seen now in the numerous ethno-territorial conflicts in post-Soviet states.^[1]

It is worth noting that Lenin broke from Karl Marx in his emphasis on nationality, though the latter’s position evolved during his final years regarding the Irish question where, even though the Irish nationalist movement was not necessarily socialist, Marx came to regard it as progressive, prompting attacks from the Russian anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin.

That Bakunin’s teachings influenced the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, whose forces were accused of anti-semitic pogroms during the Russian Civil War, perhaps might explain why contemporary anarchists often take the de facto side of Ukrainian nationalism in the current conflict whose brand is anything but progressive.

Some on the U.S. left today are infected with such amateurishness.

Like their maturation on Irish republicanism, so too did Marx and Friedrich Engels later convert on the Polish question. On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg adamantly opposed Polish independence until her death and deviated from Marx and Engels on nationalism as much as Lenin, advocating socialist revolution and self-government for her country of origin but within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire.

More than a century after Luxemburg’s death, the German-naturalized revolutionary left behind a complicated legacy, one whose theoretical shortcomings in a denial of the need for revolutionary vanguardism in Western Europe may have contributed to her own murder by social fascists in the Spartacist uprising of the failed German Revolution. Nonetheless, Rosa’s unheeded premonition regarding the Ukrainian question still resonates today and revisiting her dialogue with Lenin can help the Western Left better grasp the difficult processes driving the bloodshed between peoples of a foreign land.

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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst based in New York City. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media and he is a frequent political commentator featured in Sputnik News and Press TV. Max can be reached at [email protected]

Notes

1. Although conversely conflicts might have been avoided by giving each ethnic area the equivalent of Commonwealth status and limited control of local affairs, as states have in the U.S. 

Featured image is from Kim Petersen

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In August 2016, a group of public health experts, policymakers and donors met in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center overlooking Lake Como. Their aim was ambitious: to agree on “bold global action” that would mark the “beginning of the end of the pandemic era”. In other words, they hoped to find which viruses might cause the next pandemic, and get a head start on developing vaccines and drugs.

Known as the Global Virome Project, the scheme was officially launched in February 2018. By 2019, it had appointed a board of directors and made the “transition to a legal and operational reality”, according to an email from its head. Yet when a pandemic did break out at the end of that year, instead of leaping into action the Global Virome Project fell silent. It made no announcements, issued no press releases, arranged no public events.

Today, its website is an online zombie. In the greatest pandemic in a century, caused by exactly the sort of novel emerging virus it was designed to predict and prevent, it lists just three publications on its website, one of which is a dead link and the others four and six-years-old. Its “in the news” page lists no article after April 2021. What happened?

Using embassy cables, emails released under freedom of information, and government reports, we have pieced together the history of this wide-ranging international collaborative project and how it vanished just when it was most needed.

The seeds of the project were sown between 2009 and 2019, when the US government funded a big push into virus hunting in wildlife in tropical regions through a programme called PREDICT. When this funding came to an end, the main players got together to seek private and charitable funding to continue the work. These included, from government, Dennis Carrol, director of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Division within the United States Agency for International Development; from academia, Jonna Mazet of the University of California at Davis, who had been director of the PREDICT project; from the non-profit world, Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who became treasurer of the new project; and from the private sector, Nathan Wolfe, founder of the DNA database firm Metabiota.

The first meeting of the GVP’s steering committee took place in Beijing in January 2017. George Fu Gao, the incoming head of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was quick out of the blocks with China’s contribution to the GVP, overseeing the rapid creation of the China National Virome Project. It was formed so quickly that by August 2017 Eddy Rubin, chief scientific officer at Metabiota, wrote: “The project appears to be moving faster than expected with a China component already funded and poised to generate data”.

However, as the GVP was preparing to launch, some scientists had misgivings: did the project even make sense?

As two Australian virologists told a reporter for the Atlantic, the work was “unlikely to be informative in predicting the next pandemic”. Spotting the one virus among millions that might cause a pandemic would make finding needles in haystacks look easy. “What you’re trying to predict is likely something that happens maybe once out of tens of billions of encounters, with one virus out of millions of potential viruses. You will lose your fight against the numbers,” said Jemma Geoghan and Ed Holmes.

Other virologists shared their doubts. “Making promises about disease prevention… that cannot be kept will only further undermine trust,” wrote Dr Holmes, in a joint article with Edinburgh University’s Andrew Rambaut and the Scripps Institute’s Kristian Andersen. “I still fail to see at this point how it’s going to better prepare the human race for the next infectious disease that jumps from animals to humans,” wrote Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy.

Nonetheless, ignoring these awkward objections, the GVP team pressed ahead with the project. It was formally launched in February 2018, with an article in Science magazine, authored by Carrol, Daszak, Wolfe, Gao and Mazet with four others. China was poised to play the leading role. “Funding has been identified to support an initial administrative hub, and fieldwork is planned to begin in the first two countries, China and Thailand, during 2018,” the article declared.

In a cable from September 2017, Ping Chen, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases office in the US embassy in Beijing, had reported that the China part of the project was being funded by grants from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s leading coronavirus virologist, was quoted in the cable as saying: “CAS has already allocated funding for GVP-related research”.

Wang Zhengwu, of the Department of International Affairs at CAS, was further quoted as saying “CAS is working on a process and mechanism to support Chinese scientists with backing from the Ministry of Sciences and Technology and The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for Global Virome Project type research”.

Sure enough in January 2018, Shi Zhengli received two research grants, one each from NSFC and CAS to study the risk of cross infection of humans by bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. It appears the Wuhan Institute had already been entrusted with the main work of the China National Virome Project.

In April 2018, confirming the link between this work and the GVP, a US embassy cable noted that “The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project.”

Meanwhile, in March 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance, WIV and others had submitted a joint proposal to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency.

It included a section in which the researchers detailed plans to introduce a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses to increase their ability to infect cells in the laboratory and make them easier to grow. This is the very sequence that has turned up in the virus causing Covid, and in no other SARS-like coronavirus.

The proposal, titled DEFUSE, was turned down by DARPA. Shortly after, however, a “Special Project” was initiated by the CAS with Shi Zhengli in charge for one of the subprojects. The scope largely corresponds and overlaps with the GVP and Project DEFUSE.

The goal was to “change the passive response situation of emerging infectious diseases to active monitoring and early warning”, “explore and identify pathogens with potential risks of infecting humans, studying their ability to invade different host cells and their replication ability in different host cells”, and “analyse the key molecules affecting its cross-species infection and its pathogenic mechanism”. In November 2018, at a conference in Bangkok, Hongying Li, the coordinator for the China National Virome Project, showed a slide of the “GVP viral database model”. It included “virus isolation”, the technical term for growing live viruses in the lab.

Some have therefore speculated that the unfunded DEFUSE project could have continued with funding from the CAS. In a recent Vanity Fair article, the prominent Pasteur Institute virologist Simon Wain-Hobson was quoted as saying that “it is possible the WIV would have wanted to copy what it viewed as cutting-edge science”.

The output of the GVP was intended to be a global database of all viruses collected, available to the world.

“I believe that our Chinese side can make our great contributions for the development of GVP database system and data portal by the support from China CDC and CAS,” George Fu Gao noted in an email.

[Dr. George Gao Fu has a professional relationship with Anthony Fauci, et al. He is an Oxford graduate. He was a participant in the October 201 Table Top Simulation]

But there was unease in the West about this. As a State Department cable put it:

“Who will own the samples that are collected from many countries? Where will they be analysed? Will all the GVP data be freely available to the public?”

Another US embassy cable noted: “Other countries… are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a “gatekeeper” for this information.” Eddy Rubin was more blunt: “There is a concern about data sharing if only China takes the lead.”

They were right to be concerned. By 17 July 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had built one of the world’s largest databases of bat and rodent viruses, holding more than 22,000 samples and data entries of pathogens. It has repeatedly refused to share this data with international scientists since the pandemic began. Some of those viruses were collected with funding from US taxpayer dollars, and some samples were collected from countries neighbouring China, such as Laos.

On 12 September 2019, this database was suddenly taken offline. The Institute has not published any details of the SARS-like viruses they were studying after 2016, claiming that people were trying to hack the database. This, of course, makes no sense: sharing data, as intended, makes hacking unnecessary.

Yet far from drawing back because of the data-sharing concerns, in November 2018, Dr Ping Chen of the US Embassy in Beijing sent an email to the National Institutes of Health in the United States detailing proposals for America to share the cost of China’s virus hunting projects. In the version obtained by Judicial Watch under Freedom of Information, most of the email has been redacted, as has most of an attached presentation from July 2019 by the Ecohealth Alliance entitled “Working Towards a China-led Virome project”. What is in these documents, prepared about a year before the pandemic broke out in the city with the most active contribution to the GVP, and caused by a virus of the kind being most actively studied by that project? It would be nice to know.

In a March 2019 article in the journal Biosafety and Health, Dr Geroge F. Gao drew attention to the extra risk of causing a pandemic by studying viruses in the laboratory: “genetic modification of pathogens, which may expand host range as well as increase transmission and virulence, may result in new risks for epidemics.” This was exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing to the viruses it was collecting in the wild: working with full-length infectious clones, manipulating their spike genes, creating “chimera” hybrids and testing their infectiousness in human cells and humanised mice.

In August 2019, Dr Gao spoke at length on a podcast, saying that part of the GVP would involve altering viruses in the lab:

“[In] GVP you might isolate some virus, you look at it and there is nothing to do with humans, however through adaptation, evolution, you might have some virus adapt to human beings, so as basic scientists you will do all these either in a lab or do the surveillance.”

For some reason, professional journalists have shown little appetite for investigating the GVP since the pandemic began, arguing that it was still just an idea, not yet in operation, which is true outside China. In a recent exchange on Twitter, for instance, Jon Cohen of Science magazine suggested that the GVP had not started as a data-collecting network before the pandemic hit. The independent data analyst Gilles Demaneuf responded that China forging ahead without an agreement about data sharing was a red flag that should call the existence of the GVP into question.

As for the China National Virome Project, almost nothing has been heard of it in the past two years, as if it never existed.

The Global Virome Project has also largely evaporated. Both were designed to predict and prevent the next pandemic, a task at which plainly they failed: the research was a year and a half in the making and provided no benefit when the Covid pandemic began. That this work might instead have caused the pandemic is a possibility that must be investigated.

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Matt Ridley is the co-author of Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid 19.

Prasenjit Ray, who tweets as The Seeker, is an independent data analyst based in India.

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In an interview on Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said some NATO member states want the war in Ukraine to last longer as a way to hurt Russia.

“There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue,” Cavusoglu told CNN Turk. “They want Russia to become weaker.”

According to Iran’s Mehr News Agency, Cavusoglu did not think the war would last long after Russia and Ukraine held peace talks in Istanbul last month. But following a NATO foreign ministers meeting, he was given the impression that some alliance members don’t want the war to end.

Since Russia invaded on February 24, the US and many of its NATO allies have abandoned diplomacy with Russia. Instead of seeking a diplomatic solution, the Western powers are pouring weapons into Ukraine and waging an economic sanctions campaign against Russia.

The view among some NATO members on the war was summarized by a recent report from The Washington Post. The report said:

“For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”

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

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Ukrainian tennis star Elina Svitolina has demanded that Russian and Belarusian players be subjected to ideological purity tests before they are allowed to compete in international tournaments.

The former world number three has insisted on a total ban on all Russian and Belarusian athletes if they fail to sign up to a series of statements regarding politics and the war in Ukraine.

“We noticed that some Russian and Belarusian players at some point vaguely mentioned the war, but never clearly stating that Russia and Belarus started it on the territory of Ukraine,” wrote Svitolina on Twitter.

She is presumably unhappy with Russian and Belarusian players merely calling for peace without explicitly denouncing their own country and asserting it is to blame for the war.

‼️💙💛🇺🇦✊🏼 pic.twitter.com/UK04g8OOh9

— Elina Monfils (@ElinaSvitolina) April 20, 2022

“The very silence of those who choose to remain that way right now is unbearable as it leads to the continuation of murder in our homeland,” claimed Svitolina, asserting that tennis players not correctly saying “Putin bad” is literally leading to people being killed.

She demanded players unfortunate enough to be born on a piece of land called ‘Russia’ properly answer the following questions.

1. Do you support Russia’s and Belarus invasion in Ukraine’s territory and as a result of that the war started by those countries?

2. Do you support Russia’s and Belarus military activities in Ukraine?

3. Do you support Putin’s and Lukashenko’s regime?

Any players answering yes to any of those questions should be slapped with a full scale tournament ban, according to Svitolina.

“In times of crisis, silence means agreeing with what is happening. There comes a time when silence is betrayal, and that time is now,” she wrote.

The Ukrainian’s demand that players pass ideological purity tests before being allowed to hit a ball with a racket isn’t even as draconian as the standard imposed by the organizers of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

They’ve banned all Russians and Belarusians from competing, even those who have denounced Vladimir Putin and Russia.

Former world number one men’s champion Novak Djokovic called the decision “crazy,” saying politics shouldn’t interfere in sport.

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The rise of food protectionism by countries could exacerbate a massive hunger crisis that could take the world by storm later this year (well, that’s at least what the Rockefeller Foundation believes). 

The world’s biggest palm oil producer, Indonesia, is the latest country to embrace protectionist measures to mitigate domestic food shortages, according to Bloomberg.

President Joko Widodo on Friday announced the export ban of all cooking oil and palm oil products would begin on April 28.

Widodo said during a television broadcast that the measures aimed to ensure domestic markets had ample cooking oil supplies following a dramatic increase in prices.

“I will monitor and evaluate the implementation of this policy so availability of cooking oil in the domestic market becomes abundant and affordable,” he said.

Following the news, traders are placing bullish bets that world supplies of cooking oil and palm oil products will tighten even more. U.S. soyoil futures jumped more than 3% to a record high of 84 cents per pound.

“The news will certainly create a mayhem,” said Paramalingam Supramaniam, director at Selangor-based broker Pelindung Bestari.

“We have the largest producer banning the exports of palm products which will add more uncertainty to the already tight availability of vegetable oil worldwide,” Supramaniam said.

The Ukraine conflict has roiled the global edible oil market. The Black Sea region accounts for 76% of world sunoil exports. Commercial shipments in the region have been disrupted due mainly by insurers for vessels charging very high war premiums that make cargo nearly impossible in insure.

Indonesia’s move adds to the growing food protectionism as several other countries, including Argentina, have raised export taxes on edible oils. Meanwhile, Moldova, Hungary, and Serbia have banned some grain exports.

Increasing food protectionism is another worry for importers dependent on other countries (such as ones in the Middle East and Africa) that may lead to shortages and trigger unrest.

As we noted initially, the Rockefeller Foundation has given a timeframe on when the food crisis begins.

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Israeli anti-tank weapons are being used by Nazi soldiers in Ukraine.

A video published by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on Twitter this week showed one of its fighters firing an anti-tank missile. In the tweet Azov claimed it had hit a Russian vehicle.

Israeli media on Wednesday identified the missile system in the Azov video as a Matador, a weapon developed by a consortium involving Rafael, a state-owned Israeli arms manufacturer.

‼️Полк «Азов» продовжує знищувати ворожу техніку pic.twitter.com/1B2RvgKNXE

— АЗОВ (@Polk_Azov) April 19, 2022

The weapon seen in the video does match with established photos of the Matador.

Yahoo News reported last month that Ukraine had bought 5,100 of the missile systems from a German manufacturer – the same firm that jointly developed the Matador with Rafael.

Matador is a portmanteau of “man-portable anti-tank, anti-door” since it is also used to blow holes in walls when fighting in urban areas.

An Israeli solider trains with a Matador anti-tank missile. The same weapon recently featured in an Azov Battalion video from Mariupol. (Wikimedia Commons)

Tested in Gaza

The Matador’s “wall opening function is particularly valued” by Israeli soldiers, The Jerusalem Post reports. Israel has used the weapon in “heavily built-up environments such as the Gaza Strip,” the newspaper adds – a euphemism for how Palestinian homes have almost certainly been attacked with the weapon.

The video posted by Azov this week was also filmed in an urban environment. Azov’s headquarters has long been in the southeastern port city of Mariupol, part of the largely Russian-speaking eastern Donbass region of Ukraine.

Mariupol has been the scene of intense fighting since the Russian invasion that began on 24 February. Both Russian and Ukrainian sources this week said the city was on the verge of falling to Russian forces.

On Thursday morning Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that most of the city had been captured. The last 2,000 Ukrainian fighters in the city remain holed up in the Azovstal steel plant, he said.

Israeli anti-tank weapon Matador on display during Israel’s 2014 “independence day” celebrations of the 1948 destruction of Palestine. (Wikimedia Commons)

Azov has been a magnet for far-right volunteers who have flocked to Ukraine from around the world in recent months. On Monday, two British citizens captured in Mariupol by Russian forces appeared in handcuffs on Russian TV.

Captured volunteer Aiden Aslin was wearing an Azov Battalion t-shirt with its distinctive Nazi symbol the Wolfsangel.

“Big Israel”

The Azov Battalion itself is named after the Sea of Azov, which Mariupol overlooks.

Azov emerged out of the far-right street gangs and football hooligans that formed the vanguard of the 2014 coup against the elected Ukrainian government. The coup regime then integrated Azov into its regular armed forces.

Despite recent attempts by corporate media to whitewash Azov’s image, the group is widely accepted to be a far-right Nazi group – one with the state’s backing.

In 2018 The Electronic Intifada revealed that Israel was licensing Tavor-style special forces rifles in Ukraine which were being used to arm the government’s Nazi brigade.

Посол України в Державі Ізраїль 🇺🇦 Геннадій Надоленко спростовує fake news в ізраїльській 🇮🇱 газеті “Haaretz”.
The Ambassador of Ukraine 🇺🇦 to the State of Israel 🇮🇱 Hennadii Nadolenko refuted fake news in the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". pic.twitter.com/hWDTYX455H

— Ukr Emb in Israel (@UKRinIsrael) July 10, 2018

The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel wrote a letter in response expressing “deep concern” over our report claiming it relied on “unproven evidence” and “biased information.”

But a letter from the Israeli defense ministry’s arms export agency, as well as photos and videos from Azov’s own online presence proved otherwise.

Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Batallion on parade in 2017. (Azov.org.ua)

As the letter we published as part of our original report explained, the Israeli defense ministry said it was “careful to grant licenses” to arms exporters “in full coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government entities.” The letter – sent in response to a query by human rights lawyer Eitay Mack – did not deny arming Ukrainian Nazis.

The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel denied there had been any weapon supply from Israel “since 2014.” But in a related tweet, he seemed to contradict himself by admitting that the Tavor-style rifles were produced “under the licenses of IWI” – Israel Weapon Industries, an Israeli arms manufacturer whose licenses all must be approved by the Israeli government.

IWI’s Tavor rifles have been used by Israeli snipers to fire on Palestinians protesting near Gaza’s boundary with Israel in recent years.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a big supporter of apartheid Israel.

He has hailed a “big Israel” as the model for his country and said in his speech to the Israeli parliament last month that both countries face the same threats.

But in the speech he also criticized Israel for not sending enough weapons to Ukraine. Israel has close relations to both Ukraine and Russia – where many Israeli citizens actually come from.

Palestinian lawmakers in the Israeli parliament boycotted Zelensky’s speech in protest of his pro-Israel stance. “Zelensky’s speech was a Zionist one par excellence, hitting its bottom when he gave Israel the historical status of victim,” lawmaker Ahmad Tibi posted on Twitter.

Although the corporate media puts a lot of emphasis on Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, the president appears to be a hostage to domestic far-right and anti-Semitic forces.

Elected in 2019 on a platform of peace with Russia, the former comedian did a swift U-turn when threatened by Azov and other far-right militias. They prevented him from carrying out his election promise of implementing the Minsk peace agreements for de-escalation of the civil war that has been ongoing in the east of Ukraine since the 2014 coup.

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Boris Johnson visited a Tory donor on the first day of his tax-funded trip to India today.

The Prime Minister went on a tour of a new JCB facility in Vadodara, Gujarat, owned by Conservative peer Lord Bamford, flying to and from the site in a helicopter.

Lord Bamford backed Mr Johnson’s party leadership bid in 2019.

Mr Johnson faced renewed calls during his visit to speak up for minorities and democratic rights as he posed with JCB bulldozers.

Bulldozers have been used in New Delhi this week to tear down Muslim-owned properties.

The PM indicated that he would bring up those issues during talks with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi.

He claimed: “We always raise the difficult issues, of course we do.”

Amnesty India said: “In the backdrop of Municipal Corporation of Delhi using JCB bulldozers to raze down shops of Muslims yesterday, [the] UK Prime Minister’s inauguration of a JCB factory in Gujarat is not only ignorant but his silence on the incident is deafening.”

Downing Street denied it was a conflict of interest for the PM to meet a Tory donor on the visit and said that he was meeting “a number of businesses, universities and science and tech firms.”

Asked if he visited JCB because Lord Bamford is a Tory donor, the PM’s official spokesman replied: “No, he chose to go to the JCB factory because it is a very good illustration of British business, working with India and the Indian government to benefit both nations.”

During his visit to the factory, Mr Johnson said that he hopes to broker a post-Brexit free trade deal with India “by the autumn” in an apparent hastening of his ambition, which was earlier targeted at the end of the year.

Global Justice Now trade campaigner Jean Blaylock said: “Boris Johnson’s India trip looks as dodgy as his partygate statements.

“India has long been known as the ‘pharmacy of the developing world’ for resisting some of the monopoly demands of Big Pharma. But Boris Johnson has been a shill for Big Pharma throughout the pandemic. Pharmaceutical lobbyists want to use trade talks to secure changes to India’s patent laws, and the risk is that Johnson will do their bidding.

“More broadly, farmers’ rights, food standards, climate goals and digital regulation could all be threatened by a UK-India trade treaty.”

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Dr. Spiro Pantazatos is a researcher at Columbia University who recently co-authored a study on “vaccine-induced fatality rate”

His initial reaction to the COVID pandemic was 100% mainstream, and it was the data (and his scientific integrity) that compelled him to change his mind

Dr. Spiro Pantazatos believes that the risk associated with COVID injections is comparable to the risk associated with getting COVID in 2020, with the injection risks increasing with each dose

His message for the fellow scientists is to find their voice and stop being silent

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Click here to watch the video.

This story is about a very brave researcher at Columbia University who co-authored a paper on risks associated with COVID vaccination (“vaccine-induced fatality rate”), in October 2021.

The researcher’s name is Spiro Pantazatos, Ph.D. He is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology (Psychiatry) at Columbia University. He is also Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The title of his paper (a preprint) is “COVID vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk”:

“Accurate estimates of COVID vaccine-induced severe adverse event and death rates are critical for risk-benefit ratio analyses of vaccination and boosters against SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in different age groups. However, existing surveillance studies are not designed to reliably estimate life-threatening event or vaccine-induced fatality rates (VFR).

Here, regional variation in vaccination rates was used to predict all-cause mortality and non-COVID deaths in subsequent time periods using two independent, publicly available datasets from the US and Europe (month-and week-level resolutions, respectively).”

Currently Dr. Pantazatos is trying to fund a home for this paper but all journals where he submitted it have declined so far.

Dr. Pantazatos was interviewed for the “Perspectives on the Pandemic” series, and in my opinion, the interview came out stunning (with a disclaimer that the topic is gruesome, so it’s a stunning interview about a horrible thing). Dr. Pantazatos’ presentation is so graceful and even-headed that it could be “the” video to send to your friends who have been calling you crazy all this time!

Dr. Pantazatos’ Initial COVID Position Was 100% “Mainstream”

Early in the pandemic, Dr. Pantazatos was very moved by the vivid images that the media was feeding us — and, as a result, he became terrified of the virus. His initial plan was to lockdown inside his house until the vaccines came out.

What Compelled Him to Get More Skeptical

But then he started looking at data presented by scientists like John Ioannidis, for example, and he quickly realized that the situation was different from the one painted by the media.

Then Dr. Pantazatos’ co-author on this paper, Herve Seligmann, came up with an analysis of European data showing a consistent trend where a vaccination campaign seemed to be accompanied by an increase in all-cause mortality during the month following the vaccination campaign.

Dr. Pantazatos didn’t like that conclusion very much as it implied the unthinkable, and so he decided to do his own analysis based on the U.S. data (vaccinations and all-cause mortality), published by the CDC. And when he did his analysis using the U.S. data, it showed the same trend. His analysis of the CDC data showed that following a vaccination campaign in a given locality, there was an increase in all-cause mortality during the following month, followed by a decrease.

In Dr. Pantazatos’ opinion, the risk associated with COVID injections is comparable to the risk associated with getting COVID — if the risk associated with COVID is assessed at the high, early-in-the-pandemic level. And given that the two risks are comparable, and the injection risks seem to increase with each subsequent does — and the pharma companies are pushing for boosters from here into the horizon — he believes that we really need to discuss the VFR.

Why Rejection From the Journals Then?

Interestingly, Dr. Pantazatos mentioned in the interview that even before 2020, he was well aware of the fact that the process of getting scientific works published in prestigious journals was tainted. He referred to the 2005 article in “PLOS Medicine” called, “Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies” that talked about how exactly the journals are incentivized by pharma companies.

Furthermore, scientists themselves have developed a habit of trading total integrity of research for the prestige and benefits of having their works published — and so even before 2020, it was not uncommon for researchers to “massage” the angle etc. in order to fit in. From myself, I would like to add the following quote from the Lancet:

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” wrote Richard Horton, the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet in 2015.

Incidentally, I wrote an article about corruption in the medical establishment last year, in case you are curious.

The Importance of Speaking Out

Dr. Pantazatos is not shy at all about sharing his analysis, and he is also tremendously graceful and humble when presenting it. Personally, I am very impressed by Dr. Pantazatos’ scientific integrity and his ability to actually “follow the science” — as well as by the grace with which he presents this rather ugly topic.

He believes the issue is important, and speaking out is crucial. His message for other scientists is to find their voice and stop being silent.

Full transcript of the interview.

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Visits to Honiara, part plea, part threat.  Delegations equipped with a note of harassment.  That was the initial Australian effort to convince the Solomon Islands that the decision to make a security pact with Beijing was simply not appropriate in the lotus land of Washington’s Pacific empire.

Despite an election campaign warming up, Senator Zed Seselja found time to tell Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.  The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.  He went on to “respectfully” urge the Solomon Islands to reject the security pact with China and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”

Having not convinced Honiara to change course, a range of reactions are being registered.  David Llewellyn-Smith, former owner of the Asia Pacific foreign affairs journal The Diplomat, took leave of his senses by suggesting that a Chinese naval base in the Solomons would see “the effective end of our sovereignty and democracy”.  In a spray of hysteria, he suggested that this was “Australia’s Cuban missile crisis”.

The Labor opposition, desperate to win office on May 21, are calling this one of the greatest intelligence failures since the Second World War, which perhaps shows their somewhat tenuous command of history.  Their leader, Anthony Albanese, seeking some safe mooring in a campaign that has lacked lustre, was particularly strident.  It was a chance to show that Labor was not shaky or wobbly on national security.  “The security agreement between China and the Solomons is a massive failure of our foreign policy,” stated the opposition leader as he campaigned in Bomaderry in southern New South Wales.  “We are closer here today to the Solomon Islands than we are to Perth.  That shows how strategic they are to Australia.”

This belligerent, simple note might have been stronger were it not for the fact that his deputy, Richard Marles, had previously made the unpopular suggestion that the Pacific islands were somehow sovereign entities who needed to be treated as such while China, in providing development assistance to them, should be “welcome” in offering it.  The goons of the Rupert Murdoch roundtable capitalised, hoping to find a Chinese Red under Marles’s bed.

Scratching for electoral gains, Labor thought that it was inappropriate to have sent the junior minister, as if that would have made much of a difference. Foreign Minister Marise Payne, it was said, should have been flown in to bully those misguided savages into submission.

In Australia, the message being fanned is that the deputy – in this case, Canberra – failed in the task, leaving it to the United States to come in and hold up what seemed like a sinking ship of strategy.  “The United States very much relies upon Australia and sees Australia as playing that key role in the Indo-Pacific,” lamented Albanese.  “Australia and Scott Morrison have gone missing.”

The Morrison government poured water on such criticism by suggesting a fair share of oriental deviousness at play.  Not only had the likes of Defence Minister Peter Dutton been advised by the intelligence fraternity to keep matters tame in terms of attacking the security pact; the agreement was the product of bribery.  On radio, Dutton responded to a question from 3AW host Neil Mitchell about the suggestion.  “You asked the question about bribery and corruption – we don’t pay off, we don’t bribe people, and the Chinese certainly do.”

This clean linen view of Australian conduct is fabulously ignorant, ignoring such inglorious chapters as the oil-for-food scandal which saw the Australian Wheat Board pay $300 million in kickbacks between 1999 and 2004 to the Iraq regime via Alia, a Jordanian trucking company.  These bribing arrangements, which breached UN Security Council sanctions imposed after Baghdad’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, were unmasked in 2005.

With Australia failing to change minds, the paladins of the US imperium prepared to badger and bore Honiara.  On the list: President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink; and National Security Affairs Indo-Pacific chief Kurt Campbell.  It seemed like an absurd gathering of heft for a small Pacific Island state.

The theme was unmistakable.  A bullying tone was struck in a message from National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, who seemed to forget the Solomons was not some ramshackle protectorate of the Five Eyes.  Officials from the US, Japan, New Zealand and Australia had “shared concerns about [the] proposed security framework between the Solomon Islands and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

At the Washington Post, Henry Olsen was trying to speak home truths about an empire facing rust and decline.  The unipolar world that came into being after the demise of the Soviet Union had ended.  “Our adversaries can fight back, and they are increasingly using every means at their disposal to push back against American influence.”

He went on to put focus upon the thin stretch of territory in the Pacific that has exercised so many in Washington and Canberra.  “Lose too many places such as the Solomon Islands, and the threat will start to get uncomfortably close to home.”  It was more prudent “to spend big and push outward now rather than to be boxed into a corner later.”  In other words, more bribery, the very thing tut-tutted by Dutton, was needed.

As for the Solomon Islands itself, divided, fragmented and vulnerable to internal dissent and disagreement, Sogavare is unrepentant.  “When a helpless mouse is cornered by vicious cats it will do anything to survive.”  He has already told his country’s parliament that there is no intention “to ask China to build a military base in Solomon Islands.”  He felt “insulted” by such suggestions and felt that there was only one side to pick: “our national security interest.”

His confidant and former prime minister Danny Philip also reminded critics barking about the lack of transparency over the Sino-Solomon Islands deal that they should know better.  “People in Australia know very little about Pine Gap in the middle of the desert, the military base of the United States.”  There were “agreements that open up all major ports in Australia that are not being seen by all the citizens of that country.”

Unfortunately for the government in Honiara, thoughts of invasion and pre-emptive action on the part of Australia, possibly with aid from the United States, cannot be ruled out.  Instead of being parked in an asylum of inoffensive obscurity, pundits such as Llewellyn-Smith are encouraging invasion and conquest.  Australia, he advocates in a refreshing burst of honest, blood-filled jingoism, “should invade and capture Guadalcanal such that we engineer regime change in Honiara.”

Sovereignty for the Pacific was always a qualified concept for those exercising true naval power, and US-Australian conduct in recent weeks has made an utter nonsense of it.  At least some cavalier types are willing to own up to it.

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

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***

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued a warning about the future, which looks grim.

If things continue as they are now – and they more than likely will – global food shortages will continue. The result will be supply issues and civil unrest, likely beginning in the Third World and spreading from there.

Protests have already erupted in Peru due to unrelenting inflation, and this is probably only a taste of what is to come as the problem spreads.

Sky-high food prices, especially in poorer countries, will make it unaffordable for many families to make ends meet. This will lead to protests and riots – and as the dominoes continue to fall throughout the rest of the world, hell on earth will ensue.

“This crisis unfolds even as the global economy has not yet fully recovered from the pandemic,” says Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s research development director.

In a post he wrote, Gourinchas blamed a mix of high inflation and supply problems for the unfolding disaster that the world is witnessing. The most vulnerable countries, he added, will experience the fallout first, followed eventually by the rest of the world.

“Even before the war, inflation in many countries had been rising due to supply-demand imbalances and policy support during the pandemic, prompting a tightening of monetary policy,” Gourinchas added.

“In this context, beyond its immediate and tragic humanitarian impact, the war will slow economic growth and increase inflation.”

Will the entire world go hungry?

Gourinchas went on to talk about how increases in both food and fuel prices are likely to spur even more social unrest, starting in poorer countries. Central banks, he says, will have to adjust their policies somehow to try to anchor both medium- and long-term inflation expectations.

If they fail at this – and they eventually will, since central banking is a Ponzi scheme that cannot persist forever without eventually collapsing under its own weight – then the situation will spiral even more out of control.

Even if central banks can get a hold on inflation somehow, food shortages are likely to persist for years to come, Gourinchas further suggests. Countries like China are now hoarding food, while “breadbasket” countries like Ukraine are no longer exporting and not planting nearly as many acres as usual due to the war.

It is a perfect storm, you might say, that seems to have taken out the global economy already. The full fallout has just not manifested yet in its entirety.

It was the IMF, just to clarify, that used the words hell on earth in an earlier report to describe what it sees coming on the horizon.

“Failure to provide this year a few extra billion dollars means you’re going to have famine, destabilization, and mass migration,” says ex-Republican Gov. David Beasley, who now heads up the World Food Bank.

“If you think we’ve got Hell on earth now, you just get ready. If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe.”

This almost reads like a threat, which is probably what it is. Give us more money, Beasley is basically saying, or else.

The Western world will not be immune to this, by the way. On top of the inflation we are already seeing, the fertilizer crisis alone will reduce crop yields, theoretically collapsing our food supply by up to one half of normal.

In Ireland, officials are already encouraging their farmers to plant extra grain crops over the coming year in anticipation of this squeeze. In Scotland, however, there appears to be a lot of denial as to the severity of the situation.

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***

The Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London has granted permission for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in prison. WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson stressed that the court had effectively signed the death penalty for Assange.

“16 months ago, this court decided that extraditing Assange would be a risk to his life, would be a death sentence. Now this court has been ordered to issue that death sentence,” Hrafnsson said.

Assange’s defence lawyer can appeal to the High Court in London until May 18, but as the attention of the world community is focussed on Ukraine, there is every possibility that the High Court’s decision will just be equally controversial. Essentially, British authorities are taking advantage of the fact that Assange will not get enough public attention.

More alarmingly, the Anglo Alliance (USA-UK-Australia), for all its rhetoric of liberty and freedom, have spearheaded one of the most vicious campaigns against a journalist in human history. Assange as an Australian citizen is isolated and ignored by Canberra, imprisoned in the UK, and sought for extradition to the US – making a complete Anglo Alliance assault against investigative journalism.

Essentially, the Anglo Alliance is warning journalists and publishers that they will be targeted and persecuted if they interfere or expose their war crimes and corruption. This is all the more crucial in this period of time as the Western mainstream media and their establishment backers are running a vitriolic propaganda campaign for Ukraine, endlessly disseminating fake news that is continuously exposed – such as Ghost of Kyiv, Snake Island, etc.

Julian Assange gained notoriety after the release of documents exposing the illegal actions of the US military during their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Journalists published data on the killing of civilians by US soldiers on the WikiLeaks website. At the same time, the portal revealed information about the conditions of detention at Guantanamo Bay prison.

From June 2012, Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, but was stripped of his diplomatic asylum and detained on April 11, 2019.

Following the court decision, Australian Finance Minister Simon Birmingham could only meekly say: “We have confidence in the independence and integrity of the British justice system” and that the Australian government was not arguing against the extradition. In this way, entrapped in the historical Anglo imperial capital of London, Assange has been abandoned by the Anglo colonial offshoot of Australia and now relies on 25 human rights groups and sympathisers to challenge extradition.

The human rights group say that Assange’s persecution poses a “grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”

However, according to Fidel Narváez, a former diplomat at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, “the greatest responsibility” for the persecution of Assange “falls on the media that do not fulfill this task of challenging the official agenda of governments and the prevailing political powers. If the US imposes an agenda of persecution on its whistleblowers, in this case on journalism that has revealed crimes, it is shameful that the mainstream media simply echoes that persecution, that they take as truth what Assange’s persecutors have said about him, instead of defending one of their own.”

Narváez, who was a diplomat in London when Assange entered the embassy and requested political asylum in 2012, maintained that the most powerful media are companies with an “economic and commercial logic”, so behind their owners there are “big businessmen, millionaires or groups that are aligned with the establishment of the different countries, and in this case, especially of the US.”

The former diplomat also pointed out that Assange believed that wars could not be possible without the complicity of the large Western media outlets, which “remained silent in the face of abuses and crimes.”

This is seen today with the Western media being unrelenting towards Russia’s military operation in Ukraine despite remaining utterly silent as the Ukrainian military and their neo-Nazi Republican Guard allies, such as the Azov Battalion, terrorized and persecuted the people of Donbass since 2014.

And it is perhaps for this very reason that, as war fever and Russophobia in the West has peaked to unprecedented heights in the 21st century, the Anglo Alliance is sending out warnings to journalists that if they do not follow the official narrative, they could very well end up like Assange too.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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First published on April 4, 2022

***

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook what he referred to as a “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.” Western media immediately decried these stated goals, regularly repeating that the allegations of Nazism in Ukraine are nothing more than Russian “fake news.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, went so far as to flatly state that “there are no Nazis in the Ukraine.” Similar claims resound throughout the mass media’s echo chambers, and the fact that the current president of Ukraine is Jewish is often short-sightedly presented as the only “proof” necessary. 

Disputing the existence of Nazis and fascists in Ukraine serves the purpose of constructing a twisted but simplistic narrative loosely based on WWII: Putin is an evil, Hitler-like figure intent on attacking the freedom-loving Ukrainian government and its innocent supporters. The goal of such a narrative is to foster blind and unquestioning support for the Zelenskyy government, NATO and the imperialist Western powers.

A “humanitarian” war, meaning a brutal NATO intervention that would likely spark WWIII, is thereby presented as a viable option. In this context, any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as “pro-Putin” because it does not support this war-mongering narrative.

But an examination that accounts for the complexities of concrete situations reveals that there is indeed a deep and expansive history of fascism in Ukraine, which has been aided and abetted by the US government. This does not however mean that fascism is necessarily the dominant force in the country or even in every domain in which it exists (the military, paramilitary forces, the parliament, society at large, etc.). Moreover, it does not imply in the least that one has to support Russia’s invasion, or even assume that ‘denazification’ is its primary goal. On the contrary, it is possible to understand that fascism is a very real force in Ukraine while opposing Putin’s decision to deploy troops.

A brief history of Nazis, NATO and Ukraine

To understand the current conflict, it is important to recall that Russians and Ukrainians once lived in relative harmony, when they were both part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was founded on the principle of the self-determination of nations. This was violently interrupted in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, taking over much of Ukraine.

According to John-Paul Himka, a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust lived in Ukraine, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in carrying out their horrendous deeds. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA) participated in this genocidal rampage: “OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans’ mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.” According to Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, “the OUN played a significant part in the extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ often performing the dirty work of the German Einsatzkommando extermination squads (eg the killing of children), and continuing after the war under American sponsorship.”

Image on the right: Stepan Bandera

Indeed, in the postwar era, the U.S. government discreetly integrated an alarming number of Nazi collaborators into a veritable international network of anti-communist fascists. By 1952, John Loftus estimates that there were “hundreds if not thousands of important Nazi collaborators from Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Balkans” who had been brought to the United States (and many more had been operationalized around the world). The US Counter Intelligence Core (CIC) ran operation Anyface to protect the fascist leader of the OUN–the renowned Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera–from being brought to justice by the Soviets. Bandera’s chief of the national security service (SB), Mykola Lebed, was “the highest ranking Ukrainian Nazi to ever enter the United States.” CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner admitted in 1951 there were “at least twenty former or active members of the SB of OUN/Bandera in the United States.”

The US intelligence services worked closely with several organizations of former Nazi collaborators like these in order to run extensive sabotage, terror and assassination campaigns against the USSR. In 1951, Wisner estimated that “over 35,000 members of the Russian secret police (MVD-MKGB) have been killed by OUN-UPA since the end of the last war.”

NATO was deeply involved in this anti-communist war, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly by Operation Gladio. Overseen by the CIA and MI6, NATO established a large secret army of trained militants, many of whom were well established Nazis and fascists. According to the official Italian Senate investigation into Gladio:

“It emerges without the shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s a massive operation in order to counter by the use of all means the spreading of groups and movements of the left on a European level.”

This included targeted killings and false flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to terrify the civilian population into supporting rightwing governments and anti-communist raids.

The Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1963 to 1969 was Lyman Lemnitzer, who had given the green light to Operation Northwoods in 1962. This operation, which was never implemented because President John F. Kennedy refused to sign off on it, consisted of planning false flag terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens that would be blamed on Cuba in order to justify a military invasion of the island.

Lemnitzer’s tenure overlapped with Adolf Heusinger’s, one of the many high-ranking Nazi and fascist officials who had been integrated into U.S. military and intelligence networks. Heusinger served as Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army and later became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (1961-1964). NATO did not content itself, then, with having Nazis do some of its dirty work by recruiting them into its secret armies to run heinous anti-communist terrorist campaigns. It also integrated them directly into its leadership, thereby sending a clear message to the world regarding its political orientation.

The Maidan coup

In the ensuing years, the United States continued to work with Ukrainian fascists in their endless destabilization campaigns against the USSR. According to CIA specialist Douglas Valentine, “the CIA has been developing fascist assets in the Ukraine for 70 years.”

The Maidan coup in late 2013-2014, which 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.

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.

Although Svoboda has since attempted to mollify its Nazi image, it maintains its substance as an ultranationalist, anti-communist party that openly praises Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the politician and theorist of the militant wing of the fascist OUN.

The Azov Battalion was formed in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the Social National Assembly or SNA (founded in 2008) that is “known to have carried out attacks on minority groups.”

The Azov Battalion, Right Sector and other fascist militias played a key role in consolidating power for the post-coup government in numerous ways: engaging in street violence against the Left, running intimidation campaigns against uncooperative politicians, setting up indoctrination camps for children and youth, and exerting pressure on the government to revise the education curriculum, ban the Russian language, and rewrite official state history. This post-coup period of street violence and intimidation culminated in what some have called the worst Nazi atrocity since WWII, when some 42 leftists perished in an inferno set by fascists in the Odessa trade union building.

This U.S.-backed regime change operation is what prompted the outbreak of a civil war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. When pro-Russian separatists declared their independence from the fascist Ukrainian puppet government, it was unable to contain them. So the Azov battalion and other fascist militias were unleashed, leading to the death of some 14,000 people (just before the 2022 invasion, Putin recognized the independence of the two regions of the Donbas). Azov received backing from Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, as well as U.S. arms and training. Due to its purported effectiveness in fighting Russian separatists, the battalion was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014, formally becoming part of the state.

In 2015, the CIA, according to five former intelligence and national security officials, set up “a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel.” The same year, the U.S. Congress passed a spending bill that featured “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic and military support for Ukraine, one that was expressly modified to allow that support to flow to the country’s resident neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment.”

Image below is from Donbass Insider

Since there has been some debate regarding just how Nazi the Azov or other ultranationalist militias are, it is worth noting that the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged in 2015 that Azov is “neo-Nazi.” Although the battalion has sometimes denied that it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, “Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members.” Their uniforms carry the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which looks like a black swastika on a yellow background. Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment in 2015, claimed that “10% to 20% of the group’s members are Nazis.” It appears that he made this statement in order to downplay fears of Nazification. However, even if the numbers are that low, it necessarily follows that all of the other members of the Azov battalion are Nazi collaborators.

Regardless of whether or not Azov or similar battalions accept 100% of Nazi ideology, it is essential to recognize that their overall orientation is clearly fascist: they receive funding from reactionary elements of the capitalist ruling class to run violent para-state militias–which in some cases have been integrated into the state–that are ultranationalist, racist, pro-capitalist, and anti-communist. Andriy Biletsky is well positioned to understand their orientation because he served as the leader of the Patriot of Ukraine and the SNA, as well as the Azov Battalion, before serving as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014-2019. In an interview, he explained his position as follows: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races, according to the standard Nazi terminology].”

Fascism today in Ukraine

In Ukraine today, fascist elements are present in the capitalist ruling class, paramilitary organizations, the Ukrainian military, the parliament, and certain sectors of society. While it would be a mistake to assume that they are in each case the dominant force, it would be equally erroneous to ignore their presence, extensive reach and the support they enjoy from the Zelenskyy government and imperialist forces outside the country.

In the 2019 parliamentary election, Svoboda formed a united party list with other far-right parties: Right Sector, National Corps and the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh. They only obtained 2.15% of the votes, not surpassing the 5% threshold for a parliamentary seat. In the same election, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, which ran on an anti-corruption platform and is described as centrist in the mainstream press, won 124 seats on the nationwide party list and 130 constituency seats.

Zelenskyy’s party is named after the eponymous hit Ukrainian TV series that appealed to “Ukrainians frustrated with the country’s oligarchic elite, and the failure to drain the swamp after the country’s 2014 revolution.” In the series, Zelenskyy, a career actor and comedian, played the role of none other than the President of Ukraine. His meteoric rise to the actual presidency was thus due in no small part to his celebrity status as a famous actor, not unlike other political puppets in bourgeois democracies. Moreover, he received ample funding from a handful of private donors, including most notably the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who was his single biggest supporter.

Kolomoyskyi owns an ownership stake in 1+1 Media Group, whose TV station carried “Servant of the People,” which retrospectively looks a lot like an extended campaign advertisement. His media outlet also provided security and logistical backup for the actor’s political campaign, during which time he traveled 14 times to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoyskyi is based. The Pandora Papers revealed a spider web of offshore networks and financial entanglements between Zelenskyy and Kolomoyskyi.

Kolomoyskyi is, moreover, one of the major funders of the ultranationalist militias in Eastern Ukraine, including the fascist Azov and Aidar battalions, which have been accused of heinous war crimes in the Donbas region over the past eight years. He also allegedly funds “the Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions.” When he was appointed governor of his home state of Dnipropetrovsk in March 2014, he was instrumental in crushing the separatist movement there by “spending more than $10 million to create the ‘Dnipro battalion.’”

In 2015, it was estimated that there were some 30 nationalist militias fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Financially supported by wealthy oligarchs like Kolomoyskyi and Serhiy Taruta (the billionaire governor of the Donetsk region who also funded the Azov battalion), they function as a powerful paramilitary force that supplements the Ukrainian military. In July 2015, Russia issued a warrant for Kolomoyskyi’s arrest for “organizing the killing of civilians” due to his financial support of the militants.

Far from cracking down on these ultranationalist militias, many of which display open signs of Nazism and fascism, Kolomoyskyi’s actor-turned-president has not only allowed them to act with impunity, but he has also woven a tight relationship between his administration and open fascists.

For instance, in November 2021 Dmytro Yarosh, a former leader of Right Sector and avowed follower of Nazi collaborator Bandera, declared that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, Zelenskyy decorated Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo with the distinction “Hero of Ukraine.” On March 1 of this year, he appointed Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the Aidar Battalion – which is accused of war crimes in Donbas – as the regional administrator of Odessa. There are numerous other ties between the Ukrainian government and military, on the one hand, and these ultra-nationalist and often fascist militias on the other.

While they’ve been busy empowering fascists, Ukrainian authorities also stripped communist parties of their right to participate in elections in 2015 and issued controversial ‘decommunisation’ laws: “The laws ban the display of Soviet symbols and change the status of the 09 May holiday marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2. The laws will effectively remove all mentions of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ (a Soviet term for World War 2) and replace it with ‘Second World War’; ban the Soviet Victory flag; and rename streets, squares, and even whole cities.” Tens of thousands of streets have since been renamed, along with nearly one thousand cities and villages. Over two thousand statues and monuments have also been removed in this expansive anti-communist cultural project. Despite widespread criticism, the current government has refused to revoke the laws. According to Abdul Rahman, “Zelensky’s reluctance to take on right-wing groups in the same way that he is targeting allegedly pro-Russian groups is a sign of their influence in setting the political discourse in the country.”

There have also been a number of important symbolic gestures that glorify ultra-nationalists and Nazi collaborators, thereby fostering a broader culture of fascism within certain sectors of Ukrainian society. Zelenskyy claimed in an interview, for instance: “​There are indisputable heroes. Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain part of Ukrainians, and this is a normal and cool thing. He was one of those who defended the freedom of Ukraine.” Zelenskyy also publicly defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya as a “true patriot” when he was accused of being a Nazi due to his photos with Nazi collaborator Bandera and his open support of the Azov Battalion. Moreover, Zelenskyy’s former Prime Minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk appeared on stage at a neo-Nazi concert organized by the fascist C14 movement.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Ukraine was the only country, along with the United States, which voted against the UN General Assembly’s draft resolution “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Important media outlets have broadcast Nazi propaganda, which resound throughout the broader culture. In 2014, a Ukrainian journalist on Hromadske TV openly called for genocide in Donbas, claiming that “there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.”

On March 13 of this year, Ukrainian TV presenter Fahruddin Sharafmal issued an impassioned call for genocide and the slaughter of Russian children on a morning show on Channel 24. With a photograph of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichman behind him, he said:

“I allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann, who said that in order to destroy a nation, you must destroy, first of all, its children. Because if you kill their parents, the children will grow up and take revenge. By killing children, they will never grow up and the nation will disappear.”

“And when I get the chance to take out the Russians,” he went on,

“I will definitely do it. Since you call me a Nazi, I adhere to the doctrine of Adolf Eichmann, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that you and your children never live on this earth. You have to understand that it’s about the victory of the Ukrainian people, not about peace. We need victory. And if we have to slaughter all your families – I’ll be one of the first to do it.”

Channel 24 is part of the TRK Lux media conglomerate that is controlled by wealthy Ukrainian businesswoman Kateryna Kit-Sadova and her husband Andriy Sadovyi (the mayor of Lviv and former leader of the Self Reliance political party).

Zelenskyy has recently used the Russian invasion as a pretext to ban 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party that holds 43 seats in the parliament, while having communist leaders arrested. Alleging to fight against Russian “misinformation,” he also took control of news outlets, imposing a centralized information policy that combines all national TV channels into “a single information platform of strategic communication.” Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working directly with an international network of public relations firms to wage information warfare and control the narrative. According to a senior NATO official: “They are really excellent in stratcom [strategic communication] — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.”

Zelenskyy’s experience as a career actor has certainly been an asset in these endeavors. After all, he seeks to depict his government as free and democratic – not unlike the Western imperialist powers it is aligned with – while it supports fascist militias, receives funding from reactionary capitalists (who also fund Nazi battalions), glorifies ultranationalists and Nazi collaborators, emboldens a culture of fascism, bans political parties, and tightly controls news and information.

The fascist threat is international

Although Ukraine might seem to some in the United States or elsewhere to be a distant land with little bearing on one’s immediate political environment, it is actually an important center for the global fascist movement. According to Aljazeera: “Transnational support for Azov has been wide, and Ukraine has emerged as a new hub for the far right across the world. Men from across three continents have been documented to join the Azov training units in order to seek combat experience and engage in similar ideology.” In an investigative report from early 2021, Time found that

“Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police […] it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armored vehicles to artillery pieces.”

Olena Semenyaka, the head of international outreach for Azov, told the reporters: “It could be described as a small state within a state.”

Ali Soufan has estimated that “more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.” In 2019, U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to the State Department in which they stated that “the link between Azov and acts of terror in America is clear.” A 2018 FBI affidavit stated that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.” This included members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement, which were indicted for having “‘violently attacked and assaulted counter-protestors’ at several white nationalist and white supremacist events throughout the U.S., including the violent ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville.”

Nazism and fascism are very real factors in Ukraine, and they have been extensively documented. Recognizing this fact is essential to having a nuanced understanding of the current conflict, but it does not at all imply support for Putin’s military intervention, which has had horrific consequences for the lives of many innocent workers.

Finally, it should not be lost on us that the Biden administration, which came to power as a purported bulwark against the spread of fascism at home, is continuing the US policy of supporting fascist forces in one of the primary hubs for international fascism. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against fascism can never be limited to a domestic battle. It must always be carried out within an internationalist framework and thus inseparably linked with a resolute anti-imperialism.

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The author expresses his gratitude to Helmut-Harry Loewen for his invaluable suggestions and assistance in locating the best sources on fascism in Ukraine.

Featured image: 2015 march in Kiev to celebrate the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (pictured on black and red flag) (Source: Liberation News)

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The Pentagon announced Tuesday Ukraine’s military had received additional aircraft as well as parts for repairs to get damaged aircraft flying again. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not offer details on which countries provided aircraft, but acknowledged new transfers.

“They have received additional aircraft and aircraft parts to help them get more aircraft in the air,” Kirby told a news briefing. “We certainly have helped with the trans-shipment of some additional spare parts that have helped with their aircraft needs, but we have not transported whole aircraft,” he added.

Apparently, the Pentagon did not take Ukraine’s military authorities into confidence before making the announcement, because the official Twitter account of Ukraine’s air force tweeted Wednesday:

“Officially, Ukraine did not receive new aircraft from partners! With the assistance of the US Government, @KpsZSU received spare parts and components for the restoration and repair of the fleet of aircraft in the Armed Forces, which will allow to put into service more equipment.”

Despite the denial, nobody, not even Ukraine’s principal patron, the United States, deem preposterous claims made by Ukrainian sources credible, because Kyiv is known to have given exaggerated casualty counts and inflated figures of damage inflicted by the war in Ukraine in order to mount a disinformation campaign against Russia.

Privately, US officials recognized that Ukraine had an incentive to give only information that would bolster their case for more aid, more arms and more diplomatic assistance, CNN reported Tuesday.

“It’s a war—everything they do and say publicly is designed to help them win the war. Every public statement is an information operation, every interview, every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an information operation,” said a source familiar with Western intelligence.

Another reason Ukraine’s military authorities want to keep aircraft transfer under the wraps is that previously Russian forces claimed to have destroyed an S-300 air defense system that Slovakia transferred to Ukraine in a Kalibr cruise missiles strike hitting a hangar on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu boasted last month that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.

As demilitarization of Ukraine, alongside denazification and liberation of Donbas, was one of the principal objectives of Russia’s month-long military campaign lasting from late February to late March, therefore Russian forces would never allow vital military assets, especially air defense systems and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, to remain in the possession of Ukraine’s air force. Ukraine’s aircraft are safe only as long as they remain grounded and concealed from Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems.

Although the Pentagon spokesman refused to identify the country that delivered the aircraft to Ukraine due to secrecy of the shady transfer deal, the only NATO member state that was in talks with Washington and Kyiv to transfer its Soviet-era fleet of a dozen MiG-29 aircraft was Slovakia.

Reportedly, a batch of Ukraine’s highly skilled pilots traveled to Slovakia last week, took the delivery of the aircraft and then flew them all the way to concealed air force hangars at military airports in Kyiv while maintaining low altitudes in order to avoid detection by Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems. The Pentagon that has deployed extensive ISR, or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, assets along Ukraine’s borders fully coordinated the entire clandestine operation of transferring the aircraft.

After the scuttled aircraft-transfer deal that would’ve seen Poland handing over its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for the United States “backfilling” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s last month, Slovakia was in talks with NATO about an arrangement that could allow Bratislava to send fighter jets to Ukraine, Prime Minister Eduard Heger told reporters on April 11.

Eduard Heger said his government wanted to “move away from reliance on the Soviet MiGs” in any case. “This is equipment that we want to finish anyway, because we’re waiting for the F-16s,” he added, referring to US-made jets that Slovakia was scheduled to receive in 2024, though Bratislava could receive American fighter jets earlier as it has now delivered on the pledge of transferring the dozen MiG-29 aircraft Slovakia was reported to have to Ukraine.

In early March, Poland made a similar offer of transferring its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for receiving American F-16s, but the Pentagon rejected the proposal due to apprehensions over direct confrontation with Russian forces in Ukraine.

The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon said on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added.

But considering that Slovak aircraft have already been delivered to Ukraine, it seems plausible that the Polish proposal of transferring its aircraft might also be reconsidered by the Biden administration and Ukraine could receive additional Polish MiG-29 aircraft in the coming weeks.

In addition to transferring the aircraft to Ukraine, Slovakia also struck a deal with NATO earlier this month for transferring its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for the transatlantic military alliance delivering four Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

“I can confirm that Slovakia donated the S-300 air defense system to Ukraine based on its request to help in self-defense due to armed aggression from the Russian Federation,” Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced on April 8.

Although NATO has provided over 25,000 anti-aircraft MANPADS to Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias, those were portable shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, whereas S-300 air defense system, equivalent in capabilities to American Patriots, is a vehicle-mounted advanced system that could practically enforce a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace, a longstanding demand of Ukrainian politicians, within the range of the battery. The Slovak army website said its version of the S-300 battery had a range of 75 km and could strike targets up to 27 km above ground.

Negotiations for the transfer of S-300 air defense system to Ukraine had been going on for weeks before the announcement by the Slovak prime minister that Bratislava had “generously donated” its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for the transatlantic military alliance delivering four Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

The Dutch government announced on March 18 it would send a Patriot missile defense system to Sliac, Slovakia, as part of NATO moves to strengthen air defenses in Eastern Europe. “The worsened safety situation in Europe as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes this contribution necessary,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said in a statement. In addition, Germany also sent two Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

Along with the Patriot batteries, the Dutch also announced sending a contingent of 150-200 troops, who would operate and also train Slovak forces in operating the American air defense system, as the security forces of Slovakia as well as Ukraine are only trained to operate Russian-made military equipment, which many NATO countries that are former Soviet states possess.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Europe in mid-March included not only NATO headquarters in Brussels, but also stops in Bulgaria and Slovakia — countries that own S-300s and SA-8s — before he headed back to Washington.

Previously, Slovakia’s defense minister said on March 17 that the country was willing to give Ukraine its S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems if it received a “proper replacement.” Speaking at a press conference in Slovakia alongside US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Slovakia was discussing the S-300s with the US and Ukraine. “We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement. The only strategic air defense system that we have in Slovakia is S-300 system,” he added.

Lloyd Austin declined to say whether the United States might be willing to fill the gap.

“I don’t have any announcements for you this afternoon. These are things that we will continue to work with all of our allies on. And certainly, this is not just a US issue. It’s a NATO issue,” Austin said while diplomatically evading confirming the barter deal for which he had traveled all the way from Washington to Eastern Europe.

NATO member Slovakia had one battery of the S-300 air defense system, inherited from the Soviet era after the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Following the Slovakia visit, Lloyd Austin also visited Bulgaria on March 18. Bulgaria has S-300 systems, but the country made it clear it had no plans to send any to Ukraine.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev prudently said that any arms supplies to Ukraine were equivalent to the country being dragged into war. Ultimately, he said, such an issue should be decided by the parliament. He also said that Bulgaria needed its S-300 for its own air defense, particularly for the Kozlodui nuclear power plant.

Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger said Slovakia would receive additional equipment from NATO allies to make up for the transfer. Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad subsequently announced that Slovakia would receive a fourth Patriot missile system from the United States a week after the announcement of the deal.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the United States would place one Patriot system in Slovakia in the coming days and it would be operated by US troops. “Their deployment length has not yet been fixed, as we continue to consult with the Slovakian government about more permanent air defense solutions,” Austin said in a statement.

“As the Russian military repositions for the next phase of this war, I have directed my administration to continue to spare no effort to identify and provide to the Ukrainian military the advanced weapons capabilities it needs to defend its country,” President Joe Biden said while thanking Slovakia for sending its S-300 system to Ukraine.

Acknowledging President Biden’s gratitude, Russian forces claimed they had destroyed the S-300 air defense system that Slovakia transferred to Ukraine in a Kalibr cruise missiles strike hitting a hangar on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

In his regular briefing on the military operation in Ukraine on April 11, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed the barrage of sea-launched Kalibr missiles destroyed four S-300 launchers and as many as 25 Ukrainian troops in the precision strike. The Russian official also reported destroying an S-300 targeting radar in a separate airstrike near Uspenovka.

The Pentagon revealed last week that the United States had committed more than $3.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration, including approximately $2.6 billion since the beginning of Russia’s “unprovoked assault” on February 24.

As of April 14, United States security assistance committed to Ukraine includes:

• Over 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
• Over 5,500 Javelin anti-armor systems;
• Over 14,000 other anti-armor systems;
• Over 700 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• 18 155mm Howitzers and 40,000 155mm artillery rounds;
• 16 Mi-17 helicopters;
• Hundreds of Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles;
• 200 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers;
• Over 7,000 small arms;
• Over 50,000,000 rounds of ammunition;
• 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets;
• Laser-guided rocket systems;
• Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels;
• 14 counter-artillery radars;
• Four counter-mortar radars;
• Two air surveillance radars;
• M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
• C-4 explosives and demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
• Tactical secure communications systems;
• Night vision devices, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders;
• Commercial satellite imagery services;
• Explosive ordnance disposal protective gear;
• Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment;
• Medical supplies to include first aid kits.

Despite making Ukraine an “ordnance depot” of NATO powers on Russia’s western flank, CNN reported Tuesday the US had few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it had sent across the border into Ukraine, a blind spot that’s due in large part to the lack of US boots on the ground in the country—and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems pouring across the border.

“We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” said one source briefed on US intelligence. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”

Trucks loaded with pallets of arms provided by the Defense Department were picked up by Ukrainian armed forces, primarily in Poland, and then driven into Ukraine, Kirby said, “then it’s up to the Ukrainians to determine where they go and how they’re allocated inside their country.”

In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places, a defense official said. But right now, the official said, the administration views a failure to adequately arm Ukraine as a greater risk.

Although NATO powers did provide caches of anti-aircraft Stingers to Afghan jihadists that helped turning the tide in the Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, since then, despite providing anti-tank munitions and rest of weapons to militant groups in the proxy wars in Libya and Syria, Western powers have consistently avoided providing MANPADS to proxy forces, because such deadly anti-aircraft munitions could become a long-term threat not only to military aircraft but also to civilian airlines.

In the sheer desperation to inflict maximum material damage on Russia’s security forces, however, NATO appears to have breached its own long-standing convention of curbing the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 7, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley revealed that US and NATO countries have collectively provided over 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons during NATO’s “weapons for peace” program to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

Who would be responsible for the myopic and self-destructive policy of providing anti-aircraft munitions to Ukraine’s security forces and allied ultra-nationalist militias once the war ends and those MANPADS are found in black markets, notably in thriving weapons markets of Eastern Europe, posing grave risk to military aircraft as well as civilian airlines across the globe?

In fact, Russia alluded to the mortal risk posed by the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions in its diplomatic demarche to the United States last week. The document, titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime,” was forwarded to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington, in which Russia accused NATO powers of violating “rigorous principles” governing the transfer of weapons to conflict zones, and of being oblivious to “the threat of high-precision weapons falling into the hands of radical nationalists, extremists and bandit forces in Ukraine.”

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is from super-hobby.com

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 April 18, 2022

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Vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates recently spoke at the TED 2022 platform calling the anti-Vax movement a bunch of crazy people, here is what he said,

“So it’s somewhat ironic to have somebody turn around and say we’re using vaccines to kill people or to make money or we started the pandemic”

he continued

“Does this turn into something where there’s constantly crazy people showing up? Who knows?” 

Since the old days when the medical establishment expanded the use of vaccines to supposedly cure everything under the sun, they claim that they have saved countless lives, yet it seems that many people whether they are in the medical field or not, accept the notion that vaccines are the only answer that can cure a disease or help people stay healthy. I want to mention that there have been vaccines that were successful, but not all of them, these days its sort of playing Russian roulette with your life, so let’s take a step back and look at some of those vaccines that has caused injuries and deaths’ in its historical context.

During World War I, a major pandemic known as the Spanish Flu of 1918 shaped the way we view the use of vaccines.  It was a conspiracy that was astounding once you dive into what was behind the worldwide pandemic at the time.  It was estimated that the Spanish Flu had killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.  It is important to clarify that the Spanish Flu was not at all Spanish, it was American, and it began at an army base in Fort Riley, Kansas where the first case of the flu was discovered.

It basically began with billionaire tycoon John D. Rockefeller, an ambitious industrialist, founder of the Standard Oil Company who later joined the elite club of Globalists who helped turn Big Pharma into an influential industry controlled by the establishment.

During the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic, it was Rockefeller’s invisible hand that was behind the experimental ‘bacterial meningitis vaccine’ which was cultured in horses by the institution he funded and named after himself called the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research which is now

The Rockefeller University.  

It began in 1900, Rockefeller’s Big Oil monopoly played a major role in medicine because scientists discovered ‘petrochemicals’ which allowed them to extract different kinds of chemicals from oil to create plastics and other useful products.

The discovery also led scientists to produce vitamins leading up to the creation of new pharmaceutical drugs.

So, Rockefeller saw an opportunity to monopolize the medical industry through his oil enterprises, but he had to settle a major problem that was in the way of his new idea and that was to destroy the traditional medical practice of using natural and herbal medicines.

Holistic medicine and its uses can be traced to Europe and Indigenous tribal nations going back hundreds, even thousands of years.

Rockefeller then teamed up with another Globalist friend of his by the name of Andrew Carnegie of the Carnegie Foundation and sent Abraham Flexner who produced the Flexner Report that criticized hospitals and other institutions including medical schools that used homeopathic and natural medicines.

The result of the Flexner report forced these traditional medical institutions to close their operations.  At the same time, it led to the demonization of doctors and other health practitioners who advocated for natural and alternative medicines with the result of them ending up in prison.

Rockefeller gave more than $100 million to medical colleges and hospitals through the General Education Board (GEB), a philanthropy to support his new enterprise of producing pharmaceutical drugs from his oil companies by awarding grants to scientists who can identify which chemicals in certain plants can be used for curing diseases, then they had to produce a similar chemical in the lab from Rockefellers petroleum to recreate a new prototype of medicine that could be eventually patented and sold to the public.

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (which is the birthplace of Big Pharma) had played a major role in the global pandemic at the time because it was their vaccine that caused flu-like symptoms. 

The experimental bacterial meningitis vaccine was administered between January 21^st to June 4^th, 1918, at Fort Riley with over 6 million American soldiers who were drafted for the war effort, many of them became human test subjects after receiving numerous doses of the experimental vaccine or the horse-infused bacteria.  At the same time, while fighting the war under harsh unsanitary conditions, American soldiers had spread the bacteria infused in their bodies even further on the battlefields of Europe.

However, after the war had ended on November 11, 1918, there were claims of returning soldiers spreading various diseases from Europe within the US, so a campaign spearheaded by the Rockefeller Institute to vaccinate the US population with the remaining vaccines took place resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people.  What was shocking was the level of the vaccine experiments on the soldiers and then on the US population as autopsies revealed that the bacteria were caused by those same experimental bacterial meningitis vaccines that destroyed their immune systems.

A report from July 20, 1918, by Frederick L. Gates, M.D. First Lieutenant, Medical Corps of the US Army ‘Antimeningitis Vaccination and Observations on Agglutinins in the Blood of Chronic Meningococcus Carriers’ confirms the history of the experiments on American soldiers:

Following an outbreak of epidemic meningitis at Camp Funston, Kansas, in October and November, 1917, a series of antimeningitis vaccinations was undertaken on volunteer subjects from the camp. Major E. H. Schorer, Chief of the Laboratory Section at the adjacent Base Hospital at Fort Riley, offered every facility at his command and cooperated in the laboratory work connected with the vaccinations. In the camp, under the direction of the Division Surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel J. L. Shepard, a preliminary series of vaccinations on a relatively small number of volunteers served to determine the appropriate doses and the resultant local and general reactions. Following this series, the vaccine was offered by the Division Surgeon to the camp at large, and “given by the regimental surgeons to all who wished to take it

Preliminary Series. The preliminary series of vaccinations was carried out in the 342nd Field Artillery Regiment through the courtesy of Colonel Nugent and Major Czar C. Johnson, surgeon of the regiment. This organization volunteered en masse in response to the call issued by the Division Surgeon and offered a most promising opportunity for an extended series of observations. Moreover, only one case of meningitis had developed in the 342nd Field Artillery and the regiment had recently been covered in the search for meningococcus carriers. During the first experience the vaccination of known carriers was avoided, and this regiment appeared to be free from them

As the experiments continued, Gates reported that the men started to experience flu-like symptoms:

A survey of the reports of the regimental surgeons and of the observations in the preliminary series shows that headache was the most frequent symptom following injection and accompanied most of the other symptoms encountered. Sometimes the reaction was initiated by a chill or chilly sensation, and a number of men complained of fever or feverish sensations during the following night. Next in frequency came nausea (occasionally vomiting), dizziness, and general “aches and pains” in the joints and muscles, which in a few instances were especially localized in the neck or lumbar region, causing stiff neck or stiff back

However, bacterial meningitis is known to be very similar to flu-like symptoms as described in webmd.com that includes fever, headache, upset stomach or vomiting, stiff neck, etc.  Comparing the early symptoms of bacterial meningitis and even bacterial pneumonia to the flu is the sole reason why the vaccine experiments at Fort Riley, Kansas have been ignored as the main cause of the Spanish Flu.  In fact, an interesting article from the New Scientist published on August 4^th, 2008 ‘Bacteria were the real killers in 1918 flu pandemic’ partially admits that “Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.” The reason I say that the article “partially admits” is that it was bacteria and not the influenza virus that was the cause of death because the article never mentioned that it was the bacterial meningitis vaccine that spread the flu among soldiers and civilians:

Government efforts to gird for the next influenza pandemic – bird flu or otherwise – ought to take notice and stock up on antibiotics, says John Brundage, a medical microbiologist at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Brundage’s team culled first-hand accounts, medical records and infection patterns from 1918 and 1919. Although a nasty strain of flu virus swept around the world, bacterial pneumonia that came on the heels of mostly mild cases of flu killed the majority of the 20 to 100 million victims of the so-called Spanish flu, they conclude.

“We agree completely that bacterial pneumonia played a major role in the mortality of the 1918 pandemic,” says Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland, and author of another journal article out next month that comes to a similar conclusion

The article only mentions what lifelong bureaucrat and the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci had said regarding the vaccines:

Antibiotics and vaccines against bacterial pneumonia could limit deaths in the next pandemic. And while an effective influenza vaccine should nip an outbreak in the bud, such a vaccine could take months to prepare and distribute.

“The idea of stockpiling [bacterial] vaccines and antibiotics is under serious consideration,” says Fauci, who is on a US government taskforce to prepare for the next flu pandemic

Obviously Fauci’s statement must have been music to Big Pharma’s ears.

In the United States, the flu shot is advertised relentlessly to the public as a safe and effective way to combat the seasonal flu although there are various reports that suggest that they are dangerous.  On April 3^rd, 2020 The Children’s Health Defense published ‘An Unwelcome Milestone: Payouts for Influenza Vaccine Injuries Exceed $900 Million’ by Wayne Rohde who introduced a brief history of the development of the flu vaccine which began in the 1940’s:

Vaccine scientists have been developing inactivated influenza vaccines (IIVs) for decades, formulating the first bivalent (two-strain) IIV in the early 1940s and the first trivalent (three-strain) IIV in 1978. In 2003 , the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first three-strain live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) for use in children and adults aged 5-49 years old, extending its approval to those aged 2-49 years old in 2007

Rohde explains that “numerous influenza vaccines using different technologies and targeting different age groups have entered the market” and that “the FDA approves some influenza vaccines using accelerated approval mechanisms” which reminds us of the Covid-19 experimental injections that received the same accelerated approval process under Operation Warp Speed.   As of March 2020, Rohde’s gives a detailed analysis of the total compensation paid to the victims and their families from the injuries and deaths caused by Big Pharma’s influenza vaccines as reported by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP):

As of mid-March 2020, the total NVICP payout for all injuries and death from seasonal influenza vaccines was approximately $897,967,381.38 (based on my analysis of all decisions posted at the United States Court of Federal Claims website). In other words, just shy of $900 million dollars for damages, attorney fees and medical expert costs—for vaccines that have only been part of the compensation program for the last 15 years.

Another statistic that is concerning is the ever-growing number of petitions filed in the NVICP that await medical reviews or decisions. Over 2,000 influenza petitions alone are pending. Not even a year ago, that figure was 50% less

Some of the serious injuries included in the NVICP are Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) transverse myelitis (TM), chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) and death.

On December 1^st, 2014 the Center for Infectious Disease and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota reported on the deaths of elderly people in Italy following the use of the Novartis Flu vaccine‘Novartis flu vaccine on hold in Italy after suspicious deaths’ claimed that

“Italian authorities have suspended the use of about 500,000 doses of Fluad, a Novartis influenza vaccine for elderly people, following 13 recent deaths in people who had received the shot, according to company and media reports.”

It was first reported on November 28^th in a statement released by Novartis that it was “two batches of the vaccine, amounting to about 500,000 doses, have been put on a “precautionary hold”following the reported deaths.”  And of course, the Big Pharma giant also claimed that there was “no causal link has been found between the vaccine and the deaths.”  However, CIDRAP mentioned reports from Bloomberg News on the suspicious deaths:

Italy’s drug regulatory agency, AIFA, suspended the two vaccine lots on Nov 28, after three people died within 48 hours of being vaccinated, Bloomberg News reported. On Nov 29 the number of suspicious deaths rose to 11, Bloomberg reported that day, and today the company put the number at 13

One important question that needs to be asked is what are the ingredients in the flu vaccines?  The World Mercury Project published a brochure titled ‘Flu Vaccines in Pregnancy and Childhood: What You Need to Know’ makes it clear that mercury is in the flu vaccines and warns “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends pregnant women and infants get influenza vaccines, many of which contain ethylmercury from the preservative thimerosal” and that it may “result in mercury exposures exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended maximum levels.”  Mercury is considered “toxic to brain tissue and can impact critical stages of brain development.”  The World Mercury Project exposes the hidden dangers behind the flu shots for pregnant women citing various studies below, one of them produced by the CDC:

A 2017 CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days of receiving the vaccine. In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.

A study published in 2016 that looked at the safety of flu vaccines found a moderately elevated risk for major birth defects in infants born to women who had received a flu vaccine during the first trimester of pregnancy.

A study published in 2017 found an elevated risk of autism spectrum disorders in children whose mothers had a first trimester flu shot. Flu vaccine administration is documented to cause an inflammatory response in pregnant women. Recent research found inflammation during pregnancy is associated with the development of autism spectrum disorders.

A large study in approximately 50,000 pregnant women over five flu seasons found no difference in the risk for developing influenza or similar illnesses between those who received the influenza vaccine during pregnancy and those who did not.

An independent 2014 review found no randomized controlled trials assessing vaccination in pregnant women. It states, “The only evidence available comes from observational studies with modest methodological quality. On this basis, vaccination shows very limited effects”

The conclusion is obvious, the flu vaccine is dangerous and for those who are skeptical, are completely justified in being so.

The Polio Vaccine and the Glorification of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin

The medical establishment always flaunts how the Polio vaccine saved millions of people worldwide, but let’s take a closer look at the start of the Polio vaccine rollout.   An interesting article from The National Interest published in 2020 ‘Four Times in History Vaccines Failed (Lessons for a Coronavirus Vaccine?)’ mentioned how the polio vaccine resulted in paralysis.  There was also an increase of new cases of polio after the rollout:

In the 1955 Cutter Incident, some batches of polio vaccine given to the public contained live poliovirus—even though they had passed the required safety testing. More than 250 cases of polio were attributed to vaccines produced by one company, Cutter Laboratories. The mistake resulted in many cases of paralysis, and the vaccine was recalled as soon as new cases of polio were detected

What was known about the Cutter Incident which began on April 1955 when more than 200,000 children in the US had received the polio vaccine.  On March 2006 The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) published ‘The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to a Growing Vaccine Crisis’ claimed that the

“polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned.”

The reason behind the abandonment of the vaccine was due to investigations on the aftereffects.

 “Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.”

However, one of the most prominent advocates to vaccinate everyone for anything, Dr. Paul Offit, a well-known pediatrician who is a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices who specializes in infectious diseases, immunology, vaccines (he is co-inventor of the Rotavirus vaccine) and virology uses the Cutter Incident as a platform to propagandize the struggle of the 20^th century on behalf of medical science and its fight against polio and other diseases:

He reminds us that, within a decade of Karl Landsteiner’s identification of the polio virus in 1908, an epidemic in New York killed 2400 people (mostly children) and left thousands more with a life-long disability. In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb’, polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most’

Obviously, the JRSM explains who Dr. Offit blames for the Cutter incident which is not the people or the science behind the polio vaccine, he blamed the manufacturer of the vaccine (Cutter Laboratories) and the inspection process of the federal government:

Offit provides a gripping account of how the `March of Dimes’, inspired in part by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s personal experience of polio, raised funds for research and focused national attention on the disease. He profiles leading figures, notably Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin —brilliant, egotistical and flawed characters—pioneers in vaccine development and as scientific celebrities, and notorious for their bitter personal rivalry.

Offit offers a balanced judgement on both the Cutter incident and on the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Reviewing failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes, he exonerates Salk from blame and concludes that `the federal government, through its vaccine regulatory agency… was in the best position to avoid the Cutter tragedy’. Three larger companies produced safe polio vaccines according to Salk’s protocol for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde. The lack of experience and expertise at Cutter Laboratories, undetected by the inspectors, caused the disaster

Let’s go deeper into Offit’s propaganda.  In 2015, an article I wrote titled ‘The Jonas Salk Polio Vaccine: A Medical Breakthrough or a Propaganda Campaign for Big Pharma?’ based on the December 1960 issue of ‘Herald of Health’ an influential health magazine at the time  published a critical report titled ‘The Great Salk Vaccine Fiasco: Misuse of statistics, blackout of vaccine cases, cited by eminent Chicago doctor’ By Ernest B. Zeisler, M.D. (www.vaclib.org) who basically disagreed with Dr. Salk’s claim that the polio vaccine was safe and effective. What he wrote to the publisher of the magazine is quite revealing since he was uncertain of the new vaccine that supposedly cured polio.  Dr. Zeisler wrote “No newspaper, periodical or medical journal will touch this. Many authorities in this field agree with me, and some have written me to say so and to congratulate me for what they call my ‘courage.’But no medical man will agree with me publicly.” Dr. Zeisler made a statement on what he observed on the safety issues of the polio vaccine:

On April 12, 1955, results of a 1954 field test were published and the Salk vaccine became a licensed product. Prof. Paul Meier of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University revealed that “the vaccines used in the field trial, which were produced by two of the manufacturers, had been extensively tested in three laboratories and had been found negative for live virus. Many of the lots of vaccine released after the field trial had been produced by other manufacturers and had been tested only by the producer. Therefore, the safety of these lots could not properly be judged from the results of the field trial. All manufacturers had rejected some lots because live virus had been found in them, and therefore Salk’s theory that safety was guaranteed by the method of preparation obviously did not apply

Dr. Zeisler mentioned K.A. Brownlee from the University of Chicago whose work was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1955 as he criticized the biased field trials:

The field trial itself had violated the cardinal principles of scientific procedure. As said by Brownlee in the Journal of the American Statistical Association:

“. . . 59 per cent of the trial was worthless because of the lack of adequate controls. The remaining 41 per cent may be all right but contains internal evidence of bias in favor of the vaccinated. .. The reviewer . . . would point out that gamma globulin was triumphantly proclaimed effective by the National Foundation after a similar trial . . .”

Dr. Zeisler proclaimed that the US Public Health service continued to promote “gamma globulin” or human blood plasma made from donated human blood that contained the antibodies needed to combat polio.  He said, “it may be of interest to note that in May of 1954, several months after it had been shown to be valueless in preventing poliomyelitis, the U.S. Public Health Service continued to recommend and distribute gamma globulin “for use against poliomyelitis.” Zeisler also criticized the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for not publishing Brownlee’s criticism of gamma globulin.  In 1955, an effort to promote the polio vaccine was in effect by the ‘National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’ who published an inaccurate official report of the field trials.  But according to Dr. Salk the polio vaccine was safe.  In an interview conducted by LIFE magazine ‘Tracking the Killer’ Dr. Salk was asked if his “monkey vaccine was safe” and he said, “There is no question of ‘how safe is it?’ It is safe, and it can’t be safer than safe’.”

Dr. Zeisler said that

“the public was deceived into permitting mass vaccination of children with a vaccine which should have been known to be unsafe and which was not known to be of any value in preventing poliomyelitis” he continued “that certain lots of vaccine had produced a number of cases of poliomyelitis, and within another four weeks all the vaccine was withdrawn from use.”

On May 15^th, 1962, hearings took place before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce House of Representatives on H.R. 10541 with Clinton R. Miller who represented the National Health Federationwho asked the following question:

One of the most obvious pieces of misinformation being delivered to the American public is that the 50-percent rise in paralytic poliomyelitis in 1958 and the real accelerated increase in 1959 have been caused by persons failing to be vaccinated.  This represents a certain amount of doubletalk and an unwillingness to face facts and to evaluate a true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine.  It is doubletalk from the standpoint of logical reasoning: If the Salk vaccine is to take credit for the decline from 1955 to 1957, how can these individuals who were vaccinated several years ago contribute to the increase in 1958 and 1959? Are not these persons still vaccinated?

It was a legit question. Miller pointed out the obvious propaganda Dr. Salk used to exaggerate the benefits of the polio vaccine:

The tendency of a mass vaccination program is to herd people. People are not cattle or sheep. They should not be herded. A mass vaccination program carries a built-in temptation to oversimplify the problem; to exaggerate the benefits; to minimize or completely ignore the hazards; to discourage or silence scholarly, thoughtful and cautious opposition; to create an urgency where none exists; to whip up an enthusiasm among citizens that can carry with it the seeds of impatience, if not intolerance; to extend the concept of the police power of the state in quarantine far beyond its proper limitation; to assume simplicity when there is actually great complexity; to continue to support a vaccine long after it has been discredited;… to ridicule honest and informed consent

Today, polio vaccines are now causing a rise in new polio cases.  On November 25^th, 2019, The Associated Press (AP) published ‘More polio cases now caused by vaccine than by wild virus’ said that “four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.” The article continued:

In a report late last week, the World Health Organization and partners noted nine new polio cases caused by the vaccine in Nigeria, Congo, Central African Republic and Angola. Seven countries elsewhere in Africa have similar outbreaks and cases have been reported in Asia. Of the two countries where polio remains endemic, Afghanistan and Pakistan, vaccine-linked cases have been identified in Pakistan.

In rare cases, the live virus in oral polio vaccine can mutate into a form capable of sparking new outbreaks. All the current vaccine-derived polio cases have been sparked by a Type 2 virus contained in the vaccine. Type 2 wild virus was eliminated years ago

On November 18^th, 2020, The Science Daily published an article by the University of Michigan (Michigan Medicine) that should be an eye-opener ‘How the polio vaccine virus occasionally becomes dangerous’ stated the following:

The polio vaccine comes in two types: the Salk vaccine, made with a killed virus and the Sabin vaccine, made with a live but weakened, or attenuated, virus. The Sabin vaccine has several advantages for use in the developing world, including the fact that it does not need to be kept cold, and as an oral vaccine, it does not require needles. However, because it contains a live, albeit weakened polio virus, that virus is able to evolve into more virulent forms and cause outbreaks months to years following a vaccination campaign.

In a new paper, Adam Lauring, M.D., Ph.D., of the department of microbiology & immunology and the division of infectious disease and a collaborative team describe an enterprising study that allowed them to view the evolution of the vaccine virus into a more dangerous form in real time.  “Most outbreaks of type 2 polio virus are caused by the vaccine. Then you have a problem where our best weapon is that same vaccine, so you’re kind of fighting fire with fire,” says Lauring

If that statement by Dr, Lauring is not revealing, I don’t know what is.  However, Mami Taniuchi, Ph.D., from the University of Virginia, Michael Famulare, Ph.D from the Institute for Disease Modeling based in Seattle, Washington and a team from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research conducted human experiments on children from Bangladesh:

In an effort to understand the basic biology of poliovirus and how it replicates, Lauring’s lab seized an opportunity to build on an earlier study of a new vaccination campaign in semi-rural Bangladesh. This study, which was run by Mami Taniuchi, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia and Michael Famulare, Ph.D,. of the Institute for Disease Modeling in Seattle, Washington, along with a team from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, followed households where children were vaccinated with the live attenuated virus, collecting weekly stool samples from each household member. The virus within those samples was then genetically analyzed.

“There’s a lot of work being done to try and understand how the virus goes from attenuated to virulent again,” says Lauring. “What we haven’t known is what it is doing in those first few weeks or months. This was an opportunity to see those early steps”

The University of Michigan article concludes “yet every now and then, an enhanced virus makes it to a new host and gains a foothold, triggering disease. The hope, explains Lauring, is that this work will “inform in a better way to tinker with the vaccine so you get fewer downsides and still maintain its upsides — that it’s actually a very effective vaccine.”  

In November 2004, Neil Z Miller from the ‘Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry’ published ‘The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequences’ that can be found on researchgate.net gives an insight to what was in the polio vaccine:

Polio (poliomyelitis) is a potentially dangerous viral ailment. To combat this disease, researchers developed two polio vaccines (inactivated and live) grown in cultures made from monkey kidneys. Beginning in the 1950s, these vaccines were administered to millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. Officially, the polio vaccine is considered safe and effective, and has been credited with singularly reducing the incidence of this disease. These tenets are not supported by the data. A cancer-causing monkey virus-SV-40-was discovered in polio vaccines administered to millions of people. SV-40 has been found in brain tumors, bone cancers, lung cancers and leukemia. SV-40 is transmitted through sexual intercourse, and from mother to child in the womb. Monkeys that were used to make polio vaccines were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus closely related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent associated with AIDS. Some researchers question whether HIVs may simply be SIVs “residing in and adapting to a human host.” Polio vaccines also contain calf serum, glycerol and other parts of the cow that may have been infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, a fatal brain-wasting ailment that some researchers link to Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), its human equivalent. Current disease reduction techniques that emphasize short-term gains over long-term health consequences need to be reevaluated and discontinued while new and safer health paradigms are researched and implemented

The Most Dangerous Vaccine Ever? The Smallpox Vaccine

‘The Most Dangerous Vaccine’ was the name of an article published in 2002 from a report produced by CBS news long-time TV show 60 Minutes.  It started with “Smallpox may be the worst disease ever known to man. It killed about half a billion people from 1880 to 1980, before it was eradicated” continued “and the smallpox vaccine is deadly, too. Scientists call it the most dangerous vaccine known to man.” Then they jumped right into Iraq’s ‘WMDs’ “Today, smallpox is a potential weapon of mass destruction that could be wielded against the U.S. by enemies like Iraq and al Qaeda.”  Then the US government makes the smallpox vaccine available to everyone:

With that in mind, President Bush is expected to announce on Friday a plan which will gradually make the smallpox vaccine available to all Americans who want it.  That’s according to administration sources who say the shots will be mandatory for about 500,000 military personnel and recommended for another half-million who work in hospital emergency rooms and on special smallpox response teams.

The general public will be offered the vaccine on a voluntary basis as soon as large stockpiles are licensed, probably early in 2004, though the government will not encourage people to get them

At that time during the early stages of the US invasion of Iraq “the government has decided to bring back the vaccine because of fear that terrorists, or Iraq, could use the virus as a weapon.”  The article admits that the smallpox vaccine is dangerous and offers protection but with a catch, “but that protection has a price. Some people die from it; and others have serious reactions, some permanent. Scientists say it’s the most dangerous vaccine known to man.”  Once again, Dr. Paul Offit is mentioned in the article, “We know if we immunize a million people, that there will be 15 people that will suffer severe, permanent adverse outcomes and one person who may die from the vaccine.”

In an article from April 2003 written by Edward A. Belongia, MD and Allison L. Naleway, PhD for the  National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) titled ‘Smallpox vaccine: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ exposes some truth behind the Smallpox vaccine:

Smallpox inarguably shaped the course of human history by killing countless millions in both the Old World and the New World. Dr. Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination in the late 18th century, and the global eradication of smallpox in the 1970s, rank among the greatest achievements in human history. Amidst recent growing concerns about bioterrorism, smallpox vaccination has resurfaced from the history books to become a topic of major importance. Inoculation with vaccinia virus is highly effective for the prevention of smallpox infection, but it is associated with several known side effects that range from mild and self-limited to severe and life-threatening. As the United States moves forward with plans to vaccinate selected health care workers and the military, and perhaps offer the vaccination to all citizens in the future, it is important to fully understand and appreciate the history, risks, and benefits of smallpox vaccination

Then the article describes what were the adverse effects of the vaccine:

Smallpox vaccine is less safe than other vaccines routinely used today. The vaccine is associated with known adverse effects that range from mild to severe. Mild vaccine reactions include formation of satellite lesions, fever, muscle aches, regional lymphadenopathy, fatigue, headache, nausea, rashes, and soreness at the vaccination site. A recent clinical trial reported that more than one-third of vaccine recipients missed days of work or school because of these mild vaccine-related symptoms.

In the 1960s, serious adverse events associated with smallpox vaccination in the United States included death (1/million vaccinations), progressive vaccinia (1.5/million vaccinations), eczema vaccinatum (39/million vaccinations), postvaccinial encephalitis (12/million vaccinations), and generalized vaccinia (241/million vaccinations). Adverse events were approximately ten times more common among those vaccinated for the first time compared to revaccinees. Fatality rates were also four times higher for primary vaccinees compared to revaccinees

In conclusion, the hidden dangers in the smallpox vaccine are undeniable:

The title of this article refers to the good, bad and ugly of smallpox vaccine. We have attempted to show that the vaccine is a critical tool for controlling smallpox (“the good”), despite a relatively higher risk of complications in some individuals (“the bad”). The “ugly” refers not to the vaccine, but to the potential reintroduction of smallpox more than 20 years after its eradication

The Trials of the HPV Vaccine

The HPV vaccine or the Human Papillomavirus vaccine was created in Australia with lead researchers Ian Frazer who is an immunologist and Jian Zhou, a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher are both credited with  the invention and patents of the HPV vaccine which today are known as Gardasil and Cervarix with help from researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, the University of Rochester, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.  In 2006, The FDA fast-tracked the approval process for HPV vaccines between 2007 and 2009 in various countries which was then promoted by Merck & Co.  The HPV vaccines was supposed to prevent several types of cancers in young girls including cervical cancer, anal cancer, vaginal cancer and other life-threatening illnesses associated with cancer.  It can prevent genital warts as well.  In another report from the  National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine from November 6th, 2007 ‘Adverse events reported for HPV vaccine’ by Laura Eggertson on the adverse results from the HPV vaccines in Canada:

As 4 provinces began immunizing schoolgirls to prevent the human papillomavirus, a watchdog group in the United States warned of dangerous adverse events stemming from the vaccine’s delivery — concern government regulators dismiss.

Public health officials in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador began administering the Merck Frosst vaccine Gardasil to select groups of girls (grades 6, 7 or 8) in September, just as the US advocacy group Judicial Watch released documents obtained through Freedom of Information indicating that 3 deaths and 1637 adverse events occurred after the vaccine was administered (prior to May 15)

Judicial Watch who exposed the danger of the HPV vaccine declared that the HPV vaccine should not be mandated by state governments:

The adverse events data comes from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, as of June 30, there were 2531 adverse reports, including 9 deaths, out of 7 million doses dispensed. The figures, however, can include multiple reports of the same event, since physicians, manufacturers and patients report to the same system

On July 22, 2008, the CDC reported on the adverse events of the HPV vaccine ‘Information from FDA and CDC on Gardasil and its Safety (Archived)’ found on the internet archives of the Way back Machine.  The following is a section of the report ‘Serious Reports (6% of Total Reports)’:

Concerns have been raised about reports of deaths occurring in individuals after receiving Gardasil. As of June 30, 2008, 20 deaths had been reported to VAERS. There was not a common pattern to the deaths that would suggest they were caused by the vaccine. In cases where autopsy, death certificate and medical records were available, the cause of death was explained by factors other than the vaccine.

Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) has also been reported in individuals following vaccination with Gardasil. GBS is a rare neurological disorder that causes muscle weakness. It occurs spontaneously in unvaccinated individuals after a variety of specific infections. FDA and CDC have reviewed the reports of GBS that have been submitted to VAERS. To date, there is no evidence that Gardasil has has increased the rate of GBS above that expected in the population. While we continue to carefully analyze all reports of GBS submitted to VAERS, the data do not currently suggest an association between Gardasil and GBS.

Thromboembolic disorders (blood clots) have been reported to VAERS in people who have received Gardasil. Most of these individuals had risk factors for blood clots, such as use of oral contraceptives which are known to increase the risk of clotting. Thromboembolic disorders as well as other medical events are being studied through the VSD in previously planned controlled studies. The manufacturer has also committed to conduct a large post marketing study to further assess the vaccine’s safety

In 2010, the HPV vaccine was also administered to young girls in India which raised serious concerns according to the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics who reported in ‘Deaths in a trial of the HPV vaccine’that “the death of girls who were a part of a Human Papilloma Virus vaccine trial has raised an alarm about the nature of research in India as well as the value attached by the state to the lives of its citizens.”  The experimental trials were funded by humanity’s arch nemesis Bill Gates:

The trial was being conducted in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat by the NGO PATH with support from the Indian Council of Medical Research and local health authorities. They were funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The vaccine is supplied by two companies, Merck Sharpe & Dohme and Glaxo Smith Kline.

When the government stopped the trials, three doses had already been administered to 30,000 participants, mostly tribal girls aged between 9 and 14. The union health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has denied that the deaths have anything to do with the trials, and as things stand, there is no conclusive evidence of a causal link between the vaccine and the deaths. But the fact that the girls were a part of the trial is reason enough to warrant further investigations

On August 19, 2008, The New York Times ‘Drug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise’ reminds us of the rapid rollout of the Covid-19 experimental injections:

But some experts worry about the consequences of the rapid rollout of the new vaccines without more medical evidence about how best to deploy them. They say that because of the aggressive marketing, even parents of girls who are far from being sexually active may feel pressured into giving them a vaccine that is not yet needed and whose long-term impact is still unclear. Legislative efforts to require girls to have the vaccine only add to the pressure.

In the United States, hundreds of doctors have been recruited and trained to give talks about Gardasil — $4,500 for a lecture — and some have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Politicians have been lobbied and invited to receptions urging them to legislate against a global killer. And former state officials have been recruited to lobby their former colleagues

Big Pharma’s propaganda seems relentless in its pursuit of profits.  Sources from the CDC and FDA reported in the month of June 2008 that there were 9,749 reports of adverse events.  But keep in mind that the VAERS reporting system may be inaccurate since not everyone uses it as the CDC’s own website states in ‘Guide to Interpreting VAERS Data’:

“Underreporting” is one of the main limitations of passive surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting varies widely. As an example, a great many of the millions of vaccinations administered each year by injection cause soreness, but relatively few of these episodes lead to a VAERS report. Physicians and patients understand that minor side effects of vaccinations often include this kind of discomfort, as well as low fevers. On the other hand, more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones, especially when they occur soon after vaccination, even if they may be coincidental and related to other causes.

A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine

The fact that the VAERS reporting system is underreporting injuries and deaths can allow Big Pharma to suppress the dangers of vaccines.  However, The New York Times article admitted that the VAERS reporting system is voluntary which leads to inaccurate reporting:

The Centers for Disease Control asks health care centers to report side effects through its Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System; reporting is voluntary. There have been 9,749 reports, almost all from doctors and nurses, of patients experiencing adverse events after receiving the vaccine, the agency announced in a joint report with the Food and Drug Administration at the end of June. Ninety-four percent of them were not serious, ranging from arm pain to fainting, and 6 percent were classified as serious, including blood clots, paralysis and at least 20 deaths.

But 16 million doses of the drug have been distributed by Merck in the United States, and in a population so large, “by chance alone some serious adverse effects and deaths” will occur, the F.D.A. and C.D.C. said.  The agencies said there was no indication that the deaths or serious side effects were caused by the shot, concluding that “Gardasil continues to be safe and effective and its benefits continue to outweigh its risks”

Overall, administering vaccines in general is basically playing Russian roulette.  For those who are skeptical about vaccines should be.  There is a long history of vaccine injuries and deaths, now with the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, which is still ongoing, now with Big Pharma’s new experimental injections called Covid-19 vaccines, the danger is clear.  The Children’s Health Defense updates the public on what the VAERS reporting system although not as accurate reported as of April 8^th, 2022:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.  Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 805,921 adverse events, including 12,471 deaths and 79,811 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022

The European Union also has a system similar to VAERS called EudraVigilance as Health Impact Newspublished the latest data on March 26^th, 2022:

The European (EEA and non-EEA countries) database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, verified by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and they are now reporting 42,507 fatalities, and 3,984,978 injuries

The pharmaceutical corporations who produce the current MRNA Vaccines include Moderna (CX-024414),  Pfizer-BIONTECH,  AstraZeneca and JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S).

The Covid-19 experimental injections are dangerous as more injuries and deaths increase as time goes by, unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.  We are at the early stages of what will be known as one of the greatest crimes against humanity and I hope one day that those who are involved in the conspiracy including Big Pharma, government bureaucrats and the rest of the Globalist cabal will be brought to justice.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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First published on April 18, 2022

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VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 26,976 deaths and 219,865 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 805,921 adverse events, including 12,471 deaths and 79,811 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.

Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.

Of the 12,471 U.S. deaths reported as of April 8, 17% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 21% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 564 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 8, including 334 million doses of Pfizer, 212 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:

• 10,216 adverse events, including 242 rated as serious and 5 reported deaths.
• 18 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation).
  The CDC uses a narrowed case definition of “myocarditis,” which excludes cases of cardiac arrest, ischemic strokes and deaths due to heart problems that occur before one has the chance to go to the emergency department.
• 39 reports of blood clotting disorders.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:

• 31,048 adverse events, including 1,792 rated as serious and 44 reported deaths.
• 67 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 651 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, with 639 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 166 reports of blood clotting disorders, with all cases attributed to Pfizer.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:

• 20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
• 54% of those who died were male, 41% were female and the remaining death reports did not include the gender of the deceased.
• The average age of death was 73.
• As of April 8, 5,404 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 1,6936 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
• Of the 3,647 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 51% were attributed to Pfizer vaccinations, 40% to Moderna and 8% to J&J.
• 860 reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome, with 42% of cases attributed to Pfizer, 30% to Moderna and 28% to J&J.
• 2,373 reports of anaphylaxis where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death.
• 1,671 reports of myocardial infarction.
• 13,755 reports of blood-clotting disorders in the U.S. Of those, 6,169 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 4,911 reports to Moderna and 2,654 reports to J&J.
• 4,124 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis with 2,531 cases attributed to Pfizer, 1,402 cases to Moderna and 181 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.

Woman develops fatal brain disease after second Moderna dose

Carol Beauchine died from sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rapidly evolving, fatal degenerative brain disorder she developed after her second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Carol’s son, Jeffrey Beauchine, said it was excruciating to watch his 70-year-old mother — who was healthy until she got the vaccine — die from a disease he believes the vaccine caused.

Beauchine said Carol received her first dose of Moderna on Feb. 16, 2021, and didn’t report any complaints. After getting the second dose on March 17, Carol immediately said she “felt different.” She developed numbness that spread throughout the entire left side of her body, blindness and hearing loss. She lost the ability to walk and communicate, and her brain degenerated until she passed away on Aug. 2, 2021 — just five months after receiving her second dose of Moderna.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Jeffrey Beauchine said his mother, Carol, knew her Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was related to the Moderna shot. Watching her death was like “something you see out of a movie,” he said.https://t.co/z972KqtM9w

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 11, 2022

The family submitted a report to VAERS, but the CDC has not followed up on Carol’s death. The Defender has received numerous reports of people who died from sporadic CJD after receiving a COVID vaccine — all women who were between the ages of 60 and 70, including Cheryl Cohenand Jennifer Deason Sprague.

Biden administration extends COVID public health emergency needed to keep vaccines under EUA

The Biden administration on Wednesday extended the COVID public health emergency, now two years old, for an additional 90 days — allowing vaccines and other drugs to remain under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Keeping COVID vaccines and other countermeasures under EUA shields pharmaceutical companies from liability for the harms caused by their products.

According to Reuters, a public health emergency was initially announced in January 2020, when the COVID pandemic began. It has been renewed each quarter since and was due to expire on April 16.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement it was extending the public health emergency and will give states 60 days’ notice prior to termination or expiration. This may be the last time HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra extends it, according to policy experts.

Pfizer to seek authorization from FDA for COVID booster shot for kids 5 to 11 years old

Pfizer and BioNTech Thursday said they plan to apply for EUA of a COVID booster dose for healthy 5- to 11-year-olds based on the results of a small study that has not been published or analyzed by independent experts.

Pfizer said in a press release the third dose of its vaccine produced significant protection against the Omicron variant in children 5 to 11 in a small Phase 2/3 clinical trial. The study was based on data from only 140 children 5 through 11 years old who received a booster dose six months after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine as part of the primary series.

Pfizer claimed a closer look at 30 children showed a 36-fold increase in virus-fighting antibodies — levels high enough to fight the Omicron variant, and that a third dose was “well tolerated with no new safety signals observed.”

Although Pfizer said more than 10,000 children under the age of 12 have participated in clinical trials investigating Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, only 140 were selected for the study forming the basis for the company’s EUA request.

CDC launches internal review over failed COVID response

The CDC announced Monday it was launching a month-long comprehensive agency-wide review following widespread criticism of the agency’s response to the COVID pandemic.

The agency plans to evaluate its structure, systems and processes, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told staff in an email obtained by The Washington Post. Walensky said the goal of the review is to “modernize” the agency and “to position CDC, and the public health community, for greatest success in the future.”

The review will be conducted by Jim Mcrae, associate administrator for primary healthcare at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The HRSA and the CDC are part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Last month, the CDC’s decision to remove from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID — including nearly a quarter of the deaths the agency said had occurred among children — eroded public trust in the CDC’s handling of case counts.

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

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First published on April 5, 2022

***

Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30.

Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that 

At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor (watch video below) or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia.

Given that they are claiming bodies litter the streets they could hardly have escaped the attention of the Mayor!

It took four days for claims of a “war crime” to emerge (3rd of April).

Film of alleged victims on the roads in Bucha look suspicious, with “bodies” moving. (we know this has happened in other staged and acted films provided by Ukraine’s propaganda).

See Suspicious Video below

It is claimed that civilians had been shot and buried in shallow graves. We know from the behaviour of NATO allies in the Yugoslav war that in Racak dead soldiers were dressed up as civilians and then paraded as the victims of “a massacre” which was later debunked.

As of March 31st, Bucha was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials.

On April 2, the National Police of Ukraine released a video of “the mop up operation in Bucha”.

This official video of the Ukraine Police was  released a day prior to the release of the “suspicious video” (April 3, 2022)

Compare the two videos

Video: Ukraine Police Mop Up Operation (April 2, 2022)

There is also the possibility that those civilians in Bucha who were accused of cooperating with Russian forces could have been executed by Ukrainian forces following the Russian exit on 30th March.

It is also both unprecedented and suspicious that the U.K. Chair at the UN Security Council refused an emergency meeting called by Russia on 3rd April to discuss the Bucha claims.

A Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva has accused the Ukrainian SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] of fabricating (with the help of MI6) the Bucha “crimes”. (see youtube unless it has been censored already!)

If only we could say that “time will tell” which side is telling the truth! But there is certainly no doubt about the self-filmed Ukrainian crimes in this post (see below).

The Cynical Sacrifice of Ukraine

In an interview with CNN ON 20th March, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said of Joe Biden and the NATO leadership (the interview)

“I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,” Zelensky said.

“And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open,”

Nothing shows the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainians more than this duplicitous treatment of Zelensky by NATO.

Privately NATO and the Biden administration were telling Zelenskyy Ukraine was never going to be in NATO, yet they told him they were going to act publicly as if the possibility existed. The latter position (together with Zelensky’s remarks about developing nuclear weapons) they knew would provoke Russia into war.

The German President has every reason to be angry at this, given that he promised Zelensky before the war that if he rejected NATO membership the Russians wouldn’t attack.

The evident (at least 8 year long) intent of the USA and NATO to provoke Russia into an attack was confirmed by Biden’s intemperate admission (on his visit to Poland) that he wanted regime change in Moscow.

As Madeleine Albright (recently deceased) said in 1998:

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

According to recent polls, one-third of the American people were enthusiastic about the idea of nuclear war with Russia. Even though as one commentator pointed out most of them would be Democrat supporting inhabitants of major cities which would be nuclear bomb targets! After years of wall to wall Russophobic bigotry and lies about Ukraine blasted out by tech companies, politicians and the mainstream media this mad mass psychosis is no surprise.

David Sanger reported for the New York Times that the Biden administration

“seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted (!!!) Ukrainian military units, according to American officials.”

In fact (as happened with US weapons provided to Syrian rebel forces) hundreds of tanks and anti tank weapons have found their way into the hands of the Russians as Ukrainian troops have defected, been killed or captured.

The Mindless Western and Ukrainian War Propaganda

Here are some examples of the blatantly distorted media and image war. A picture of an injured child from Damascus is used again as anti Russian propaganda in Ukraine:

Here a “heartbreaking” image of a Ukrainian soldier leaving his loved one to go to war turns out to be from fiction film “The War of Chimeras”.

The BBC broadcast on the World Service the news that somewhere called “Tarkov” was resisting the Russians. Pity it is a fictional city from a computer game!

A film of a rocket ostensibly shooting down a Russian aircraft also turned out to be a scene from a commercial film!

Russian Civilians Killed in East Ukraine Don’t Make News

This DONETSK bombing by Ukrainian troops which killed 20 civilians was not reported in the western media. The missile was one used only by Ukrainian forces. See this.

Indeed there is a report that a far greater crime had been intended with civilians drawn by false information to an Administration building with fake text messages.

The very next day, Monday March 14th, at about 12:20 in the afternoon, the ukrops (Ukrainian forces) launched a Tochka-U ballistic missile with a 1,000 pound anti-personnel cluster bomb warhead at the Administration building in the city center.

The Nazis sent text messages and posted on social media (under fake pro-DPR accounts) for mothers, wives and sisters of our soldiers to gather at the administration building at noon on Monday to get information about their men. THIS was the intended target of the missile. 

As many civilian women as possible. And it is not a rumour, I can confirm I have seen the text message myself sent to the daughter of one of my comrades. Our air defence intercepted the missile and prevented it from reaching the target, but some of the cluster bomb cassettes fell on University Avenue in downtown Donetsk (where the 20 civilians were killed).

Ukrainian War Crimes and Propaganda

As befits a regime headed by a comedian and actor, never has one side in a war used so many actors to fake scenes for propaganda purposes. The most common has been the use of actors to fake dead bodies. The most recent being claims related to areas where Russian troops have withdrawn since 30th March.  Here a “body” moves and after the car goes by, starts to get up.

A similar film was taken a couple of weeks ago ostensibly from a morgue where some 30 “bodies” were lined up. Unfortunately some of them moved while the filming was going on!

Ukrainian Psychopaths

But such fakes are nothing compared to the treatment by Ukrainian soldiers of captured Russians in an infamous video.

At the beginning of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting newly arrived prisoners through their legs. Needless to say they are not treated. Shock could have killed them due to the pain. In the rest of the video Russian POWs lying on the ground with bullet wounds in their legs. Some of them have their legs broken. It takes psychopaths to film their own atrocities and then make it public. All of this was filmed by Ukrainian soldiers themselves.

Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states: “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated.” Here Ukrainian soldiers call up the mothers and wives of soldiers they have killed, mocking them

Ukrainian Soldiers Film Themselves Calling Up Mothers of Russian Soldiers Killed in Action And Mocking Them

Ukrainian soldier using the phone of a dead Russian soldier to call the Russian’s mother and make fun of her and her son.
Disgusting pic.twitter.com/hPS5d8GTPA

— Angelo Giuliano 🇮🇹 🇨🇭 (@Angelo4justice3) March 25, 2022

Crimes in the Donbass

“Tatyana accompanies me to the hospital. She has also lived in Volnovakha most of her life. “The Ukrainians deliberately destroyed us. They needed the land. And then, it seems, the land was no longer needed, so they just beat us out of anger,” she says, pointing to holes blown into the hospital by shells and shrapnel-scarred asphalt. Then she takes me to the morgue, a small building that has also been noticeably damaged by shooting. The door turns out to be unlocked, and I see the morgue is completely filled with dead bodies. They lie in the corridor stacked up in two or three layers.

According to Tatyana, the National Guard soldiers siphoned diesel fuel from the hospital’s generators, so all the old people who depended on artificial ventilation devices died. “

The Ukrainian military allegedly said they would “leave nothing” in Volnovakha if they were ousted by pro-Russian forces.

See this.

When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked President Zelensky on Friday about reports of Azov Battalion committing atrocities, Zelensky appeared to brush them off by saying, “They are what they are, they were defending our country.” Fox then censored their report!

See this.

The main reason why so many civilian buildings have been damaged and destroyed in Ukrainian towns is because Ukrainian soldiers have used those buildings and the civilians in and around them as human shields. Here is a report from Odessa which although not yet the centre of Russian operations its preparing for an attack. Ukrainian troops have apparently taken up positions in Schools and hospitals.

See this.

Odessa native (Lev Vershinin) living in exile in the EU wrote in this article in Russian:

• Nazi/Ukr-soldiers taking positions in schools, hospitals:
• school no.1 at Mikhailovskiy-Place 10
• school no. 57 at Yamchinkiy street 7
• school no. 59 at Maraslievskyy street 60
• medical centre/surgery at Sudostroitelnaya 1
• Odessa University clinic at Tenista st. 8
• maternity clinics no.1 and no.4
• evening school no.25 at Staroportofrankovskiy st 45a
• Marinskiy gymnasium at Lev-Tolstoy-st 9

Aidar-leader Maksim Marchenko in a document of 16/3/2022 ordered his troops to prevent civilians from leaving the city (apparently a document with his stamp & signature exists). This has been the norm which is why the humanitarian corridors offered by the Russians were for a long time a dangerous failure. Only the Ukrainians have the incentive to bottle up civilians as human shields in the cities to which they have retreated. They know the Russians don’t want to destroy such heritage but are forced to fire on buildings which protect Ukrainian gun positions. Would the British Government station guns in St Paul’s Cathedral?

Oles Yanchuk – former mayor of Odessa, now leader of Nazi-battalion “Bratstvo” – said about Odessa: the city will be destroyed (by us): “if they come to Odessa, they will receive it only burned down and destroyed.”

Other buildings used by Ukrainian troops have been a synagogue and the famous Pecherskaya Lavra monastery in Kiev. See this.

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First published on February 21, 2022

In recent developments  A UK magistrates’ court has announced a decision on the extradition of Julian Assange to the US. A definitive endorsement from the UK Home Secretary is expected to be released in mid-May.

Should Priti Patel move to extradite Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher will face numerous counts of “criminal acts” in the US and will be subjected to torture while in detention. 

***

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being made an example of by the US government to deter investigative journalists from exposing state abuses, the current UN Special Rapporteur on torture says.

Nearly 12 years ago Wikileaks published the Afghan War Diary, one of the biggest leaks in US military history. More documents would folliow, exposing state secrets and allowing journalists to scrutinise and hold politicians to account.

To avoid extradition to the States to face espionage charges, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, before Ecuador turned him over to Britain in 2019. He is currently in Belmarsh Prison in south-east London.

Nils Melzer, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture initially declined to get involved in Assange’s case. But as he writes in his new book The Trial of Julian Assange, when he started to look closely at the facts he found Assange to be a victim of political persecution.

He first met Assange in May 2019 when he visited him with two medical specialists at Belmarsh, four weeks after he had been arrested. The team were there to investigate claims of torture.

When Assange name first crossed his desk, he says his reaction was visceral – he dismissed Assange as a rapist, a narcissist and a hacker, based on media reports of his case. Assange’s lawyers had contacted him in December 2018 when he was still in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London asking for intervention under the conditions of the Anti-Torture Convention as his living conditions were considered inhumane.

It was only after looking at the medical reports that he acted and looked deeper into the case.

“I didn’t know Mr Assange,” he told Saturday Morning. “I had never analysed the case and I was under the same impression that many others are still under today from those narratives that had been spread in the press for 10 years about him – being suspected of rape, being a coward hiding in the embassy, a self-centred narcissist. I had also sub-consciously absorbed this narrative.

“So, when his lawyers reached out to me as the mandated UN human rights expert I had been so affected by this narrative that I was unable to objectively look at the case. I initially declined to look at it.

“It was only when his lawyers came back three months later and said they were afraid they might be imminently expelled from the embassy and sent to the US on espionage charges that they sent along a couple of pieces of evidence, including some medical opinion by Dr Sandra Crosby, who’s not an Assange activist. She’s a well-known independent medical expert in the US who had visited Guantanamo… and had specialised in examining torture victims for all of her career. She had visited Assange and had come to the conclusion that his living conditions had indeed breached the Convention against torture.”

On 8 April 2019, he requested that the UK and Ecuadorian government freeze the situation until he could visit and carry out an investigation. On 11 April Assange was expelled from the embassy and taken into custody without due process.

“I might even have accelerated this process. I don’t know that for sure,” he says.

Melzer has no binding authority on governments and can only point out allegations of torture and make recommendations to governments, but he was surprised at the UK government’s lack of engagement with him over Assange.

The UN Human Rights Council has an expectation that governments co-operate with their mandate, but cannot compel acfion. The Assange cases highlighted its lack of teeth, he says.

“The reaction of the states in the Assange case actually prompted me to conduct a wider analysis of the effectiveness of my interventions more generally and indeed about nine of the 10 requests don’t receive adequate responses where you could actually resolve a case and provide protection to a person,” Melzer says.

Assange’s position has been widely misunderstood due to a media narrative that suggested Assange had voluntarily remained at the embassy. His position had been ridiculed as someone paranoid of being arrested, as well as being portrayed as a person hiding to avoid justice in the Swedish courts on rape charges, Melzer says.

However, Assange felt compelled to stay at the London Embassy due to threats of rights violations if he left, Melzer points out.

In December last year the High Court in London ruled he could be extradited to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act, after a judge accepted assurances authorities would take measures to reduce his risk of suicide and wouldn’t impose restrictive prison conditions on him.

He faces a sentence of up to 170 years in prison.

“Espionage Act has the advantage for the US that it does not allow any form of defence on the part of the accused,” Melzer says.

“As soon as the accused is proven to have disclosed classified information protected by the Espionage Act, then he’s basically to be convicted for espionage.

“So, then he can’t raise a defence of public interest for example, saying ‘well the information I disclosed is evidence for serious misconduct if not war crimes on the part of the authorities and therefore cannot be protected by secrecy.

“That’s a defence that’s not allowed under the Espionage Act and that’s the main reason why they would want to accuse him and prosecute him under that piece of legislation, because otherwise Julian Assange would clearly start unpacking the content of the information he disclosed and the fact that no one has ever been prosecuted for those very serious crimes, and that would clearly make it very difficult for the US to maintain a viable case.”

Contrary to the High Court judge’s interpretation there were no substantive assurances given that Assange would be treated humanely by the US, he says.

“They have promised that they would not detain Julian Assange in a very specific supermax prison in Florence, Colorado that was used in eventual hearings as an example of particularly harsh conditions. But the United States has dozens of other supermax prisons… they have not been excluded in those assurances.”

Assange faces up to 15 years in strict solitary confinement while his legal team fights for him to serve his time in Australia, if the Australia government accepts this arrangement, Melzer adds.

For Melzer there has been so much misinformation released about Assange and Wikileaks that it’s important to distinguish between facts and false narratives circulating in media.

The US has never proven that lives of military personnel were put under threat because of Wikileaks, he points out. Much of those false accusations serve to mask the true intent of the US government’s actions against Wikileaks.

“What was so dangerous is the methodology of Wikileaks,” Melzer says.

“It’s not the actual content of the actual information that has been disclosed, but the mechanism that has been developed – that was revolutionary.

“We’ve had before massive leaks, such as that of the Pentagon Papers, for example. But because there was no internet at the time there was a natural limit to the amount of information you could leak and make available to the public. Through the Wikileaks platform that allows whistleblowers to remain anonymous and at the same time leak millions of pages of secret information from all over the world.

“If that replicates, if that would proliferate as a model and a few years later you might have 20,000 Wikileaks for all over the world, well, that would be the end of the business model of governments based on secrecy and impunity.

“That’s what the US government and their allies are afraid of and they’re setting on example with the Assange’s case to deter others because the actual real-world damage created by those specific publications… there has been no evidence that there has been more than embarrassment for the US.”

Melzer accepts the need in liberal democracies to create protective space for negotiations and bilateral dialogue between states and institution, but cautions there is an important distinction between confidentiality and secrecy..

“Confidentiality does not remove the content of those discussions from legal oversight should there be any crime committed behind the vale of secrecy.”

He says there cannot be any justification for removing any part of governance for public oversight, at least through an intermediary like the judiciary.

Much has also been said about how irresponsible Wikileaks had been dumping millions of pages of diplomatic papers into the public domain without redaction or curation. Melzer points out Assange warned the US about the file dump and suggested co-operative ways of mitigating threats.

“Wikileaks actually went to great lengths ensuring that there was a proper redaction and risk reduction,’ he says.

“The publication of unredacted diplomatic cables for example was not something that came from Wikileaks as the first publisher, but was apparently two Guardian journalists who published a book and in that book they published the passwords that they had been given by Wikileaks to work on those unredacted files. Through that password those unredacted files that had been stored on the internet encrypted were made available to the public and only after that happened Wikileaks decided to also publish files unredacted.”

Assange has been in Belmarsh Prison for three years now, with reports of his mental health deteriorating. Melzer says when he visited him he did not expect to find torture.

“I expected to find someone who was stressed out, who had some medical problems,” he says.

“He immediately reminded me of political prisoners I had visited around the world… He also reminded me, from his behavioural pattern, his body language, that really reflected the findings of the doctors that he had been exposed to enormous psychological pressure.”

His answers to questions were unfocused, Melzer says.

There were signs of autism, something that has been mischaracterised by some as evidence of narcissistic tendencies.

“I do believe the diagnosis of Aspergers, a slight form of autism, is probably the most appropriate way to describe him – as someone who is extremely focused on his own thoughts and you have to verbalise what you want to know from him, otherwise he will go off in his own thoughts.”

Assange never fully sleeps and has constant thoughts of suicide, suffering several psychological breakdowns and a very deep depression, he says.

“When you look at psychological torture you have to look at how the identity or the stability of someone’s psyche has been affected by his isolation the constant pressure he’s been under, the constant threats he’s been under, the separation from positive influences – all of these factors are being used quite deliberately in psychological torture to break down someone’s mental resistance and confuse him.”

Melzer says his investigation was objective, neutral and impartial, but when he found out Assange was subject to torture and ill-treatment, his job has been to defend him and call on states to respect legal obligations.

Western democracies such as Sweden and the UK rejecting those obligations has frustrated Melzer. He says he’s been so outspoken about the case because of the way political interests have been allowed to neutralise the judiciary and legal process.

Assange’s case, he says, provides evidence of a wider systemic failure.

“They simply refused to engage in a dialogue with me or to even provide any counter evidence of why my interpretation of those facts would be wrong and that really is something that I would not expected.”

There is no sign US President Joe Biden will show leniency to Assange, with the Democratic Party still holding Assange responsibly for Hilary Clinton losing the 2017 election on Wikileaks’ release of internal party emails prior to the vote and Russian hacking. Melzer says that has been another highly-dubious narrative used to corner Assange.

“I’m not trying to defend Assange. I’m not his lawyer,” he says.

“I’m trying to defend human rights and the rule of law. If states have any crime that they can indict Julian Assange and have evidence, by all means he has to stand trial like everybody else. My problem simply is, if you look at the US indictment, 17 of those 18 points refer to receiving and disclosing classified national security information. Julian Assange is not American.

“He has no duty or allegiance to the Americans, no contractual obligations. He was not in the US during the release of this information. That’s what investigative journalists do. The information that he published was in large parts in the public interest.”

The eighteenth point refers to a hacking charge. However, Melzer says Assange actually only helped the source of the leaks, Chelsea Manning, cover her tracks to avoid detection. “It was not to get access to information or steal information, but to do source protection… which is something that journalists do all the time with their sources.”

The real purpose behind Assange’s imprisonment and trial is to deter journalists from exposing state crimes and intimidate them into not publishing material that challenges dominant political interests, he says.

“What exactly are we accusing Julian Assange of? Even the rape allegations were dropped by the Swedish authorities… because they had not even sufficient evidence to press charges… That’s why I came to the conclusion that the purpose here is not prosecution for any serious crime. It is to deter journalists from doing what he has done.”

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***

There’s something that makes me sick in the stomach about Boris Johnson’s trip to India.

We’ve seen the obligatory pictures of Johnson on a rickshaw. We’ve read the carefully briefed articles by lobby correspondents about differences with Narendra Modi over Russia and Ukraine. 

We’ve studied the photos of a relaxed Johnson briefing a huddle of British journalists on his plane. And being received by an official delegation getting off the plane. And, of course, we’ve read the informed speculation that a trade deal will be struck.

But we’ve not read a word from the British press about Modi’s systematic, organised, murderous persecution of India’s 200 million Muslims. And I’d be astonished if we hear a word on the subject.

On Wednesday, Johnson arrived in Gujarat, Modi’s political base. He announced new India investment deals in science and technology. A routine exchange of political favours. But the British prime minister courteously made no reference to the Gujarat pogrom, which left more than 1,000 dead 20 years ago, with Modi accused of fanning the violence.

If this terrible event had been an isolated episode, fair enough. But it has gone on to set the pattern for Modi’s premiership.

Anti-Muslim narrative

In the eight years he has been Indian prime minister, Modi has repudiated the multi-faith India embraced by the nation’s founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Remember that Modi has been a member of the Nazi-influenced Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), out of which his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has grown, since he was a boy.

Under his leadership, a terrifying anti-Muslim narrative has emerged. Modi’s BJP follows a Hindu nationalism that sees India’s 200 million Muslims as foreigners and invaders.

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, has recently claimed that the situation for Indian Muslims is approaching genocidal and that India may be broken up.

In December, an event was held in the northern Uttarakhand state at which participants urged the mass killings of Muslims. “Even if just a hundred of us become soldiers and kill two million of them, we will be victorious,” one woman said about Indian Muslims. A video of the event went viral.

The meeting was attended by at least one member of Modi’s BJP. Another delegate, Prabodhanand Giri, often photographed with senior BJP members, declared that “like Myanmar, the police, politicians, the army and every Hindu in India must pick up weapons and do this cleansing”.

As in other countries, the government and sections of the media accuse Muslims of disloyalty. In a farcical case in point, Indian Muslims were arrested for celebrating Pakistan’s cricketing defeat of India in November 2021.

A dark path

The Indian government is seeking to alter the demography of India’s Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, by encouraging Hindus to move there. The state has been under a dense military occupation for decades; most Kashmiris do not wish to be part of India. In August 2019, Prime Minister Modi revoked Kashmir’s historical semi-autonomous status.

That same year, Modi’s Citizen Amendment Act excluded Muslim refugees from citizenship. Arundhati Roy wrote that Modi was enacting “India’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews and other minorities of their citizenship rights”.

There is no doubt that India under Modi has embarked on a dark path. The BJP’s president, Amit Shah, has compared migrants from Bangladesh to “termites”, drawing comparisons with Nazi language about Jews in the 1930s or the language used about the Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, recently warned the US Congress there were early “signs and processes” of genocide in the Indian state of Assam and Indian-administered Kashmir. Stanton, who warned about the Rwandan genocide three years before it happened in 1994, drew parallels between Modi’s policies and Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims ahead of the 2017 slaughter.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States is on record as stating that India is the second most likely country to experience mass killings in 2022. Total silence about this from the British government, and the accompanying press party.

Threat of genocide?

To be fair, Boris Johnson is in India to bring home a trade deal, and he cannot afford to jeopardise that cherished prize. Nor can we reasonably expect the United Kingdom to solve all of the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, in high-profile negotiations of this sort, I think it is fair to expect a British prime minister to raise concerns about India’s treatment of Muslims, highlight them publicly and report back not just to the British parliament but also to the international community.

All the more so because Johnson can’t claim ignorance. Modi’s assault on Muslims is well-documented by the relevant international organisations. We can therefore be confident that the British High Commission in Delhi, however silent, knows all about it. British foreign correspondents, too.

In Johnson’s defence, Labour leader Keir Starmer has been silent, too. He did not raise the persecution of India’s Muslims when he had the chance at yesterday’s prime minister’s questions. To sum up, this week, Boris Johnson stepped foot in Narendra Modi’s India. It contains 1.4 billion souls, 200 million of whom are Muslims. According to good judges, under Modi they face the threat of genocide.

Yet not a word from Johnson, his Labour opponent Starmer, or the British political press.

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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in 2017 and was named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the 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, was published in February 2021. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

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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Hours after the Feb. 3 U.S. military raid in northern Syria that left the leader of ISIS and multiple family members dead, President Biden delivered a triumphant White House address.

The late-night Special Forces operation in Syria’s Idlib province, Biden proclaimed, was a

“testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.”

Unmentioned by the president, and virtually all media accounts of the assassination, was the critical role that top members of his administration played during the Obama years in creating the Al Qaeda-controlled hideout where ISIS head Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, as well as his slain predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, found their final refuge.

In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today.

A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

Sullivan, the current national security adviser, is one of many officials who oversaw the Syria proxy war under Obama to now occupy a senior post under Biden. This group includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, climate envoy John Kerry, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, NSC Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and State Department Counselor Derek Chollet.

Their efforts to remake the Middle East via regime change, not just in Syria but earlier in Libya, led to the deaths of Americans – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials in Benghazi in 2012; the slaughter of countless civilians; the creation of millions of refugees; and ultimately, Russia’s entry into the Syrian battlefield.

Contacted through their current U.S. government agencies, none of the Obama-Biden principals offered comment on their policy of supporting an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria.

The Obama-Biden team’s record in Syria resonates today as many of its members handle the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. As in Syria, the U.S. is flooding a chaotic war zone with weapons in a dangerous proxy conflict with Russia, with long-term ramifications that are impossible to foresee. “I deeply worry that what’s going to happen next is that we will see Ukraine turn into Syria,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told CBS News on April 17.

Based on declassified documents, news reports, and scattered admissions of U.S. officials, this overlooked history of how the Obama-Biden team’s effort to oust the Assad regime – in concert with allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey – details the series of discrete decisions that ultimately led the U.S. to empower terror networks bent on its destruction.

Seizing Momentum – and Munitions – From Libya to Pursue Regime Change in Syria

The road to Al Qaeda’s control of the Syrian province of Idlib actually started hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean in Libya.

In March 2011, after heavy lobbying from senior officials including Secretary Hillary Clinton, President Obama authorized a bombing campaign in support of the jihadist insurgency fighting the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Backed by NATO firepower, the rebels toppled Gaddafi and gruesomely murdered him in October.

Buoyed by their quick success in Libya, the Obama administration set their sights on Damascus, by then a top regime change target in Washington. According to former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the Assad regime – a key ally of U.S. foes Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia – was marked for overthrow alongside Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A leaked 2006 U.S. Embassy in Damascus cable assessed that Assad’s “vulnerabilities” included “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists,” and detailed how the U.S. could “improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising.”

The outbreak of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011, coupled with the fall of Gaddafi, offered the U.S. a historic opportunity to exploit Syria’s vulnerabilities. While the Arab Spring sparked peaceful Syrian protests against the ruling Ba’ath party’s cronyism and repression, it also triggered a largely Sunni, rural-based revolt that took a sectarian and violent turn. The U.S. and its allies, namely Qatar and Turkey, capitalized by tapping the massive arsenal of the newly ousted Libyan government.

“During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Gaddafi] regime in October 2011,” the Defense Intelligence Agency reported the following year, “…weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

The redacted DIA document, obtained by the group Judicial Watch, does not specify whether the U.S. was directly involved in these shipments. But it contains significant clues. With remarkable specificity, it detailed the size and contents of one such shipment in August 2012: 500 sniper rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with 300 rounds, and 400 howitzer missiles.

Most tellingly, the document noted that the weapons shipments were halted “in early September 2012.” This was a clear reference to the killing by militants that month of four Americans – Ambassador Christopher Stevens, another State Department official, and two CIA contractors – in Benghazi, the port city where the weapons to Syria were coming from. The Benghazi annex “was at its heart a CIA operation,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. At least two dozen CIA employees worked in Benghazi under diplomatic cover.

Although top intelligence officials obscured the Benghazi operation in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a Senate investigation eventually confirmed a direct CIA role in the movement of weapons from Libya to Syria. A classified version of a 2014 Senate report, not publicly released, documented an agreement between President Obama and Turkey to funnel weapons from Libya to insurgents in Syria. The operation, established in early 2012, was run by then-CIA Director David Petraeus.

“The [Benghazi] consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms” to Syria, a former U.S. intelligence official told journalist Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books. “It had no real political role.”

The Death of a U.S. Ambassador

Image on the right: J. Christopher Stevens — United States ambassador to Libya from June 7, 2012 until killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, on September 12, 2012. (Licensed under the public domain)

Under diplomatic cover, Stevens appears to have been a significant figure in the CIA program. More than one year before he became ambassador in June 2012, Stevens was appointed the U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. In this role, he worked with the Al Qaeda-tied Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and its leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, a warlord who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. After Gaddafi’s ouster, Belhadj was named head of the Tripoli Military Council, which controlled security in the country’s capital.

Belhadj’s portfolio was not limited to post-coup Libya. In November 2011, the Al Qaeda ally traveled to Turkey to meet with leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the CIA-backed opposition military coalition. Belhadj’s trip came as part of the new Libyan government’s effort to provide “money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar al-Assad,” the London Telegraph reported at the time. On September 14, 2012 – just three days after Stevens and his American colleagues were killed – the London Times revealed that a Libyan vessel “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began,” had recently docked in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. Once unloaded, “most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines.”

The known details of Stevens’ last hours on September 11 suggest that shipping weapons was at the top of his agenda.  Although based in Tripoli and facing violent threats, he nonetheless made the dangerous trek to Benghazi around the fraught anniversary of 9/11. According to a 2016 report from the House Intelligence Committee, one of Stevens’ last scheduled meetings was with the head of al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services Company, a Libyan firm involved in ferrying weapons to Syria. His final meeting of the day was with Consul General Ali Sait Akin of Turkey, where the weapons were shipped. Fox News later reported that “Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer.”

With the Libyan channel shut down by Stevens’ murder, the U.S. and its allies turned to other sources. One was Croatia, where Saudi Arabia financed a major weapons purchase in late 2012that was arranged by the CIA.

The CIA’s use of the Saudi kingdom’s vast coffers continued an arrangement from prior covert proxy wars, including the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and of the Contras in Nicaragua.

Although the Obama administration claimed that the weapons funneled to Syria were intended for “moderate rebels,” they ultimately ended up in the hands of a jihadi-dominated insurgency. Just one month after the Benghazi attack, the New York Times reported that “hard-line Islamic jihadists,” including groups “with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda,” have received “the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition.”

Covertly Arming An Al Qaeda-Dominated Insurgency

The Obama administration did not need media accounts to learn that jihadists dominated the Syrian insurgency on the receiving end of a CIA supply chain.

One month before the Benghazi attack, Pentagon intelligence analysts gave the White House a blunt appraisal. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report, disseminated widely among U.S. officials, noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.” Al Qaeda, the report stressed, “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.” Their aim was to create a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” – an early warning of the ISIS caliphate that would be established two years later.

General Michael Flynn, who headed the DIA at the time, later recalled that his staff “got enormous pushback” from the Obama White House. “I felt that they did not want to hear the truth,” Flynn said. In 2015, one year after Flynn was forced out, dozens of Pentagon intelligence analysts signed on to a complaint alleging that top Pentagon intelligence officials were “cooking the books” to paint a rosier picture of the jihadi presence in Syria. (The Pentagon later cleared CENTCOM commanders of wrongdoing.)

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main CIA-backed insurgent force, also informed Obama officials of the jihadi dominance in their ranks. “From the reports we get from the doctors,” FSA officials told the State Department in November 2012, “most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra, due to their courage and [the fact they are] always at the front line.”

Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front) is Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. It emerged as a splinter group of Al Qaeda in Iraq after a falling out between AQI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his then-deputy, Mohammed al-Jolani. In 2013, Baghdadi relaunched his organization under the name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Jolani led his Syria-based Al Qaeda faction under the black flag of al-Nusra.

“[W]hile rarely acknowledged explicitly in public,” Charles Lister, a Gulf state-funded analyst in close contact with Syrian insurgent groups wrote in March 2015, “the vast majority of the Syrian insurgency has coordinated closely with Al-Qaeda since mid-2012 – and to great effect on the battlefield.”  As one Free Syrian Army leader told the New York Times: “No FSA faction in the north can operate without al-Nusra’s approval.”

According to David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who covered Syria in the war’s early years, U.S. officials knew that “al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of the insurgency.” This, McCloskey says, was “a tremendously problematic aspect of the conflict.”

In his memoir, senior Obama aide Ben Rhodes acknowledged that al-Nusra “was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition.” It was also clear, he wrote, that U.S.-backed insurgent groups were “fighting side by side with al-Nusra.” For this reason, Rhodes recalled, he argued against the State Department’s December 2012 designation of al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization. This move “would alienate the same people we want to help.” (Asked about wanting to help an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Rhodes did not respond).

In fact, designating al-Nusra as a terror organization allowed the Obama administration to publicly claim that it opposed Al Qaeda’s Syria branch while continuing to covertly arm the insurgency that it dominated. Three months after adding al-Nusra to the terrorism list, the U.S. and its allies “dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels” to help “rebels to try and seize Damascus,” the Associated Press reported in March 2013.

‘There Was No Moderate Middle’

Harvard 2014: Biden goes off-script, revealing the truth of U.S. support for jihadists in Syria.

Despite being privately aware of Nusra’s dominance, Obama administration officials continued to publicly insist that the U.S. was only supporting Syria’s “moderate opposition,” as then-Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken described it in September 2014.

But speaking to a Harvard audience days later, then-Vice President Biden blurted out the concealed reality. In the Syrian insurgency, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden admitted. Instead, U.S. “allies” in Syria “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.” Those weapons were supplied, Biden said, to “al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden quickly apologized for his comments, which appeared to fit the classic definition of the Kinsley gaffe: a politician inadvertently telling the truth. Biden’s only error was omitting his administration’s critical role in helping its allies arm the jihadis.

Rather than shut down a CIA program that was aiding the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Obama expanded it. In April 2013, the president signed an order that amended the CIA’s covert war, codenamed Timber Sycamore, to allow direct U.S. arming and training. After tapping Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to fund its arms pipeline for insurgents inside Syria, Obama’s order allowed the CIA to directly furnish U.S.-made weapons. Just as with the regime change campaign in Libya, a key architect of this operation was Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s upgraded proxy war in Syria proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times reported in 2017. Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a budget of nearly $1 billion per year, or around $1 of every $15 in CIA spending. The CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” U.S. officials told the Washington Post in 2015. Two years later, one U.S. official estimated that CIA-funded militias “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.”

But these militias were not just killing pro-Syrian government forces. As the New York Times reported in April 2017, US-backed insurgents carried out “sectarian mass murder.”

One such act of mass murder came in August 2013, when the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army joined an al-Nusra and ISIS offensive on Alawite areas of Latakia. A Human Rights Investigation found that the insurgents engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families,” slaughtering a documented 190 civilians, including 57 women, 18 children, and 14 elderly men. In a video from the field, former Syrian army general Salim Idriss, head of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), bragged that “we are cooperating to a great extent in this operation.”

The Latakia massacres came four months after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, hailed Idriss and his fighters as “the moderate and responsible elements of the armed opposition.” The role of Idriss’s forces in the slaughter did not cancel the administration’s endorsement. In October, the Washington Post revealed that the “CIA is expanding a clandestine effort … aimed at shoring up the fighting power of units aligned with the Supreme Military Council, an umbrella organization led by [Idriss] that is the main recipient of U.S. support.”

[After this article was published, RCI received Ford’s email response to our request for comment. Ford wrote that there was “no question” that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army engaged in war crimes but noted, “We denounced [them] publicly at the time and in private.” Ford said the administration’s official stance that moderates were engaged in the fight was accurate in light of the facts on the ground. “Our definition of moderates in the armed opposition,” he wrote, “were people willing to negotiate a peaceful end to the war.”]

Officially, the upgraded CIA program barred direct support to al-Nusra or its allies in Syria. But once U.S. weapons arrived in Syria, the Obama administration recognized that it had no way of controlling their use – an apparent motive for waging the program covertly. “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra,” a former senior administration official told the New York Times in 2013.

One area where U.S. arms got into al-Nusra’s hands was the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. Al Qaeda leaders would ultimately control and – though the group disputes it – provide ISIS leaders sanctuary there.

‘Al-Qaeda’s Largest Safe Haven Since 9/11’

In May 2015, an array of insurgent groups, dubbed the Jaish al-Fatah (“Army of Conquest”) coalition, captured Idlib province from the Syrian government. The fight was led by al-Nusra, and showcased what Charles Lister, the D.C.-based analyst with contacts to insurgents in Syria, dubbed “a far improved level of coordination” between rival militants, including the U.S.-backed FSA and multiple “jihadist factions.”

For Lister, the conquest of Idlib also revealed that the U.S. and its allies “changed their tune regarding coordination with Islamists.” Citing multiple battlefield commanders, Lister reported that “the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey,” which coordinated support to U.S.-backed insurgent groups, “was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation” led by al-Nusra. While the insurgents’ U.S.-led command had previously opposed “any direct coordination” with jihadist groups, the Idlib offensive “demonstrated something different,” Lister concluded: To capture the province, U.S. officials “specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.”

The U.S.-approved battlefield cooperation in Idlib allowed al-Nusra fighters to directly benefit from U.S. weapons. Despite occasional flare-ups between them, al-Nusra was able to use U.S.-backed insurgent groups “as force multipliers,” the Institute for the Study of War, a prominent D.C. think tank, observed when the battle began. Insurgent military gains, Foreign Policy reported in April 2015, were achieved “thanks in large part to suicide bombers and American anti-tank TOW missiles.”

The jihadist-led victory in Idlib quickly subjected its residents to sectarian terror. In June 2015, al-Nusra fighters massacred at least 20 members of the Druze faith. Hundreds of villagers spared in the attack were forced to convert to Sunni Islam. Facing the same threats, nearly all of Idlib’s remaining 1,200 Christians fled the province, leaving a Christian population that reportedly totals just three people today.

In a 2017 post-mortem on the Obama administration’s covert war in Syria, the New York Times described the insurgents’ conquest of Idlib as among the CIA program’s “periods of success.” This was certainly the case for Al Qaeda.

“Idlib Province,” Brett McGurk, the anti-ISIS envoy under Obama and Trump, and now Biden’s top White House official for the Middle East, said in 2017, “is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”

U.S. Allows ISIS Takeover

Al Qaeda is not the only sectarian death squad that managed to establish a safe haven in the chaos of the Syria proxy war. Starting in 2013, al-Nusra’s sister-turned-rival group, ISIS, seized considerable territory of its own. As with Al Qaeda, ISIS’ land-grab in Syria received a significant backdoor assist from Washington.

Before Al Qaeda captured Idlib, the first ISIS stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, grew out of a similar alliance between U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” and jihadis. After this coalition seized the city from the Syrian government in March 2013, ISIS took full control in November.

When ISIS declared its caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq in June 2014, the U.S. launched an air campaign against the group’s strongholds. But the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS offensive contained a significant exception. In key areas where ISIS’s advance could threaten the Assad regime, the U.S. watched it happen.

In April 2015, just as al-Nusra was conquering Idlib, ISIS seized major parts of the Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus, marking what the New York Times called the group’s “greatest inroads yet” into the Syrian capital.

In the ancient city of Palmyra, the U.S. allowed an outright ISIS takeover. “[A]s Islamic State closed in on Palmyra, the U.S.-led aerial coalition that has been pummeling Islamic State in Syria for the past 18 months took no action to prevent the extremists’ advance toward the historic town – which, until then, had remained in the hands of the sorely overstretched Syrian security forces,” the Los Angeles Times reported in March 2016.

In a leaked conversation with Syrian opposition activists months later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained the U.S. rationale for letting ISIS advance.

“Daesh [ISIS] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth,” Kerry explained. “And we know that this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage, that Assad would then negotiate” his way out of power.

In short, the U.S. was leveraging ISIS’s growth to impose regime change on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. strategy of “watching” ISIS’s advance in Syria, Kerry also admitted, directly caused Russia’s 2015 entry into the conflict. The threat of an ISIS takeover, Kerry said, is “why Russia went in. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government.”

Russia’s military intervention in Syria prevented the ISIS government in Damascus that Kerry and fellow Obama administration principals had been willing to risk. Pulverizing Russian airstrikes also dealt a fatal blow to the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency that the Obama team had spent billions of dollars to support.

From U.S. Enemy to ‘Asset’ in Syria

With U.S.-backed fighters vanquished and one of their main champions, Hillary Clinton, defeated in the November 2016 election, the CIA operation in Syria met what the New York Times called a “sudden death.” After criticizing the proxy war in Syria on the campaign trail, President Trump shut down the Timber Sycamore program for good in July 2017.

“It turns out it’s – a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal that month.

With the exit of the Obama-Biden team, the U.S. was no longer fighting on Al Qaeda’s side. But that did not mean that the U.S. was prepared to confront the enemy that it had helped install in Idlib.

While Trump put an end to the CIA proxy war, his efforts to further extricate the U.S. from Syria by withdrawing troops were thwarted by senior officials who shared the preceding administration’s regime change goals.

“When President Trump said ‘I want everybody out of Syria,’ the top brass at Pentagon and State had aneurysms,” Christopher Miller, the Acting Secretary of Defense during Trump’s last months in office, recalls.

Jim Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy for Syria, admitted to deceiving the president in order to keep in place “a lot more than” the 200 U.S. troops that Trump had reluctantly agreed to. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told Defense One. Those “shell games” have put U.S. soldiers in harm’s way, including four servicemembers recently wounded in a rocket attack on their base in northeastern Syria.

While thwarting a full U.S. troop withdrawal, Jeffrey and other senior officials have also preserved the U.S. government’s tacit alliance with Idlib’s Al-Qaeda rulers. Officially, al-Nusra remains on the U.S. terrorism list. Despite several name changes, the State Department has dismissed its rebranding efforts as a “vehicle to advance its position in the Syrian uprising and to further its own goals as an al-Qa’ida affiliate.”

But in practice, as Jeffrey explained last year, the U.S. has treated Al-Nusra as “an asset” to U.S. strategy in Syria. “They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” he said. Jeffrey also revealed that he had communicated with al-Nusra leader Mohammed al-Jolani via “indirect channels.”

Jeffrey’s comments underscore a profound shift in the U.S. government’s Middle East strategy as a result of the Syria proxy war: The Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, the terror group that attacked the U.S. on 9/11, and which then became the target of a global war on terror aimed at destroying it, is no longer seen by powerful officials in Washington as an enemy, but an “asset.”

Since retaking office under Biden, the Obama veterans who targeted Syria with one of the most expensive covert wars in history have deprioritized the war-torn nation. While pledging to maintain crippling sanctions and keep U.S. troops at multiple bases, as well as announcing sporadic airstrikes, the White House has otherwise said little publicly about its Syria policy. The U.S. military raid that ended ISIS leader al-Qurayshi’s life in February prompted the only Syria-focused speech of Biden’s presidency.

While Biden trumpeted the lethal operation, the fact that it occurred in Idlib underscores a contradiction that his administration has yet to address. By taking out an ISIS leader in Al Qaeda’s Syria stronghold, the president and his top officials are now confronting threats from a terror safe haven that they helped create.

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All rational Americans agree that we shouldn’t get involved in the Russia-Ukraine War. The neocon warmongers with brain dead Biden as their figurehead want to destroy Russia, and they are willing to risk nuclear war to do it. 

But this doesn’t negate what I’ve just said. These monsters are anything but rational. But speaking of monsters leads to another question. Everybody knows John Quincy Adams’s line: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

Is this the reason we should stay out of the Ukraine war? Is Putin a monster, bringing death and destruction to innocent people, but someone whose actions we have to ignore because it’s too dangerous to act against him? Some people who say this don’t get what’s happening, although others don’t view Putin as a monster, but think he made a mistake. I don’t agree, but this isn’t my target. Putin is a rational statesman, with legitimate security interests and the supposed hero Zelensky is a dubious character.

Why do people think otherwise? One reason is the charges of Russian atrocities in Bucha.  These charges are just that “charges”. Fake atrocity claims have often been a way to inflame people to support war, and the Bucha accusations are the latest example.

Christopher Roche, who isn’t pro-Putin, explains why we shouldn’t fall for it:

“The reports and photographs showing an apparent massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, are truly terrible. They are reminiscent of the atrocities used to galvanize Western opinion during Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, when the Srebrenica Massacre and the Siege of Sarajevo were seared into Western consciousness.

Of course, pictures do not always tell the whole story. For example, to determine whether a war crime took place we must know who did the killing, why, and how. After all, the United States killed many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, frequently by accident, in the course of those wars. Few in the United States or Europe would call those actions war crimes. This all became apparent after the United States exonerated itself for the annihilation of an Afghan family via a missile strike during the withdrawal of U.S. forces last summer. Oops.

Like any crime, a war crime must involve intent or at least recklessness. Killing civilians or POWs without trial, or humiliating them as an act of revenge, are each undoubtedly war crimes. The documented abuse of prisoners by Donetsk People’s Republic commander Givi was the basis for a Ukrainian war crimes investigation against him, before he was assassinated in 2017.

If civilians were shot and purposefully killed in Bucha, it undoubtedly would be a war crime and a terrible thing. But there are credible reasons to believe the so-called Bucha Massacre was not the doing of the Russian Forces, but rather of the Ukrainians—either local militia or SBU or some combination of thereof—as part of brutal reprisals against ‘saboteurs’ and ‘Russian collaborators.’

First, this fits with a pattern of Ukrainian forces violating the rules of war, as evidenced by numerous videos showing the shooting of prisoners, torturing civilians, and the like. Unlike the still photos in Bucha, these videos show the actions themselves, as well as the perpetrators, which even the New York Times recently acknowledged.

Second, Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelenskyy has given numerous speeches calling for the punishment of ‘saboteurs’ and ‘traitors,’ saying the war will ultimately end with the ‘de-Russification’ of Ukraine. These are tough words, which clearly would tend to inflame and encourage the more extremist elements.

Three, the atmosphere in Ukraine is ripe for war crimes. While U.S. Second Amendment supporters were understandably heartened by the Ukrainian government’s weapons giveaway, some of those weapons ended up in the hands of criminals and undisciplined characters. This was not a mere oversight; Ukraine deliberately freed prisoners with combat experience in order to allow them to fight. One would not expect this group to be scrupulous adherents to the laws of war.

There are also many documented accounts of Ukrainians killing one another out of paranoia about spies and saboteurs. It is easy enough to see why. There is a hair’s breadth of difference between Ukrainians and Russians, and many in the East only speak Russian, have supported Russia, or at least have a less-than-enthusiastic attitude about the Ukraine regime. This fuels the possibility of internecine violence, which will be rationalized after the fact as the clearing out of traitors and fifth columnists.

Four, the timeline of reports creates real doubts about whether Russia perpetrated the Bucha Massacre. It is widely acknowledged that Russian forces left Bucha on March 30. Then, Bucha’s mayor happily announced their withdrawal on March 31 without any mention of massacres, bodies in the streets, or other war crimes. Finally, the Ukrainian SBU said it was moving into Bucha on April 2 to conduct a ‘cleansing’ operation against saboteurs and traitors.

The photos of the dead only appeared on April 2, and Zelenskyy soon appeared in order to give international journalists a tour. Reuters and the New York Times have also posted Maxar satellite images apparently showing bodies in the streets earlier on March 19. This is not as compelling as it might otherwise be; bodies left outside for two weeks would not be in the condition seen in the April 2 photos, but instead would be significantly decomposed. If there were bodies on the street earlier in March—whether combatants or civilians—they had to be different people than the dead civilians on display from April 2.

Rather, it’s a question of whether atrocity stories will lead to U.S. involvement in another war that does not advance America’s national interests. Whether it was the Rape of Belgium alleged in World War I, genocide in Kosovo, or Iraqi troops ‘removing babies from incubators’ in Kuwait, lurid and false atrocity stories have been used before to encourage Western involvement in unnecessary wars. As with ordinary criminal investigations, it is always worth asking if the source has a motive to lie about culpability.

Russia has called for an independent investigation of these events through the U.N. Security Council, but the current chair, the United Kingdom, apparently refused to convene the council. Why? Wouldn’t an independent investigation be the best way to determine what happened? Of course, the truth here is secondary, and neither Ukraine nor the West would have any interest in uncovering the extent of Ukrainian war crimes. Rather, it is clear the United States and the EU are invested in prolonging the war in order to weaken and punish Russia, even though the next phase appears likely to be much worse for everyone involved, with the Kiev government calling for the mass evacuation of the East in its most recent communications.

For all the ink spilled in condemning what is being called the Bucha Massacre, one wonders if the calls for war crimes trials and claims that the responsible government is illegitimate would be withdrawn if it turns out not Vladimir Putin and Russia, but Voldomyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, were responsible for whatever took place in Bucha. The question answers itself.”

The real atrocities are being committed by Zelensky’s forces, which include neo-Nazis. Russians remember the horrors of the German invasion during World War II and don’t want them repeated. Hence Putin’s demand that the Ukrainian government purge the Nazi elements in its government, especially to be found in the Azov Regiment. As Joe Lauria says. “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been making a virtual world tour with video hookups to parliaments around the globe, as well as to the Grammy Awards and the U.N. Security Council, sometimes with troublesome results.

On Thursday a major row erupted when Zelensky brought along a Ukrainian soldier of Greek heritage from the city of Mariupol, who just happened to be a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment. Greece was under Nazi occupation during World War II and fought a bitter partisan war against Nazism (later to be betrayed by Britain and the United States.)

With Zelensky in the screen, the man, who gave only his first name, told Parliament: ‘I speak to you as a man of Greek descent. My name is Michail. My grandfather fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. I am born in Mariupol and I am now also fighting to defend my city from the Russian Nazis.’

Ignoring Greece’s suffering under German Nazism was a slight made worse by bringing a Nazi along to address Greek lawmakers.

Zelensky has gotten into trouble before by referring to a nation’s history in his addresses to parliaments. He caused outrage in Israel for comparing what Ukraine is going through today to the Holocaust while completely ignoring the role Ukrainian fascists played in that Holocaust.

In his address to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday Zelensky said Russia had committed the worst war crimes since World War II, ignoring the much bigger crime of aggression by the United States against Iraq built totally on lies.

Just as Western governments and corporate media are doing, the Ukrainian embassy in Athens denied Azov is a Neo-Nazi regiment, despite sporting the Waffen-SS Wolfsangel on their uniforms and their open political alignment with Nazism.”

Putin’s campaign against this Nazi revival and his defense of the independent Russian areas in the beleaguered Donbas region deserve our admiration, not our condemnation.

Let’s heed the wisdom of the great Dr. Ron Paul, who warns us about getting into war through CIA atrocity falsehoods: “Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume.

In other words, the article reports that the US ‘deep state’ admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion.

According to the NBC News article, ‘multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…’

Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, ‘trying to get inside Putin’s head.’

That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative. . . t’s time to revisit President Kennedy’s post-Bay of Pigs wish. The CIA using lies to propagandize the American people toward war with Russia is just one of thousands of reasons to scatter a million pieces of that agency to the wind.”

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Featured image: Destroyed car in Bucha with a dead person inside, 2 April 2022 (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

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***

“Who will suffer if 30% of Earth is “protected”? It won’t be those who have overwhelmingly caused the climate crisis, but rather indigenous and other local people in the Global South who play little or no part in the environment’s destruction. Kicking them off their land to create Protected Areas won’t help the climate: Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of the natural world and an essential part of human diversity that is a key to protecting biodiversity.” – Stephen Corry, director of Survivalist International [1]

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On the Earth Day organizing site earthday.org there is a lot of attention focused on climate change, regenerative agriculture, rejecting plastic, cleaning up or avoiding litter, conservation and restoration. There is however very little said about the role of Indigenous people in protecting natural habitats.

For example, the World Resources Institute’s official 2016 study, Climate Benefits, Tenure Costs: The Economic Case for Securing Indigenous Land Rights in the Amazon, found that securing and rights for Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia could generate billions of dollars in returns both local communities and for the world’s changing climate.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did symbolically recognize the link however. In his Earth Day 2022 statement he said:

“We have much to learn from Indigenous Peoples who have been responsible stewards of the land, water, air, and all living things since time immemorial. We are supporting more Indigenous-led conservation initiatives across the country through the Indigenous Guardians and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area initiatives.”[4]

The sad reality is that there may be a lapse between words and deeds. Recall for example how at a Liberal Party Fundraising event in Toronto, activists raised awareness that the government was lagging on commitments to fund a specialized mercury treatment facility to remediate damages caused by mercury poisoning from a Dryden chemical plant upstream of Grassy Narrows First Nation nearly sixty years ago. The physical impacts today included tremors, headaches, neuromuscular effects, memory loss and much more. [5]

This week’s episode of the Global Research News Hour pays tribute to the spirit of Earth Day by honoring the principal architects of true solutions. It also laments how many people in today’s society, including environmentalists, find themselves in adversarial positions with regard to respecting the land rights of these first people of the land.

First up, we hear from Judy DaSilva, a long time resident and spokesperson for Grassy Narrows First Nation. She discusses the mercury poisoning and several other environmentally damaging activities thrust on her community, talks about where this disrespectful attitude toward them comes from, and also talks about a new Indigenous-led event intended to bring healing and strength to her people, her allies beyond and to the world.

Our next guest, Stephen Corry is a long time director of the non-profit organization Survivalist International which focuses on partnering with tribal peoples throughout the Earth and campaigning, lobbying and protesting for their rights. Corry explains his group’s opposition to conservation the way it is traditionally practiced, his opposition to “protected areas,” and some of the roots of this modern ecological practice in the nineteenth century eradication of Indigenous peoples in North America.

Judy Da Silva is the environmental health coordinator for Grassy Narrows First Nation. She has hosted Environmental Youth Gatherings, Women’s Gatherings, Community Gatherings and Traditional Powwows. She helped inspire young people to develop a blockade against logging in 2002 which became the longest lasting such blockade in history. In 2013, she received the Michael Sattler Peace Prize from the German Mennonite Peace Committee for her work in nonviolent resistance of the Grassy Narrows First Nation against the destruction of nature and for the preservation of their Indigenous culture.

Stephen Corry is an Indigenous Rights activist and was since 1984 the CEO of the organization Survival International which works in collaboration with tribal peoples to campaign lobby and protest for their land rights, to investigate, expose and confront atrocities committed by governments and big business, and to amplify the tribal voice to make sure it is heard. In 1989, the organization received the Right Livelihood Award, with Corry himself giving the acceptance speech.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 352)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://survivalinternational.org/campaigns/biggreenlie
2. https://www.earthday.org/about-us/
3. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-first-earth-day?msclkid=900703b2c27211ecacfd7749ab00232e
4. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/statement-by-the-prime-minister-on-earth-day-835655233.html?msclkid=bdc90159c27711ec8c254e9769c57682
5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/grassy-narrows-celebrates-mercury-care-home-funding-1.6124129

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We have already shown the extent of Nazism in the Ukraine’s armed forces. This post will demonstrate the extent to which Fascism/National Socialism (Nazism) have been and are an integral part of Ukrainian civilian life.

There is no better evidence of institutional Nazism in Ukraine than the education of its youth. The Azov battalion has its youth movement called the Azovets

Here is a photo from Russia’s “Life News” on May 13th, 2015 “Soldiers of ‘Azov’ Teach Students to Shoot a Grenade Launcher and Throw Grenades”:

That “wolfsangel” insignia on their T-shirts is Ukraine’s version of the German Nazis’ original. Perhaps Boris Johnson would like these allies of his to lecture in British schools?

One of the towns taken by Russian forces in recent days was Berdyansk where a call centre used to scam Russian Ukrainians was exposed. The large Swastika over the doorway is clear enough!

There is of course the Zelensky myth repeated ad nauseam by American and European propaganda that you can’t be Jewish and a Nazi so Ukraine is not Nazi! – as if the Nazis’ hatred of and extermination of Russians, Poles, Serbs (all Slavs regarded by German and Ukrainian Nazis as “sub humans”) and Roma did not matter and only the anti semitism made them Nazis! There were in fact 150,000 Jews who served in the Nazi army, including the part Jewish former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Schmidt! See this.

Consider this openly racist attack on Russians by a modern commentator on German mainstream media:

“we should not forget that even if Russians look European they are not European. They are not European in the cultural sense. They think differently about violence and death (!!). There is no concept of a liberal post modern life. They think differently about violence and death a concept of life that each individual can choose. Instead life can simply end early with death (!!) Russian life expectancy is quite low you know – 70 for men. That’s why they treat life differently, that people simply die”

The words of Florence Gaub on the Markus Lanz programme on ZDF (German equivalent of ITV in the UK). This German television interview managed to show extreme stupidity, racism and bankrupt “intellectualism” in one individual who was nevertheless given mainstream media coverage! Will the BBC now invite her?

President Zelensky saw nothing wrong with allowing to address the Greek Parliament a member of the openly Nazi Azov Battalion who was of Greek origin. (In fact he has since  been killed in Mariupol)

Even a Greek government spokesman Giannis Oikonomou said on Twitter following the session that “To include a message from an Azov Battalion member was wrong and inappropriate,” and Alexis Tsipras the SYRIZA party leader – Greece’s main opposition party – protested:

“The speech by members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the Greek Parliament is a challenge. The absolute responsibility lies with the prime minister. He spoke of a historic day, but it’s a historic shame. Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But the Nazis cannot have a say in parliament,”

In fact of course the responsibility did not lie with the Greek PM but with Zelensky. But none of this should come as a surprise given the institutional recognition of Nazis in public life in Ukraine. Andrei Biletsky the former leader of the Azov battalion became the leader of the Patriot of Ukraine party and was an MP between 2013 and 2019. His fellow party member, Vadym Troyan who served as a deputy commander of Azov, was appointed police chief of the province of Kiev.

Biletsky is an open admirer of Hitler and claimed that

“Social Nationalism raises to shield all old Ukrainian Aryan values forgotten in modern society. Only their recovery and implementation by a group of fanatical fighters can we lead to the final victory of European civilization”

The founder of the “Social Nationalist” Party Andriy Parubiy became Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and was welcomed in London by the Royal United Services Institute! The Americans were so embarrassed by the “Social Nationalist” name that they advised changing it – to Svoboda.

Torchlight Nazi Marches

Every 1st January Ukrainian Nazis march under torches to celebrate the birthday of Stepan Bandera the Ukrainian extreme nationalist who led the wartime movement allied with the Nazi occupiers of Ukraine: His OUN – B group called on Ukrainians to “liquidate Poles, Muscovites and Jews”. Such torchlight marches are reminiscent of course of Nazi Germany, as they are meant to be.

Ukraine Statues’ Tribute to the Nazi Holocaust

The extent to which the political class and people in general adopt uncritically Nazi supporting individuals, insignia and politics can be seen in the statues on public display. Imagine if there were statues in Britain glorifying the former leader of the British Union of Fascists Oswald Mosley!

In 2017 The World Jewish Congress denounced the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa’s “disgraceful and deplorable” move to celebrate nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose Ukrainian People’s Republic killed tens of thousands of Jews in pogroms under his leadership in 1918-1921, and urged the local authorities to pull a monument unveiled in his honour. See this.

Anti-Nazi activist Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said that “Ukraine has more statues for killers of Jews than any other country.” Zuroff also attacked the Canadian Government for training Ukrainian Nazi troops. Canadian troops were photographed training members of the “Azov” regiment with at least one soldier bearing the insignia of the SS division “Galizien,” a Ukrainian unit that fought for the Nazis in WWII. Canada has reportedly spent nearly a billion dollars (US$794 million) on training Ukrainian troops since the 2014 coup.

Here are two memorials to Ukrainian war time Nazis, Stefan Lynnik and Volodomyr Kubiyovych which confirm Efraim Zuroff’s statement above.

Pure Blood Ukraine!

A Ukrainian state body for historical research published nine arguments why Ukrainians and Russians cannot be called brother nations, including one that stated that Ukrainians are pureblood Slavs, while Russians count people from Ugro-Finnish tribes among their ancestors. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance released a series of info cards which were were posted on its social media accounts. Some of them were later deleted, but not before being retained by web archiving algorithms.

See this.

Political Opponents Are Traitors

As is increasingly the case in the former democracies in the West, the corporatist left and much of the media regard any opposition to the State “narrative” be it on Russia, COVID, Climate, the family, sexual identity or nationhood and democratic sovereignty as being “illegal” and those who propagate such alternative ideas or policies are or should be classed as criminals. So it is – in even clearer terms – the case in Zelensky’s Ukraine where his own totalitarian politics (no wonder the openly Nazi are on his side) has led to the closing of television and other media outlets and the arrest of opponents, the latest being Viktor Medvedchuk the leader of the largest opposition party. He has just been arrested yet again by the State Security Service SBU. Medvedchuk, who opposed the 2014 Kiev Maidan coup, and opposed Ukraine’s turning to the West has led his party since 2018.

When Medvedchuk’s party began to pull ahead of Zelensky’s “Servant of the people” party, Zelensky started his purge of unfriendly media and had Medvedchuk arrested for “treason”.

Another political opponent of Zelensky, businessman Vadim Rabinovich, once led a movement to remove the president. He is now officially declared “a traitor” although all he wanted was an independent neutral Ukraine.

Zelensky’s administration declared that Rabinovich was a “collaborator, pro-Russian politician” and was recently added to a blacklist of Ukrainians that includes opposition lawmakers, local politicians, journalists and bureaucrats who are allegedly “linked to”  Russia or Vladimir Putin. Several of them have been murdered since the beginning of the war. Rabinovich now lives in Israel.

With such an example from the top it is no wonder that a Ukrainian TV presenter Fahrudddin Sharafmal could call on his countrymen to destroy the Russian nation by killing their children. He even summoned up the shining example of Adolf Eichmann!

“I allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann, who said that in order to destroy a nation, you must destroy, first of all, its children. Because if you kill their parents, the children will grow up and take revenge. By killing children – they will never grow up and the nation will disappear,”

A photo of Eichmann appeared on the screen. From hromadske TV. Well done Boris! Keep sending these people sophisticated weaponry!

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Featured image: A news broadcast by German ZDF station showed soldiers of the Ukraine Azov Battalion with nazi symbols on their helmets. PHOTO BY FILES /ZDF station

This article was originally published in 2018 following its 19th anniversary.

Twenty-three years ago, on 23 April 1999, a NATO missile attack on Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) headquarters killed 16 employees of the state broadcaster.

The forgotten war crime occurred during the Kosovo War (March 1999-June 1999), and was part of NATO’s aerial campaign alongside the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) a paramilitary entity with links to Al Qaeda and organized crime, in opposition to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In the aftermath of the attack there were no great public campaigns launched for the 16 murdered journalists and employees, no outpouring of emotion for those killed, no calls for solidarity and togetherness in the face of aggression. On the contrary the West justified this grievous blow against freedom of expression, praised it even.

Tony Blair, Britain’s then Prime Minister, welcomed the killings when speaking at NATO’s 50^th anniversary summit in Washington. Blair said the missile attack was “entirely justified… in damaging and attacking all these targets”, and that those murdered were part of the “apparatus of dictatorship and power of [Slobodan] Milosevic”.

Blair felt that, “the responsibility for every single part of this action lies with the man [Milosevic] who has engaged in this policy of ethnic cleansing and must be stopped”. Apparently Milosevic “must be stopped” by wiping out state journalists or what Blair describes as an “apparatus of dictatorship”.

According to one of the main leaders of the Western world, Milosevic must bear full responsibility for a NATO fighter plane firing a US-made missile on a state broadcasting service’s headquarters. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by Blair’s visions of justice, particularly when examining his key role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the following decade.

Blair was not alone in praising this violation of international law. His Secretary of State for International development, Clare Short, said afterwards that,

“the propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it’s a legitimate target”.

Short is a Labour Party member and her official title today is The Right Honourable Clare Short. Defending these killings was neither right nor honourable one can assume.

NATO themselves commended the deliberate attack afterwards. NATO’s military spokesperson Air Commodore David Wilby declared RTS,

“a legitimate target which filled the airways with hate and with lies over the years”.

This followed on from a number of other NATO attacks on radio and television outlets in the country.

In the build up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Cardiff University revealed that the BBC adopted the most pro-war stance of any British network. The official reasons for invading Iraq were based entirely on lies and misinformation. In this case was the BBC “the propaganda machine”, had it become “a legitimate target” too?

Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon also legitimised the war crime saying that,

“Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is”.

Not to be outdone, the respected US diplomat and magazine editor Richard Holbrooke described the bombing of RTS as,

“an enormously important and, I think, positive development”.

In the build up to the Iraq invasion American networks like Fox News were styling the illegal intervention as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, with its correspondents and news anchors compelled to repeat that phrase. In addition a permanent American flag was fluttering in the top corner of the screen, and during the invasion itself the banner “war on terrorism” was unfurled.

Did this make Fox News and others like it, “a legitimate target which filled the airways with hate and lies”? Judging by the standards of Western elites, one would have to suggest so.

Meanwhile, a single person was charged for the attack on RTS: Dragoljub Milanovic, the Serbian network’s general manager, who received a 10-year jail term for failing to evacuate the building in time. Yet the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded that NATO’s bombing of RTS was not a crime, noting that deaths were “unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate”. Clearly disproportionate to the overall number of civilian deaths inflicted by NATO perhaps.

However, in January 2015 the Western reaction was somewhat different when 12 journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper were murdered by Islamic extremists – along with four Jewish men killed at a kosher supermarket shortly afterwards.

The British Prime Minister on this occasion, David Cameron, did not justify the killing of journalists and said,

“We stand absolutely united with the French people against terrorism and against this threat to our values – free speech, the rule of law, democracy”. Cameron went on, “we should never give up the values we believe in… a free press, in freedom of expression, in the right of people to write and say what they believe”.

About two weeks later Blair, now a Middle East peace envoy, said of the thinking behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “this extremism is not natural, it’s taught and it’s learned and you have to un-teach it in the school systems”. Blair seems further unaware of his own role in creating “this extremism” by playing the junior partner role in invading Iraq, a crucial factor in the rise of ISIS.

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, millions marched to honour the dead with the slogan “I am Charlie” becoming famous. When the Serbian journalists and employees were killed just over 15 years earlier, there was no international motto of “I am RTS”.

New York civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams described the Charlie Hebdo shootings as, “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory”. The perception of “living memory” appears to be a remarkably short one.

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This article was originally published by The Duran in August 2017.

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 frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

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Novavax on Wednesday announced that early data on its combination vaccine targeting COVID-19 and influenza showed the vaccine produced a strong immune response. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to grant the Maryland-based company’s request for Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-only vaccine.

Vaccine maker Novavax on Wednesday announced that early data on its combination vaccine targeting COVID-19 and influenza showed the vaccine produced a strong immune response.

Chief Medical Officer Filip Dubovsky, during a call with reporters, said the Maryland-based company’s early phase clinical trial found that up to 25 micrograms of the COVID formulation combined with up to 35 micrograms of the flu formulation triggered a promising level of protective antibodies in the Novavax COVID-Influenza Combination Vaccine.

The shot would combine a seasonal booster for COVID with a seasonal flu shot.

“What we demonstrated in this study is we were able to get the immune responses really comparable to what the individual vaccines did prior to combination,” Dubovsky said.

Participants in the Phase 1 trial had a median age of 59 and all previously had received COVID vaccines.

Novavax plans to move forward with a Phase 2 trial this year to confirm the appropriate dosing levels, and plans to launch a Phase 3 trial on efficacy during the 2023 flu season at the earliest, Dubovsky said.

“Combination vaccines are an attractive public health intervention,” Dubovsky said. “You are hitting two life-threatening diseases in one medical contact, giving a single vaccination.”

Novavax’s COVID vaccine uses different technology than the Pfizer and Moderna shots, which rely on messenger RNA to turn human cells into factories that produce copies of the virus spike protein, inducing an immune response that fights COVID.

The spike is the part of the virus that latches onto and invades human cells.

Novavax’s shots, in contrast, synthesize the virus spike outside the human body. The genetic code for the spike is put into a baculovirus that infects insect cells, which then produce copies of the spike that are purified and extracted.

The spike copy is then injected into people to induce an immune response against the virus.

The vaccine also uses a novel adjuvant that contains a purified extract from the bark of a tree in South America, to induce a broader immune response.

The most common side effects of the Novavax combination vaccine were injection site pain, fatigue and headaches, Dubovsky said.

The company said the preliminary trial results found that the combination vaccine formulations induced immune responses in participants comparable to reference stand-alone influenza and stand-alone COVID-19 vaccine formulations (for H1N1, H3N2, B-Victoria HA and SARS-CoV-2 antigens).

According to Dr. Meryl Nass, internist and member of Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, experts acknowledged during the April 6 meeting of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting that immune responses, or neutralizing antibody titers, were inadequate to assess the immune response for COVID.

“The committee said future COVID vaccines would need to be authorized or licensed using clinical trial data, not antibody titers,” Nass said.

Novavax said clinical modeling results also showed a combined formulation has the potential to reduce total antigen amount by up to 50% overall, optimizing production and delivery, and reducing side effects.

“We continue to evaluate the dynamic public health landscape and believe there may be a need for recurrent boosters to fight both COVID-19 and seasonal influenza,” said Dr. Gregory M. Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax.

“We’re encouraged by these data and the potential path forward for a combination COVID-19-influenza vaccine as well as stand-alone vaccines for influenza and COVID-19.”

Dubovsky expressed confidence the new vaccine’s recombinant protein-based nanoparticle technology would allow the combo shot to be easily “tweaked” to address emerging coronavirus variants.

Is FDA slow-walking Novavax authorization in U.S.?

The World Health Organization in December 2021 approved Novavax’s COVID vaccine (not the new COVID-flu combination vaccine) for use in the European Union, but the FDA has yet to grant Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the product in the U.S.

Novavax’s Glenn today told attendees at the World Vaccine Congress the company is still optimistic about obtaining the EUA.

In a statement later in the day, the company said:

“We continue to have a productive dialogue with the FDA as they review data and we answer inquiries related to clinical and manufacturing data as expected. We look forward to scheduling our VRBPAC meeting in the near future as indicated by the FDA.”

At a Wednesday meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee, an FDA official indicated the agency was still awaiting manufacturing data from Novavax.

But an FDA spokesperson later said it was nothing more than the usual back-and-forth as part of the regulatory process.

An FDA spokesperson said:

“While the FDA cannot predict how long its evaluation of the data and information will take, the agency will review the EUA request as expeditiously as possible using its thorough and science-based approach.

“The agency plans to schedule a meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) to discuss the EUA request with the FDA’s panel of outside scientific and medical experts.”

The company published its clinical data in the New England Journal of Medicine soon after filing its EUA application on Jan. 31, but still has not received a date for its FDA advisory committee meeting.

Nass said similar to trials for other COVID vaccines, the Novavax trial followed participants for only 70 days post-“full vaccination” status — not long enough to identify the waning efficacy and determine how well the vaccine really works over 6 to 12 months and more.

“The bottom line is that with yet another brief-duration trial, we can’t say anything about the long-term safety or efficacy, which are the only measures that really matter,” Nass said.

By comparison, the other three vaccines available in the U.S. were authorized prior to publication of their clinical data.

Also, the vaccine applications of Pfizer and Moderna in late November 2020 were authorized by the FDA in just over three weeks.

“It’s been far too long since Novavax has asked for authorization and I think the FDA has been slow-walking it,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University.

Another vaccine option is important for the U.S., Gostin said.

“The FDA should authorize it and it should be another vaccine in the toolbox for the United States and the world,” he said.

In an interview with CBS affiliate WUSA9 just days after filing for emergency use, a Novavax official said unlike Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines, many people are holding out for Novavax’s protein-based shot, which is very similar to many childhood immunizations.

“We think that our vaccine can be an important option in making people feel more comfortable and confident in getting their vaccination,” said Silvia Taylor with Novavax Global Corporate Affairs.

Clinical trials have shown Novavax to be 90% effective against COVID infection. If approved, those 18 years and older would be eligible for the shot.

“It may not be that there will be a very large uptake of Novavax, but there’s a certain segment of the population that really wants to use a much more traditional vaccine and not a messenger RNA vaccine,” said Gostin.

In January, Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed to dismiss Novavax’s potential to jump-start a nationwide vaccination effort largely stalled since last October.

“It just seems rather unusual that people are waiting for something else when you have vaccines that have been given to 9 billion people,” Fauci told Yahoo Finance. (The global population is estimated to be only about 8 billion people.)

“I’m not sure what people are waiting for when you say they’re waiting for something else,” he said.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was more optimistic, noting that Novavax’s “approval could help address [vaccine] hesitancy.”

Japan authorizes Novavax COVID vaccine

Meanwhile, Japan’s health ministry on Tuesday joined a list of more than 40 countries that have approved Novavax’s COVID vaccine, announcing the purchase of 150 million doses.

Japan in recent days reported a resurgence of the fast-spreading omicron BA.2 variant.

The ministry approval came the day after its expert panel endorsed use of Novavax’s protein vaccine, which is designed with vaccine technology similar to that used in vaccines for the flu and hepatitis B.

Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto told reporters the Novavax product adds variety to the choices available and could appeal to those who are hesitant to use COVID vaccines such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s, which are designed with newer technologies.

Shots are expected to be available in Japan as soon as early May.

In March, the country lifted all COVID restrictions as infections slowed significantly, but experts noted signs of a resurgence in a number of prefectures during a season of traveling and parties marking graduation and the start of the academic and business year.

The government is trying to expand businesses and put the pandemic-hit economy back on track. Japan slowly eased the border controls following sharp criticisms for its longtime restrictions on non-resident foreign students, scholars and business people, but Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan is not considering restarting inbound tourism anytime soon.

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David Charbonneau, Ph.D. is a fellow for The Defender.

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Incidence of early puberty has surged since the start of the COVID pandemic, and is affecting children at ages that are historically unprecedented

Many children diagnosed with slow-progressing early puberty also experienced an acceleration of pubertal progressing during and/or after lockdown

Early puberty can have serious consequences for those affected. It’s been linked to a higher risk for depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and antisocial behavior

The cause for the unprecedented rise in early puberty is unknown, but experts suspect it has to do with lifestyle changes related to lockdowns, such as stress, elevated electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure, an unhealthy diet, low physical activity, increased obesity, elevated exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the home and poor sleep

Several COVID-19 clinical trials have involved anti-androgen drugs, with many showing positive results in terms of blocking the progression of infection. Some have suggested the influence of androgen on SARS-CoV-2 infection may be why young children have such a low incidence of COVID-19, as they have low androgen levels

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According to recent data, incidence of early puberty has surged since the start of the COVID pandemic.¹ It’s also affecting children at ages that are historically unprecedented. What could possibly account for this phenomenon?

Rare Condition Has Suddenly Become More Prevalent

Early puberty, also known as precocious puberty, has historically been rare, affecting approximately 1 in 5,000 to 10,000 children. The female-to-male ratio of incidence is about 10-to-1 in favor of girls.

But for some as-yet unknown reason, since early 2020, doctors around the world have seen a surprising increase in cases, predominantly if not exclusively among girls, with girls as young as 5 sprouting breasts and menstruation starting in girls younger than 8. Typically, breast development begins around age 10 to 11, with menstruation starting two years later.

Dr. Vaishakhi Rustagi, a pediatric endocrinologist in Delhi, India, told The Fuller Project² that he normally sees about 20 cases of early puberty each year, but since June 2020, he’s seen more than 300 such patients.

In Italy, a survey³ of five pediatric endocrinology sites found 328 girls had been referred for suspected early puberty between March and September 2020, up from 140 during the same seven-month period in 2019. Another Italian study⁴ found patients previously diagnosed with slow-progressing early puberty experienced an acceleration of pubertal progressing during and/or after lockdown.

Similar findings have emerged from Turkey, where early puberty cases reported between April 2020 and March 2021 were more than double that of any of the preceding three years⁵ (58 cases during the pandemic year compared to a total 66 cases for the previous three years combined).

Early Puberty Can Have Serious Consequences

While on the surface this may not seem like a catastrophe, it can in fact have serious consequences for those affected. Early puberty has been linked to a higher risk for depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and antisocial behavior, for example.

Early puberty may also be caused by a more serious condition, such as a central nervous problem, or an ovary, adrenal, pituitary or brain tumor, so these conditions need to be ruled out as causative factors before hormone treatment is considered.

Early puberty (provided it’s not caused by some underlying condition that needs to be addressed) is typically treated with a monthly injection of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH analogue therapy⁶), which delays further development. Once the child reaches the appropriate age for puberty, the hormone treatment is stopped, and the process of puberty then restarts.

Did Lockdowns Trigger Early Puberty?

The authors of the Italian study⁷ hypothesize there might be an association between early puberty in girls and “the complex lifestyle changes related to the lockdown.” But how?

One possibility is stress. Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin, a pediatrician at Texas Children’s Hospital, told The Fuller Project,⁸ “From 9 to like 15, you’re going through this process, but the stress of the pandemic sped up that physiological process. Meanwhile, socially and emotionally, they’re still children.” Rustagi agrees, saying, “I think it’s directly related to the amount of stress that the children have gone through.”⁹

Other suspects include elevated electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure, an unhealthy diet, low physical activity, increased obesity, elevated exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the home and poor sleep^10,11 — all of which were exacerbated during the lockdowns as children were cooped up indoors and had to study remotely.

Additionally, pervasive exposure to plastics and microplastics loaded with phthalates and BPA, which are known endocrine disrupters, certainly haven’t helped the situation.

Separately, none of these are sufficient to explain the sudden explosion of early puberty, but taken together, they might trigger changes in central nervous mediators and an increase in catecholamines to set off the pubertal process.

A Curious Connection

Curiously, at the same time as precocious puberty was skyrocketing, researchers at Penn Medicine published preclinical trial results^12,13 suggesting anti-androgen drugs could disrupt the ACE2 and TMPRSS2 receptors that SARS-CoV-2 uses to gain entry into the cell.

The study,¹⁴ which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and a U.S. Department of Defense award, was published March 19, 2021.

In it, the authors noted that the two receptors are regulated by androgen hormone — the same hormone responsible for premature adrenarche¹⁵ (sexual maturation and libido) — and by blocking the receptors with Camostat and other androgen inhibiting drugs, viral entry and replication were prevented. According to a Penn Medicine press release:¹⁶

“The findings provide more insight into the molecular mechanisms of the virus but also support the use of anti-androgen therapies to treat COVID-19 infections, which are currently being investigated in clinical trials and have produced promising results. They also support data showing increased mortality and severity of disease among men compared to women, who have much lower levels of androgen.

‘We provide the first evidence that not only TMPRSS2, which is known to be regulated by androgen, but ACE2 can also be directly regulated by this hormone,’ said senior author Irfan A. Asangani, PhD, an assistant professor of Cancer Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

‘We also show that the SARS-CoV-2 spike relies on these two receptors to impale and enter cells, and that they can be blocked with existing drugs. That’s important because if you stop viral entry, you reduce the viral load and disease progression.’”

Other research¹⁷ has found ACE2 receptors are present on nearly all testicular cells. This raises the question of whether male fertility and/or gonad function might be adversely affected by SARS-CoV-2 infection. It’s also been shown that estrogen regulates the expression of ACE2 in pulmonary epithelial cells.¹⁸ So, sex hormones appear to play a role in SARS-CoV-2 infection in more ways than one.

Puberty Versus Adrenarche

For clarity, while premature adrenarche and early puberty are similar, they’re not the same. Adrenarche refers to the activation of the adrenal glands, resulting in the production of sex hormones such as androgens, which are responsible for public hair, oily skin and hair, body odor, acne, sexual desire and increased libido.

Puberty, on the other hand, is the maturation process of sexual reproduction. Brain signals are sent to the testes and ovaries, triggering the development of sperm and eggs respectively, as well as secondary characteristics such as the deepening of the voice in boys and breasts in girls.

Is This Why Children Aren’t Susceptible to COVID?

While we haven’t heard a whole lot about it in the news, several COVID-19 clinical trials over the past year or so have involved anti-androgen drugs, with many showing positive results in terms of blocking the progression of infection. Some have also suggested that the influence of androgen on SARS-CoV-2 infection may be why young children have such a low incidence of COVID-19, as they have low androgen levels.

As explained in the paper, “The Resilient Child: Sex-Steroid Hormones and COVID-19 Incidence in Pediatric Patients”:¹⁹

“Androgens upregulate the protease TMPRSS2, which facilitates efficient virus-host cell fusion with the epithelium of the lungs, thus increasing susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and development of severe COVID-19. Owing to low levels of steroid hormones, prepubertal children may have low expression of TMPRSS2, thereby limiting the viral entry into the host cells.”

That said, there’s something quite curious about the timing of this information, because all of a sudden, the health care system has become very focused on normalizing transgenderism. Is it possible that they’re thinking of dosing children with sex hormones as a treatment for COVID and need a cover story? As noted in the Penn Medicine study:²⁰

“Together, our data provide a strong rationale for clinical evaluations of TMPRSS2 inhibitors, androgen-deprivation therapy / androgen receptor antagonists alone or in combination with antiviral drugs as early as clinically possible to prevent COVID-19 progression.”

Could treating children with anti-androgens cause changes in how they feel about their sexuality? And if so, could it be that the medical industry wants to “get ahead” of the trend and quench questions by indoctrinating everyone into thinking transgenderism and gender confusion is completely normal? That’s pure speculation, of course, but perhaps something to tuck into the back of your mind for later on.

Precocious Puberty Triggers

While there’s no direct evidence EMF exposure during childhood can trigger early puberty, one animal study²¹ did find Wi-Fi and cell phone radiation during pregnancy increased the risk of early puberty in the offspring.

So, it’s possible that generational effects are at play, and/or that this susceptibility is worsened by other environmental factors such as diet, lack of exercise, obesity, stress and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals and foods high in estrogen.

Without a clear cause, it’s difficult to prescribe a remedy. But I believe it’s safe to say that parents would be wise to pay close attention to what their children are doing and being exposed to — pandemic or not. For example:

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Notes

¹ MD Edge April 4, 2022

^{2, 8, 9, 10} The Fuller Project March 28, 2022

^3, 7 Endocr. Connect. February 14, 2022; 11(2): E210650

⁴ Italian Journal of Pediatrics 2020; 46: article number 165

⁵ Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism December 8, 2021 DOI: 10.1515/jpem-2021-0565

⁶ Mayo Clinic Early Puberty

¹¹ Frontiers in Pediatrics 2021; 9: 734899

^12, 14, 20 iScience March 19, 2021; 24(3): 102254

^13, 16 Penn Medicine Press Release March 22, 2021

¹⁵ Childrens Hospital Premature Adrenarche

^17, 18 Hormones 2021; 20: 259-268

¹⁹ Journal of the Endocrine Society September 2020; 4(9): bvaa106

²¹ Biological Trace Element Research 2013; 156: 221-229

²² Sports Mom Survival Guide, 12 Bodyweight Exercises Your Child Can Do From Home

²³ Endocrine.org Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals

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It all just seems a grotesque waste of taxpayers’ dollars. The good news, upgrades to mRNA vaccines might be considered “New Vaccines”, as I’ve proscribed earlier. We’ll see.

According to CNN, CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) continue to “mull over” what’s next for Covid-19 boosters, and indeed are even considering what the “upgrades” Covid-19 vaccines. There are indications that they know that “entirely different vaccine formulations could be needed”.

Currently, additional booster doses are recommended only for certain people with weakened immune systems and adults 50 and older.

CDC quoted Dr. Sara Oliver, one of CDC’s epidemic intelligence service officers with the Division of Viral Diseases, who provided a robust soundbite:

“Policy around future doses require continued evaluation of Covid-19 epidemiology and vaccine effectiveness, including the impact of both time and variants, and the ability of doses to improve this protection.”

The specifics CNN cited Oliver as seeing CDC needing to take into account include recent case counts, hospitalization rates, and vaccine effectiveness in the US, and also – shocking – including whether it’s waning over time. They also cited that she thought CDC should weigh “the impacts of circulating coronavirus variants”.

We know vaccine effectiveness is unacceptably low – and given Dr. Fantini’s results may actually be negative, indicating disease enhancement.

Oliver stated that the evolution of the virus will be an important consideration for considering “platforms” for future COVID-19 vaccinations.

It’s not hard to read between the lines here. Readers of #PopularRationalism already know that the mRNA vaccines have proven to be worse than a dismal failure. This is CDC putting the word out that a second round of vaccine development is expected, and is about the closest we’ll ever see to CDC admitting the vaccination program has flopped.

And it’s surprising to see ACIP being focused on future “effectiveness”. Clearly, if newly formulated vaccines are proposed, they will be a square one in terms of the regulatory stage of development, and we should be seeing data on efficacy, which is a measure of a vaccine’s ability to reduce transmission in a prospective randomized clinical trial, not effectiveness, which is measured using real-world data.

As the real-world data on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness came in, it was quite bad, so the net was lowered from “preventing transmission” and “reducing new infections” to “producing an antibody response”.

So far, according to USASpending.Gov, the US has now spent over 3.63 trillion dollars in its response to COVID-19. According to the US Center for Economic Studies, the US suffered record-smashing loss of -9.5% of its GDP in 2020, and over 30% shrinkage in economic growth.

Nevertheless, both Pfizer and Moderna are taking a stab at vaccines meant to be available against Omicron, but it is doubted whether the variant will be around long enough to even be targeted by the new vaccines. Pfizer is hoping for a vaccine that will remain effective for more than a year, while Moderna’s non-peer-reviewed preprint containing data from their internal study of the efficacy of their bivalent vaccine was cited by CDC with the careful caveat that the preprint had “not been peer-reviewed or published in a professional journal.”

In the heyday of the pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna could get away with sending FDA assurances that they would share data mentioned in press releases once the FDA gave EUA or full-out approval. Now that the fog of the pandemic has lifted, it seems that the standard practice of labeling press releases, such as Moderna’s recent one on their bivalent vaccine as “Forward Looking Statements” is in place, so I suspect Moderna, Pfizer and the SEC got my memos.

Due to evidence of lack of efficacy and need, FDA, Pfizer and Moderna have delayed further consideration of COVID-19 vaccines for young children until June, according to Politico (SeekingAlpha, Politico).

Unfortunately, the companies are still communicating “success” as equivalent with “antibody response” when we all know (or at least my immunology students know that they really should be measuring and reporting memory B-cell responses and the degree of match between the antibodies produced by B-cells upon reinfection and whatever variant or variants have taken over after Omicron is a distant memory.

CDC also shared that Kaiser Permanente – which profits from vaccine sales – was in the driver’s seat of the CDC’s ACIP committee, with Dr. Matthew Daley, ACIP Vaccine Working Group Chairperson and senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Research issuing “marching orders” to the rest of ACIP to be “be more proactive than reactive” on the future of Covid-19 vaccinations.

This article is just a reminder to those who need it that #ParentsAreWatching, and that #ScientistsAreWatching, too.

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A major new study adds more evidence that Moderna’s high-dose mRNA shots are more dangerous than Pfizer’s smaller jabs; will public health bureaucrats acknowledge reality as they push more boosters?

A huge new study shows mRNA shots sharply raised the risk of dangerous heart damage in Scandinavians who received them last year, and that Moderna’s 100-microgram shot was significantly more dangerous than Pfizer’s 30-microgram dose.

For young men, who are at particularly high risk of post-jab heart inflammation, the gap was especially significant.

Data from the study, published in a peer-reviewed journal called JAMA Cardiology, show that giving 1 million men aged 16-24 two doses of Moderna’s vaccine would lead to almost 300 hospitalizations for myocarditis and a related illness called pericarditis. Most would come after the second dose. Using Pfizer’s shot instead would lead to about 100 hospitalizations. SOURCE

An appendix in the paper also showed a trend towards deadlier outcomes in myocarditis patients who had received Moderna’s shot as opposed to Pfizer’s jab or no vaccination, though the trend was not statistically significant.

Almost 5 percent of people who were hospitalized for myocarditis after receiving Moderna’s shot died, compared to under 1 percent who received Pfizer’s shot or were unvaccinated. (SEE ETABLE 11)

Sweden, Norway, and Finland halted the use of the Moderna shots in people under 30 last October. The United States has no similar restrictions, though regulators have so far refused to approve Moderna’s jab for people under 18.

The higher risk of Moderna’s shots found in the paper add to growing evidence that the dangers of mRNA rise with dosing. Moderna scientists themselves acknowledged the potential problem in a paper the company posted last month.

In turn, that evidence raises the question of whether pushing people to take additional “booster” doses to shore up the vaccines’ failing protection may bring new risks. Because so few clinical or safety studies have been conducted on boosters, at this point regulators and scientists are essentially guessing about the dangers of repeated dosing.

But that lack of knowledge has not stopped a relentless push for the boosters, which temporarily raise antibodies to the coronavirus before their protection again fades.

In the new paper, published Wednesday, researchers drew on exceptionally thorough health and vaccination records from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. They examined thousands of myocarditis and pericarditis cases in the four Scandinavian countries from late December 2020 to early October 2021, checking them against vaccination dates.

Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle itself, while pericarditis results from the inflammation of the sac around the heart. They generally resolve with rest and anti-inflammatory treatment, but in some cases they can lead to permanent heart damage or even be fatal.

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The UN Security Council held an extraordinary event on April 6 under the rubric Arria Formula Meeting on Biological Security regarding the biological activities in countries including Ukraine. Predictably, the US and UK representatives didn’t show up at the event and the western media also blacked out the proceedings. But that does not detract from the profound significance of what transpired. 

The highlight of the Security Council proceedings lasting over two hours was the disclosure by General Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, that Washington is creating biological laboratories in different countries and connecting them to a unified system.

He said the US has spent more than $5 billion on military biological programs since 2005 and detailed that in territories bordering Russia and China alone, about 60 facilities have been modernised during this period. The Ukrainian network of laboratories is designed to conduct research and monitor the biological situation consisting of 30 facilities in 14 populated locations.

Highly sensitive materials from the Ukrainian biological laboratories were exported to the US in early February just before the Russian special operation began, and the rest were ordered to be destroyed lest they fell into Russian hands. But the cover-up was only partially successful. Indeed, Russia is in possession of highly incriminating evidence. 

Previously also, Russia had released a number of documents related to the biological military activities of the Pentagon, which pointed toward a worldwide project to set up biological laboratories in rival countries with the goal of developing targeted viral weapons against those countries. 

The proceedings of the Security Council conference on April 6 are in the public domain and are accessible. See the video below: 

Russia has made specific allegations, pointing finger at: 

• Pentagon funding for the bio-labs in Ukraine; 
• Location of these bio-labs(not only in Ukraine but in 36 countries around the world); 
• Diseases and epidemics on which research work is going on, focusing on the means for their release, the countries where they are being tested (even without the knowledge of the governments of these countries); and, of course, 
• Experiments relating to coronavirus (and bats used to transmit this virus). 

However, the US has so far point-blank refused to accept any supervision and verification of such incriminatory evidences and has stonewalled the demand for a verification mechanism. It is unlikely that the US will permit an international verification process that holds the potential to expose it as indulging in crimes against humanity — although there are appropriate frameworks in place including the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the UN, to hear the clarifications from the relevant country in a fair and impartial manner. 

A mind-boggling “discovery” that Russian forces in Ukraine stumbled upon is the use of numbered birds by the Pentagon-funded labs. This almost falls out of science fiction and Sir Alfred Hitchcock could have made an epic movie out of it where deception mixes with innocence and man’s cruelty to nature becomes unbearably grotesque. The project works like this: 

To begin with, the Pentagon accesses the scientific data available with environmental specialists and zoologists after studying the migration of birds and observing them throughout the seasons, relating to the path these birds take each year on their seasonal journey from one country to another and even from one continent to another. 

On the basis of this data, groups of migratory birds are caught, digitised and capsules of germs are attached to them that carry a chip to be controlled through computers.  They birds are then released to the flock of the migratory birds in those target countries toward which the US intelligence has malevolent intentions. 

Of course, these migratory birds travel great distances. The wandering albatross, for instance, is known to migrate at least 8500 km eastward across the South Pacific to the coast of South America, and many shy albatrosses migrate westward across the Indian Ocean to the coast of South Africa.

During the long flight of the birds that have been digitised in the Pentagon bio-labs, their movement is monitored step by step by means of satellites and the exact locations are determined.  The idea is that if the Biden Administration (or the CIA) has a requirement to inflict harm on, say, Russia or China (or India for that matter), the chip is destroyed when the bird is in their skies.  

Plainly put, kill the bird carrying the epidemic. Sadly, my mind goes back to the novel by the American author Harper Lee To Kill a Mocking Bird, the haunting story of innocence destroyed by evil. 

To return to reality, once the “digitised” bird is killed and the capsule of germs it carries is released, the disease spreads in the “X” or “Y” country. It becomes a highly cost-effective method of harming an enemy country without any need of war or coup d’état or colour revolution.

The Russians have made the shocking claim that they are actually in possession of such migratory birds digitised in the Pentagon’s bio-labs. 

International law expressly forbids the numbering of migratory birds because they freely criss-cross the blue sky and air of other countries.  By supplying them with germs, these birds become weapons of mass destruction. What human ingenuity! But the US enjoys total immunity from international law.

The bottom line is that only the US intelligence — and President Biden, perhaps, if he remembers — would know where all humans have been infected so far in this century by the Birds of Mass Destruction. Was Ebola that devastated Africa a test case and precursor of things to come?

What about Covid-19, which is known to have originated from funded laboratories that were administered by the US? It is very likely that the US might have used migratory birds to kill Chinese citizens. Clearly, the US in its desperation to reverse its global decline is pulling out all the stops to restore its hegemony in a world order that is inexorably moving toward multipolarity.

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Featured image: Albatross, famous migratory bird, is also a love bird. It is known for being monogamous, forming long-term bond with one partner that is rarely broken. Mated pairs never split up until one bird dies.  (Source: Indian Punchline)

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Just as the first rally in Peshawar, these two rallies are among the largest political gatherings in the country’s history. Significantly, they show that PTI is the first real *national* political party in the country’s history – the other major ones are province/ethnicity-based.

Whether the rallies are pro-Khan or simply a rejection of the return of the ancien regime, it’s interesting how the military has not moved in on them yet – despite millions of these demonstrations outrightly condemning the generals for their collaboration with the corrupt political mafias and Washington.

It’s pretty clear that the primary reason for the high command/top brass’s reluctance is because they know fully well that Khan commands overwhelming support in the ranks of soldiers and junior officers (those who don’t get the perks of American largesse designed to keep Pakistani generals on America’s side).

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Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion, Law, and Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Political polarization in Germany continues to increase. Currently, there is strong pressure for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to take a more incisive stance on the Ukrainian issue. The opposition insists on the need to send weapons to support Zelensky, endorsing the speech spread by NATO and the EU. It is evident that by refusing to take such positions, Scholz is trying to look for the interests of his country, but it remains to be seen whether he will be really strong enough to deal with the pressure coming both externally, from Brussels and London, and internally in Berlin.

Recently, Scholz met in London with his British counterpart Boris Johnson to discuss the Ukrainian conflict. During the conversation, Johnson clearly pressed Scholz to go along with the UK and the rest of the West in their stance of absolute opposition to Russia in the conflict. The Chancellor, however, avoided giving clear answers and maintained his ambiguous position on the possibility of supporting Kiev militarily, preventing from doing more incisive statements and preferring silence.

What happened next was even more remarkable and symbolic: the British prime minister traveled to Kiev to meet with Zelensky while Scholz returned to Germany in order to promote electoral campaign. The international mainstream media took advantage of the fact to intensify its pro-NATO propaganda, claiming that Scholz is concerned only with his internal political condition, ignoring the current international situation, while the Western world is supposedly “concerned” and takes the Ukrainian issue as a “humanitarian” priority.

In Germany, Scholz’s opponents are also increasingly agitated to criticize the chancellor, taking benefit of international pressure to intensify polarization and generate a crisis of legitimacy against him. Obviously, this was a predictable attitude on the part of opposition groups, but the main problem currently is that Scholz is losing support within his own coalition. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Green Party are deeply dissatisfied with Germany’s unwillingness to send weapons to Kiev and use the case as a pretext to point to Scholz as a “big problem” to be solved through an electoral overthrow. And, in this sense, his situation is really worsening day after day.

In general, Scholz’s enemies demand that he takes a more active stance on the German role in the conflict. The chancellor is characterized by an extremely passive posture, avoiding making decisions until they become inevitable. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a member of the FDP and head of the Defense Committee in parliament, for example, recently commented that Scholz needs to “take the baton in his hand and set the rhythm.” In other words, opponents are asking Scholz to guarantee Germany a leading role on the European stage, as might be expected from the continent’s greatest economic power.

The central problem in this topic is that Scholz already seems to have realized that the most strategic thing for Germany is to remain as neutral as possible and away from any involvement in activities that harm the partnership with Russia, which is a very important commercial pillar for Germany. Scholz did not want to adhere to large-scale economic sanctions, especially regarding the SWIFT ban and the energy boycott. But he was forced to slowly accept such measures as other Western countries implemented them. This has been his typical behavior: postponing but, in the end, passively adhering to all Western measures when he finds himself “isolated”.

In this sense, the opposition is right on one point: Scholz has to change his attitudes and assume a leadership position, since this is what is expected from a country like Germany, which for years has consolidated itself as one of the “leaders” of the European bloc. The oppositionists’ problem is that they are pressuring Scholz to assume a leadership stance that is as damaging to German interests as his current indecision and passivity.

It is naive to think that sending heavy weapons to Ukraine benefits German interests in any way. On the contrary, it only extends the abyss between Moscow and Berlin even further, and with practically no benefit in return for the Germans: neither Ukraine will be sufficiently strengthened to win the conflict by receiving such heavy weaponry, nor will Germany reassume a supposed role of “leadership” in Europe.

It is not by chance that the greatest pressure on the Germans so far has been exerted precisely by Boris Johnson. The UK is not part of the EU and therefore does not care about the German role in the bloc, but, on the other hand, it is one of the most important members of NATO and tries to elevate its status in the military alliance as a way of boosting its international image in this post-Brexit context. In fulfilling British requests, Scholz would only be pursuing non-German and non-European interests.

It is obvious that there is also pressure within Europe and within Germany itself, but this pressure belongs to an outdated view of what the role of Germans and Europeans in the Western world should be. Scholz’s opponents apparently still expect a totally submissive stance on NATO from Berlin. This is also a very active thought in Brussels, with a strong tendency to see the entire European continent as a mere annex of the American military umbrella, ignoring that Europe has its own interests, which can often collide with those of the Western military alliance. That is why, in trying to prevent Germany from getting actively involved in the Ukrainian case, Scholz proves to be a really pragmatic politician who prioritizes the interests of his own country, but without the political force necessary to guarantee them.

In addition, there is a topic that needs to be mentioned, which is the German military passiveness of the last seventy years. Although it is active within NATO and has been trying to reform its defense forces in recent years, Berlin remains a virtual-demilitarized country, with an army of low offensive potential, outdated weaponry and a low-investment war industry.

In order to send heavy weapons to Ukraine, Germany would have to start a broad military industrial investment, which would cost it not only millions of euros, but a change in its international image, returning to being a nation of effective participation in international conflicts. Of course, improving its military status is a German right, but it must be taken into account in the name of what Berlin intends to do so. Would it really be strategic to break with seventy years of pacifism to defend the interests of the Maidan Junta in a conflict where Russian victory is highly predictable?

Scholz needs to be strong and active in defending German interests. His posture of passivity and silence demonstrates weakness and damages the image of both him and his country. But his stance must not be to subject Germany even more to foreign interests: on the contrary, he must assert what is in Berlin’s interests and pragmatically defend it, even if he has to clash with the NATO’s plans to do so. If Germany is interested in neutrality and maintaining good relations with Russia, Scholz must not only refrain from adhering to the new Western sanctions but also revoke those taken so far.

*

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

A full EU ban on Russian crude oil and gas imports could have unintended economic consequences for the United States and its Western allies, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told reporters in Washington on Thursday.

The Treasury Secretary added that such a ban could do more harm than good.

Europe does need to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas, Yellen said, “but we need to be careful when we think about a complete European ban on, say, oil imports.”  

Europe has been under pressure to stop purchases of Russian oil and gas—an action that would cut off revenue streams for Russia, but would also starve the EU of much needed energy supplies.

Yellen’s warning follows JP Morgan’s from earlier this week that suggested a full and immediate ban in the EU on Russian energy supplies would cut off more than 4 million bpd of Russian oil and send crude oil prices to $185 per barrel.

The EU and the European Commission has been discussing an embargo on Russian crude oil, but the group is divided on the issue, with countries such as Germany strongly opposed due to its significant reliance on Russian energy supplies. Even if all EU members do agree on such a ban, it would still take months to draft and prepare, European officials said last week. The EU is already in talks with other oil-producing countries with the end goal of obtaining alternative oil suppliers so it can more readily wean itself off Russian oil supply.

Yellen agreed that a European energy ban would raise oil prices, “and, counterintuitively, it could actually have very little negative impact on Russia” because while Russia could end up exporting less oil, the price it would get for each barrel could also go up. The U.S. Administration has been railing against high gasoline prices—a result of high crude oil prices—since last Fall.

A UK magistrates’ court has recently announced a decision on the extradition of Julian Assange to the US. A definitive endorsement from the UK Home Secretary is expected to be released in mid-May.

Should Priti Patel move to extradite Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher will face numerous counts of criminal acts in the US and will be subjected to torture while in detention. There will be disregard for Assange’s human rights, narrowly defined.

While Assange has suffered enormously from publishing information that is of public interest, the very war criminals he exposed remain unpunished. This is travesty of justice.

Forward this selection to family and friends.

***

#FreeAssange: Sign to Urge UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to Reject Julian Assange’s Extradition to the United States!

By Reporters Without Borders, April 21, 2022

If extradited to the United States, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison on 18 charges related to Wikileaks’ publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of leaked classified military and diplomatic documents, exposing war crimes and human rights violations and informing extensive public interest reporting around the world. RSF fully believes that Assange has been targeted for this important contribution to journalism.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Was Part of CIA-linked Lobby Group with Husband of Assange Judge

By Matt Kennard, April 22, 2022

Priti Patel sat on the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) advisory council from around 2013-16, although the exact dates are unclear as neither the HJS nor Patel responded to Declassified’s requests for clarification. She has also received funds from the HJS, and was paid £2,500 by the group to visit Washington in March 2013 to attend a “security” programme in the US Congress.

“Wiki-Gate”: Julian Assange Was Framed by the People Who Supported Him

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 21, 2022

Statements by US prosecutors suggest that Assange would not be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. What is contemplated are accusations of conspiring “to commit unlawful computer intrusion based on his alleged agreement to try to help Ms. Manning break an encoded portion of passcode that would have permitted her to log on to a classified military network under another user’s identity.” (NYT, April 11, 2019).

Julian Assange Has Been Imprisoned in British Guantanamo for Three Years. It’s a Crime Against Us All

By DiEM25, April 13, 2022

The UK and US governments rightly express outrage over reports of war crimes in Ukraine. Yet while doing so, they make an example of Assange for revealing, with definitive proof, their own war crimes. While the media decries the spread of disinformation and attacks against journalists, most stay silent as an actual journalist slowly dying in prison for doing his duty of informing the public.

Assange Extradition: On to the Next Hurdle

By Craig Murray, March 17, 2022

The legal grounds which the High Court had previously ruled to be arguable, were that the USA government should not have been permitted to give at appeal new (and highly conditional) diplomatic assurances about Assange’s treatment, which had not been offered at the court of first instance to be considered in the initial decision. One important argument that this should not be allowed, is that if given to the original court, the defence could argue about the value and conditionality of such assurances; evidence could be called and the matter weighed by the court.

War, Dissent and Julian Assange: Why We Must Stop this Extradition

By Morning Star, March 16, 2022

Assange is not a US citizen, let alone an employee of the US military. He is not accused of having leaked classified information. He is accused of having published classified information that was passed to him. The airwaves are now full of the horror being inflicted on Ukrainians by Russian bombers and artillery. So we should think back to the content of the Afghan and Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks.

Rotten Rulings: Julian Assange and the UK Supreme Court

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 15, 2022

District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser initially ruled on January 4, 2021 against the US, finding that Assange would be at serious risk of suicide given the risk posed by Special Administrative Measures and the possibility that he would end his days in the ADX Florence supermax facility.  It took little to read between the lines: the US prison system would do away with Assange; to extradite him would be oppressive within the meaning of the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

The Political Persecution of Julian Assange: Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture

By Saturday Morning, February 21, 2022

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being made an example of by the US government to deter investigative journalists from exposing state abuses, the current UN Special Rapporteur on torture says. Nearly 12 years ago Wikileaks published the Afghan War Diary, one of the biggest leaks in US military history. More documents would folliow, exposing state secrets and allowing journalists to scrutinise and hold politicians to account.

The ongoing extradition case against Julian Assange is a crucial indicator of the demise of Freedom of the Press. Don’t let your news be chained to Big Money. Uphold freedom of the Press as a cornerstone of democracy. 

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***

The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals

Nearly 1 in 3 — 27.3% — of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety

This is the price society is paying for ill-conceived, irrational pandemic measures and nonstop fearmongering

To treat everyone, each of the 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S. would have to see approximately 3,000 patients a year — a patient load that simply isn’t feasible

Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or worked our way out of it) can act as a lifeline to others by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we live our lives

*

The United States is facing a mental health crisis, experts say, noting we’re in dire need of more mental health professionals. Christin Drake, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, writes:¹

“Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her. These are not the worried well. They are people in crisis.

Their conditions are complex and acute, and require the expertise of a psychiatrist who can talk with them, assess possible medical causes for their problems, manage withdrawal, prescribe medications when needed, and connect with other providers … Before the pandemic, I could almost always help. I would be able to find time to meet someone for a consultation, or make a few calls to secure the right referral.

But now, my every available hour — even those that jut into my ability to meet my obligations to my family — is full. My colleagues tell me the same. They are starting work earlier, working later, contending with long waitlists and their own limits. All the while, patients in crisis are going without psychiatric help.”

Depression and Anxiety Are at All-Time Highs

According to the most recent Household Pulse Survey,² conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 27.3% of American adults now struggle with depression and/or anxiety, and that’s in addition to the 40 million Americans who report substance use disorders³ and the 14 million who have more serious mental illnesses.⁴

“There are about 33,000 practicing psychiatrists in the U.S.⁵ By my back-of-the-napkin math, if all of us were treating only people with depression or anxiety, each of us would have to see more than 3,000 patients a year,” Drake notes.⁶

In short, there aren’t enough practicing psychiatrists to handle the burgeoning tsunami of mentally unwell Americans. There also aren’t enough residency positions available to significantly expand the profession any time soon.

The Price of Fearmongering

While Drake doesn’t go into the causes behind the mental health crisis, it’s fairly obvious that this is the price society is paying for our government’s ill-conceived and irrational pandemic measures and the nonstop fearmongering. NPR contributor Kat Lonsdorf describes the constant fear of kidney transplant patient Jullie Hoggan:⁷

“While the surgery was successful and Hoggan is now vaccinated and boosted, she is still severely immunocompromised and has to take significant safety measures.

‘I’m so nervous. Like, my heart rate is through the roof when I’m out for anything,’ she said. ‘And I wonder if I’m ever able to be out safely again and be normal and go out to a store. Am I going to be feeling that forever?’

Hoggan works from home, rarely leaves the house, and when she does, it’s incredibly stressful. Her husband and college-age daughter both wear masks at home and have to be extremely careful about who they see and what they do.

Hoggan’s pandemic experience carries no violence and there have been no explosions or assault, which is why she has a hard time calling it trauma. But Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), says viewing the world as unsafe can be a symptom of trauma.”

A Nebulous and Hard-to-Define Trauma

As noted by Lonsdorf, trauma typically involves some kind of life-threatening event or something that leaves you feeling fearful and/or helpless. Many who have religiously followed mainstream news over the past two years have clearly been traumatized, feeling as though death is imminent and there’s no escape. The death-dealing blow — in the form of an invisible virus — could come from anyone, including loved ones. No one was “safe” to be around.

What’s more, the pandemic wasn’t an isolated incident that could be processed and recovered from. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist with expertise in collective trauma, likens the pandemic to a “slow-moving disaster” that “escalated in intensity over time” — and to this day doesn’t have a clear endpoint.⁸

Not everyone agrees that what we’re seeing is the result of collective trauma, though. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of “The Body Keeps the Score” — one of the most-sold books on Amazon during the pandemic — is hesitant to categorize the pandemic as a collective trauma.

He tells Lonsdorf,⁹ “We need to be very precise … because if we don’t know what we are treating, we may give the wrong treatment.” He believes we need “a new term, a new language” to accurately define our circumstances. “That’s really what I’m encouraging us to do — to really identify what is making us all feel like we’re barely hanging on,” he says.

Officials Are Unwilling to Let Go of the Fearmongering

Whatever we end up calling it, it’s clear that our government’s and media’s response to the pandemic has been a key causative factor behind this mental health crisis. It’s also notable that even though COVID-19 has become endemic in most parts of the world, causing few deaths, the pandemic has not officially been declared “over.”

In early March 2022, the World Health Organization said discussions about when and how to declare an end to the pandemic were underway, but that “we are not there yet.”¹⁰

Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. have functionally declared an end to their national emergencies by lifting all or most restrictions, but other countries, such as New Zealand and Hong Kong, are moving in the opposite direction, renewing lockdown orders amid fresh surges in COVID cases (i.e., positive PCR tests, which doesn’t mean people are dying or even getting seriously ill).¹¹

Meanwhile in the U.S., April 13, 2022, the CDC extended for another 90 days the public health emergency that’s been in effect since the pandemic began. In tandem, President Biden extended the mask mandates for airplanes and public transportation until May 3.¹²

In alternative media circles, fear of the virus has been tempered by more clearheaded analyses of statistics and data, showing that the real-world risk is actually quite limited, and that there are highly effective early treatments available even if you do get infected.

My guess is that those who now, two years in, are still struggling with overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety about the virus are the ones who for whatever reason weren’t exposed to these comforting data, or chose to dismiss them (which is what mainstream media told them to do).

And, if they persist in following the legacy media, there’s really no relief in sight for them. While many now accept COVID-19 as another version of, or addition to, the seasonal flu, and are going about their lives more or less as usual, the mainstream media are trying to pump up the fear level yet again with — you guessed it — another variant.¹³

This one is called “Xe.” It’s said to be a combination of two previous subvariants of Omicron and the most contagious form yet. “COVID-19 Could be Surging in the U.S. Right Now and We Might Not Even Know It,” a headline for Time magazine announced April 11, 2022, adding:¹⁴

“… as the country tries to move on from the pandemic, demand for lab-based testing has declined and federal funding priorities have shifted. The change has forced some testing centers to shutter while others have hiked up prices in response to the end of government-subsidized testing programs.

People are increasingly relying on at-home rapid tests if they decide to test at all. But those results are rarely reported, giving public health officials little insight into how widespread the virus truly is.”

Truth Is a Big Part of the Remedy

This fearmongering is again based on the lie that the PCR test can identify an active infection (it can’t), and the false idea that asymptomatic spread is a driver of infection (it’s not). Time magazine also promotes the false idea that the COVID shot is “extremely effective at preventing severe disease” and that Omicron causes milder symptoms only in “healthy, vaccinated people,” even though real-world data suggest otherwise on both accounts.

There’s no mention of the fact that the COVID shots may be responsible for more than 1.2 million injuries¹⁵ and are, by any metric, the most dangerous drugs ever to be released. There’s also no mention of the fact that most people are likely immune to Xe at this point, as it arose right on the heels of a major Omicron surge.

Even questions about remasking have popped up again. “Is It Time to Start Masking Again?” The Atlantic asked April 8, 2022.¹⁶ According to The Atlantic, in the face of new variants, we ought to prepare “by having good masks on hand — and being mentally ready to put them on again.”

It’s that kind of mental preparation to face death every day and the useless ritual of donning a mask that is driving people to the brink of their mental endurance. Masking was futile from the start, but that doesn’t stop the mainstream media — which gets its talking points from those trying to figure out how to shove The Great Reset down our collective throats — from pushing this worn-out and wholly unscientific narrative.

Totalitarianism Is Built Through Fear

Let’s face it, they need us to be fearful because, otherwise, they know we won’t comply with what’s coming next — digital identities, biosensors and emotional monitors, vaccine passports, the green new deal (which will virtually eliminate your ability to travel any significant distance), programmable central bank digital currencies (which will give the issuers complete control over your spending) and much more.

For The Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution to come to pass, the great masses must be willing to give up their freedoms and submit to more invasive surveillance and control, and for that, their fear of imminent death must eclipse all other concerns. For a description of how large swathes of society can be made mentally ill, on purpose, see the After Skool production above.

The good news is about half the population (in my estimation) have worked their way through the propaganda and no longer fret unnecessarily. Around the U.S., people are standing up to tyrannical and irrational COVID measures, be it mask and vaccine mandates or inhumane COVID rules in the hospitals.

In Tennessee, for example, a new state law will force hospitals to allow end-of-life visitations for COVID patients, so that they won’t have to face death alone.¹⁷ As noted by Dr. Jason Martin, an ICU doctor who’s been on the frontlines since the beginning of the pandemic, “End-of-life care in an ICU with COVID is terrible,” and watching patients die all alone, separated from their families “is a life-changing experience.”

Be a Role Model

There are no simple answers to the mental health crisis facing us, but putting an end to unnecessary fearmongering, I think, is a task that needs to be shouldered by those who still chose to work in mainstream media. On an individual level, it may mean shutting off MSM news altogether.

Those of us who have not succumbed to irrational fear (or who have worked our way out of it) can also act as a lifeline to untold numbers of people by sharing information that empowers rather than enforces fear, and by being role models in the way we go about our lives.

Don’t wear a mask to appease people’s fears. Let people see you smile. Be friendly and optimistic when in public. You never know how seeing you enjoy life might benefit someone who feels the world has become an unsafe and scary place.

In the long term, we need additional solutions — we need more qualified psychiatrists and therapists, for example — but in the meantime, we must do what we can, on an individual level, to ease the collective pressure, and we can begin by simply demonstrating that a different reality is possible.

The collective has been squeezed, mangled and brought to the precipice by a few in power. Many have been broken down in this process. It’s now time for the rest of us to take the reins and steward our fellow humans back to reality, back to sanity, by being firm yet kind, principled, ethical, truthful, rational and optimistic.

*

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Notes

^1, 6 STAT News April 12, 2022

² CDC National Center for Health Statistics Household Pulse Survey

³ 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health

⁴ NAMI Mental Health 2020

⁵ Physician Specialty Data

^7, 8, 9 NPR April 7, 2022

¹⁰ Bloomberg March 11, 2022

¹¹ Science March 4, 2022

¹² US News & World Report April 13, 2022

¹³ Daily Beast April 7, 2022

¹⁴ Time April 11, 2022

¹⁵ OpenVAERS

¹⁶ The Atlantic April 8, 2022

¹⁷ WKRN November 17, 2022

Featured image is from iStock

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***

While almost the entire world is criticizing China and accusing her of human rights abuses for locking down all of 26 million Shanghai citizens, when only some 26,000 positive-tested “Covid-19” cases were detected. At first sight, that indeed seems abnormal, or even a vast exaggeration. At first sight.

But let’s look again.

Remember the 2002 – 2004 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak?

It infected about 8,000 people and caused 774 deaths. By far, most of the cases and of the deaths were found in mainland China and Hongkong, some in Taiwan, and even a few in Japan, the US, and apparently in some more than 20 countries around the globe.

What is remarkable is that all of the “cases” were people with the Chinese genome. In other words, the virus attacked specifically the “Chinese race”, i.e. it was tailor-made to target China and her citizens.

“Coincidentally”, a few years earlier, in 1999 and 2000, the Chinese government detected hundreds of western “scientists”, typically from Harvard and other western reputed learning institutes and laboratories, collecting DNA samples from people in rural China, mostly in the north western provinces of China.

These “scientists” hired Chinese citizens to help them collect blood samples in isolated regions for pay. The westerners were, of course expulsed, once detected. However – too late. They had already smuggled out of China thousands of DNA samples taken from native Chinese. See this.

These samples would later serve to design a special corona virus targeting the Chinese genome. The resulting 2002-2004 SARS outbreak in China was a trial – for worse to come.

Remember also Event 201 that took place in NYC on October 18, 2019? sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security which also hosted the event.

During this event, all the important world actors, such as the World Bank, IMF, the UN and many of the UN specialized agencies, including UNICEF – and of course WHO – as well as key banking and financial institutions – major US health institutes, like CDC, FDA, and even China’s CDC – and many more – participated in this desk-top simulation – which was to produce worldwide more than 60 million deaths in the span of about two to three years. See this.

As the Chinese authorities were well aware of the genetically targeted virus, they were alert when SARS-Cov-2 hit Wuhan in early 2020. Their reaction was logical, immediate and severe. They locked down not only Wuhan (pop. 11 million) at once, but a large portion – some 50 million people – of Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Subsequently more areas within China, where SARS-Cov-2 was detected, were locked down. It meant the beginning of zero-tolerance for what later was conveniently renamed by WHO as Covid-19. Also remember, Covid-19, alias SARS-Cov-2, was never isolated or identified as a new virus.

Knowing the background of genetic- or race-designed viruses, China’s reaction to protect her citizens was logical and immediate. In fact, with this policy China mastered the disease largely within about six to eight months. During those harsh lockdowns, some 80% of the Chinese industrial complex was paralyzed. But by the end of 2020 most of the Chinese production apparatus, factories, shipping lines, agricultural production were humming again – and back on stream.

This is among the main reasons why the Chinese economic growth hardly suffered during this new covid outbreak. In fact, against IMF projection of 1.2% growth in 2021, and the Chinese own projection of 3.5% economic expansion in 2021 – actual Chinese growth in 2021 was registered as 5.5%. This growth and resulting export potential has helped many countries, especially on the Asian Continent, to reduce their covid-induced losses and to move their economies forward.

Ever since Chairman Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in 1949, China was a persistent thorn in western capitalist eyes. As China has gradually grown into a super-power, economically as well as strategically speaking, attacks and western sanctions on China have also grown. No matter how illegal, against international law and against human rights – led by the US, the west is relentlessly imposing economic sanctions on China – and of course also on China’s closest ally, Russia.

Despite these sanctions, China will soon – within the next 3 to 4 years, if not before – surpass the US economy. In fact, when measured according to the only real economic indicators, namely the PPP-factor (Purchasing Power Parity – meaning the value of goods a currency may purchase), China has surpassed the United States already several years ago.

China is a supply chain of vital interim production and / or end-use production parts, the west needs to make its consumer goods work, and consumers happy. Russia, on the other hand, supplies most raw materials available on her vast territory to produce these goods the west covets.

Both China and Russia are economically and strategically crucial for the west. Thy are also close allies. They represent a threat to western supremacy. The west does not tolerate this, as domination is in the west’s genes. Just look back at thousand years of western colonies in the Global South.

Instead of seeking cooperation agreements with these vital Should-Be Partners, the west seeks to dominate and annihilate them, with sanctions and with physical warfare. The west’s top war-institution, NATO, doesn’t miss a beat to threaten and attempt to intimidate Russia and China – by encroaching on the borders of these two allies, as well as by playing out their military might in close-to-their borders armed maneuvers. No wonder, China has recently joined Russia in opposing further NATO expansion, as the two countries move closer together in the face of Western pressure.

*

Now comes the Ukraine war with Russia, of which NATO expansion is just one reason. By now most of the world know – even the mainstream doesn’t make a secret of it anymore – that then US Secretary of State James Baker III, and Washington’s European allies promised at the capitulation of the Soviet Union in 1991, then Soviet / Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, not to move NATO an inch further east of Berlin.

This was a promise made in return for allowing Germany to re-unite with East Germany and to integrate East Berlin into West Berlin, remaking the combined city of Berlin again Germany’s capital.

As we all know, this promise has been broken miserably. In 1991 NATO counted 16 member countries, of which 2 in the Americas (the US and Canada) and 14 in Europe. Today, some 30 years later, NATO counts 30 members. All of the 14 new ones are in Europe, many moving ever closer to the borders of Russia. Ukraine was the next NATO candidate. This, Russia could not tolerate.

Just imagine, Russia or China were to build military bases in Mexico or Central America – how the US would react. We have a livid example of the 1961 Bay of Pigs crisis, when then US President JFK and Russian President Nikita Khrushchev avoided a potentially all-destructive nuclear war, through negotiations in a Vienna meeting.

President Putin’s worries today are more than understandable – and they explain partially his intervention in Ukraine. This is not justifying a war by any means, but partially explaining Russia’s reaction.

Connecting the Dots to the Shanghai Lockdown

However, possibly an even more important reason than the NATO threat for President Putin’s intervention in Ukraine are the 20 to 30 war-type (grade 3) US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine. They were built during the past 20-some years, most of them after the western-instigated Maidan Coup in February 2014 which led to the current state of affairs with Ukraine, and between Ukraine and Russia.

For reasons of national security, Russia has to control and possibly destroy these deadly labs. To do so, an intervention was necessary. The timing of the western aggressions to trigger the Russian intervention, especially the Azov-Nazi battalions’ killings of civilians in the separatist Donbas region, is not a coincidence. In 8 years since the Maidan Coup, 14,000 civilian deaths, of which about a third are children, were recorded. It fits the narrative of the WEF’s Global Reset which aims at global domination of the total world population, all of the 193 UN member countries, through many means.

This is all part of the infamous UN Agenda 2030. The beginning was the false Covid-war of fear, lowering peoples’ immune system and willingness to resist; thus, leading them like a heard of sheep to the so-called vaxx-chambers, where they were injected with what the lie-narrative calls anti-covid-19 vaccines, when in reality they are mRNA – DNA-modifying – test jabs.

Different vials of western produced vaxxes contain different bio-chemical compositions, including graphene oxide to eventually facilitate electro-magnetic brain manipulations – coinciding with Klaus Schwab’s dream of the 4^th Industrial Revolution where ultimately the remaining surviving world would be fully digitized.

According to Mike Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief of Science of Pfizer, these fake vaxxes further reduce humans’ immune system. The first jab by about 30%, the second by another 30% and the third jab, the so-called booster, by another 20%. That leaves about 20% of men and women’s auto-immune system intact. In other words, within one to three years of being vaccinated people could die from a variety of diseases, including aggressive cancers and different types of heart ailments which would be difficult to trace back to the vaxxes. As examples see this, Covid jabs to sterilize women and this Covid jabs to include HIV ingredients.

What if the 4^th and 5^th and-so-on “boosters” – all programmed, will be let loose and imposed on humanity within the coming 7 or 8 years to completion of UN Agenda 2030?

In addition, the constant western media-indoctrinated vaxx-narrative leaves many people – today still a majority – in a state of cognitive dissonance; meaning, they cannot admit to themselves having been lied to by their government which they purportedly elected and paid with their taxes to protect them. Such betrayal is too much to believe and admit to themselves. The dark Cabal behind this plan and behind the tyrannical UN Agenda 2030 knows that. That makes it all the more difficult to waking people up – and bringing them into a solidarity opposition.

Back to the Ukraine Virus Labs

These Grade-3 war-type bio-labs are capable of producing genome-specific viruses that can be directed to attack different Russian genomes and Chinese-DNA people, as well as others, if programmed accordingly. Numerous such tests of tailor-made viruses have been carried out during the last two to three decades. Not least the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (2014-2016), affecting mainly Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, the epicenter of the outbreak. Over the duration of this Ebola epidemic, there were 28,616 suspected, probable, and confirmed cases from these three countries and 11,310 deaths, leading to a horrendous death-to-case rate of some 40% – see this. Compare this to the so-called Covid-19 death rate of about 0.07 to 0.1%; a flu-like incidence.

Who knows whether a genome-targeted Ebola or any other deadly virus is or was being lab-produced in one of the US-funded bio-labs – that Russian forces “intervened” to destroy for the sake of humanity?

There is of course no assurance that none of such deadly, population decimating bio-war germs have “escaped” or been target-released before the Russian intervention – in line with the Great Reset and Bill Gates predicted new and much more dangerous epidemic outbreak.

A similar warning about a possible Marburg outbreak (internal bleeding similar to Ebola) was made earlier this year by French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, when he warned that the French elections in early April 2022 may have to be postponed… it did not happen, so far. But who knows, whether and when such an outbreak may occur….

And who would be the prime targets of such viruses? – China and Russia?

While there is no concrete evidence of a biological attack, perhaps China’s “zero covid tolerance” – and the full lock-down of Shanghai – is now better understood?

We, the people, in solidarity with each other, within and with all nations, must do whatever we can to bring down this “dark agenda” and bring on the Light, even if it requires temporary sacrifice. – In the end, be sure, Light conquers darkness.

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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. 

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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***

Covid lockdowns may partly explain the mysterious spate of hepatitis cases which has sickened dozens of British children, experts claim.

Some 108 youngsters under 10 have been struck down with the inflammatory liver condition in Britain so far since January. Eight have needed a liver transplant.

Sick children have also been reported in the US, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain — but scientists are still unsure what is behind the cases.

The UK Health Security Agency believes adenoviruses — a family of common viruses which usually cause mild colds, vomiting and diarrhoea — may be playing a role.

Around 77 per cent of the cases in Britain also tested positive for adenovirus, the agency said today.

Experts tasked with investigating the spate of illnesses believe the endless cycle of lockdowns may have played a contributing role, weakening children’s immunity and leaving them at heightened risk of adenovirus.

Click here to read the full article.

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Featured image is from Adobe Stock

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The COVID Crime Continues Full Speed. Don’t be Fooled by the War. “Watch the Water”

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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Was Part of CIA-linked Lobby Group with Husband of Assange Judge

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Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will soon decide whether to extradite Julian Assange to the US, has been a political adviser to – and been funded by – a right-wing lobby group which has attacked Assange in the British media for a decade.

Who Are the War Criminals? The Nightmare: The Iraq Invasion’s Atrocities, Unearthing the Unthinkable

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I have a deeply held belief that the duty of a commentator is, to the best of one’s ability, to record, to shine light in often dark places, to act as a voice for those whose own voice, fears, plights might not be heard or known. To write about the emotions one sometimes feels when doing it, is an anathema and anyway a redundancy.

#FreeAssange: Sign to Urge UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to Reject Julian Assange’s Extradition to the United States!

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On 20 April, the Westminster Magistrates’ Court signed an order confirming the alarming next step in the more than decade-long case against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. Following more than two years of extradition proceedings in UK courts, Assange’s fate has once again become a political decision for the Home Secretary – the very office that made the political decision to green-light the US extradition request in 2019.

Israel’s Fortress State Is the Model for the UK’s New Asylum Policy

By Jonathan Cook, April 21, 2022

There is nothing innovative or humanitarian about Britain’s new policy of shipping asylum seekers, “on a one-way ticket“, thousands of miles to central Africa. Nor is there anything surprising about the choice of destination: Rwanda. Boris Johnson’s government has simply copied wholesale a programme established by Israel eight years ago.

Deadly: COVID Vaccine Smoking Gun; AstraZeneca CEO Reveals the Secret

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Project Veritas has just released a leaked recording of a December 2020 Zoom call, during which AstraZeneca CEO, Pascal Soriot, stated that millions of people, whose immune systems are compromised, cannot receive the COVID vaccine.

“Wiki-Gate”: Julian Assange Was Framed by the People Who Supported Him

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 21, 2022

We must act decisively in support and in solidarity with Julian Assange. In this regard, we must understand the history: On how Assange was betrayed and misled by those who allegedly supported him.

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By The Daily Expose, April 21, 2022

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Destination Ukraine: Will Poland Go Rogue? Warsaw’s Ulterior Motive? The Lviv Connection

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British Brinkmanship: Boris Johnson’s “Clandestine” Visit to Kyiv, Amidst Secrecy

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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).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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After supplying equipment and emboldening a militarized Ukraine, Britain has now started arming Kosovo’s Albanians with Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missile systems. The British Embassy in Belgrade said that some Serbian media published fabricated claims of arms exports from the United Kingdom to Kosovo and claimed that there was no truth to those allegations. However, Serbian Minister of the Interior Aleksandar Vulin insists that the UK did transfer weapons to Kosovo, stating:

“You are creating an army, arming them, giving them armored vehicles, anti-tank systems, drones, conducting training, we hear that you are sending them to trial courses in Turkey and Albania,” adding that the integration of Kosovo into NATO is only intended to “provoke Serbia.”

London seemingly wants to use the situation in Ukraine to increase pressure on the Serbs over the issues in Kosovo and Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). Before the Russian military operation commenced in Ukraine, Britain was already heavily involved in security issues in the Balkans. It is recalled that Boris Johnson warned of an extremely dangerous situation in the Balkans as early as December last year and appointed Air Marshal Sir Stuart Peach as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the Western Balkans.

Following Brexit, the UK did everything it could to keep its presence in Europe, including in the Western Balkans where the roots of conflict already exist and threaten to boilover. The UK advocated for the maximum strengthening of Operation Althea (formally the European Union Force Bosnia and Herzegovina), the strengthening of the NATO contingent in the country, and even coordinated the unilateral arrival of British contingents and forces on the territory of BiH.

Such British (and NATO) militarization awakens anxieties and counters the security of both Serbia and the Balkans, with the violent wars of the 1990’s still fresh in the memory. The UK will likely continue to deliver equipment to the Balkans and also encourage other NATO members to strengthen anti-Serbian militaries in the region.

This comes as Montenegro seems synchronised in terms of Russophobia and pointing to Serbia as a disruptive factor in the region. This is ironic when considering Montenegro has no independence itself and follows the interests of the UK and US instead. Albania is also another key to Anglo designs over the Balkans, especially as they enthusiastically express their willingness to take practical steps to strengthen NATO forces in the Balkans.

The Western arming of Kosovo, bolstering of BiH, and encouragement for Montenegro and Albania to militarize is a warning to Serbia that it should not be so close to Russia, especially in the context of the Ukraine War.

The fact that foreign instructors are arriving with military systems in Kosovo is not a novelty because they have so far trained Kosovo Albanian soldiers in special forces, support units, telecommunications, anti-armour, PVO systems and more. However, this is likely just elementary training and an incomplete process with a future aim of fully equipping Kosovo’s forces with much more powerful weapon systems.

London is making such a decision to arm Kosovo even though there is no complete consensus in NATO regarding the status of the territory, with Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain refusing to recognize its illegally declared independence from Serbia. Despite a consensus not being reached, London and Washington are working timelessly to assist Pristina and construct some kind of Kosovo Army.

In effect, the Anglo Alliance are further radicalising Kosovo’s Albanians and encouraging destabilisation in the Balkans. Instead of punishing Kosovo’s de facto Prime Minister Albin Kurti for banning Kosovo Serbs from voting, they reward him with weapons and further integration into NATO.

Lightweight anti-missile and Javelin anti-tank systems, most commonly mentioned as part of a Western “support” package for the Ukrainian Armed Forces against Russia, have become part of the arsenal of Kosovo’s so-called security forces. The acquisition was agreed at a meeting between Albin Kurti and Boris Johnson in February this year, and according to Serbia but denied by the UK, the first contingent of 50 systems was delivered in April.

At the same time, the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee will hold a session to discuss a draft resolution that will invite Serbia to harmonise with EU decisions in foreign and security policy, including sanctions on Russia. A draft resolution proposed by EP rapporteur for Serbia, Vladimir Bilczyk, expressed regret over the fact that Serbia failed to comply with EU sanctions following Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and urged Serbian authorities to show “a real commitment to EU values.”

The draft resolution reminds Serbian authorities that progress in the dialogue on normalising relations with Kosovo will determine the pace of EU accession negotiations. The proposed text is to be adopted by the European Parliament at a plenary session this year.

In effect, the EU and the Anglo Alliance are working in tandem to move Serbia away from Russia. The EU provides the carrot of bloc membership while the Anglo Alliance provides the stick by arming, training and militarizing Kosovo’s Albanians against Serbia. Given that Serbia has already experienced the full horrors of NATO and could do little as Europe divided the Serbian people by establishing new countries and not allowing them to be in the borders of Serbia, it is unlikely that Belgrade will be intimidated into abandoning its long, tried and tested relationship with Moscow.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image: Aleksandar Vulin, Minister of Internal Affairs of Serbia (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

First published on March 31, 2022.

***

Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will soon decide whether to extradite Julian Assange to the US, has been a political adviser to – and been funded by – a right-wing lobby group which has attacked Assange in the British media for a decade.

Priti Patel sat on the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) advisory council from around 2013-16, although the exact dates are unclear as neither the HJS nor Patel responded to Declassified’s requests for clarification.

She has also received funds from the HJS, and was paid £2,500 by the group to visit Washington in March 2013 to attend a “security” programme in the US Congress.

Patel, who became an MP in 2010 and was appointed Home Secretary in 2019, also hosted an HJS event in parliament soon after she returned from Washington.

After the UK Supreme Court said this month it was refusing to hear Assange’s appeal of a High Court decision against him, the WikiLeaks founder’s fate now lies in Patel’s hands. He faces life in prison in the US.

The HJS, which was founded in 2005 and does not disclose its funders, has links to the CIA, the intelligence agency behind the prosecution of Assange and which reportedly developed plans to assassinate him.

One of the HJS’s international patrons is James Woolsey, CIA director from 1993-95, who was in this role throughout the period Patel was advising the group. Woolsey’s affiliation to the HJS goes back to at least 2006, soon after it was founded.

In 2014, the group hosted General David Petraeus, CIA director from 2011-12, at a UK parliament meeting from which all media were barred.

Three years later, in 2017, the HJS organised another event at parliament with General Michael Hayden, CIA director from 2006-9, to “discuss the current state of the American Intelligence Community and its relationships with foreign partners.”

Hayden described “the relationship within the Five Eyes community as strong as ever, despite potential concerns over recent intelligence leaks between members.” Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

‘Perception of bias’

During a visit to the UK in July 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a roundtable hosted by the HJS with what the Washington Post referred to as a group of “hawkish” members of the Conservative Party.

As director of the CIA in 2017, Pompeo had launched a blistering attack on WikiLeaks calling the media organisation a “hostile intelligence service” that makes “common cause with dictators”.

Pompeo did not provide evidence but added a threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

On the HJS advisory council at the same time as Patel was Lord James Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister. His wife, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, was Westminster Chief Magistrate from 2016-2021.

For part of her tenure, she was in charge of the Assange case and made two key rulings against him in 2018. Lady Arbuthnot eventually stepped aside from ruling on the case because of a “perception of bias” but never declared a conflict of interest.

The links between Patel and Lord Arbuthnot go further. In 2010, soon after becoming an MP, Patel was appointed one of five parliamentary officers of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) when the group was chaired by Lord Arbuthnot.

CFI has been described as “beyond doubt the most well-connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups”. It also does not disclose its funders.

Patel was forced to resign as Secretary of State for International Development in November 2017 after it was revealed that she had held more than a dozen undeclared meetings with Israeli ministers and organisations while on holiday in the country.

Many of these were arranged by CFI’s honorary president, Lord Polak. Patel’s resignation letter accepted that her conduct “fell below…standards of transparency and openness”.

Lady and Lord Arbuthnot attend the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in May 2017. Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

‘Bonkers and paranoid’

HJS staff have been repeatedly critical of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the British media since 2011 when its then associate director, Douglas Murray, engaged in a combative debate with Assange.

The following year, the HJS posted a video of Murray stating on media channel Al-Jazeera English:

“There is not a witch-hunt of WikiLeaks. An organisation illegally obtained, or stole as we used to call it, a whole set of government documents and published them with consequences which are still not fully understood.”

Murray continued:

“I think Mr Assange has been bonkers and paranoid for years, it’s part of his alleged political makeup, and indeed I would allege that of many of his supporters.”

Over the following years, the HJS and its staff continued to be among the most active civil society voices for impugning the motives and reputation of Assange.

This stands in contrast to nearly all human rights and press freedom organisations which argue that extraditing the WikiLeaks publisher to the US would be a grave blow to media freedom.

‘Conspiracy theories’

In October 2016, the HJS released a statement to the media, which claimed:

“Mr Assange has a long track record of stealing and distributing information, peddling conspiracy theories, and casting aspersions on the moral standing of western democratic governments. He has done this whilst supporting, and being supported by, autocratic regimes.”

No evidence was supplied to support the assertions.

A number of other HJS staff—including spokesperson Sam Armstrong and then chief of staff Ellie Green—have made anti-Assange interventions in the British media.

In April 2019, after Julian Assange was seized from the embassy by British police, HJS executive director Alan Mendoza was put up as the counterweight against Assange’s lawyer on BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme.

Posted to the HJS Youtube channel, Mendoza told the national broadcaster:

“Journalists are not allowed to break the law in obtaining their materials.”

He added:

“I think it’s quite clear Mr Assange has spent many years evading justice, hiding in a room in Knightsbridge…Isn’t it time he actually answered questions in a court of law?”.

Secrecy

In October 2019, as home secretary, Patel visited Washington again to meet William Barr, the US Attorney General who was then in charge of the Assange case as head of the Department of Justice.

Together they signed the Cloud Act which made it easier for American and British law enforcement agencies to demand electronic data on targets as they undertake investigations.

Assange’s defence team had previously raised the concern in court that Barr may be using Assange’s extradition case in the UK for political ends.

In August 2020, Declassified requested basic information about Patel’s 2019 trip to Washington. The Home Office confirmed it held the information but refused to release it because the department considered “that disclosure of some of the information would prejudice relations between the UK and the United States”.

In May 2020, Declassified also requested information about any calls or emails made or received by Patel since she became Home Secretary which concerned the case of Julian Assange, or mentioned his name.

The Home Office told us “we can neither confirm nor deny whether we hold the information you have requested” because “to do so either way would disclose information that constitutes the personal data of Julian Assange”.

The same request for Sajid Javid’s tenure as Home Secretary from 2018-19 was rejected because the department said “we have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”

This was despite the fact Javid signed the initial US extradition request for Assange in June 2019. The shadow home secretary at the time, Diane Abbott, opposed approving the US extradition request.

Declassified previously revealed that before signing the US request, Javid had attended six secretive meetings, some attended by former CIA directors, which were organised by a US lobby group which has published calls for Assange to be assassinated or taken down.

The Home Office recently admitted it had eight officials working on Operation Pelican, the UK government campaign to seize Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The department, however, claimed it did not know which other UK government ministries were involved in the operation.

Priti Patel and the Henry Jackson Society did not respond to requests for information and comment.

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Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt

Featured image: Priti Patel (R) meets Alejandro Mayorkas, US Secretary of Homeland Security, Washington DC, 17 November 2021. (Photo: Priti Patel / Twitter)

March 19 2022 marks 19 years since the US-UK led war on Iraq in 2003. But that war did not start in 2003. It is an ongoing 31 years wars. It is part of a broader war against humanity. 

This article by Felicity Arbuthnot was first published on October 9, 2010. Felicity was for several years a war correspondent in Iraq.

***

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” François-Marie Arouet -“Voltaire” (1694-1778.)

I have a deeply held belief that the duty of a commentator is, to the best of one’s ability, to record, to shine light in often dark places, to act as a voice for those whose own voice, fears, plights might not be heard or known. To write about the emotions one sometimes feels when doing it, is an anathema and anyway a redundancy.

The purpose is to attempt to draw attention to wrongs, not to whinge about the effects they can have – and any way, a private life should be just that. If politicians wish to strip themselves of their dignity and allude to everything from their sex life, to using private grief to gain sympathy votes, those with a shred of self-respect do not wish to emulate them. Here, I am breaking my taboo, for a reason.

Over the last several weeks I have again researched in depth, invasion’s atrocities in Iraq, unearthing the unthinkable, switching off emotion and reading of terror, torture, monstrous wickednesses, word after sickening word. Then, Fallujah revisited (1) with document after document revealing the depth of the darkest depravities towards others, which can be plumbed, by “some mother’s son” – or daughter. Indeed, some child’s father or mother, able to shoot the children, toddlers, babies of others, in cold blood, drive over them in tanks, leaving the pathetic remains to be eaten by stray dogs.

Photographs viewed have included many which even hardened investigators have deemed: “too disturbing to view.” This is not a view I hold.

If family members who have survived, emergency workers (when not incinerated by U.S., troops themselves) medical staff, if not shot, imprisoned, tortured, or tied up with a bag over their head) can view, identify, bury with love and respect – or in the case of medical staff, carefully photograph, and note time, location of finding, then number, wrap and retain for a period, before burial, hoping a relative will claim the charred, mutilated, or worse, remains. It is a duty for those with any “voice”, from countries responsible for this first documentable U.S., U.K., genocide of the 21st century, to draw attention to it, in the memory of and in tribute to, the voiceless, nameless, uncounted victims, in the hope that eventually, legal recourse might result.

In fact it was compassion which over came all – bodies and faces burned near beyond recognition, or the eviscerated, the all with the eyes, often, still staring out in a desperate silent plea for help, combined with utter bewilderment. “We have the scumbags on the run”, wrote a marine on his website. “We lit them up”, wrote another, as many took photographs of these lost souls – and sent them to porn sites in exchange for free viewing. And between the U.S., occupiers (now, surreally, re-branded “advisors” – same car, new paint) and what Hussein al-Alak of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign has called: ” the U.S., imposed Vichy government, with their foreign passports ..”, who will fight for justice for the Iraqis?

And, as since 1991, this is also a war against the unborn, new born and under fives. After the bodies and the rubble, the gore, blood and limbs, there are the deformities. The fledgling life, born without eyes, brain, with one cyclops eye,  with no head, with two heads, with no limbs, or fingers – or too many.

A biblical land turned to genetic and ecological Armageddon, for current and future generations, till the end of time. “Mission accomplished”, said George W. Bush, in his ridiculous little flying suit, on the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1st May 2003. “Let freedom reign”, he scribbled, after the first, corrupt, murderous, corpse-littered “elections”. Result: “Let genocide commence.”

The U.S., appointed “Viceroy” in Iraq, J. Paul Bremer, dressed for the part, Hollywood style, in ridiculous desert, or army boots, depending on your perception, arrived shortly after the invasion, seemingly believing in population reduction. Reportedly asking what the population of Iraq was, he was told, about twenty five million. His response was allegedly : “Too many, try five.” But then, he had been Kissinger Associates’ man.

As I read, I listened to the great and the good in various world legal bodies discuss whether the Congo and Rwanda should be “classed” as genocide. In July 2004, as U.S., troops were training for the Fallujah massacre, the coming November, the U.S., House of Representatives passed a unanimous resolution calling the tragedy of Darfur: “Genocide.” They asked the administration to consider “Multilateral or even Unilateral” action, to end this genocide. Reluctance to take proactive steps to prevent further loss of human life was “criminal”, they opined.

Seemingly genocides these days are only committed by Africans or Eastern Europeans, not those great bastions of democracy, U.S., U.K., and the “only democracy in the Middle East”, ally Israel. The Israeli Defence Force, trained U.S., troops for the two week November 2004, Fallujah pogrom. (2) “If it moves, shoot it”, was the order of the day. As two world wars, as Korea, Vietnam, the face of liberation never changes.

“Their tactics basically involve massive fire power … bringing in tanks and helicopters to fire on targets … demolishing buildings, establishing snipers on roofs, smashing holes in walls (and) shooting anything that moved.” This in addition to:  ” … aerial bombardment and shell fire from large field guns.”

The plight of Fallujah:

“Was not fully understood in the West, save by some of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto … they were trapped (like) rabbits in a cornfield”, being circled to be mown down and dismembered by combine harvesters.(3)

The photographs are testimony to the chilling description. The unsung heroes are those who determined to record them, so some time, some where, the crimes would be known and legal retribution sought. These terrible, pathetic images, are the silent testimony to the first known Western genocide of the 21st century. Sadly, it is a near certainty that Iraq and Afghanistan will, in time, produce proof of more.

On visits to Iraq during the embargo years, when there was the silent genocide over nearly thirteen years of the U.S.-U.K.,- driven U.N., embargo’s prohibition of all necessary to sustain the basics of life, with children dying of “embargo-related causes”, at an average of six thousand a month, witnessing the heartbreak, the bafflement at their plight, the terrible guilt was always leaving. One saw and shared to some extent, the unimaginable, being perpetrated in one’s name, then one left. Across the border, in Jordan, the lights were on, the towns bustled, clean water came out of the taps, and the illegal American and British bombs were not dropping. Yet so near, the children were dying, the people were dying, in the name of “We the people …”

Looking through the photographs, reading of the near incomprehensible depths of sadistic destruction of their fellow human beings, men and women in uniform can uniformly sink to, I could also escape at the end of the day. I could make a meal, go and listen to live jazz at a favorite jazz pub, or simply pour a glass of wine and listen to music, surrounded by numerous books, collected pictures and loved items, in a home I enjoy, before seeking the warmth of the duvet and a comfortable bed.

But if the conscious mind can switch off, clearly the sub-conscious does not. One night the nightmare, one was sure was not a nightmare, but reality, struck. In the surreal world of nightmares, I “woke”, to find myself saturated, blood pouring from under my arms. Wondering what was happening and what to do about it, I did, in nightmare-land, what I often do when working something out (though not usually at 3 a.m.,) and got the tools together and went out in to my garden. As ever, to trim and nurture plants, and bushes, mostly grown from tiny, often quarter inch cuttings, cosseted indoors, until clement weather, then planted outside, in sheltered warmth, and further fed and tended until suddenly seemingly overnight, a vibrant, colored addition, standing on its own roots, is ready to face all seasons. But my garden, with its protective hedges, (white flowers in summer, orange berries in winter and thorns to deter the trespasser …) had gone. There were just bulldozer tracks, deep, ruining, not a leaf, stem or bloom left – just a wasteland.

Then, in nightmare-world, in my nightclothes, blood covered, I realised I had no keys to get back in. What if anyone found me in this state? I turned to the front door to try and figure a plan – but the building had gone. I was alone, bloody, near undressed and all had vanished, turning back to other familiar buildings, suddenly there was nothing. Just ruin, rubble and wasteland, as far as the eye could see. My life, my books, my comfort zone, were no more. Just the bloodied clothes I stood in remained.

Like walking away, I, of course, woke up – soaked and shivering. To a hot bath, a washing machine and a warm airing cupboard full of clean bed linen – my garden still intact. The people of Iraq, with their destroyed homes and gardens, fruit groves, date palm groves, or their vibrant plantings on balconies or flat roofs; the Palestinians, suffering the same plight for sixty two interminable years, and the people of Afghanistan in their flattened compounds, destroyed with their scented groves and gardens of blossoms and apricots, live a nightmare from which they never awake.

I thought again of the Iraqi child, whose parents had a beautiful garden, who showed a friend and I her drawing book, before the invasion. One picture had an abundance of flowers, carefully colored, in numerous hues,  on the side were American soldiers – shooting at the flowers. “Why are the soldiers shooting the flowers?” We asked. “Because Americans hate flowers”, she replied solemnly. It was a deeply saddening moment, that she represented so many children, who saw American as representing only wrath, fear and deprivation. She knew nothing of those Americans who had worked tirelessly to reverse the situation. If she has survived, she will be a young adult. She is unlikely to have changed her views.

In the U.K., Scottish parliamentarian, Dr Bill Wilson (4) is ploughing a determined path to bring Tony Blair to justice. In furtherance of this, he has now written to Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond and Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, calling for Scotland to adopt the recently agreed international definition of the crime of aggression into its legislature. His letter reads:

“The International Criminal Court’s Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala (5) earlier this year adopted a resolution by which it amended the Statute so as to include a definition of the crime of aggression and the conditions under which the Court could exercise jurisdiction with respect to the crime.  The actual exercise of jurisdiction is subject to a decision to be taken after 1 January 2017 by the same majority of States Parties as is required for the adoption of an amendment to the Statute.  However, I believe that there is now no legal obstacle to individual countries adopting the new definition of the crime of aggression into their own legislatures.  I hope you will agree with me that it would be to Scotland’s credit if we could be one of the first countries to do this, and it would be a fine legacy for the present Scottish Government to leave as it nears the end of its term.”

He commented that, further, since the The International Criminal Court has now  agreed on a definition of the crime of aggression: “I believe that although the ICC itself cannot prosecute on the basis of this for the time being, there is no impediment to individual countries adopting the definition into their own legislatures immediately.  If Scotland did so, it would be an excellent example to the rest of the world and would send the clear message that we respect international law here.  It would also create a powerful incentive for present and future UK Governments to think carefully before embarking on warfare.

“I think most Scots would not wish to see a repeat of the tragedy we have seen unfold in Iraq. This might be a way of preventing such misguided ventures in the future.” Dr Wilson, is adamant: Scotland is in a position to: “… lead ethically in adopting the crime of aggression definition”, and has legal advise which concurs. Dr Wilson plans to use Fallujah as an example of this aggression, but also points out there there are surely numerous others, undocumented, as yet.

As John Pilger reminds, Blair promised that the (illegal) invasion of Baghdad would be ” … without a bloodbath and that Iraqis in the end would be celebrating … In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed a society, killing up to a million people, driving four million from their homes, contaminating cities such as Fallujah with cancer-causing poisons and leaving a majority of young children malnourished in a country once described by Unicef as a ‘model.’ ” (New Statesman, 30th September, 2010.)

As Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, now seem to be in would be imperial sights, a precedent which will flag a up a warning sign to leaders of ill intent, is surely needed. Dr Gideon Polya, who’s work on excess deaths from invasions since 1950, states, in Afghanistan: “The annual death rate is 7% for under-5 year old Occupied Afghan infants, as compared to 4% for Poles in Nazi-occupied Poland, and 5% for French Jews in Nazi-occupied France.”

The U.S., and U.K., whose leaders have trumpeted the dangers of the latest “new Hitler” in the countries they planned to decimate, have outdone the Nazis. Enough.

Felicity Arbuthnot, distinguished journalist, Veteran War Correspondent, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Associate Editor of Global Research.

Notes

1. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=212121

See also : www.billwilsonmsp.org

2. “War Crime or Just War”, Nicholas Wood, South Hill Press, 2005.

3. See 2.

4. See 1.

5.http://www2.icc-cpi.int/menus/icc/press%20and%20media/press%20releases/review%20conference%20of%20the%20rome%20statute%20concludes%20in%20kampala

March 19 2021 marks 19 years since the US-UK led war on Iraq in 2003.

This article by Felicity Arbuthnot first published on September 22, 2010 recalls the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed against the people of Iraq, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and many more.

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When the horrors of the sadistic, near necrophile behaviour of U.S., personnel at Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, first showed the tip-of-the-iceberg-lie of “liberation”: cruelty, depravity and bestiality on a scale which apparently dwarfed all that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been accused of, President George W. Bush said: ” This does not represent the America I know.”

He should have. It was under the watch of his father, George Bush, Snr., that in 1991, thousands of Iraqi conscripts were buried alive in southern Iraq, by US army tanks and bulldozers. “What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches, with peoples arms and things sticking out of them”, said Colonel Anthony Moreno who participated.(1)

Sixteen years earlier, in 1975, Bush Snr., with Henry Kissinger and Vernon Walters, set up “Plan Condor”, under which CIA-enlisted exiles, orchestrated : “.. the torture and assassination of leftist leaders (under which) Latin American military rulers, also ‘disappeared’ thousands of their opponents.” (2)

This followed in the bloody footsteps of the CIA 1966 Phoenix Project, designed to “cleanse” South Viet Nam of Communists (Viet Cong.) “Specially designed torture chambers were constructed in all forty four provinces. Rape of women suspects, electric shock, water torture, and hanging from ceilings were standard methods during interrogations.” (3) Further: “The U.S.’s Phoenix Program killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese.

Vietnamese prisoners were thrown into ‘tiger cages’ – built by Texas military conractor RMK-BRJ, the forerunner of Halliburton subsidiary KBR .. and routinely tortured.” (See 2.) Halliburton has, of course, hit financial bonanzas in Iraq and Afghanistan, along the occasional slightly bumpy legal path.

Fast forward to the revelations this month that twelve soldiers from (U.S.,) 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division have been charged with seventy six crimes, ranging from murder, to taking or appropriating pictures of the dead, keeping body parts, including fingers, a skull, a leg bone and a tooth. Allegations also include: “..hitting, kicking, strangling, dragging and spitting on ..” a colleague with one, the highest ranking accused, a Staff Sergeant, also allegedly showing him fingers from a corpse to dissuade him from going to the army authorities.(4) Bodies were “cut up and photographed”, states the (UK) Telegraph.

An army spokeswoman said the, as yet, unproven charges were: ” .. an aberration in terms of the behavior of our forces, if true … I don’t believe the allegations here, against those few individuals, are representative of the behavior or the attitudes of the entire force.”

Sadly, history, recent and earlier, hardly supports this sanguine view. A few quickly collected reminders, from the uncountable include:

In Vietnam :

The “elite” Tiger Force : U.S. troops tortured and executed prisoners and cut off their ears as souvenirs and to make into necklaces. “There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears,” one soldier remembered.

“When women and children in one village crawled into a bunker to try to hide, GIs threw grenades into the bunker and ignored the pleas and screams of the wounded until all were dead. Such actions were not limited to this one unit–they were typical of U.S. forces in Vietnam.

The widespread murder and torture had a strategic purpose–to terrorize the people, drive them away from the revolutionary fighters, and to force them to follow U.S. orders.” (5)

“Of the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese detained, at least twenty thousand were summarily executed … the severed heads of those executed were frequently displayed in the villages. Even more common was collecting the ears of dead Communist troops.” (6)

In a terrifying overview: “Torture is an American Value”, S. Brian Willson gives some salutary background to U.S., policy:

“I became aware of torture as a U.S. policy in 1969 when I was serving as a USAF combat security officer working near Can Tho City in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. I was informed about the CIA’s Phong Dinh Province Interrogation Center (PIC) at the Can Tho Army airfield where supposedly ‘significant members’ (of Viet Cong) were taken for torture as part of the Phoenix Pacification Program. A huge French-built prison nearby was also apparently utilized for torture of suspects from the Delta region. Many were routinely murdered.

“Naive, I was shocked! The Agency for International Development (AID) working with Southern Illinois University, for example, trained Vietnamese police and prison officials in the art of torture (“interrogations”) under cover of ‘public safety.’ American officials believed they were teaching ‘better methods’, often making suggestions during torture sessions conducted by Vietnamese police.”

A chilling sleight of hand, Willson points out, was that: “Instead of the recent euphemism ‘illegal combatants’, the United States, in Vietnam, claimed prisoners were ‘criminal’, and therefore exempt from Geneva Convention protections.” Think Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, think “renditions” and the uncounted, unknown secret prisons and secreted away human beings.

Far from being an “aberration”, Willson states: “The use of torture as a function of terror, or its equivalent in sadistic behavior, has been historic de facto U.S. policy.” (7)

And, lest forgotten: “From 1981 to 1985, John Negroponte was President Reagan’s ambassador to the bloody U.S.-backed regime in Honduras. Negroponte oversaw the training of the Honduran army. According to the Baltimore Sun,a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, used “shock and suffocation devices in interrogations…. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.”

“Negroponte also oversaw the brutal Contra war against Nicaragua. The CIA supplied the Contras with a manual titled ‘Psychological Operations In Guerilla Warfare.’ It called for the use of assassinations, kidnappings, extortions, and other violence for propagandistic effect. ” (8)

Willson scales the decades in tracing the parallels in behaviour, the linguistics are depressingly familiar : “When indigenous Nicaraguan resistance fought against the occupying U.S. forces in the late 1920s, the Marines launched counterinsurgency war. U.S. policymakers insisted on “stabilizing” the country to enforce loan repayments to U.S. banks. They defined the resistance forces as “bandits,” an earlier equivalent to the “criminal prisoners” in Vietnam and “illegal combatants” in Iraq. Since the United States claimed not to be fighting a legitimate military force, any Nicaraguan perceived as interfering with the occupiers was commonly subjected to beatings, tortures, and beheadings.”

In Nick Gier’s “Beheading, Hooding and Waterboarding: Torture in Viet Nam, Latin America and Iraq”, the America unrecognised by Bush Jnr., walks tall. An Abu Ghraib Military Intelligence e-mail, dated 17th August 2003, reads of the prisons inmates: “The gloves are coming off . . . Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.”(9)

In fact the 6th March 2003, Defense Department “Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism” requested by Donald Rumsfeld, read:

“In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, (prohibition of torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

On 20th March Iraq was illegally invaded and in April: “Rumsfeld issues a final policy approving twenty four special interrogation techniques, some of which need his permission to be used.”(10) With yet again, so little regard for international law or the U.S., Constitution, at the top, it is little wonder there is often either scant or none for either, leading to a culture of depravity down the chain of command..

In a supreme irony, John Negroponte was named U.S., Ambassador to Iraq in April 2004, just as the enormity of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was becoming known.

It is widely reported that the aspect most concerning Commanders regarding the latest alleged depravities by troops, is that it might cause widespread anger, further turning the Afghans against the U.S., presence. It is hard to find shame, surprise, humility or regret expressed up the chain of Command.

A recent report in to standards in the U.S., army cites an increase in drug abuse and bad behavior, seemingly coming at the same time that the Army enlisted thousands of recruits who, in previous years, would have been ruled ineligible because of drug abuse or other criminal convictions. According to the report, nearly twenty percent of the soldiers who’ve enlisted in the Army since 2004 — perhaps as many as ten thousand — would “not have been eligible for entry into the Army before.”

“I think we’ve got to understand that the force we have today is different from the force we had ten years ago,” said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice Chief of Staff of the Army, who oversaw the study. “We’ve got kids that are going to have some behavioral health issues.” He pondered on whether he had ” .. a force capable of doing whatever the nation asks it to do? “

Cheer up General, the good news is that it is hard to spot the difference.

Felicity Arbuthnot, distinguished journalist, Veteran War Correspondent, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Associate Editor of Global Research.

Notes

1. War Crimes, Ramsey Clark and Others, Maisonneuve Press, 1992.

2. http://revcom.us/a/1241/ustorture.htm

3. http://www.newwest.net/index.php/main/article/9930/  )

4. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/09/09/100321/stryker-brigade-soldiers-kept.html#ixzz0zm70e384

5. See 2

6. See 3

7. http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=579

8. See 2

9. See 2.

10. http://www.counterpunch.org/stephens05132005.html

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A British magistrates court ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States and sent the request for his extradition to Home Office Secretary Priti Patel for approval.

The order came a little more than a month after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom refused to hear Assange’s appeal. In December, the UK High Court of Justice granted the US government’s appeal and overturned a district court decision that spared Assange.

Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring contended he was “duty-bound” to send the extradition request to Patel. Goldspring also told Assange he had a right to appeal if the Home Office approved the extradition before issuing the order.

Mark Summers QC, an attorney for Assange, asserted there were “fresh developments” in the case and bemoaned the fact that the defense was not permitted at this stage to raise this evidence, according to Computer Weekly’s Bill Goodwin.

Assange’s legal team has until May 18 to submit evidence to the Home Office and argue why the department should block the extradition request. In two months, Patel is expected to make a decision.

If approved by Patel, attorneys for Assange may request permission to appeal to the British High Court of Justice. His attorneys may appeal the decision of the district judge to send the case to the Home Office for approval and may also appeal the Home Office secretary’s order.

While the defense for Assange objected to District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling on January 4, 2021, particularly as it related to issues of press freedom, they never had an appropriate opportunity to raise their objections. She denied the extradition request after determining it would be “oppressive” for mental health reasons.

His attorneys would likely challenge many of Baraitser’s conclusions about Assange if Patel allowed the request. (Note: Baraitser is no longer a district judge at the Westminster Magistrates Court.)

Assange is detained at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. He faces 18 charges brought against him by the US Justice Department, 17 of which are under the Espionage Act. All the charges relate to documents WikiLeaks released in 2010 and 2011, which were provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

The prosecution makes Assange the first publisher to be charged under the 1917 law, and globally the case has been condemned by virtually all reputable civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom organizations.

Patel and the Home Office support an expansion of the Official Secrets Laws in the UK, which Elmaazi reported “would expand possible imprisonment for leakers, recipients of leaks and secondary publishers–including journalists–from the current maximum of two years to as high as 14 years in prison.”

The Home Office contends there is no longer much of a difference between “espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures.” That includes what Patel would call “onward disclosure.” The department treats journalism as an act capable of “far more serious damage” than traditional espionage.

In the UK, the Office for Security and Counterterrorism is a part of the Home Office. The division is responsible for MI5 (Britain’s FBI) and anti-terrorism police operations.

Operation Pelican, the name for the pressure campaign to force Assange out of the Ecuador embassy in London, was supported by the Home Office. But as Declassified UK chief investigator Matt Kennard noted, the Home Office claims it does not “hold” any records containing details related to the operation, even though eight officials from the department were involved.

Kennard also reported that Patel was on the advisory council for a right-wing group linked to the CIA called the Henry Jackson Society, which has attacked Assange in the press for over a decade.

“[Prime Minister] Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, don’t extradite Julian to the country that conspired to murder him,” Stella Assange declared. “They can stop this nightmare today and return to Julian to his family. They can do the right thing and enforce Article 4 of the US/UK extradition treaty, which prohibits extradition for political offenses.”

“This is a political case, and with the signature of the magistrate, this now passes squarely into the political domain,” Stella added.

“The next four weeks will prove crucial in the fight to block extradition and secure the release of Julian Assange,” stated Rebecca Vincent, the director of operations and campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF). “The Home Secretary must act now to protect journalism and adhere to the UK’s commitment to media freedom by rejecting the extradition order and releasing Assange.”

RSF, a global press freedom organization, launched a “Free Assange” petition urging supporters to sign on before May 18, the last day Assange can make any submissions to the Home Office.

The National Union for Journalists (NUJ) in the UK renewed their call for his release from Belmarsh prison and charges to be dropped.

Assange defense groups and a coalition of civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom organizations will build on prior work and use the next several weeks to ramp up their campaigning. Their intent will be to make the extradition request a political issue in the UK and throughout Europe.

He will remain in detention at Belmarsh until Patel’s decision and during any appeal.

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Featured image: Westminster Magistrates Court in the United Kingdom, where Julian Assange’s extradition hearing was held. (Photo by Ludhi85)

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There is nothing innovative or humanitarian about Britain’s new policy of shipping asylum seekers, “on a one-way ticket“, thousands of miles to central Africa. Nor is there anything surprising about the choice of destination: Rwanda. Boris Johnson’s government has simply copied wholesale a programme established by Israel eight years ago.

When Israel introduced the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda in 2014, it did so in secret, fully aware that it was breaking the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention it ratified.

When the policy came to light, Rwanda initially tried to spare Israel’s blushes by denying its involvement. Israel, meanwhile, falsely claimed the deportations were happening on a voluntary basis.

The British government, by contrast, is being far more brazen. It has trumpeted its similarly abusive treatment of asylum seekers, making a feature of the compulsion. According to reports, the British scheme will deport refugees first, then force them to apply for asylum in Rwanda. If they succeed, they can remain in Rwanda. If they fail, Rwanda can forcibly return them to the place from which they fled.

Johnson presumably hopes the policy will play well with British voters in the run-up to local elections in May, as they tire of the seemingly endless deceptions and bottomless cronyism of his ruling Conservative Party. Last week the British prime minister was among those fined for breaking Covid lockdown rules his own government set.

With the mood against Johnson souring, however, he may have been caught off-guard by the backlash. The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, condemned the Rwanda plan in an Easter Sunday address, saying the failure to take responsibility for refugees was “the opposite of the nature of God”.

On Tuesday night Johnson was reported to have attacked Welby and the BBC’s coverage at a meeting of Tory party backbenchers, accusing them of being “less vociferous” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than the government’s Rwanda scheme.

Dangerous journey

Some are dismissing the scheme as the prime minister’s latest wheeze to deflect attention from his political troubles. But that would be to ignore a growing confidence on the British right towards treating asylum seekers inhumanely – especially those who are not white. Johnson’s government has even been reticent to ride a wave of public sympathy towards those seeking sanctuary from the war in Ukraine.

The Conservative Party is amplifying deep-rooted nativist tendencies in the UK – and drawing inspiration from Israel, which has long experience of turning itself into a fortress state.

In a sign of the continuing need to pay lip service to humanitarian concerns, Johnson’s government has publicly dressed up the new asylum policy as a move to prevent people-smugglers from endangering the lives of refugees by transporting them in inflatables across the Channel from France. Dozens have died, including at least 27 people who drowned in November when a single boat capsized.

But Britain’s real motive – barely disguised – is the same one that drove Israel to adopt the policy. It wants to wash its hands of its legal obligations towards refugees by outsourcing responsibility to far poorer countries whose services can be easily bought.

Bad as that is, there is an even uglier ambition. The UK understands that Rwanda, one of the most densely populated and poorest countries in Africa, is unlikely to make serious efforts to treat the refugees with dignity or resettle them. Britain’s goal is to make an example of them. The refugees’ likely mistreatment is part of the programme, serving to deter others from following in their footsteps.

Britain is trying to make clear that anyone arriving on its shores will face not a warm welcome or British justice but the very oppressive conditions from which they fled in the first place. The vagueness of the policy – and who it applies to – is the point. Why make the hugely dangerous and costly trip to the UK if you are likely to end up effectively back where you started?

Johnson is demonstrating that post-Brexit Britain has the freedom to reinvent itself as the most hostile corner of Europe to refugees.

Dissent crushed

Rwanda is an ideal destination. Helped by western leaders like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Rwanda has largely succeeded in whitewashing its image with western publics following the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s.

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Most judges and lawyers agree that the war on drugs in the past 50 years has seriously diminished the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

Now a small group of legal academics is arguing that the war in Ukraine should be used to diminish property rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

Here is the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment was written to guarantee that the government may only search and seize persons, houses, papers and effects pursuant to a search warrant issued by a judge after the presentation under oath of evidence demonstrating that the place to be searched more likely than not contains evidence of crime. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

These requirements — the work of James Madison, who was the scrivener of the Constitution in 1787 and the author of the Bill of Rights in 1791 — were intended to have two effects.

The first effect was to uphold the quintessentially American right to be left alone. The second was to compel the government to focus its law enforcement personnel and assets on crimes for which there is probable cause, not fishing expeditions or hunches.

Madison’s language prohibited absolutely the use of general warrants, a favorite tool of the British government against the colonists. General warrants were based on whatever the government wanted or claimed it needed.

The colonists were tormented by, and driven to revolution over, general warrants, as they authorized British agents to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. Surely, the dreadful colonial experience with general warrants was a driving force behind the wording and ratification of the Fourth Amendment.

Sadly, during the war on drugs, prosecutors and police persuaded judges to craft “emergency” exceptions to the Fourth Amendment. These included allowing police to look for whatever they wanted in cars and homes, and using the CIA for warrantless surveillance, lest the drugs supposedly being sought be destroyed before capture.

The effect of this was to destroy a fundamental liberty in deference to easing police work; that’s the definition of a police state. The courts effectively ruled that somehow the Constitution prefers liberty — rather than evidence of crimes — to be destroyed.

The Fifth Amendment protects the life, liberty and property of all persons from destruction or aggression by the government without due process of law. Due process requires a jury trial at which the government must prove fault.

Thus, property cannot be seized temporarily or taken permanently without either a search warrant or a jury trial.

Now back to the war in Ukraine.

I have argued in this column and elsewhere that the Biden administration sanctions imposed on Russian and American persons and businesses are profoundly unconstitutional because they are imposed by executive fiat rather than by legislation and because the sanctions constitute either the seizure of property without a warrant or the taking of property without due process.

When the feds seize a yacht from a person whom they claim may have financed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, they are doing so in direct violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Similarly, when they freeze Russian assets in American banks, they engage in a seizure, and seizures can only constitutionally be done with a search warrant based on probable cause of crime.

As well, when the feds interfere with contract rights by prohibiting compliance with lawful contracts, that, too, implicates due process and can only be done constitutionally after a jury verdict in the government’s favor, at a trial at which the feds have proved fault.

As if to anticipate these constitutional roadblocks to its interference with free commercial choices, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Magnitsky Act of 2016. These constitutional monstrosities purport to give the president the power to declare persons and entities to be violators of human rights and, by that mere executive declaration alone, to punish them without trial.

These laws turn the Fourth and Fifth Amendments on their heads by punishing first and engaging in a perverse variant of due process later. How perverse? These laws require that if you want your seized property back, you must prove that you are not a human rights violator.

As if to run even further away from constitutional norms, a group of legal academics began arguing last week that the property seized from Russians is not really owned by human beings, but by the Russian government. And, this crazy argument goes, since the Russian government is not a person, there is no warrant or due process requirement; therefore, the feds can convert the assets they have seized and frozen to their own use.

To these academics — who reject property ownership as a moral right and exalt government aggression as a moral good — the argument devolves around the meaning of the word “person.” The Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect every “person” and all “people,” not just Americans.

And in American jurisprudence, “person” means both human beings and artificial persons — corporations and governments capable of owning property. Property ownership is defined by the right to use, alienate and exclude. Only persons can exercise those rights.

Madison and his colleagues clearly sought to protect property rights from government aggression, no matter the legal status of the owner. We know this from the judicial opinions involving foreign property that preceded and followed the ratification of the Fifth Amendment. If this were not so, then nothing could prevent the feds from seizing and converting the property of states or local governments or international religious institutions to federal use.

War is the health of the state and the graveyard of liberty. The drug war was a disaster for freedom. The war in Ukraine will be so as well, only if we permit it.

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THE TRUTH COMES OUT.

Project Veritas has just released a leaked recording of a December 2020 Zoom call, during which AstraZeneca CEO, Pascal Soriot, stated that millions of people, whose immune systems are compromised, cannot receive the COVID vaccine:

“If you have an immune disease, lupus or some other immune condition, you cannot – or multiple sclerosis, you can’t be vaccinated. So, there are millions of people in the world that will need a protection that cannot be coming from a vaccine.”

The reasoning is very simple. I explained it early in 2020. A vaccine is supposed to provoke a reaction from the immune system. But if the system is weak and can’t respond, the vaccine functions as a SUPER-high toxic invader and overwhelms the body.

The AstraZeneca CEO does not fully understand the scope of what he is referring to—because the number of people in the world whose immune systems are compromised are on the order of 700 million; and that may be an underestimate.

I base this estimate on my 1987-88 research (see my book “AIDS Inc: Scandal of the Century”), which turned up the fact that the largest cause of immune T-cell depletion in the world is severe malnutrition/lack of nutrition. Chronic hunger, for example. And you can add in people who are routinely eating a diet of empty calories.

ALL these people have compromised immune systems.

Then you also have people who, for other reasons, have weak immune systems. For instance, as a result of pollution, pesticides, and toxic medical and street drugs and vaccines.

Worse yet—almost all the 700 million or more people whose immune systems are compromised DON’T KNOW IT. They don’t think in those terms. Therefore, they don’t know how harmful the COVID vaccine (or any vaccine) will be to them.

Now here is the kicker. Don’t imagine that the AstraZeneca CEO’s statement above is shared by public health agencies. It isn’t. These agencies have no concern for people whose immune systems are compromised.

For instance, referring to the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine (Vaxzevria), the European Medicines Agency, an agency of the European Union, states:

“There are limited data on immunocompromised people (people with weakened immune systems). Although immunocompromised people may not respond as well to the vaccine, there are no particular safety concerns. Immunocompromised people can still be vaccinated as they may be at higher risk from COVID-19.”

And then, shockingly, we have this, from a World Health Organization advisory:

“SAGE [Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization] recommends that severe and moderately immunocompromised persons should be offered an additional dose of vaccine.”

In other words, the usual highly destructive effects of the vaccine would not be enough. People should be more deeply injured. Those who die should be deader.

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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.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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“Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.”

This article was first published on February 20, 2022

***

In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”— George Orwell  

The U.S. government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

All of us are in danger.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists.

The next part is the kicker.

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest terrorism bulletin, “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”

You see, the government doesn’t care if what you’re sharing is fact or fiction or something in between. What it cares about is whether what you’re sharing has the potential to make people think for themselves and, in the process, question the government’s propaganda.

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI latest report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

You don’t have to be a Joe Rogan questioning COVID-19 to get called out, cancelled and classified as an extremist.

There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

This is why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself. Because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling,

“The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

We’re almost at that point now.

Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.

Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of allindividuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

The right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once again, we find ourselves reliving George Orwell’s 1984, which portrayed in chilling detail how totalitarian governments employ the power of language to manipulate the masses.

In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

Much like today’s social media censors and pre-crime police departments, Orwell’s Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the other government agencies peddle in economic affairs (rationing and starvation), law and order (torture and brainwashing), and news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).

Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

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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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The UK Health Security Agency is refusing to publish any further data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status because previous figures show that the triple vaccinated population are on the verge of developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, and the double vaccinated are suffering Antibody-Dependent Enhancement.

Back in October 2021, The Expose exclusively revealed how the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data was showing that the Covid-19 injections has a real-world effectiveness against infection of minus-109%.

Source

Not long after this, the UKHSA added a note to their reports stating ‘case rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection‘

Click to enlarge

This was clearly done in response to our report, and also because they could no longer use their own data to show that the Covid-19 injections are effective. But it was perfectly okay when Pfizer used this exact method to falsely claim their mRNA Covid-19 injection was 95% effective of course.

Now, as we quitely predicted, the UKHSA have gone one step further, and have announced that they will no longer publish the number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths by vaccine status.

The reason?

The UKHSA claims this is because the UK Government has ended free universal Covid-19 testing and this therefore affects their “ability to robustly monitor Covid-19 cases by vaccination status”.

However, this doesn’t explain why they’re no longer able to publish the data on Covid hospitalisations and deaths. If someone is hospitalised with Covid-19 then we’re pretty sure the doctors and nurses are going to know about it, and if someone dies of Covid-19 we’re pretty sure a doctor is going to know about it.

There’s a good reason though as to why their excuse falls short, and it’s because they are lying. The UK Health Security Agency has been looking for an excuse for months to stop publishing the data because it clearly shows that the triple vaccinated population are on the cusp of developing Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), and the double vaccinated population are suffering Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED) and Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE).

The Evidence

The UKHSA claims that vaccine effectiveness wanes substantially over time and this is why it’s important to get a booster dose.

Source

But this is a lie. Vaccine effectiveness doesn’t wane. Immune system performance does.

Vaccine effectiveness isn’t really a measure of a vaccine, it is a measure of a vaccine recipients immune system performance compared to the immune system performance of an unvaccinated person.

Vaccines allegedly help develop immunity by imitating an infection. Once the imitation infection induced by the vaccine goes away, the body is left with a supply of “memory” t-cells and antibodies that will remember how to fight that disease in the future.

So, when the authorities state that the effectiveness of the vaccines weaken over time, what they really mean is that the performance of your immune system weakens over time.

A vaccine effectiveness of -50% would mean that immune system of the vaccinated is now performing at a worse rate than the natural immune system of the unvaccinated. It would mean the Covid-19 vaccines have damaged the immune system.

With that being said it should come as no surprise to anyone as to why the UKHSA no longer wish to publish the Covid-19 data by vaccination status, because it clearly shows in all areas that the Covid-19 injections are proving to have a negative vaccine effectiveness that is declining by the week, and therefore a negative immune system performance, which implies the fully vaccinated are developing Covid-19 vaccine induced Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

The following table showing the number of cases by vaccination status between week 9 and week 12 of 2022, is taken from the UKHSA Week 13 – 2022 – Vaccine Surveillance Report, the very last report to contain figures on Covid-19 by vaccination status –

Source – Page 40

As you can see from the above, the triple vaccinated population accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases in each age group by an extremely concerning amount, except for the under 18’s.

The highest number of cases in those four weeks was recorded among triple jabbed 50-59-year olds, with 210,265 confirmed cases. This compares to just 7,669 cases among unvaccinated 50-59-year-olds.

The UKHSA also used to conveniently provide the case-rates per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status in their vaccine surveillance reports, and the following table has been stitched together from the case-rate tables found in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 Vaccine Surveillance Reports –

Source

As you can see from the above the case-rates per 100k have been highest among the triple vaccinated population over these 3 months, except for the 18-29-year-olds in the week 3 report only, and the under 18’s in all 3 months.

However, it is worth noting the rapid decline in rates among unvaccinated children compared to the small decline in rates among vaccinated children. This suggests that in just a few weeks the case rate will be highest among triple jabbed kids. But now we’ll never know because the UKHSA is hiding it.

Now that we know the case-rates we can use Pfizer’s simple vaccine effectiveness formula to calculate the real-world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated.

Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Unvaccinated Case Rate x 100

The following chart shows the Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness among the triple vaccinated population in England in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 reports of 2022 –

This is nowhere near the claimed 95% effectiveness by Pfizer is it?

As you can clearly see the vaccine effectiveness has been falling month on month, with the lowest effectiveness recorded among 60-69-year-olds at a shocking minus-391%. This age group has experienced the sharpest decline, falling from minus-104.69% in week 3.

But one of the more concerning declines in vaccine effectiveness has been recorded among 18-29-year-olds, falling to minus-231% by Week 12 of 2022 from +10.19% in Week 3.

However, vaccine effectiveness isn’t really a measure of a vaccine, it is a measure of a vaccine recipients immune system performance compared to the immune system performance of an unvaccinated person.

Using the case rates provided by UKHSA, we can also calculate the immune system performance. All we need to do is alter the vaccine effectiveness formula slightly for a negative immune system performance, and use the same formula for a positive immune system performance –

Positive Immune System Performance = Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Unvaccinated Case Rate x 100
Negative Immune System Performance = Unvaccinated Case Rate – Vaccinated Case Rate / Vaccinated Case Rate x 100

The following chart shows the immune system performance of the triple vaccinated population in England by age group in four week periods, compared to the natural immune system of the unvaccinated population –

The lowest immune system performance is currently among 60-69-year-olds at a shocking minus-80%, but all triple vaccinated people aged 30 to 59 are not far behind, with an immune system performance ranging from minus-75% to minus-76%.

Even the 18 to 29-year-olds are within this region at minus-70%, falling from an immune system performance of +11.35% between week 51 and week 2, meaning they have suffered the fastest decline in immune system performance.

AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is the name used to describe a number of potentially life-threatening infections and illnesses that happen when your immune system has been severely damaged.

People with acquired immune deficiency syndrome are at an increased risk for developing certain cancers and for infections that usually occur only in individuals with a weak immune system.

If that immune system performance was to hit around the -95% mark then this would strongly suggest the triple vaccinated population have developed some new form of Covid-19 vaccine induced acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, and unfortunately based on the current trend seen over the past 3 months, the youngest age groups do not have long to wait.

But we won’t be able to officially confirm it because the UK Health Security Agency have decided to sweep it under the carpet and hide the official data.

That isn’t the only terrible outcome that the UKHSA are attempting to conceal though. Because UKHSA data also suggests the double vaccinated are suffering Antibody-Dependent Enhancement.

Antibody-Dependent Enhancement

The UKHSA have been trying to hide this revalation since the turn of the year, when they decided to stop publishing the rates per 100,000 for the double jabbed and instead only publish the rates for the triple jabbed.

The rates are calculated by dividing the total population size of each vaccination status group by 100,000; and then dividing the total number of cases, hospitalisations or deaths among each vaccinated group by the calculated figure.

e.g. – 3 million Double Vaccinated / 100k = 30
500,000 cases among double vaccinated / 30 = 16,666.66 cases per 100,000 population.

Questions were raised at the time as to why the UKHSA decided to stop publishing the rates for the double vaccinated, mainly because in the weeks prior they were beginning to look terrible for the double vaccinated population. But, as is usually the case, the UKHSA never provided a reason.

However, the UKHSA produces a separate report containing the overall population size by age group and vaccination status, meaning we can take these figures and actually calculate the case, hospitalisation and death rates per 100,000 among the double vaccinated ourselves.

Here’s the table taken from the Week 12 Influenza and Covid-19 Surveillance Report –

The following chart shows the actual double vaccinated population size by age group on the 20th March 2022, based on the figures provided by UKHSA above –

Source – Page 85

Now that we know the population size all we have to do is divide each population by 100,000; and then divide the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths by the answer to that equation, to calculate the case, hospitalisation and death rates.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 hospitalisation rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of hospitalisations provided on page 41 of the same report –

the rates per 100,000 are highest among the double vaccinated in every age group except for the 18-29-year-olds. This data shows that all double vaccinated people aged 30 and over are more likely to be hospitalised with Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

The following chart shows the Covid-19 death rate per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status between 28th Feb and 27th March 22. The unvaccinated case rate has been taken from page 45 of the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report – Week 13 – 2022, and the double vaccinated case rate has been calculated with the number of deaths provided on page 44 of the same report –

The death-rate per 100,000 is highest among the double vaccinated in all age groups excluding the 30-39 year olds where the death rate is the same as the unvaccinated, and the 18-29-year-olds where the death rate is lower. This data shows that all double vaccinated people aged 40 and over are more likely to die of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people.

If the rates per 100,000 are higher among the vaccinated, which they are, then this means the Covid-19 injections are proving to have a negative effectiveness in the real-world. And by using Pfizer’s vaccine effectiveness formula we can accurately decipher what the real world effectiveness among each age group actually is.

Pfizer’s vaccine formula: Unvaccinated Rate per 100k – Vaccinated Rate per 100k / Unvaccinated Rate per 100k x 100 = Vaccine Effectiveness

The following chart shows the real world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation among the double vaccinated population in England, based on the hospitalisation rates provided above –

This data shows that all double vaccinated people over age 30 are between 0.2 and 2 times more likely to be hospitalised, with a minus-1% vaccine effectiveness among 30 to 39 year olds, and a minus-76% vaccine effectiveness among the over 80’s.

The following chart shows the real world Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness against death among the double vaccinated population in England, based on the death rates provided above –

This data shows that all double vaccinated people over age 40 are between 2 and 3 times more likely to die of Covid-19, with a minus-90% vaccine effectiveness among 30 to 39 year olds, and a minus-156% vaccine effectiveness among the over 80’s.

But why are most double vaccinated people more likely to be hospitalised, and more likely to die of Covid-19 than unvaccinated people?

Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease

Intensive research conducted by health experts throughout the years has brought to light increasing concerns about “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement” (ADE), a phenomenon where vaccines make the disease far worse by priming the immune system for a potentially deadly overreaction.

ADE can arise in several different ways but the best-known is dubbed the ‘Trojan Horse Pathway’. This occurs when non-neutralizing antibodies generated by past infection or vaccination fail to shut down the pathogen upon re-exposure.

Instead, they act as a gateway by allowing the virus to gain entry and replicate in cells that are usually off limits (typically immune cells, like macrophages). That, in turn, can lead to wider dissemination of illness, and over-reactive immune responses that cause more severe illness.

Of the information collated by Pfizer so far from the ongoing study they have conducted, it is plain to see that they are fully aware antibody-dependent enhancement is a possible consequence of their Covid-19 injection, and it looks like they may even know the consequence has killed people.

Pfizer, the company hit with the largest healthcare fraud settlement and criminal fine to date in 2009; which also happens to be the same company behind the first every mRNA gene therapy injection administered to the general public under emergency use authorisation in the name of Covid-19, has admitted in confidential documents, that it desperately tried to keep from going public, that its Covid-19 mRNA gene therapy may cause Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to delay the release of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine safety data for 75 years despite approving the injection after only 108 days of safety review on December 11th, 2020.

But in early January 2022, Federal Judge Mark Pittman ordered them to release 55,000 pages per month. They released 12,000 pages by the end of January.

Since then, PHMPT has posted all of the documents to their website. The latest drop happened on 1st April 22.

One of the documents contained in the latest data dump is ‘reissue_5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf’. Table 5, found on page 11 of the document shows an ‘Important Potential Risk’, and that risk is listed as ‘Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED), including Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Reporatory Disease (VAERD)’.

Vaccine-associated enhanced diseases (VAED) are modified presentations of clinical infections affecting individuals exposed to a wild-type pathogen after having received a prior vaccination for the same pathogen.

Enhanced responses are triggered by failed attempts to control the infecting virus, and VAED typically presents with symptoms related to the target organ of the infection pathogen. According to scientists VAED occurs as two different immunopathologies, antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) and vaccine-associated hypersensitivity (VAH).

Pfizer claim in their confidential document that up to 28th Feb 2021, they had received 138 cases reporting 317 potentially relevant events indicative of Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease. Of these 71 were medically signifiant resulting in 8 disabilities, 13 were life-threatening events, and 38 of the 138 people died.

Of the 317 relevant events reported by 138 people, 135 were labelled as ‘drug ineffective’, 53 were labelled as dysponoea (struggling to breathe), 23 were labelled as Covid-19 pneumonia, 8 were labelled as respiratory failure, and 7 were labelled as seizure.

Pfizer also admitted that 75 of the 101 subjects with confirmed Covid-19 following vaccination, had severe disease resulting in hospitalisation, disability, life-threatening consequences of death.

But Pfizer still definitively concluded, for the purposes of their submitted safety data to the Food and Drug Administration, the very data that was needed to gain emergency use authorisation and make them billions and billions of dollars, that ‘None of the 75 cases could be definitively considered as VAED’.

But Pfizer then went on to confirm that based on the current evidence, VAED remains a theoretical risk.

This confidential data proves that the Covid-19 injections should never have been granted emergency use authorisation, and should have been pulled from distribution by the FDA as soon as they sighted the figures.

But the FDA failed to act, and that is precisely why the UK Health Security Agency has been looking for, and found an inadequate excuse not to publish any further data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status.

*

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***

Read Part I:

Destination Ukraine: The Ignorance of War

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 07, 2022

Important factors have come into play this past week as reported from the streets here in Warsaw.

While NATO, the US military and Ukrainian president Zelensky have to this point been thwarted by the nuclear realities in their goal of fomenting World War III in Ukraine it may be that Poland, due to its own ulterior motives, will do the dirty work on their behalf.

NATO member countries and the political leaders of each have expressed very public reticence towards crossing into Ukrainian territory with their national armies.

Zelensky’s whistle-stop tour this past week in attempting to solicit the support of these same leaders by shaming them publicly has almost universally fallen on deaf ears, if not created indignation amongst each nation’s media, a media that seems to be quickly turning on Zelensky himself. As mentioned in the recent article, “Destination Ukraine: The Ignorance of War,” it is media derived popular support for war that is essential to furthering NATO goals. To lose that support means peace.

NATO has rarely stood for peace.

However, the singular exception to this sudden western coup that now seems ready to cast Zelensky aside and force him to accept the Russian proposals for peace is Poland.

Judging by the established reports coming from the Donbas of Eastern Ukraine, NATO has mere days to stir the pot of war away from peace via some manner of sudden escalation that will thus allow NATO to enter Ukraine.

Yesterday, Mariupol fell to Russian troops and the remains of the Azov battalion and its generals there are surrounded. The Russian goal of the liberation of the Donbas including Donetsk and Luhansk is now only a matter of days away.

While some reporters suggest that the impetus to draw NATO onto Ukrainian soil may come from Germany or via a bio-weapons attack orchestrated by American military bio-weapons interests discovered there, the more likely player may be right here: Poland.

After five days here in Warsaw this allegation of Poland’s ulterior motive came to my attention first by my translator Andrew and was confirmed during one of my many interviews with local citizens.

Often the most important story is right before one’s eyes and materializes only when paying close attention while attentively walking the streets.

If Poland is not held in check by its NATO brethren, this war is far from over.

*

It was announced two weeks ago that faux-US president Joe Biden would be visiting NATO member countries and the HQ in Brussels to stir up what has been so far a lacklustre- by US standards- support for Ukraine. However, his trip at that time did not include Poland.

Strangely, the news reported that Biden would suddenly be making a speech in Warsaw. Why?

Before arriving in Warsaw, Biden, on March 25 used his first Polish stop to visit the troops of the 82^nd Airborne Division, one of America’s elite military divisions currently based in Rzeszow. They are part of the 10,000 US servicemen already here. I have seen these troops here in Warsaw marching together on the streets near Warsaw’s Central Station.

In keeping with Barack Obama’s warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” while sitting with the 82nd for pizza and a photo op, Biden did exactly that before finishing his first slice. Referring to the situation in Ukraine and presumably US boots on the ground there, in a moment worthy of the 25^thAmendment, said Biden with his chemical grin,

“You’re going to see when you’re there.”

Within minutes, the collective energies of the US State Dept. were in overdrive denying Biben’s faux-pas and attempting to explain it away. But the words stuck. Especially with the Poles.

Next, on Saturday in Warsaw, Biden appeared before a packed outdoor crowd and delivered a very forcefully pro-war speech. There is no space in this article to challenge this speech for what it was:  factually inept. Other journalists will surely take on this task since virtually every sentence was a crafted distortion of history and the on-scene realities of this war to date. It was obviously designed to continue popular Polish enthusiasm for this war, and likely, according to the streets, much more.

But, it was just before the Teleprompter scrolled to a close that Biden, raising his voice and holding his fists and eyes to the heavens, stated to the now rabid crowd,

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,”

Washington and NATO leaders again immediately scrambled to deny this outrageous call for regime change in Russia and explain that it was not so.

The singular exception was Poland. Why?

It should be remembered that just before Biden’s arrival Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski had offered a Polish idea to Washington. Poland would send a tranche of 28 Russian MIG-29s to Germany so that US pilots could then fly them to airbases within Ukraine. This was not very funny on many levels. For many good reasons, this was summarily rejected by Washington, since this Polish ploy would trigger WWIII.

But Kaczynski was not finished with crafting further lunacy in an attempt to hide its possible ulterior motive, beyond that of driving a NATO entry into the war.

Two weeks ago Kaczynski offered that Poland now intended to seek NATO permission to send its military to the Ukrainian city of Lviv in order to establish humanitarian corridors that would allow Ukrainian refugees who were escaping west to safely enter Poland. There are many problems with this, but the most important, beyond NATO Article 5, is that Lviv is not on the Polish/ Ukrainian border as many western reporters have claimed. Lviv sits eighty kilometres to the east, firmly inside Ukrainian territory.

Lviv’s true proximity makes Kaczynski’s claim of “humanitarian” efforts as duplicitous as was his offer of used Russian fighters the week before. If this was done, and should a single Polish military member be attacked, injured or killed by Russian forces- allegedly or under false pretences, Article 5 would require NATO toimmediately enter the war on behalf of defending, not Ukraine, but Poland!

NATO, again, rejected this madcap plan for obvious reasons. Kaczynski did not. Why?

Reports from the refugees, aid agency workers and journalists who have been embedded in Lviv have told this reporter that although they have seen and heard bombings and rocket strikes in and around Lviv, they have not witnessed or reported any civilian targets being hit or any civilian casualties. The mayor of Lviv confirmed this publicly in a post on Telegram this past Saturday after his city took at least six strikes on Friday night just hours after Biden’s war-torn speech in Warsaw while Kaczynski sat watching in the wings.

Have the Russians also been listening to the streets?

While I Prowled the streets of Warsaw talking to as many people who either spoke English or Polish within the time that my excellent translator Andrew could provide to me, the answer to this most important question, “why Poland?” became more clear.

A Deputy Prime Minister’s Iron Hand

Jaroslaw Kaczynski is deputy prime minister of Poland and leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. According to those I spoke with he is far more powerful behind the scenes in Poland than current President Andrezej Duda and exercises a strong, almost authoritarian hand over parliamentarians and particularly all things military.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, was formerly the President but died in a plane crash at Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 along with many other Polish political and military leaders. Evidence indicated this crash was indeed an accident, but in the current Kaczynski’s mind it was a Russian hit, hence he detests all things Russian, in particular Vladimir Putin.

The current plot thickened when, on March 15 from Kyiv, Ukraine Kaczynski stated,

“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”

Kaczynski’s NATO offering called for sending 10,000 NATO troops from the member states to cross the Polish border and occupy Lviv while also imposing a no-fly zone. Like his first offer of MIG-29s NATO turned it down flat. But Kaczynski may go it alone.

During my many interviews with Ukrainian refugees who had arrived from Kyiv and many other western cities and towns via Lviv and then onwards to Warsaw, only one reported being accosted by any of the limited military factions roaming western Ukraine. Ana, with her small son and daughter, had made it out of Kyiv by train in the dead of night just past 2 AM. The train had all its lights out and moved slowly westward. Suddenly, several windows of the train were shot out by rifle fire. This caused all aboard to hit the deck. Fortunately, no other shots were fired and the train and her family made it safely to Lviv and then on to Warsaw.

Regarding the journey from Lviv to the Polish border, I did not speak to anyone who had problems along the way. Humanitarian aid flows in regularly while refugees flow out. To the East, it is quite another matter.

So, Kaczynski’s desire to provide “safe passage” corridors seems merely a ruse to serve other intentions. Why?

Regardless, Polish President Andrzej Duda vetoed his idea as NATO did as well.

According to the Poles I spoke with, Duda and Kaczynski do not agree very much regarding Polish military matters. However, it is Kaczynski who has the real power in Poland which he has built up over many years. Reportedly he has contempt for Duda and works behind his back to affect his agenda. It is the ulterior motive here in Poland that some that I interviewed think may see Kaczynski effect his “Humanitarian Effort” regardless of NATO approval which Duda demanded, but Kaczynski does not think is essential.

Considering Bidens rhetoric that whipped those Poles in attendance into a frenzy on Friday night, this speech certainly served Kaczynski’s agenda, not that of peace.

To understand the possible entry of Poland it is important to consider the last ten years under Kaczynski’s ever-growing power. Certainly, he is far more aligned with the war hawks of NATO than Duda which should not be surprising.

Poland, under Kaczynski’s tutelage, has declared that it wishes to be the strongest military power in Central Europe. In 2020 the Polish government pledged to “radically increase” the country’s defence capabilities and to expand the Polish Armed Forces to a staggering 300,000 personnel. Current numbers are, respectively, 113,000 regular active servicemen and women and 32,000 TDF, the equivalent to the National Guard.

Kaczynski has declared this expansion a state of emergency in national defence saying,

“The security conditions have deteriorated so much that Poland, as a frontline state, has no choice but to radically re-arm itself and become one of the best European armies…”

Accordingly, Poland now plans to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2026, using a funding scheme that includes bonds, loans and leasing options. The PiS-led cabinet already is among NATO’s top spenders (2.2% of GDP in 2022). This year’s military spending stands at 57.7 billion zlotys, or 12.5 billion euros, which will consume 12 per cent of the country’s budget.

As stated by the Defence Ministry, the military modernisation plan until 2035 has a price tag of 524 billion zlotys (115 billion euros), but details have not been made public. The increased spending also does not require parliamentary approval, let alone a referendum, even for the largest procurement items. All that is required is the signature of Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak, one of Kaczynski’s right-hand men.

Blaszczak has routinely signed purchasing requests that include “made in the USA”. Patriot air and missile defence systems, F-35 stealth fighters, HIMARS rocket launchers, Black Hawk helicopters (made in Poland by Lockheed Martin) and even used MRAP vehicles from Afghanistan, all since becoming defence minister in 2018.

An Abrams tank procurement, that has recently arrived, will be the most substantial so far at a cost of 23 billion zlotys (5 billion euros). Tank warfare is perfect for the flatlands of Western Ukraine. In all this, Blaszczak is clearly making Poland dependent on Washington.

Poland’s Ulterior Motive? The Lviv Connection

Image on the right: Jarosław Kaczyński speaking during the inauguration of a monument to his brother Lech Kaczyński (November 2018, Warsaw) (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)

760 years old, Lviv City is situated on the crossing of two profitable ancient trade routes. It developed and flourished rapidly and became one of the main trade centers of medieval Europe. It is reportedly a beautiful city full of the architecture of many influences including Austrian, Ukrainian and Polish since at various times in history all three laid claim to Lviv.

Lviv became part of Ukraine when taken by the Ukrainians from Austria in November 1918 with the creation of the West-Ukrainian People’s Republic and the unification with Great Ukraine.

But Lviv became Polish from 1919 to 1939 and Polish culture via immigration put a Polish stamp forever on Lviv that remains strong today. This takeover only served to intensify the resistance of the Ukrainians and consolidate them in the fight for a return of Lviv to Ukrainian sovereignty.

In September 1939, as a result of collusion between Stalin and Nazi Germany, Lviv became a part of the Soviet empire and with Ukraine being a USSR satellite it was returned to Ukraine under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement.

Here lies the rub, or possibly Kaczynski’s ulterior motive in repeatedly dangling a means for NATO to enter Ukraine during the past few weeks.

The Poles have never been happy with the Soviet land grab that included Lviv and this is yet another reason they detest all things Russian. In talking with several Poles they would like to see Lviv returned to Poland, but the reality that this would require war has meant that it was just not worth the sacrifice.

But a return of Lviv has always remained in mind. This was evidenced in 2018 when a fringe Polish political party, The Confederation of Independence and Freedom Party,  managed its historic and largest, yet relatively insignificant, number of seats in the Polish Parliament. Part of their platform is the return of Lviv. Certainly, these parliamentarians do not have the influence to drive Poland to war, but their platform does indeed show that the return of Lviv remains firmly in the minds of the Poles and their politicians.

Until a month ago such grand designs were opposed due to the need for a war to accomplish them. Now, that war is on the border and for the opportunists who may wish to reap the spoils of this war this may be their moment of opportunity. According to the streets, Kaczinsky himself sees this war as a chance not seen since the annexation of 1939.

Should NATO or the Polish military enter Ukraine via Polish borders the eighty kilometres to Lviv will be breached in a matter of hours since there is very little available Ukrainian defence with all forces dedicated already eastwards. Similar to 1939 the Polish/ Ukraine border could be redrawn once the current war turns into an armistice.  Possession being 9/10^th of the law during any ceasefire, this advent could see Lviv sit again on newly re-marked Polish soil.

Cease-Fire? Or, Not?

When closely examining the news that a cease-fire and peace negotiation are going well, this is as much a lie as the war has brought to bear so far. The news seems more designed to placate Wall Street and the current economic disasters of war rather than accurate reporting.

Yes, negotiations in Turkey has seen both sides sit down together but news that the Russian contingent has “accepted” Ukraine terms turn fact on its head while at the same time torturing the definition of the word.

The Ukrainian terms are laughable and it is not possible that Russia will approve them since to do so is an admission of defeat and a waste of military, political and human capital that would shame Russia before the world community. Its citizens who have been watching the body bags pile up for thirty- four days would be outraged.

It is far more accurate to say that the Russian contingent has received the Ukrainian proposals and is laughing all the way back to Moscow for further instructions. It is important to note that Russia, beyond its oft-repeated terms for a cease-fire has not at this point, delivered its own proposal to the Ukrainian side.

The Russian response will most certainly be summed up by using only the sixth and twenty-first letters of the English alphabet.

In the meantime, Russian troops will be getting R&R while resupplying and thankfully so will the refugees across Eastern Ukraine. As to the Ukrainian military, they will remain surrounded or under siege across the Donbas from Mariupol, to Luhansk, to Donetsk.

Meanwhile, NATO will continue to attempt to find an avenue for legitimizing its escalation and entry into Ukraine.

For the reasons stated on the streets of Warsaw and in this article, it is more than mere conjecture that the “Hot Phone” sitting on the desk of Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski may soon be ringing off the hook!

*

Read Part III:

The Lies…and the Eyes…of Ukraine. Reporting from Lviv

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, April 19, 2022

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Dedication: For Andrew. (Proof that good never rests until the evils of war are vanquished.)

Brett Redmayne-Titley has spent the last decade travelling and documenting the “Sorrows of Empire.” He has authored over 200 articles all of which have been published and often republished and translated by news agencies worldwide. An archive of his many articles can be found at watchingromeburn.uk. He can be contacted at live-on-scene ((@))gmx.com.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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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***

Two British citizens, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, who went to Ukraine to fight for the now-disbanded “international legion” of foreign mercenaries created by Kyiv in early days of the war and were fighting alongside neo-Nazi Azov militia in Mariupol, were captured by Russian forces and fervently appealed to the British prime minister for their immediate release.

Image on the right: Viktor Medvedchuk (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The Britons appeared on Russian state TV on Monday and asked to be exchanged for Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who is the leader of Ukraine’s Opposition Platform and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was charged with “high treason” and “aiding terrorism” by the Zelensky government and was placed under house arrest, from where he escaped and was rearrested last week. He is currently being held at an undisclosed location by the SBU, the fearsome Ukrainian intelligence agency being used as a tool for political persecution by the autocratic regime.

One of the captives wearing a T-shirt bearing the emblem of Ukraine’s infamous Azov battalion, Aiden Aslin, made a direct appeal to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson:

“If Boris Johnson really does care like he says he does about British citizens then he would help pressure Zelensky to do the right thing and return Viktor to his family and return us to our families.”

Asked on Sky News whether a possible swap was something the government would get involved with, Britain’s Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis said on Tuesday: “We’re actually going through the process of sanctioning people who are close to Putin regime, we’re not going to be looking at how we can help Russia.” Reading between the lines, neither would the Boris Johnson government be looking at how to help British citizens.

“We always have responsibility for British citizens, which we take seriously. We’ve got to get the balance right in Ukraine and that’s why I say to anybody: do not travel illegally to Ukraine,” Lewis added while conveniently overlooking the fact British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss publicly acknowledged she supported individuals from the United Kingdom who might want to go to Ukraine to join an international force to fight.

She told the BBC on Feb. 27, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, it was up to people to “make their own decisions,” but argued it was a “battle for democracy.” She said Ukrainians were fighting for freedom, “not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe.” The British government is as criminally culpable for inciting citizens to join NATO’s crusade in Ukraine as gullible volunteers who actually joined the fight in the war zone on the call of the government.

Favoring providing lethal weapons only instead of deploying British mercenaries as cannon fodder in Ukraine’s proxy war, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace took a nuanced approach and said with diplomatic overtones Ukraine would instead be supported to “fight every street with every piece of equipment we can get to them.” In other words, Ukraine would be made an “ordnance depot” of NATO powers on Russia’s western flank.

On April 9, Boris Johnson undertook a clandestine visit to Kyiv amidst much secrecy and tweeted a picture sitting beside Zelensky after the visit. Johnson’s trip came a day after the EU’s top executives, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, publicly visited Kyiv and met with Zelensky.

British media hailed the “daredevil feat” of taking the train journey in the war zone by the prime minister and compared him to the fabled British secret agent, James Bond 007. During the visit, he pledged 120 “armored vehicles” and new “anti-ship missile systems” to Ukraine.

The British government also announced it would be sending £100 million of military equipment, including more Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles, helmets, night-vision devices and body armor. The United Kingdom guaranteed an extra $500 million in World Bank lending to Ukraine, taking the total loan guarantee to up to $1 billion.*

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

Too Much to Ignore: COVID Vaccines Cause 16,633% More Miscarriages Compared to Flu Vaccines

By Mary Villareal, April 20, 2022

There had been an increase in the number of women who have lost their unborn or newly born children in the United States following their Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination. The number has now surpassed 4,000, just 16 months after the first COVID vaccine was given emergency use authorization.

The World Health Tyranny: Towards the WEF “Great Reset of Misery”

By Peter Koenig, April 21, 2022

On 1 December 2021 the 194 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) reached a consensus to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

To the Home Office We Go: The Extradition of Julian Assange

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, April 21, 2022

It was a dastardly formality.  On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

“Police Terrorism” in America: Patrick Lyoya Chased and Shot in the Back

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 21, 2022

Over two weeks after Patrick Lyoya, 26, was stopped, chased, tackled and shot in the back of the head by a Grand Rapids patrolman,killing him instantly, there still has not been any punitive action taken against the white officer responsible for the death of the Congolese immigrant.

The Art of Transformation: Vasily Kandinsky at the Guggenheim

By Prof. Sam Ben-Meir, April 21, 2022

Through September 5, New York’s Guggenheim Museum is hosting “Around the Circle,” an immense retrospective of this extraordinarily innovative and influential painter – one that invites us to rethink Kandinsky’s contribution in light of his anarchist social thought, his interest in the emancipatory potential of synesthetic experience, and his determination to explore the possibilities of mon-representational forms.

Canada Must Condemn Israeli Violence at Al-Aqsa

By CJPME, April 21, 2022

On Friday alone, Israeli forces injured at least 153 Palestinians, and videos have emerged showing the use of brutal violence against journalists and medics. Yet in her response to the incident, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly failed to directly criticize Israeli actions. More than 5,000 Canadians have written to Prime Minister Trudeau, urging him to respond by condemning Israeli violence and suspending military trade.

From Syria to Ukraine, Western Media Is Practicing the Same Lies. Eva Bartlett

By Manar Salameh and Mazen Eyon, April 21, 2022

Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett affirmed that the crimes of terrorist organizations in Syria and cover-up of the Western media have been repeated again since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, noting that the hands of the West and its media machine are stained with the blood of innocent civilians in the two countries.

“Preemptive Nuclear War”: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Threatens the Future of Humanity

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 21, 2022

The underlying US nuclear doctrine consists in portraying nuclear weapons as a means of “self defense” rather than as a “weapon of mass destruction”. Moreover, there are powerful financial interests behind the NPR which are tied into the $1.3  trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama.

European Feed Stocks Expected to Run Out Soon

By Free West Media, April 21, 2022

The situation for Europe’s farmers is getting worse. Prices are rising and feed stocks are starting to run out. Animal breeders around Europe are deeply concerned. At the same time, the EU and the governments of some countries in various ways prevent farmers from maintaining or increasing their production.

Babies Are Saying Less Since the Pandemic: Why That’s Concerning

By Sarah D. Sparks, April 20, 2022

 New studies from Rhode Island Hospital and the nonprofit LENA Foundation find that infants born during the pandemic vocalize significantly less and engage in less verbal “turn-taking” behaviors found to be critical for language development. As those babies grow, experts worry they will need significant supports to be ready for school.

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

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***

In the first edition of her “Don’t Ask That Question” podcast program, investigative reporter Kelly O’Meara talks to Kristina Borjesson about the shut-down of their investigation of TWA 800 crash & current attempts to shut down Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Kelly O’Meara is a valuable addition to the podcast community of investigative reporters.

\We worked together investigating the Flight 800 crash and talk about our bizarre experiences that included her car being broken into and her TWA investigation documents and laptop being stolen and the press censoring and doing hit pieces on our TWA 800 coverage.

–

*

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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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***

On 1 December 2021 the 194 members of the World Health Organization (WHO) reached a consensus to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

An intergovernmental negotiating body was constituted and held its first meeting at the beginning of March 2022, with the purpose of agreeing on the process and the timelines for reaching consensus on a so-called “Pandemic Treaty”. A second meeting is planned for 1 August 2022 to discuss progress towards an agreement on the contents and legal bearing of such a treaty. The interim result will then be presented to the 76^thWorld Health Assembly in 2023, with the aim of adopting the new instrument, the so-called infamous “Pandemic Treaty” by 2024.

Why infamous Pandemic Treaty?

In a recent European Parliamentary session, Ms. Christine Anderson, Member of the European Parliament (MEP), from the German party an “Alternative for Germany”, made the following very pertinent comment and posed an appropriate question –

“Many who favor the treaty believe that it offers the best way to increase political commitment from states to reform global health governance. However, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that this proposition has no basis in fact. Government responses to COVID-19 have purportedly violated or manipulated many treaties, including human rights agreements.”

“To what extent will the Commission ensure that the citizen, who has no direct vote in a body such as the WHO, is not bypassed in the decision-making process and that a shift of competence further and further away from the voter does not lead to an increasing ‘de-democratization’ of our society?”

See the full 6-min. video below.

This was indeed a benign question – one that underscores the gravity of the new Pandemic Treaty. If approved by the World Health Assembly, the Pandemic Treaty will be above and overarching the sovereignty of the 194 WHO member countries.

WHO could declare a pandemic whenever it decides, or gets instructions from the dark Financial and Power Cabal pulling the strings behind the UN-curtain.

The World Health Organization could decide on international lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing – and much worse, like forced vaccination – with, as we now know from the covid-19 vaxxes, causing disease or even death. By now the world knows or ought to know, that these vaxxes are not vaccines, but experimental mRNA injections – injections containing varying bio-chemical and mostly poisonous, even deadly concoctions.

WHO could declare a worldwide pandemic for the common flu – pretty much what they did with the so-called Covid-19, a virus that was never isolated, never identified as anything else than the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus that hit China from 2002 to 2004. SARS was, in fact a trial, for what was to follow 17 years later – on a worldwide scale.

The SARS virus was tailor-made in a class-3 US bio-lab. The virus was based on extensive blood samples taken from Chinese rural populations, to target the Chinese genome. Chinese authorities learned about this western blood-harvesting by “scientists” of famous US learning institutes, such as Harvard and others, in the 1990s.

See section ”The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGD project) in China” of this text.

This was the reason for China’s extraordinary preparedness at the first announcement of the “new” / old virus, the Covid-19 virus, hitting again China (the city of Wuhan) first, in the early days of 2020.

Because China knows that bio-war labs can design specific DNA-directed viruses, and because China is also aware of the 20-some war-grade (grade 3) US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine which Russia in her ongoing military intervention in Ukraine is aiming at dismantling, and China is also aware of the risks that viruses may have been intended to again attack the Chinese genome, like the SARS virus in 2002-2004 – therefore, China’s authorities are proceeding with a “zero covid” policy. Therefore, is the current Shanghai lockdown a severe precautionary measure?

As was demonstrated by the Ebola outbreak – 2014 – 2016 in West Africa – Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone – fatality rates of Ebola and similar epidemic diseases can be as high as 40% when compared to the infection rate. See this. That’s a stark contrast to the low covid death rate of 0.07 to 0.1%.

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Under the new “Pandemic Treaty” WHO would have the authority to vaccinate children, babies right after birth, when their immune system is still basically zero and damages could be lasting or even killing newborns.

WHO could mandate general vaccination against any disease deemed “dangerous” by the powers that be, with an injection that is not really a vaccination but an “experimental jab” – possibly leading to millions of deaths, if the current covid crisis and “covid-vaxxes” are any indication. Exponentially more deaths are caused by the fake and criminal covid-19 vaxxes, than by the covid infections which have similar symptoms to those of the common flu.

As we now know, the purpose of the covid-vaxxes is not the prevention of a disease, quite the contrary – it’s the wanton promotion of massive disabilities and death caused by experimental substances injected into human bodies.

The “Masterminds” behind WHO, as well as their invisible handlers, are eugenists, interested in a drastic reduction of the world population. The new Pandemic Treaty is an ideal tool for an eugenist agenda.

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Under the New Pandemic Treaty, the WHO would convert into the World Health Tyranny, the WHT.

That’s where we are at today. WHO, alias WHT, today is funded by two thirds to three quarters by interest groups, like the pharma industry and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Only about a quarter or one third (variable by year) of the WHO budget is funded by the member countries. The bulk of WHO funding comes from interest groups.

The Gates Foundation is a key donor, the largest after United States. Gates also appointed the current Director General of WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He was before the head of GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, housed just next door to WHO in Geneva. GAVI is also a Bill Gates creation. Dr. Tedros is WHO’s first DG, who is not a medical doctor.

See this 5-min video interview of Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a former World Health Organization (WHO) scientist, describing how the WHO is months away from overriding the U.S. Constitution and those of all 194 WHO member countries.

If this new WHO “Pandemic Treaty” is adopted by the World Health Assembly, then national laws, those of sovereign countries, made to protect their citizens from diseases and pandemic outbreaks, are overruled and made worthless.

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Logically, an agency in charge of world health, should basically focus on disease prevention. WHO is wired as a curative agency, mostly staffed by medical doctors and scientists, thereby playing into the interests of the pharma-industry.

For those who are not yet aware, how WHO came into being as a specialized UN agency, just a quick reminder who invented and created WHO – and with what purpose.

WHO was created by the Rockefeller foundation in 1948 – and following the pattern of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), in existence since 1902 and integrated in 1948 into the new World Health Organization. The motto: Who decides over health and disease, decides over life and death. Sounds like a suitable axiom for eugenists.

At that time, the Rockefeller magnate also owned Standard Oil, a worldwide hydrocarbon corporation, mostly a petrol monopoly. Up to the 1950’s medicines were largely plant-based. Rockefeller’s petro-clan geniuses felt medication or modern pharma might as well be “crafted” from petro-chemicals. Thus, grew a new pharma-industry – exponentially. The drugs available today are an umpteen-multiple of those available when medication was plant-based. Today plant-based medicines are almost exclusively used by indigenous people.

Petrochemical-based pharma produces generally also myriad of side effects. These side effects have to be fought with new medication with other side effects – some of them deadly. And so, the spiral spins along.

The new medical apparatus – to which Rockefeller gave the impetus – has produced a medical labyrinth – a mill of health and disease, once caught in it, escaping from it is not easy. So-called health services have become an important economic growth factor. U.S. health care spending grew 9.7 percent in 2020, reaching $4.1 trillion, or 19.7% of GDP. Once-upon a time a patient, has become an income-producing client in today’s medical factory.

The new Pandemic Treaty of the WHO might render the world health system in a prison-like spiral, to the point where people are totally in the hands of one tyrannical world organization – in charge of health and disease, or life and death.

We the People, must not allow the creation of a health tyranny as envisaged today, and supported by the WEF and its henchmen of darkness.

We must stop WHO from becoming a World Health Tyranny. In fact, we should collectively deny the authority of WHO, requesting our governments to exit WHO. We do not need or want a Global World Health Tyranny. By dismantling it, we the People, would also put a nail in the WEF’s coffin.

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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).

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The Ulster Defence Regiment, the largest in the British army, fueled the conflict in Northern Ireland and was a sectarian weapon in Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy, shows a new book drawing on declassified files.

Say ‘UDR’ to the vast majority of Britons and, despite the increasingly totemic status of ‘our boys’ in the military, eyebrows will universally raise.

Yet the Ulster Defence Regiment was active throughout most of the recent conflict in Ireland – the longest period of continuous duty of any British military unit.

Successive UK governments lavishly praised its courage and commitment to peace. There were regular visits by members of the royal family to barracks and parade grounds across Northern Ireland from Fermanagh to Belfast.

A recently-published book, however, reveals a quite different story.

UDR Declassified by Micheál Smith relies for hard evidence on declassified internal British memos, position papers and analysis, much of which were retrieved from the UK National Archives over the last two decades by the Pat Finucane Centre.

Successive governments in London, the book argues, fueled the conflict in Northern Ireland by policing and alienating one part of the community (those who are pro-Irish unity, mainly Catholic) while arming, training and providing intelligence information through the UDR to the other section of the community (those who are pro-union, mainly Protestant).

“Writers of books like this”, says Smith, “often get accused of re-writing history.  But history is always rewritten whenever new evidence proves it wrong. This evidence allows us to narrow the permissible lies”.

‘A kind of monster’

The UDR was formed in April 1970, supposedly to replace the discredited “B-Specials”, a quasi-military force. All the UDR’s original seven battalions, however, were led by former B-Special county commandants.

Hardly surprising, then, that the UDR is described by French political scientist, Anne Mandeville, as “a kind of monster”.

While it was supposedly an arm of the British state, she says, in reality it was “deeply in solidarity with the Protestant community”.

Integrated into the British Army, it was also divided from it “organically, geographically and by its specificity”, a toxic recipe for any law-enforcement unit seeking cross-community support.

For many Catholics, the slogan ‘UDR by Day: UVF by Night’ was a lived reality, referring to the oldest loyalist paramilitary group in the conflict, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Stories abound of people stopped on the roadside in the dead of night – or on the way home from church or Gaelic sporting fixtures – to be insolently abused or worse.

The one-time leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Nobel peace prize winner, John Hume, described the regiment as a “group of Rangers supporters put in uniforms, supplied with weapons and given the job of policing the area where Celtic supporters live”.

More officially, a 1984 briefing document prepared for the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Douglas Hurd, concluded:

“The regiment is mistrusted, even hated, in much of the Catholic community, and by many Catholic politicians”.

It added:

“More significantly, it is not held in the highest regard by the RUC itself (including the Chief Constable …) even amongst regular soldiers it is not universally popular.”

The UDR was also seen as an impediment to peace. In 1986 a Foreign Office official noted in a memo to a Ministry of Defence colleague that:

“For all its courage and dedication (which I certainly do not underestimate), and despite its incorporation into the British Army, the UDR is an inescapably sectarian body and an obstacle to reconciliation between the two communities in Northern Ireland.”

Counter-insurgency

Smith, while pulling no punches, freely concedes not every member of the regiment was motivated by sectarian hatred. Far from it, he says many of its members wished to end the conflict through patrolling, surveillance and lending their local knowledge to support the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

The main thrust of this book, however, judges the UDR in its structural context, rising well above a day-by-day account of its sectarian and criminal failings. Instead it examines the regiment’s role as a key element of British colonial/post-colonial counter-insurgency strategy in Ireland.

That is not to say the UDR’s dubious record is overlooked. Smith points out that between 1985 and 1989, UDR members were twice as likely to commit a crime as the general public. The UDR crime rate was 10 times that for police officers in the RUC and about four times the British army rate.

The central problem, he says, is that London never viewed the problem in Northern Ireland as rooted in a demand for civil rights, equality and constitutional reform. Instead it blindly interpreted republican violence as a criminal conspiracy that must be crushed.

The book is full of examples where, rather than deal even-handedly with both communities, London concluded that armed republicanism was its only true enemy. Just three examples from the book suffice to show the malign out-workings of this policy.

Shockingly, it points out that the word “collusion” to describe covert collaboration between loyalist paramilitaries and state forces was first used as early in the conflict as September 1971 when a rifle was reported taken and “connivance” suspected.

Even more disturbing was the lack of police inquiries into “missing” weapons such as the “theft” of sub-machine gun serial number UF57A30490, taken from Glenanne UDR barracks in County Armagh, in May 1971.

This weapon was subsequently used to murder 11 people in 11 months, leaving four children orphaned and 19 fatherless.

Heavily infiltrated

London cannot say it was unaware of the dangers. In 1975, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and opposition leader Margaret Thatcher were informed by an official that:

“The Army’s judgment [was that] the UDR were heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants and that in a crisis situation they could not be relied on to be loyal”.

Stunning evidence, even earlier, of the UDR’s dangerous proclivities is provided in an internal British discussion document entitled ‘Subversion in the UDR’, written in August 1973.

“It seems likely”, says the document, “that a significant proportion (perhaps 5% – in some areas as high as 15%) of UDR soldiers will also be members of the UDA, Vanguard Service Corps, Orange Volunteers or UVF”, referring to loyalist paramilitary forces.

Yet, the document concludes, little should be done about this:

“The discovery of members of para-military or extremist organisations in the UDR is not, and has not been, a major intelligence target” and the UDR remained “wide open to subversion and potential subversion”.

Moreover, the same document concludes that “some soldiers are undoubtedly leading double lives” and that “the UDR is the single best source of loyalist weapons and their only significant source of modern weapons”.

Rather amazingly, there is even doubt over the very legality of the UDR. A 1981 memo, only recently discovered in the archives, notes concerns amongst Ministry of Defence legal advisers as to whether UDR soldiers were legally ‘on duty’, as the formal call-out procedures had not been followed since the early 1970s.

As a result, officials were concerned about the legality of arrests, search operations and other actions.

Technically, it may yet be possible for people to challenge pre-1981 arrests by the UDR through the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Convictions of persons for failing to answer a question or for resisting arrest might also be called into question.

But the book’s central focus is what the UDR did while its soldiers were let loose on the populace, legally or otherwise.

Blame for this deplorable and deadly lack of action, Smith concludes, should not be laid at the door of individual UDR members but at those who devised a policy of using it as a counter-insurgency weapon for three decades and who continue to escape detection and accountability of any kind.

The price, he points out, was paid by the UDR’s many victims whose lives continue to be blighted by its existence and because of its shameful record.

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Anne Cadwallader has been a journalist in Ireland, North and South, for the last 40 years, working for the BBC, RTE, The Irish Press, and Reuters. She is an advocacy case worker at the Pat Finucane Centre, a non-party political, anti-sectarian human rights group advocating a non-violent resolution of the conflict in Ireland.

Featured image: Soldiers of 11 UDR on a patrol break in the South Armagh area. The soldier on the right is carrying a jamming device to prevent the detonation of radio-controlled improvised explosive devices. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The situation for Europe’s farmers is getting worse. Prices are rising and feed stocks are starting to run out. Animal breeders around Europe are deeply concerned. At the same time, the EU and the governments of some countries in various ways prevent farmers from maintaining or increasing their production. This is in addition to the already alarming shortage of seeds and fertilizers.

Only this autumn will the catastrophic impact be witnessed due to a sharp reduction in grain production. Moreover, meat and milk producers could see large parts of their businesses eliminated long before that. Western leaders have issued warnings about food shortages, but have offered no solutions.

The news agency Reuters recently interviewed the Italian farmer Carlo Vittorio Ferrari, who runs a farm with his brother near the town of Cremona in northern Italy. Among other things, they have about two thousand pigs, which it is now becoming unsustainably expensive to raise. He fears that their fourth-generation family business will be lost due to the conflict in Ukraine, which more and more people believe could be the death knell for global food security. This is because war-ravaged Ukraine and sanctioned Russia, in addition to being major exporters of wheat, maize and fertilizers, were also major suppliers of animal feed globally. Europe’s import-dependent feed stocks have recently declined rapidly and are likely to run out soon.

Michele Liverini, vice president of the Italian feed producer Mangimi Liverini SPA, said that the combination of all negative factors and most recently the war in Ukraine has created a “perfect storm”. Liverini is also sounding the alarm that soon their supply of animal feed will run out.

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Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett affirmed that the crimes of terrorist organizations in Syria and cover-up of the Western media have been repeated again since the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine, noting that the hands of the West and its media machine are stained with the blood of innocent civilians in the two countries.

In an exclusive interview with SANA, Bartlett, who worked as a war correspondent in Syria and is present today in Donbas to cover the special military operation, pointed out the similarity between the political and media disinformation practices carried out by US and its allies during the crisis in Syria and what is currently happening in Ukraine.

She stressed that the Western media are participating in the crimes committed against civilians in Ukraine, as they were doing in Syria, through their lies and covering up of the facts.

Bartlett added that the Western media’s coverage of what is happening in Ukraine and its description of the Russian operation as an invasion was just an expected issue, just as the media in the West and the US have whitewashed the page of terrorist organizations in Syria since their occurance in 2011 and covering up the atrocities they committed over many years.

Bartlett said that the scenes that show Ukrainian civilians welcoming the Russian forces are similar to what the world saw in Syria when the Syrian Arab Army entered to liberate the areas where terrorists were deployed.

Bartlett went on to say that most Western media deny the existence of Nazism in Ukraine and lie about what is happening, noting that BBC and other media promoters in the West were not satisfied with such behavior only, but also reached the point of manipulating video footages and removing images that appear Nazi slogans.

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Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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This is a link to the police bodycam video of the encounter with Patrick Lyoya which led to his death:  (18) Bodycam footage from fatal Grand Rapids police shooting of Patrick Lyoya – YouTube. Or watch video below.

Over two weeks after Patrick Lyoya, 26, was stopped, chased, tackled and shot in the back of the head by a Grand Rapids patrolman, killing him instantly, there still has not been any punitive action taken against the white officer responsible for the death of the Congolese immigrant.

The City of Grand Rapids has refused to even release the name of the officer since he has not yet been charged with a crime.

This incident in a major midwestern municipality clearly illustrates the systematic refusal by the local, state and federal government agencies to address the ongoing deaths at the hands of the police. Two years after the brutal shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others, the relevant authorities responsible for the funding and oversight of law-enforcement have refused to take any action to reform the operational culture of the police.

Lyoya’s family immigrated to the United States from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2014, according to quotes cited in the press from his father. Both of his parents are demanding justice in the case.

A videocam from the police officer illustrates the aggressive questioning and posture of the white Grand Rapids patrolman. After Lyoya attempted to get away from the officer, he was pursued and tased. Later the videocam shows Lyoya being tackled and further abused physically. At the instance that the fatal shot was fired to the rear of the head, the police videocam appears to have been turned off by the officer. An independent autopsy requested by the Lyoya family confirmed that he died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Since the killing of Lyoya, people in Grand Rapids have demanded the release of the officer’s name and that he be terminated from the police department. They are also insisting that prosecutors file criminal charges against the unnamed law-enforcement agent. The case has gained international attention due to the fact that Lyoya was an immigrant from Africa and was unarmed.

The government of the DRC and its Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde discussed the killing of Lyoya at a cabinet meeting on April 15 in Kinshasha, the capital of the central African state. The U.S. has extensive business interests in the DRC which is a major producer of strategic minerals.

An article published in the Guardian from the Agence France Press (AFP) said of the situation that:

“During a government meeting on Friday (April 15), DR Congo Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde ‘forcefully condemned the cowardly assassination by a white police officer in the United States of a citizen of Congolese origin Patrick Lyoya, unarmed, during a traffic stop,’ according to the minutes of the meeting. He said the U.S. ambassador in DR Congo had expressed ‘his deep regrets and his government’s condolences following this despicable act.’

U.S. (Grand Rapids) police have released four videos from the incident, one of which shows the officer — who has not been named — lying on top of Lyoya as the two scuffled, and then appearing to shoot him in the head.”

This incident has revealed the actual social character of the U.S. to not only the Lyoya family but to over 1.3 billion Africans living on the continent. The U.S. promotes itself as the paragon of democracy, human rights and peace. However, the country is one of the most violent in the world with thousands killed annually.

A CBS report on the incident notes:

“The father of Patrick Lyoya said his son was ‘killed like an animal’ after recently released videos showed the 26-year-old Black man being fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop. The family fled from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014 for a safer life in the U.S. ‘I came here to save my family,’ Peter Lyoya told CBS News. ‘My son has been killed like an animal. The one [who] was supposed to be protecting Patrick’s life, is the one [who] killed Patrick and take Patrick’s life away,’ he added.”

U.S. Role in the Historic Destabilization of the DRC

The region where the DRC is today has been for centuries a center for exploitation and national oppression. During the period of African enslavement, the Angola and Congo areas were victimized by the Portuguese and French role in the Triangular Trade in human beings and natural resources.

By 1876, the Belgian monarchy had seized large swaths of territory in order to force Africans to engage in rubber production. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 awarded the Congo area to Belgian colonial corporations. Conditions were so brutal that millions of Africans died under the rule of colonial agents at the direction of the monarchy. In 1908, the colonial project in Congo was brought under the tutelage of the government in Brussels.

Between 1908 and 1960, Africans were denied education, equal employment, the control over their land and natural resources as well as political rights. A rebellion during 1959 created the conditions for multi-party elections which led to national independence on June 30, 1960.

The first elected leader was Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, a Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist with a mass base among the Congolese people. Since Lumumba wanted to end Belgian domination over the resources of his country, he was targeted for liquidation by the U.S. administration of then President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lumumba was overthrown just three months into his tenure as prime minister. He attempted to flee to the eastern region of the country where his supporters had taken control of several cities and provinces.

However, he was captured with the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in January 1961. He was held illegally by the puppet collaborators of the U.S. and other imperialist states. By late January he was tortured to death along with two other cabinet ministers in his government.

A series of neo-colonial surrogate regimes were imposed on the vast country for 36 years until Mobutu Sese Seko was forced out of office in May 1997. Nonetheless, the continued domination of the resources of the DRC has hampered its capacity for a much-deserved political stability and economic prosperity.

Consequently, the underdevelopment in the DRC and in other African states, can be linked directly to the ongoing interference into the internal affairs of these mineral rich countries. Therefore, many Congolese nationals have migrated to the U.S. in search of economic opportunities and social stability. However, the U.S. still remains a racist-capitalist and imperialist country. The African American people brought to the U.S. as enslaved persons have been denied full equality, economic justice and self-determination for more than 400 years. Africans from the continent are viewed by the ruling class and their police agencies as being deserving of the same degree of brutality as all Black people.

U.S. Government Guilty of Systematic Brutality and Terrorism

The police execution of Patrick Lyoya is a direct result of the legacy of policing in the U.S. which dates back to the early period of European colonial enslavement. Despite the mass demonstrations and rebellions which swept many municipalities during 2020, the current administration of President Joe Biden maintains a similar position as successive leaders: they are all committed to the maintenance of the status-quo as it relates to the role of police in containing the African American people and other oppressed groups.

Biden made his position clear in the State of the Union Address earlier in the year. He denounced the mass slogans calling for the defunding of the police and instead urged more public money for law-enforcement. Additional funding for police departments has been bolstered by the American Rescue Plan (ARP) which was supposedly designed to assist workers and oppressed peoples suffering from the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Independent activists and mass organizations within the labor and nationally oppressed movements will undoubtedly continue the demands aimed at defunding and dismantling the existing system of policing. This system of policing on a domestic level is reflected in the foreign policy imperatives of the White House and Wall Street.

The Biden administration has pursued the same policies of war and economic domination of the peoples of the world. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and a host of other states are considered principal enemies of the imperialist ruling class in the U.S. Therefore, the struggle against police terrorism with impunity is inherently linked to broader issues aimed guaranteeing peace and stability from the DRC to the streets of Western Europe and North America.

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

Featured image is from the author