Searching for War Criminals

April 12th, 2022 by Philip Giraldi

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The United States is now insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. As Putin is still insisting that he will attend the upcoming G20 summit in November on the island of Bali, Indonesia, it will be a great opportunity to have US Marshalls snatch him from the stage and whisk him off to a federal courthouse in Virginia for justice to be served. Or a form of justice anyway, since the United States has no actual jurisdiction over where Putin’s alleged crimes might have taken place and it will be impossible to prove that he actually ordered anyone to carry out so-called “crimes against humanity.” We’ll see how it all works out.

Indeed, there is no other phrase that has been more misunderstood and generally abused of late than “war crimes” or “war criminals.” It belongs with several other labels, including “weapons of mass destruction” and “crimes against humanity” that are used to indicate an adversary has crossed a red line and is so deplorable that anything that is done to him either during actual fighting or in the aftermath is completely acceptable. Going back to Greek and Roman times it has always been understood that even in wartime there are certain activities that are unacceptable, but the attempted definition and codification of “war crimes” as a concept is largely a twentieth century creation used to inflict additional punishment on the losers after the fighting is over. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War punished Germany far beyond what most would consider reasonable, largely because the victorious powers were able to do so without any consequences until the next war began. Likewise, the linked concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity came largely out of the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, which shaped the legal arguments around alleged German behavior, not that of the allies.

The Second World War certainly included atrocities of various kinds on both sides, but the Anglo-American deliberate bombing of German cities has to stand out as particularly disproportionate. Forty-two thousand mostly civilians died in Hamburg in the 1943 firebombing and the bombing of Dresden in 1945, at a point when Germany was on the verge of defeat, was remarkable in that the city was not a military target and was full of refugees from the east. At least 200,000 civilians died. Judge Andrew Napolitano has suggested that the greatest war crime in history, if one makes a case based on unnecessary human suffering, was President Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which almost certainly killed more than 200,000 mostly civilians, when Japan was preparing to surrender. As Truman was on the side that won the war and controlled the prosecution process, there were no legal consequences or punishment relating to his decision, though critics since 1945 have sometimes decried the first use of nuclear weapons.

If killing civilians unnecessarily is the standard definition of a war crime, then America’s most recent five presidents have been war criminals. In other words, historically speaking, accusations of war crimes, which have no real meaning in law and are both infinitely elastic and subject to interpretation, have often depended on which side of the fence one is standing on when the war ends. And it gets more complicated than that, given the politics of what is sometimes referred to as the rules based international order, which in theory arose from the ashes of World War Two. The new world order was US-centric from the start, with the United Nations (UN) situated in New York City, the World Bank in Washington, and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the UN, American primacy was reinforced through the creation of a Security Council, which alone has the power to authorize military action against a rogue state. The Security Council had five permanent members, each of whom was armed with a veto, meaning that no effective action against them could ever take place no matter what they had done. And so it has played out, with the US plus China, Russia, Britain and France being effectively immune from censure authorizing military action by the United Nations.

It is of particular interest to observe that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was set up to deal with “war crimes and crimes against humanity” that were otherwise ignored. Neither the US, nor the Russians nor the Israelis recognize the authority of the court and the US has stated that no ICC investigator will be allowed entry into the United States. Given that, it becomes possible to witness how the whole farce of war crimes and other violations of the new world order have played out in practice.

Currently the US and its allies are waging economic warfare on Russia without an actual declaration of war, to include an avalanche of sanctions plus completely illegal confiscations of the property of Russian citizens. It is also blocking Moscow from the use of the international monetary conventions and systems that it has had access to. The clearly stated intention is to destroy the Russian economy due to Russia having been charged by the US government with the commission of what it is calling war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin argues in turn that Ukraine’s apparent intention to join NATO, which is a hostile military alliance directed against Russia, is a direct threat to his country and is already manifesting itself in military action undertaken against breakaway parts of Ukraine which are largely inhabited by Russian speakers and ethnics.

There are other issues, but those are the most important. It should also be noted that the issues themselves were at least somewhat negotiable prior to the outbreak of fighting, which Putin sought to do but Joe Biden and NATO were not interested. So ultimately the war, from a third-party point of view, is pitting a Russian vital interest against what really amounts to no genuine interest at all for NATO and the US, apart from goading the Russian bear and removing its government as a way to prevent against any change in the international order.

Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.

A principal beneficiary of American financial and political largesse is, of course, Israel, which consists not only of people “chosen” by Yahweh but also by the media, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. A comparison of what Russia is doing that is being condemned by Washington versus what both what the US and Israel have been able to get away with might be considered to be in order.

Russia has invaded Ukraine after months of warnings that the status quo was untenable in national security terms, largely due to intentionally fruitless negotiations with stonewalling United States representatives and NATO. Israel, widely acknowledged to be an apartheid state, is currently bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, unnoticed by the US media and the Biden Administration. It in the past has attacked all its neighbors, including the renowned Seven Days War in June 1967 which was a surprise attack staged against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Subsequent to that war, Israel occupied nearly all of what had been Palestine. It also seized the Golan Heights belonging to Syria and has recently received consent from Washington to illegally annex Arab East Jerusalem as a part of Israel, making the whole of the city Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights have also recently been annexed with Washington’s approval and there are 700,000 heavily armed and violent Jewish settlers now sitting in 261 settlements on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank.

Image below: Israeli soldier kneeling on the neck of a Palestinian child (Source: Silent Crow News)

And what has the United States and its allies done to dissuade Israel? Well, nothing. One rule for Israel and the US and another quite different Washington dictated “rules based” system for everyone else, most particularly if one is Russian. In fact, the more belligerently Israel behaves, the more it gets in terms of US taxpayer money and made-in-USA weapons. Israel has also been the favored destination for traveling congress-critters of late because it is an election year and Jewish donors are being hotly pursued. Recently, a large group of Democrats was departing just before former Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Tel Aviv on Miriam Adelson’s private jet so he could kiss Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ring and also spend some quality time with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ironically, while Joe Biden was turning the screws on Russia, the Congress was showering gifts on Israel above and beyond the billions of dollars in “aid” that the wealthy Jewish state already receives. Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnew has examined the recently signed pork laden 2022 federal government spending bill and has identified numerous line-item instances of money going directly to Israel or in support of causes that benefit Israel in some fashion. She estimates that Israel’s economy, which is able to support both free medical care and higher education, now benefits to the tune of $22 million per day from the United States taxpayer, for a total of $8 billion per year, and the number might actually be much higher. And there are other sources of income indirectly funded by the US Treasury, most notably the ability of Israel-focused charities to contribute tax exempt money to Israeli foundations and groups. Many of the “charities” are essentially fraudulent, funding the illegal settlements, domestic terrorism and other anti-Palestinian activities. Every artifice is used by some Jewish groups and billionaire donors to keep the US dollars flowing to Israel while no one of any significance in the federal government complains about the double standard when one compares Israel to Russia. And the Zionist controlled media are completely silent.

The hypocrisy that pervades United States foreign policy is difficult to ignore, but Washington has successfully manipulated its financial instruments to keep its remaining friends and allies in line. Whether that will survive the inevitable pushback coming from Russia, China and a number of non-aligned nations remains to be seen. At a minimum, the Cold War alignment that was broken in 1991 and which seems to again be taking shape around the Ukraine issue appears to have exceeded its expiry date. Ukraine might indeed wind up doing severe damage to the Russian economy, but it seems plausible that it will also bring with it the long overdue demise of American hegemonistic fantasies and NATO.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

America’s Astonishing War Crimes Hypocrisy

April 12th, 2022 by Walt Zlotow

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Of course Russian president Putin is guilty of war crimes in Ukraine. In a war of aggression, every death is a crime emanating from the original, supreme crime of unnecessary war. It is right for the U.S. and others to charge Putin with war crimes.

But while the U.S. may charge others with war crimes, it conveniently omits itself from an endless series of its war crimes in the 21st century. Upwards of a million folks are dead in the Middle East and Africa from unnecessary, senseless wars either launched by the U.S in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya; or joined into by Uncle Sam, as in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, among others.
It’s fair to add Ukraine to the list of countries on America’s war crimes roster. Eight years ago the U.S. committed an act of war against Ukraine democracy, inspiring and supporting a coup against the democratically elected president, simply to keep Ukraine from partnering economically with Russia.
The new West leaning puppet government was quickly hijacked by ultranationalists who decided to brutalize Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas. This set off a civil war now claiming over 13,000 Ukrainians, mostly the Russian speaking and leaning variety. Their blood is partly on the hands of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, who weaponized and trained the ultra-nationalist Ukrainians, and egged on their refusal to make peace with ‘the other’ Ukrainians simply to punish Russia.
What truly astounds about U.S. war crime charges is that when such charges are even hinted at against the U.S., we sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC), the agency charged with opening such investigations.
Two years ago, in response to a pending investigation of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 11. It blocked financial assistance to the ICC and imposed visa restrictions on ICC staff and their families. As former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton explained, “We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.” The investigation went nowhere.

That puts the U.S. in the peculiar position of promoting an investigation into Putin’s war crimes by an agency the U.S. considers illegitimate….when it dares investigate the gold standard of 21st century war crimes.

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In the early years of America’s war on terror, during an undisclosed meeting of the top brass of the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), senior intelligence officials gathered to discuss what to do with the individuals subjected to rendition and “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

After looking at a number of options, including keeping them in detention, sending them to another country, and prosecuting them, one senior official asked, “Why don’t we just kill them?”

The details of that meeting were revealed on Monday, in a virtual panel with author and journalist Cathy Scott Clark, whose book The Forever Prisoner offers an in-depth look into the CIA’s controversial torture programme.

“You hear revelations like that, which I found a bit alarming,” she said during the event, hosted by the New America think tank.

The book, which will be released later this week, focuses on the case of Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah, who was interrogated using techniques that amounted to torture – including being waterboarded 83 times in one month, hung naked from a ceiling, and deprived of sleep for 11 straight days.

It covers a number of aspects in the CIA’s rendition programme, including interviews Clark had with several top military and intelligence officials.

In the process of working on the book, Clark interviewed James Mitchell, one of the architects of the torture programme. Clark also interviewed another person, identified as “Gus” in the book, who orchestrated the entire rendition operation.

“Having met and interviewed so many people in the programme, my overall feeling is that it sort of became like a pack mentality – that everybody was in it together,” Clark said.

“And if someone were to say who’s responsible should someone be prosecuted, I don’t think you can point to any one person.”

From CIA torture to Abu Ghraib

Following the 9/11 attacks, the US launched a far-reaching campaign to root out “terrorists” that had planned the attacks and who could coordinate further attacks on US soil.

However, civil society groups have said that many of Washington’s practices, including rendition and “enhanced interrogation techniques” – which the Senate concluded in a landmark report amounted to torture – are illegal according to international law.

Last month, newly declassified documents detailed how Ammar al-Baluchi, a detainee at a CIA black site in Afghanistan, was used as a living prop for interrogators-in-training to receive certification in interrogations. The torture he received led to brain damage.

During the event on Monday, Clark also revealed that despite denial from US officials, there is a link between the creators – such as Mitchell – of the CIA’s torture programme and the gross abuses that took place at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison where detainees endured physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including the use of electric shock and mock executions at the hands of US forces.

“The other thing that I put together in great detail in the book is how the CIA’s enhanced interrogation programme absolutely, definitely led to abuses in the US military as well,” Clark said.

“The same people… were involved in putting together training programmes, training materials, training the CIA, training interrogators to go to Guantanamo, training interrogators at Bagram, and then interrogators who went to Abu Ghraib.

“Jim [Mitchell] can rightly say ‘I didn’t design what went wrong at Abu Ghraib’, but he has to accept responsibility that he created something that got out of control.”

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It’s in Pakistan’s objective national interests to dispel doubts about the rule of law but this is extremely difficult for all responsible stakeholders in The Establishment to do considering what just took place and how immensely polarizing it’s been. Regardless of whichever side one might be on, it’s indisputable that these contrasting perceptions about the rule of law create a socio-political environment that can be easily exploited to harm Pakistan’s objective national interests, which is why it must be resolved as soon as possible even if it’s unrealistic to expect it to be anytime soon.

The ouster of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan following the opposition’s successful no-confidence motion on Saturday immediately resulted in contrasting perceptions about the rule of law in that country. It’s always been a sensitive and much-discussed issue, but never on the scale that it presently is.

Supporters of his removal insist that it was completely in line with the constitution, totally unrelated to any American regime change plot, and allege that the former leader was the one who ridiculously cast doubt on the legality of this process by groundlessly accusing the US of trying to unseat him as punishment for his independent foreign policy. Opponents, meanwhile, insist with equal passion that his removal amounted to the external exploitation of political processes in order to overthrow the former Prime Minister and thus regard it as immoral at best and illegal at worst.

The core of these contrasting perceptions comes down to the relationship between the rule of law and national security. Those who supported the former Prime Minister’s ouster believe that he exploited patriotic Pakistanis’ sincere concerns about national security by supposedly concocting what they describe as a completely false regime change conspiracy theory while their opponents have no doubt about the veracity of his claims and consider his removal to represent a very serious national security threat irrespective of its formal legality. National security is also the domain of the Pakistani Establishment, which refers to its influential military-intelligence structures that can speculatively be described as having two primary schools of thought right now: pro-US and multipolar. That in turn leads to questions about the role that it played (or should have played according to some) in recent events.

These contrasting perceptions are sincerely believed by those who hold them yet they regrettably appear to be irreconcilable, at least for the time being so shortly after former Prime Minister Khan’s ouster. It’s in Pakistan’s objective national interests to dispel doubts about the rule of law but this is extremely difficult for all responsible stakeholders in The Establishment to do considering what just took place and how immensely polarizing it’s been. It also doesn’t help any that opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif, who many expect to become the next Prime Minister, is accused of money laundering. Opponents of the former Prime Minister’s removal claim that this shows what a joke the rule of law has become that a suspected criminal from what they describe as a notoriously corrupt family (his brother Nawaz was the Prime Minister before Imran and sentenced in absentiafor corruption) will replace him.

An added wrinkle to all of this is that Shehbaz Sharif publicly accused former Prime Minister Khan of “high treason” so some suspect that he might try to arrest him on that pretext upon taking power in a move that his opponents decry as a political witch hunt and potential revenge for the investigation into his alleged money laundering. The opposition leader is in a dilemma though since not carrying through with that implied threat will suggest that he himself just violated the same rule of law principle that he claims to hold so dear yet trying to get Imran Khan arrested will feed into accusations that he’s also violating the rule of law as explained. The end result is that neither choice will help resolve the seemingly irreconcilable differences that Pakistanis nowadays have over the rule of law in their country but will only widen this divide.

The entire problem that Pakistan is now forced confront can be traced back to prior governments’ failure to resolve their country’s corruption issues, with some of them even engaging in corruption themselves like former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was found guilty of doing in absentia.

It’s for this reason why Pakistanis are so passionate about the rule of law in their country, but the national security dimension connected with the latest developments concerns them even more than usual since each side’s interpretation of events is mutually exclusive: either Prime Minister Khan exploited national security concerns to violate the rule of law in order to cling to power or the opposition exploited the rule of law to endanger their country’s national security by playing into the hands of a foreign regime change plot (if not openly conspiring with it).

The Establishment probably wishes that everything didn’t get to this point, yet there’s still plenty of speculation swirling about its role in recent events. Even presuming the existence of two primary schools of thought within it, this institution as a whole cannot allow these contrasting perceptions to deepen to the point where it risks endangering national security, yet it must also be careful with its actions and statements in order to avoid inadvertently fueling concerns that its representatives are also violating the rule of law by doing or saying whatever it may be. Regardless of whichever side one might be on, it’s indisputable that these contrasting perceptions about the rule of law create a socio-political environment that can be easily exploited to harm Pakistan’s objective national interests, which is why it must be resolved as soon as possible even if it’s unrealistic to expect it to be anytime soon.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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The serial number of the Tochka-U missile that hit the Kramatorsk railway station on 8 April 2022 is Ш91579 (in Russian) or Sh91579 (in English). This serial number marks the stock of Tochka-U missiles in the possession of the Ukrainian Army. Only the Ukrainian Armed Forces have Tochka-U missiles. Russia has not had them since 2019: they have all been deactivated. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics do not have and have never had Tochka-U.

The direction of the cone and the tail section of the missile that landed on the ground near the Kramatorsk train station clearly shows that it was fired from the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, deployed near Dobropolie 45 km from Kramatorsk.

Previously the Ukrainian Armed Forces have used Tochka-U missiles of the same series as Ш915611 fired at Berdyansk and Ш915516 fired at Melitopol. The same missiles were used against Donetsk and Lugansk.

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This article was originally published in Italian on byoblu.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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The claim by Ukraine’s foreign minister at the NATO meeting in Brussels that ‘Weapons, weapons and weapons’ are the only items on his agenda, reflects the growing clamour from its government, from the western media and many politicians to pour even more military hardware into the country.

The minister, Dmytro Kuleba, claims that this will save lives and bring the war to a quicker end:

‘The more weapons we get, and the sooner they arrive in Ukraine, the more human lives will be saved.’

In fact, the opposite is true. The more weapons sent to Ukraine, the more likely this war will spill over into an open conflict between NATO and Russia in which the major losers will be the people of Ukraine.

Yet already these weapons are being provided on a large scale. We have heard in recent days that the Czech Republic has been sending tanks to Ukraine. Britain has hosted Ukrainian generals on the army training ground at Salisbury Plain where they have been shown different weapons in action and have supposedly been promised air defence systems and armoured personnel carriers.

NATO maintains the fiction that it is not involved in this war by claiming that it is supplying nothing – this is being done by sovereign states who just happen to be part of the military alliance. Yet this whole process is facilitated by NATO – and the meeting in Brussels will be only the latest opportunity to discuss which of the sovereign states will be the latest to line up with more weaponry.

None of this is new. ‘Over the last seven years, the UK has trained more than 22,000 Ukrainian military personnel as part of Operation Orbital and the UK-led Maritime Training Initiative, including in, dealing with improvised explosive devices, infantry tactics, medical skills, logistics, leadership and planning,’ according to one account.

A report on NATO surveillance on Ukraine’s and Russian border from a German air base claimed that it did not share any intelligence gathered in this way with Ukraine:

‘The alliance itself stresses that it is not involved with the co-ordination or dissemination of any intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, but that member states could be taking unilateral decisions to pass on any information that could help Ukraine’s armed forces with their defence.’

Given that around 100 NATO planes a day have been involved in this surveillance since the war began this claim has to be met with a large degree of skepticism.

The trigger for these further demands for weapons to Ukraine has been the evidence in recent days of terrible war crimes by Russia in several towns now evacuated by their troops. These reports of rape, torture and killing are numerous and must be investigated, and those responsible held to account.

They demonstrate the extent to which civilians are likely to be disproportionately the victims of war and are unfortunately the common experience of war, where invading armies behave in this way. There can only ever be condemnation for such crimes, wherever they occur and whoever has committed them – and there has also been evidence of them on the Ukrainian side. They should not, however, be the justification for what is happening, which is calls on all sides to escalate the war.

We can rightly completely oppose the Russian invasion and the continued prosecution of the war. But the situation in Ukraine calls out for a peace settlement, not further war. Casualties on both sides have clearly been very high. The number of refugees who have left the country runs into several million, while towns and cities are devastated by bombardment and fighting.

Yet peace is precisely what is not on the agenda from NATO or the British and US governments. You would be hard pushed to find reports or discussion in Britain about peace talks going on between Russia and Ukraine recently in Istanbul and Belarus. Calls for more weapons are music to Boris Johnson’s ears. He does not want a peace settlement and has been putting pressure on the US to oppose any compromise by Ukraine with Russia, despite such a compromise being the only way to settle this war.

At the same time, Joe Biden has raised the stakes by calling Putin a war criminal and demanding that he is removed. Regime change has been a total failure where the US has attempted it in recent decades and has only led to further war and instability – witness Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The US and Britain believe that prolonging the war will further weaken Russia. It will also help strengthen NATO and its military agenda. That is why they (and the largely uncritical media) keep urging more arms and more sanctions, which are a form of economic warfare. These considerations are not in the interests of the people suffering in Ukraine or indeed in Russia.

So, the week in which we see evidence of the devastation caused by the Russian invasion is also the week where we are seeing a major escalation by the US, UK, EU and NATO. Further sanctions are being imposed on Russia which will have consequences for the Russian people and for the wider world economy. The weapons being supplied are leading towards a more dangerous war in which the involvement of NATO member states is more obvious and more potentially lethal. We should remind ourselves that this is a conflict between a nuclear armed state which is turning into more open conflict with nuclear armed states in NATO.

Whatever the outcome of the next few weeks and months in Ukraine, and we must do everything to end the war as soon as possible, it will have a permanent impact on global politics and economics. The world order is being remade round Ukraine. We are already down a path of greater militarisation and the strengthening of NATO, with pressure on Europe’s major power, Germany, to stop its energy supplies from Russia and to dramatically increase its military spending – a long-term demand of the US and NATO. This will have long term consequences for the arms race internationally and the military role of Europe.

There are also attempts to change the structures of the United Nations, for example to enable majority voting on the UN Security Council. Russia’s removal from the UNHRC is evidence of this – but was clearly opposed by many countries especially in the global south, who either voted against it or abstained. The UN was part of the post-war settlement in 1945 and contains five permanent members on its security council – the US, UK, China, Russia and France. They represent the major powers and can veto the council’s decisions. The UN tended to reflect this great power politics and its Cold War iterations. There are many criticisms that one could make of it but blaming its inadequacies all on Putin’s Russia simply ignores the way in which the biggest power, the US, has always circumvented UN decisions and wishes when it wanted to take another course of action.

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has become much more marginal particularly as NATO has taken on a more expansionist and aggressive role. So, the UN was side-lined by NATO in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The bombing of Libya in 2011 was a UN backed operation, but its morphing into regime change caused disquiet especially from Russia and China.

The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall says:

‘The UN desperately needs a fresh start. And so, too, does the disintegrating international order. If the UN fails over Putin and Ukraine as the League of Nations did over Mussolini and Ethiopia, then the global consequences, as in the 1930s, may be catastrophic for all.’

This is a ridiculous rewriting of history which – like so much coverage of the Ukraine – conveniently starts with Russian aggression rather than with the accumulation of arms spending, sanctions and conflict which has marked recent decades or the role of the richest countries in launching wars.

These developments have marked a stage of imperialism and inter imperialist conflict which has been marked by a declining superpower in the form of the US which still retains overwhelming military might and the rise of China both economically and militarily and growing competition between the two.

This division has implications for the other powers who are increasingly defined by their alliances. This is true militarily, economically and politically. We have seen this in the development of the AUKUS pact between the UK, US and Australia, set up as part of the growing cold war with China, which this week announced it would develop ‘next generation’ hyper-sonic weapons in response to Russia using them in Ukraine.

The British government is determined to increase its arms and military spending at a time as presiding over major cuts to living standards domestically. They are using the cover of the war to do so. Most people in Britain are sympathetic to the Ukrainian people and are against the war. They can see the misery already caused and the potential for far worse.

This sympathy should not be harnessed to further warmongering or for support for NATO expansion. That includes further arms deliveries and sanctions. The Ukrainian government is not free from criticism, whether through its banning of left parties, or its ever stronger demands for more weapons. Its President Zelensky allowed a member of the far-right Azov battalion to speak during his address to the Greek parliament this week, something which has caused outrage across the political spectrum there.

The left has a strong tradition of opposing war and campaigning for peace. To do that effectively we have to tell the truth about our government’s involvement in its own wars, but also about its military alliances. We also must reject a logic which says that we cannot criticise its foreign policy when there is war in Europe. It is precisely now that we need to campaign over its priorities: money for war but not for the poor; and the development of a new phase of imperialist conflict that threatens us all.

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Economic coercive measures, commonly known as economic sanctions, are a means of coercive pressure through disruption of trade relations and economic isolation. The use of sanctions under international law is governed chiefly by Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, providing that the Security Council may decide to enact a “complete or partial interruption of economic relations” in order to restore international peace and security.

Measures not authorized by the Security Council, or “unilateral coercive measures” (UCM), have become an increasingly common coercive tactic of the United States, which presently imposes sanctions on approximately one-third of the global population.

Since 2010, the United States has also been enforcing select secondary sanctions against international actors that maintain economic relations with sanctioned states. The adverse effects of these measures on civilian populations of targeted countries—“especially severe for vulnerable groups,” including “women and children”—have been repeatedly and unequivocally documented.

Issues surrounding the legality of UCM have largely centered around the question of compatibility with the United Nations Charter. One primary concern has been the claimed illegitimacy of sanction measures not authorized in multilateral fashion by the Security Council. Others allude to the problems raised by UCM in both the context of state sovereignty (principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states) and international humanitarian law (right to life, health and medical care set forth in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).

The United Nations General Assembly has also voiced regular concerns about UCM. A resolution overwhelmingly passed 29 years in a row calling for the cessation of the United States’s “economic blockade” on Cuba is illustrative.

UN General Assembly votes on the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba.

UN General Assembly votes on resolution (June 23, 2021) demanding an end to the U.S. economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba. [Source: news.un.org]

On February 13, 2020, the government of Venezuela submitted a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) requesting an investigation into another possible legal frailty of the United States UCM—namely, whether such measures can constitute crimes against humanity pursuant to Article 7 of the Rome Statute. As recourse to economic warfare ramps up further amidst an intensifying new Cold War, pressure mounts surrounding the Court’s eventual decision.

Case Background

Venezuela has a population of more than 28 million. Since the 1930s, it has been a significant oil-producing state and is considered to preside over the world’s largest oil reserves.

Under President Hugo Chávez (1998-2013), a new national constitution was adopted which provided for the use of national oil revenues to improve social conditions. The United States responded to this shift in policy with an attempted, but ultimately foiled, coup d’état in 2002. Despite hostile relations with the United States and a series of anti-terrorism and anti-drug trafficking-related sanctions, the Chávez social programs achieved impressive results in improving the standard of living for the Venezuelan population. Poverty and unemployment rates dropped markedly and education standards and literacy rates steadily increased.

Following the death of President Chávez and the election of Nicolás Maduro, the United States intensified its economic coercion. In March 2015, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and providing for the blocking of Venezuelan assets.

Cartoon @Operamundi – @BarackObama's Interference Service – #Venezuela #Russia #Iran | Latuff Cartoons

Source: latuffcartoons.wordpress.com

The Trump administration ramped up the financial pressure with Executive Order 13808 in August 2017, denying the Venezuelan government, including the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, access to United States financial markets. Executive Orders 13827 and 13835 followed in spring 2018, prohibiting transactions involving the Venezuelan government’s issuance of digital currency and transactions related to the purchase of Venezuelan debt, respectively.

President Trump issued Executive Order 13850 in November 2018 setting forth a framework to block the assets of, and restrict certain transactions with, any person deemed by the Treasury Department to be engaging in transactions with the Venezuelan government that advance its “corrupt purposes.” In January 2019, the United States, in a display of open contempt for democracy, ceased to recognize the government of President Maduro, instead acknowledging Juan Guaidó as interim President.

Strangulation of the Venezuelan economy escalated further in August 2019 with Executive Order 13884, freezing property interests of the Venezuelan government in the United States, prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in transactions with the Venezuelan government and authorizing financial sanctions and visa restrictions on non-U.S. citizens who assist or support the Venezuelan government.

Effect of United States UCM

All of the above-enumerated measures were enacted unilaterally by the United States government and have had a catastrophic impact on the Venezuelan economy, which has in turn precipitated a humanitarian crisis for the Venezuelan population.

In February 2021, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures, Elena Douhan, released preliminary findings on the impact of United States UCM on the enjoyment of basic human rights in Venezuela. Ms. Douhan notes that, before the imposition of UCM, Venezuela was committing 76% of its national oil revenues to the advancement of social programs. As a result of the monumental UCM-related drop in oil revenue (e.g., from $42 billion in 2013 to just $4 billion in 2018), the government is now unable to commit even one percent to the social programs.

The loss of these resources has led to a “devastating impact on the whole population of Venezuela” with basic human rights directly affected. These include the:

  • Right to food—more than 50% of food consumption has been impacted by United States UCM, which led to one-third of the Venezuelan population becoming acutely food insecure;
  • Right to water—water-related services have been significantly disrupted by United States UCM such that the average Venezuelan household has access to running water for only a couple of hours sporadically throughout a given week;
  • Right to health—access to quality healthcare has been significantly disrupted by United States UCM, resulting in extreme shortages of medical staff and equipment; maternal and infant mortality rates have increased, as well as mortality rates from various diseases; and
  • Right to education—United States UCM have resulted in a massive decrease in government funding for education, frustrating the ability of schools to procure staff and basic necessities, including meals for students; the situation has been further exacerbated by regular electrical and internet outages.

The severely beleaguered financial condition of the Venezuelan government has also inhibited its ability to provide basic health services amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to its unwillingness to unfreeze Venezuelan assets to enable the purchase of Covid vaccines, the United States has also declined to donate vaccinations to Venezuela, citing concerns over a lack of Venezuelan “transparency.”

Claim

The Venezuelan referral claims that United States UCM constitute crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Specifically, the claim asserts that the United States UCM represent a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Venezuela; that this effect is known to the United States; and that these UCM manifest themselves in punishable acts enumerated in Article 7—in particular, murder (Art. 7(1)(a)), extermination (Art. 7(1)(b)), deportation (Art. 7(1)(d)), persecution (Art. 7(1)(h)), and other inhumane acts (Art. 7(1)(k)).

The referral is novel in multiple respects. First, UCM have not previously been challenged on grounds that they violate international criminal law. Claims abound that UCM are inconsistent with the United Nations Charter, with principles of state sovereignty and with international humanitarian law, but their possible criminality has not been investigated.

Second, the ICC has not previously investigated a case alleging crimes against humanity emanating from policies enacted in one state, but executed on the territory of another. The referral advances the argument that it is accepted in ICC case law that “non-state actors” can commit crimes against humanity even where they do not control the territory in which they are operating. As such, there is no principled reason why “states” cannot commit crimes against humanity in territory which they do not control—i.e., the United States can commit crimes against humanity on the territory of Venezuela.

Third, the referral also raises a jurisdictional oddity. While Article 12 of the Rome Statute clearly provides jurisdiction over qualifying crimes committed on the territory of a member state party, the question arises where precisely the alleged crimes against humanity flowing from United States UCM occur. The referral acknowledges that the actual decisions to impose the UCM in question occurred outside the territory of Venezuela, but argues that the clear intent of the decisions was to have effects within its territory. Thus, the question of whether the ICC can exercise territorial jurisdiction over actions by a non-Rome Statute member state directed against the territory of a Rome Statute member state must be addressed by the Court and further raises the stakes in connection with potential implications of the referral.

Assessment of Venezuela’s Challenge

In addition to raising serious international legal concerns under, inter alia, the United Nations Charter and international humanitarian law, UCM cause significant and well-documented suffering among innocent civilian populations and are ripe for investigation under international criminal law.

The Venezuelan referral advances sound arguments that United States UCM can constitute crimes against humanity. It appears unequivocal that the United States imposes these measures, which appear to satisfy the criteria set forth in Article 7 of the Rome Statute, knowing full well their effects on the Venezuelan population.

An anti-sanctions protest in Caracas, February 2020. (Ciudad Valencia)

Anti-sanctions protest in Caracas. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Despite calls for the investigation of others when politically expedient, the United States has hidden itself behind its non-party status to the Rome Statute to avoid investigation of its own actions and has a history of unprecedented hostility toward the ICC.

In 2002, the United States enacted the American Service-Members Protection Act “to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials…against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not part.” The Act authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate”—including conceivably force—to bring about the release of United States personnel detained by the ICC.

In June 2020, President Trump issued Executive Order 13928, taking the extraordinary step of declaring the Court’s pending investigation into United States crimes in Afghanistan an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and authorizing the freezing of assets of ICC personnel and placement of restrictions on their ability to travel to the United States.

The ICC has displayed a distinct wariness of confrontation with the United States, giving rise to credible concerns surrounding its impartiality. Upon taking office in 2021, the new Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, immediately brought controversy and renewed doubts of credibility on the Court with his arbitrary decision to “deprioritize” inquiry into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by United States military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan under the Bush administration and to, instead, focus selectively on infractions of the Taliban.

The Court may well be tempted to skirt Venezuela’s requested investigation of the United States on technical jurisdictional grounds, but yet another dismissal of a sound case against the United States, all the while vigorously launching a new probe into Russian crimes in Ukraine, could further tarnish the ICC’s already suspect reputation.

Though the referral has unsurprisingly received little coverage in the United States, the stakes are indeed high. A decision to exercise jurisdiction and to proceed with investigation would set an unwelcome precedent for the United States—even if the chances of U.S. leaders actually standing trial is all but non-existent.

An investigation, and ultimate finding, by the ICC would cast concrete doubt on already dubious United States UCM and could possibly prompt a United Nations General Assembly request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the broader legality of UCM. At a time when its economic coercive tactics are coming to seriously jeopardize the global economy—and, accordingly, raise critical eyebrows around the world—the United States can ill afford an adverse ICC ruling. For the ICC, on the other hand, the referral presents an opportunity to show its courage and prove its impartial commitment to global justice.

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Ryan Swan is a doctoral researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies in Germany. He holds a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law and a Master’s in international relations and politics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Ryan can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from venezuelaanalysis.com

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***

 

In March 1962, after eight years of armed, diplomatic and mass struggles, the National Liberation Front (FLN) compelled the colonial leadership in Paris to commit to relinquishing its control to an Algerian Provisional Government (GPRA), overturning 132 years of French imperialist domination.

The FLN and its allies were able to defeat the colonial regime in France setting an example for other states throughout the African continent who were then waging a revolutionary guerrilla war against settler-colonial and imperialist-backed European regimes.

This victory against French imperialism was a Pan-African project bringing in newly independent governments such as Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana and Mali. Dr. Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born French-trained psychiatric physician went to Algeria to work on behalf of the colonial regime when he shifted his allegiance to the FLN becoming an ambassador and contributing editor to a leading journal (El Moudjahid) allied with the national liberation movement.

An ideological orientation which grew out of the independence movements in Africa emerged during the 20th century with worldwide influence. France along with other European imperialist states such as Spain, Portugal, Britain, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the United States had met in Berlin in 1884-1885 where they carved up the African continent into spheres of interests based upon their overall strengths economically and militarily.

These agreements of course, would eventually break down in the lead up to the first and second world wars. The outcomes of World War II created an atmosphere for U.S. imperialist domination. However, the weakening of France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal during WWII, emboldened the oppressed colonized masses of workers and farmers leading to the advent of national liberation revolutions throughout Africa and Asia from the 1940s through the latter decades of the 20th century.

France fought bitterly to maintain control of Algeria arguing that it was an overseas territory of Paris. Beginning with a blockade in 1827, the French military forces attacked Algiers in 1830 with no intention of leaving the country.

One historical account of the growth of French colonial rule and the resistance to imperialism in Algeria says:

“Settler domination of Algeria was not secured, however, until the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 and the rise of the Third Republic in France. Until then Algeria remained largely under military administration, and the governor-general of Algeria was almost invariably a military officer until the 1880s. Most Algerians—excluding the colons (settler population known as pieds noirs—were subject to rule by military officers organized into Arab Bureaus, whose members were officers with an intimate knowledge of local affairs and of the language of the people but with no direct financial interest in the colony.” See this.

Prior to this period of the 1880s, between 1830-1847, resistance to French control began in Algeria. As a result of the defeat of another series of rebellions occurring in the 1860s and 1870s marked the French consolidation of their control over the country. French settlers were able to secure the most arable lands forcing the Algerian people into a marginalized existence. Despite the political turmoil in France during the 1830s and 1840s, the military forces supported by the ruling class continued their colonial project in Algeria.

The rise of fascism in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s provided impetus for Italy and Germany to seize larger swaths of territory in Europe and North Africa. The German military seizure of France in 1940 resulted in the installation of a government beholden to Hitler and his regime. However, Britain and the U.S. challenged German and Italian efforts in North Africa through a series of battles in Egypt, Libya and Algeria during 1940-1943.

In Algeria, a U.S. military occupation began in late 1942 under the banner of “Operation Torch” and continued throughout the war. At the conclusion of WWII, Algerians embarked upon a mass campaign to win independence from France.

A massacre of thousands of Algerians took place starting May 8, 1945, the same day as the defeat of the Nazis in Germany. Known as the Setif and Guelma massacres, these attacks lead to the deaths of up to 30,000 Algerians after the killing of over 100 French colons. Rebellions erupted throughout sections of the country in response to the repression. Nonetheless, the French were able to contain the rebellion through brutal military actions, closing the avenues for nonviolent struggle in the North African state.

Algerian Armed Struggle Set a Precedent for Anti-Colonial Struggles

Despite the French crushing of the May 1945 rebellion, nine years later the movement would reconsolidate and launch an armed revolutionary struggle for national independence beginning in 1954. The Battle of Algiers and the intense guerrilla activity in the rural areas weakened the French resolve to remain as a colonial power.

The defeat of the French in North Vietnam during the same year at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu portended much for the future of military actions to preserve colonialism. The armed struggle continued until March 1962 when both the French governmental security forces and colons had exhausted all options aimed at remaining in power in Algiers.

After the independence of Algeria, the country under the FLN served as a base for national liberation struggles throughout the African continent. Nelson Mandela, the co-founder and initial commander of the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, received training in a FLN camp in Morocco.

Fanon, who was deployed as a diplomat for the FLN in Ghana under the government of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, served to bring greater awareness of the political significance of the liberation movement in Algeria. Although Fanon died of Leukemia in December 1961 while receiving medical care in the U.S., his writings compiled under the title of “The Wretched of the Earth” were widely read in Africa and the world.

In the U.S., revolutionary youth-led organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) studied Fanon’s writing extensively utilizing them as a guide to the Black Revolution which was sweeping the world during the 1960s and 1970s. James Forman, the former executive secretary and international affairs director for SNCC, said in an address delivered at a regional Black youth conference in Los Angeles on November 23, 1967 that:

“Racism and U.S. imperialism, inextricably entwined, are being assaulted by liberation fighters all over the world. In this worldwide struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there can be no ‘innocent bystanders.’ As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘Yes; everybody will have to be compromised in the fight for the common good. No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands….Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.’ The fight against racism is not the struggle of Black people, it is ours. And the battle has been joined.”

By August 1969, Algeria was the host of the First Pan-African Cultural Festival which brought together people of African descent from throughout the continent and the globe. The Black Panther Party was invited as a delegation representing the African American people. Later the BPP was given an official embassy in Algiers which served as the International Section of the BPP from 1969-1972.

Algeria in the Modern Era

The former French colony became a large producer and exporter of oil and natural gas, placing the independent nation as an important player in international relations. In addition to the Pan-African Cultural Festival of 1969 and the housing of the BPP, then the subjects of extreme repression by the U.S. government, the country captured the seccessionist counter-revolutionary Moise Tshombe of the former Belgian Congo, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Tshombe, who had been an agent of the former Belgian colonial authorities in southern DRC and was involved in the assassination of the first Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, died in Algerian custody in 1969. The U.S. National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) wanted Lumumba killed, being ordered to do so by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960-1961.

Algeria war of independence against France (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Disagreements over a national election in 1992 when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was denied the ability to create a government in Algeria, led to a civil war that lasted for the remaining years of the 1990s. The civil war resulted in the deaths of many Algerians on both sides of the conflict. After the government prevailed by the beginning of the 21st century, the country continued to serve as a bastion of support for the Polisario Front, the liberation movement fighting for the liberation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) of the Western Sahara, which remains under the domination of the Kingdom of Morocco.

In recent years, the Hirak opposition movement has organized large demonstrations demanding reforms in Algeria. The protest action created an atmosphere for the resignation of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2019.

By early 2020, a new leader, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was elected. The current administration opposed the secret granting of Israeli observer status within the African Union during 2021-2022. Working in conjunction with the governments of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the decision by the AU Commission Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, was reversed at a summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in early February of 2022. (See this)

In addition, the Algerian government recalled its ambassador from Spain after the government in Madrid recognized the control of the Kingdom of Morocco over the Western Sahara. The SADR has been given membership status within the AU and maintains a mission at the United Nations.

Relations with France have also been strained in recent months leading up to the 60th anniversary of independence. French President Emmanuel Macron has made comments indicating that the Algerian independence struggle was somehow illegitimate. These ridiculous claims by Paris are taking place amid rising anti-French sentiments across the continent, particularly in the Sahel region of West Africa where Macron has maintained troops under the guise of anti-terrorism. The fact of the matter is the security situation in North and West Africa has worsened due to the presence of French and U.S. troops known as the Africa Command (AFRICOM) and Operation Barkhane.

These military and diplomatic struggles unfolding in North and West Africa will determine the status of France and the U.S. within these regions of the continent. The role of imperialist militarism in Africa will continue to be a source of conflict until the foreign intervention is ended and unity is achieved.

*

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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: Frantz Fanon at the All-African People’s Conference in Ghana, Dec. 1958 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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What Does Standing Up for Ukraine Signify While Casually Ignoring “Violence Against Others”?

By Kim Petersen, April 11, 2022

The leaders of a bevy of NATO-aligned countries have appeared in a collage that reads “Stand up for Ukraine.” It comes across blatantly as propaganda cooked by a corporate PR firm as part of the information war being waged against Russia.

USA Admits Fake News: Railway Station Bombing by Ukrainian Forces. Ukrainian “Bodies” Can’t Keep

By Rodney Atkinson, April 11, 2022

It appears there was a false flag attack by Ukrainian forces on their own people at the railway station in Kramatorsk. While a BBC report shows quite clearly that the missile was a Tochka used only by the Ukrainian side a BBC television report said the missile used “was of a type used by the Russians” – the exact opposite of the truth, as their own image showed.

Over 100,000 Released Documents Expose COVID Origin Fraud

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 11, 2022

In a March 31, 2022, investigative report, Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban reviewed the contents of more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, including meeting minutes and internal emails and reports, most of which predate the COVID-19 pandemic, showing a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research.”

The Privatization of Nuclear War. What Is More Dangerous? A Mini-Nuke or COVID-19?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 11, 2022

America’s major defense contractors which produce the nukes are increasingly involved in strategic decisions pertaining to their use as well as the formulation of US nuclear military doctrine. There is a powerful faction within the Deep State which considers that a nuclear is “winnable”.

Biden Administration Budgets Record $27.6 Billion for Militarization of Outer-Space

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, April 11, 2022

As homeless rates skyrocket and public education flounders, the Biden administration has proposed a record $27.6 billion budget for the militarization of outer space in 2023—a 25% increase from the 2022 budget.

NATO Mobilized 40,000 Troops in Eastern Europe

By APA, April 11, 2022

NATO is preparing plans for full-scale deployment of troops on its eastern borders in response to Russia’s growing military activity. Stoltenberg said that NATO was “in the midst of a very fundamental transformation” and that this major “reset” will entail the replacement of the relatively small “tripwire” presence on the alliance’s eastern flank with stronger forces.

Video: Monopoly — Who Owns the World?

By Tim Gielen, April 11, 2022

This brilliant documentary by Tim Gielen reveals how a small group of super rich criminals have been buying virtually everything on earth, until they own it all. From media, health care, travel, food industry, governments… That allows them to control the whole world. Because of this they are trying to impose the New World Order.

The Covid-19 “Vaccine”: We are in the Fourth Stage of the DNA War against Humanity. Dr. Lee Merritt

By Ramon Tomey, April 11, 2022

Brighteon.TV host Dr. Lee Merritt told Bob “The Plumber” Sisson that humanity is at the fourth stage of the DNA war involving the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines.

‘We the People’ Are the New, Permanent Underclass in America

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, April 11, 2022

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who must foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

By Rep. Ron Paul, April 11, 2022

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.

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CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

April 11th, 2022 by Rep. Ron Paul

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***

Late last year, a Gallup poll showed that Americans’ trust in the mainstream media has fallen to its second lowest level on record. Only seven percent of Americans responded that they have a “great deal” of trust in the media.

That loss of trust has been well-earned by the mainstream media, and it explains the massive growth of independent media and alternative voices on social media. The response to the rise of independent media voices has been a rush to “cancel” any voice outside the accepted mainstream narrative.

Citizens of the Soviet Union would read manipulated media like Pravda not because the regime reported facts, but because truth was hidden between the lines of what was reported and what was not reported. That seems to be where we are in the US today.

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.

Those pushing the “Russiagate” hoax through the Trump years claimed that the goal of “Russian disinformation” was to undermine Americans’ trust in our government, media, and other institutions. Isn’t it ironic that the CIA itself has done more than the Russians to undermine Americans’ faith in the media by feeding false stories to establish a particular narrative among the American people?

After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy has been quoted as wanting “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” That didn’t work out too well for him. As Senate Majority Chuck Schumer famously told Rachel Maddow in 2020, responding to the-President Trump’s criticism of the CIA, “let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

As more information about the activities of the US Intelligence Community in trying to bring down Trump come out, it appears that, for once, Schumer was right.

It’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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***

The media in the West is telling us the reported massacre in Bucha, Ukraine was an act of unspeakable horror by Russian troops. According to Fox News and others, the “Russian troops who carried out the atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha discussed the killing of civilians over the radio, according to Germany’s intelligence agency, which claims to have intercepted the radio messages.”

The article does not specify which intelligence agency, but more than likely it is the BND, an abbreviation of Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency.

The credibility of this organization should be called into question. The agency evolved from Germany’s Nazi military intelligence agency during World War II, the Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost or FHO Section in the General Staff, led by Wehrmacht Major General Reinhard Gehlen, a high-ranking Nazi. Following the war, Gehlen collaborated with the United States and established the “Org,” a group of FHO Nazis that worked with the US Army’s G-2 intelligence agency and later the newly established CIA.

Operating until 1956, when it was superseded by the BND, the Gehlen Organisation was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers. … Among them were Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Alois Brunner, who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major Emil Augsburg. … Many ex-Nazi functionaries including Silberbauer, the captor of Anne Frank, transferred over from the Gehlen Organisation to the BND. … Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them – at least for a few years”.

Gehlen “brokered a deal that instead of being prosecuted for war crimes, he and a select group of his men would establish a secret intelligence service for the occupation forces and hand over the service files they had on the Soviets,” writes Claire Barrett. “Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans. Even the vilest of the vile–the senior bureaucrats who ran the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust–were invited into the Org, including Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy.”

In order to understand how far the CIA would go in recruiting Nazis, in 1952 the agency described the above mentioned Emil Augsburg—convicted in absentia in Poland for planning the SS executions of “enemies of the Reich,” including Polish intellectuals, Jews, and those suspected of resistance to Nazi occupation—favorably by the CIA as “Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …” He was allowed to live out his life without being brought to justice.

In 2016, the German government announced an investigation into the influence of the Nazis on the country’s post-war government, according to a report by the Independent. Nazi influence in the postwar years cannot be denied. Hans Globke, the chief of staff for former West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was a Nazi official responsible in part for the establishment of the Nuremberg race laws, the so-called “Jewish Code” enforced on Slovakia under Nazi occupation.

According to a German government report, around 77 percent of the officials in the justice ministry in 1957 had been members of the Nazi Party. The most controversial of them was former Nazi magistrate Eduard Dreher, who in 1968 drafted a law that made the work of Nazi hunters difficult and ended almost all inquiries into Third Reich figures. Many former Nazi officials received government pensions.

“Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998,” writes Rob Urie,

the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ‘Operation Paperclip’ thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon,’ was employed by the CIC [the Army’s clandestine Counterintelligence Corps], and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara. Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip ‘scientists,’ worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.

In addition to rocketry and foreign intelligence, the Nazi specialists imported by the CIA in the early 1950s helped fine-tune the art of propaganda, most notably the “Big Lie” developed by Adolf Hitler in his prison book, “Mein Kampf.”

In short, the theory is to tell lies to the people so huge that most would not believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously,” in the words of Hitler. Big lies are then repeated over and over, resulting in the acceptance of the lies as truth, especially if alternative facts and views are squelched.

The Big Lie technique merged with previous work done by Edward Bernays on “public relations,” that is to say the art of propaganda and manipulation for commercial and political purpose.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country,” Bernays wrote in the opening sentence of his 1928 book, “Propaganda.”

Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

Bernays’ “new ways to bind and guide the world,” updated and refined for the 21st century and its media, and merged with a highly developed Big Lie technique formulated by Nazis and employed by intelligence agencies, are now being used to spin the planned war in Ukraine, as it was used in the past to gain consensus for organized high-tech mass murder in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, et al.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, programmed to salivate at the ring of a bell, the American and much of the Western public are trained to believe whatever outrageous lie the state manufactures. Increasingly, efforts to oppose false and misleading narratives are being censored by corporate media and the social media monopolies.

The corporate-state media in the US has taken for granted an accusation made by an organization established by Nazis, and of course without the need of an independent investigation. We are expected to accept whatever they churn out, otherwise we are labeled as “far right extremists,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “domestic terrorists.”

“Der Spiegel reported that the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, intercepted Russian radio chatter about the killing of civilians in Bucha, and that some of the conversations could be tied directly to specific killings in Bucha that have been documented since news first emerged of an apparent massacre there,” CNN reports.

Note the verb “could” in this story. The fact of the matter is at this time

1) we don’t know definitively who may have killed civilians in Bucha (recall earlier stories of the Ukrainian state passing out military weapons to civilians), or if there are indeed dead civilians in the streets, despite what we see on social media,

2) so far, there has not been a call for an independent investigation to discover possible evidence of who might be responsible for the alleged massacre, and

3) this may indeed be a false flag event now that the absurd chemical weapons story has all but deflated. (Note: some on social media claim the supposed crime scene in Bucha has been scrubbed of evidence.)

Like Saddam’s illusory Weapons of Mass Destruction, the story of sadistic Russian soldiers mowing down innocent civilians for the sheer sadistic joy of it may turn out to be nothing but a manufactured pretense for direct NATO involvement in the war. The endgame here is plain to see: the US and its partners in crime, including the UK, France, and Canada, are angling to destroy Russia, a direct and serious competitor, along with China.

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Sources

“Russian troops discussed Bucha atrocities over radio, German intelligence agency claims,” Tyler O’Neil, Fox News, April 7, 2022.

“Global Secret and Intelligence Services I: Hidden Systems that deliver Unforgettable Customer Service,” Heinz Duthel, Books on Demand, 2014.

“When the CIA Bankrolled a Nazi Spy Chief,” Claire Barrett, Historynet, January 14, 2022.

“The CIA’s Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis,” Martin A. Lee, Institute for Policy Studies, May 1, 2001.

“Nazi influence on Germany’s post-war government to be investigated.” Caroline Mortimer, Independent, November 27, 2016.

“Berlin to investigate Nazi influence on post-war government,” Deutsche Welle, November, 2016.

“Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA,” Rob Urie, Counterpunch, July 31, 2020.

“Propaganda,” Edward Bernays, Routledge, 1928.

“Russian troops discussed killing Ukrainian civilians in radio transmissions intercepted by Germany, source says,” Luke McGee, CNN, April 7, 2022.

Featured image is from South Front

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“We are now speeding down the road of wasteful spending and debt, and unless we can escape we will be smashed in inflation.”—Herbert Hoover

This is financial tyranny.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who must foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $30 trillion and growing. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer.

Now the Biden administration is proposing a $5.8 trillion spending budget that notably includes $813 billion for national defense, $30 billion to “fund the police,” and a plan to reduce the national deficit by roughly $1 trillion over 10 years through additional tax hikes.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Essentially, the U.S. government is funding its very existence with a credit card.

In 2021, we paid more than $562 billion in interest on that public debt, which according to journalist Rob Garver, “is more than the annual budget of every individual federal agency except for the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services (which manages the Medicare and Medicaid government health insurance programs), and the Department of Defense.”

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

Clearly, the national debt isn’t going away anytime soon, especially not with government spending on the rise and interest payments making up such a large chunk of the budget.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16thAmendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who will have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that staggering $6 trillion is only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, in response to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, the Biden Administration approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, with an additional $200 million for immediate military assistance.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex will continue to get richer, while the American taxpayer will be forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that pit us against one another and keep us powerless and divided that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

Trust me, we’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”

There is power in our numbers.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might).

Where we lose out is when we fall for the big-talking politicians who spend big at our expense.

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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.

Featured image is from Newsmax.com

Putin Fell into Biden’s Trap

April 11th, 2022 by Eric Zuesse

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On Sunday, February 10th, Russia’s RT News headlined “NATO to station permanent force in east – Stoltenberg”, and reported — basically admitted — that Putin’s main international objective of preventing continuance of NATO’s enlargement right up to Russia’s borders was boomeranging and producing the exact opposite result, an acceleration of NATO’s enlargement:

The change comes after the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the bloc’s chief says

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that the bloc will deploy a permanent full-scale military force on the eastern flank to deter Russia. The move comes in response to Moscow’s military campaign against Ukraine.

In an interview published by The Telegraph on Saturday, Stoltenberg explained that the US-led military organisation has been focused on “a very fundamental transformation” in order to better reflect the “new reality” in Europe.

“We have now asked our military commanders to provide options for what we call a reset, a more longer-term adaptation of NATO,” he said, adding that the decisions on the matter are expected at the bloc’s summit in Madrid, Spain in June.

This is part of the reset which we have to make, which is to move from tripwire deterrence to something which is more about deterrence by denial or defense. This is already in process.

Stoltenberg said last month that the bloc had 40,000 troops “under direct command,” mostly in Eastern Europe.The group’s individual members are supplying Kiev with weapons, ranging from anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems to tanks and armored fighting vehicles.

Read more EU now NATO’s ‘economic department’ – Russia

Moscow has repeatedly stated that it views NATO’s expansion eastward as a threat to its security, and listed Ukraine’s aspirations to join the bloc one day as one of the reasons for launching its offensive.

This admission comes after, on April 2nd, RT had already headlined “Finland can join NATO without referendum – president”.

On April 7th, Reuters bannered “Prospect of Finland, Sweden joining NATO discussed at Brussels meeting: State Dept. official”.

On April 8th, CNN headlined “US readies for long-term European security ramp-up after Russia’s invasion”, and opened:

“The top US military general this week endorsed creating permanent US bases in Eastern Europe as a response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” On April 9th, CNN bannered “Finland and Sweden could soon join NATO, prompted by Russian war in Ukraine”, and opened: “Finland and Sweden could soon join NATO, moves that would likely infuriate Moscow and that officials say would further underscore Russia’s strategic error in invading Ukraine.

The person who basically controls whether or not NATO will expedite, retard, or else entirely block, a new country (such as Ukraine, or Finland, or Sweden) being admitted into the U.S.-created anti-Russian military alliance, which is NATO, is the President of the United States, and no one else. NATO is an extension of that one individual’s geostrategy. All U.S. allies (vassal nations) must adhere to that geostrategy.

By Russia’s invading Ukraine before Ukraine invaded its breakaway former Donbass region (which the U.S. and its NATO anti-Russian alliance had for years been training, arming, and preparing, Ukraine to do), Russia thereby became the international ‘villain’ in this war (simply by being the first of the two to invade, and, so, widely considered to be ‘the aggressor’ in it), and, thereby, scared so many people in the nearby neutralist countries, into wanting their own Government to join the anti-Russian alliance ‘for safety’s sake’ against a Russian invasion such as Russia had just done to Ukraine, even though (and few of these people probably even had thought much about this) by doing that, their own land will then become among the ones against which Russia’s missiles and nuclear weapons will become targeted against (and are not now being targeted against).

It’s an invitation, in other words, to their own becoming direct targets in the U.S.-planned World War III, which the U.S. Government (ever since at least 2006) has been planning to ‘win’ — and no longer for the U.S. to be using its nuclear weapons only in order to PREVENT a global nuclear war from ever breaking out.

Biden’s plan to conquer Russia is being skillfully carried out as a continuation of the plan that his predecessor, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, had brilliantly started secretly and only privately by no later than 2010, and which then started actively being planned within the Administration and the top level of Google corporation by no later than 23 June 2011, and that was held-off from enabling Putin to become aware of the plan’s possible existence until 2012, after Obama would become re-elected to a second term.

Prior to that election, Obama had successfully deceived Putin (just as he had earlier deceived the Nobel committee) into believing that the U.S. wanted, in his second term of office, to come to a mutually amicable arrangement with Russia, so that both countries would be able to move forward together in peace and continue to have the (ever since 1945) existing nuclear meta-strategy, of “M.A.D.” or Mutually Assured Destruction — meaning that nuclear weapons would NEVER be used by either side for any aggressive purpose, but ONLY in order to RESPOND to an attacker that is first to use nuclear weapons against it.

In America’s secret 2006 change-over to now planning to use its nuclear weapons in order to blitz-attack Russia so fast that Russia’s retaliatory weapons would be destroyed and disabled within just five minutes or even less, “M.A.D.” became replaced, in U.S. planning, by “Nuclear Primacy” — the plan to attain ultimately that extreme degree of nuclear supremacy so as to then blitz-invade and, basically, just annihilate, Russia.

Putin was fooled by Obama, and therefore he was almost totally unprepared for Obama’s February 2014 coup (run by Victoria Nuland) that grabbed Ukraine, whose nearest border to Moscow is within just a five-minute missile-striking distance from hitting the Kremlin — beheading “The Bear.”

The intended future from this is, of course, a world in which the U.S. Government will be the dictator to ALL countries, and the castrated United Nations that U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Administration shaped, will become totally replaced by whatever America’s aristocracy — the billionaires who effectively own all successful U.S. national politicians and thereby control that Government — want.

It will be like a vast corporation, that’s controlled by its top few stockholders. This will be the world that coming generations will be living in, unless the main countries that are trying to prevent that — Russia and China in particular — will, somehow, become enabled to reverse the direction that the world now seems to be hurtling into (regardless of what the publics everywhere might want).

Our descendants will, now, likely be experiencing that world. This is what is actually now at stake, for everybody, and especially for their descendants. It is at stake now in Ukraine, and, sadly, everywhere. The future is at stake there, for everywhere.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Russia’s Investigation into the Crimes Committed Against the People of Donbass

April 11th, 2022 by Investigative Committee of Russia

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The following text is an excerpt of Russia’s Investigative Report, with a link to the complete document.

This is for the information of our readers. Global Research does not endorse this report.

Click here to read the full document.

***

 

Starting from 2014, Ukrainian forces have been conducting warfare in Donbass. Over all this time, for almost 8 years, Ukraine’s authorities and representatives of militarized formations in fact have been exterminating the civilian population of the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Unstopping fire from large-caliber artillery – mortar and grenade guns – as well as light weapons claimed thousands of lives. Among the victims, there are elderly people and children, whereas lives of others are destroyed by heavy injuries. For example, the story of little Vanya Voronov who survived the explosion of a projectile only by miracle. Those people, especially children, take no part in the armed conflict. It is just as obvious to Ukrainian military who carry high-precision firepower against residential buildings, schools, hospitals, culture facilities, critical infrastructure, public transit, etc. Nevertheless, official Ukrainian authorities pay no attention to these merciless attacks, and give no security guarantees to civilians. On the contrary, they basically ignore this problem and encourage the illicit activities of the military despite the effective international agreements on that matter.

Ever since 2014, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has been legitimately investigating hundreds of crimes of terrorism and extremism against peace and security of mankind that have been committed during the armed conflict.

Based on the established facts, the Committee initiated 467 criminal cases with regard to the developments in Ukraine and Donbas. Those cases implicate representatives of Ukraine’s military and political leadership, members of radical nationalist formations – “Right Sector”, Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, Azov Detachment; and all those who are involved in these crimes.

The investigation ascertained that starting from April 2014, the Ukrainian side has operational missile complexes “Tochka- U”, multiple rocket launchers “Grad” and “Uragan”, unguided airborne rockets, and other types of heavy offensive weapons of indiscriminate action that have broad impact effect, as well as light firearms. As a result, thousands of civilians were wounded or killed, over 2,200 facilities of civil infrastructure were completely or partially destroyed.

Most casualties were caused by fire of Ukraine’s governmental forces that used explosive weapons, small arms and light weapons.

During the proceedings, over 146,000 people were interviewed, more than 22,000 people were recognized as victims, including some 2,500 minors. By now, 103 individuals have been called to criminal liability in absentia – for crimes against the peace and security of mankind during an armed conflict. Among them Ukraine’s former minister of the interior A.Avakov, former governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region of Ukraine I.Kolomoiskyi, brigade commanders and officers of Ukraine’s armed forces who carried out the shelling that targeted peaceful population.

Ukrainian forces and authorities not only used banned techniques and methods of warfare, but also committed murders of Russian journalists, rights advocate A.Mironov, and Italian national A.Rocchelli. They are also responsible for kidnappings, impeding legitimate activities of journalists, tortures, incitement of hatred or enmity, public calls to start an aggressive war, and other crimes.

We have records about members of the criminal community kidnapping Russian nationals in Ukraine with involvement of the SBU. They intend to exchange them for members of the Ukrainian military, inflict heavy injuries on the prisoners, they also seek to mistreat, torment and torture peaceful population of southeastern Ukraine.

Earlier, court passed a sentence upon N.Savchenko who was condemned for killings of Russian journalists and the illegal crossing of the state border of the Russian Federation. Another convict, S.Litvinov, was found guilty of attacking a Russian national in Ukraine. Other individuals were convicted in absentia. We have record of 21 attacks on Russian diplomatic facilities in Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov. Besides, there were cases when Russian nationals were prevented from exercising their electoral rights on the territory if Ukraine. There are 25 individuals implicated in these crimes, among them former members of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada A.Lozovoy and V.Parasyuk. Work is underway to identify others attackers involved in this case.

The evidence that we receive during the investigation is used to articulate Russia’s position at various international judiciary bodies. The claim against Ukraine that Russia lodged at the ECHR is based on the copies of materials from criminal proceedings that the Investigative Committee of Russia submitted to the Court. Those are materials fromcases regarding the genocide of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, attacks on Russian diplomatic facilities, bombardments in the Rostov-on-Don region, murders and other acts of violence against journalists.

With the help of the Investigative Committee, Russian lawyers processed more than 39,000 files, prepared and submitted approximately 7,500 complaints to the ECHR on behalf of those who suffered from the acts of Ukrainian authorities. Under those complaints, the total amount of damage to be repaired stands at more than 350,000,000 EUR.

All the illicit actions will not go unpunished. Sooner or later the guilty will be held accountable for their crimes. If Ukrainian authorities and law enforcement think it is acceptable to criminalize the minds of their people, the Investigative Committee of Russia will not tolerate this lawlessness. We will continue keeping record of all evidence to prove the guilt of people involved in crimes against peace and security of mankind and against Russian citizens. The Investigative Committee is taking every measure to implement the principle of inevitability of punishment for those who committed crimes in Donetsk and Luhansk.

As a guarantor of criminal liability for the perpetrators, the Investigative Committee of Russia will keep reacting to all illegitimate actions – proportionately to the menace that those actions pose to society.

Click here to read the full document.

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Brighteon.TV host Dr. Lee Merritt told Bob “The Plumber” Sisson that humanity is at the fourth stage of the DNA war involving the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines.

“Speaking [of] the great DNA war against humanity … basically, we’re in the fourth stage of the war. I don’t think we can vote ourselves out of this. We’re going to have to prepare, protect ourselves and maybe fight our way out of this,” she said during the four-day Let’s Go Brandon Rally held in Brandon, Florida.

The “Merritt Medical Hour” host told Sisson:

“Since 2015, I feel like I’ve been witnessing a slow-motion terrorist attack against the whole world and couldn’t stop this. The only reason I was awakened early is because the [AAPS] woke me up to what was happening and the crimes of organized medicine.” (Related: Dr. Lee Merritt warns: Forced vaccines are a Holocaust-level crime against humanity.)

The former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) wrote an op-ed back in 2015, which was published under her maiden name Lee Hieb. Her March 10, 2015 piece criticized the Obama administration’s National Adult Immunization Plan.

“You cannot scream for a ‘woman’s right to choose’ when it applies to abortion, but give her no right to choose what gets administered to her in a syringe. Let me be clear: Public health does not trump individual liberty. End of story,” she wrote at the time.

Both Sisson and Merritt cited conservative writer G. Edward Griffin as being instrumental in opening their eyes about vaccines. Sisson, host of “CLO2TV,” said Griffin’s book “A World Without Cancer” showed him how the Carnegie and Rockefeller families took over medical schools and dramatically altered the practice of medicine.

“I sort of began to wake up, but I didn’t really get serious until maybe when [former President Donald] Trump was running. I thought that we had made it once he got in [the White House]. But the swamp is deeper than we thought,” said Sisson. “[Griffin] was telling us what’s [going to] happen today, probably as early as the 1960s and 1970s.”

Vaccinated individuals can’t un-vaccinate themselves

“Nobody that’s unvaccinated right now that I know is going to jump into the vaccinated group. The vaccinated group are already vaccinated, they can’t jump. They can just decide whether to have the fourth or fifth booster, I guess – but they can’t ‘un-vaccinate’ themselves as far as we know,” said Merritt.

“We’re in a situation where [it’s] kind of the calm before the storm. We’re seeing the dying, but we don’t have a sense of what they would say the ‘first derivative of dying.’ In other words, we don’t know how rapidly the death rate is changing.”

The “Merritt Medical Hour” host pointed to a “marked, unprecedented increase” in all-cause mortality caused by the COVID-19 vaccines, citing data from the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. “I can’t find numbers in Israel, but I’m sure they’re having big problems because they were the first people vaccinated,” she said. Merritt also mentioned stillbirths, miscarriages and infertility as some of the other issues linked to the shots.

“Instead of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, we need to be looking at data and preparing ourselves because [that will] tell us if we need to see the trend [and] where it goes. We can’t back up on this.”

According to Merritt, there are several ways to address the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the COVID-19 vaccines.

“We can deal with the spike protein, we know how to do that. Ivermectin, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, chelation, [intravenous] glutathione – there’s lots of things we can do.”

She then turned to Sisson and said “I think your thing is right up there,” in reference to chlorine dioxide, which the “CLO2TV” host is promoting.

Watch the conversation between Bob Sisson and Dr. Lee Merritt at the Let’s Go Brandon Rally in Florida below.

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First published on Global Research on July 17, 2021

 

 

***

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers this important interview with Ricardo Delgado Martin, Founder and Director of Quinta Columna. Ricardo is responsible for coordinating the Spanish research team’s analysis of the impacts of graphene oxide nano-particles contained in the vial of the mRNA vaccine.

The results of their analysis by electron microscopy and spectroscopy are far-reaching. Graphene oxide is a toxin which triggers thrombi and blood coagulation. It also has an impact on the immune system. Graphene oxide accumulated in the lungs can have devastating impacts.

The results of the Spanish study suggest, yet to be fully confirmed and ascertained, that the recorded vaccine related deaths and “adverse events” (e.g. published in the US by the CDC and in the EU) are attributable to the presence of graphene oxide nano-particles contained in the Covid vaccine vial.

Of significance, (acknowledged by national health authorities) graphene oxide is also contained in the face mask.

Graphene has electromagnetic properties which have been detected in people who have been vaccinated. These effects have been amply documented and confirmed. See the study conducted by the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance

Ricardo Delgado Martin is specialized in biostatistics, clinical microbiology, clinical genetics and immunology.

For further details on this project see the report by  Prof. Dr. Pablo Campra Madrid, specialized in Chemistry and Biology, Escuela Superior de Ingenería, University of Almería.

See summary of their report entitled Graphene Oxide Detection in Aqueous Suspension, Observational study in Optical and Electron Microscopy.

Full Study (English)

Speaking on behalf of the Spanish research team, Ricardo Delgado Martin recommends that the covid-19 experimental mRNA vaccine should be cancelled and discontinued immediately.

***

This is a controversial study. There are scientists and medical doctors who disagree with the results of the Spanish study.

The evidence has to be either ascertained or refuted. What is required is that independent scientists and health professionals conduct their own lab analysis of the contents of the vaccine vial.

Similarly, we call upon the national health authorities of the 193 member states of the UN which are currently vaccinating their people, to conduct their own study and analysis of the vaccine vial. And if graphene-oxide is detected, the vaccination program should immediately be discontinued.

Video:

***

Confirmed by Health Canada, Graphene-Oxide particles are also contained in the Face Mask which is intended to protect you.

Face Masks Contain Graphene, A Poisonous Substance

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 14, 2021

“The wearing of the face mask started in the immediate wake of the covid-19 lockdown on March 11, 2020. Worldwide, people have been instructed to wear the mask for more than a year.

And then one year later, we are told that in some cases it may contain a poisonous substance.

According to Health Canada: “There is a potential that wearers could inhale graphene particles from some masks, which may pose health risks.””

See also

Nanotechnology-derived Graphene in Face Masks — Now There Are Safety Concerns

By Andrew Maynard, July 12, 2021

Graphene Oxide has electromagnetic properties which have been detected in people who have been vaccinated.

See the study conducted by the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance:

Study on Electromagnetism of Vaccinated Persons in Luxembourg

By Mamer and Amar Goudjil, July 08, 2021

 

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NATO is going to beef up its military forces on the eastern flank as part of a fundamental reset of the alliance, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with The Telegraph, APA reports citing Sputnik.

NATO is preparing plans for full-scale deployment of troops on its eastern borders in response to Russia’s growing military activity.

Stoltenberg said that NATO was “in the midst of a very fundamental transformation” and that this major “reset” will entail the replacement of the relatively small “tripwire” presence on the alliance’s eastern flank with stronger forces.

According to The Telegraph, NATO military commanders are developing options for the reset, and the alliance’s military presence in countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland is expected to be transformed into a “major force” that would be able to repel a potential invasion.

Stoltenberg noted that about 40,000 troops are already stationed on the eastern flank of the alliance, which is about ten times more than a few months ago. The head of the alliance said that their number will increase.

“What we see now is a new reality, a new normal for European security,” Stoltenberg told the newspaper, adding that NATO leaders are expected to make decisions on “what we call a reset, a longer-term adaptation of NATO” at the Madrid summit in June.

Stoltenberg said in the interview published on Saturday that NATO’s “strategic concept” will, for the first time, address the “threat” from China, amid closer cooperation between Beijing and Russia.

On March 24, in response to the events in Ukraine, NATO Secretary-General announced that he would constantly increase the Alliance’s military presence on the eastern flank by sea, land and air, as well as strengthen air defense.

In addition, four additional multinational combat groups will be established in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.

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Video: Biden Jokes About Starting World War 3

April 11th, 2022 by Steve Watson

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***

In another incredible moment of stupidity Wednesday, Joe Biden deviated from his teleprompter and joked that he might start a third world war.

Biden was speaking at the national conference of North America’s Building Trades Unions, the AFL-CIO group for workers in the construction industry, when he made the idiotic remark.

Biden began talking about the Ukraine conflict, saying

“This war could continue for a long time, but the United States will continue to stand with Ukraine, the Ukrainian people and their fight for freedom.”

Then he addressed the unionists in the room and said,

“And by the way, if I gotta go to war, I’m going with you guys – I mean it.”

Watch:

This latest face palm moment comes after weeks of continued stupid comments about sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops, calling Putin a war criminal, expressing support for an international war criminal trial and advocating regime change in Russia.

In addition to the stupid joke about nuclear armageddon at the appearance Wednesday, Biden reeled off a series of outright lies again.

Earlier in the week he declared that he used to be an 18 wheeler truck driver, but now he used to be a practicing professor at the University of Pennsylvania:

Obviously, that claim is total horse shit.

That wasn’t where the lies ended for the day.

Whenever Biden is talking about something that he knows isn’t true or is just dumb, he caveats it with the phrase ‘this is not a joke’:

During the speech he also did that bizarre creepy whispering thing while threatening to force American companies to unionise:

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Last week the U.S. government participated in a two-day summit normalizing Israeli cooperation with four Arab states in what was hailed as a “historic” gathering. Hosted by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid in the Negev Desert, part of occupied Palestine, the meeting excluded any Palestinian representatives. In addition to the Israeli foreign minister, the foreign ministers of Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken were present.

The meeting put Washington’s hypocrisy on full display. The U.S. government claims outrage over human rights in the Ukraine, and calls Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. Yet, here it quietly colluded against the people of the region with some of the most reactionary and repressive regimes in the world, including the Israeli regime repeatedly accused of war crimes. The so-called watch dog of democracy and self-proclaimed defender of global human rights has no problem supporting the apartheid Zionist regime in Palestine, or the Saudi genocide in Yemen.

U.S. involvement in the summit is for geostrategic purposes and a drive for more control. Washington’s goals at the summit included pushing the participants to increase their support for sanctions and other moves against Russia, and to beef up the military cooperation of the regimes as a protectors of U.S. interests in the area so the Pentagon could free-up more fighter jets and ships to aim them at Russia and China.

Washington and its proxies at the Negev Summit. Credit: commons.wikimedia.org

Arab reaction: the enemy of the region’s people

Those arch reactionaries at the summit framed themselves as “moderates” in the region, there to “form a front against the extremists,” according to Gil Haskel, a foreign ministry official from Israel.

“This new architecture, the shared capabilities we are building, intimidates and deters our common enemies, first and foremost, Iran and its proxies,” said Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid.

The truth is that the Negev Summit is a continuation of the 2020 Abraham Accords where the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco made public their covert relations with Israel, and made it clear to progressives that the enemy of the Palestinian people is not only Zionism and imperialism, but also Arab reaction.

The summit hid its true intentions by continuing a narrative that the region’s many struggles for liberation from pro-imperialist regimes are a single entity, “Iran’s proxies.” This false narrative is amplified by the establishment media.

That narrative does not tell us about the millions of people who are struggling as a result of the agreements made at these summits or how and why they are actively resisting imperialism and its client states. It demonizes Iran as well, which has given support to many of these people’s struggles. This is a major reason why Iran was a major target of the summit.

What about the Israeli war crime of apartheid?

Just days before the summit, yet another human rights expert Michael Lynk, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, declared, “With the eyes of the international community wide open, Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.” The report called on Israel to “completely and unconditionally” end the occupation.

Washington’s hypocrisy is on full display as it denounces the killing of civilians in Ukraine, but remains silent on the indiscriminate killings of Palestinians civilians by Israel and the attacks on civilians by the settlers it arms and protects. Since the start of the year, over two dozen Palestinians have been killed, and this violence will likely escalate during the holy month of Ramadan.

“We live in a state of tension and preparedness for any new attack from the settlers, and we fear for our lives,” said Nisfat al-Khuffash, a Palestinian activist describing violent acts committed by Israeli settlers in his village.

The U.S. continues to work with Egypt and Morocco, despite their practice of targeting journalists and human rights defenders, and Morocco’s continued occupation of the Western Sahara.

The lack of democracy does not matter in the UAE either, where political parties are banned and opponents to the ruling family are persecuted. Nor in Bahrain, where the Shia majority are routinely persecuted.

Washington’s silence on Yemen speaks volumes. Already deemed by the UN to be the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, the humanitarian situation in the country is poised to get even worse between June and December, with the number of people who will be unable to meet their minimum food needs in Yemen possibly reaching a record 19 million people in that period. All this is being done with U.S. weapons and regular assistance from the Pentagon.

Yet, even under such difficult conditions, the resistance in Yemen continues. Last month, in an unprecedented move, Yemen brought the fight to Saudi Arabia. It destroyed an oil depot in Jeddah and other facilities in Riyadh. Their example shows that Washington and its proxies may plot against liberation struggles, but repression alone cannot stamp them out, and the people will have the final word.

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Jackie and Me: A Brooklyn Thing

April 11th, 2022 by Philip A Farruggio

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***

 

 

 

 

 

We have memories, like flashes of lightning from afar – now we see them, now we don’t. Yet, one can almost call upon them at will, these bits and pieces of our lives, once so vivid, once so real, filed forever as nostalgia. So it is for me, 60 plus years after the fact. Brooklyn, circa 1955, was truly a special place. Those who did not live or come from Brooklyn told us that we were only a part of New York City – admittedly a large part, but a part. What did they know!? After all, to Brooklynites, who in the hell would brag about being from Manhattan or Queens or Da Bronx?  No, they were all wrong. Brooklyn was a city, a world onto itself… and everyone knew it!

I was born in Bensonhurst; actually I was born in Bay Ridge Hospital, located in the (duh!) Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, as different from Bensonhurst as Toledo is from Cleveland. Bay Ridge was home to countless Scandinavians; with more blondes per square block than perhaps all the other neighborhoods combined… did I say neighborhood! Now that’s worth exploring. You see, Brooklyn was this great expanse of land, inhabited by little villages we called neighborhoods, with Native American, Dutch and English names.

Places like Flatbush (containing Ebbets field, where the Dodgers played), Kings Highway, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island (you all heard of Nathan’s and the Cyclone roller coaster?), Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville (former home of Murder Incorporated), Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Canarsie, Dyker Heights, the aforementioned Bay Ridge… and finally Bensonhurst, where my family resided. This was a working class community, accented by mostly two family brick homes, replete with landlord and tenant (not much “absentee ownership” in those days, thank heavens). There were also four and six story apartment houses scattered about, mainly rent controlled by the city.

Bensonhurst, a mostly Jewish and Italian-American neighborhood, with a smithering of other ethnic groups blended in, was almost 100% white. The only black people we would see were the seltzer man’s helper delivering heavy cases up the stairs, various cleaning women (for those few families lucky enough to afford such a luxury), and the janitors – that was it! I still remember walking with my mother, at the corner of Avenue P and Dahill Rd., when this lone black man approached. Suddenly, she tightened her grip on my hand, pulling it closer to hers, and kept it there until the man had passed us. Thus, I learned that all colored men (as they were referred to in the 50’s), were to be both avoided and looked upon with caution… until, that is, I discovered baseball, and Jackie Robinson.

NYC was the baseball capitol of the world in 1955. We had not one, not two, but three major league teams. I should clarify that statement. They, the rest of the city, had the Yankees and the Giants….. we, Brooklyn, had but one team: Dem Bums, the Dodgers!  For all the decades of their existence, the Dodgers never once won a World Series. The Yankees won it seemingly all the time; even the hated Giants had just won the World Series the year before (1954). The Yankees had Yankee stadium, the “House that Ruth built”, seating over 70,000, and the Giants the massive Polo Grounds, where a fellow could get lost in left center field. Brooklyn had but tiny Ebbetts Field, a bandbox of a place that could squeeze perhaps 40,000 diehards into it. Who cared! With the blue “Dodgers” scripted across their white linens, and that lone white “B” atop their royal blue cap, Dem Bums could conquer the world….. Or at least try.

So, we kids would be out there on the sidewalk after kindergarten, or on Saturday mornings, playing catch. We all wore our Dodger caps and clutched little baseball gloves, each portraying our own hero. Johnny Molinari would be Duke Snyder, center fielder, and Roy Edelstein becoming Gil Hodges, first baseman. Another kid would be Pee Wee Reese, shortstop, and always some crazy Yankee lover would be Mickey Mantle, Yankee center fielder. And me, well… I would be Jackie Robinson, Dodger second baseman. Being 5 year olds, we didn’t know at the time that Jackie Robinson was special, being the first Negro baseball player allowed to play in Major League Baseball. Who knew and who cared  to we little kids?  Jackie was simply # 42, who played the infield and could steal bases. And I loved him!

I recall now, as if it were yesterday, my first tryout with the Little League. My dad, a longshoreman and part-time bookmaker, made a deal with the head of the Davy Crockett Little League. The league president received a pass on a bet owed and I got to join Little League a year early, at age six. So here I was at the tryout, inside our elementary school gym. Perhaps a hundred of us were there, fielding ground balls, throwing, and running the bases. I was a fast kid, and soon found myself in a prolonged rundown between first and second bases. Finally, I faked one way, quickly pivoted in the other direction and avoided the coach’s tag with a beautiful slide. Someone yelled out “We gottanuda Jackie Robinson here!” That was enough for me. Although they didn’t have a # 42, whenever I ran the bases or had to slide, I was Jackie!

Days and months flow into years. By ’58 the Dodgers were gone to La La land and we had to wait until 1962 and the arrival of the Mets. I grew up, graduated Brooklyn College, got married, had kids, and got divorced…. well you know how that goes?  Then ’97 came around. I was living in Indianapolis at the time. On NPR (National Public Radio) they were having a tribute for the 50th anniversary of Jackie’s breaking into the Majors.  Someone was being interviewed about what Jackie had to go through at that time – things we 5 year olds never knew until years later.  An anecdotal story that followed seemed to parrot what has defined me my entire life.

The Dodgers were on the road, playing either the Phillies or the Reds, I forget. It didn’t matter, because both of those teams had more than their share of racists – goodness, even the Dodgers had them!  On the day in question, the bigots were in rare form. As the Dodgers were going through their pre game infield practice, some bench jockeys from the home team were spewing unbelievable vulgarities at Jackie.  Playing second base, in close proximity to the other team’s bench, Jackie could not help but be overwhelmed by the profanities. They questioned his manhood, his sexuality, his wife and family…. nothing was spared that day. As the story goes, when it was time for the Dodgers to return to their own bench, Jackie was boiling! Though he had gone through this kind of thing many times, this day the assaults were “crossing the line”.

Jackie, when he signed with Brooklyn in ‘ 47,  had given his word to Branch Rickey, the Dodger General Mgr. The agreement was that he would never once respond either physically or verbally to any racist attacks on his person. Rickey knew that Jackie, a college graduate and veteran army officer, had a certain sustenance that many men, regardless of race, could not or would not summon up, that inner resource to ‘take it’. What occurred next became the stuff of legends, forever touching any sensitive heart.  The Dodger shortstop and captain, Pee Wee Reese, being a Louisville native, grew up in a Jim Crow world of ‘whites only’ segregation.  He had reservations, and acknowledged them after Jackie’s signing, that this might not be such a great idea. Yet, to Pee Wee, once any player was dressed in Dodger blue, he became part of one team, and deserving of the same respect.  So, the taunting continued, and as the players were called in, Pee Wee Reese suddenly scampered across the mound.  He caught up with Jackie in full view of the gang of bench jockeying racists, and quickly put his hand around his second baseman’s shoulders, as they walked in together! The poignancy of that moment still brings tears to this writer.

Jackie passed on to the other side decades ago, and well, life goes on.  The Brooklyn of my youth is gone, racism still remains in the hearts of the ignorant, and memories flicker like lightning bugs on hot summer nights.  I’ll never forget you, Brooklyn Dodgers, and what you meant to this little street kid on Dahill Road, playing on Roy Edelstein’s perfect baseball diamond stoop. Most of all, I love you Jackie Robinson, my first hero! You were the greatest and the strongest of them all!

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, Countercurrents., Smirking Chimp and Independent Australia sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

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***

For eight years, Ukraine terrorized the people of Eastern Ukraine with U.S. weapons but this was never reported on.

Here is a timeline of events:

  • October 2002 – “Full Spectrum Dominance” declared by the Pentagon to rule the world.
  • January 2014 – U.S. military trainers arrive in Ukraine. [1]
  • February 2014 – Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a violent coup.
  • March 2014 – Ukraine started the war and killed 10,000 Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine.
  • February 2015 – Ceasefire agreements at Minsk were violated by Kyiv, continuing war.
  • May 2019 – Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine after false peace promise.
  • May 2019 – U.S. Rand Corp. think tank issued a manifesto to destroy Russia.[2]
  • March 2021 – Russian troops appeared at the Ukrainian border.
  • Feb. 17, 2022 – Ukraine attacked a kindergarten in Donetsk, blaming Donbass separatists.[3]
  • Feb. 21, 2022 – Kyiv increased its shelling of Donbass by a factor of 100 within four days. [4]
  • February 21, 2022 – Russia recognized independence of Donetsk and Luhansk.
  • February 22, 2022 – Donetsk reported intelligence that Ukraine planned invasion of Donbass [5]

See the source image

Source: arabi21.com

The democratically elected government of Ukraine, overthrown by a U.S.-supported violent coup in 2014, was sparked by a massacre of protesters by a renegade Nazi brigade in the Ukraine Army, a cynical and deliberate false-flag tactic to anger the population. It worked as well as the German Nazi false flag Reichstag Fire that allowed Hitler to take over Germany.[6]

A more recent false flag attack was the anthrax terror a month after 9/11/2001 which stampeded the U.S. into war for oil, costing 2 million lives and 10 million displaced. The anthrax from a U.S. Army lab was falsely blamed on an Islamic zealot.[7]

See the source image

Source: theglobalherald.com

In 2014, the Ukraine Army started shelling Donbass in the east, killing 10,000 civilians, which is 10 times more than the UN-reported 1,000 civilians that Russia allegedly killed in 24 days since their incursion into Ukraine, February 24 to March 20.

DPR Claims Shelling Against Donetsk From Ukraine | News | teleSUR English

Shelling of Donetsk from Ukraine. [Source: telesurenglish.net]

Considering that the population of West Ukraine is 10 times that of the seccessionist-held Donbass, one can easily calculate that those killings by Ukraine were 20 times the percentage of population killed than those allegedly killed by Russia now.

The map below shows the blue two-thirds of Donetsk and Luhansk was occupied by Kiev which was besieging people in the brown one-third to the east. The Russian rescue mission stopped Ukraine’s genocide of Donbass.

Map Description automatically generated

Source: wikipedia.org

In addition, 4,000 combatants were killed in the Donbass siege. Trainers and equipment from the U.S. were there since 2014 to help the Ukrainian Army.

Not only has Kyiv started the war in Ukraine, but it also committed major war crimes like the shelling of a kindergarten in Donetsk, while trying to blame Russian for false flag attacks.

Why? Because Kyiv knows NATO has their back and they want to remove Russian-speakers from Ukraine. They want to grab that valuable property in the east.

It has been confirmed that 14,000 were killed Ukraine’s 2014 civil war, most of them Russian speakers in Donbass. Ukraine cleared minefields on February 23 around Donbass, preparing to invade. Russia blocked that with the incursion on February 24.

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Richard Ochs is a board member of Maryland Peace Action. He has published articles in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Chronicle, and the website: www.freefromterror.net. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

  1. Secretary of War Lloyd Austin told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation on March 20, 2022 “Our trainers have been in Ukraine since 2014.” 
  2. The US capitalist think tank, Rand Corporation, declared US war on Russia with their 2019 manifesto on how to destroy Russia, which has not been repudiated by any US government entity nor reported by any US mass media.
    Rand Corporation: How to Destroy Russia. “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” | Truth11.com 
  3. Ukraine attacked a kindergarten, blaming Donbass separatists.Report of the Organization for Security & Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

    The Monitoring Mission’s report on the kindergarten incident:
    “On 17 February, the Mission followed up on reports of damage to a working kindergarten in the north-western part of Stanytsia Luhanska (government-controlled, 16km north-east of Luhansk), located about 4.5km north-west of the north-western edge of the disengagement area near Stanytsia Luhanska.”

    Comment by munitions expert:

    “So the kindergarten was 4.5 kilometers inside Ukrainian-held territory. The monitors were denied access to the site by Ukrainian authorities and were only able to see it from a distance (very suspicious).  Also suspicious is that the mission was told that “20 children had been in the kindergarten at the time of the incident but reported no injuries”.  Really?  An artillery shell bursts through a classroom wall, and no one was injured?  More likely, they had been warned to get out ahead of time and evacuated before the shell was fired.

    “But there is no doubt whatsoever about how far away the tank (or artillery piece) was. The impact was dead on, and not from a descending shell. And the surrounding buildings mean that whoever fired at the kindergarten was situated in that very small open space right next to it.  And we know it was a dummy shell, because of the unbroken windows.  If there had been an explosion, they would have been shattered.  Someone took deliberate aim from only a few hundred yards away and carefully fired a single shot on a flat trajectory. They probably weren’t interested in causing “collateral damage”, but just wanted a propaganda photo. How convenient that the damage was to a kindergarten and not to one or another of the anonymous buildings surrounding it.” 

  4. The Organization for Security & Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reports each day on the security situation with daily reports: https://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/reportsWednesday February 16:  number of explosions: 5 in Donetsk and 71 in Luhansk=76

    Thursday February 17:  Kindergarten hit by Ukraine’s false flag attack

    Thursday February 17: number of explosions: 128 in Donetsk and 188 in Luhansk

    =316Friday February 18: number of explosions: 135 in Donetsk and 519 in Luhansk

    =654Saturday February 19:     number of explosions: 553 in Donetsk and 860 in Luhansk-1,413. 

  5. Ukraine Army’s Plan to Attack Donbass
    https://ugetube.com/watch/firefight-ukraine-army-039-s-plan-to-attack-donbass_wmIf7NNHXvOCqNV.html?msclkid=f3d55ab0ab2a11ec9d8c68334c4999d6
    Published on 21 Feb 2022. “In recent days, the number and intensity of shelling on the territory of the Republics by the Ukrainian army has sharply increased. The units of the People’s Militia are forced to constantly suppress the firing points of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in order to prevent the death of the civilian population.”
  6. Watch the documentary “Ukraine on Fire” by Oliver Stone, producer of “JFK.” https://rumble.com/embed/vubrga. Dmitry Yarosh’s highly trained and disciplined paramilitaries had dressed during the coup as if they were state security troops, and they fired down upon the Maidan demonstrators and police, in what’s called in the trade a “false flag” attack—one that’s designed to appear to have been perpetrated by the side you’re intending to defeat, so as to deceive the public about who had caused the violence and thus get your enemy to be blamed (by your own electorate) for the bloodshed, and thereby unite your country to fear your chosen (typically foreign) enemy and so to be willing to invade them. Adolf Hitler had most prominently pioneered the false-flag technique, both in his burning of the Reichstag, and in his setting up the incident that became his excuse to invade Poland in 1939. Dmitriy Yarosh is a proven master of this craft.https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-did-vladimir-putin-probably-save-volodymyr-zelenskys-life/5773835 
  7. www.freefromterror.net; Graham McQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: the Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2014). 

Featured image is from cgtn.com

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As homeless rates skyrocket and public education flounders, the Biden administration has proposed a record $27.6 billion budget for the militarization of outer space in 2023—a 25% increase from the 2022 budget.

Adopted in violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that sets aside space “for peaceful purposes,” Biden’s space program is designed to maintain strategic advantages over Russia and China, which are developing what U.S. intelligence agencies consider “destructive anti-satellite weapons,” including ballistic missiles, that could be “used against the U.S.”

The U.S. Space Command reports that Russia tested a space-based anti-satellite weapon in orbit on Dec. 16, 2020. This image shows the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, the site of another Russian anti-satellite missile test in April 2020.

Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, the site of a Russian anti-satellite missile test in April 2020. [Source: space.com]

On Wednesday, April 6, the House Armed Services Committee held hearings that publicized the national security space activities of the Department of Defense, including within the U.S. Space Force (USSF), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Jim Cooper (D-TN), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces which oversees the U.S. space program, stated in introducing the panel from the space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that he was encouraged by the new budget and fact that the Pentagon had finally recognized what his subcommittee had long suggested: Space was no longer a “benign domain.”

According to Cooper, we “must be prepared to defend our assets in orbit and maintain our ability to use space in support of global combatant commanders…in the wake of an irresponsible satellite test by Russia [which left thousands of pieces of debris] and China’s grappling with a U.S. satellite and pulling it out of orbit, we cannot be too bold or aggressive in demonstrating our intent in space.”

Dr. John Plumb, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, followed Cooper by reiterating that Russia and China had developed counter-space weapons to target U.S. space satellites which, he said, required major new investments to counteract.

DoD space policy nominee highlights complex security challenges facing U.S. - SpaceNews

Dr. John Plumb [Source: spacenews.com]

Plumb specified that $4.7 billion out of the Biden budget would go toward development of a new missile-warning and missile-track architecture, $1.8 billion toward development of GPS satellites and integration of GPS user military equipment; $1.6 billion toward development of jam resistance satellite communication capabilities; and $1.6 billion toward national security space launches.

L3 Harris and Jim Cooper

One of the major winners of Biden’s new budget—and by implication the new Cold War—is the Florida-based defense contractor L3 Harris.

Last October, L3 Harris was awarded a $120.7 million contract to produce ground-based communications jammers used to block adversaries’ satellite transmissions—the “first offensive weapon system in the United States Space Force.”

L3 Harris is also the lead Pentagon contractor on the space-based missile-tracking systemthat is being generously funded by the Biden administration.

Space-based missile-tracking system developed by L3 Harris and Space X, two big winners from Biden’s new budget and the new Cold War. [Source: breakingdefense.com]

According to opensecrets.com, L3 Harris is listed as Jim Cooper’s top contributor during the 2020 election cycle: It provided him with $15,500 which helped Cooper win his 16th term.

No wonder then that Cooper was so pleased with Biden’s new budget.

Nazi Roots—Seeking “Control over the Earth”

The roots of the U.S. weaponization of space lie with the former Nazi rocket scientists and engineers brought to the U.S. from Germany after World War II under Operation Paperclip.

In 1947, Major General Walter Dornberger, former head of the Nazi rocket program now working as an Air Force and Pentagon consultant, proposed a system—subsequently implemented under the acronym NABS (Nuclear Armed Bombardment Satellites)—of hundreds of nuclear-armed satellites all orbiting at different altitudes and angles, each capable of re-entering the atmosphere on command from Earth to proceed to its target.

Historian Jack Manno, author of Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-1995 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1984), told space expert Karl Grossman that “control over the Earth” was what those who have wanted to weaponize space seek. “The aim is to … have the capacity to carry out global warfare [using] weapons systems that reside in space.”

This capacity was enhanced considerably with Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program in the 1980s—which created space battle stations from which laser weapons refracted through mirrors could intercept incoming ballistic missiles or nuclear bombs[1]—and then with the establishment by Donald Trump in 2019 of the Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces.

Both Chinese and Russian government leaders have publicly stated their desire for a binding treaty to ban the deployment of “any types of weapons” in space, which the U.S. has rejected. The profits to military industry are just too high, and Americans have long considered super-weapons the key to defeating evil empires and securing a world of peace and prosperity dominated by the U.S.[2]

Aces Up the American Sleeve

Tonya P. Wilkerson, deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, testified at the House hearing last Wednesday that U.S. space-based satellites have proven valuable in the Ukraine war in providing the public images of the devastation caused by the Russian invasion.

The U.S. today is developing some truly fantastical weapons systems that it is believed will help win future wars.

One, “Rod from God,” is a $230 million tungsten projectile rod measuring 20 feet long and 1 foot in diameter that can be dropped directly from orbit in outer space and achieve the force of impact from a nuclear strike but with none of the radioactive fallout.

Rods from God' Weapon System Gets Another Look - YouTube

Rod from God. [Source: youtube.com]

The U.S. military has hinted that it will publicly unveil another secret space-based super weapon that is designed to wreak havoc on enemy satellites.

Speculation ranges from the weapon being a land-based mobile laser to blind enemy satellites, radio-frequency jammers, or high-powered microwave systems to throw other satellites’ electronics into disarray.

The Heavens are for Wonder, not Warfare

A dedicated core of activists showed up at the space symposium in Colorado Springs that Jim Cooper was attending with signs stating “the heavens are for WONDER, not warfare,” “The USA is Suffering from a Military-Industrial Complex,” and “Where is the Morality in Military-Funded Technology.”

At least 60% of the symposium’s exhibits, panels and speeches were from military contractors. According to Loring Wirbel, author of Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy(London: Pluto Press, 2004), even companies intent on working solely in the civilian realm “often get prodded into taking contracts with the Air Force, Space Force or intelligence community.”

Evelyn Baher-Murphy, a freshman at Colorado College who is part of a student peace group, told the local newspaper that “adding space as a landscape for future battles furthers the proliferation of war and violence. Enough damage and suffering have already been caused in the air, on land and on water. It makes it illogical to place our investments to make the war machine larger than it already is. Our tax dollars too often fund militarism instead of things like education.”

Another freshman, Tim Smith of Minneapolis, said that “we are at the most unequal moment in history—folks can work a full-time job and still not be able to get by. Our government is concerned with spending millions, billions of dollars on putting random stuff in space. How is this just? How does this demonstrate a government whose priority is the well-being of its citizens? It doesn’t.”

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

Notes

  1. See Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 

  2. See H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). 

Featured image: The Space Test Program-3 Mission for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command preparing for launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida. [Source: spacenews.com]

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First published on March 22, 2022


“Meeting with Congress, Zelensky Asks for More Weapons and a No-Fly Zone” according to the New York Times.

A No Fly Zone is tantamount to a World War III scenario. 

Who writes and/or determines the content of  Zelensky’s speeches? 

Zelensky addressed President Joe Biden in a carefully scripted text:

“You are the leader of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”

Zelensky is a political proxy, an obedient lackey. Visibly his speeches had been carefully crafted on behalf of his U.S. sponsors, i.e. Powerful factions within the “Deep State” in support of America’s defense giants.

The Military Industrial Complex has made billions since the Russian invasion. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop, BAE et al. have seen their shares go fly high, amidst a slump in market values following the Russia invasion on February 24th (for more details see Asia Times). 

Source: Asia Times

Largest Military Budget in US History  

In the immediate wake of Russia’s invasion, the US Congress approved (on behalf of defense contractors, private mercenary companies, et al.),  the “largest ever defense spending bill” in US history, “while U.S. allies in Europe pledged to dramatically ramp up their defense spending to counter the Russian threat, measures that will bring lucrative new contracts to the arms industry” (The Hill, emphasis added).

Did the defense giants have foreknowledge of the Russian attack?

A month prior to the invasion: “top western arms companies were briefing investors about a likely boost to their profits”. Gregory J Hayes, the chief executive of US defense giant Raytheon, stated on a January 25:”

“Raytheon and Lockheed Martin — are openly telling their investors that tensions between the countries are good for business.”

Let us be under no illusions: A World War III scenario involving the use of nuclear weapons directed against Russia and China as well as against several non-nuclear states has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 20 years.

And America’s major defense contractors which produce the nukes are increasingly involved in strategic decisions pertaining to their use as well as the formulation of US nuclear military doctrine. There is a powerful faction within the Deep State which considers that a nuclear is “winnable”. And winnable WWIII scenarios and simulations (most of them classified) are routinely contemplated.

Analysis: The Dangers of Nuclear War: Michel Chossudovsky

Comments: Link to Odysee

Post 9/11 Nuclear Doctrine: “The Cold War Goes Hot” under G.W.B.

A  dangerous shift in US nuclear doctrine occurred in 2001 under the Bush administration.

In early 2002, the text of George W. Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review had already been leaked, several months prior to the release of the  September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) which defined, “Preemption” as: “the anticipatory use of force in the face of an imminent attack”. 

The Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War Era was scrapped and replaced with the Doctrine of Preemptive Nuclear War (PNW), namely the “peacemaking use” of nuclear weapons as a means of “self-defense” against both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states.

One thing was replaced by its opposite. MAD is real, PNW is fake. There is no such thing as “a peace-making use” of nuclear weapons.

Secret Meeting on Hiroshima Day 2003. Setting the Stage for “The Privatization  of Nuclear War”

A year later, on August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

 “Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.” (Michel Chossudovsky, August 2011)

This meeting was instrumental in setting the stage for the privatization of nuclear war leading up to Obama’s $1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program, which is now slated to increase to $2 trillion by 2030.

Diplomacy is scrapped in favor of Big Money. The privatization of both conventional and nuclear war is the driving force behind the crisis in Ukraine, coupled with the influx of foreign mercenaries recruited by private companies (on contract to the Pentagon and NATO).

While Biden is officially against the use of nukes on a first strike basis, the lobby groups acting on behalf of the defence giants are calling the shots.

Nuclear War Is “Good for Business”, But It Requires a “Human Face” and a “Peace-Making Mandate”

The Defense Giants are pushing the preemptive nuclear war doctrine with Russia, allegedly as a means of self-defence and national security for America and its allies. And the media applauds. Public acceptance of WMDs is predicated on a public relations campaign which posits that mini-nukes as humanitarian bombs.

The “peacemaking use” of nuclear weapons, missiles and fighter jets is being used as a marketing strategy on behalf of  Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrupp Grumman, BAE, et al

The latest state of the art B61-12 mini-nuke, the  “more usable” “low yield” nuclear weapons is a portrayed as a “humanitarian bomb” “harmless to civilians” because the explosion is underground.

The B61-12 “peace making bomb” has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons which is more than three times that of a Hiroshima bomb (15 kilotons) which resulted in excess of 100,000 deaths in matter of minutes.

Humanitarian Preemptive Nukes are part of a dangerous ideology as well as a marketing strategy on behalf of the defense giants. The unspoken reality of a nuclear war is “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) and the End of Humanity as we know it.

Mini Nukes Versus SARS-CoV2

The corporate media is complicit. Lies through omission. There is no informative “fear campaign” on something which is real.

The REAL dangers of nuclear war which threatens the future of humanity do not make the headlines. 

In contrast, a 24/7 fear campaign spearheaded by the media in the course of the last two years has focussed on the deadly impact of COVID-19, which according to the WHO is similar to seasonal influence.

Inventing Fear: “Why Is the Virus Such a Threat”

V- the Virus is portrayed as a “Terrorist”

A sensationalist (scary?) BBC report portrays the SARS-CoV2 as a “Weapon of Mass Destruction”.

“Why is the Virus such a Threat”, because it is a “hit and run killer” with “brilliant evolutionary tactic”:

“Master of Deception. In the early stages of an infection the virus is able to deceive the body. …

It [the virus] behaves like a ‘hit and run’ killer

The amount of virus in our body begins to peak the day before we begin to get sick. …

This is a really brilliant evolutionary tactic – you don’t go to bed, you go out and have a good time,” says Prof Lehner.

So the virus is like a dangerous driver fleeing the scenethe virus has moved on to the next victim long before we either recover or die. 

In stark terms, “the virus doesn’t care” if you die, says [Cambridge] Prof Lehner, “this is a hit and run virus”.  ….

It does peculiar and unexpected things to the body (BBC, James Gallagher, October 22, 2020, emphasis added)

Law’s Limits: The Passage of the Anti-lynching Bill

April 11th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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In 1900, Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, the sole Black law maker in Congress at the time, dared to introduce legislation (HR 6963) that would make lynching a hate crime.  To back his case, he submitted an anti-lynching petition from New Jersey residents protesting the lynching of Black Americans for alleged offences, from the most fleetingly minor, to the most serious.  The bill stuttered and expired in the Judiciary Committee, never making it out to a House vote.

Such instruments were drafted with an express purpose of targeting that nastily cruel weapon of choice for white insecurity and supremacy.  Nearing the end of March this year, US President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, its name taken from the teenager murdered in 1955 by a mob for supposedly flirting with a white woman.  In being designated a hate crime, those responsible for its infliction, resulting in either death or injury, can face up to three decades in prison in addition to time for other charges.

Lynching had a defining role of keeping Black Americans in their place, a vigilante method of control that received more than a little bit of support from local policing authorities. It symbolised the fangs and threat of Jim Crow and its sheer durability, initially justified as a form of popular sovereignty in the face of tardy justice.  Such a form of terror was seminal in compelling the migration of millions of Black Americans from the Southern States to the north and enforcing insidious racial hierarchies.

Between 1877 and 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative claims that 4,400 African Americans met their fate in this way.  The NAACP estimates that Black victims accounted for 72 percent of 4,743 cases of lynching between 1882 and 1968.  This took place, despite the warnings from White House occupants that such acts could “not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States” (William McKinley in 1897) or represented “much a loosening of the bonds of civilization” (Theodore Roosevelt in 1906).

Such acts were, as the EJI’s report Lynching in America notes, characterised by a number of features: the lingering fear of interracial sex; a reaction to casual social transgression; a response to allegations of serious crime; the lure of the public spectacle; the escalation of violence against whole African American communities and a hunger to punish specific figures: sharecroppers, ministers and community leaders.

For over a century, legislation remained unpassed.  There were 200 failed attempts in Congress to take it to the statute books.  “That it took so long is a stain, a bitter stain on America,” stated Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.  Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, considered the legislation “a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history”.

On this occasion, there were no objections in the Senate as it sailed through earlier in the month.  But three House members refused to pass it when it reached them in February: Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia.

Massie justified his decision in a social media spray.  “Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech.” He was on better ground in noting that the States had already made lynching illegal within their jurisdictions.  He also expressed concern about using the “conspiracy” concept, thereby lending the law to be potentially “enforced overbroadly”.

Roy’s reasons were less systematic (he had time to suggest that this was “an effort to advance a woke agenda under the guise of correcting racial injustice”), arguing that this was a matter best left to the States.  His reluctance might be best explained by that old school of thought that a lynching could itself be an example of expeditious justice.  “There’s old sayings in Texas about ‘find all in the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,” he stated during a 2021 hearing on Asian-American hate crimes.

Resistance to the specific framing of such a law has not always been racial or deranged.  The fact that a law acknowledging lynching as a hate crime has made it to the federal law books is one thing.  Its actual effectiveness is yet to be determined.  Those seasoned by penal scepticism, such as Kara Gotsch of The Sentencing Project, see little merit in compiling sentences with severity.  The more, the nastier.  “We often react and assume that somehow crime will end if we just make sentences longer or punishments tougher.”  Her organisation, not without some sense, opposed the bill “because we don’t believe in expanding criminal punishments and creating additional federal crime”.

A similar argument was advanced, with some coherence, by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who argued in holding up the Till Antilynching Act in a previous iteration that making lynching a hate crime could lead to a brutal sentencing regime. “This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it too broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion.” The country’s “national history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness than that.”

There is also a paradox to having laws designed to protect a particular group or community being turned on those very same individuals.  Once on the books, prosecutors can feel inclined to use them for other purposes, simplifying the often complex profile of the offender.  Victims and perpetrators trade places.

In a June 2021 report from the Stanford Law School and the Brennan Center for Justice, gathered data suggests that Black people made up a quarter of hate crime offenders in 2018, and a third of violent hate crime offenders between 2004 and 2015. Admittedly, weaknesses in the report include its reliance on voluntary reporting and a lack of focus on the prosecution, conviction, and sentencing stages.

That said, this problem is not a new one.  The South Carolina Sentencing Reform Commission voted in January 2010 to change the lynching law to “assault and battery by a mob” because it had been used to target the activities of African American gangs.

Fitzhugh Brundage of the University of North Carolina said at the time that the law had seen “a corruption not only of the idea of what a lynching is, but also the historical memory of what a lynching is”.  But, showing a distinct indifference to historical memory, Charleston, S.C.’s first black police chief, Rueben Greenberg was pragmatic: the law was highly effective in coping with urban gang activity.

However well intentioned, laws on the statute books will be used and enforced in shifting circumstances, however ironic and disturbing the outcome.  Symbolism eventually gives way to the crude inclinations and biases of the law enforcing pragmatist.

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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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Tuomioja’s alternative to appease Finns and Swedes’ artificially manufactured support of NATO membership through the regional alliance compromise that he proposed – including through the US’ potential role as a third party within it – could present a “face-saving” exit from this security dilemma if it comes to pass. It would fall just short of crossing Russia’s national security red lines but would also somewhat formalize the US’ already existing military influence over their countries.

Non-NATO countries Finland and Sweden are reportedly preparing to apply for membership in this anti-Russian military bloc by sometime this summer according to a scandalous report from The Times that was released over the weekend. Whether credible or not, such chatter isn’t surprising since there’s been a strong movement in that direction over the last decade, which the author most recently wrote about late last year in his piece about how “The Spectre Of ‘Shadow NATO’ Hangs Heavy Over ‘Greater Scandinavia’”. This US-led organization already de facto includes those two within its ranks, but their formal membership and subsequent inclusion under America’s nuclear umbrella risks crossing yet another one of Russia’s regional national security red lines, hence the concern over this scenario.

That being the case, Sputnik published an intriguing piece on Monday that deserves to be read by those who’ve been following this issue in recent months. Titled “Finnish Foreign Policy Heavyweight Touts Alliance With Sweden as Alternative to NATO Membership”, the outlet reported on former Foreign Minister and heavyweight Social Democrat Erkki Tuomioja’s recent interview with local media. This politician is also deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, a member of the Defence Committee, and the leader of the Social Democrats’ working group on defence issues, hence their description of him as a “Finnish foreign policy heavyweight”. He proposed a Finnish-Swedish alliance as an alternative to NATO membership, even suggesting that the US play a third role in this new bloc.

Despite claiming that “We have had digital meetings with the Social Democrats in the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committees in both countries. We have taken up the matter and there has been no negative reaction”, this was refuted by both countries’ Defense Ministers. Nevertheless, it remains an intriguing possibility to consider since it could at least theoretically resolve this artificially manufactured dilemma that American strategists have created in recent months as part of their Hybrid War on Russia. The commencement of Moscow’s ongoing special militaryoperation in Ukraine was exploited by the declining unipolar hegemon’s perception managers to concoct weaponized infowar narratives that served to increase local support for those countries’ potential NATO memberships.

Objectively speaking, there’s no reason why they need to join. Russia isn’t threatening them and they’re already informal members of that bloc anyhow though importantly without the US’ mutual security guarantees. Joining that anti-Russian alliance, however, could result in the placement of US “missile defense” infrastructure and strike missiles along that Eurasian Great Powers’ borders. That would in effect replicate the exact same national security scenario that it felt compelled to kinetically preempt through its special operation in Ukraine, among the other reasons that it decided to commence that campaign. America is keenly aware of this and thus hopes to provoke yet another regional security crisis, including for the purpose of possibly prompting yet another Russian operation to overextend its rival.

The only “winner” in such a scenario would be the US, which would succeed in further dividing-and-ruling Russia and Europe, the latter of which would suffer even more economic and humanitarian consequences if Moscow was compelled to militarily intervene in order to uphold the integrity of its national security red lines. Again, that’s just one scenario among many and shouldn’t be misunderstood by the reader as the author confidently predicting that such a sequence of events will certainly unfold. All that’s being suggested is that it could possibly happen considering the Ukrainian precedent. In any case, the Finns and Swedes would suffer the most, which appears to be the outcome that Tuomioja is expecting and thus possibly why he proposed his creative alternative to NATO membership.

Apart from obtaining formal security guarantees from the US and all that entails with respect to potentially crossing Russia’s national security red lines as was explained (which would truly be a game-changer and the consequences of which shouldn’t be downplayed), it’s pretty much a moot point whether or not Finland and Sweden join NATO since they’re already de facto members through the “Shadow NATO” concept. What this means is that Tuomioja’s alternative to appease Finns and Swedes’ artificially manufactured support of NATO membership through the regional alliance compromise that he proposed – including through the US’ potential role as a third party within it – could indeed present a “face-saving” exit from this security dilemma if it comes to pass.

It would fall just short of crossing Russia’s national security red lines but would also somewhat formalize the US’ already existing military influence over their countries. It would of course be better for the US not to have any official role over their security affairs but it already actually does in practice despite it not being formally recognized. Institutionalizing this reality through his alternative proposal to NATO membership might be enough to calm down those two people’s externally encouraged eagerness to join NATO while “saving face” in a way that doesn’t look like their leaders’ retreated in the face of Russia’s public opposition to them becoming part of that hostile bloc. It remains to be seen whether or not this scenario unfolds, but it’s still worthwhile monitoring considering the high security stakes involved.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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On April 9, Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSAI) removed from its 2021 handbook on international terrorism the labelling of the Ukrainian Azov batallion as a far-right neo-Nazi organization. It has also issued an apology for describing it as Nazi:

“Recently, there have been cases of misinformation published as though the PSIA recognized the Azov battalion as a neo-Nazi organization. We regret the occurrence of this situation.” Moreover the PSAI clarified that such previous description did not mean that the agency independently classified the organization as such because “The 2021 guide includes data collected from various open sources, including foreign and Japanese media, research institutes, and others”.

Although Japan is of course an Asian nation, one can still arguably count this recent development as yet another example of the larger Western campaign to “whitewash” the aforementioned Ukrainian battalion. Already in 2008, French economist and philosopher Guy Sorman, wrote in a Japan Times piece that “the West” has become a kind of a mind set in such a way that sometimes even Japan can be considered “Western”.

 

 

The “modernization” process, as it is understood today, includes institutional changes (which normally presuppose European Enlightenment values), and thus it is often hard to tell the difference between such process and so-called “westernization”. Westernization projects can be described as an instance of Occidentalism or Westernalism which often has foreign policy consequences, even for emerging powers. Thus, adherence to the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) can at least partially be considered a political expression of westernization – a goal Kiev has been pursuing.

Since the post-war period, the idea of “fascism” has become a kind of shadow mirror of the image the West has tried to create for itself. Instead of describing a set of specific features, it has often been used as a merely accusatory category. This is why a very heterogeneous group of political actors such as left-wing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, former US President Donald Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and many others have at times all been described by journalists and intellectuals as “fascists”. Similarly to “populism”, the concept of “fascism” today has also become a residual category that can be used to name anything that does not fit within the aesthetic, behavioral, and institutional expectations of Western sensitivities.

This is particularly ironic because real Fascism and real Nazism were products of Western civilization. And the case of Ukraine, a Slavic country who has both embraced Fascism and embarked on the road to Westernization, short-circuits Western narratives.

“Whitewashing” the Azov battalion, regardless of the complicit Western media and the immense propaganda war is not an easy task, though. Its open usage of the Nazi Wolfsangel is hard to ignore, for instance. Over 7 years ago, a Guardian piece of news by Shaun Walker described Ukrainian Azov fighters as Kiev’s “greatest weapon” in Mariupol in 2014 and 2015, and properly described them as having neo-Nazi “leanings”. In a March 30 CNN piece, Tara John and Tim Lister once again write of the neo-nazi “leanings” of this organization (curiously employing the same wording), and adding that Putin “exploits” this fact.

Rather than denying the Nazi “leanings” of this paramilitary group that was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 (an untenable task), well-informed analysts are left with the uncomfortable option of trying to downplay it. For example, in his February 27 interview to Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, Benjamin Teitelbaum, a University of Colorado international relations professor, comments on Moscow’s denazification military goals claiming that there are about as many Nazis in Ukraine as in Brazil – an absurd statement. He adds that “for them, it is like dressing up [as a Nazi] for Halloween.”

One might try to downplay it as much as one can, but the truth is that the Banderist and neo-Nazi overtones of post-Maidan Ukraine have been discussed since 2014, and they are abundantly documented. It has partially hampered Polish-Ukrainian relations and, more recently, Greek-Ukrainian relations also; the Ukrainian chauvinistic policies of far-right ethno-nationalism and the official glorification of genocidal Nazi collaborators as national heroes have been denounced and has polarized Ukrainian society (to the point of escalating into the Donbass civil war) and so have the human rights violations as well as Kiev’s state terrorism and genocidal violence employed in Eastern Ukraine. A March 16 Deutsche Welle article properly describes the Azov combatants as “extremists defending Mariupol” and as “far-right radicals”.

One should note that Azov is not the only neo-Nazi military organization freely operating in Ukraine since 2014 regardless of its current president being a Jew, it is merely the most famouse one. Thus, in order to support post-Maidan Ukrainian nationalism, one needs to “whitewash” its neo-nazism. However, this could have unintended consequences – for example, paving the way for rehabilitation of fascism. Turkish-Ukrainian ultra-nationalist cooperation has been going on for a while, and, more recently, many Azov commanders who fled to Poland will likely establish alliances and dialogue with European networks.

In this scenario, while NATO keeps arming and training Ukrainian mercenaries, Europe can expect an increase in crime, terrorism, and extremism within the European bloc, in a situation reminiscent of the infamous Gladio Operation during the Cold War – when the US funded European neofascist and neo-Nazi groups as a secret anti-Soviet army. The SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that tracks extremist groups, warns that there are far-right militias in Europe ready to join Ukrainian nazis in their struggle.  Azov recruits  foreign volunteers and mercenaries, and Ukraine has already become a new hub for the far-right globally.

Notwithstanding any valid criticism one may have of the current Russian military operations conducted on Ukrainian soil, the hard truth is that there is today a global wave of russophobia – and it now includes the possible rehabilitation of Nazism in the West. It is about time real neo-Nazism is described for what it is – and properly denounced.

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

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Bahrain, ruled by the Al-Khalifa dynasty, is one of the closest allies of the US in the Persian Gulf region. It hosts the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy since 1995 and has developed close relations with Israel despite popular opposition 

In a statement released on Thursday, April 7, Bahraini opposition group, the February 14 Revolutionary Youth Coalition, raised the demand of disbanding the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the country along with the withdrawal of all foreign forces. The movement claimed that the presence of the US Navy is leading to interference in Bahrain’s domestic politics and protects the ruling unpopular Al-Khalifa dynasty.

“Day after day, people of Bahrain are forcibly deprived of their national, legitimate and sovereign right to self-determination, and are subject to the most violent forms of injustice and violations at the hands of the ruling Khalifa family with American protection and clear military, political and intelligence support,” the statement read.

It called the presence of US troops in Bahrain illegal, saying that it represented “complete occupation” of the country.

Last week, the leader of the movement called for the revival of the “National day to expel the American base from Bahrain”.

Established in 1995, the Fifth Fleet is one of the largest US naval bases outside North America. It is responsible for operations in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea and all nearby areas.

Ruled by the Al-Khalifa dynasty, Bahrain is one of the few surviving monarchies in the world. Its present ruler Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has opposed attempts to establish an elected government in the country. This was the central demand of the February 2011 popular uprising from which the opposition movement derives its name.

The Al-Khalifa dynasty has dealt brutally with the opposition in the country since the 2011 uprising. One major accusation leveled at opposition activists is of being collaborators with Iran. Apart from imprisoning scores of political activists, it has also banned the main opposition Al-Wefaq party and revoked the citizenship of Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim, the country’s main Shia cleric, for speaking in support of the protesters.

Opposition groups in Bahrain allege that the US naval base has been used to train foreign mercenaries who were used by the monarchy to suppress the 2011 uprising and the opposition in subsequent years.

Opposition to growing Israeli presence in Bahrain

In its statement, the February 14 Revolutionary Youth Coalition also accused the government of turning Bahrain into a hub of espionage and other clandestine operations against some other countries in the region following the normalization of its relations with Israel in 2020.

Going against its commitments under the Arab Peace Initiative to not have any relations with Israel until the issue of Palestine is resolved, Bahrain, along with the UAE, Sudan and Morocco, signed the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020 under US pressure.

Following the signing of the accord, several Israeli officials have visited Bahrain. Israel is seeking a formal presence in the US naval base in the country. Bahrain became the second country in the entire Arab world after Morocco to sign a military pact with Israel.

The signing of the deal and subsequent visits of the Israeli officials have invited large-scale protests in Bahrain. Isa Qassim, Bahrain’s most important religious leader, forced to live in Iraq due to political persecution at home, had also demanded the disbanding of the US base and withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.

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Over 100,000 Released Documents Expose COVID Origin Fraud

April 11th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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An investigative report by Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban, based on more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, shows a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research”

In 2014, EcoHealth received a $3.7 million NIAID grant to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations. Nearly $600,000 of that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was a key collaborator

The 2014 grant highlights the truth of what critics of gain-of-function (GOF) research have been saying for years, which is that this kind of research never achieves its aims. They say it needs to be done to prevent and/or get ahead of pandemics, but not a single pandemic has ever been averted and, instead, GOF research may actually be the cause of them

EcoHealth president Peter Daszak’s behavior has added fuel to suspicions of a lab leak — potentially of a virus that he himself helped create. In 2015, he warned a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident, especially the sort of virus manipulation research being done in Wuhan. Despite this history, in February 2020, Daszak wrote a “scientific consensus statement” published in The Lancet that condemned the lab leak theory as a wild conspiracy theory

It appears those who insist SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, despite all the evidence to the contrary, are doing so because they don’t want risky virological research to be blamed for the COVID pandemic

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In a March 31, 2022, investigative report,1 Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban reviewed the contents of more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, including meeting minutes and internal emails and reports, most of which predate the COVID-19 pandemic, showing a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research.”2

April 4, 2022, Eban discussed her investigative report with “Rising” cohosts Ryan Grim and Robby Soave (video above). The various documents were released in accordance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by several parties, including BuzzFeed, The Intercept, U.S. Right to Know, White Coat Waste, GOP Oversight and others.3

EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak admits to “cultivating” government connections for years by attending fancy cocktail parties in Washington D.C., oftentimes giving presentations alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and internal correspondence reveal his obsession with funding — to the point of pitching risky research proposals to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Missing Gene Sequence

Eban begins her story with the account of Jesse D. Bloom, Ph.D., a computational virologist and evolutionary biologist with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. June 18, 2021, Bloom sent the draft of a preprint article he’d written to Fauci and Fauci’s boss, Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.

According to Eban, the paper “contained sensitive revelations” about the NIH, and Bloom wanted Fauci to see it before it went to print and became public knowledge.

“Under ordinary circumstances, the preprint might have sparked a respectful exchange of views. But this was no ordinary preprint, and no ordinary moment,” Eban writes.4

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 was highly contested at this point, with most officials still insisting it had evolved naturally and jumped species, while a growing group of independent investigators kept pointing to genetic discrepancies that made natural evolution highly unlikely.

“A growing contingent were asking if it could have originated inside a nearby laboratory that is known to have conducted risky coronavirus research funded in part by the United States,” Eban writes, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 outbreak first occurred. Eban continues:5

“Bloom’s paper was the product of detective work he’d undertaken after noticing that a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences mentioned in a published paper from China had somehow vanished without a trace.

The sequences, which map the nucleotides that give a virus its unique genetic identity, are key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved.

In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.

Now, he was hoping Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, could help him identify other deleted sequences that might shed light on the mystery.”

On a brief side note, The Epoch Times addressed the alleged deletion of genetic sequences from its database at the request of a Chinese researcher in an April 2, 2022, article.6 NIH media branch chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times that the sequences were not actually erased; the data were merely removed from public access, so the data is now only available to those who have its accession number.

Contentious Disagreements

Collins responded by scheduling a Zoom meeting for June 20, 2021, to which he invited Fauci, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist, and Robert Garry, Ph.D., a virologist. Bloom invited evolutionary biologist Sergei Pond, Ph.D., and Rasmus Nielsen, Ph.D., a genetic biologist with expertise in statistical and computational aspects of evolutionary theory and genetics.

The meeting was a contentious one, and it so troubled Bloom that, six months later, he wrote a detailed account of it. After Bloom had described his findings and the questions it raised, Andersen jumped in, saying he found Bloom’s analysis “deeply troubling.” Eban writes:7

“If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed. And there was nothing unusual about the early genomic sequences in Wuhan.

Instantly, Nielsen and Andersen were ‘yelling at each other,’ Bloom wrote, with Nielsen insisting that the early Wuhan sequences were ‘extremely puzzling and unusual.’

Andersen … leveled a third objection. Andersen, Bloom wrote, ‘needed security outside his house, and my pre-print would fuel conspiratorial notions that China was hiding data and thereby lead to more criticism of scientists such as himself.’

Fauci then weighed in, objecting to the preprint’s description of Chinese scientists ‘surreptitiously’ deleting the sequences. The word was loaded, said Fauci, and the reason they’d asked for the deletions was unknown.

That’s when Andersen made a suggestion that surprised Bloom. He said he was a screener at the preprint server, which gave him access to papers that weren’t yet public.

He then offered to either entirely delete the preprint or revise it ‘in a way that would leave no record that this had been done.’ Bloom refused, saying that he doubted either option was appropriate, ‘given the contentious nature of the meeting.’

At that point, both Fauci and Collins distanced themselves from Andersen’s offer, with Fauci saying, as Bloom recalled it, ‘Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print.’ They seemed to know that Andersen had gone too far.”

EcoHealth, a Government-Funded Sponsor of Risky Research

The June 20 Zoom call reflected “a siege mentality at the NIH,” Eban writes, “whose cause was much larger than Bloom and the missing sequences.” The NIH had a publicity problem, because it was becoming known that the NIH/NIAID had funded potentially risky gain-of-function (GOF) research at the WIV through the EcoHealth Alliance. Bloom’s questions only ratcheted up an already delicate situation.

In 2014, EcoHealth received a $3.7 million NIAID grant to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations. Nearly $600,000 of that went to the WIV, which was a key collaborator. (By that time, Daszak had already been working with Shi Zhengli, the director of the WIV best known as “the bat woman,” for nine years. In all, since 2005, Shi and Daszak have collaborated on 17 scientific papers.8)

The 2014 grant highlights the truth of what critics of GOF research have been saying for years, which is that this kind of research never achieves its aims.9 They say it needs to be done to prevent and/or get ahead of pandemics, but not a single pandemic has ever been averted, and instead, GOF research may actually be the cause of them.

EcoHealth utterly failed to predict, let alone prevent, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the initial outbreak occurring in the vicinity of the WIV raised suspicions of a lab leak from the start.

The NIH/NIAID’s obvious attempts to hide their involvement with GOF research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV has only worsened such suspicions, as did the Chinese government’s refusal to share raw patient data or participate in efforts to investigate SARS-CoV-2’s origin.

Curiously, in September 2019, three months before COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, the WIV also took down its virus database, which at the time contained some 22,000 samples of viruses and their genetic sequences, and they’ve refused international requests to restore it ever since.

On the flipside, in what appears to have been an act of beneficent reciprocity to its American allies, the WIV deleted mentions of its collaboration with the NIAID/NIH and other American research partners from its website in March 2021, after Senate members started grilling Fauci about his funding of GOF research at the WIV.10 At the same time, they also deleted a scientific article discussing genetic research on the SARS virus.11

Daszak’s Suspicious Behavior

Daszak’s behavior has also added fuel to suspicions of a lab leak — potentially of a virus that he himself helped create. For example:

  • In an October 2015 Nature article, Daszak warned a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident, and that “the risks were greater with the sort of virus manipulation research being carried out in Wuhan.”12

Earlier that year, he also gave a speech at a National Academies of Science seminar on reducing risk from emerging infectious diseases, and among the material he presented was a paper titled, “Assessing Coronavirus Threats,” which included an examination of the “spillover potential” from “genetic and experimental studies” on viruses.

Specifically, he highlighted the danger of experimenting on “humanized mice,” meaning lab mice that have been genetically altered to carry human genes, cells or tissues.

Yet despite his history of such warnings, in February 2020, Daszak wrote a “scientific consensus statement” published in The Lancet that condemned the lab leak theory as nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory.13

  • EcoHealth received funding from the USAID PREDICT program, which was involved in identifying viruses with pandemic potential. The director of that program, Dennis Carroll, is now suspected of having stolen taxpayer funds by using PREDICT funds to pay for expenses related to his own organization, the Global Virome Project (GVP).14

In March 2019 email, Daszak noted that lawyers had flagged this conflict of interest and had suggested changes to a board of directors’ letter. Daszak wrote: “I realize this isn’t the language you wanted, but it’s safer for us at this sensitive point where we still receive USAID funding … for GVP related activities.”15

The comment seems to confirm that Daszak was aware that what Carroll was doing was inappropriate and potentially illegal, and he helped cover up Carroll’s improprieties.

  • Nathan Wolfe, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader graduate, has been on EcoHealth’s editorial board since 2004, and in 2017, they cowrote a study on bat coronaviruses.16 Wolf is the founder of Metabiota, now implicated in the operation of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine that Russia claims have been conducting secret bioweapons research.17
  • Daszak is also one of the 15 coauthors of the 2015 paper, “SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronavirus Pose Threat for Human Emergence,”18 which biowarfare expert Francis Boyle claims is “the smoking gun” that reveals the culprits responsible for the COVID pandemic.

Other coauthors and funders of that paper include Collins, Fauci and Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who has been doing coronavirus research on humanized mice together with Shi — the very research Daszak had warned could pose the most serious pandemic hazard.

Why the Lack of Transparency From All Involved?

The efforts by Collins, Fauci, Dazak and other members of the scientific community to stifle debate about the genesis of SARS-CoV-2 — most of whom have clear connections to bat coronavirus GOF research and/or the WIV — raises obvious questions about motive.

“Could it have been to protect science from the ravings of conspiracy theorists?” Eban asks.19 “Or to protect against a revelation that could prove fatal to certain risky research that they deem indispensable? Or to protect vast streams of grant money from political interference or government regulation? …

Perhaps more than anyone, Peter Daszak … was uniquely positioned to help the world crack open the origin mystery, not least by sharing what he knew.

But last year, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who oversees the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission, dismissed Daszak from the helm of a task force investigating the virus’s genesis, after he flatly refused to share progress reports from his contested research grant.

(… Daszak said he was ‘simply following NIH guidance’ when he declined Sachs’s request, because the agency was withholding the reports in question ‘until they had adjudicated a FOIA request.’ The reports are now publicly available, he said.)

‘[Daszak] and NIH have acted badly,’ Sachs told Vanity Fair. ‘There has been a lack of transparency …’

He said that the NIH should support an ‘independent scientific investigation’ to examine the ‘possible role’ in the pandemic of the NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and a partner laboratory at the University of North Carolina. ‘Both hypotheses are still very much with us,’ he said, and ‘need to be investigated seriously and scientifically’ …”

Alarm Bells Went Off in 2016

Getting back to the $3.7 million NIAID grant EcoHealth received in 2014, Eban recounts how warning bells went off in 2016, when EcoHealth was late on submitting its annual progress report. “The agency threatened to withhold funds until he filed it,” she writes, and “The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists.”

According to the report, Daszak and his collaborators were seeking to create an infectious clone of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus with a 35% mortality rate.

“The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide.

(A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?” Eban writes.20

“With that, Daszak’s grant got tangled in a yearslong debate that had divided the virology community. In 2011, two scientists separately announced that they had genetically altered Highly Pathogenic Asian Avian Influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu virus that has killed at least 456 people since 2003.

The scientists gave the virus new functions — enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice — as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.

The scientific community erupted in conflict over what became known as gain-of-function research. Proponents claimed it could help prevent pandemics by highlighting potential threats.

Critics argued that creating pathogens that didn’t exist in nature ran the risk of unleashing them. As the dispute raged, Fauci worked to strike a middle ground, but ultimately supported the research …

In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new federal funding for research that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible, while a review took place. But the moratorium, as written, left loopholes, which allowed Daszak to try to save the research.

On June 8, 2016, he wrote to the NIH’s grant specialists that the SARS-like chimeras from the completed experiment were exempt from the moratorium, because the strains used had not previously been known to infect humans …”

NIH Circumvented Moratorium Rules on Gain of Function

In his letter to the NIH, Daszak also referenced a 2015 paper written by Shi and Baric, which detailed an experiment in which they mixed components of SARS-like viruses of different species to create a novel chimera capable of directly infecting human cells. Incidentally, this research was funded by both the NIH and EcoHealth.

According to Daszak, the chimera produced was less lethal than the original SARS, so his chimera would probably be less lethal as well. However, the NIH grant specialists were far from reassured that his MERS chimera wouldn’t be dangerous, as Shi and Baric in that 2015 paper had noted the danger of such experiments, stressing that “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

“If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier,” Eban writes.21 “So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, ‘we will immediately:

i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.’”

July 7, 2016, the NIH agreed to Daszak’s proposal, which as Eban notes “relied entirely on mutual transparency.” Shi would be responsible for informing Daszak if any of the recombinations had 10 times the growth rate of a natural virus, and Daszak would inform the agency of the results, so they could decide the fate of the experiment.

Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center, told Eban that allowing this kind of high-risk research to be pursued at the WIV was “simply crazy.” “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China … that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”

Indeed, in January 2021, declassified intelligence from the U.S. State Department claims Chinese military scientists have been working with the WIV since at least 2017, raising questions about whether research at the WIV was serving a dual purpose.

Dangerous DARPA Proposal

In late March 2018, EcoHealth, facing financial troubles, in collaboration with Shi and Baric, pitched a proposal22 to DARPA with the hopes of securing fresh funding.

Part of the proposal included examining SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites, which is what allows the virus to infect human cells. They also proposed inserting a furin cleavage site, ostensibly to create an infectious coronavirus, and to test it on mice with humanized lungs.

The furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 is one of the curious hallmarks that makes it stand out as a potential manufactured bioweapon, as coronaviruses don’t have this feature naturally, that we know of. They then proposed mapping high-risk areas and testing various substances in an effort to reduce the viral shedding among bats.

“By almost any definition, this was gain-of-function research,” Eban writes.23 “The federal moratorium had been lifted in January 2017 and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). This required a safety review by the agency funding the research.”

Yet the EcoHealth Alliance, in its DARPA proposal, insisted the research would be exempt from the P3CO framework. DARPA rejected the proposal, and told Eban that part of the reason for the rejection was “because of the horrific lack of common sense” of it.

DARPA grant reviewers viewed EcoHealth as a “ragtag group,” and the WIV was assessed as having subpar safety standards. An unnamed former DARPA official who was there at the time of the proposal told Eban that allowing EcoHealth Alliance to be the prime contractor for a research project with national security risks would be like “having your rental car agency trying to run an armada.”

Importantly, the grant application failed to adequately assess the GOF risks, and the possibility of the work constituting dual-use research of concern (DURC). In other words, EcoHealth didn’t consider how the research might be repurposed as a bioweapon, or how it might endanger national security.

Simon Wain-Hobson, after reviewing the DARPA proposal, has stated it’s “basically a road map to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus.”24 Daszak, however, claims the research was never implemented, not by EcoHealth, Baric or Shi, as far as he’s aware of.

Still, the question remains: Did the GOF research that Shi and Baric published (and EcoHealth funded) in 2015 result in the creation of SARS-CoV-2? While Shi and Baric did that research at Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, might Shi or others have expounded on the work at the WIV?

Daszak has been unwilling to release certain SARS coronavirus sequences from the work at the WIV, claiming he needs the Chinese government to authorize their release. But this explanation seems to “undercut the entire rationale for having the U.S. government help fund a global collaboration on virus emergence,” Eban notes, adding:25

“Wain-Hobson has his own hypothesis for what is taking place: The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin, he says, ‘want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.’”

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Notes

1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25 Vanity Fair March 31, 2022

2, 3 Twitter thread Katherine Eban March 31, 2022

6 The Epoch Times April 2, 2022 (Archived)

9 Nature June 7, 2018

10 MSNBC March 19, 2021

11 Web Archive WIV Will SARS Come Back? December 4, 2015

12 Daily Mail January 9, 2021

13 The Lancet February 19, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9

14 Disinformation Chronicle Substack March 15, 2022

15 USRTK March 16, 2022

16 The Daily Expose March 20, 2022

17 Daily Mail March 25, 2022, Updated March 27, 2022

18 Nature Medicine 2015; 21(12): 1508–1513

22 DARPA Proposal from EcoHealth March 24, 2018

Featured image is from National File

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The leaders of a bevy of NATO-aligned countries have appeared in a collage that reads “Stand up for Ukraine.” It comes across blatantly as propaganda cooked by a corporate PR firm as part of the information war being waged against Russia.

My question to these upstanding, er … these people standing up, is: When have you stood up for, in no particular order:

  • Palestine
  • Syria
  • Libya
  • Iraq
  • Afghanistan
  • Yemen
  • Iran
  • Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Somalia
  • Haiti
  • Serbia
  • Venezuela
  • Bolivia
  • Honduras
  • Nicaragua

This is, of course, an inexhaustive list. What follows is an analysis of what NATO types standing up for signifies for the first six listed countries above, along with two unlisted countries.

Palestine

According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 10,165 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, and an additional 82 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli civilians. This disregard for the life of the non-Jew is ingrained in many Talmudic Jews, as Holocaust survivor and chemistry professor Israel Shahak detailed in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight Of Three Thousand Years. If anyone needs convincing of this Jewish discrimination and racism towards non-Jews, then peruse the statistics at the B’Tselem website on home demolitions, who can and cannot use roads in the West Bank, the water crisis, and settler crimes against Palestinians.

Many of these Stand up for Ukraine types have been been glued to their seats during the slow-motion genocide by Zionist Jews against Palestinians.

Are Palestinians a lesser people than Ukrainians?

Syria

These Stand up for Ukraine types in their spiffy business attire have also been seated while backing Islamist terrorists in Syria. Americans later invaded and still occupy the northeastern corner of Syria, stealing the oil and wheat crops.

The UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet reported that more than 350,000 people have been killed in 10 years of warring in Syria, adding that this figure was an undercount.

Are Syrians a lesser people than Ukrainians?

Libya

In February 2020, Yacoub El Hillo, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Libya, called the impact of the NATO-led war on civilians “incalculable.”

Are Libyans a lesser people than Ukrainians?

Iraq

I have a vivid memory of a crowd of students gathered around a TV screen in the University of Victoria to cheer on the start of Shock and Awe in Iraq. The US-led war on Iraq was based on the pretext that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction although the head UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had found Iraq to be “fundamentally disarmed.”

Chemistry professor Gideon Polya was critical of how the western monopoly media “resolutely ignore the crucial epidemiological concept of non-violent avoidable deaths (excess deaths, avoidable mortality, excess mortality, deaths that should not have happened) associated with war-imposed deprivation.” Polya cites 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million).

Abdul Haq al-Ani, PhD in international law, and Tarik al-Ani, a researcher of Arab/Islamic issues, wrote a legal tour de force, Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States, that makes the case for myriad US war crimes that amount to a genocide.

Nonetheless, US troops are still stationed in Iraq despite being told to leave by the Iraqi government.

Are Iraqis a lesser people than Ukrainians?

Afghanistan

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. The institute’s key findings are:

As of April 2021, more than 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war.

  • The United States military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, which resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties.
  • The CIA has armed and funded Afghan militia groups who have been implicated in grave human rights abuses and killings of civilians.
  • Afghan land is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, which kills and injures tens of thousands of Afghans, especially children, as they travel and go about their daily chores.
  • The war has exacerbated the effects of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, and environmental degradation on Afghans’ health.

Are Afghans a lesser people than Ukrainians?

Yemen

In November 2021, the UN Development Programme published “Assessing the Impact of War in Yemen: Pathways for Recovery” (available here) in which it was estimated that by the end of 2021, there would be 377,000 deaths in Yemen. Tragically, “In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict.” (p 12)

The Yemeni economy is being destroyed and has forced 15.6 million people into extreme immiseration along with 8.6 million people being malnourished. Worse is predicted to come: “If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result…” (p 12)

Countries such as Canada, the US, UK, France, Spain, South Africa, China, India, and Turkey that supply arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE are complicit in the war on the Yemeni people.

Are Yemenis a lesser people than Ukrainians?

One could continue on through the above list of countries “invaded” and arrive at the same conclusions. The predominantly white faces of western heads of government in their suits and ties or matching jackets and skirts did not stand up for the brown-skinned people killed in the countries adumbrated. Most of these countries were, in fact, directly attacked by NATO countries or by countries that were supported by NATO. What does that imply for the Standing up for Ukraine bunch?

The Donbass Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk

And lastly, most telling, is just how many of these people stood up for Donbass when it was being shelled by Ukraine?

If France and Germany, guarantors for the Minsk Agreements that Ukraine signed, had not only guaranteed but also enforced Ukraine’s compliance, then, very arguably, no Russian recognition of the independence of the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk would have been forthcoming and there would have been no Russian military response. But France and Germany did not stand up for their roles as guarantors of the Minsk Agreements.

Consequently, for all these politicians to contradict their previous insouciance and suddenly get off their posteriors and pose as virtuous anti-war types standing up for Ukraine is nigh impossible to swallow. Given that the historical evidence belies the integrity of this Stand up for Ukraine bunch, they ought better to have striven for some consistency and remained seated.

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Kim Petersen is a scuba diver, independent writer, and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Kim Petersen

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Pakistan: Politics of Deception and Betrayal

April 11th, 2022 by Mahboob A. Khawaja

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Politics of the Few Criminals waits for Dark Future

The lingering suspicion unfolds a reasoned impression that Imran Khan – the hurriedly ousted PM’s failure is the net success of the nine skeleton grouped parties – “Democratic Front.” This Front is not formed by the people but by the few discontented figures eager to grab political power by any means. It would be illogical to describe the opposition as democratic as so many of them are listed indicted criminals, thugs, killers and failed politicians of the recent past. The current political chaos does not signal any ingenious mechanism of rational perception to appreciate the necessity of political change engineered by the few against many – the masses of Pakistan.

There is stunning embarrassed silence as to why the army General would become part of violent assumption for change and plague the extravagant idea of leadership change in the country. The so called “Democratic Front” does not appear to have any rational agenda for the present or futuristic socio-economic and political challenges and hard times facing the besieged nation. Most Pakistani wonder as to who unleashed the unwarranted and sudden political change to appease the few and to undermine the stability of the country? Was it a military sponsored coup d’état against an elected civilian governance?

Imran Khan – a new generation sportsman (Tehreek-e-Insaf) “Movement for Justice”, with moral and intellectual integrity had many weaknesses and strength but unlike the opposition leaders, he has no criminal past, he did not rob any banks nor killed any fellow citizens and did not loot any public treasury to buy palaces in UK, France, Dubai and elsewhere. Is Pakistani politics reserved for the thugs, criminals and killers and not for any intelligent proactive person standing for a fair and just society to be evolved in a systematic manner?

A rational skeptic in an irrational Pakistani political culture would imagine wide range of gulf between opinions of the few and truth of the majority. Pakistani politics is infested with corruption from top to bottom and those in the governance lost sense of rationality to distinguish between right and wrong.

This means, the nation will pay with pains, tormenting worries and insane rages of the few egomaniac and perverted rulers who could not think right or lead the nation – the political gangsters and the laughing stalk of the wounded nation and perpetrators of violence and the typical “Right Men” syndrome in its most naked form. For several decades, Pakistan’s capacity for change has been badly fractured and its moral, intellectual and political consciousness and values derailed and undermined by the few. As this author noted in “Pakistan: More Things Change, More Remain the Same” (MMN, USA, 2013), there are three major contending forces escalating conflicts to degenerate the future and cripple the freedom and integrity of Pakistan:

(1) the Generals, who have ruled the country for almost four decades and are not willing to relinquish their own strategic- political  powerhouse, militarization of the nation;

(2) Feudal landlords transformed politicians, the systematic by-products of the military Generals are the selected few families – Bhutoos- Zardaris, Sharifs and Chaudris of Gujarat acting as accomplice to support the military-based indoctrination as and when required for all seasons;

(3) People, the besieged masses of Pakistan – the net participatory victims and reactionaries to all of the tragedies for over fifty years

To Comprehend the Prevalent Political Reality:  USAID – A Game Changer

The current chaotic politics deserves critical understanding of the prevalent reality. The scenario of “foreign interference” according to Imran Khan is an irrational excuse. Khan knew well how Pakistan politicians are corrupt and enjoin a history of selling the national interest.

America is a big game player in Pakistan and its security apparatus.  Two of the nation’s former Prime Ministers (Moeen Qurashi and Shaukat Aziz) were appointed by the IMF- US dominated Bank. The aid gimmick has kept Pakistan interdependent on the policy making of the US administration and a nation being viewed more liability than an asset to the American geo-political interests in that region.

The US leaders allege Pakistani rulers (civilians and military) as “double dealers” paid, bribed but act contrary to the American dictates. The imagery that floats across the globe that Pakistani Generals and politicians are in the paid US basket and survive on its active support to rule Pakistan.  The NYTimes May 18, 2008 headline reads: “Pakistani Generals are paid to do the job.” That job was war in Afghanistan was under General Musharraf. The beggar nation that continues to be living at the mercy of the so called US aid money and foods. All that can go wrong have gone wrong with the system of Pakistani governance. Every one selling others, every one making cash dollars by trading-in the interests of the nation. It is business “as usual” and nobody seems to raise any eyebrows anymore in a culture of nuisance, filthy corruption, and non-Islamic governance claiming to be Islamic Republic of Pakistan.  Nobody knows where Islam exists or is operative within Pakistan.

Khan should have known his strength and weaknesses in aligning his relationship with the MQM- Mohajar Qaumi Movement. He should have faced the “no confidence” move in the Assembly with courage and confidence and make navigational change for the best of Pakistan. There are no ‘Mohajar” (refugees) in Pakistan, this is just a political gimmick being used to deceive the masses. It is a hilarious impersonation that the opposition Democratic Front could do anything good for the people. They have enriched record of robbing the nation in all mainstreams of life. They violated all norms of rational thoughts, honesty and expectations- what else could be expected from them now?

At the edge of reason, Khan should have listed educated and intelligent people of new generation to foster any change in the country. In 2019, this author offered Khan a logical plan for sustainable change (“Pakistan: How to change political culture of corruption and rebuild the future.” Media Monitors Network, USA, 2019). Most of his associates were feudal lords, uneducated and former loyalists of the current political opposition parties. None of them had any knowledge or experience in critical thinking, strategic planning and change or future-making profile. Why did Khan waste almost four years in fantasy of New Pakistan and failed to live up to his imagination. He was supposed to have a Plan for Change.

Pakistani political culture has its psychology of self-interest and trading-in their individualistic interest in exchange for national interest. Pakistan’s system of law and justice is futile and questionable as most verdicts are influenced by political motivation. If the Constitution was a reference point, the Supreme Court according to the clause 6, should have stayed out of this political chaos and not interfered and ask the politicians to work out political remedies within the National Assembly. Not, so, perhaps dictates came from above and many powerful establishments to oust Imran Khan. He should have stopped the blame game and face the ‘no confidence vote’ with leadership courage. Will Khan learn from the failure of his mission, ideals and expectations and lead a movement for rational and sustainable political change in Pakistan? Will he make a navigational change to ensure a true system of law and justice in the country? Will he evolve a fair and honest Assembly of people representing the nation?

The Enemies are WITHIN

Pakistan’s worst enemies are those who are unable to listen to voices of reason and peaceful activism for political change. The ruling elite and the people live in a conflicting time zone being unable to understand the meaning and essence of the Pakistan’s Freedom Movement. Pakistan faces multiple chronic problems which could undermine its future. To all concerned and thinking Pakistanis, the country needs a Navigational Change or we could end up losing our national freedom.

What is the cure to the current problems? There is no magic pill to deal with all critical situations except a comprehensive new systematic approach for ‘Anew Pakistan.’ Few decades earlier, in “Pakistan: Enigma of Change”(Media Monitor Network, USA) and “Revisiting Pakistan Enigma of Change”, this author offered proactive vision for planned political change to evolve new institutions and new-age educated leadership for a sustainable future. For too long, the masses have experienced tormenting pains and political cruelty. Shahbaz Sharif- the current opposition leader and his brother Mian Nawaz Sharif should have been tried in a court of law for the killings of 14 civilians and injuring 80 peaceful activists at Minhaj al Quran Academy Lahore and stolen wealth.

The current Acting speaker of the Assembly stated “I wish Mian Nawaz Sharif was here.” Nawaz Sharif was tried on various crimes and indicted and has no future in Pakistan. You may find it relevant to see: “Pakistan- Leaders or Criminals” Uncommon Thought Journal, 2014).

It will provide a logical breathing space for a planned and workable remedy to a highly critical political crisis and to enhance a sustainable Change goal. A new Government of National Unity should be formed under a non-partisan and nonpolitical leader of moral and intellectual integrity for a period of two years; a New Constitution for a Presidential form of government should be framed with new public institutions under leadership of new generation of educated people; and then a new election could give meaning and clarity to the purpose of democracy and to transform the ideals of a progressive legitimate functional democracy.

The Need is desperate for the Pakistani nation to think critically and see the Mirror and stand firm in raising voices of reason for accountability and political change. The people must ponder at past misconceptions and errors of judgments and to bring 21st century’s educated, proactive and intelligent young people into political leadership role and to safeguard the national interest, freedom of the nation and its future.

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 12/2019.

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Verehrte Leser!

Heute möchte ich Sie gerne mit dem deutschen Journalisten Rolf Winter und seinen Büchern bekannt machen beziehungsweise Sie an ihn erinnern. Seine bereits Ende der 1980er- und Anfang der 1990er-Jahre erschienenen Publikationen, die großes Aufsehen erregten und heftige Kontroversen auslösten, sind gerade heute wieder von großer Popularität und wert, (nochmals) gelesen zu werden. Seine erste Reportage über die Vereinigten Staaten erarbeitete Winter (1927-2005) im Jahr 1963, sein erstes Amerika-Buch schrieb er 1972. Von 1967 bis 1970 lebte er in New York City. Später führten ihn Reisen häufig in die Vereinigten Staaten zurück.

Winter: „AMI GO HOME. Plädoyer für den Abschied von einem gewalttätigen Land“

Für dieses Buch, das 1989 in Hamburg erschien, verwendete der Autor ausschließlich amerikanische Quellen und zitierte in ihrer Kompetenz unanfechtbare amerikanische Gelehrte. Winter verweist insbesondere auf die verhängnisvolle Neigung der Nordamerikaner zur Gewalt, die – verbunden mit ihrer Überzeugung, in „God’s own country“ zu leben und einen Weltordnungsauftrag zu haben – eine Trennung Europas von den Vereinigten Staaten begründet (1).

Winter: „Die amerikanische Zumutung“

Zwei Jahre später veröffentlichte Winter ein weiteres Buch: „Die amerikanische Zumutung. Plädoyers gegen das Land des real existierenden Kapitalismus“ (2). Darin vertieft der Autor seine scharfsichtige Analyse über das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten, das seiner Ansicht nach in einer tiefen Krise steckt und nicht länger als Vorbild für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland gelten könne. Bereits vor 40 Jahren konstatiert Winter:

„Bemerkenswert ist die ständig wachsende Bereitschaft der Welt, sich mit der amerikanischen Unerträglichkeit abzufinden, sie, sozusagen, zu ignorieren oder so zu tun, als hätte es mit ihr doch ihre Ordnung.“ (3)

Winter: „Der amerikanische Alptraum. Vom Niedergang der Neuen Welt“

In seinem dritten Buch fungiert Winter als Herausgeber (4). Auf der Rückseite des Buchdeckels des bereits 1992 erschienenen Buches heißt es:

„Die von dem Amerika-Kenner Rolf Winter zusammengestellte Anthologie mit Beiträgen namhafter Experten beinhaltet aktuelle Bestandsaufnahmen und persönliche Erfahrungsberichte über eine krisengeschüttelte Nation, deren Probleme zur Bedrohung für die gesamte westliche Welt werden.“

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische- und Medien-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

Noten 

(1) Siehe Text auf Schutzumschlag, Innenseite

(2) Winter, R. (1990). Die amerikanische Zumutung. München

(3) Buchdeckel, Rückseite

(4) Winter, R. (1992). Der amerikanische Alptraum. Vom Niedergang der Neuen Welt. München

 

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America’s Fatal Tendency Towards Violence: Rolf Winter

April 11th, 2022 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

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Today I would like to introduce you to the German journalist Rolf Winter and his books, or rather remind you of him. His publications, which appeared at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s and caused a great stir and heated controversy, are very popular again today and are worth reading (again). Winter (1927-2005) wrote his first reportage on the United States in 1963, his first book on America in 1972, and lived in New York City from 1967 to 1970. Later, travels frequently took him back to the United States.

Winter: “AMI GO HOME. A Plaidoyer to Say Goodbye to a Violent Country.”

For this book, published in Hamburg in 1989, the author used exclusively American sources and quoted American scholars whose competence was unimpeachable. Winter refers in particular to the North Americans’ fatal tendency towards violence, which – combined with their conviction that they live in “God’s own country” and have a mission of world order – justifies a separation of Europe from the United States (1).

Winter: “The American Imposition”

Two years later, Winter published another book: “The American Imposition. Pleas against the Land of Real Existing Capitalism.” (2). In it, the author deepens his perceptive analysis of the land of unlimited opportunity, which in his view is in a deep crisis and can no longer be considered a model for the Federal Republic of Germany. Already 40 years ago, Winter states:

“What is remarkable is the ever-growing readiness of the world to come to terms with American intolerability, to ignore it, so to speak, or to pretend that it is all right with it after all.” (3)

Winter: “The American Nightmare. On the Decline of the New World”

In his third book, Winter acts as editor (4). The back cover of the book, which was already published in 1992, states:

“The anthology compiled by Rolf Winter, a connoisseur of America, with contributions by renowned experts, contains up-to-date stocktaking and personal accounts of experiences about a nation in crisis, whose problems are becoming a threat to the entire Western world.”

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) See text on dust jacket, inside cover.

(2) Winter, R. (1990). The American imposition. Munich

(3) Book cover, back cover

(4) Winter, R. (1992). The American Nightmare. On the decline of the New World. Munich

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Meanwhile, PDF versions are still available for purchase.

Thank you for your valuable support.

***

Digital Tyranny: The EU Digital Covid Vaccine Certificate Framework

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 11, 2022

The Memorandum outlined by the EU (scroll down for complete text) points to the derogation of fundamental human rights entrenched in the adoption of the EU Digital COVID Certificate Framework.

Shock Videos: Thousands of COVID Locked Down Shanghai Residents Scream From Their Apartment Buildings

By Arthur Topham, April 10, 2022

Videos circulating on social media show an eerie cityscape at night filled with the anguished screams of residents forcibly quarantined in their apartment buildings for over a week.

Manufactured Crisis: CIA Trained the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Has Chosen Ukraine as Birthplace of New “Global White Supremacist” Terror Threat

By Whitney Webb, April 10, 2022

As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to escalate and dominate the world’s attention, the increasing evidence that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is and has been working to create and arm an insurgency in the country has received considerably little attention considering its likely consequences.

Torture Killed Every Single Avenue for 9/11 Terror Prosecution

By John Kiriakou, April 10, 2022

The CIA’s torture program was born out of failure, frustration, and hubris. The September 11 attacks were arguably the worst intelligence failure in American history, and the rule of law was about to go out the window. What also went out the window was any hope of cooperation with the FBI on terrorism-related legal matters.

How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

By Dustin Broadbery, April 10, 2022

The CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Preventing China’s Rise: The “America COMPETES Act of 2022” Risks Turning Taiwan into the Next Front Line

By Keith Lamb, April 10, 2022

The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science (COMPETES) Act of 2022 only needs to be passed by the President and it will become law. The bill sounds innocuous but the contents of it are not.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Was Created by US Policies. “The WEF together with BlackRock, has infiltrated the Government”

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 09, 2022

WEF operates via fearmongering — about disease and environmental catastrophes, for starters. When the population is controlled by fear, it welcomes authoritarian “protections” like increased surveillance and digital identity systems, introduced under the guise of safety, but which ultimately remove personal autonomy and freedom.

Video: The WEF’s “Great Reset: Is Klaus Schwab the Most Dangerous Man in the World?

By AwakenWithJP, April 09, 2022

Klaus Schwab is bringing you the Great Reset. And not only will it be great, it’ll be a fantastic reset! The folks at the World Economic Forum are busy helping protect you from climate change and disease. Yet some people still ask, is Klaus Schwab the most dangerous man in the World? Get the full picture along with everything they DON’T want you to know in this video!

“Defending Democracy” Through Fascist Nationalism and Suicidal Military Spending? No, Thanks.

By Enzo Pellegrin, April 09, 2022

The offensive against the Ukrainian government has been carried out by ultranationalist and paramilitary formations with methods that aimed at the annihilation of an ethnic and/or cultural expression (Russian and Russian-speaking), with a massacre that, according to the most conservative estimates (Report of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) concerns at least 3404 civilians (without “part”, because civilians are considered as such) and 6500 separatist insurgents.

Suddenly, Peak Oil and Gas! The Cataclysmic Result of Sanctions against Russia

By Michael Welch and David Hughes, April 09, 2022

Right now, the European Union pays the equivalent of $850 million every day for natural gas and oil over to the state run by the current mastermind of the moment Vladimir Putin. Logically, it seems like banning fuel from the country would both prop up the EU’s role in solidarity with their Ukrainian friends and possibly win an award for super-duper environmental champions on the COP27 stage!

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Once again thousands have died, communities have been terrorized and destroyed, and as usual it’s somebody else’s fault. But Karma may be approaching. 

It bears reflection that a long list of countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran – none of which ever attacked or threatened the US or Europe in any way – have all been ruthlessly sanctioned while the US has never been sanctioned for flagrant attacks on Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and innumerable “color revolutions” and regime overthrows by the CIA, JSOC et al, including Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Congo and Operation Condor in South America, all in flagrant violation of the UN Charter.  Sanctions are a modern update of siege warfare and as such violate the UN Charter prohibition of “the threat or use of force against the territorial sovereignty or political independence of any state.”  This fundamental treaty document, we should be ashamed to say, was drafted in San Francisco, and its abrogation violates Article VI of the U.S. Constitution that declares our treaties “the supreme law of the land.”  Thus, America, we are a nation of serial dishonor and must look in the mirror before frowning upon any aggression abroad.  The current one in particular.

Some Ukrainians in WWII fought with the Nazis, collaborated in the regional Holocaust, and afterwards have been maintained and supported by the CIA initially as part of Operation Gladio.  The Bush-Gorbachev agreement in 1991 permitting reunification of Germany upon assurance that NATO would move no closer to Russia has been repeatedly violated by the West, admitting three new states in 1999 and another seven in 2004, with NATO announcing its intention in 2008 to bring in both Georgia and Ukraine right up to Russia’s borders. This would be comparable to Russian or Chinese bases in Quebec or Baja California, and a vastly greater existential  threat to Russia than the Cuban Missile Crisis was to us. Russia swatted down Georgia’s attempted invasion through South Ossetia later that year.

In 2014 US-backed neo-Nazis overthrew the elected East-West neutral Yanukovich Ukrainian gov’t at a cost of $5 billion over about a decade as publicly boasted by arch-neocon Victoria Nuland, including installation of her hand-picked, pro-Western successor as she distributed cookies to Nazis in the Maidan.  This exposes Russia’s 1200-mile border with Ukraine to unrestrained NATO border threats and opened a gold-rush for Ukrainian resources including gold prospector Hunter Biden.  Putin has been watching this with alarm as neo-Nazi paramilitary units (e.g., Right Sector, Azov Battalion) have been shelling, terrorizing and ethnic-cleansing Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian nationals in the Donbass for 8 years, killing at least 14,000 to date.  Having lost an estimated 27 million Russian citizens to the Nazis while winning WWII in Europe, how must Russians feel about seeing Nazis again at their doorstep flying swastika-bearing battle flags?

Through a growing alliance with China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and extensive bilateral trade in their own currencies, Putin finally feels strong enough to put a stop to it.  China immediately inked a contract for massive grain purchases from Russia, and can buy all the oil Russia wants to sell supplied cheaply through pipelines.  SCO member India has declined to censure Russia.  Russia has announced the ruble is now gold-based (as had Ghadafi for an African development bank to wrest control of Africa from the IMF but without the muscle to protect his country from US/NATO fury).  Iran was provisionally accepted into the SCO last September, which will close the geographic circle giving all of Eurasia to the SCO – the crown jewel of Brzezinski’s global chessboard – excepting Afghanistan in the middle, which was one of several motives for our illegal invasion and occupation. It may now be free to join the club which represents 40% of the world’s population with a land mass dwarfing the North Atlantic imperium.  The petrodollar is now facing serious threat as the world’s reserve currency.

The two Donbass states requested annexation by Russia along with Crimea, which Putin declined.  As late Princeton and NYU Russian scholar Stephen Cohen observed, Putin is not interested in more pensions to pay.  War is horrible, but this didn’t just begin with Russian invasion. It began 8 years ago following the Nuland-orchestrated coup with violent and sadistic Neonazi attacks against the Donbass (see 2016 French documentary film, “Donbass”). Their elimination is one of Putin’s primary objectives along with NATO guarantees that Ukraine will never join NATO and will resume the Minsk accords, both of which the Trump and Biden administrations have steadfastly refused.

The US/NATO cabal has forced this on Russia, with the more realistic DOD now trying to put brakes on the fanatic neoconservative Blinken-Nuland State Dept. Strong hints of a false flag bioweapons attack blamed on Russia may be looming to justify NATO intervention, which would produce a precariously dangerous situation. To deter the worst outcome, Americans must first be honest and knowledgeable about who has brought this about.  As Putin stated in his speech, we have backed him into a corner.  And as Sun Tzu advised in “The Art of War,” always leave the enemy a path of escape or they’ll bite and claw you to the bitter, bloody death.

East and West are poised for divorce and resumption of the Cold War, and I doubt the West will come out ahead this time.

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Jack Dresser, Ph.D. is a retired psychologist and NIH-funded research scientist. National vice-chair, Veterans for Peace working group on Palestine and the Middle East. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Note the identical arithmetic used by Stoltenberg and Georgia’s interior minister.

Russia controls part of Georgian territory, and we will look into how we can provide more support – Jens Stoltenberg

By Rustavi2
March 7, 2022

Excerpt from the article below

Russia controls part of Georgian territory, and we will look into how we can provide more support. Such a statement made today NATO Secretary General ahead of the meeting of NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs on 6 and 7 April 2022.

“I believe that one of the lessons we all should learn from the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, is that it is important…to provide support to close and highly valued partners like Georgia. It”s better to support them sooner than later. And therefore, one of the issues that will be discussed at the Foreign Ministerial meeting, today and tomorrow, is how can we step up support for other partners which are under Russian pressure and of course, Georgia is one of them. Russia controls part of Georgian territory, and we will look into how we can provide more support both when it comes to everything from cyber to secure communications, capacity building, and other ways to strengthen Georgia in resisting the pressure from Russia. NATO’s door remains open.

*

NATO Sec Gen: Allies agree to help partners, including Georgia, to strengthen resilience, ability to defend themselves

By Agenda.ge
April 7, 2022

NATO allies have agreed to help partners, including Georgia, in strengthening their resilience and shoring up their ability to defend themselves, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a briefing on Thursday following a meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers.

Stoltenberg said NATO could increase support for the country through the NATO-Georgia Substantial Package, including “in areas like situational awareness, secure communications and cyber.”

He also spoke about the meeting with the Georgian Foreign Minister, pointing out “it is important to have close contacts with Georgia.”

“That demonstrates the strength and importance of partnership between Georgia and NATO. We also work on how further to strengthen our partnership. We look into how we can further strengthen both political and practical cooperation and partnership with Georgia,” Stoltenberg concluded.

*

Georgian, Turkish interior ministers discuss law enforcement cooperation, Ukraine war

By Agenda.ge
April 7, 2022

Excerpt from the article below

Cooperation in the field of law enforcement, the importance of further deepening relations between Georgian and Turkish agencies, and the ongoing war in Ukraine were in the focus of a meeting between Vakhtang Gomelauri, the Georgian Interior Minister, and his Turkish counterpart Suleyman Soylu in Georgia on Thursday.

Soylu reaffirmed strong support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, for which Gomelauri expressed his gratitude, noting “the support is crucial for Georgia as 20 percent of the country is occupied by Russia.”

*

Irakli Garibashvili meets Minister of Internal Affairs of Turkey

By Rustavi2
March 7, 2022

Excerpt from the article below

Irakli Garibashvili, Prime Minister of Georgia met Süleyman Soylu, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Turkey today.

Meeting was focused on the friendly and partnerly relations existing between the two nations. It was noted that since regaining independence, Georgia has regarded Turkey as the most reliable friend. Strategic partnership between Georgia and Republic of Turkey is at a high level and it is important to further advance the current cooperation.

…Discussion was also devoted to the current security environment in the region of South Caucasus, impact of the military activities in Ukraine….

The Head of Government of Georgia expressed his gratitude to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Turkey for the unwavering support of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and Euro-Atlantic aspirations of Georgia.

*

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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This video taken yesterday in Shanghai, China, by the father of a close friend of mine. She verified its authenticity: People screaming out of their windows after a week of total lockdown, no leaving your apartment for any reason.  

Videos circulating on social media show an eerie cityscape at night filled with the anguished screams of residents forcibly quarantined in their apartment buildings for over a week.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1512600420610363394

Haunting video out of Shanghai shows thousands of frustrated residents screaming from apartment buildings after being locked down again following another alleged COVID-19 outbreak.

“The translation she gave me:

‘It’s Shanghai, everyone is screaming, started with a couple now everyone is screaming, after a week of lockdown, something is going to happen, no one knows when this is going to end.’ He says they can’t even step outside their apartments.”

Another dystopian video shows a drone hovering around the buildings with a prerecorded message discouraging residents from crying for help: “Please comply with COVID restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1511558828802068481    https://m.weibo.cn/status/4755028135383701#&video

Other videos show the people of Shanghai beginning to openly defy the Chinese Communist Party’s lockdowns as they reach their breaking point.

This is what the CCP is doing to the 26 million people of Shanghai

Do not look away:  https://twitter.com/i/status/1512855678741798923

The people of Shanghai are beginning to fight back against the CCP’s terror lockdowns:


https://twitter.com/i/status/1512856082359664640

NEW – Shanghai’s inhuman “zero-COVID” lockdown leaves residents desperate for food and medicines.

Authorities now say they will ease restrictions after another mass test in China’s most populous city.


https://twitter.com/i/status/1512787344570597377 

 


The Chinese Communist Party extended its citywide “zero tolerance” lockdown for 26 million residents in Shanghai earlier this week after thousands of new COVID cases were detected in the city.

“The city will continue to implement seal and control management and strictly implement ‘staying at home,’ except for medical treatment,” the city wrote in its official WeChat account.

The People’s Liberation Army has deployed 2,000 medical personnel to Shanghai with an additional 38,000 medical workers to carry out a mass mitigation effort to test all 26 million city residents for COVID.

Authorities had initially locked down Shanghai, China’s largest city, on March 28 amid a surge of mostly asymptomatic COVID cases.

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***

The eruption of war between Russia and Ukraine appears to have given the CIA the pretext to launch a long-planned insurgency in the country, one poised to spread far beyond Ukraine’s borders with major implications for Biden’s “War on Domestic Terror”

As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to escalate and dominate the world’s attention, the increasing evidence that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is and has been working to create and arm an insurgency in the country has received considerably little attention considering its likely consequences.

This is particularly true given that former CIA officials and a former Secretary of State are now openly saying that the CIA is following the “models” of past CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria for its plans in Ukraine. Given that those countries have been ravaged by war as a direct result of those insurgencies, this bodes poorly for Ukraine.

Yet, this insurgency is poised to have consequences that reach far beyond Ukraine. It increasingly appears that the CIA sees the insurgency it is creating as more than an opportunity to take its hybrid war against Russia ever closer to its borders. As this report will show, it appears the CIA is determined to manifest a prophecy propagated by its own ranks over the past two years.

This prediction from former and current intelligence officials dates from at least early 2020 and holds that a “transnational white supremacist network” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of Covid-19 recedes.

Per these “predictions”, this global network of white supremacists – allegedly with a group linked to the conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine at its core – is to become the new Islamic State-style threat and will undoubtedly be used as the pretext to launch the still-dormant infrastructure set up last year by the US government under President Biden for an Orwellian “War on Domestic Terror.”

Given that this CIA-driven effort to build an insurgency in Ukraine began as far back as 2015 and that the groups it has trained (and continues to train) include those with overt Neo-Nazi connections, it seems that this “coming Ukrainian insurgency,” as it has been recently called, is already here.

In that context, we are left with the unnerving possibility that this latest escalation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has merely served as the opening act for the newest iteration of the seemingly endless “War on Terror.”

Insurgency Rising

Soon after Russia began military operations in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs – the media arm of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – published an article entitled “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency.”

The piece was authored by Douglas London, a self-described “retired Russian-speaking CIA operations officer who served in Central Asia and managed agency counterinsurgency operations.” He asserted in the article that “Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that will spread across multiple borders” with the potential to create “widening unrest that could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit.”

Other notable statements made by London include his assertion that “the United States will invariably be a major and essential source of backing for a Ukrainian insurgency.”

He also states that “As the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home.”

London explicitly refers to models for this apparently imminent Ukrainian insurgency as the CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the “moderate rebels” in Syria from 2011 to the present.

London isn’t alone in promoting these past CIA-backed insurgencies as a model for “covert” US aid to Ukraine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose State Department helped to create the “moderate rebel” insurgency in Syria and oversaw the US and NATO-backed destruction of Libya, appeared on MSNBC on February 28th to say essentially the same.

In her interview, Clinton cited the CIA-backed insurgency in Afghanistan as “the model that people [in the US government] are now looking toward” with respect to the situation in Ukraine. She also references the insurgency in Syria in similar fashion in the same interview. It is worth noting that Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff when she was Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, is now Biden’s National Security Adviser.

The Afghanistan insurgency, initially backed by the US and CIA beginning in the late 1970s under the name Operation Cyclone, subsequently spawned the US empire’s supposedly mortal enemies – the Taliban and Al Qaeda – who would go on to fuel the post-9/11 “War on Terror.”

The US’ campaign against the descendants of the insurgency it had once backed resulted in horrific destruction in Afghanistan and a litany of dead and war crimes, as well as the longest (and thus most expensive) war and occupation in American military history. It also resulted in the bombings and destruction of several other countries along with the whittling down of civil liberties domestically.

Similarly, in Syria, the US and CIA’s backing of “moderate rebels” was and remains incredibly destructive to the country it supposedly wants to merely “liberate” from the rule of Bashar al-Assad. The US military continues to occupy critical areas of that country.

With these openly touted as “models” for the “coming Ukraine insurgency,” what is to become of Ukraine, then?

If the history of CIA-backed insurgencies is any indicator, it heralds significantly more destruction and more suffering for its people than the current Russian military campaign.

Ukraine will become a failed state and a killing field. Those in the West cheering on their governments’ support for the Ukrainian side of the conflict would do well to realize this, particularly in the United States, as it will only lead to the escalation of yet another deadly proxy war.

However, in addition to the above, we must also consider the very unsettling reality that this Ukrainian insurgency began to be formed by the CIA at least several months, if not several years, prior to Russia’s currently ongoing military campaign in Ukraine. Yahoo! News reported in January that the CIA has been overseeing a covert training program for Ukrainian intelligence operatives and special ops forces since 2015.

Their report explicitly quotes one former CIA official with knowledge of the program as saying that the CIA has been “training an insurgency” and has been conducting this training at an undisclosed US military base. This training of Ukrainian “insurgents” was supported by the Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations, with the latter two expanding its operations.

While the CIA denied to Yahoo! that it was training an insurgency, a New York Times report also published in January stated that the US is considering support for an insurgency in Ukraine if Russia invades.

Given that the CIA, at that time and prior to this year, has been warning of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine up until the current escalation of hostilities took place, it is worth asking if the US government and the CIA helped “pull the trigger” by intentionally crossing Russia’s “red lines” with respect to NATO encroachment in Ukraine and post-2014 Ukraine’s acquisition of nuclear weapons when it became clear that the CIA’s repeated predictions about an “imminent” invasion failed to materialize.

Russia’s red lines with Ukraine have been stated clearly – and violated repeatedly by the US – for years. Notably, the US’ efforts to provide lethal aid to Ukraine have coincided with the winding down of its lethal support to Syrian “rebels”, suggesting that the US war and intelligence apparatus has long seen Ukraine as the “next” on its list of proxy wars.

However, more recently, the CIA’s warnings of an imminent invasion of Ukraine were scoffed at, not only by many American analysts, but also apparently by both the Russian and Ukrainian governments themselves.

It is alleged that this all changed, at least from the Russian perspective, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim at the Munich Security Conference that his government would seek to make Ukraine a nuclear power in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Surely, Zelensky and his supporters in Washington DC and Langley, Virginia would have known that such an extreme claim from Zelensky would elicit a response from Russia.

U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com

One need only consider the reverberations that follow any country announcing its intentions to become a nuclear power on the world stage. Russian leadership has since made the case that they felt compelled to act militarily after Ukraine, which has been regularly attacking separatists along its border with Russia with embedded paramilitary units that have called for the “extermination” of ethnic Russians who live in those regions, announced plans to acquire nukes.

In addition, given Ukraine’s growing ties to NATO and its desire to integrate itself into that alliance, these theoretical nuclear weapons would be NATO-controlled nukes on Russia’s border. Zelensky, the US, and their other allied parties surely knew that this intention, particularly its admission in public, would push an already tense situation to the next level.

Of course, this statement from Zelensky followed a US-led airlift of weapons to Ukraine early last month, weeks before the current Russian military campaign. US lethal aid to Ukraine has previously been described as being tantamount to a “declaration of war” on Russia by the US, per members of Russia’s Ministry of Defense as far back as 2017.

It is worth considering that these red lines and the potential to cross them was discussed by Zelensky and representatives of Ukraine’s intelligence services when they met with the head of the CIA, William Burns, in January. The CIA, at that time, was already claiming a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Given the events described above, could it be possible that the CIA wanted to bring about the insurgency they have been preparing for, potentially since 2015?

Would they have done so by pushing their allies in Ukraine’s government to manifest the conditions necessary to begin that insurgency, i.e. prompting them to cross Russia’s “red lines” to elicit the reaction needed to launch a pre-planned insurgency? With the CIA also training Ukraine’s intelligence operatives for nearly seven years, the possibility is certainly one to consider.

If this theory is more than plausible and close to the truth of how we got here, we are left with more questions, mainly – Why would the CIA look to launch this insurgency in Ukraine and why now? The apparent answer may surprise you.

Manufacturing the Narrative and the Threat

In May 2020, Politico published an article entitled “Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next.”

The article was written by Garrett Graff, former editor of Politico, a professor at Georgetown’s Journalism and Public Relations program, and director of cyber initiatives at The Aspen Institute – a “non-partisan” think tank funded largely by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Carnegie Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Graff’s introduction to the piece states the following:

Every year, the intelligence community releases the Worldwide Threat Assessment — a distillation of worrisome global trends, risks, problem spots and emerging perils.

But this year, the public hearing on the assessment, usually held in January or February, was canceled, evidently because intelligence leaders, who usually testify in a rare open hearing together, were worried their comments would aggravate President Donald Trump. And the government has not yet publicly released a 2020 threat report.”

In 2020, the CIA did not release a “worldwide” threat assessment for the first time since it first began annually releasing them decades ago. This article published by Politico was intended by Graff to serve as a “Domestic Threat Assessment” in the absence of the CIA’s Worldwide Threat Assessment and is styled as a “list of the most significant events that might impact the United States” in the short, medium and long terms.

Graff created this Threat Assessment document after interviewing “more than a dozen thought leaders,” many of whom were “current and former national security and intelligence officials.” A few months later, the Department of Homeland Security, for the first time since its creation in 2003, would publish its own “Homeland” Threat Assessment in October of that year.

As I noted at the time, this signalled a major shift within the US national security/intelligence apparatus away from “foreign terror”, its ostensible focus since 9/11, to “domestic terror.”

Just months after this Homeland Threat Assessment was published, the war on domestic terror would be launched in the wake of the events of January 6th, which itself was apparently foreseen by then-DHS official Elizabeth Neumann.

In early 2020, Neumann had presciently stated:

“It feels like we are at the doorstep of another 9/11 — maybe not something that catastrophic in terms of the visual or the numbers — but that we can see it building, and we don’t quite know how to stop it.”

Indeed, when January 6th 2021 took place, no real effort was made by Capitol Police or other law enforcement officials present to stop the so-called “riot”, with plenty of footage from the event instead showing law enforcement waving the supposed “insurrectionists” into the Capitol building.

This, however, did not stop top politicians and national security officials from labelling January 6th as the “another 9/11” that Neumann had apparently predicted. Notably, the DHS’ first-ever Homeland Threat Assessment, Neumann’s warning, and the subsequent official narrative regarding the events of January 6th were all heavily focused on the threat of “white supremacist terror attacks” on the US homeland.

Returning to the May 2020 Politico article – Graff notes that many supposed pandemic “experts“, which – per Graff – includes Bill Gates and US intelligence officials James Clapper and Dan Coats, had “projected the spread of a novel virus and the economic impacts it would bring” as well as “details about the specific challenges” the US would face during the initial phase of the Covid-19 crisis. Graff then asks “What other catastrophes are coming that we aren’t planning for?”

According to the “thought leaders” he consulted for this piece, which included several current and former intelligence officials, the most immediate “near-term threat” likely to disrupt life in the US and beyond following Covid was “the Globalization of White Supremacy.” In discussing this imminent threat, Graff wrote:

“‘Terrorism’ today conjures images of ISIS fighters and suicide bombers. But if you ask national security officials about the top near-term terrorism threat on their radar, they almost universally point to the rising problem of white nationalist violence and the insidious way that groups that formerly existed locally have been knitting themselves together into a global web of white supremacism.

In recent weeks, the State Department — for the first time — formally designated a white supremacist organization, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a terrorist organization, in part because it’s trying to train and seed adherents around the globe, inspiring them to carry out terror attacks …” (emphasis added)

Graff then adds that

“There are serious — and explicit — warnings about this coming from U.S. government and foreign officials that eerily echo the warnings that came about for al Qaeda before 9/11.”

He then quotes FBI Director Christopher Wray as stating:

“It’s not just the ease and the speed with which these attacks can happen, but the connectivity that the attacks generate. One unstable, disaffected actor hunkered down, alone, in his mom’s basement in one corner of the country, getting further fired up by similar people half a world away. That increases the complexity of domestic terrorism cases we have in a way that is really challenging.”

This quote from Wray was first published in a piece Graff had written a month prior to publishing his Politico piece. The focus of that interview centered around domestic terrorism in the US, with extensive discussion about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the Russian Imperial Movement.

In that article, published in Wired, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, characterized that movement as

“a terrorist group that provides paramilitary-style training to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and it plays a prominent role in trying to rally like-minded Europeans and Americans into a common front against their perceived enemies.”

This Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM, advocates for the re-establishment of the pre-1917 Russian empire, which would exert influence over all territory inhabited by ethnic Russians. Their ideology is described as white supremacist, monarchist, ultra-nationalist, pro-Russian Orthodox, and anti-Semitic. They are not considered neo-Nazi, but have worked to build ties with other, far-right groups with neo-Nazi connections.

RIM was allegedly responsible for training a bomber whose acts resulted in no deaths in Sweden from 2016-2017. The bomber, Victor Melin, was not an active RIM member but was reportedly trained by them, and he conducted 2 of his 3 bombings with an individual completely unaffiliated with RIM. Melin was, however, a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement at the time.

A few years later, in April 2020, RIM became the first “white supremacist” group to be labeled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity (SDGT) by the US, despite not being tied to an act of terror since 2017 and despite those previous acts resulting in no deaths. The acts of terror cited as justification by then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were those perpetrated by Melin.

However, the Nordic Resistance Movement, of which Melin was an active member at the time of the bombings, did not receive the SDGT label, even though it is significantly larger in terms of membership and reach than RIM. The decision to label RIM this way was considered “unprecedented” at the time.

It has since been claimed that the group now numbers in the “several thousand” worldwide, though little publicly available evidence exists to support this statistic and that statistic notably only emerged roughly a month after the US terror designation and originated from a US-based institute. There are also no statistics available on the number of individuals they have allegedly trained via their paramilitary arm, known as the Imperial Legion.

Per the US government, RIM’s reach is global and extends to the US. However, its US ties are based on dubious allegations of a relationship with Atomwaffen Division’s Russian affiliate and a “personal relationship” with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally organizer Matthew Heimbach. However, this again is based on the allegations (not direct evidence) that Heimbach received funds from RIM.

Heimbach’s group, the Traditionalist Workers’ Party, has been inactive since 2018, two years before the US SDGT designation for RIM. It is also alleged that RIM offered to train other “Unite the Right” figures, though RIM and the “white supremacists” who supposedly received this offer deny the reports. Furthermore, there remains no evidence of any US citizen ever participating in paramilitary training with RIM.

This contradicts Nathan Sales’ April 2020 claim that RIM plays “a prominent role in trying to rally like-minded Europeans and Americans into a common front against their perceived enemies.” Despite the lack of evidence left-leaning, non-partisan, and right-leaning think tanks have continued to use RIM as proof of a “large, interconnected, transnational network” of violent white supremacists.

It seems odd that a group that is apparently small and very limited in terms of its presence in the US and that is responsible for no deadly terror attacks would earn the honor of becoming the first US-designed, white supremacist Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity. This is especially true when the acts cited as justification for the SDGT designation were committed by a member of a different, larger group, a group that did not receive this designation at the time or in the years since.

However, in the context of current events in Ukraine, the 2020 designation of RIM begins to make more sense, at least from the US national security perspective.

RIM is alleged to support separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014 and has been described by the US as “anti-Ukrainian.” These regions are at the center of the current conflict and its most recent escalation last month.

The US government and pro-Western think tanks list RIM’s “first attack” as its involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. According to Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the number of fighters sent by or trained by RIM in Eastern Ukraine is unknown, though one report states RIM sent “groups of five to six fighters” from Russia to Eastern Ukraine in mid-June 2014.

RIM’s paramilitary arm, the Imperial Legion, has not been active in Ukraine since January 2016. However, some reports have asserted that “some individuals opted to stay and continue fighting.” Claims have also been made in more recent years that RIM members have fought in the Syrian conflict and in Libya on the side of General Haftar.

Following this “first attack,” Stanford’s CISAC claims that, from 2015 to 2020, they have been “building a transnational network,” though as previously noted – their success in that endeavor is based on reports of dubious authenticity and/or significance, particularly in the United States.

However, their alleged role on the side of separatists in the Donbass has been used by US think tanks to argue that RIM advances Moscow’s policy goals, which they say include “seeking to fuel white supremacist extremism in Europe and the United States.”

Some think tanks in the US, like Just Security, have used RIM to argue that Russia’s government plays a major role in “transnational white supremacy” due to “a mutual affection between Western white supremacists and the Russian government.” They claim that because Russia “tolerates” RIM’s presence domestically, “the Kremlin facilitates the growth of right-wing extremism in Europe and the United States that exacerbates threats to the stability of democratic governments.”

However, what Just Security fails to mention is that RIM has vocally opposed and protested against Putin’s government, has been labeled an extremist group by the Russian government and has even had its offices raided by Russian police because of their opposition to Putin’s leadership.

Notably, Just Security’s advisors included former CIA deputy director and Event 201 participant, Avril Haines as well as former deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Jake Sullivan. Haines and Sullivan now serve as Biden’s Director of National Intelligence (i.e. the top intelligence official in the country) and Biden’s National Security adviser, respectively.

The Dawn of “Domestic Terror”

As a result of the current escalation of events in Ukraine, it appears inevitable that the effort to use RIM to paint Russia as a driving force behind “transnational white supremacism” are due to resurface. This effort appears to have as one of its goals the minimization of the role that neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, the Neo-Nazi paramilitary unit embedded within Ukraine’s National Guard, are actively playing in the current hostilities.

In January of this year, Jacobin published an article about the CIA efforts to seed an insurgency in Ukraine, noting that

“everything we know points to the likelihood that [the groups being trained by the CIA] includes Neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.”

It cites a 2020 report from West Point which states that:

“A number of prominent individuals among far-right extremist groups in the United States and Europe have actively sought out relationships with representatives of the far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.”

It adds that

“US-based individuals have spoken or written about how the training available in Ukraine might assist them and others in their paramilitary-style activities at home.”

Even the FBI, though more publicly concerned about RIM, has been forced to admit that US-based white supremacists have cultivated ties with the group, with the Bureau stating in a 2018 indictment that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations.” In contrast, there remains no proof of any concrete ties of a single US citizen to RIM.

With the CIA now backing an insurgency that prominent former CIA officials are claiming will “spread across multiple borders,” the fact that the forces being trained and armed by the agency as part of this “coming insurgency” include Azov battalion is significant.

It seems that the CIA is determined to create yet another self-fulfilling prophecy by breeding the very network of “global white supremacy” that intelligence officials have claimed is the “next” big threat after the Covid-19 crisis wanes.

The injection of the group RIM into the narrative should also be of concern. It seems plausible, given the pre-conflict terror designation for the group and its alleged past ties to the Ukraine conflict, that a CIA-trained Ukrainian insurgent, perhaps from a group like Azov or an equivalent, would willingly pose as a member of RIM, allowing RIM to be labeled as the “new Al Qaeda”, with its base of operations conveniently located in Russia and its presence there “tolerated” by Moscow.

It certainly would serve the now, rather pervasive narrative equating Putin with Adolf Hitler in the wake of Russia’s decision to launch its military campaign in Ukraine. It would also serve to launch, in earnest, the up-until-now largely dormant War on Domestic Terror, the infrastructure for which was launched by the Biden administration just last year.

While January 6th was used to equate support for former President Donald Trump with neo-Nazism and white supremacism, recent articles that have followed Russia’s recent military campaign against Ukraine deliberately link this “Putin as Hitler” narrative with US Republicans. US conservatives have long been the focus of “domestic terror” fear-mongering over the past several years (They are also, incidentally, the majority of gun owners).

An editorial by Robert Reich published in The Guardian on March 1st claims “the world is frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism.” Reich goes onto to state that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine “is a new cold war … The biggest difference between the old cold war and the new one is that authoritarian neo-fascism is no longer just an external threat to America and Europe.

A version of it is also growing inside western Europe and the US. It has even taken over one of America’s major political parties. The Trump-led Republican party does not openly support Putin, but the Republican party’s animus toward democracy is expressed in ways familiar to Putin and other autocrats.” Other articles making similar claims have appeared in The New York Times and The Intercept, among others, in just the past week.

On March 2, Salon followed Reich’s piece with a similar editorial entitled “How white supremacy fuels the Republican love affair with Vladimir Putin,” which concludes with the assertion that “today’s Republican Party is America’s and the world’s largest white supremacist and white identity organization” and “that “conservatism” and racism are now fully one and the same thing here in America.”

As this muddying of the waters regarding the relationship among Putin, the US Republican Party, and white supremacism escalates, we also have intelligence agencies in Europe and the US increasingly linking opposition to Covid measures, like lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to neo-Nazism, white supremacism and the far-right, frequently with little to no evidence.

This recently occurred with the Freedom Convoy in Canada and, more recently, German security agencies and officials asserted just days ago that they can no longer distinguish between “far-right radicals” and those who oppose vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions. However, these efforts to link opposition to Covid measures with “domestic terrorism” and the far-right go back to 2020.

In addition to these trends, it also seems inevitable that the “Russian misinformation” label, used and abused for the past several years so that any dissenting narrative was often labeled “Russian” in origin, is likely to make a comeback in this context and provide the justification for a zealous censorship campaign online and particularly on social media, where this “transnational white supremacist network” is said to be dependent upon for its supposed success.

The coming “global white supremacist” terror threat, if we are to believe our unusually prescient intelligence officials, appears to be the “next thing” to befall the world as the Covid crisis wanes.

It also appears that the CIA has crowned itself the midwife and chosen Ukraine as the birthplace of this new “terror threat,” one which will create not only the next proxy war between US empire and its adversaries, but also the pretext to launch the “War on Domestic Terror” in North America and Europe.

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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

Resurrecting the Fear of AIDS

April 10th, 2022 by Michael J. Talmo

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Here we go again folks. The COVID-19 narrative is getting old. Oppressive, idiotic, and useless restrictions are being rolled back. But now we are being told that a team of scientists in the Netherlands have discovered a more aggressive variant of HIV, the virus that supposedly causes AIDS. Didn’t you just know that they would have to find some way to keep the fear porn going.

MSN reported that scientists have dubbed this variant “VB” (virulent subtype B). But the MSN article assures us that this HIV strain is “not a public health crisis” because as explained in a February 2022 article in Healthline, “current treatments are still effective against the virus.” That is, provided those who are infected get early treatment. Therefore, declares Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex: “Every single one of us has a duty to get an HIV test.” He said this a few days after the study on the newly discovered HIV variant was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

But wait, there’s more.

ABC News reported that development of an HIV vaccine is underway.

Moderna announced that it has launched early-stage clinical trials for guess what? An HIV mRNA vaccine. An August 2021 article in The Body explains why it will be very difficult to develop such a vaccine.

But not to worry, Moderna has teamed up with IAVI (International AIDS Vaccine Initiative), a nonprofit organization that is funded by guess who? The Rockefeller Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, Pfizer, and of course the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just to name a few.

Of course, we now know that mRNA vaccines aren’t vaccines at all. They are radical gene therapy. Sefan Oelrich, president of Bayer AG Pharmaceuticals Division in Berlin Germany, admitted at the World Health Summit last October that

“Ultimately, the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say: if we had surveyed two years ago in the public: would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body? We would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in a way that was maybe not possible before.”

How about closed their eyes via fear and by fraudulently marketing gene therapy as vaccines, Stefan. “Genes are small sections of DNA within the genome that code for proteins. They contain the instructions for our individual characteristics.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Gene therapy involves altering the genes inside your body’s cells in an effort to treat or stop disease.” In other words, the claim that COVID shots don’t alter your DNA as claimed by the media and all of those fact checkers is a lie.

And lest we forget, according to a fact checker website, Bayer was contacted about Oelrich’s speech and their “official response states that there was an obvious slip of the tongue and that mRNA technology is not gene therapy.” While we’re at it, let’s also not forget that two plus two equals five and that the Moon is made of green cheese.

In reality, AIDS, like COVID-19, is a total scam. There is no need for vaccines, or any kind of gene therapies to cure them. There is no epidemic or pandemic in any way shape or form. Here is a list of some of the many doctors and scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, who have spoken out against AIDS propaganda and exposed it as fraud. Read what they have to say. There is nothing to be afraid of.

How it all began

The whole AIDS fiasco started in 1981 when Dr. Michael Gottlieb along with several colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine and Cedars-Sinai Hospital initially identified five young gay men who were suffering from a pattern of rare illnesses that was originally called GRID (gay related immune disorder). It was also referred to as “The Gay Plague” and as “gay cancer.” By the end of the year “there were 270 reported cases of severe immune deficiency among gay men, with 121 individuals dead.” In 1982 GRID was renamed AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) after the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) linked it to blood and sexual transmission.

A well-orchestrated propaganda campaign was launched and AIDS was labeled a global epidemic with most of the cases and deaths occuring in Africa.

In my country, the US, heart disease kills 659 thousand people a year. Cancer kills almost 600 thousand people a year. Smoking kills over 480 thousand people per year. Smoking kills over 8 million people per year worldwide. The WHO (World Health Organization) calls smoking “one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced.”

But AIDS has only killed more than 700 thousand Americans since 1981. In recent years, on average, AIDS kills almost 13 thousand Americans per year (see page 2 of CDC Fact Sheet under “Advances in treatment”). Total AIDS deaths worldwide from 1981-2021, a 40 year period, have been about 36.3 million. Compare that to a global average of 56 million deaths from all causes each and every year. Yet, despite the pathetically small amount of deaths, people were more afraid of AIDS while continuing to smoke, eat junk food, abuse recreational and prescription drugs, and subject themselves to enormous levels of stress. The reason for this is obvious: AIDS was labeled a sexual plague. People were told that having sex could kill them.

Thanks to our culture’s puritanical aversion to sex, AIDS became the most talked about and feared illness of the modern age. It carried the voice of mom and the fear of God. Deep in our gut it felt right somehow. It was a contemporary way of saying God will punish you if you have sex outside of marriage. Parents used it to scare kids away from early involvement is sex. Spouses used it to keep their mates faithful. Religious fanatics used it to demonize gay people. AIDS was the greatest thing to come along since fire and brimstone.

By making AIDS a fatal illness that can be transmitted sexually, gay bathhouses were closed, harassment of prostitutes increased, CNN reported that “nurses refused to take in meals to hospitalized patients,” and that “Parents refused to see their sick children.” The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) reported in its “HIV & Civil Rights” paper that some hospitals and medical providers refused to treat HIV-positive patients.

HIV=AIDS=Death is a sub paradigm of the larger judeo-Christian cultural paradigm that sex is sinful. It doesn’t matter what religion one practices. It doesn’t matter if one’s creed is atheism. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloaked in the guise of scientific or medical fact. It doesn’t matter how showy and free people can be with sex. The underlying guilt and shame remains. If AIDS wasn’t labeled a sexual plague hardly anyone would have cared about it at all.

But every false belief requires a kernel of truth. With AIDS, as is the case with COVID-19, it’s the existence of sick people who supposedly have it. This is enough to convince the reactionary majority that everything they’ve been told about AIDS must be true. But medical science has made a plethora of mistakes before.

For example, in the late 19th and early 20th Century vitamin deficiency diseases like scurvy, beriberi, rickets, and pellagra were thought to be caused by germs (see second paragraph of CDC report).

Another example was SMON, an acronym for subacute myelo-optic neuropathy. Among it’s symptoms were bouts of diarrhea and vomiting along with blindness, paralysis, and death. From 1955-1970 several nations—among them Great Britain, Sweden, Mexico, India, and Australia had outbreaks of SMON, but it was mainly concentrated in Japan. Originally, SMON was labeled a viral disease and several possible viruses were blamed. But ultimately, in late 1970, the truth came out. It was the drug clioquinol mainly manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Ciba-Geigy that was the cause of SMON. A lawsuit revealed that Ciba-Geigy had been aware of clioquinol’s harmful effects for years.

How AIDS is defined

AIDS isn’t a disease just as sporting goods isn’t a hunting rifle. AIDS is a made-up category for 27 different diseases that include herpes, yeast infections, a few cancers, dementia, tuberculosis, and some types of pneumonia. In people who test HIV-positive these diseases are called AIDS. In people who test HIV-negative they are called by their old names and treated conventionally. For example, if a person has herpes and they test HIV-positive they have AIDS. If a person has herpes and they test HIV- negative they just have herpes and are treated conventionally. AIDS is real only in the sense that these 27 illnesses are real. A complete list of them can be accessed here.

All of the aforementioned diseases existed long before the AIDS era and can occur without HIV infection. Thus, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) cannot be the cause of AIDS.

Originally, AIDS was mainly two rare diseases: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a fungal infection, and Kaposi sarcoma (KS), a form of blood vessel cancer that causes, among other things, purple lesions to appear on the skin and internal organs. Both are old diseases. KS was named after Moritz Kaposi (1837-1902), a 19th Century dermatologist who first noticed it in elderly European men back in 1872. PCP, now called Pneumocystis Jirovecii Pneumonia, was originally identified in premature and malnourished infants in orphanages in Europe following World War II.

The AIDS case definition was expanded over the next 12 years. In 1985 it was expanded to 20 different conditions. In 1987 additional conditions were added. In 1993 it was again expanded to included cervical cancer, bacterial pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis, and a low T-Cell count, a non disease. This created the illusion that AIDS was continuing to spread and becoming an ever-growing threat.

In Third World Countries like Africa AIDS is defined differently. Due to lack of money and adequate medical facilities, AIDS is usually diagnosed on symptoms alone. The World Health Organization Bangui definition of AIDS created in 1985 and modified in 1994, defines AIDS as fever, cough, diarrhea, asthenia, and weight loss to name some. Since these symptoms also occur in people with malaria, parasites,malnutrition, and exposure to unclean drinking water, all rampant in Africa, there is no way to tell who has AIDS and who has some other disease.

Some limited HIV testing is done by a charity and sometimes a government. But no one really knows what percentage of the population in any of these poor countries has AIDS, died of AIDS, is getting diagnosed and tested or anything else because African AIDS statistics are determined by computer models which are notoriously inaccurate.

The Lancet:

“…the proportion of people living with HIV who know their status is particularly challenging to monitor in Sub-Saharan Africa because neither the number of people living with HIV, nor the number who are diagnosed, are directly counted. Estimates for people living with HIV typically come from mathematical models.”

The Spectator:

“Every year, all over Africa, blood would be taken from a small sample of pregnant women and screened for signs of HIV infection. The results would be programmed into Epimodel, which transmuted them into estimates. If so many women were infected, it followed that a similar proportion of their husbands and lovers must be infected too. These numbers would be extrapolated out into the general population, enabling the computer modelers to arrive at seemingly precise tallies of the doomed, the dying and the orphans left behind.”

Yet, pages 5 and 6 of the WHO Bangui definition declares:

“Good clinical definition of AIDS is of great importance in Africa, where adequate laboratory facilities are often lacking…Given that these symptoms are not specific, they will not be recognized as suggestive of AIDS until other possible causes have been ruled out…Without field verification, it is difficult to establish a purely clinical definition of AIDS that is simple, exhaustive and specific.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but how in the Devil’s realm can computer models do any of the aforementioned? Obviously, they can’t. In other words, All AIDS statistics in Africa are fabrications, illusions, digital spam—they are completely, utterly, and totally false.

HIV doesn’t cause AIDS

A contagious disease will rapidly spread into the general population affecting equal numbers of males and females. But the vast majority of AIDS cases have been males. For the entire over 40 years that AIDS has been around the overwhelming majority of cases and deaths have been men who have sex with men (gay and bisexual men) and IV drug users in North America, Europe, and other Developed Countries as documented here, and here.

What do these risk groups have in common? Drug use.

Gay and bisexual men suffering from AIDS that made up less than 2% of the LGBT+ community were highly promiscuous drug users. They were the bath house crowd, the sex club crowd. These were the people who had 30-40 partners a night, regularly engaging in anal intercourse, took antibiotics prophylactically to prevent contracting venereal diseases–not very smart since antibiotics if taken for long periods of time can wreck havoc on the human body as explained here. They were also heavy smokers and drinkers, got little sleep, and took a laundry list of recreational drugs, such as cocaine, crystal meth, Special K, lysergic acid, and amphetamines to name some which as explained in the scientific literature here and here are very capable of making them sick and killing them.

Another staple of this unhealthy lifestyle were alkyl nitrites better known as poppers. When inhaled they act as an aphrodisiac, produce an instant high, and dilate blood vessels making anal intercourse more comfortable by relaxing the anal sphincter muscles. They also intensify sexual desire and orgasm. They are sold in small bottles under names like Rush, Ram, Thunderbolt, Rock Hard, Locker Room, and Crypt Tonight. But poppers are also toxic and deadly. They can cause blood pressure to drop to dangerously low levels, damage red blood cells and vital organs, weaken the immune system, cause, nausea, headache, disorientation and loss of consciousness. Due to causing abnormal heart rhythm poppers can cause “sudden sniffing death syndrome,” and cancers like the AIDS defining illness Kaposi sarcoma as reported in the Washington Post, AP News, and in this study published in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology.

IV drug users are an AIDS risk group for the same reason as the gay bath house crowd who also engaged in some injection drug use. Because IV recreational drugs are illegal, addicts often shared unclean needles which subjected them to even more infectious agents. Needle exchange programs were introduced to try to reduce HIV transmission. But as this 2018 comprehensive study in Cureus demonstrated, the needle exchange programs didn’t work. Not surprising since, as this 2003 study in Clinical Microbiology Reviews demonstrates, recreational drugs whether injected or taken orally destroy the immune system. Since 1981, “injection drug use has been responsible for one-third of adult and adolescent AIDS cases in the country.”

Heterosexual AIDS cases in the US can be anywhere from 10% to less than 25% of all cases in a given year. A 2003 study in the British Medical Journal explained that “A heterosexual contact patient is currently defined as a person who denies other risk factors.” In other words, we don’t really know if any of these heterosexual cases were injection drug users or had any same-sex sexual contacts. People usually don’t like to admit to doing something that they consider immoral due to embarrassment or that is illegal due to the possibility of getting arrested. But government propaganda wanted to Portray AIDS as a danger to everyone.

In 1996, the Wall Street Journal did an expose on the CDC (click on May 1, 1996 article, second from the top). It showed that for years the CDC had been lying to the public about everyone being at risk for AIDS and that since 1987 it knew that AIDS would be mainly confined to gay men and inner city drug users. For example, the CDC ran phony ran TV ads. One was a baptist minister’s son who said “If I can get AIDS, anyone can.” Turns out he was gay. Another example was an AIDS brochure mailed to 117 million households that had a photo of a middle-aged female AIDS victim saying “AIDS is not a ‘we’ ‘they’ disease, it’s an ‘us’ disease.” She turned out to be an IV drug user.

The Wall Street Journal expose was validated by probably the largest most comprehensive study on the heterosexual transmission of HIV ever done entitled: “Heterosexual Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Northern California: Results from a Ten-year Study” published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1997. It was conducted by a research team led by Nancy Padian, PhD at the University of California, San Francisco.

The study involved 442 HIV-discordant couples (one partner is HIV-positive, the other is HIV-negative). 16 couples were eliminated from the study due to suspected drug use leaving 426. From 1985-1995 Padian and her colleagues followed them to see what percentage of the noninfected partners would seroconvert to HIV-positive. There were so few seroconversions that Padian and her team concluded:

“In general, we estimate that infectivity for male-to-female transmission is low, approximately 0.0009 per contact, and that infectivity for female-to-male transmission is even lower.”

Naturally, an AIDS apologist website claims that people like me are misinterpreting/misunderstanding Padian’s findings and that “heterosexual intercourse is now responsible for 70-80% of all HIV transmissions worldwide” if you take into account AIDS cases in Third World Countries like Africa rather than the low numbers in the Developed World. It further states that the HIV discordant couples in Padian’s study “were strongly counseled to use condoms and practice safe sex.” However, some facts to consider: as previously explained, AIDS statistics in countries like Africa mean nothing because they are computer estimates; there was no way for Padian to know if the couples in her study really practiced safe sex—she didn’t watch them doing it; there were no seroconversions among 25% of the couples in Padian’s study who said they did not use condoms consistently.

Luc Montagnier (1932-2022), discoverer of HIV and Nobel Prize winner, the father of AIDS science, did not consider HIV to be as deadly as claimed. He had this to say in an interview in the 2009 documentary House of Numbers:

“we can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected, our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system;”

Speaking of the immune system, In 1992 the CDC conjured up a new disease called Idiopathic CD4 Lyphocytopenia (ICL) to explain away the fact that there were AIDS patients who had “no serological evidence of HIV infection” and “should be considered in any patient with widespread viral, fungal, or mycobacterial infection whose HIV test is negative” as explained here and here. In addition, “Kaposi sarcoma, dementia, and weight loss may occur without immunodeficiency” as explained here and here.

Here’s another fact to consider: to this day no scientific paper exists anywhere that can demonstrate how HIV causes AIDS. HIV is supposed to cause AIDS by destroying T-helper cells (also known as CD4 cells and CD4+ T cells). Without these lymphocytes, the immune system is unable to fight off infections and diseases. But how HIV accomplished this is unknown.

Dr. Kary Mullis (1944-2019), inventor of the PCR test for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1993, explained in an interview a number of years back that he needed to reup a grant from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) for an AIDS project he was working on. He began the scientific paper he had to submit with: “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” Mullis asked for a reference for that scientific statement. But there was no reference. There was no such paper. He looked and asked around everywhere. He even asked Luc Montagnier—none could give him a reference to a paper that definitively explains how HIV causes AIDS. Mullis elaborated on this in a longer interview years earlier conducted by Dr. Gary Null.

Bottom line: all the evidence shows that what they are calling AIDS is a toxic condition caused by long-term drug abuse and other unhealthy lifestyle choices in Developed Countries and, additionally, in Third World Countries, lack of clean drinking water, endemic diseases, malnutrition, and extreme poverty. You don’t need a killer virus to explain what’s really going on.

The HIV tests

Regardless of how many there are, what they are called, and how they are done, there are only three different kinds of HIV tests: antibody tests, antigen/antibody tests, and NATs (nucleic acid tests).

The first HIV tests developed in 1984 were antibody tests. They contain proteins that are supposed to be unique structural components of HIV. These proteins are also called antigens which means antibody generating. An antigen can be a bacteria, a virus, a parasite—anything that causes the body to produce antibodies. When the antibodies in a person’s blood react to these proteins to enough of a degree the person is branded HIV-positive. When not enough of a reaction occurs they are deemed HIV-negative. All the tests are is your antibodies, which are proteins produced in your B-cells, interacting with the foreign protein in the test kits. It’s not a test for HIV. It’s test for something that your body makes to protect you from foreign substances in general.

Antigen/antibody tests can also detect the HIV protein/antigen P24 in addition to antibodies.

Contrary to the assertion on the CDC website, NATs, also referred to as NAATs (nucleic acid amplification tests), do not look for the actual HIV virus. Instead, they amplify fragments of nucleic acid that are supposed to be part of the HIV genome. There are different ways to amplify nucleic acid (RNA or DNA). But the original, and still preferred method, is PCR (polymerase chain reaction) invented by the late Kary Mullis.

In 1995, Dr. David Ho got a paper published in Nature that showed contrary to over a decade of AIDS research, HIV was not a slow inactive virus, but was incredibly active and producing massive amounts of virus in the blood of infected people. He made this claim using the PCR test which was dubbed the viral load test. No one in the AIDS orthodox camp spotted the absurdity that viral load didn’t mean how much virus is in a person’s body, but how many copies of genetic fragments are produced in a PCR machine outside of the body. The logic is beyond stupid.

HIV antibody tests can be notoriously inaccurate due to cross-reactions. Meaning, even if the proteins in the test kits were HIV proteins, it doesn’t prove that the antibodies reacting to them are HIV antibodies. This is due to the fact that antibodies are promiscuous—they will react to anything of a similar structural sequence. For example, so-called HIV proteins gp41 and gp120 are glycoproteins. Meaning, they have carbohydrate/sugar molecules on their surface. Fungal yeast infections like Candida also have glycoproteins which can cross-react with the proteins in the HIV tests.

The scientific literature lists over 60 different diseases and conditions that can cause false positives on HIV antibody tests. Many of them are AIDS defining illnesses. To name some, Epstein-Barr virus, autoimmune disorders, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis (there are over 80autoimmune diseases), STDs like syphilis and herpes, pregnancy (remember those pregnant women in Africa used to fabricate AIDS statistics via computer modeling), prior pregnancies, multiple blood transfusions, the flu, vaccinations, tuberculosis, malaria, alcoholism, a cold. The complete list of conditions that can cause false positives with references to the scientific literature are available here.

The AIDS establishment insists that such cross-reactions are rare. But since HIV tests are verified by using other nonspecific tests instead of by finding the actual virus, there is no way to prove how accurate the tests are. Using a nonspecific test to verify another nonspecific test is the equivalent of chasing you tail.

Another problem with HIV tests is that they aren’t standardized which renders them meaningless. This was documented in a 1993 study by a research team in Perth Australia that was published in the peer reviewed journal Biotechnology, the sister publication of Nature.

The study focused on the HIV Western blot test that was considered the definitive test for HIV until it was replaced by the HIV differentiation test in 2014. Unlike the ELISA test (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay), the Western blot test separates the proteins that are supposed to belong to HIV and blots them onto a nitrocellulose membrane. The separated proteins are called bands.

Different labs used different standards that revolved around which combination of bands constitute a true HIV infection. Some used the FDA’s standards, others the standards set by the American Red Cross, others the CDC’s while still others used the CRSS standards (Consortium for Retrovirus Serology Standardization). The Perth Group pointed out that when the more stringent FDA standards are used less people test HIV-positive than when the other standards are used.

The number of bands required to test HIV positive also varied depending on what country you’re in. As stated in the Biotechnology study (page 698), sometimes only two bands are required. In other countries it’s three bands (see chart on page 3). And as stated in a 2015 studypublished in PubMed Central, “In Australia, anti-HIV western blot positivity is defined as reactivity to at least one glycoprotein band and at least three non-envelope protein bands,” In other words, four bands.

But since the antigens in the HIV tests were never extracted from an isolated viral particle, there is no reason to believe that they are HIV proteins or the proteins of any other virus. They are most likely, based on the analysis of the Perth study, “normal cellular proteins.”

HIV has never been isolated

Viruses are microscopic particles that consist of a nucleic acid core (RNA or DNA) encased in a protein envelope. They also have a few enzymes. Unlike bacteria, protozoa, and fungi, viruses are not alive and are also a lot smaller.

In order to cause disease pathogenic viruses enter a cell, hijack its machinery, and cause it to produce more viruses which ultimately destroys it. They then go on to infect and kill other cells. Viruses have to do this because they can’t reproduce on their own since they aren’t alive. Thus, pathogenic viruses are cytotoxic—they kill cells. If viruses kill enough cells quickly enough illness results. Fortunately, most viruses, as is the case with bacteria, are harmless and the body’s immune system, provided we didn’t screw it up, will usually get rid of the dangerous ones.

Now, here’s the kicker: HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus consisting of two strains: HIV-1 and HIV-2. It’s nucleic acid core/genome is RNA. Like all other retroviruses, the Knobs or spikes on its outer surface hook onto a cell and its genetic material is injected into the cell where the virus knits itself into the host cell’s DNA via reverse transcription and becomes part of the cell. It then survives in the cell like a benign passenger. So, retroviruses don’t do what pathogenic viruses must do to cause disease: “they do not kill cells” as stated on page 390 of this study in the Journal of Biosciences. This is why the whole HIV causes AIDS argument is so utterly stupid.

As explained in the Perth study and in Science Direct, to isolate or purify a virus, the particles must be separated from everything else in an impure cell culture. or mixed culture which is a biological soup that contains multiple cells and organisms. It’s like catching a fish, taking it out of everything else that’s in the water and placing it in your boat. The isolated viral particles or pure culture must then be photographed under the electron microscope. The virus particles must be characterized. Meaning, demonstrating that its proteins and genetic material belong to it and to no other entity. Once this is accomplished, it can be determined if the isolated microbe causes a particular disease by applying Koch’s postulates. River’s postulates which are similar can also be used.

In 1997, Luc Montagnier was interviewed by writer and film director Djamel Tahi. It was published in Continuum Magazine, vol 5, no 2. A critique of Montagnier’s statements by the leader of the Perth research team can be accessed here. Just follow the red numbers.

When asked by Tahi if he isolated/purified HIV, Montagnier declared: (see no 18)

“I repeat we did not purify…because if you purify, you damage. So for infectious particles it is better to not touch them too much.”

So, how did Montagnier know there was a virus? By observing nonspecific phenomena in impure cell cultures: “density, RT, pictures of budding” (virus-like particles emerging from a cell), etc. (see no 6)

“…It is not one property but the assemblage of the properties which made us say it was a retrovirus… Taken in isolation, each of the properties isn’t truly specific. It is the assemblage of them.”

This is like saying you know that zero means nothing. But if you have a whole bunch of zeros you must have something even though all of them together still equal nothing.

But what about all of those pictures of HIV and the AIDS orthodoxy’s insistence that it has been isolated?

Pictures of HIV that are displayed on TV and in other media outlets are either paintings, computer images, or electron micrographs of unisolated virus-like particles in impure sub-cultures. Such particles are ubiquitous in cell culture. To quote the Perth study in Biotechnology:

“…the terms in the AIDS literature ‘HIV,’ ‘HIV isolation,’pure particles,’ ‘virus particles,’ ‘virions’ and ‘infectious particles’ have a variety of meanings and include all of the following, but most often without proof of the presence of a particle: ‘RNA wrapped in protein’…Isolation, however, is defined as separating the virus from everything else and not detection of some phenomena…some of the best known retrovirologists do not consider the finding of ‘virus-like particles morphologically and biochemically resembling,’ retroviruses, proof of the existence of such viruses. In the 1970s, such particles were frequently observed in human leukaemic tissues, cultures of embryonic tissues, and ‘in the majority, if not all, of human placentas.”

Incredibly, it wasn’t until 1997 that the first electron micrographs of what was claimed to be isolates of HIV were published in Virology which can be accessed here (click on PDF). The isolates, as the authors admit, are cellular debris and the few particles they claim are HIV don’t even look like retroviruses.

This is an electron micrograph of isolated virus “type C” retrovirus particles cultured by Etienne de Harvan M.D. (1928-2019) and published in the journal Pathologie-Biologie,1965. Notice that the viral particles all look the same. The arrows show three contaminants that aren’t viruses. (Source: virusmyth.com)

These are electron micrographs of what was claimed to be isolates of HIV published in Virology, 1997. The arrows point to what the authors assume are HIV  without any proof. Big difference between de Harvan’s micrographs and the cellular junk in these electron micrographs. (Source: Virusmyth.com) 

AIDS is big business

Make no mistake. AIDS is big business. There are thousands of AIDS organizations all over the world that are happy to wear red ribbons, push toxic medications for a virus that doesn’t exist, and attempt ruin everyone’s sex life by promoting the use of condoms, dental dams, and surgical gloves. They don’t want to hear the truth about AIDS because their existence and continued funding by multinational corporations and governments depends on maintaining the big lie as shown here, here, and here.

Then there’s a branch of the CDC called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). It has been described by some as the medical CIA. Founded in 1951, EIS is a two-year postgraduate program that trains health professionals in what they call “shoe-leather epidemiology.” The CDC website describes EIS officers as “disease detectives” who work day and night domestically and globally to protect us from disease epidemics. But, unknown to the public, not only are EIS agents assigned to positions in state and local health departments, they, as reported by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, can also be medical doctors, veterinarians, dentists, lawyers, PhDs, nurses, and even anthropologists, athletes, park rangers, and journalists.

In reality, Since virus hunting has dominated medical science since the polio epidemic, late 1940s to 1950s, as shown here, here, and here,not to mention the CDC’s cozy connection to the pharmaceutical industry, EIS agents are a hammer looking for a nail and can pull imaginary viruses out of their ass like magicians can pull rabbits out of their hats.

Let’s also not forget that the COVID shots, whether mRNA or an adnovirus vector, cause the body’s cells to mass produce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein so antibodies against it will be produced. As explained in this study, the spike protein “can damage endothelial cells and disrupt the blood-brain barrier.” And foreign proteins, as explained earlier, also cause false positive reactions on HIV antibody tests as reported by the BBC.

My take on this new AIDS scare is that they are throwing different fear campaigns against the wall to see what sticks. For example, they are also trying to gin up fear over a new SARS-CoV-2 strain called the BA.2 subvariant. The whole idea is to keep the mRNA mass vaccination program going.

To quote former FDA associate commissioner, Peter Pitts:

The battle against viruses is a never-ending one. I think that from a public health perspective, we should focus on prophylactic care.”

Don’t allow yourselves to be drugged and vaccinated into the twilight zone folks. Refuse to go along with this sick agenda. Don’t let them control you.

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Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties. He also did three music videos on COVID-19. The Masker Mash, COVID Vaccine Man, and The Corona Globalists. He can be reached at [email protected]

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Conversation

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Global Research Editor’s Note 

John Kiriakou statement that Osama Bin Laden committed the 9/11 atrocities is questionable.

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The Guardian has reported that a recently-declassified CIA Inspector General’s report from 2008 found that CIA officers at a covert detention site in Afghanistan used a prisoner, Ammar al-Baluch, as a “training prop,” taking turns smashing his head against a plywood wall and leaving him with permanent brain damage. 

Baluch is currently one of five defendants before a military tribunal at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo charged with participating in the planning for the September 11 attacks. The case has been stuck in the pre-trial phase for 10 years, in part because much of the information that the government wants to use against the defendants was collected using torture.

In addition to the five, Mohammed al-Qahtani, known as the potential “20th hijacker,” is to be transferred so he can be treated at a rehabilitation and mental health care in his home country of Saudi Arabia. Al-Qahtani was reportedly suffering from mental illness and brain injuries as a young man, which were exacerbated by torture after he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, and was not deemed fit for trial.

The Guardian article comes amid reporting from the New York Times that lawyers for the five men are in talks with military prosecutors on a plea deal that would have them plead guilty to terrorism in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, agreeing to sentences of 30 years to life for some, or to life without parole for others, and promising to keep them in Guantanamo, rather than to transfer them to the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

This all sounds great on the surface of things. But in fact, it represents a failure, perhaps of historic proportions, for the CIA. More than 20 years after the September 11 attacks, these cases are still pending for the sole reason that the CIA carried out a brutal and patently illegal torture program that resulted in confessions that cannot be used against the defendants in a court of law, military or otherwise.

The CIA’s torture program was born out of failure, frustration, and hubris. The September 11 attacks were arguably the worst intelligence failure in American history, and the rule of law was about to go out the window. What also went out the window was any hope of cooperation with the FBI on terrorism-related legal matters.

The CIA didn’t offer its own training class in interrogations, but the FBI, though, had been doing interrogations successfully since the Nuremburg trials in 1946. Their process was actually quite simple: Establish a rapport with the subject. Speak to him respectfully. Once the rapport is established, the prisoner opens up and starts talking. That’s how to collect intelligence. But that’s not at all what the CIA did. They went directly to the use of force. The case of Abu Zubaydah — one of the five currently engaged in plea negotiations — is the clearest example of what the CIA did and how it went wrong so quickly.

After his capture, Abu Zubaydah was taken to a secret prison, where his FBI interrogation began. He was interviewed daily by FBI agent Ali Soufan, who, in that well-known FBI style, established a rapport, built trust, and got Abu Zubaydah talking. And talk he did. There were two critical pieces of intelligence that he gave us.

The first was al-Qaeda’s wiring diagram. We knew, of course, that Osama bin Laden had created the terrorist group with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, formerly the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. We also knew that there was a very bad character out there using the nom de guerre “Mukhtar” who likely had planned the September 11 attacks. But that’s all we knew. We had no idea where around the world al-Qaeda was located, how it operated, how it came up with attack plans, and how it communicated with its leadership. We also didn’t know anything about “Mukhtar.”

Abu Zubaydah explained to Ali Soufan in great detail just how al-Qaeda was constructed. He explained the concept of “cells” and he told us how targets were chosen. He gave us the names and locations of al-Qaeda sleepers around the world, which enabled the CIA to inform its liaison partners overseas, resulting in the arrest of dozens of al-Qaeda operatives and the disruption of countless attacks. Even more importantly, Abu Zubaydah told Ali Soufan that Mukhtar was Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11 and the planner of an earlier, disrupted, attack called Bojinka. But the CIA didn’t know who Mukhtar was until Abu Zubaydah told Ali Soufan.

By July 2002, though, the CIA was frustrated. It was frustrated that the FBI had primacy in the Abu Zubaydah interrogations and it was frustrated that it had spent millions of dollars coming up with an “enhanced interrogation program” and hadn’t been able to put it into practice. In late July, CIA Director George Tenet went to President George W. Bush and asked him to remove the FBI from the case and to let the CIA take over. For reasons that have never been fully explained, Bush did exactly that. And on August 1, the CIA took over and immediately began torturing Abu Zubaydah.

The original torture plan called for CIA officers to begin with the least harsh method that had been approved by the Justice Department. That was called the “attention grab.”  It was where a CIA officer would grab Abu Zubaydah by the shirt or the lapels, give him a shake, and yell “Answer my questions!”  The attention grab was supposed to be followed by the “insult slap,” a quick whack across the face, and then by the “belly slap,” which is an open-handed smack on the belly that makes a loud sound, leaves a red mark, and is supposed to be humiliating.

This would be followed by stress positions, where the prisoner would be forced to stand chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so that he could not get into a comfortable position, couldn’t sit, and couldn’t lay down, causing extreme pain and then muscle failure.

The “cold cell” was then supposed to follow. The prisoner would be stripped naked, chained to the eye bolt in the ceiling again, and his cell would be chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, then every hour, a CIA officer would throw a bucket of ice water on him. The final technique, the one that was supposed to be so awful that it was reserved for last, was waterboarding. That is where the prisoner is tied to a board, his feet are elevated, his face is wrapped with a towel, and water is poured on his face. It causes a feeling of drowning. And in truth, a great deal of water gets down the throat.

Abu Zubaydah did indeed drown during this technique, and he had to be revived by a CIA doctor, according to the Senate Torture Report. The CIA interrogators were supposed to begin with the most basic technique and slowly work their way up to waterboarding. Instead, though, they started with waterboarding.

All of the enhanced interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah. He was slapped, punched, beaten, subjected to mock executions, and kept locked in a coffin and in a dog cage for weeks at a time. He had his head slammed repeatedly against both plywood and concrete block walls. He was chained to eye bolts and kept awake for more than nine days, long enough for most people to go insane. He was subjected to hypothermia. And he was waterboarded 83 times. Abu Zubaydah had gotten to the point where his interrogator merely walking into the room was enough to make him cry.

Abu Zubaydah is now one of the Guantanamo defendants who apparently are negotiating plea deals. But does it really matter?  The CIA told U.S. Senate investigators that Abu Zubaydah will never go free. Never. He’ll die at Guantanamo someday. And when he does, they said, they would cremate him and throw his ashes into the Caribbean. It’ll be as though he never existed.

This doesn’t make America stronger. It makes us weaker. Besides ceding the moral high ground by exhibiting behavior as reprehensible as what the terrorists have done to Americans and others over the years, the CIA’s torture program forced countless analysts to waste countless hours poring through false and worthless information collected through torture. How many Americans were endangered because of that?  How many terrorist attacks went forward because of the way the CIA tried to “collect” information?

And worst of all, our government is unable to prosecute its most dangerous prisoners because the CIA violated their constitutional rights. The torture program was wrong from the very beginning. There was no upside.

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Featured image: By 2006, at least 100 prisoners had died in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of them violently, according to government data. (Photo: US torture Image by Witness Against Torture)

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As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere. But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

The Dawn of PSYOPs

According to historian Joy Rhodes, a renowned physicist told U.S. defence secretary Robert McNamara in 1961:

“While World War I might have been considered the chemists’ war, and World War II was considered the physicists’ war, World War III . . . might well have to be considered the social scientists’ war.”

The intersection of social science and military intelligence is recognised by the US Army to have begun during WW1 when pre-war journalist Captain Blankenhorn established the Psychological Subsection in the War Department to coordinate combat propaganda.

These grey-area operations, as they become known, plateaued during world war II, when military strategists, building on wartime research in crowd psychology, drafted social scientists into the war effort through the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). The office would aggregate information about the German people and develop propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOPS) to lower their morale. This culminated in 1942, with the US federal government becoming the leading employer of psychologists in the US.

OSRD was an early administration of the Manhattan Project and responsible for important wartime developments in technology, including radar. The agency was Directed by engineer and inventor, Vannevar Bush – a key player in the history of computing, known for his work on The Memex, an early hypothetical computer device, that would store and index a user’s books, records and other information, and which would go on to inspire most major advancements in the development of personal computers over the next 70 years.

As the second world war ended, and a new threat emerged from post war ravaged Europe, scholars and soldiers once again reunited to defeat an invisible and aggressively expansionist adversary. 

Across the Soviet satellites in Europe and in the nations threatened by communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cold war special operations, as they become known, were a nebulous category of military activity that included psychological and political warfare, guerrilla operations and counterinsurgency. To mobilise these ‘special warfare tactics’ the army established the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW) in 1951, whose mission was to recruit, organise, equip, train, and provide doctrinal support to Psywarriors.

The office was directed by General Robert McClure, a founding father of psychological warfare and friend of the Shah of Iran, who was instrumental in the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état.

Integral to the projects of McClure’s OCPW, was a quasi-academic institution with a long history of military service called the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). Founded by anthropologist turned FBI whistle-blower George Murdock, HRAF was set up to collect and standardise data on primitive cultures around the world. During WW2 its researchers worked hand in glove with naval intelligence to develop propaganda materials that would help the US liberate pacific nations from Japanese control. By 1954, the department had grown into an inter-university consortium of 16 academic institutions, funded by the army, CIA, and private philanthropies.

In 1954 the OCPW negotiated a contract with the HRAF to author a series of special warfare handbooks, disguised as scholarship, that sought to understand the intellectual and emotional character of strategically important people, particularly their thoughts, motivations and actions, with entire chapters compiled on the attitudes and subversive potentials of foreign nationals, while other chapters focussed on the means of transmitting propaganda in each target nation, whether news, radio or word of mouth. This was, of course, decades before the internet.

SORO

In 1956, the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) emerged from these programs. Charged with managing the US Army’s psychological and unconventional warfare tactics during the cold war and taking the work of HRAF to the next level, SORO set about the monumental task of defining the political and social causes of Communist revolution, the laws governing social change and the theories of communication and persuasion that could be used to transform public perception.

SORO formed a central component of the Pentagons militarisation of social research, and particularly the ideas and doctrine that would usher in a gradual shift towards an American-led world order. Its research team was located on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C, and comprised the era’s pre-eminent intellectuals and academics. SORO’s ensemble team, from the fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology, would immerse themselves in social system theory, analysing the society and culture of numerous target countries, particularly in Latin America, while confronting the universal laws governing social behaviour and the mechanisms of communication and persuasion in each jurisdiction. If the US Army could understand the psychological factors that sparked revolution, they could, in theory, predict and intercept revolutions before they got off the ground.

SORO was part of a rapidly expanding nexus of federally Funded Research Centres (FCRC’s), that reoriented academia towards national security interests. Working at the intersection of science and the state, SORON’s, as they were known, advocated for an expert-directed democracy, regardless of the totalitarian consequences of social engineers and technocrats acquiring control over the thoughts, actions, and values of ordinary people.

In those early days of the cold war, academics and scientists working at the intersection of military and academia firmly believed that intellectuals should guide geopolitics. This was accepted as the most stable form of governance to take the free world into the next century. It explains how we have arrived under the rubric of the ‘settled science’ today. Or at least, policies masquerading as science. From the biosecurity state to the fundamentalism of climate science, much of what was achieved in those golden years of militarised social research shapes the twenty first century.

By 1962, sixty-six federally funded military research institutions were in operation. Between 1951 to 1967, the number tripled, while funding skyrocketed from $122 million to $1.6 billion.

But as opposition to the Vietnam War intensified in the 1960s, a growing number of intellectuals, policymakers and academics became increasingly concerned that the national security state was morphing into the statist, globalist force it had been fighting during the cold war and began publicly criticising Pentagon-funded social scientists as technocratic social engineers. 

This inspired a wave of discontent for the militarisation of social research to grip America, culminating in 1969 with American University’s administrators banishing SORO from their campus and severing ties with their military partners. The move was endemic of the changing attitude towards these grey area special operations and resulted in the 1960’s and 1970’s with the excommunication of military research centres from university campuses across the US. A move that forced the military to look elsewhere – towards the private sector for their alternative warfare capabilities. Following a long tradition of public-private military cooperation, from the Rand Corporation to the Smithsonian Group, these quasi-private institutions were being spun-out of the military at a rate of knots since the 1940’s.

Project Camelot

One of the programs conceived by SORO was ‘Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential. Codenamed Project Camelot, the landmark program sought to understand the causes of social revolution and identify actions, within the realm of behavioural science, that could be taken to suppress insurrection. The goal, according to defence analyst, Joy Rhodes, was ‘to build a radar system for left wing revolutionaries.’ A sort of ‘computerised early warning system that could predict and prevent political movements before they ever got off the ground.’

‘This computer system’ writes Joy Rhodes, ‘could check up to date intelligence against a list of preconditions, and revolutions could be stopped before the instigators even knew they were headed down the path of revolution.’

The research collected by Project Camelot would produce predictive models of the revolutionary process and profile what social scientists deemed ‘revolutionary tendencies and traits.’ It was anticipated that such knowledge would not only help military leaders anticipate the trajectory of social change, but it would also enable them to design effective interventions that could, in theory, channel or suppress change in ways that were favourable to U.S. foreign policy interests. 

It was intended that the information gathered by Project Camelot would funnel into a large ‘computerised database’ for forecasting, social engineering, and counterinsurgency, that could be tapped at any time by the military and intelligence community.

But the project was beleaguered by controversy when academics in South America discovered its military funding and imperialism motives.

The ensuing backlash resulted in Project Camelot being, ostensibly, shut down, though the core of its project survived. Multiple military research projects picked up on Project Camelot’s ‘early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries,’ while its computerised database for ‘forecasting, social engineering, and counterinsurgency’ went onto inspire a nascent technology developed in the years to come, that would eventually become known to the world as the internet.

The Military Origins of the Internet

As Sasha Levine reveals in his groundbreaking book, Surveillance Valley, at the height of the Cold War, US military commanders were pursuing a decentralised computer communications system without a base of operations or headquarters, that could withstand a Soviet strike, without blacking-out or destroying the entire network.

The project was coordinated by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created by President Eisenhower in 1958, for the development of technologies that would expand the frontiers of science and technology and help the US close the missile gap with the Soviets.

DARPA has since been at the vanguard of every major advancement in the development of personal computers ever since the cold war, culminating in 1969 with the first computers being in universities across the US.

A few years later DARPA would develop the protocols to enable connected computers to communicate transparently across multiple networks. Known as The Internetting Project, DARPA’s prototypical communications network, the ARPANET, was born in 1973.

The project was eventually transferred to the Defence Communications Agency and integrated into the numerous new networks that had emerged. By 1983 the ARPANET was divided into two constituents: MILNET to be used by military and defence agencies, while the civilian version would retain the ARPANET handle.

Fast forward to 1990 and the ARPANET was officially decommissioned, and the Internet privatised to a consortium of corporations including IBM and MCI. Eventually the federal government created a dozen or so network providers and spun them off to the private sector, building companies that would become the backbone of today’s internet, including Verizon Time-Warner, AT&T and Comcast. That’s the same six corporations who not only own 90% of US media outlets, they control the flow of global communications, through a process of absolute vertical-horizontal alignment of legacy media with digital media, and the infrastructures and technologies that enable their mass communication, including cable, satellite and wireless, the devices and hardware, software and operating systems.

J.C.R. Licklider

A central player in the development of the ARPANET, who many consider the founding father of computing, was American psychologist, J. C. R. Licklider.

Lick, as he was known, was the first Director of the agency tasked with executing DARPA’s information technology programs, The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), that has been responsible for just about major advancement in computer communications since the sixties.

As Stephen J. Lukasik, a contributor to the ARPANET project reflected in his paper ‘ ‘Why the Arpanet Was Built’ ‘Lick saw information technology and behavioural and cognitive science issues as connected.’

‘Lick was essentially predicting how the internet would go on to evoke real world social processes that would radically transform how we communicate, organise and process information. It is no coincidence that a psychologist of ‘Licks calibre was at the vanguard of a new technology designed to exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.

In the 1960’s Lick oversaw DARPA’s strategic interest in a new frontier of information technology, called Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI’s). In his famous paper, considered one of the most important in the history of computing, Lick put forward the then radical idea that the human mind would one day merge seamlessly with computers. He was anticipating the evolution of AI and the role that DARPA would go on to play in funding just about every major advancement in BCI technology over eight decades, including Elon Musk’s fully-implanted, wireless, brain-machine interface company, Neuralink.

The Vietnam War

The ARPANET brought together the Pentagon’s war machine with university research departments and the Bay area’s counterculture scene. Inspiring much of the anecdotal idealism that would define the early years of cyberspace as a liberating new frontier for humanity. Cyberspace, it was lauded by its early adopters, would free information and provide universal connectivity. The realms of possibility were, indeed, endless. 

But war hawks and intelligence analysts had other ideas. If the lessons of the Vietnam war were anything to go by, the future of US warfare would not be with nation states, it would be with ideologies, or more specifically, grassroots movements, such as the Viet Cong, who had the power to stoke the flames of civil unrest, that could lead to uprisings, or worse, revolution. Alternative approaches were, therefore, needed to infiltrate and disrupt this new threat to the free world. 

As the war raged in Southeast Asia, another psychology PHD, Robert Taylor, joined DARPA as the agency’s third director. Taylor transferred to Vietnam in 1967, to establish the first computer centre at the Military Assistance Command base in Saigon, a central pillar in the DoD’s psychological warfare operations. The move was endemic of the changing rules of military engagement that saw DARPA, and indeed, this new technology, playing a major role in the war effort, both in Southeast Asia, and at home on US soil, against the growing anti-war movement.

In 1968, Taylor and ‘Lick published their seminal paper “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Laying out the future of what the Internet would eventually become. The paper began with the visionary statement: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” Anticipating the meteoric rise of social media, particularly Facebook, in the decades to come.

Bringing the PSYOP Back Home

The origins of Facebook coincide with a controversial military program that was mysteriously shut down the same year Facebook launched.

The military program in question, LifeLog, was developed by DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, with the stated aim of creating a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life – a dataset of their most personal information, including their movements, conversations, connections, and everything they listened to, watched, read and bought.

But would people willingly give up a record of their private lives to a military intelligence social media platform?

Probably not. Enter Facebook.

LifeLog, meanwhile, was ostensibly shut down. But this was not the first nor the last time that a project of this magnitude would be proposed.

In a 1945 article for The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush who, the reader will recall, directed the US Army’s psychological operations during World War II, discussed his hypothetical project, The Memex, as a device “in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”

In immortalising people’s lives, it was hoped that LifeLog would eventually contribute to the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI), that would one day think just like a human, intersecting with another DARPA backed project – the Personal Assistant That Learns (PAL) – a cognitive computing system designed to make military decision-making more efficient, which was eventually spun-off as Siri, the virtual assistant on Apple’s operating system, present in the homes of 1 billion unsuspecting people.

But LifeLog is just one part of the story. There was another DARPA program that also ‘disappeared’ one year before Facebook made its debut. Often cited as the precursor to Facebook. The Information Awareness Office (IAO) brought together several DARPA surveillance and information technology projects including MDDS which provided Google’s seed funding.

The stated aim of the IAO was to gather and store the personal information of every US citizen, including their personal emails, social networks, lifestyles, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, without, of course, the need for a search warrant. This information would funnel back to intelligence agencies, under the guise of predicting and preventing terrorist incidents before they happened. Reminiscent of Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries.

Despite the government, apparently, abandoning their gambit for total information awareness over ordinary Americans, the core of the project survived.

I draw your attention to Palantir, the spooky data analytics firm founded by Facebook’s board member, Peter Thiel.

Portrayed as science fiction in the firm Minority Report, Palantir’s predictive policing analytics have been deployed extensively against insurgents in Iraq and by police departments in the US.

This is, of course, nothing new for the Chinese. The convergence of big tech data analytics with social credits has been put to good use by the CCP to weed out and punish dissidents who can find themselves held indefinitely without charge or trial in political re-education camps for holding the wrong set of political beliefs.

But it must also be accepted, these Orwellian methods of repression did not originate in China. The encroachment of the CIA onto the public sphere has been happening since the 1960’s, when the US imported decades of counterinsurgency from the soviet satellites to tackle the anti-war and civil rights movements. This was ramped up in the wake of 9/11 and now through the backdoor of COVID-19 total information awareness is coming home to roost, as China’s social credits system has been implemented on the back of the Green Pass.

Before anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, you had civil rights and anti-war activists. The ideology guiding dissent may have changed, but the military tactics used to counter it remain the same.

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Dustin is a writer and researcher based in London who has been writing about the New Normal these past two years, particularly the ethical and legal issues around lockdowns and mandates, the history and roadmap to today’s biosecurity state, and the key players and institutions involved in the globalised takeover of our commons.

Aside from COVID-19, Dustin writes about the intelligence state, big tech surveillance, big philanthropy, the co-option of activism and human rights.

You can find his work at https://www.thecogent.org. Or follow him on twitter @TheCogent1

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 America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science (COMPETES) Act of 2022 only needs to be passed by the President and it will become law. The bill sounds innocuous but the contents of it are not. While the bill is partly about promoting U.S. science and technology it is just as much about preventing the rise of China’s 1.5 billion as well as the Global South who have democratically partnered with China to build a new world through the Belt and Road Initiative.

In attempting to prevent China’s rise the bill pays special attention to preventing peaceful cross straights reunification. This could lead to chaos on both ends of the Eurasian continent while the far-off U.S. benefits.

Already, in the west, the Ukrainian front has been opened at the expense of Europeans who are now forced to buy U.S. gas. All the while, as reported in “The Global Times”, the U.S. has increased its purchase of Russian crude oil by 43 percent. In the East a similar strategy is at play. Taiwanese and European tech companies have, for some time, been forced to limit their sales to mainland China while the U.S. has made special tech provisions to continue selling tech.

If the America COMPETES Act of 2022 is passed then stoking tensions with China by playing the Taiwan card will become U.S. law!

If a war can also be sparked in the east then the U.S. will, as in Ukraine, seek to profit geopolitically and economically by fuelling tensions through weapons sales and “sitting it out” while others are sacrificed in a proxy war.

Many do not realise the seriousness of the “America COMPETES Act of 2022” because, on March 28th, its contents were quietly replaced “lock stock” with the more aggressive “United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021” which has yet to pass the House. Unfortunately, looking at the bill it is less about competing and more about making sure there are no other competitors.

The bill is more about preventing China’s rise as it is about improving U.S. technology and science. As a point in case the bill references the word “science” 582 times; “technology” 811 times; China 666 times, and Chinese 202 times. Indeed, “America” is only raised 297 times.

There is also an obsession with China’s regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. “Taiwan”, for example, is referenced 185 times which is bizarre considering this bill, concerned with “technology” and “science”, doesn’t even mention “California” the centrepiece of U.S. hi-tech once. Imagine the consternation that Americans would feel if China was on the verge of signing a bill into law that mentioned how they were going to deal a blow to U.S. states!

One way the U.S. plans to deal with Taiwan is to “recognize Taiwan as a vital part of the United States Indo-Pacific strategy.” However, what can this achieve except for heightened tensions? Beijing might consider this as crossing the sovereign red line, especially when the bill calls for “regular transfers of defence articles to Taiwan.”

Just like talk of NATO expanding east exacerbated tensions with Russia and goaded it into military action this bill will exacerbate Chinese concerns that the U.S. is cooking up a similar stratagem. Of course, for China the existential crisis is more pronounced considering Taiwan is recognised, even by the U.S., as part of China’s territory, albeit with a different de-facto government.

As such, this bill, due to heightening tensions, rather than protecting Taiwan could throw them into a proxy war as Beijing using force rushes in to protect its integratory fearing peaceful reunification will be impossible if the U.S. makes Taiwan a de-facto colony. If war breaks out, the U.S. on the other side of the Pacific, would profit handsomely especially as the bill urges “Taiwan to increase its defence spending.”

Section 3215 of the bill entitled “Treatment of Taiwan government” states that the U.S. will drop the practice of “referring to the government in Taiwan as the Taiwan authorities” and instead engage with government departments as “the legitimate representative of the people of Taiwan.” This has the terrifying implication of “tiptoeing” to full recognition of Taiwan as an independent state and destroying the bedrock of peace in East Asia which has been the “One China Policy.”

Bizarrely, the bill goes on to say: “Nothing in this paragraph shall be construed as entailing restoration of diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan) or altering the United States Government’s position on Taiwan’s international status.” As such, the U.S. stance is further obfuscated, which risks misjudgement on both sides. While for the U.S. this may be a “play of words” for those on both sides of the Taiwan Strait these words threaten their basic peace and security.

The ripping up of the “One China Policy” and the goading towards war is even more obvious considering the bill will give legitimacy to the Republic of China’s official emblems such as flags in official ceremonies.

The bill even suggests it will meddle with Taiwan’s media and political institutions. For example, there will be “media training for Taiwan officials and other Taiwan entities targeted by disinformation campaigns.” However, as we have seen with the fake Uygur genocide claims, which have been thoroughly debunked by independent Western media, such as the Gray Zone, the masters of disinformation do not reside in Beijing. As such, this “media training” will add another layer media distortion onto Taiwan.

Even Taiwan’s claim of democracy is at threat. Traditionally, liberal Democracies have the problem of being captured by capital which is able to fund the media and pay off politicians. Of course, the U.S. as the prime capitalist state with the most capital and best “logistics” for influencing elections is no stranger to capturing foreign elections. However, the American COMPETES 2022 act goes a step further by seeking to plant “fellows” directly into Taiwan’s governing system.

This could amount to Taiwan’s governing organs being completely captured by a foreign entity to observe and dictate Taiwan’s policies. Unlikely, would such a parasite tolerate those who sympathise with China’s peaceful unification. This is because the “disaster of peace” would disrupt revenue coming from the U.S.’ traditional field of “technological excellence” which is the profits garnered from advanced weapons sales.

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Keith Lamb is a graduate from the University of Glasgow, Staffordshire University and the University of Oxford. His primary research interests are the international relations of China, neoliberalism and China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

With all the hollering and scolding of Russian barbarity in Ukraine and Chinese viciousness against the Uighur populace, one could be forgiven for thinking that Australia’s politicians were presiding from the summit of human rights superiority.  The vote to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council was also greeted in Canberra with hooting sounds of approval.  The savages were being banished from such bodies that have had, over the years, the membership of such joyful paragons of human rights as Saudi Arabia.

This smugness did not convince the international standards body on human rights, which has found that the Australian Human Rights Commission should be downgraded in its standing.  The reason: seemingly political appointments, without a rigorous selection process, of Ben Gauntlett to the position of Disability Discrimination Commissioner in 2019 and Lorraine Finlay to the position of Human Rights Commissioner last year.

The Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, which conducts the review every five years, considers whether the body in question meets the UN Principles on National Institutions which considers institutional independence for the purpose of ensuring the effective promotion and protection of human rights.

In a statement, the AHRC noted three possible fates: reaccreditation at the A-level; a “downgrade to a B-status institution” or a deferral of the process to permit “serious matters of compliance to be addressed.”  In some ways, the Commission has been given the worst of all worlds: being neither the most appalling, nor the best in terms of practice, it has to languish in the purgatory of deferral, with the Australian government having a period of 15 months to address the problems.

The GANHRI statement had all the flavour of a committee chastisement.  It acknowledged the efforts of the AHRC to address old problems but not enough had been done to heed “previous recommendations.”  It took issue with a selection process where the Attorney-General “may consider that a full selection process is not required” or where the “availability of an eminent person” would make conducting a selection process fairly meaningless (as was the case of Finlay’s appointment in 2021).

Reiterating the same concerns expressed in 2016, the body stressed that “such appointments have the potential to bring into question the legitimacy of the appointees and the independence of the NHRI.”

While human rights standards are always a hard thing to measure, being often hostage to political fortune and self-interest, this was a notable threat.  It means that Australia will be given, quite rightly, mere observer status, its voice, and relevance in the field, reduced.

This latest glaring spotlight on Canberra’s human rights resume continues a legacy of much contradiction.  The country was very encouraging of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, being one of several nations tasked with drafting it.  Attorney-General Herbert V. Evatt, who led the Australian team, saw the document as very much in keeping with the spirit of the “fair go”.

As he promoted that view, Evatt also gave a cast iron guarantee that the White Australia Policy, in place since 1901 as a barrier against the hordes of Asia, would remain unthreatened.  A fair go was very dependent on who had won, to adapt that expression of Cecil Rhodes, that most ruthless of British Empire builders, first prize in the lottery of life.  (For Rhodes, it was the Englishman.)  As Evatt reasoned, “There is no relationship between the Declaration of Human Rights […] and the exercise by a country of its national right […] to determine the composition of its own people.”

In 2018, Australia was elected to sit on the UN Human Rights Council for a three-year term on the crest of two arguments: that it would be the first Pacific state to sit on the body; and because of the country’s commitments to civil and political rights.  Its tenure did not prove particularly impressive, marked by a tendency to conduct “constructive bilateral dialogues” and meek positions.  Elaine Person, Australia director at Human Rights Watch, noted that Canberra had a preference for “making generic statements of concern in Geneva.”

Those generic statements about certain countries and their human rights records have suddenly disappeared – at least regarding those selected autocratic states Prime Minister Scott Morrison is so keen to condemn.  Forceful remarks can be found about Hong Kong, the Uighur populace, and Ukraine.  Officials in Canberra can take some comfort that Australia’s sadistic refugee program and its inglorious record on Indigenous protection can be momentarily eclipsed.

The behaviour surrounding the AHRC is all part of a conscious bankrupting of integrity in a range of public institutions.  This month has been particularly frenetic on that score, with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) proving a favourite forum.  A body responsible for scrutinising decisions made by government ministers and departments is now stacked with Liberal Party loyalists.  These include former West Australian Liberal state politician, Michael Mischin, who is assuming the role of deputy president, and former NSW Liberal Minister, Pru Goward, and Morrison’s former chief of staff, Anne Duffield.

Call it the pestilence of the friendship-made complex: You pick the girls and chaps of your stripe, avoid a rigorous selection process and eschew advertising vacancies.  Discretion will be based on loyalty; criticism of the government will be minimised.  It ensures a lack of independent thinking does much to destroy the basis of a public service above scorn and dispute.  Those days, if indeed they ever existed, are gone.

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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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***

David Callahan is an oil and gas man through and through. With thirty years’ experience in the energy industry, Callahan is currently president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC).

One of the leading trade associations promoting fracking in the Marcellus basin, which is primarily in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, MSC is focused on promoting shale development. The more the better. The coalition sees anyone who stands in the way of LNG expansion as an “extremist”.

Like many in the American oil and gas sector, Callahan sees Putin’s war in Ukraine as a flagrant opportunity to sell more gas. And lots of it. He has been writing syndicated opinion pieces calling on the U.S. to “unleash American energy’s strength and security”. The use of the word “unleash” here is interesting, symbolising a huge resource that is just ready to be tapped. Ironically it is often a word used in war too.

Writing in one journal, Callahan said: “As the world’s largest producer and exporter of natural gas, America is uniquely positioned to do even more to support our allies and their efforts to counter Russia’s hostility. We are fortunate to have such abundant resources that can meet domestic consumer demand and aid European allies.”

The Coalition believes that the U.S. should not only supply Europe, but indeed the whole world. Everyone should have U.S. shale gas.

He of course is not alone in the view that American LNG exports should be ramped up. The leading oil and gas lobby group in the U.S., the American Petroleum Institute (API), has even gone so far as to suggest that the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine is that Biden restricted domestic oil and gas production in the first year of his presidency. More drilling is the answer, it seems, to everything.

But they’re not the only ones. The world’s biggest fossil fuel financiers are salivating at the opportunity too. Jamie Dimon, the powerful CEO of JP Morgan, just this week told shareholders in his annual letter “While the United States is fairly energy independent, we need to increase our energy production and get more gas (in the form of liquefied natural gas) to Europe immediately.”

Dimon added: “Our work with all of our allies should include urging them to both increase their production and deliver some of it to Europe. To do this, we also need immediate approval for additional oil leases and gas pipelines, as well as permits for green energy projects; i.e., solar and wind.”

Whilst Dimon did, rightly, call on solar and wind too, it is ironic that his comments came the day of the latest UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. This was the third and final comprehensive review of the latest climate science, compiled by thousands of leading scientists. The world’s scientists were effectively screaming that we have to stop burning fossil fuels now. As OCI tweeted in response:

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres said at the launch of the IPCC report:

“Inflation is rising, and the war in Ukraine is causing food and energy prices to skyrocket. But increasing fossil fuel production will only make matters worse.”

So we know that American LNG is not the long term answer for Europe, even if Germany is contemplating building LNG terminals in light of the Ukraine war. Although a partnership between the U.S. and European Union could see U.S. LNG exports to Europe grow by 15 billion cubic meters this year, U.S. LNG is not the long-term solution to Europe’s energy needs.

And that is for a simple reason. The IPCC warned that carbon emissions need to peak within three years, and fall rapidly after that if we want any chance of having a liveable climate.  Any new LNG infrastructure would take at least that long to build and would have an expected economic life of decades.

So that is the fundamental flaw with the LNG expansion proposition. It will take years to build terminals which are designed to last decades, but we don’t have decades left in the climate fight. We have three years to peak emissions.

This has not gone unnoticed. As the New York Times outlined earlier in the week: “Developers, though, will be wary of whether the current boom in Europe might fade well before the expiration of the new L.N.G. projects, which are generally expected to operate for 20 years or more. And European leaders insist they still view gas as a temporary fix before renewable energy sources like wind and solar and hydrogen take over.”

Experts are warning that Europe should not build new LNG terminals either. As a recent report by E3G pointed out:

“Security of supply and reduction of Russian gas dependence does not require the construction of new EU gas import infrastructure such as LNG terminals”.

Building LNG terminals is the wrong solution to the problem of weaning Europe off Russian gas. As E3G noted: “Make investments in energy efficiency an energy security priority and increase the ambition of and fast track key renewable energy and efficiency policy.”

We knew the solutions long before this bloody, brutal war: renewables, energy efficiency, batteries and EVs, together with new ways of organising and democratising our energy supply. They were the solutions then, they are the solutions now.

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Ukrainian War Crimes Tribunal: A Moral Imperative

April 9th, 2022 by Stephen Karganovic

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As reports of atrocities and human rights violations in Ukraine mount, corroborated by extensive witness testimony and much tangible evidence (and here), it becomes paramount to consider ways and means of punishing instigators, enablers, and direct perpetrators of these outrages.

It is equally important to preserve the legal and historical record of the crimes and to administer suitable punishments in order to deter other potential war criminals in the Ukrainian theatre.

Finally, the purpose of such a Tribunal would be educational, to impress upon that segment of Ukrainian society which had become swayed by extremist Nazi propaganda the enormity of the misconduct perpetrated in their name and in furtherance of a criminal agenda that, actively or passively, deliberately or unwittingly, some of them may have supported. For, unless there is a sober confrontation with these crimes against humanity by Ukrainians vulnerable to the extremist narrative, and as soon as possible, stability and civility will continue to evade Ukraine for a long time to come.

The first step is to set the framework within which Ukrainian war crimes investigations and trials ought to be conducted. It is possible, of course, to entrust this task to the judicial authorities of Donetsk and Lugansk because obviously they have territorial and subject matter jurisdiction. However, for the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings to be preserved, it would be preferable for Ukrainian war crimes investigations and resultant trials to be conducted under the auspices of an international forum, removed as much as practicable from the parties on the ground.

Clearly, a replication of the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY) in the 1990s is unlikely in the present case. Setting aside technical issues concerning the legitimacy of such a tribunal under the UN Charter, three out of five governments permanently represented on the Security Council are potential suspects for active collusion with and logistical support extended to direct perpetrators of war crimes in the Ukraine. That makes it extremely improbable that this time round they would agree to the establishment of a similar court. The solution, therefore, must be sought elsewhere.

Taking into account the ongoing decline of the global Western hegemonic system, a process which was greatly accelerated precisely by the political, military, economic, and financial fallout of the Ukraine conflict, it would be advisable to look for another way to elevate the Ukrainian war crimes inquiry to the international level. One possible approach would be to place the matter under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. CSTO nations are now effectively the global counterpart to the moribund West-centered “international community” which, in the 1990s, was still able to manipulate the UN in furtherance of its political aims, and to a lesser extent is still able to do that today.

Assuming that CSTO could be a viable option to serve as the supranational patron for the Ukraine war crimes tribunal, the next step would be to carefully define the Tribunal’s remit and to devise its procedural rules to avoid ICTY’s errors. In order to blunt inevitable efforts from the West to discredit the new Tribunal, much of the general language found in corresponding ICTY foundational documents should be utilised, always taking great care to identify and discard those provisions of ICTY Statute and Rules of Evidence and Procedure which are not compatible with best legal practice, and substituting for those provisions universally accepted legal principles.

The next important issue that would have to be dealt with is the staffing of the Ukraine International Criminal Tribunal. Recruitment of judges, investigators, prosecutors, and support staff need not, and in fact should not, be confined to personnel from CSTO states. Persons who satisfy the criterion of professional integrity should be encouraged to participate regardless what country they are nationals of.

The Ukraine Tribunal will also have to select a conceptual framework, a set of main legal principles that it will apply in the conduct of its proceedings. Three major concepts or devices come immediately to mind that have been used by ICTY (the “Mechanism,” which is its successor, is included by reference) to secure often questionable convictions. Those concepts are: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and Plea Bargaining.

With the likely exception of the pernicious practices of accepting uncorroborated confessions and plea bargaining, which in the form as  applied at ICTY have radically undermined rather than promoted the administration of justice, JCE and Command Responsibility could conceivably be reconfigured and preserved in modified form, at least to the extent that they are not in conflict with the tasks of determining objective facts and administering politically neutral justice. For instance, JCE (detached from some of its more absurd variants invented by ICTY judges specifically to facilitate incrimination and conviction by any means) could be a useful tool not only for linking perpetrators acting with criminal intent and in concert, but also for establishing overarching connections between direct on-the-ground perpetrators and their instigators and supporters from beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Another conceptual issue that inevitably will have to be addressed is the scope of the investigations to be carried out beyond the factual matrix of the particular crimes being adjudicated. There is also the further and related question of the nature of broader historical and contextual evidence that should be considered probative and allowed to be presented in court. From the standpoint of securing justice, ICTY’s performance in that regard has been most unsatisfactory, not to say dismal and flagrantly prejudicial to the accused parties.

That is the case because even when ICTY attempts to apply seemingly sound principles it regularly twists them to serve its politically compromised agenda. Background “evidence” presented by ICTY historical, military, media, and other “expert” witnesses had invariably been geared not to shed light on relevant and probative circumstances but to heap maximum discredit upon the targeted parties. The resulting hugely prejudicial reputational damage, that under normal conditions would be inadmissible in a trial court, was designed to impact not just the individual defendant but, even more importantly, the entire ethnic group (at ICTY, in practical terms that meant the Serbs) the defendant happened to belonged to. A particularly obnoxious example were the attempts of ICTY “expert witnesses” to contextually portray verses of nineteenth century Serbian poet Njegoš as no less than the inspiration for the alleged genocide in Srebrenica.

Hopefully, the Ukrainian Tribunal will not have to resort to such pseudo-academic and pseudo-judicial skulduggery because it will operate scrupulously and above board, without fabricating or shaping facts to fit preconceived conclusions dictated by political controllers. That will be its huge moral and professional advantage.

There is no formal reason why the Ukrainian war crimes Tribunal should not be established within the ambit of the judicial systems of the Donbass republics, because such a court would be dealing primarily with criminal conduct in violation of international humanitarian law as it affected the population of those two entities. But it would carry greater weight and would thus be preferable for the task of investigating, apprehending, trying, convicting, and incarcerating offenders to be entrusted to an international body, backed by the legitimacy of recognised and indisputably sovereign nation-states.

Such an approach would make the Ukraine Tribunal’s factual findings and verdicts unquestionably legitimate, which might not entirely be the case with verdicts issued by some local courts. It would serve also an additional important purpose. It would dovetail perfectly with the emergence of the Fair World Order, intended to replace its relatively short-lived “NWO” counterpart. Taking advantage of the convenient opportunity presented by the current crisis, the Ukraine Tribunal could lay the groundwork for a revitalised system of international criminal law, serving as an essential foundational component of a broadly acceptable, inclusive, and viable future global order.

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Stephen Karganovic is president of “Srebrenica Historical Project,” an NGO registered in the Netherlands to investigate the factual matrix and background of events that took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Klaus Schwab, owner and chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is the most dangerous man in the world

WEF’s ultimate goal is to do away with the democratic process and give all ownership and control to the deep state — and the technocratic elite who control it

WEF relies on fearmongering; when the population is controlled by fear, it welcomes authoritarian “protections” like increased surveillance and digital identity systems, introduced under the guise of safety, but which ultimately remove personal autonomy and freedom

WEF’s goal isn’t to just control life on Earth but to fundamentally change it by hacking into humans and removing free will

WEF, in partnership with investment firm BlackRock, has infiltrated the government and is colluding in corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population

You can protect your sovereignty by relying on your own critical thinking and choosing bravery over obedience

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Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is the personification of The Great Reset — the ultimate goal of which is to do away with the democratic process and give all ownership and control to the deep state — and the technocratic elite who control it.

In the video above, comedian JP Sears outlines the primary reasons why this makes Schwab easily among the most dangerous people in the world — and arguably the most dangerous. One of The Great Reset’s “new normal” dictums is that you’ll own nothing and be happy. This is part of WEF’s 2030 agenda,1 and a plan is already in place to make it happen.

Schwab is also author of the book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” which was published July 9, 2020. “Wonder how he got it written and published that fast?” Sears said. “It’s almost like he prewrote it before he started the pandemic. I mean, before the pandemic started.”2

Acute Crisis Boosts the Power of the State

WEF operates via fearmongering — about disease and environmental catastrophes, for starters. When the population is controlled by fear, it welcomes authoritarian “protections” like increased surveillance and digital identity systems, introduced under the guise of safety, but which ultimately remove personal autonomy and freedom.

In fact, Schwab wrote, “One of the greatest lessons of the past five centuries in Europe and America is this: Acute crisis contributes to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case, and there is no reason why it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic.”3 Remember, nobody elected Schwab to any government position, but he’s behind the scenes pulling strings nonetheless.

WEF portrays itself as a global organization committed to improving the state of the world, but most would be taken aback if they knew who’s behind it. As Sears put it:4

“You’ll be excited to hear that the lineup of World Economic Forum’s speakers at their annual gathering of elites in Davos included such benevolent humanitarians like Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, who’s currently committing genocide, and Tony Fauci, who’s arguably involved in crimes against humanity, and Bill Gates, who’s arguably involved in crimes against humanity, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who’s arguably currently involved in crimes against humanity. What a great line up!”

Committed to Reengineering Life Itself

WEF’s goal isn’t to just control life on Earth but to fundamentally change it. Schwab’s top adviser, transhumanist Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, openly admits data might enable human elites to do more than “just build digital dictatorships.”

“By hacking organisms,” Harari said, “elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it.”5 Soon, he says, some corporations and governments will be able to “systematically hack all the people.” And if they succeed in hacking life, he describes it as the “greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life 4 billion years ago.” According to Harari:6

“For 4 billion years, nothing fundamental changed. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds, but our intelligent design, and the intelligent design of our clouds — the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud — these are the new driving forces of evolution.”

Once human life is hacked, the hackers will maintain control over life itself — a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. After all, Harari said, “It’s often said that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.”7

Surveillance is a key part of the plan for global totalitarian control, and Harari says that in 100 years, people will be able to look back and identify the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when a new regime in surveillance took over — “especially surveillance under the skin.”8

WEF Is Actively Indoctrinating ‘Young Leaders’

WEF maintains a “Young Global Leaders” program,9 a five-year indoctrination into their principles. Its goal is to create world leaders who don’t answer to their people but to their bosses at WEF. Graduates of the program include world leaders who are “suspiciously in lockstep” with WEF’s Great Reset, such as:10

  • Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada
  • Emmanuel Macron, president of France
  • Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook

Sponsors of WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google — “I wonder why Google censors and shapes information to be in exact support of the World Economic Forum’s narrative?” Sears asks.11 Meanwhile, WEF is predicting a worldwide cyberattack, which Schwab says “could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole.”12

WEF then conducted a simulation of the cyberattack, which appears more like an elaborate planning session, much like Event 201 — WEF’s pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus” that took place in October 2019.

How Will People ‘Own Nothing and Be Happy’?

If WEF and Schwab are intent on moving ahead with their plan for global domination, they’ll need to get people on board with the idea of giving up ownership to an elite class. But how? Bring in BlackRock, an investment firm that has $9 trillion under management — a higher GDP than every country on Earth aside from the U.S. and China, Sears says.

BlackRock has more power than most governments on Earth, and it also controls the Federal Reserve, Wall Street mega-banks like Goldman Sachs and the WEF’s Great Reset, according to F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.13

So, what’s the connection with the World Economic Forum? Blackrock founder and CEO Larry Fink is a WEF board member. Sears poses the question: “Is the World Economic Forum and Blackrock colluding in corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population?”14

To do this, they’d need to infiltrate the government — and they have. Brian Deese, the U.S. director of National Economic Council, was formerly BlackRock’s global head of sustainable investing. “Now he’s Biden’s main adviser for economic policy,” Sears says.15 Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief economic adviser Michael Pyle also came from BlackRock, where he was a global chief economic strategist.

“It looks like corporatism but it’s probably not,” Sears says jokingly. “But if it was, it would actually be a viable strategy for BlackRock and the World Economic Forum to own everything and for you to own nothing.”16

BlackRock is also buying up single family homes at an alarming rate, paying up to 50% above asking price17 so “average” people can’t buy them. Why is BlackRock interested in overpaying for modest, single family homes? In a Twitter thread posted by user Culturalhusbandry, it’s noted:18

“Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street control 20 trillion dollars worth of assets. Blackrock alone has a 10 billion a year surplus. That means with 5-20% down they can get mortgages on 130-170k homes every year. Or they can outright buy 30k homes per year. Just Blackrock.

… Now imagine every major institute doing this, because they are. It can be such a fast sweeping action that 30yrs may be overshooting it. They may accomplish feudalism in 15 years.”

If the average American is pushed out of the housing market, and most of the available housing is owned by investment groups and corporations, you become beholden to them as your landlord. You’ll then own nothing, not even your home. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class.

Schwab Wasn’t the Mastermind Behind WEF

If Schwab is the most dangerous person alive today, his predecessors deserve honorable mentions. In an investigative report by journalist Johnny Vedmore, it’s revealed that Schwab wasn’t the mastermind behind WEF and The Great Reset.

That honor goes to his three mentors — John K. Galbraith, a Canadian-American economist, diplomat and public policy maker, Herman Kahn, who created concepts on nuclear deterrence that became official military policy, and Henry A. Kissinger, who recruited Schwab at a Harvard international seminar, which was funded by the U.S. CIA.

“If you have a decent knowledge of Klaus Schwab’s history, you will know that he attended Harvard in the 1960s where he would meet then-professor Henry A. Kissinger, a man with whom Schwab would form a lifelong friendship,” Vedmore explained.19

“My research indicates that the World Economic Forum is not a European creation. In reality, it is instead an operation which emanates from the public policy grandees of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixonian eras of American politics; all of whom had ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and the associated “Round Table” Movement, with a supporting role played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There were three extremely powerful and influential men, Kissinger among them, who would lead Klaus Schwab towards their ultimate goal of complete American Empire-aligned global domination via the creation of social and economic policies.

In addition, two of the men were at the core of manufacturing the ever present threat of global thermonuclear war … their paths would cross and coalesce during the 1960s … they recruited Klaus Schwab through a CIA-funded program, and … they were the real driving force behind the creation of the World Economic Forum.”

Your Free Will Is Under Attack

Environmental pollution, disease and cyberattacks are being used to generate fear in order to keep the population compliant. Another part of The Great Reset is a reset of the economy, including jobs. Many across the U.S. are facing unemployment if they do not choose to take a genetic therapy experiment in the form of a COVID-19 shot.

It’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has created “a unique window of opportunity” to rapidly usher in the Great Reset, which involves changing everything from future global relations and the direction of national economies to “the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.”20

Part of the plan involves the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which Schwab has been discussing since at least 201621 and “is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

In terms of government, the Revolution will bring new technological powers that allow for increased population control via “pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure.”22 Meanwhile, while people are busy worrying about the orchestrated threats that are out to get them, technocrats are working on how to remove the essence of what it means to be human — namely, free will.

“Humans are now hackable animals,” Harari said. “Humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will — that’s over.”23 It’s urgent that we all take steps to remain free, sovereign individuals, which can be as straightforward as:24

  • Be guided by your own critical thinking and what your heart and soul know is right
  • Choose bravery over obedience

“We are in the process of either The Great Reset or the Great Awakening,” Sears points out, “and the choice isn’t Klaus Schwab’s. The choice is yours.”25

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Notes

1 Forbes November 10, 2016

2 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 1:25

3 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 2:33

4 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 3:00

5 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 3:35

6 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 4:30

7 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 6:01

8 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 6:27

9 WEF, Young Global Leaders

10 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 7:16

11 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 7:38

12 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 7:51

13 WilliamEngdahl.com June 18, 2021

14 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 9:00

15 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 9:51

16 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 10:00

17 YouTube June 10, 2021

18 Bitcoin.com, News June 11, 2021

19 Unlimited Hangout March 10, 2022

20 WEF, The Great Reset, The Opportunity

21, 22 World Economic Forum January 14, 2016

23, 24 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 12:30

25 YouTube, Awaken With JP March 5, 2022, 13:25

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Klaus Schwab is bringing you the Great Reset. And not only will it be great, it’ll be a fantastic reset!

The folks at the World Economic Forum are busy helping protect you from climate change and disease. Yet some people still ask, is Klaus Schwab the most dangerous man in the World?

Get the full picture along with everything they DON’T want you to know in this video!

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In order to scuttle the Ukraine-Russia peace initiative to Ukraine announced at the Istanbul talks on March 29, halting Russian military campaign north of the capital and focusing on liberating the Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in the embattled country, NATO powers have announced transferring heavy weapons, including tanks and S-300 air defense system, to Ukraine to further escalate the conflict.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, April 7, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley revealed that US and NATO countries have collectively provided roughly 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

“The Russian air force has not even today established air superiority let alone air supremacy, which is one of the reasons why they are having great difficulty on the ground,” the ambitious four-star general, who appears to have sights set on the presidential office after retirement, like Dwight Eisenhower, boasted before the committee:

“So the air superiority mission over Ukraine’s airspace has not been achieved, why is that? It’s because of the survival of the air defense systems, both the MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems) that we have been providing – stingers and the like from other NATO countries – plus the longer range SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) that have been provided and that they already had.”

“We are providing Ukrainians intelligence to conduct operations in the Donbas, that’s correct,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confessed publicly for the first time that the US is providing intelligence to Ukrainian forces in response to the question from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

“We continue to provide useful information and intelligence to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in their fight,” a senior defense official acknowledged after Austin’s remarks. “As that fight migrates more to the Donbas region, we will adjust our information content and flow as required.”

In most cases, two sources familiar with the intelligence-sharing system told CNN, the intelligence being shared involved information about Russian force movements and locations, as well as intercepted communications about their military plans. And it is typically provided to Ukrainian officials as quickly as within 30 minutes to an hour of the US receiving it, making it nearly real-time intelligence sharing.

Literally fawning over the top Pentagon officials, Sen. Roger Wicker, an establishment Republican, asked Austin on why all of $3 billion in congressional authorization for US arms to Ukraine previously pledged by the Biden administration has yet to be provided. “We’ve only used $900 million of this – less than a third of the amount authorized. Why hasn’t the administration provided the full $3 billion?”

US security assistance is flowing into Ukraine “faster than most people would have ever believed conceivable,” Austin told the committee on Thursday – at times arriving in Ukraine within days of receiving authorization, he said. “From the time authorization is provided, four or five days later we see real capability begin to show up,” Austin said during the hearing on the Defense Department’s whopping $773 billion budget request.

Asking for permanent US military presence in Central Europe to deter Russia, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs proposed before the House Armed Services Committee: “My advice would be to create permanent bases but don’t permanently station (forces), so you get the effect of permanence by rotational forces cycling through permanent bases,” he said.

“I believe that a lot of our European allies, especially those such as the Baltics or Poland and Romania, and elsewhere — they’re very, very willing to establish permanent bases. They’ll build them, they’ll pay for them.”

“I do think this is a very protracted conflict and I think it’s at least measured in years. I don’t know about decades, but at least years for sure,” said Milley. “I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine and all of the allies and partners that are supporting Ukraine are going to be involved in this for quite some time.” (emphasis added)

“We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules based current global order. We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing,” Gen. Milley said.

Czechoslovakia used to have the most advanced military-industrial complex in Central Europe during the Soviet era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and subsequent separation of the “conjoined twins” in 1993, the Czech Republic has inherited the Soviet weaponry. Famous of its arms black market, Czech weapons have been found in war theaters as far away as Syria, Libya and South Sudan.

The Czech Republic had delivered tanks, multiple rocket launchers, howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine among military shipments that had reached hundreds of millions of dollars and would continue, two Czech defense sources confided to Reuters.

Defense sources confirmed a shipment of five T-72 tanks and five BVP-1, or BMP-1, infantry fighting vehicles seen on rail cars in photographs on Twitter and video footage this week. “For several weeks, we have been supplying heavy ground equipment – I am saying it generally but by definition it is clear that this includes tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers and multiple rocket launchers,” a senior defense official said.

“What has gone from the Czech Republic is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” The senior defense official said the Czechs were also supplying a range of anti-aircraft weaponry. Independent defense analyst Lukas Visingr said short-range air-defense systems Strela-10, or SA-13 Gopher in NATO terminology, had been spotted on a train apparently bound for Ukraine.

One agreed shipment authorized by the German government includes 56 Czechoslovak-made infantry fighting vehicles that used to be operated by East Germany. Berlin passed the IFVs on to Sweden at the end of the 1990s, which later sold them to a Czech company that now aims to sell them to Kyiv, according to German Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

But in a significantly escalatory move, virtually scuttling the Russian peace initiative to Ukraine announced at the Istanbul talks on March 29 and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian forces from the rest of the embattled country, excluding Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, Slovakia has struck a deal with NATO 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,” Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced Friday.

Although NATO has provided thousands of 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. 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.

Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Politico on March 16: “The U.S. was working with allies to send more S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Ukraine. The country has had the S-300 for years, so troops should require little-to-no training on how to operate the Soviet-era anti-aircraft equipment. CNN reported that Slovakia had preliminarily agreed to transfer their S-300s to Ukraine.

“A Western diplomat familiar with Ukraine’s requests said Kyiv specifically has asked the U.S. and allies for more Stingers and Starstreak man-portable air-defense systems, Javelins and other anti-tank weapons, ground-based mobile air-defense systems, armed drones, long-range anti-ship missiles, off-the-shelf electronic warfare capabilities, and satellite navigation and communications jamming equipment.”

To further help, there is a push to get Eastern European allies to send new air defense systems to Ukraine that the US doesn’t have. At the top of the list are mobile, Russian-made missile systems such as the SA-8 and S-300. Like the S-300, Ukraine also possesses SA-8s. The SA-8 is a mobile, short-range air defense system still in the warehouses of Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. The larger, long-range S-300 is still in use by Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia.

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 heading 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 receives 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.

Slovakian 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 the fourth Patriot missile system from the United States next week.

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.

In a spirit of reconciliation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday Russia’s military “operation” in Ukraine could end in the “foreseeable future” as goals were being reached and negotiations were ongoing.

“The operation continues; the goals are being achieved. Substantive work is being carried out both through the military in terms of advancing the operation, and through the negotiators who are in the negotiation process with Ukrainian counterparts,” Peskov told reporters. “We are talking about the foreseeable future,” he added when asked for a timeline.

Dismissing Russia’s peace overtures to Ukraine as “nothing more than a smokescreen,” however, US and European officials voiced skepticism over Russia’s “sincerity and commitment” towards the peace talks, underlining that only a full ceasefire, troop withdrawal and return of captured territory to Ukraine would be enough to trigger discussions over lifting sanctions on Russia’s economy.

“The notion that you would reward Putin for occupying territory doesn’t make sense … it would be very, very difficult to countenance” a senior EU official confided to the Financial Times. “There’s a disconnect between these negotiations, what really happens on the ground, and the total cynicism of Russia. I think we need to give them a reality check,” the official added.

Advising Ukrainians to hold out instead of rushing for securing peace deal with Russia, the Sunday Times reported, senior British officials were urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to instruct his negotiators to refuse to make concessions during peace negotiations with Russian counterparts.

A senior government source said there were concerns that allies were “over-eager” to secure an early peace deal, adding that a settlement should be reached only when Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.

In a phone call, Boris Johnson warned President Zelensky that President Putin was a “liar and a bully” who would use talks to “wear you down and force you to make concessions.” The British prime minister also told MPs it was “certainly inconceivable that any sanctions could be taken off simply because there is a ceasefire.” London was making sure there was “no backsliding on sanctions by any of our friends and partners around the world,” he added.

About the author:

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East 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.

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First posted on Global Research on December 30, 2021

***

“The proof is there. They are killing our children”

“These Vaccines are Killing the Young and the Old, They are Killing our Children”

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Dr. Bhakdi explains how and why the gene-based COVID-“vaccines” trigger the breakdown of immunological defenses against infectious agents that lie dormant (“sleeping”) in our bodies. These include many viruses such as Herpes zoster (shingles), Epstein-Barr-Virus (infectious mononucleosis), Cytomegaloviruses, bacteria – particularly tuberculosis – and parasites.

Moreover, our sentinel lymphocytes are vitally important in protecting us against tumors because they swiftly exterminate cancer cells that continually arise in our bodies. “Vaccine”- mediated destruction of these sentinel lymphocytes is going to have disastrous global consequences.

Patients with dreaded “old” infections such as tuberculosis and with malignant tumors will flood the hospitals around the world.

Video

Dr. Suchrit Bhakdi has spent his life practicing, teaching and researching medical microbiology and infectious diseases. He chaired the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, from 1990 until his retirement in 2012.

He has published over 300 research articles in the fields of immunology, bacteriology, virology and parasitology, and served from 1990 to 2012 as Editor-in-Chief of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, one of the first scientific journals of this field that was founded by Robert Koch in 1887.

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The withdrawal of Russian troops from the periphery of Kiev had been announced by Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin, who was leading the Russian peace delegation in Istanbul:

“In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions.”  (emphasis added)

It is worth noting that the withdrawal of Russian troops from the village of Buch on the outskirts of Kiev was confirmed by the Mayor of Bucha on March 31st.

The video interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky addresses the historical context as well as recent events focussing on  the peace negotiations as well as the alleged accusations directed against Russia of having killed civilians in the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital.

Video: Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux

Link to Lux Media Odysee: Click here to Leave a Comment

 

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On April 7, another evidence reportedly confirmed that the ‘Bucha massacre’ was staged by Ukrainian military.

As soon as Ukrainian journalists reached the area of the Kiev region left by Russian forces, the streets of Bucha turned out to be covered by corpses of Ukrainian civilians. Obviously, Russian servicemen are blamed of mass murders when leaving the area.

Numerous evidences from the area confirmed that the Bucha massacre was another propaganda provocation by the Kiev regime.

On the video from Bucha, one of alleged corpses of civilians is seen getting up from the ground. Another argument confirming that the video is fake was the fact that there were no women allegedly killed by Russian servicemen, seen on the streets. More information here: LINK, LINK, LINK

On April 7, an audio recording of the alleged negotiations between the militants of the unit of the so-called territorial defence under the command of Ukrainian Nazi Sergei “Bossman” Korotkov. This unit was one of the first to enter Bucha after Russian forces left the area and they were free to kill civilians without a blue handband, as a sign for Ukrainian military.

Some of the MSM have already tried to present the recording as a conversation between Russian soldiers who were allegedly preparing a provocation in Ukraine. However, it is evident that the servicemen are speaking Ukrainian, they discussed the exact video staged in Bucha, and that ‘Sergey’ mentioned during the conversation is likely the notorious Ukrainian commander.

At the same time, the sources of the recording have not yet been confirmed, and there is a possibility that this is nothing but another fake spread by any of the warring sides within the ongoing information war.

Swear words are written with ****

– Hello.
– Hello Vasya, are you talking?! Can you f**ing hear me right now?
– Yes, I hear you well. Yes.
– Vasya, can you f** answer me one question. What the ***, Vasya, are you all really f**ed up there. Could you do anything well to me or not?!
– That is, what?!
– Shut up, Vasya. Why *** are they moving on camera, tell me, Vasya, ***. Can’t they *** lie down for five minutes?! Sergey Sergeevich f***ed me for half an hour now in front of everyone.
– I understand everything, this will not happen again.
– Don’t *** do it anymore, Vasya. Do you understand or not?! Next *** time, you’ll follow that Russian ship, ***. And I will go with you.
– Taras Grigoryevich, I understand everything, everything. Next time it will be different.
– How *** is there any other way?! Was difficult to put a woman on the road? You tell me! There was no *** normal woman?! You have *** only men in the frame lying, *** ***. I found some *** idiots in a civilian settlement.
– I assure you, Taras Grigoryevich, next time we will definitely do it well.
– That’s a *** (failure) , Vasya. I’m telling you, it’s just a f*** (failure). And tell Feder *** too, he is gonna get from the office now, ***. That’s it, ***.

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Video: What the Great Reset Really Has in Store for Us

April 8th, 2022 by Kristina Borjesson

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***

The Whistleblower Newsroom presents excerpts from a riveting panel discussion among independent investigative journalists Iain Davis and Whitney Webb, Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review Matthew Ehret, political commentator and analyst Tom Luongo, and Moscow-based journalist Riley Waggaman, who talk about The Great Reset’s hallmarks, how it was kicked into high gear by a fraudulent covid pandemic, and how those fighting for the ultimate prize—total governance over all people and things–think the world and all humans in it, should be.

Titled “Russia and the Great Reset: Resistance or Complicity,” the panel discussion was hosted by Off Guardian and Unlimited Hangout.

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Video: Donbass Front Lines Start Moving

April 8th, 2022 by South Front

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After the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kiev and Chenihov regions, pressure on the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the Donbass front lines increased. While the shelling on Ukrainian military targets around Ukraine continues on a daily basis, the joint DPR, LPR and Russian forces are claiming small victories on the front lines.

DPR units with support of Russian forces are advancing and securing their rears to the east of the town of Maryinka, where fierce street fighting continues.

On April 6, the Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed that DPR units finished the mop up operation in the village of Sladkoye. The 11th regiment of the DPR broke through fierce resistance of the AFU and took control over the village.

Meanwhile, units of the Russian army entered the village of Novomikhailovka to the south of the town of Maryinka.

Positional battles continue to the north of Avdiivka. After DPR forces took control over the village of Novobakhmutovka, they are strengthening their positions there. Several streets are still under the AFU control.

Ukrainian soldiers attempted a counterattack on the village of Verhnetoretskoe with 6 tanks and infantry, but were repelled. Advance of DPR forces at the Avdiivka—Konstantinovka highway is expected.

One of the main strongholds of the AFU in the region is the town of Novgorodskoe to the west of Gorlovka. After years of war, Ukrainian forces have heavily fortified the area. Fierce clashes reached some streets of the town, but the DPR advance is slowed down by the AFU advantage in forces. The DPR assault is carried out with the air support of the Russian Aerospace forces.

The AFU are amassing in the Kramatorsk, Artemovsk (or Bakhmut), Druzhkovka area, while Russian forces are attempting to surround the AFU grouping from the north.

The main hotspot on the Donbass front lines is the region of Izyum. Amid fierce resistance by the AFU, Russian forces are slowly advancing to the south and southeast of Kamenka in the direction of Barvenkovo and Slavyansk. The villages of Brazhkovka and Sukhaya Kamenka are now under the Russian control.

In their turn, LPR forces are slowly advancing on the streets of the town of Popasnaya. In the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area, LPR troops reached the outskirts of the Severodonetsk city, clashes continue in the eastern regions of Rubezhnoe, where the AFU blew up a tank with toxic substances at the Zarya chemical plant.

The Kharkiv and Sumy front lines remain without significant changes. A large offensive of Russian forces is expected in the region, after more Russian troops are transferred form the Kiev region to the Eastern front lines.

The Kiev officials are preparing to the battle by their traditional means, sharing lies. The notorious adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine Alexey Arestovich has recently claimed that of the 648 soldiers of the Russian 200 motorized rifle brigade, only three survived on the Kharkov outskirts.

In response, servicemen of the brigade responded with a video showing them carrying out combat missions a few kilometers from the city.

Despite unconfirmed reports of the Mykolaiv officials, no changes on the border of the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions are confirmed. The village of Snegirevka and the outskirts of Alexandrovka are under the Russian control. The AFU forces are attempting to attack from the Nikopol direction in the area of Novorontsovka.

The mop up operations in the city of Mariupol continue. According to the official representative of the DPR People’s Militia, about three thousand soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including nationalist regiments may currently be besieged in Mariupol.

The main battles in the central part of the city are over. Fighting moved to the port of the city and to the territory of the heavily fortified industrial area of the Azovstal plant.

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue to strike at the the military infrastructure of Ukraine.

On April 6, high-precision ground-based missiles destroyed the command post of Ukraine’s 56th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade near Novogrodovka, as well as a nationalist base in Grodovka, in Donetsk Region.

High-precision air-based missiles destroyed a fuel depot near Chuguev, in the Kharkov Region, from where fuel was supplied to Ukrainian troops.

In addition, a large concentration of foreign-made weapons and military equipment supplied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces was destroyed on the eve at the Lozovaya railway station in Kharkov Region.

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***

 

 

 

 

 

Videos have circulated on Twitter and the Chinese social media platform Weibo of what appears to be a drone hovering in the sky, broadcasting Covid lockdown guidelines to residents under quarantine.

One particular clip shows a drone with red, flashing lights hovering above apartment buildings, broadcasting a message loudly. The video’s original poster said the clip was taken in a residential district in Shanghai.

“Everyone, don’t sing songs on your balcony. Songjiang Jiuting Park residents sang a little bit and then there was a drone coming over to say to control the desire for freedom in one’s soul,” read the poster’s caption on the video.

In the video, the drone is seen flying over buildings, and a robotic voice broadcasts the message:

“Residents of Jiuting. During the pandemic, we request that you strictly abide by COVID-19 restrictions and related guidelines. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing. This increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”

Other drones have also been seen flying over Shanghainese districts, prompting some posters who filmed videos of the drones to call it “a glimpse of Cyberpunk 2077,” referencing the dystopian video game.

In other clips on the Twitter-like Weibo platform, drones broadcasting messages to college students were seen taking off. These drones broadcast messages that indicated that due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, one must keep face masks on at all times and stay in the confines of their college dormitories.

It’s not just drones that are being deployed in Shanghai. Videos of robot dogs trotting along the empty streets of Shanghai have also been uploaded to Weibo .

One robot dog was spotted carrying a loudspeaker from which COVID-19 lockdown guidelines were broadcast.

“Disinfect regularly. Ventilate your home. Prevent the pandemic in a scientific manner,” intoned the broadcast message, in a similarly robotic voice.

Shanghai is currently struggling with a marked surge in COVID-19 cases, prompting the entire city of 26 million to be put on a strict lockdown amid mandated mass-testing for the virus. The city’s Covid-zero policy has, however, drawn flak after disturbing videos emerged of infants and toddlers being left unattended in an overcrowded quarantine center in the city — a move that the Chinese government has defended .

The city’s mass-testing regimen has surfaced more than 94,000 infections in the southern financial hub since March 1, per the South China Morning Post.

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***

The World Government Summit is underway this week in Dubai and we’ve already got a bombshell to report.

Dr. Pippa Malmgrem, a top American economist who served as a special adviser to former President George W. Bush, made a statement that confirms everything myself and others have been reporting for quite some time – that a cashless society is looming right around the corner.

Listen to her comments in the video clip below.

Malmgren stated:

“We are on the brink of a dramatic change where we are about to, and I’ll say this boldly, we are about to abandon the traditional system of money and accounting and introduce a new one. And the new one; the new accounting is what we call blockchain… It means digital, it means having an almost perfect record of every single transaction that happens in the economy, which will give us far greater clarity over what’s going on.”

Who is Pippa Malmgren? She is a globalist and an elitist. Her father, Harald Malmgren, was a senior adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford. Pippa has also advised presidents and prime ministers around the world. One of her favorite topics over the last two years has been “The Upside of COVID.” Like Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum, she sees COVID as an “opportunity” to transform the world.

According to her website:

Dr. Malmgren brings simple sensemaking to the complexities of the world economy, geopolitics and technology. She’s advised Presidents and Prime Ministers, co-founded an award-winning tech firm, worked in finance and asset management and served as a judge in The Queen’s Enterprise Awards competition and as a regulator of technology standards.

She has lectured at Sandhurst, Duke Fuqua GEMBA, INSEAD, UT Austin and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Read her full bio.

This new money system Malmgren talks about with such enthusiasm will not only be digital, it will be centralized and it will be programmable. Do not confuse it with Bitcoin or other crypto currencies. The only thing it will share in common with other crypto is that it will be based on blockchain technology.

So what do I mean by “programmable” money?

This means the central banks will have complete control over your money and will be able to program it so that it can only be spent on certain things or in certain places. For example, have you purchased too many guns or too much ammunition over the past month? Maybe you indulged in too much frivolous travel and blew through too much gasoline? The government could easily have your money reprogrammed to limit future purchases of such taboo items. The possibilities are endless.

What’s the bottom line? Once we get digital programmable money, where and how you will be “allowed” to spend your money will depend on your social credit score.

This money will be linked to everyone’s personal digital identity. The digital ID marks the other pillar of the new digital economy that they haven’t really told you about yet. But if you read their documents at the World Economic Forum, you know it’s coming.

As I’ve stated before, the entire Great Reset hinges on two things – the establishment of a global digital currency and a global digital identity for every man, woman and child.

Pippa Malmgren is warning us. That system is at the door. And once it’s here, it marks the beginning of the end because nobody will be allowed to buy or sell without becoming a digitized, hybrid human being. I believe it will be possible for us to live outside this system for a while, but we need a plan, a network. We will need to live in community with like-minded refusniks.

The vast majority of people will walk blindly into this digital trap being set by the power elites, only to regret it later. They will lose all autonomy over their bodies, having to submit to endless booster shots, as well as over their minds. Independent critical thinkers will be banned from the system. Traditionally minded Christians and Jews will be banned. Why? Because free thought is not allowed. They talk about diversity and inclusion but that is a euphemism for a society based on total information domination, where you must not only follow but celebrate whatever lie of the day is being promoted in the mainstream corporate media and on social media.

Have you “done your part” to defeat the latest virus by getting vaccinated?

Do you “stand with Ukraine”?

Do you believe that it’s impossible to define what makes a woman a woman?

Do you believe that Biden was legitimately elected and that elections are still “free and fair” in your country?

These are just a few of the items on the litmus test of the New World Order.

Get ready to resist and prepare yourself to live outside the system. One day you may even be faced with martyrdom for your faith.

They’ve told us what they are going to do. Are you listening?

  • They’ve told us that they are working on a new digital currency (see Biden’s March 9 executive order).
  • They’ve told us a major cyber attack is coming that will target our banking and financial system (providing the pretext for the new digital money system).

What more do we need to know?

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***

In a bombshell NBC scoop published Wednesday, the authors of the report alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to mainstream news outlets to mount an information warfare campaign against Russia during the latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine, despite being aware the intelligence wasn’t credible.

The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.

The crux of the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the mainstream news outlets are not at liberty to report on.

Despite being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession to Kyiv, halting Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”

Screenshot from NBC News

Regarding the malicious disinformation campaign mounted by Western media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes:

“The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”

It has become clear now the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real battles for territory were actually fought and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.

But US security agencies insidiously kept feeding false information of impending fall of the Ukrainian capital to the mainstream media throughout Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine.

Only two conclusions could be drawn from this scaremongering tactic: either it was a massive intelligence failure and Western security agencies weren’t aware the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” approaching the capital was a ruse; or the NATO’s spy agencies had credible intelligence since the beginning of Russia’s military campaign that real battles for territory would be fought in Donbas in east Ukraine and the feigned assault on the capital was simply a diversionary tactic but they exaggerated the threat in order to vilify Russia’s calculated military offensive in Ukraine, and win the war of narratives that “how the war is perceived across the world.”

Except in the early days of the military campaign when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to degrade the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military force had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.

By mid-March, after the “40-mile-long” column of armored vehicles that created panic in the rank and file of Ukraine’s security forces and their international backers and that didn’t move an inch further after reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war, it became obvious even to the lay observers of the Ukraine War that it was evidently a diversionary tactic.

But Western security agencies and the corporate media kept propagating the myth that the purported assault on the Ukrainian capital was stalled by alleged “fierce Ukrainian resistance,” and if it were up to Russian forces, they would “ransack the capital Kyiv” and “overrun the whole territory” of the embattled country.

Even a week after the unilateral Russian peace initiative on March 25, scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, Western intelligence community and the mainstream media kept warning the gullible audience Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” and that Russian forces had withdrawn back into Belarus and Russia simply to “regroup, refit and resupply.”

Last week, US officials told reporters they had intelligence suggesting “Putin was being misled” by his own advisers, who were “afraid to tell him the truth.” “The degree to which Putin is isolated or relying on flawed information can’t be verified,” Paul Pillar, a retired career US intelligence officer, confided to NBC. “There’s no way you can prove or disprove that stuff,” he said.

Two US officials said the intelligence about whether “Putin’s inner circle was lying to him wasn’t conclusive” — based more on “analysis than hard evidence.” Multiple US officials acknowledged that the US had used “information as a weapon” even when “confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.” Sometimes it had used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the US was just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

While attempting to play mind games with Putin, the US intelligence community must’ve overlooked “an inconsequential detail” that before venturing into politics, Putin himself was part of the Cold War’s Russian intelligence agency, the KGB, for many years.

Based on declassified intelligence, The New York Times reported last week:

“The Russian military’s stumbles have eroded trust between Mr. Putin and his Ministry of Defense. While Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu had been considered one of the few advisers Mr. Putin confided in, the prosecution of the war in Ukraine has damaged the relationship. Mr. Putin has put two top intelligence officials under house arrest for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, something that may have further contributed to the climate of fear.”

Other American officials, as reported in the mainstream media, had said that “Putin’s rigid isolation during the pandemic” and willingness to publicly “rebuke advisers who did not share his views” had created a degree of wariness, or even fear, in senior ranks of the Russian military. Officials believe that Putin had been getting “incomplete or overly optimistic reports” about the progress of Russian forces, “creating mistrust with his military advisers.”

All the media hype in order to misguide gullible audiences following the stellar Russian victory in the Ukraine War aside, the fact remains it’s old wine in new bottles. The intelligence wasn’t declassified last week, it was declassified a month ago, but nobody paid much attention to the asinine assertion of an alleged rift between Putin and the Russian military leadership.

The Politico reported as early as March 8, in an article titled “Putin is angry,” that the US intelligence heads warned before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the panel’s annual hearing on worldwide threats that Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was not going as planned and it could “double down” in Ukraine.

“Although it still remains unclear whether Russia will pursue a maximalist plan to capture all or most of Ukraine, Director National Intelligence Avril Haines said, such an effort would run up against what the U.S. intelligence community assesses is likely to be a persistent and significant insurgency by Ukrainian forces.”

Clearly, DNI Avril Haines spilled the secret before the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence was in dark whether the Russian forces would overrun the whole of Ukraine, or the Russian blitz north of the capital was only a diversionary tactic meant for tying up Ukrainian forces in the north, while Russia concentrated its efforts in liberating Donbas in the east.

Echoing the “recently declassified intelligence” disclosed by NYT the preposterous claim that Putin’s rigid self-isolation during the COVID pandemic allegedly created a rift between him and Russia’s military leadership, the Politico report from a month ago presciently endorsed the inane intelligence assessment:

“William Burns, the CIA director, portrayed for lawmakers an isolated and indignant Russian president who is determined to dominate and control Ukraine to shape its orientation. Putin has been ‘stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. That personal conviction matters more than ever,’ Burns said.

“Burns also described how Putin had created a system within the Kremlin in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower — and sparser still because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In that hierarchy, Burns said, ‘it’s proven not career-enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.’”

The most notable success of the US information warfare campaign based on misleading declassified intelligence to media outlets, as claimed by the NBC report, may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence. By the time Russia moved its troops in, “the West presented a unified front.”

“A former U.S. official said administration officials believe the strategy delayed Putin’s invasion from the first week of January to after the Olympics and that the delay bought the U.S. valuable time to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.”

Contradicting the NBC claim, however, The Intercept reported on March 11, citing “credible intelligence sources,” that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.

Last April, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

After perusing such contradictory reports, citing “credible intelligence estimates,” it appears the US intelligence community has developed a novel espionage technique of playing both ends against the middle. The world’s leading US spy agencies seem to have this uncanny ability of predicting with absolute certainty that an event is as likely to happen as it is likely that it may not happen. And since the media watchdog has been tamed to the point where it dares not question the authority, therefore security agencies would get the credit whether or not they performed their duties diligently.

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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 Af-Pak and Middle East 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.

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***

Updated on April 8, 2022

This is the latest outrage inflicted on our right to access information and it goes one step further in the war on freedom of expression!

Previously, intercepts like the one below, only happened when you clicked on a link in your Browser but Google have taken censorship onto an entirely new level. Google now intercepts your PRIVATE EMAIL, allegedly to protect you against phishing and other online scams.

This is how it works:

The email in question arrives in your Inbox and looks normal until you click on it to open it when this message appears, replacing the content of the email!

Mr intercept

There are two live links in the offending message, one asks you to report the ‘offending’ site by saying “This isn’t a web forgery…”

Clicking on the link: ‘This isn’t a web forgery…” takes you to the page below:

You can submit a report, either for or against. Once you have submitted the report, you are presented with the following page:

Google intercept

If you reply, which I did, cursing the bastards for interfering with my right to information. ‘Google Safe Browsing’ [sic] but not safe from Google! The algorithm even intercepts mail from Google!

If you click on the link, “Ignore this warning”, the message disappears and the original Email message is revealed but Google have another trick up their sleeve, as any links in the message, DON’T WORK! There is however, a workaround as the actual link is there it just doesn’t work! If you can, copy the link and paste it directly into your browser (Windows and Macs use a different method to reveal the link) and you’ll get to the site in question.

This is insidious censorship masquerading as protecting the user and it reveals the true nature of Google because it means that Google is not only scanning your PRIVATE EMAIL for ‘questionable’ links but of course, for ‘questionable’ content, which means Google is actually reading the contents of your formally, private Email!

Given the ubiquitous nature of Google’s role in ALL electronic communications, short of returning to actual, physical letters, I’m not sure what can be done about this outrage but at least let’s make the world aware that this kind of outrageous interception of our communications is going on. Frankly it’s the final nail in coffin of any kind of democratic control over communications.

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William Bowles is an outstanding author and geopolitical analyst. He is regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Controversy gripped the Greek political scene on April 7 as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was invited by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to speak before Greece’s parliament in a virtual address, appeared alongside two fighters of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Although the Greek government and its media arms attempted to whitewash the Azov Battalion in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, which failed, it actually ended up being counterproductive as it made Greek civilians aware to the fact that the neo-Nazi group were oppressing the 100,000+ ethnic Greeks living in Mariupol and its surrounding villages like Sartana.

Zelensky’s invitation to speak to the Greek Parliament was already mired in controversy as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), left-wing MeRA25 and right-wing Hellenic Solution boycotted parliament that day. The appearance of the Azov fighters prompted MPs from the official opposition SYRIZA to storm out of parliament, despite the party initially being enthusiastic for Zelensky to speak before parliamentarians.

With Greek media and opposition parties, even those who supported Zelensky, blowing up at the appearance of the Azov Battalion, it took the Greek government almost three hours to try and distance themselves from the debacle, with government spokesperson Yiannis Economou saying: “including a message from an Azov Battalion member was wrong and inappropriate.

For their part, Mitsotakis and President Katerina Sakellaropoulou highlighted Zelensky’s speech but made no reference to the appearance of the Azov Battalion. SYRIZA, MeRA25 and fellow left-wing party KINAL (third largest party in Greece) are demanding explanations from the ruling New Democracy government. Even former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of the New Democracy party characterised the speech from the Azov Battalion fighter as “a big mistake.”

This scandal is now being moved to the forthcoming Conference of [Party] Presidents, and the opposition are seeking explanations as to whether the government was aware or agreed with Zelensky to give the floor to Azov Battalion fighters.

The appearance of the Azov Battalion in the Greek parliament should not be surprising when the Greek mainstream media were whitewashing the group to the point of even lionising them in interviews and claiming they had “nothing to do with the Ukrainian government” despite being a unit of the Republican Guard, which falls under the command of the Interior Ministry.

In addition, Manolis Androulakis, the last EU diplomat to evacuate Mariupol, deliberately lied to the Greek public and claimed in an interview that the “Azov do not kill their own”, i.e. civilians. This not only contradicts all available evidence from Mariupol civilians themselves, including from ethnic Greeks, but even contradicts Western liberal human rights organizations who have documented Azov Battalion crimes since 2014.With a Greek diplomat and mainstream media whitewashing the Azov Battalion, it is little wonder why Zelensky had the audacity to play a video message from the two Azov Battalion fighters claiming to be ethnic Greeks from Mariupol.

One of the biggest questions being raised in Greece at the moment is why did the two Azov Battalion fighters appear in Zelensky’s virtual address to the Greek Parliament to begin with when the Ukrainian president has always appeared alone during his tour of receiving the applause and adulation of European parliaments.

One of the supposed ethnic Greek fighters of the Azov Battalion identified himself as Mikhail. The other kept his face hidden. Speculation is rife whether the Azov Battalion member, who spoke in Ukrainian to the Greek parliament, is actually an ethnic Greek or not – but at this time it is impossible to verify, and more importantly, irrelevant to the fact that the Greek government has exposed itself to a massive humiliation at a time when its popularity is already dropping due to the declining economic situation and decision to send weapons to Ukraine.

As the Azov Battalion has the disdain of all Greeks – from liberals to the Far Right and the Far Left, except from the most radical neoliberal circles, it can be assumed that Zelensky attempted to foster a good image for the neo-Nazi group. The beginning of the war in Ukraine saw the pro-government Greek media engage in a massive whitewashing of the Azov Battalion, but as the weeks passed on, more and more testimonies from Greeks in Mariupol revealed the suffering they had endured under the Kiev regime and the Azov Battalion.

More revealing, ethnic Greeks from Essentuki, Chechnya and other parts of Russia were joining the Russian military to fight against the Azov Battalion in Mariupol, especially after news filtered that one ethnic Greek in the Russian military was killed, public opinion towards the Azov Battalion began to sway significantly. It can only be assumed that Zelensky attempted to restore the image of the Azov Battalion by presenting their own alleged ethnic Greek fighters.

What began as an exercise to tick off the Greek Parliament’s participation in Zelensky’s tour of Europe’s Parliaments, has now turned into a massive debacle. As Greece has a special responsibility for the 100,000+ Greeks in Mariupol, the country should not just blindly follow Western interests who have been silent about Donbass’ suffering since 2014. But alas, as New Democracy serve the interests of NATO and the West rather than Greek citizens and diaspora Greeks, it will once again have to deal with another blow to its already diminishing popularity.

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***

A speech by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Greek parliament on Thursday (8 April) was overshadowed by the inclusion of a video message from the far-right militia group, the Azov Battalion, that was addressed to lawmakers.

Addressing the Greek parliament via videoconference,  Zelenskyy called on Athens to put pressure on the EU to adopt stricter sanctions against Moscow.

However, a video showing a member of the Azov Battalion, which was broadcast to Greek lawmakers right after Zelenskyy’s speech, has triggered strong reactions in Athens.

“I have been waking up every day for more than a month thinking about Mariupol, which is being destroyed by Russian troops,” the Ukrainian president said.

“There are still 100,000 people on the border with Mariupol. There is no building left. Mariupol has been destroyed,” Zelenskyy added.

He stressed that

“Ukraine is one of the Orthodox countries that was Christianised by the Greeks. In Ukrainian culture and history it will be seen that we will lose a big part of history if we lose the culture brought by Greek culture”.

“Freedom or Death was what your revolutionaries were saying. We are shouting the same today,” the Ukrainian president said, referring to the Greek Revolution of 1821.

Zelenskyy also called on Greeks to mount pressure on the EU and adopt stricter measures against Russia.

“We must close the door on Russian banks. No Russian ship should approach European ports. No acceptance on Russian tankers. With the money Russia earns, it destroys our cities,” he said, emphasising also the need for weapons, anti-aircraft equipment and armour.

Lawmakers from the biggest parties, ruling New Democracy (EPP), Syriza (EU Left) and socialists (Pasok) attended Zelenskyy’s speech, while communists and the populist Greek Solution party abstained. Diem25, Yiannis Varoufakis’s leftist party, was represented by just one lawmaker.

Although all lawmakers present hailed the Ukrainian president’s speech expressing their support for Ukraine, a video message to parliament showing a member of the Azov Battalion describing the disaster of Mariupol overshadowed the event.

The soldier in the video message said:

“I was born in Mariupol, and I take part in the defence of the city from the Russian Nazis. I will not talk about the difficulties we have in defence, participating through the Azov Battalion. This is my debt to my city, my debt as a man and I must talk about the catastrophic conditions in which the Greek Mariupol is experiencing.”

The video of Azov Battalion’s soldier triggered the reaction of opposition parties as well as influential members of the ruling New Democracy party.

“The speech of members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the Greek Parliament is a provocation. The absolute responsibility lies with the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. He talked about a historic day, but it is a historic shame. The solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But the Nazis cannot have a say in Parliament,” Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras posted on Facebook.

Similarly, former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said allowing this video to be broadcast in the Greek House was a “big mistake”.

“The Greek government irresponsibly undermined the struggle of the Ukrainian people, by giving the floor to a Nazi. The responsibilities are heavy. The government should publish a detailed report of preparation and contacts for the event,” commented former foreign affairs minister Nikos Kotzias.

The socialists issued a statement asking why Greek lawmakers had not been informed about the video intervention of an Azov Battalion member and called on the president of the Greek Parliament to bear responsibility.

Mitsotakis issued a statement saying “Europe is called upon to immediately put out the fire of war that ignited in its heart the Russian regime. The heinous crimes that were committed should be punished”.

Meanwhile, government spokesperson Giannis Oikonomou said the inclusion of the Azov Battalion message was “incorrect and inappropriate”. However, he did not say who should be held responsible for this.

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***

While the western media quickly jumped from the COVID crisis to the Ukraine crisis, in the background of current events there is a lot of activity amid western government that does not look very democratic.

The word ‘autocracy‘, with all its variants, has been used a lot frequently by western government politicians as they attack the ideology of Russia, China and essentially every national leader who does not join their “rules-based order” club.  There is so much linguistic repetition from the same western leadership, it’s impossible not to see this autocracy narrative as some form of talking point that stemmed from some G7 or NATO collaboration meeting.

It does not seem coincidental the new catch phrases of “autocracy” vs “rules-based order” surfaced at the tail end of the COVID crisis, when Build Back Better shifted from a talking point into an actual set of western legislative constructs  perhaps intended to codify the emergency powers those same officials deployed.

What kind of democracy, or rules-based order mindset, was the European Commission carrying when they decried the overwhelming national election in Hungary? Surely if the EU wanted to celebrate democracy, they would cheer for the high voter turnout that reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban, yet they did exactly the opposite. Apparently, some democracies are more valued than others.

At the same time the EU is clutching pearls over the results in Hungary, another western ally, Canada, is codifying the government’s emergency act power to seize property without due process.  As we are directed to be distracted by everything Zelenskyy, it might be worth noting that Ontario Bill 100 is about to permanently change the rules of permitted political protest. You can read about Bill 100 here and watch the economic debate here.

Essentially, Bill 100 gives the Canadian government the power to seize your home, finances, bank accounts and assets if you take part in any form of protest that would create economic harm to any loosely defined entity.  Protest at the border, lose your house; at least that’s the threat they are about to make into a law.

It seems rather incredulous to me that securing a corporate financial interest would override the concerning possibility of forever losing liberty and freedom for the individual citizen. However, in this new post-COVID ‘rules-based order’, that’s the official justification from the Canadian government.  Slippery slope and all that accepted, this Ontario Bill 100 is a few slides beyond the slippery.

Similar actions are taking place in New Zealand and Australia, where codifying the emergency powers of public health officials post-COVID rules, is at the forefront of their legislative and constitutional reform efforts.

Creating new era ‘rules-based democracy’ stuff is filling up the business end of western government attention in Europe, North America and the land down under.

But it’s not just Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia doing this.  In the United States we have a combination of new restrictions on liberty and freedom around emergency health issues in combination with J6 “threat to democracy” outcomes being created.  The J6 committee is looking at Trump supporters the way the EU commission is looking at Hungarian citizens.

Add it all up, and this new version of western democracy doesn’t look like it is based on the same principles the older version, the non-rules-based version, was using.

These new “rules of democracy” are also being overlaid by new rules for discussing democracy as found in the guidelines from the tech overlords.

Google just recently announced, in the era post-COVID, they will no longer tolerate content that “makes claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.

So, if you are to speak against the new “rules of democracy”, or the legislation that is going through the “democratic process” in the EU, NZ, AU, Canada or the United States, you can be targeted by the online Google wrong-think police.  Isn’t that convenient considering the effort to codify the totalitarian tendencies of the new “western democracies.”

If you speak against the newer version of the ‘rules-based order‘, the leaders of western democracies will enjoy protection from the internet police.  A rebellious sort, as defined by a person who still thinks independently, might say that sounds almost autocratic or something.

There was always a concern that any political leader who granted themselves extreme powers, under the pretense of the pandemic threat, would never want to relinquish that scale of control over their citizens.  Indeed, it can be argued we are seeing those concerns come to fruition with supportive action from ruling elites in the various parliamentary and congressional offices.

A wise fellow of steward-minded disposition stated today that if U.S. government officials were genuinely concerned about the welfare of Americans, they would immediately be holding legislative sessions to ramp up energy production, cut through regulatory hurdles, lower gasoline prices, seal our borders and prepare our national food stocks for a concerning global food shortage.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if a legislative body was truly representative of the citizens, they would be using a few billion taxpayer dollars to purchase or offset fertilizer costs, help farmers with diesel fuel prices and work earnestly to insure full harvests this year.

Alas, the only nation worthy of such financial consideration is a tenuously manipulated -by them- country called Ukraine.

These new western democracy rules certainly appear to be rules of priority for the few, and not rules that would be a priority for the many.   Perhaps that’s the whole point.  Maybe that’s the bigger picture.

As it appears by action and consequence, this new western, post-COVID, ‘rules-based order’ is focused exclusively on providing benefit for the self-described elites.

I wonder what will happen if the many just don’t comply?…

… Or have the autocrats thought about that with the open border rules coming May 23rd?

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Remembering Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin, 20 Years Later

April 8th, 2022 by Jennifer Loewenstein

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From approximately April 3-17, 2002 Israeli military forces stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing more than 50 Palestinians and making 13,000 people homeless. Jennifer Loewenstein remembers touring camp in the aftermath, and the media’s indifference to the onslaught.

In late March 2002 as the Second Intifada raged on, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation Defensive Shield against cities and towns in the occupied West Bank.  Defensive Shield was the biggest military operation in the territory since 1967 with Israeli military forces invading Ramallah, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Nablus, Bethlehem, and Jenin. The operation was said to have been a direct response to the March 27th  suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya that killed 30 vacationers, known also as the “Passover Massacre.”

The purpose of “Defensive Shield” was to reassert Israeli control over the major population centers of the West Bank. [1] The plans for Defensive Shield, however, had been laid out in a 1996 blueprint known as “Operation Field of Thorns” drafted by then Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon. It was drawn up in response to three days of violent clashes beginning on 24 September 1996 that followed Israel’s opening of a tourist tunnel that would link the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred site, with the Via Dolorosa (where, in Christian tradition, Jesus is said to have walked on his way to the crucifixion) and pass by several Islamic holy sites.[2] In the violence that ensued 25 Israeli soldiers and nearly 100 Palestinians died. Over 1,000 Palestinians were wounded both in East Jerusalem and Gaza where the violence had spread. [3]

The purpose of Operation Field of Thorns was to develop a clear military strategy to retake the West Bank, crush Palestinian resistance, and transfer Palestinians out of the territory, or ‘sensitive areas’. Operation Defensive Shield was less radical than Field of Thorns but shared similar goals and was no less violent in its implementation. [4]

From approximately April 3rd -17th, 2002 Israeli military forces stormed the Jenin refugee camp to pursue ‘terrorists’. (Different sources provide different dates for when the IDF left the camp.) In fact, however, the demolition of the camp was an act of collective punishment that lasted at least two weeks. Jenin was targeted, in this case, ostensibly because it was home to the man responsible for the suicide bombing in Netanya. Jenin was a “hotbed of terrorism,” claimed Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. This doesn’t explain why the other Palestinian cities were targeted in the operation or why an entire refugee camp had to pay the price.

IDF forces, including 150 tanks, armored personnel carriers, Apache helicopters, and F-16 fighter jets along with 2 regular infantry battalions, commando teams, and 12 D9 armored bulldozers pummeled the camp in dense, urban warfare in a campaign that would leave at least 52 Palestinians dead and scores wounded (52 is the official figure; many claim the death toll was higher). [5] Twenty-three Israeli soldiers also died.  According to Human Rights Watch, 22 of the 52 Palestinian dead were civilians. [6] To this day people are divided over whether or not to call the battle of Jenin a massacre, arguing over whether or not it fits the dictionary definition of an “act or instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.”  Amnesty International compiled a detailed report on Operation Defensive Shield in which it states:

During the fighting Palestinian residents and Palestinian and foreign journalists and others outside the camp saw hundreds of missiles being fired into the houses of the camp from Apache helicopters flying sortie after sortie. The sight of the firepower being thrown at Jenin refugee camp led those who witnessed the air raids, including military experts and the media, to believe that scores, at least, of Palestinians had been killed. The tight cordon round the refugee camp and the main hospital from 4-17 April meant that the outside world had no means of knowing what was going on inside the camp;… [7]

In its report, Amnesty also documents unlawful killings; the use of Palestinians as human shields; torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; a lack of access to food and water; blocked medical and humanitarian assistance; and the widespread destruction of property and civil infrastructure. [8]

In the spring of 2002 I lived and worked in Gaza City, Gaza. Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were not allowed to travel to the West Bank so the Mezan Center for Human Rights (where I worked) sent me to report from the refugee camp in Jenin. I arrived on the 18th of April and the following is an account of what I saw. It is taken from articles I wrote at the time, a diary I kept of the events, what I remember cross-checked with facts, and the countless pictures I took, some of which became part of an exhibit.

A Group Of Observers Enters Jenin Refugee Camp From The South Side, April 2002. Photo By Jennifer Loewenstein.

At first, I didn’t know if I was in the right place. Before me was a landscape of ruin. I remember asking an old man where the camp was. He gave me a look, gestured toward the wreckage and said, “al-mukhayim!” (“the camp!”) That’s when it hit me just how devastating the destruction had been. I wandered from heap to heap of debris often not even knowing what I was seeing. The ground was muddy and there were people, including women and children, trying to salvage personal property, clear pathways around the fallen buildings for emergency medical teams, and locate the dead.

The smell of death permeated the camp. I’d heard of people talking about ‘the terrible smell of death’ but until then had never experienced it. When I did, I knew what it was almost instinctively. In the ruins of someone’s home, I saw the bottom of a shoe sticking out of a pile of dirt. Around me people held pieces of cloth over their noses and mouths to keep from gagging at the smell. That’s when I realized the shoe was attached to a foot, and the foot to a person. To keep out of the way, I left the area and walked to what I now know was the entrance to the camp – where the hospital was. I walked through its mostly empty hallways until I came to the back entrance. Outside there was a lot of commotion.

Two Girls Sitting Outside Their Destroyed House. Photo By Jennifer Loewenstein

I moved away from the throng of people and climbed up on a ledge overlooking the area in back of the hospital. There, the dead were wrapped in white sheets and lay on the ground in the sun. Workers piled some of the bodies into the back of a pickup truck, leaving the rest lined up next to each other, their names scribbled in black marker on the sheets, for the living to identify. A young man knelt before one of the bodies, deep in thought or prayer or grief. Behind the rows lying in the sunlight, men dug open a grave where those who had died during the siege had been buried. The grave had been dug hastily so that the bodies of those who had died would not spread disease. Now they were unearthed, brushed free of dirt, and lined up alongside the others. They, too, would be loaded onto the truck and taken away for proper burial.

An old woman stood in the center of this commotion screaming at the journalists to stop taking pictures. The journalists ignored her, snapping photographs anyway: the need for proof of what happened overruled preserving the dignity of the dead. Two men carrying a makeshift stretcher brought another body in from the camp. I didn’t count how many bodies were there. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that so much controversy would surround the number of people killed.

Earlier, on that day after the siege ended, I had stood in a line with foreign reporters waiting for permission from the army to enter the camp and document the aftermath. We filed down a snaking path from a nearby village. I came to understand that we took this path to avoid being fired at by soldiers who’d remained behind, but the soldiers fired anyway –above our heads. Undaunted, this procession of outsiders moved in anyway: Eastern Europeans, a Greek photographer, a couple of Italians, some Lebanese, a Russian, and a collection of others. Only one other American, a student from the Midwest, and a British NGO volunteer entered with us.

This was the first time civilians, journalists and photographers –except for a very few who had risked their lives to get in earlier —had been allowed in. The perpetrators had not wished to be filmed with their bulldozers, guns, and bombs; their helicopter gunships, their missiles, their use of human shields; the explosives they used to blow up buildings and family homes, one with a paralyzed man in a wheelchair still inside. [9] Evidently, they didn’t want outsiders to know that electricity, water, food, and medical supplies had been cut off; that no one was allowed in or out. They didn’t want observers to see how soldiers burned family photographs; how they urinated and defecated in kitchen pots and pans; stuck pins into and ripped up children’s toys; fired missiles into people’s living rooms; slashed women’s clothing, and dumped supplies of food on kitchen floors; how they ruined furniture and smashed cups, plates, bowls, glasses, vases, picture frames, televisions, and radios on the ground. In the hallway of a school at the back of the camp someone had taken great care, with something like an exacto knife, to scratch the eyes out of each of the children painted on a wall mural. When it was all over, some laughed or bragged at the destructiveness in overdrive.[10] In a now infamous interview, a soldier nicknamed Kurdi Bear (Moshe Nissim), recalled his time driving an armored bulldozer around the camp. With a bottle of whiskey stashed up front, Kurdi Bear spent three days straight demolishing what he could of the camp.

For three days I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come (sic), but I gave no one a chance. …I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? … I didn’t give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn’t just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders. Many people were inside the houses we sought to demolish. … I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. And I didn’t see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all.  … I really enjoyed it. I remember pulling down a wall of a four-story building. We would go for the sides of the buildings, and then ram then. If the job was too hard, we would ask for a tank shell.   … On Sunday… after the fighting was over, we got orders to pull our D-9s out of the area and stop working on our ‘football stadium’, because the army didn’t want the cameras and the press to see us working.

Now the work was done and the same soldiers responsible for this had retreated outside the camp to rest. Some sat on their tanks talking to one another; some walked around, guns slung over their shoulders. Others relaxed on the grass watching the parade of cars and trucks going in and out. A group of soldiers sat on a bench eating ice cream.

Jenin Refugee Camp After The Onslaught, April 2002. Photo By Jennifer Loewenstein.

In the aftermath, there was still no water or electricity or food available for the inhabitants because there was no camp. It had been flattened; wrecked beyond recognition. A few empty homes, their windows and doors blackened and blown out, stood empty, as if gaping in shock. More than thirteen thousand people fled the camp in terror, became refugees of the refugees. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers disappeared, leaving behind family members with no idea how to find them. At the end of that first day, just before twilight, a wooden shack at the edge of the camp exploded and burst into flames.

There had never been a call to ship in equipment and arms to help the resistance, and no recognition that it was resistance. There was no mainstream acknowledgment of the vastly superior attacking forces or their violations of international law. US Secretary of State Colin Powell took nearly a week to arrive in Israel, claiming his mission to broker a ceasefire was “not in the least in jeopardy” as the battle in Jenin continued. In a joint statement by the Mideast “Quartet” (Colin Powell, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, EU policy chief Javier Solana, and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov), Israeli Prime Minister Sharon was asked to “withdraw from Palestinian areas” and Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was called on to “rein in terrorism”. “Terrorism, including suicide bombing, is illegal and immoral,” the statement said. and Israel “must fully comply with international humanitarian principles [and] …allow full and unimpeded access to humanitarian organizations and services. [11] The statement was, of course, ignored.

Rubble Of Jenin Refugee Camp, April 2002. Photo By Jennifer Loewenstein.

Ariel Sharon insisted it would be a “tragic mistake” for Powell to meet with Yasser Arafat and claimed the “operation” was in “self-defense” though inside the camp a Palestinian fighter informed a resistance leader by phone that they had run out of ammunition. [12]

“I hope our great friend the United States understands that this is a war of survival for us …it’s our right to defend our citizens and there should be no pressure put on us not to do that,” Mr. Sharon told reporters as he toured an army command post overlooking the Jenin refugee camp where Israeli troops have battled armed Palestinians this week. [13]

The US announced it would veto any Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s actions.

After the siege, there were no Lester Holts or Anderson Coopers in Jenin to tell the world what had happened, interviewing survivors who had lost everything in the fighting, filming their tears, getting their stories firsthand with an accompanying camera crew and translators. There were no images of mothers carrying their babies or old women weeping because they’d lost their sons, their homes, their neighbors; CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and the other US media giants weren’t filming people hunkered down in underground bunkers for safety (though in fact there were no bunkers or shelters of any kind). There were no military analysts asked to speak on TV, or foreign ministers vowing hospitality if the refugees fled to their nations; no promises that they’d be taken in “with open arms–no questions asked”. There were no political pundits to assess the circumstances or guess what would come next.

Western journalists recorded no sound bites of men who had stayed behind to fight because this was their land. Aid organizations could send no humanitarian aid packages into the camp to help the inhabitants survive under siege. There were no walks through the hospital to film people with shrapnel wounds or bandages around their heads and limbs; no footage of bombed and bulldozed buildings and no commentators holding back tears. There were no images of children clinging on to their mothers’ sides or of people carrying away their beloved pets to keep them safe.

On the contrary, there was solidarity with the Israelis. This radical absurdity prevailed as the media conglomerates landed instead in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to shake hands with the perpetrators, swearing solidarity with the occupiers and guaranteeing more military aid. Imagine these same actors landing in Moscow for a wrap-up of events. The residents of Jenin were ignored. When I finally left on the afternoon of 20 April 2002, I remember glancing back at the piles of rubble. On one jagged heap of broken concrete, someone had planted the black flag of Islamic Jihad.

Jenin has been forgotten. It was 20 years ago after all. Why remember it—when there have been far more horrible operations in Palestine, especially Gaza, since then: Operation Cast Lead, Operation Summer Rains, Operation Autumn Clouds, Operation Hot Winter, Operation Pillar of Defense, Operation Protective Edge, Operation Guardian of the Walls (just a year ago, in May 2021) –to mention but a few.  It has become more difficult if not impossible for the media to enter at all and, on 15 May 2021, an Israeli airstrike knocked down the Jala’a Tower, home to a number of foreign media agencies including the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera., claiming without evidence that it hosted a Hamas jamming station. This made it nearly impossible for news media from within the Gaza Strip to reach the outside world. After the strike, Israeli military forces submitted an edited report to US Secretary of State Tony Blinken who reported that the strike had been “necessary”. [14]

As scenes of the war in Ukraine pervade living rooms across the country, and death, destruction, and human suffering are decried from coast to coast, other people’s forgotten wars and battles are demanding acknowledgment for the suffering, death, and displacement they caused. Many such anniversaries pass without notice except by those who lived through them, haunted by images deliberately buried and denied. Outrage at the hypocrisy of Western nations saluting Ukraine, lighting up their cities with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, and plastering pictures of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among other things, would be mitigated by, especially, a recognition of US and US-backed crimes.

Commemorating such events has therefore become that much more necessary: as in many cases, resistance begins with memory. Remembering often provokes action, and can harness popular discontent. If the news media fails because of its subservience to the state, it becomes the burden of individual citizens to correct the record; to monitor and check the centers of power.

Jenin is just one symbol of forgotten battles. Ukraine has reminded us just how compelling media can be, even when it is used for questionable reasons, and how states and other actors should (or could) respond to human crises. Remembering Jenin, or any forgotten crime, is an act of resistance; a confrontation of our past, and a demand to change the present. It is a first step toward popular action and hope for the future.

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Jennifer Loewenstein is faculty associate of Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; LEAP project administrator; and founder of the Carol Chomsky Memorial Fund.

Notes

  1. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-defensive-shield
  2. https://electronicintifada.net/content/they-cant-distinguish-forest-trees/4366   (Field of Thorns) and  https://www.csmonitor.com/1996/0930/093096.intl.intl.1.html
  3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-09-25-mn-47381-story.html
  4. Between The Lines
  5. https://reliefweb.int/report/israel/israeli-forces-commit-massacre-jenin-refugee-camp
  6. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/05/02/israel/occupied-territories-jenin-war-crimes-investigation-needed#   & 
    https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/
  7. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/mde151432002en.pdf
  8. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/mde151432002en.pdf
  9. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/05/02/israel/occupied-territories-jenin-war-crimes-investigation-needed#   &  https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/
  10. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51a/041.html
  11. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1018466560712917120
    https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1018466560712917120
  12. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1018466560712917120
    https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1018466560712917120
  13. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1018466560712917120
    https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1018466560712917120
  14. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-gaza-media-tower-bombing-edited-intelligence-handed-us-justify

Featured image: A Family On The Rubble Of Their Home In Jenin Refugee Camp, April 2002. Photo By Jennifer Loewenstein.