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Toward late this century global temperatures are likely to either reach super-tropical levels of >>14°C or/and extreme levels of storminess consequent on clashes between Arctic and Antarctic sourced cold and warm air and water masses.

Humans appear to be mainly concerned about any one issue at a time, and while COVID-19 is [allegedly] “claiming the lives of millions” Homo sapiens appears to be increasingly oblivious to the growing threat to billions of humans and to nature, including the inhabitability of large regions and extinguishment of habitats.

The almost universal assumption as if a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is in itself sufficient to prevent further warming is misleading, since positive feedbacks from land and ocean would continue to raise greenhouse levels and temperatures.

Such feedback effects include:

1. increased evaporation with warming, water vapor being a greenhouse gas;
2. melting ice decreasing the albedo effect of Earth, exposing dark rock surfaces, reducing the albedo of the polar terrains and sea ice in surrounding oceans, enhancing infrared absorption and heating;
3. burnt and desiccated vegetation decreasing the albedo;
4. decreased absorption and solubility of CO₂ in warming oceans;
5. release of CO₂ and methane from drying vegetation, from melting permafrost and from bogs.

A critical parameter, rarely mentioned in the media, is the inexorable accelerating rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases. With CO₂ reaching 414.6 parts per million, CH₄ (methane) is reaching 1891.3 parts per billion and total greenhouse gas concentration of 500 parts per million, a level unknown since the Miocene about 5.3-23 million years ago.

With a Miocene CO₂ level in the range of ~400-500 parts per million and mean temperatures up to 18.4°C, the atmosphere is tracking toward super-tropical temperatures, which would render large regions uninhabitable.

Anthropocene temperature rise rates are at least an order of magnitude higher than the mean temperature rise since the Last Glacial Maximum:

• Given the current mean global land and ocean temperature of 14°C, i.e. 6.2°C warmer than the mean ~7.8°C temperature of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (~19,000–23.000 years-ago), the mean warming of (~0.00026°C/year rate; 6°C/23.000 years) is an order of magnitude slower than during the Anthropocene.
• Late Holocene/Anthropocene: 1.04°C/250 years ~0.004°C/year). This relegates the current global warming to an unprecedented category during the last ~3 million years and longer.

Namely, at ~+4 degrees Celsius of warming toward later the 21st century the Earth’s mean surface land/ocean temperature would be warmer than tropical Miocene temperatures. A lag effect between the rise of greenhouse gases and temperature would delay but not prevent the worst effects of global warming.

But even before such high mean temperatures is reached, the weakened jet stream climate zone boundary, allowing penetration of cold and warm fronts, allowing clashes between air and water masses of contrasting temperatures, would lead to storminess, disrupting human agriculture and habitats, as is already happening in northern Europe and within the Arctic circle.

How long would it take for global temperatures to rise to about ~4°C and higher would depend on:

1. The acceleration in rising concentration of greenhouse gases and the lag in consequent rising temperatures;
2. The extent to which ice melt flow from Greenland and Antarctica may slow down further warming in certain regions, such as the north Atlantic and the Southern Ocean;
3. Further anthropogenic emissions and/or draw-down of atmospheric CO₂.

From the continuing rise of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations (CO₂: 2020 – 414.62 ppm; 2021 – 416.96 ppm) to date global greenhouse gas emissions are hardly slowing down, nor have attempts at mitigation and/or sequestration been effective. In 2019, the world emitted roughly 36.44 billion metric tons (BMT) of carbon dioxide, compared to 14.83 BMT in 1970.

According to the head of the International Energy Agency no new oil, gas or coal development ought to take place if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.

However, rising production of hydrocarbons in several regions, for example new drilling for oil in the North Sea, high production of oil and gas the USA, new coal mines in Australia and elsewhere cast doubt on the level of carbon emissions in future.

Conclusion

A rise in the mean global temperature to about 4 degrees Celsius or higher, as projected by IPCC, and/or a stormy climate consequent due to clashes between air and water masses of contrasting temperatures consequent on weakening of climate zone boundaries, are likely to progress through the 21st Century, severely disrupting natural and human habitats and species.

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Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, Canberra, Australia. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Further evidence proving the Covid-19 vaccination programme is a huge failure has been released which confirms throughout the whole of August 80% of the people who allegedly died of Covid-19 had been vaccinated against the disease.

We’re living in strange times, and if you believe the Covid-19 vaccination programme is working because the authorities on the television tell you that it is, then you must surely find it extremely strange that the UK is in the middle of a third wave in the middle of summer? Especially when you consider that in summer 2020 Covid-19 deaths flat-lined to zero even though a Covid-19 injection was not available.

But the strangeness doesn’t end there, just take a look at the latest Covid-19 Statistical Report released by Public Health Scotland (PHS) on the 8th September 2021.

The report provides an array on data on testing, quarantining, vaccinations, cases, hospitalisations, and deaths but it doesn’t get very interesting until you read Table 15 which covers the number of Covid-19 positive cases by week and vaccination status.

Interesting because it shows that the majority of confirmed cases are now among the vaccinated population. In the most recent week from 28th August to 3rd September 2021 the report shows that there were 20,744 confirmed cases among the unvaccinated population, who are more likely to be tested for the simple reason they have not been vaccinated.

But it also shows that there were 5,508 confirmed cases among the partly vaccinated population, and 16,810 cases among the fully vaccinated population – two populations who are least likely to be tested due to be being vaccinated.

This means that between 28th August and 3rd September there were 22,318 cases among the vaccinated population – almost 2,000 more than the unvaccinated population.

The same can also be said for the week of 21st August to 27th August which saw 15,647 cases among the unvaccinated population and 22,234 cases among the vaccinated population, and the same can also be said for the previous two weeks before that.

The data actually shows that between 7th August 2021 and the 3rd September 2021 there were 47,580 cases among the unvaccinated population, 21,020 cases among the partly vaccinated population, and 41,748 cases among the fully vaccinated population. Meaning there were 15,188 more cases among the vaccinated population.

So now that we’ve cleared up that the experimental Covid-19 injections clearly do not prevent infection or spread of Covid-19, let’s find out if they prevent hospitalisations like the authorities claim.

According to table 16 of the report between the 28th August 2021 and the 3rd September 2021 there were 36 admissions to hospital related to Covid-19 among the unvaccinated over 60 population, whilst there were 7 admissions on the partly vaccinated population.

However, there were a huge 299 admissions among the fully vaccinated over 60 population, and the same pattern can be seen for the weeks previous all the way back to the 7th August 2021.

In all for the week of 28th August to 3rd September 2021 there were 271 hospitalisations among the entire unvaccinated population but 423 hospitalisations among the fully vaccinated population. If we base these hospitalisations occurring after the previous weeks confirmed cases then we can calculate the case-hospitalisation rate.

In the week beginning 21st August there were 15,047 confirmed cases among the unvaccinated population. Therefore based on the unvaccinated hospitalisation figures of 271 in the week beginning 28th August the case-hospitalisation rate is 1.7%. However, when we carry out the same calculation for the fully vaccinated population hospitalisations (423) and cases (14,519) we can see that the case-hospitalisation rate is 2.9%.

Therefore, this shows that the Covid-19 injections are increasing the risk of hospitalisation when exposed to Covid-19 by 70% rather than reducing the risk by the 95% claimed by the vaccine manufacturers and authorities.

So now that we’ve cleared up the Covid-19 injections increase the risk of hospitalisation rather than reducing it let’s find out if they prevent deaths like the authorities claim.

Table 17 of the Public Health Scotland report shows the number of deaths to have occurred via vaccination status. However, PHS have been very clever in the way they’ve presented the number of deaths. Because rather than present them on a week by week basis like they have with the number of cases and hospitalisations, they’ve instead included deaths all the way back to the 29th December.

This means they are including deaths from the height of the alleged second wave of Covid-19 where just 9% of the population had received a single dose, and just 0.1% of the entire population were fully vaccinated. Therefore, PHS are very sneakily able to give the impression that the majority of Covid-19 deaths are occurring among the unvaccinated population.

The above table is taken from the report released by Public Health Scotland on the 18th August 2021 and shows deaths due to Covid-19 by vaccination status between the 29th December 2020 and the 5th August 2021. As you can see anyone reading the report would be given the impression that the vaccines are doing a fantastic job at preventing death due to Covid-19.

But fast forward to the most recent report and you will find on Table 17 that there have been 3,102 deaths among the unvaccinated population, 279 deaths among the partly vaccinated population and 298 deaths among the fully vaccinated population between the 29th December and the 26th August 2021.

Therefore, the true number of deaths by vaccination status between the 5th August 2021 and the 26th August 2021 are as follows:

• Unvaccinated population – 25 deaths
• Partly vaccinated population – 6 deaths
• Fully vaccinated population – 92 deaths

This means the unvaccinated population have accounted for just 20% of alleged Covid-19 deaths throughout the whole of August, whilst the fully vaccinated accounted for 75% of them. But couple the partly vaccinated deaths with the fully vaccinated deaths and you can see that throughout August 80% of deaths occurred among the vaccinated population.

However this makes it hard to work out the case-fatality rate so to do this we need to look at how many deaths occurred in the previous weeks report. Up to the 19th August there had been 3,096 deaths among the unvaccinated, 277 deaths among the partly vaccinated, and 264 deaths among the fully vaccinated.

Therefore, the true number of deaths by vaccination status between the 19th August 2021 and the 26th August 2021 are as follows:

• Unvaccinated population – 6 deaths
• Partly vaccinated population – 2 deaths
• Fully vaccinated population – 34 deaths

If we base these deaths on occurring two weeks after the number of confirmed cases then we can work out the case-fatality rate.

In the week beginning 7th August there were 3,788 confirmed cases among the fully vaccinated population. Therefore based on the unvaccinated death figures of 6 in the week beginning 19th August the case-fatality rate is 0.15%. However, when we carry out the same calculation for the fully vaccinated population hospitalisations (34) and cases (3,490) we can see that the case-hospitalisation rate is 1%.

Therefore, this shows that the Covid-19 injections are increasing the risk of death when exposed to Covid-19 by a huge 566% rather than reducing the risk by the 95% claimed by the vaccine manufacturers and authorities.

What’s even more concerning about this is that the number of confirmed cases among the fully vaccinated population have rose significantly in the most recent week compared to four weeks prior. Therefore the number of hospitalisations and deaths that could occur in the next few weeks could possibly be enough for the authorities to justify another lockdown.

The data clearly shows the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission, and it clearly shows that they are increasing the risk of hospitalisation and death rather than reducing the risk.

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Time goes by.  It has been 20 years since three World Trade Center skyscrapers designed to withstand airliner collision were destroyed. Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition as its collapse at free fall acceleration proves conclusively.  The destruction of the twin towers was accompanied by a series of explosions, and these buildings also fell into their own footprints at essentially free fall acceleration.  The US government’s official coverup story has been totally demolished by authors such as David Ray Griffin, by scholarly conferences, university investigations, expert reports, and by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.  

The great mass of evidence that has been accumulated proves that the official narrative is false, but it doesn’t say who was responsible for the attack.  Some, such as Ron Unz, Laurent Guyenot, and Chris Bollyn, have noted the Israeli Connection, but the focus has been on the total implausibility of the official narrative, not on the who and why of the attack.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that 9/11 was a scheme of George W. Bush regime neoconservative officials allied with vice president Dick Cheney and Israel to create a “new Pearl Harbor” that would generate support on the part of the American people and Washington’s European allies for a Middle Eastern “war on terror” whose real purpose was to destroy Israel’s enemies in the interest of Greater Israel.  Commentary Magazine editor Norman Podhoretz had called for such a war, and General Wesley Clark reported that he was informed of Pentagon war plans to that effect.  

This is the most plausible explanation, but, if true, it is not one that the US and Israeli governments would ever acknowledge.  Consequently, we are stuck with an official explanation long championed by the presstitutes that no one believes.  In addition to the human casualties of the 9/11 attack, we can list the credibility of the US government and the US media.

I wrote many columns about 9/11 and reviewed the careful work of those proving the counterfactual and implausible nature of the official account.  Over the two decades, I wrote anniversary articles.

Here is the one on the 11th Anniversary. 

What gave the utter implausibility of the official narrative away to everyone who has ever served in a high government office is the fact that “the world’s only superpower” suffered the most embarrassing defeat at the hands of a few Saudis armed only with box cutters, and there was no outcry for an investigation how the entirety of an annual trillion dollar military/security complex totally failed, every single part of it.  

Never in world history had a superpower experienced such a total defeat, and there was no outcry from the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the media for an investigation.  Indeed, there was active resistance to any investigation.  People too stupid to see what this means are too stupid to justify their existence.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Travelling to Lebanon last week U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy had promised to find additional means “to support” the population and the Lebanese army. On September 7, Murphy came good on his promise after U.S. President Joe Biden authorized Secretary of State Antony Blinken to raise a total of $47 million to provide aid for the Lebanese military. 

It appears that the American aid aims to prevent the implosion of the Lebanese military. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who was a part of Murphy’s delegation, admitted as much by telling reporters:

“Lebanon is in free fall… we’ve seen this movie before and it’s a horror story… but the good news is it can, should, and hopefully will be avoided.”

Lebanon is in chaos and has been for years. However, last year’s Port of Beirut blast tipped the country over the edge, and now even officers in the Lebanese military, one of the most trusted and respected institutions in the country, receive about $400 a month, down from $4,000. A non-commissioned soldier only receives $50 a month.

Mohammed Fahmi, outgoing Lebanese Minister of the Interior, told the Lebanese daily Al Joumhouria on August 31 that the rate of desertion in the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s Gendarmerie, has recently increased because of financial issues. A general collapse of Lebanon is occurring, especially as unpaid and/or low paid security forces are no longer responding to street mobilizations and urban violence.

The Lebanese are becoming increasingly frustrated as lines at gas stations are endless, power cuts are more frequent, bakeries and restaurants are closing because of a lack of electricity and pharmacies have run out of medicines.

With general life collapsing in Lebanon and the financial situation seemingly irreconcilable, sectarianism is once again creeping into society. August was marked by clashes between Sunni Arab tribes and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah political and paramilitary group, tensions between Druze villagers and Hezbollah supporters, and acts of vandalism against a Christian village.

Against this backdrop, American aid would therefore be more than welcomed in Beirut as it allows the last respected pillar of the Lebanese state, the military, to not collapse. A collapse of the Lebanese military would likely instigate sectarian clashes between the different religious communities in the country as they seek to protect, and advance, their own interests.

Washington increased its aid to the Lebanese military by 12% last May, reaching $120 million in 2021. This financial support is multisectoral and aims to improve the equipment of the army – from armored vehicles to combat helicopters and night vision systems. Washington is also trying to train Lebanese soldiers, and since 2014, more than 6,000 military personnel have received training in the U.S.

Other western countries, such as former colonial master France, are also privileged partners of the Lebanese military too. French Defense Minister Florence Parly organized a virtual meeting on June 17 to gather emergency aid for the Lebanese army, a “pillar institution, which prevents the security situation in the country from strongly deteriorating,” according to her cabinet. France and Lebanon also signed three conventions last February on defense, naval cooperation and the fight against terrorism. Since 2016, Paris has delivered more than €60 million of equipment to the Lebanese military.

Although the financial support from the U.S. and France is undeniably generous as it helps maintain and preserve Lebanon’s most respected institution, there is undoubtedly a political objective – a policy of rebalancing vis-à-vis Hezbollah and Iran. Washington and Paris fully understand that if the Lebanese military collapses, then Hezbollah will fill the void to maintain security in the country and thus be further cemented into state structures.

Washington believes that the Lebanese army can counterbalance Hezbollah’s influence and power. The U.S. is especially worried that the Lebanese Shi’ite party is less impacted by the economic collapse because of allocated Iranian aid that reaches $700 million per year – a huge amount in Lebanon. The pro-Iranian party has recently undertaken initiatives to alleviate the deficiencies of a failed Lebanese state by importing Iranian oil in an attempt to solve the gasoline shortage, provide assistance to the families that suffered from the Akkar tanker explosion in August, and provide free and/or affordable healthcare.

However, Washington does not consider that the Lebanese army actually has cordial relations with Hezbollah. In fact, relations between Hezbollah and the military are so close that the Shi’ite group has an especially strong presence in Lebanon’s intelligence community and the two forces regularly conduct joint exercises to secure the country’s border. It is recalled that in August 2017, in the context of the Syrian War spilling over the border, Lebanese soldiers and Hezbollah fighters cleared out a pocket of jihadist in the Beqaa valley.

Although the Lebanese military is on the verge of collapse, the U.S. will not allow it to happen as it is their only gateway to any kind of influence in Lebanon. However, it appears that there is a clear misunderstanding or miscalculation in Washington – they will never be able to cut the ties between the Lebanese military and Hezbollah so long as Beirut refuses to make peace with Israel, something that is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book.  It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.

Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research.  There is nothing speculative about this book.  It is not a “conspiracy theory.”

McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government.  To have their simple and obvious questions answered.  To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.

Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur.  The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups.  And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.

The families’ search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty.  McGinnis is their champion.  He insists on answers.

He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities.  While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9/11.  The “war on terror” has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.

By refusing to answer the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.

For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people.  He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered.  Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence.  The government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national security” or just plain arrogance.  When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.

Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission Report.  Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.

But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not.  And so his title – Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being true.

This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.

While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds.  The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it.  And if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth.  This book demands attention.

As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report, Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.

For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal.  For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a “best-seller.”  That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes.  But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer?  Better to read The New York Times, Slate magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11 Commission Report when it was released.  As McGinnis reports, “The New York Times called the Report ‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an ‘improbable literary triumph.’”  This is simply propaganda.

But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s dedication to the truth.  It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.

“Part One: From Grief to Advocacy” is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity.  We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies.  We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this was stopped.  Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’ questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline.

“Part Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11 Commission” examines how the 9/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation.  It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director.  Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons.  He had been a member of Bush’s transition team.  Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was appointed.  Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest.  He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced.  He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc.  His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.  As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).

This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified.  Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged the  families of first responders that their fury was uncontained.  McGinnis tells us:

They held up signs that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’ Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’ She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to get out! He would’ve gotten out!  My son was murdered, murdered because of your incompetence and radios that didn’t work!’

McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.

“Part Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions” is the heart of the book.  It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered.  Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation. McGinnis writes:

The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day.  They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the questions.  Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.

Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  One question the FSC asked the 9/11 Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?’

NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada.  Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.  Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted.  And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.

It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating.  He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.

In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar?  McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s conduct.”  Of course the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.

Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:

With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once.  This explanation for the devastating attacks of September    11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value.  Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again…Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored?  Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security            screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray?  Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not  followed?  Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?  To me luck is something that happens once.  When you have this repeated pattern of brokenprotocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.

Comically, The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.”

In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11?

This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed.  This insider trading that anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush.  Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.

Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.”  Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars.  Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.

Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane.  Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes.  An excellent film about Building 7, Seven by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all.  Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.

Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.?  Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack?  Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?

“The vice president was reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M.  Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.”  Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.

“However,” writes McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment – 9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack.  ‘And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said , “That’s one terrible pilot.”  And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.”  But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”

You can’t make this stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’ families as acceptable.  Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear.  But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.

These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered.  Instead, as McGinnis writes:

But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004.  It was not held under oath.  No transcript was made available of their conversation with the commissioners.  Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S.  Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against      Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.

Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11.  Nothing about who warned them and why.

Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered.  But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York. By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:

• Cheney’s deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed toward the capitol.
• Rumsfeld with his lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit and why the Pentagon was not defended.
• Giuliani and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters carried.

Since this is not meant to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there.  I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22: The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”

It is part of Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to McGinnis’s conclusion.  Whatever one’s position on the events of September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and first responders are objective and brave in the extreme.  Of the emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were firefighters – 343 of them perished that day.  They were doing their duty.  So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are priceless and beyond dispute.  They had absolutely no reasons to lie.  McGinnis tells us:

On September 11, 2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first responders, firefighters, and medical workers.  He wanted to preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World Trade Center.  In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503 oral histories were taken. However, they were not released to the public. The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, refused.

The Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission refused to answer their question. After a law suit, the oral histories that run to 12,000 pages were released.  They contain copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before the Towers collapsed.

FDNY firefighter John Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his father and said:

I finally got through to my father and said ‘I’m alive.  I just wanted to tell you, go to church, I’m alive.  I just so narrowly escaped this thing.’  He said, ‘Where were you?  You were there?’  I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’  He said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’  I said, ‘No, I was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’  He said, ‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up.  That’s just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have exploded out.

Captain Karin DeShore, who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and red flashes coming from the North Tower:

Initially it was just one flash.  Then this flash…kept popping all around the building and that building started to explode … These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going up and down and the all around the building.

Keith Murphy: “There was tremendous damage in the lobby…like something had exploded out…a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”

Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory:  “I saw low-level flashes…[at] the lower level of the building.  You know when they demolish a building?”

Explosions were being reported everywhere and by reporters as well.  Researchers Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers came down as a result of explosions and demolition.  Take a look here.

There were explosions reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit.  William Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11 Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report.

The evidence for explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the mass media complicit in its coverup.  In fact, the demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the best-selling report.  It should be obvious to any objective thinker that if these building were wired for explosives and were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high security buildings.

Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Evan Solomon:

I believe 100% that the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies around the world…There’s people within the US that knew it happened, that planned this to happen.

To Solomon’s question “You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?” McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”

He is joined by many others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106^th floor of the North Tower.  Matt Campbell and his family have recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown up from within.

After reading Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.

Learning about the determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational.  They will never give up.  Nor should we.

There is no doubt that this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.

So don’t turn away.

It will break your heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the truth can do for those family members who have so long sought the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.

In their ongoing grief, Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has answered them.

He has also given the public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent investigation forthwith.

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Edward Curtin is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

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Edward Curtin is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

It’s impossible not to start with the latest tremor in a series of stunning geopolitical earthquakes. 

Exactly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent onset of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the Taliban will hold a ceremony in Kabul to celebrate their victory in that misguided Forever War.

Four key exponents of Eurasia integration – China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan – as well as Turkey and Qatar, will be officially represented, witnessing the official return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As blowbacks go, this one is nothing short of intergalactic.

The plot thickens when we have Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid firmly stressing “there is no proof” Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11. So “there was no justification for war, it was an excuse for war,” he claimed.

Only a few days after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, never publicity-shy, released a statement to Al Jazeera:

“I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons (…) I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.”

On September 28, Osama bin Laden was interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat. I remember it well, as I was commuting non-stop between Islamabad and Peshawar, and my colleague Saleem Shahzad, in Karachi, called it to my attention.

This is an approximate translation by the CIA-linked Foreign Broadcast Information Service:

“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people.

“I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it.

“Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive. Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year (…) They need an enemy.”

This was the last time Osama bin Laden went public, substantially, about his alleged role in 9/11. Afterward, he vanished, and seemingly forever by early December 2001 in Tora Bora: I was there, and revisited the full context years later.

And yet, like an Islamic James Bond, Osama kept performing the miracle of dying another day, over and over again, starting in – where else – Tora Bora in mid-December, as reported by the Pakistani Observer and then Fox News.

So 9/11 remained a riddle inside an enigma. And what about 9/9, which might have been the prologue to 9/11?

Arriving in the Panjshir valley in one of Massoud’s Soviet helicopters in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

A Green Light from a Blind Sheikh 

“The commander has been shot.”

The terse email, on 9/9, offered no details. Contacting the Panjshir was impossible – sat-phone reception is spotty. Only the next day it was possible to establish Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, had been assassinated – by two al-Qaeda jihadis posing as a camera crew.

In our Asia Times interview with Massoud, by August 20, he had told me he was fighting a triad: al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani ISI. After the interview, he left in a Land Cruiser and then went by helicopter to Kwaja-Bahauddin, where he would finish the details of a counter-offensive against the Taliban.

This was his second-to-last interview before the assassination and arguably the last images – shot by photographer Jason Florio and with my mini-DV camera – of Massoud alive.

One year after the assassination, I was back in the Panjshir for an on-site investigation, relying only on local sources and confirmation on some details from Peshawar. The investigation is featured in the first part of my Asia Times e-book Forever Wars.

The conclusion was that the green light for the fake camera crew to meet Massoud came via a letter sponsored by CIA crypto-asset warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – as a “gift” to al-Qaeda.

In December 2020, inestimable Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott, author among others of the seminal The Road to 9/11 (2007), and Aaron Good, editor at CovertAction magazine, published a remarkable investigation about the killing of Massoud, following a different trail and relying mostly on American sources.

They established that arguably more than Sayyaf, the mastermind of the killing was notorious Egyptian blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, then serving a life sentence in a US federal prison for his involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Among other nuggets, Dale Scott and Good also confirmed what former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Naik had told Pakistani media already in 2001: the Americans had everything in place to attack Afghanistan way before 9/11.

In Naik’s words:

“We asked them [the American delegates], when do you think you will attack Afghanistan? … And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”

As many of us established over the years after 9/11, everything was about the US imposing itself as the undisputed ruler of the New Great Game in Central Asia. Peter Dale Scott now notes,

“the two US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were both grounded in pretexts that were doubtful to begin with and more discredited as years go by.

“Underlying both wars was America’s perceived need to control the fossil fuel economic system that was the underpinning for the US petrodollar.”

Massoud versus Mullah Omar

Image on the right: Deceased Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar in a file photo. Photo: Wikimedia

Mullah Omar did welcome Jihad Inc to Afghanistan in the late 1990s: not only the al-Qaeda Arabs but also Uzbeks, Chechens, Indonesians, Yemenis – some of them I met in Massoud’s riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001.

The Taliban at the time did provide them with bases – and some encouraging rhetoric – but deeply ethnocentric as they were, never manifested any interest in global jihad, in the mold of the “Declaration of Jihad” issued by Osama in 1996.

The official Taliban position was that jihad was their guests’ business, and that had nothing to do with the Taliban and Afghanistan. There were virtually no Afghans in Jihad Inc. Very few Afghans speak Arabic. They were not seduced by the spin on martyrdom and a paradise full of virgins: they preferred to be a ghazi – a living victor in a jihad.

Mullah Omar could not possibly send Osama bin Laden packing because of Pashtunwali – the Pashtun code of honor – where the notion of hospitality is sacred. When 9/11 happened, Mullah Omar once again refused American threats as well as Pakistani pleas. He then called a tribal jirga of 300 top mullahs to ratify his position.

Their verdict was quite nuanced: he had to protect his guest, of course, but a guest should not cause him problems. Thus Osama would have to leave, voluntarily.

The Taliban also pursued a parallel track, asking the Americans for evidence of Osama’s culpability. None was provided. The decision to bomb and invade had already been taken.

That would have never been possible with Massoud alive. A classic intellectual warrior, he was a certified Afghan nationalist and pop hero – because of his spectacular military feats in the anti-USSR jihad and his non-stop fight against the Taliban.

Jihadis captured by Massoud’s forces in a riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

When the PDPA socialist government in Afghanistan collapsed three years after the end of the jihad, in 1992, Massoud could easily have become a prime minister or an absolute ruler in the old Turco-Persian style.

But then he made a terrible mistake: afraid of an ethnic conflagration, he let the mujahideen gang based in Peshawar have too much power, and that led to the civil war of 1992-1995 – complete with the merciless bombing of Kabul by virtually every faction – that paved the way for the emergence of the “law and order” Taliban.

So in the end he was a much more effective military commander than politician. An example is what happened in 1996, when the Taliban made their move to conquer Kabul, attacking from eastern Afghanistan.

Massoud was caught completely unprepared, but he still managed to retreat to the Panjshir without a major battle and without losing his troops – quite a feat – while severely smashing the Taliban that went after him.

He established a line of defense in the Shomali plain north of Kabul. That was the frontline I visited a few weeks before 9/11, on the way to Bagram, which was a – virtually empty and degraded – Northern Alliance airbase at the time.

All of the above is a sorry contrast to the role of Masoud Jr, who’s in theory the leader of the “resistance” against Taliban 2.0 in the Panjshir, now completely smashed.

Masoud Jr has zero experience either as a military commander or politician, and although praised in Paris by President Macron or publishing an op-ed in Western mainstream media, made the terrible mistake of being led by CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, who as the former head of the National Directory of Security (NDS), supervised the de facto Afghan death squads.

Masoud Jr could have easily carved a role for himself in a Taliban 2.0 government. But he blew it, refusing serious negotiations with a delegation of 40 Islamic clerics sent to the Panjshir, and demanding at least 30% of posts in the government.

In the end, Saleh fled by helicopter – he may be now in Tashkent – and Masoud Jr as it stands is holed up somewhere in the northern Panjshir.

The 9/11 propaganda machine is about to reach fever pitch this Saturday – now profiting from the narrative twist of the “terrorist” Taliban back in power, something perfect to snuff out the utter humiliation of the Empire of Chaos.

The Deep State is going no holds barred to protect the official narrative – which exhibits more holes than the dark side of the moon.

This is a geopolitical Ouroboros for the ages. 9/11 used to be the foundation myth of the 21^st century – but not anymore. It has been displaced by blowback: the imperial debacle allowing for the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the exact position it was 20 years ago.

We may now know that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. We may now know that Osama bin Laden, in an Afghan cave, may not have been the master perpetrator of 9/11. We may now know that the assassination of Massoud was a prelude to 9/11, but in a twisted way: to facilitate a pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan.

And yet, like with the assassination of JFK, we may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma. As Fitzgerald immortalized, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” probing like mad this philosophical and existential Ground Zero, never ceasing from asking the ultimate question: Cui Bono?

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Massoud leaving Bazarak in the Panjshir after our interview in August 2001, roughly three weeks before his assassination. Photo: Pepe Escobar

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by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

How Can America Wake Up from Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, September 09, 2021

We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

Implications of the Electoral Defeat of the Detroit People’s Charter

By Abayomi Azikiwe, September 09, 2021

A grassroots initiative to rewrite the municipal charter of the City of Detroit, Proposal P or the People’s Charter, was drowned out by a multi-million dollar propaganda and psychological warfare campaign aimed at maintaining the status quo.

Gutting the Fiscal Stimulus

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, September 09, 2021

Since at least this past spring 2021, it’s been clear that the corporate wing of the Democratic party (in basic agreement with McConnell and the Republicans) has been pursuing a strategy of chipping away at fiscal spending proposals promised during the 2020 elections and introduced by Biden upon entering office last January-February.

Rutgers University Freezes Accounts of Several Non-Vaccinated Students

By Carly Baldwin, September 09, 2021

According to Rutgers University, more than 98 percent of undergrads have complied with its mandate that students upload their coronavirus vaccine card in order to return to dorms and classes this fall. But the few students who chose not to get the vaccine are now finding themselves locked out of fall classes, even classes they had planned to take online only.

What to Expect from Taliban 2.0

By Pepe Escobar, September 09, 2021

The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.

Merck’s Deadly Vioxx Playbook, Redux: A Debunked Smear Campaign Against Its Competing Drug—the FDA-approved, Nobel prize-honored Ivermectin

By Dr. David E. Scheim, September 09, 2021

Recently, many news reports picked up on Merck’s theme, lambasting the use of a dangerous horse de-wormer by gullible consumers. The most recent were by the BBC, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, MSN and others, about Oklahoma hospital facilities being strained with ivermectin overdoses, delaying other emergency care.

After Calling Vaccine Passports a “Conspiracy Theory,” U.K. Government Now Says Everyone Will Need to Show Proof of Vaccination to Live

By Ethan Huff, September 09, 2021

On September 5, the government of the United Kingdom confirmed that Brits will soon need to show proof of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” in order to enter nightclubs and large venues.

Video: Why Canada Should Leave NATO

By Michael Welch, Margaret Kimberley, Tamara Lorincz, and Ludo De Brabander, September 09, 2021

Today, NATO operates an a budget of €258.9 million for civil purposes and €1.61 billion for military purposes. Its military spending equals 57% of the global Normal total and defence spending of the constituent nation states are aiming for a target of 2% of their GDP by 2024.

Unprecedented Global Debt Crisis: The IMF’s Announcement of $650 Billion in Special Drawing Rights

By Eric Toussaint, Milan Rivié, and Abbès Zineb, September 09, 2021

The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help.

Video: Ethics 101. Dr. Julie Ponesse, Professor of Ethics at the University of Western Ontario, Provides a Lesson in Courage and Integrity

By Dr. Julie Ponesse, September 09, 2021

On September 7, 2021, Julie Ponesse, Ethics Professor Huron College University of Western Ontario, London, ON Canada was dismissed for not submitting to medical experimentation.

“America’s Longest War” Is Not Over!

By Brian Terrell, September 09, 2021

But the U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end on August 31. It has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that may be less visible—and therefore more politically sustainable.

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them. 

That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness. 

Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses—activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy. 

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.” 

“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.” 

Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it. 

By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place. 

In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House. 

Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war. 

Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged. 

Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see. 

But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” 

Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force. 

The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. 

A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.  

America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.    

But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a downpayment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy—if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard. 

• We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” – please join us! 
• We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”  
• We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others—never to the United States. 
• And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia. 

Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

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

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Featured image is from the authors

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

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***

 

A grassroots initiative to rewrite the municipal charter of the City of Detroit, Proposal P or the People’s Charter, was drowned out by a multi-million dollar propaganda and psychological warfare campaign aimed at maintaining the status quo.

In 2018, a citywide election was held for candidates to serve for three years on a Charter Commission assigned to develop a new guide for the municipality.

The outcome of the 2018 Charter Commission elections startled the ruling class and its agents within city government including the corporate-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan and the majority compliant City Council. Several of the Commissioners elected in 2018 were committed to making sweeping changes in how the city has operated for many years.

Of course, there were sharp differences between members of the Charter Commission after the officials took office. Meetings during the early phase of the process were marked by intense debate and discussions.

Detroit police officers were called into Charter Commission meetings which were held at various community centers. Such a repressive atmosphere was designed to squash the process of developing a new governance document which was slipping beyond the control of the local ruling elites beholden to the multi-national corporations, banks and the federal government.

To coincide with the actual work of the Charter Commission, numerous task forces were established across Detroit to discuss revisions in the guidelines regulating public safety, water rights, affordable housing, disability rights, immigrant rights and the division of power within the administrative and legislative structures. Meetings for the focus groups were open to the public where people from various neighborhoods, social backgrounds, nationalities and genders participated.

The process under which the revisions were drafted represented the most democratic exercise that the city has undergone in decades. A 145-page document was eventually published encompassing the desires and interests of the majority African Americans, People of Color, immigrants and working-class peoples as a whole.

Detroit Action organizer speaks at rally to demand release of federal CERA funding, Sept. 8, 2021

In previous years during the charter revision process, the City of Detroit through the City Council would provide funding to publicize the proposed charter among the electorate. The funds would be utilized for literature, media ads and other methods of encouraging eligible voters to either support or reject the revisions. These funds desperately needed by the Charter Commission were restricted, hampering the ability of the elected body to educate the voters about the importance of the document.

However, the political and social character of the document drafted by community activists outraged the existing corporate-allied officials. A Committee to Protect Detroit’s Future was formed on May 19 to launch a campaign of legal challenges and disinformation.

The Committee to Protect Detroit’s Future was funded and endorsed by the leading capitalist entities in the city. The Chamber of Commerce, the Restaurant Owners Association, DTE Energy and Blue Cross-Blue Shield were leading firms and associations propping up the anti-charter grouping.

Local compromised ministers, police officials and supporters of the Duggan administration were recruited to appear in television ads and on billboards to spread outright distortions and lies to turn people away from voting yes on the revised charter during the primary elections on August 3. Perhaps the most insidious falsehood was that the Charter would bankrupt the City of Detroit once again. Yet, no discussion was forthcoming on what interests engineered the Financial Stability Agreement (FSA), Emergency Management and the illegally imposed bankruptcy, the largest in the history of the United States. These events took place between 2012-2014.

In fact, it was the banks through predatory lending within the housing sector and municipal finance which drove the City of Detroit to the crisis which occurred beginning in the years between 2005-2009. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans and working-class people were driven out of the city during the census period of 2000-2010. Job losses, home foreclosures, utility and water shut-offs, insurance red lining, police brutality, inferior education and environmental degradation were all caused by the racist and super-exploitative character of governance which prevailed within the city.

The People’s Charter advocates did receive support from two major labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and LIUNA, which organizes in the construction industry. These two endorsements were important. However, they were no match financially for the total hostile opposition of the banks, the criminal justice establishment and the comprador operatives within the community that are promoted by the ruling class.

Housing Crisis Escalates in Detroit 

Moratorium NOW! Coalition in alliance with several housing and social justice groups including Detroit Action, Detroit Eviction Defense, Charlevoix Village Association and Detroit Will Breathe have mounted a political struggle for the immediate release of the COVID Emergency Relief Assistance (CERA) funds provided through the legislative bills designed to provide a lifeline to people severely impacted by the pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis. A press conference was held on September 1 outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (CAYMAC) located in the heart of downtown. The press conference was given extensive coverage in the local television market as well as some newspapers such as the Metro Times and MLIVE. com.

During the September 1 action, the demands were clear: a moratorium on evictions until the CERA funds are completely dispersed; that the U.S. Congress pass legislation to remedy the legal dilemma created by the Supreme Court decision during late August essentially outlawing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratoriums declared as a measure aimed at stemming the new wave of infections taking place throughout the country; and that Chief Judge of 36th District Court, William C. McConico, reimpose a moratorium on eviction proceedings until a methodology is created to address the burgeoning threats of evictions.

The question of quality housing availability and access to supplemental rental funds are inextricably linked to the ruling class war waged against the People’s Charter. Municipal policy under the administration of Mike Duggan seems to be designed to force as many Black, Brown, working class and impoverished people out of the city.

After the mortgage foreclosures of the 2000s involving tens of thousands of homes in the city, by 2015, due to the over assessments of property taxes, there were the imminent seizures of tens of thousands of other homes for delinquencies in taxes for the City of Detroit and Wayne County. Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other community organizations from across the city were able to mobilize public opinion to force the Wayne County Treasurer to allow people to make arrangements on illegally assessed tax bills, therefore, in effect halting yet another exodus from Detroit. A compounding problem to the property tax debacle was the placement of liens on homes by the County for unpaid water bills. A wave of water shut offs in the tens of thousands were implemented during the bankruptcy in the summer of 2014.

Clauses within the People’s Charter viewed water and housing issues as fundamental human rights. A water affordability plan to prevent shut offs would have been embedded in the document governing the city’s operations. In addition, the municipal government would have been compelled to respect the rights of immigrants and people living with disabilities.

The Need for a People’s Movement Remains 

Although the People’s Charter was targeted and derailed by the ruling class led by Dan Gilbert, the Illitch Holdings firms, Chase Bank, DTE Energy, among others, the process of democratic discussions and popular actions around the fundamental needs of the working majority continues to be paramount. In reality, there is no real alternative to the continued mobilization and organization of the communities in Detroit based upon their own interests. The failure to not pursue this course of thinking and political work will only result in the rapid decline in population and the consequent political power for the people.

The impact of climate change has been starkly evident. A series of floods since June have damaged untold numbers of homes, apartment buildings and small businesses. A class action lawsuit against the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department (DWSD) and the post-bankruptcy Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) portends much for the fiscal stability of the city and the region. The failure of pumping stations, antiquated equipment and the systematic downsizing of the workforce employed in water services, has resulted in the current situation.

The most recent Census data for Detroit indicates a further decline in population. Among the African American people, the numbers within this majority community have declined by 16% since 2010.

Corruption which is rife within municipal government has been further exposed with the federal investigations and raids against several City Council members. All of the people convicted or presently under scrutiny by U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District are staunch puppets of the Duggan administration who routinely vote in favor of capital.

These issues will create the conditions for an eventual social explosion in Detroit and other major cities across the U.S. The task of organizers is to be prepared for this inevitability in order to assist in directing the struggle toward victory.

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

All images in this article are from the author

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***

 

Since at least this past spring 2021, it’s been clear that the corporate wing of the Democratic party (in basic agreement with McConnell and the Republicans) has been pursuing a strategy of chipping away at fiscal spending proposals promised during the 2020 elections and introduced by Biden upon entering office last January-February.

While most of media attention has focused on the negotiations between Biden’s Democrats and McConnell’s Republicans in Congress, much less attention has been given to the second set of negotiations–i.e. within the factions of the Democratic party itself and specifically between its corporate wing and its so-called progressives.

Three Fiscal Rescue Plans

There were three fiscal spending initiatives introduced by Biden when he took office in late January 2021: The first was the Covid relief measure called the American Rescue Plan (ARP). It’s projected spending was set at $1.9 trillion. However, the amount of authorized spending will be less than $1.9T, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). And even the authorized amount per the CBO will likely get cut over time as arcane Congressional spending rules take effect in 2022 and beyond that put annual limits on spending even what was authorized.

For 2021-22, the CBO’s indicates only $1T spending is actually authorized to be spent. But much less than that will be spent due to more than 20 states discontinuing unemployment benefits early, failure of distribution of rent assistance due to landlord resistance, and other early terminations of programs.  Unemployment benefits have already ended, stimulus checks were distributed and spent months ago, increases in food stamp benefits expire this month as well, $85 billion in assistance grants to small businesses have been largely made, and $403 billion in funds to state and local governments mostly distributed.

Despite all these distributions, the net economic effects so far this year appear to have dissipated or had little impact on the economic recovery, which shows signs of fading as of September 2021. A much more aggressive fiscal stimulus is needed as a follow on to the ARP which, in retrospect now, appears more like a ‘mitigation’ fiscal measure than a bona fide ‘stimulus’ measure. The more aggressive fiscal stimulus measures were to be the second and third fiscal ‘plans’ announced by Biden early in the year. These were the Infrastructure spending bill and an initially less well defined ‘Family’ support fiscal spending bill.

The second fiscal spending initiative–the Infrastructure bill–is called the American Jobs Plan (AJP).  It was initially intended to spend $2.3 trillion on various traditional as well as new ‘human infrastructure’ initiatives.  The latter human infrastructure initiatives, however, were quickly stripped out, leaving only traditional fiscal spending measures on roads, bridges, water, etc. to comprise the what’s called the Infrastructure bill.  The stripped out programs were then repackaged into a revision of the third fiscal spending proposal called the ‘Family’ Act, with an initial spending cost of $3.5 trillion.

Over the past summer the $2.3 trillion Infrastructure bill was drastically cut to only $550 billion in actual new spending, to which was appended roughly another $600 billion in previously authorized spending on highways and other. The media and politicians ‘spun’ the already authorized spending as ‘new’ and part of the Infrastructure bill, thus boosting the total to $1.1 trillion or so. Even with the best assumptions, the much reduced net new spending of $550 billion will not get into the US economy until late 2022 and in 2023. So its impact on the slowing recovery today will have no effect whatsoever. The $3.5 trillion ‘catch-all’ human infrastructure proposal (including spending on climate change, medicare, education, etc.) stands even less chance of passage–in this year or next.

So what exists as fiscal stimulus this year is on average only $50 billion a month in government social program spending, in an economy of $2.2 trillion! That’s hardly an economic ‘drop in the bucket’ and won’t move the recovery needle much, if at all. Especially in the final months of 2021 given that nearly all of it has either been spent or discontinued.

Why then is the Biden fiscal stimulus and Covid wracked US economy plan about to fail?

One answer is the three proposals amount to insufficient fiscal stimulus to generate a sustained economic recovery. What remains is just a rebound of the economy as it reopened this summer. And ‘rebounds’ are not ‘sustained recoveries. Fiscal measure #1, the ARP, is already mostly spent or is being discontinued. And the other two fiscal spending proposals are either ‘dead in the water’ in terms of Congressional passage, in worst case scenario, or, should they eventually pass in some form, the magnitudes will be too little too late.

What’s happened the past six months is that the 1st measure, the ARP, was undermined and cut either by Republican states (unemployment benefits early terminations) or by the US Supreme Court (rent moratorium ruled unconstitutional), or inept administration of funds and landlord resistance (rent assistance), or state and local governments sitting on hiring workers with the $400 billion they received from ARP.

The second and third measures (Infrastructure & Family plans) in turn have been sharply reduced or blocked altogether by corporate interests and the corporate wings of both parties, Democrat and Republican alike. This has been evident in the evolution of the Infrastructure bill and negotiations dramatically reducing its projected spending amount from an initial $2.3 trillion to only $550 billion actual new spending.  The same sharp reduction in spending is about to occur with the $3.5 trillion Family plan in coming weeks that was witnessed with the evisceration of the $2.3 trillion original Infrastructure bill.

How Corporate Interests Gutted the $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Bill

This writer warned back in March, as the fight over the $2.3 trillion original infrastructure bill ratcheted up, that corporate interests in the Democratic party would collude with the Republicans to dramatically cut the Infrastructure bill. The $2.3 trillion would be gutted and deeply reduced, leaving it a shell of its original proposals. That of course is exactly what happened. The net new spending both sides agreed would be $550 billion–not $2.3 trillion.

To cover up the nearly $1.8 trillion in cuts, the spin by the corporate wing in both parties was the Infrastructure bill spending was reduced only to $1.1 trillion. But that $1.1 trillion amount was the result of including in the final bill spending on highway and transport previously authorized in legislation passed well before Biden’s original infrastructure proposals. The actual new spending thus was only $550 billion.

The reduction of $1.8 trillion made it possible to fund the final $550 billion new money Infrastructure bill by means of ‘smoke and mirrors’ and thus avoid raising taxes on corporations and investors, which the original $2.3 trillion would have required. And that’s the crux of all the reductions in the three fiscal spending proposals. Neither the Republicans nor the corporate wing of the Democratic party want to spend big on social programs because it will mean taxes will have to be raised on corporations and investors in order to pay for the programs. And they don’t want to raise taxes–which means reverse some of the $4.5 trillion in Trump tax cuts passed in 2017-18.

Avoiding raising taxes has been, and remains, the number one objective of corporate interests in both the Democratic and Republican parties. They got their way with Biden’s Infrastructure bill. None of the Trump tax cuts were reversed. The Infrastructure bill is to be paid for by ‘smoke and mirrors’ measures but not taxes.

Now corporate wings in both parties are intent on doing the same with the $3.5 Trillion ‘human’ infrastructure/climate change/healthcare reform bill (aka the de facto Sanders bill). The corporate goal once again is to prevent funding via taxes.

There were always two negotiations underway simultaneously as Biden’s original $2.3 trillion Infrastructure bill was reduced to $550 billion: one negotiating track in which Biden, in the name of ‘bipartisanship, made concession after concession to McConnell in order to get Republican support to pass the Infrastructure bill without having to end the filibuster or do a budget reconciliation; the other track was the negotiation within the Democratic Party itself over the size and scope of the original Infrastructure proposal as well.

The internal negotiation was led by Senators Manchin and Senema, who were point persons for the corporate wing of their party that was, like the Republicans, intent on paring down the spending on infrastructure.

In the end the Democrats’ corporate wing prevailed: the original $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill was cut to only $550 billion in actual new spending. That was the Republican position all along. McConnell and Republicans got their way: no actual tax hikes (meaning no cuts to Trump’s massive $4.5 trillion 2017 tax cuts). And the Democrat corporate wing got its way as well which was the same objective of no corporate or investor tax hikes. Corporate interests in both parties wanted the same and they got it: reduce the spending enough to avoid raising taxes.

How Corporate Interests Will do the Same with the $3.5 Trillion

Manchin and Senema were leading the charge to reduce spending on infrastructure, and were there to serve as ‘cover’ for the corporate wing. It appeared as if Manchin-Senema were responsible for the slashing of the infrastructure bill from its original $2.3 trillion to $550 billion. However, the negotiations within the Democratic party were really corporate interests vs. the progressives. Manchin-Senema were the corporate wing’s ‘stalking horses’.

Clearly aligned with the broader corporate interests in his party, and not the progressives, Biden gladly cut out much of his original Infrastructure $2.3 trillion. To placate the progressives in the party (Sanders, Warren, etc.), he agreed to shift most of the cuts to a new, repackaged family human infrastructure bill. That’s the $3.5 trillion now on the table. Sanders was satisfied with the move.

So too were Pelosi and the House Progressives. The progressives in the House were placated with Pelosi declaring the two fiscal bills would have to be voted on together: the $550B in new spending on infrastructure and whatever amount resulted of the $3.5 trillion Family bill after negotiations gutted it as well–as shall be evident in the coming weeks.

The same process of gutting the Infrastructure bill that occurred in the Senate will now be replicated with the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill; namely, the $3.5T will be reduced in stages in both the House and Senate until corporate interests in both the Democratic and Republican parties are satisfied the final funding will not require big tax hikes.

In fact, the slashing the $3.5T has already begun. Early last week Joe Manchin called for a ‘pause’ in negotiations on the $3.5T saying it was too large for him to support. That formulation signaled he might accept it but not in its present form or size. Yesterday Manchin followed up saying the $3.5T should be reduced to no more than $1.5 trillion over ten years.

It what looks like a nicely coordinated initial position by corporate party interests in the House, Manchin was quickly followed by Jim Clyburn, a power broker in the House, who just declared the $3.5T should be considered only a ‘wish list’ and just a start point for negotiations. In other words, let’s negotiate down from there.

So here we go: just as occurred in the Senate with the original $2.3 trillion traditional Infrastructure bill, the $3.5T human infrastructure/family bill will be slashed in stages in coming weeks, in a nicely choreographed effort by Democratic party corporate interests in the Senate and the House.

McConnell and Republicans will look on with a big smile on their face, nodding their heads, silently urging their corporate cousins in the Democratic party to do their work for them again, and bring them a bill that requires no rollback of Trump’s $4.5 trillion massive 2017 tax cuts.

Meanwhile, what existed of fiscal stimulus this past spring is quickly dissipating. Consumer and retail spending continue to weaken, as unemployment benefits are cut, rent assistance is blocked, employers pull back on job hiring, distribution of funds by state and local governments are hoarded, supply chain bottlenecks globally continue, most of Asia is slipping into recession, business price gouging continues to push up inflation, and the Covid delta wave accelerates.

But hey, what the hell. It’s not all bad. The stock market keeps hitting records. Corporations plan to distribute a record $1.5 trillion this year in stock buybacks and dividend payouts to their shareholders. Corporate spending on global mergers and acquisitions is projected to hit record levels. And the Federal Reserve keeps the financial bubbles going with its $120 billion a month QE free money to bankers and investors.

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Dr. Jack Rasmus is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Matt Kenyon/Financial Times

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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***

 

We who are so easily dismissed as ‘Conspiracy Nuts’ know, both intuitively and through careful research, that there was lots more about what really went down the morning of September 11th, 2001.

When I first read David Ray Griffin’s 2004 bestseller 9/11 The New Pearl Harbor I literally could not put it down. He laid out countless facts that the whitewash 9/11 Commission failed to even address. Rather than go into the myriad of details allow me to just state a few coincidences: When the FAA and NORAD realized that there were jumbo jets failing to respond to radio contact and on their way to the NYC area, the call was made to scramble fighter jets.

Well, logic would dictate that the call would go to McGuire AFB in New Jersey, whereupon the jets could reach  Lower Manhattan, less than 30 miles away, within 15-20 minutes. Yet, the call went out to Otis AFB in Mass., which is over 150 miles from NYC.

Go figure! Then we have the military exercise, Operation Vigilant Guardian, on the day in question. This was a NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) exercise involving fake airplane hijackings in North America.

So, you have tapes of air traffic controllers, as the Four death planes were approaching, saying over their microphones: “Is that one a real hijacking or a fake one?” Meanwhile, the damage was being done. How about Bush Jr. sitting in an elementary school classroom reading to the kids after the 1st plane hit a twin tower? Then, his chief of staff Andrew Card walked over and whispered in Junior’s ear that a 2nd plane hit the other tower. It then took his handlers more than 7 minutes to get him out of there! Now here is the kicker: It was advertised well in advance that Bush Jr. would be at that Sarasota, Florida school that morning. If we were truly under attack, come on, you all see those same films about presidential assassination attempts. In the films, at the first signs of any danger to a president the Secret Service guys rush in, grab the president and hurry him the hell out of wherever he is!

Bottom line: Anyone who has watched the great film Casablanca knows where I am going with this. In the film, Claude Rains playing the Vichy French captain (after the Germans kill his prisoner) states “He was  found dead in his cell” and then orders his men to “Round up the usual suspects”. In October of 2001 the ‘Usual Suspects’ were the entire population of Afghanistan, which we proceeded to invade and occupy. Soon after, ditto for Iraq. It was never really about Osama or Saddam. They were just the icing on the cake of empire.

After the two towers came down like pancakes (in less than 10 seconds, a world record – Please note that there is a video of three NYC fireman watching a tower go down on live television. These were three veteran firefighters by the way. As they watch the tower pancake down one says ‘Did you see that? Boom boom boom.’

Another replies ‘Controlled demolition’). Junior Bush sent out the demand to get Wall Street open and working again within 7 days. Meanwhile, all those truly brave and dedicated first responders were trudging around inside a zone of destructive debris — destructive to the human organs. This cloud of a potpourri of dangerous toxins just filled the nasal passages of anyone having to breath them.

Meanwhile, Christine Todd Whitman, head of the EPA at the time, assured America that ‘The air is now safe’. It only took her about 15 years to apologize for her lie. We now surmise that it was the Bush Cabal that ordered her to lie.

Sadly, when you watch all the media doing all those human interest stories of the terrible tragic day, you won’t see or hear much truth. Not at all. Will anyone in the mainstream media dare offer any of the handful of facts I shared in this piece? To add insult to injury, Junior Bush is scheduled to address the nation at the site of the Shanksville, PA crash.

Those who (again) ‘know better’ will realize that he, along with that whole Cabal, is a war criminal. There are actually two theories about how much Junior Bush actually knew about this ‘9/11 Inside Job’. One theory is that he was just too stupid for the Cheney/Rumsfeld et all cabal to allow him to know in advance. He might have screwed things up afterwards. The other theory is that he was ‘schooled’ by those criminals that something like ‘A new Pearl Harbor ‘ was necessary to justify going full speed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Either way, this is just one man’s opinion, for that is what a good columnist does.

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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, and Countercurrents.org,. 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].

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Featured image is from The Greanville Post

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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Meine Damen, meine Herren, geschätzte Kolleginnen und Kollegen! Die Zukunft unserer Kultur wird wesentlich davon abhängen, ob es genügend freie Denker geben wird, die uns darüber aufklären, was Wahrheit und was Lüge ist. Dies erfordert von einem unabhängigen Geist, der in Niemandes Dienst steht, ein hohes Maß an Gemeinsinn und das sittliche Bewusstsein, Hüter seines Bruders zu sein. Je größer der Mut eines Denkers, um so mehr wagt er in Frage zu stellen, um so weniger bleibt er mit der Menge konform. Sein Denken ist nicht nur Gedankenspiel: denkend verändert er die Welt. Er ist der Typus eines redlichen Geistes, eines Ethikers und wahren Menschen, der für sich und alle anderen Menschen (denkend) die Verantwortung übernimmt. Mit der Freiheit des Denkens wird die Freiheit überhaupt proklamiert. Denn die Wahrheit ist kein Selbstzweck; sie ist lediglich die Gussform für etwas Größeres, nämlich die Freiheit. Die Wahrheit allein kann uns frei machen. Der Intellektuelle hat deshalb eine viel größere Verantwortung, als man gemeinhin wahrhaben möchte.

Dabei wird ein freier Denker nie behaupten, er verfüge über die allein selig machende Wahrheit. Für den freien Geist gibt es eine unbegrenzte Anzahl von zu entdeckenden und dem Wandel folgenden Wahrheiten. Wahr ist für ihn, was nicht dogmatische Fessel ist und die Menschen nicht in Gläubige und Nichtgläubige oder Andersgläubige trennt, sondern dem Zusammenleben der Menschen nützt, ihr Einvernehmen und den Gemeinsinn fördert.

Da für die Gestaltung der Zukunft jeder Einzelne gebraucht wird, kann nicht auf einen Messias gewartet werden: Es muss hier und jetzt gehandelt werden. Deshalb sehe ich den gewaltfreien Weg allein darin, weiterhin aufzuklären, Hoffnung zu vermitteln und niemals aufzugeben. Totschlagargumente wie „Verschwörungstheoretiker“ oder „Faschist“ sollten freie Geister nicht verunsichern, negative Kategorisierungen noch unentschlossener Mitbürger unterlassen werden. Unentschlossene muss man freundlich und verständnisvoll dort abholen, wo sie sich momentan gefühlsmäßig befinden.

Wenn zum Beispiel Mitbürger davon ausgehen, dass es sich bei den politischen, wirtschaftlichen und klimatischen Horrormeldungen um schicksalhafte Ereignisse handelt, dann sollten sie erfahren, dass die Menschen überall auf der Welt von der herrschenden „Elite“ durch bewusst herbeigeführte Katastrophen aller Art ins Chaos gestürzt werden, damit sie in eine Schockstarre verfallen (Naomi Klein) und nicht mitbekommen, wie hinter ihrem Rücken eine Neue Weltordnung entsteht, in der sie nur noch ein Sklavendasein fristen werden. Aber wie in jedem anderen Krieg birgt der Nebel der Ungewissheit für Bürger die Chance, mithilfe des gesunden Menschenverstands die Wahrheit herauszufinden.

Wenn ein Mitbürger der Meinung ist, dass Politiker mit der Verordnung von Zwangsmaßnahmen wie Lockdown, Quarantäne, Maulkorb oder gen-therapeutische Seren die Gesundheit der Bevölkerung schützen wollen, dann sollte ihm vermittelt werden, dass die Schalthebel der Macht bereits vor Jahren mit korrupten, sittenlosen, unbedeutenden und verlogenen Polit-Darstellern besetzt worden sind, weil diese die Anordnungen der herrschenden Psychopathen bereitwillig umsetzen. Dazu zählen gegenwärtig das mediale Schüren irrationaler Ängste, die Zerstörung des Mittelstands, die Abschaffung des Bargelds, die totale Kontrolle sowie die Reduktion der Bevölkerung und die Isolation „Uneinsichtiger“ in speziellen „Quarantäne-Camps“. Doch diese Lakaien müssen eines Tages abtreten. Das Böse wird nicht siegen, weil der Mensch zwar irritiert, aber von Natur aus gut und sozial ist.

Wenn jemand im Zusammenhang mit den verordneten politischen Zwangsmaßnahmen und der anstehenden Zwangsimpfung meint, dass Politiker und Bürger gut beraten seien, wenn sie auf die Expertisen von Medizinern aller Couleur vertrauen, dann soll er daran erinnert werden, dass kein Berufsstand so tief in die Gräueltaten des Nationalsozialismus verstrickt war wie die Ärzte. Sie bildeten gewissermaßen das Rückgrat nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen.

Wenn Mitbürger nicht wissen oder wahrhaben wollen, dass freie Länder und freiheitliche Regierungen von skrupellosen Großmächten bewusst zerstört werden und die Öffentlichkeit darüber getäuscht wird, dann empfehle man ihnen den Artikel von John Pilger in „Global Research“ und „RT.DE“ über das jahrzehntelange Leiden des afghanischen Volkes: “Das große Spiel, Länder zu zerschlagen“. Der vielfach ausgezeichnete Journalist plädiert dafür, die Wahrheit über die Vergangenheit ernst zu nehmen, damit all dieses Leid nie wieder geschieht. Dabei ist Afghanistan nur eines von vielen Beispielen für die brutalen Eroberungsfeldzüge und Wirtschaftskriege des Imperiums.

Wenn Mitmenschen hoffen, dass die gegenwärtigen Verbrechen an der Menschheit bald ein Ende finden werden, dann sollte man sie schonend darauf vorbereiten, dass bereits nachfolgende Zwangsmaßnahmen geplant sind, um den angeblich von Menschen verursachten Klimawandel einzudämmen. Gleichzeitig sollte man ihnen Hoffnung machen, da weltweit immer mehr Menschen aufwachen und gegen den gigantischen Schwindel und die Verbrechen aufstehen.

Wenn ein Mitbürger wegen der menschenverachtenden Machenschaften der Obrigkeit in eine für ihn ausweglos erscheinende wirtschaftliche, finanzielle und soziale Notlage gerät, dann ist ihm dringend zu empfehlen, sich an Mitmenschen zu wenden, weil das Prinzip der „Gegenseitigen Hilfe“ (Kropotkin) sowie soziale Gefühle und gemeinschaftliche Verbundenheit in der Menschenwelt eine ebenso große Rolle spielen wie der Wille zur Macht und der Eigennutz.

Wenn aber irgendjemand die Mitmenschen zum Aufstand gegen die Staatsgewalt treiben will, dann muss ihnen dringend davon abgeraten werden, weil die Staatsgewalt gut gerüstet ist und mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgegangen werden muss.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is Diplom-Psychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.

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***

 

Dear friends and esteemed colleagues!

The future of our culture will largely depend on whether there will be enough free thinkers to enlighten us about what is truth and what is a lie. This requires from an independent mind, which is in nobody’s service, a high degree of common sense and the moral consciousness to be his brother’s keeper.

The greater the courage of a thinker, the more he dares to question, the less he /she conforms to the crowd. His thinking is not just mind games: thinking he changes the world. He is the type of an honest spirit, an ethicist and true human being who takes responsibility for himself and all other human beings (thinking). With the freedom of thinking, freedom in general is proclaimed. For truth is not an end in itself; it is merely the mould for something greater, namely freedom. Truth alone can make us free. The intellectual therefore has a much greater responsibility than one would commonly like to admit.

At the same time, a free thinker will never claim to have the only blessed truth. For the free mind, there is an unlimited number of truths to be discovered and to follow change. For him, truth is that which is not dogmatic and does not divide people into believers and non-believers or those of other faiths, but which is beneficial to the coexistence of people and promotes their understanding and common sense.

Since every individual is needed to shape the future, we cannot wait for a Messiah: Action must be taken here and now. Therefore, I see the only non-violent way is to continue to enlighten, to convey hope and to never give up.

Killing arguments like “conspiracy theorist” or “fascist” should not unsettle free spirits, negative categorisations of still undecided fellow citizens should be refrained from. Undecided people have to be picked up in a friendly and understanding way from where they are at the moment.

If, for example, fellow citizens assume that the political, economic and climatic horror reports are fateful events, then they should be told that people all over the world are being thrown into chaos by the ruling “elite” through deliberately brought about catastrophes of all kinds, so that they fall into a state of shock (Naomi Klein) and do not notice how a New World Order is being created behind their backs, in which they will only live a slave existence. But as in any other war, the fog of uncertainty offers citizens the chance to use common sense to find out the truth.

If a fellow citizen thinks that politicians want to protect the health of the population by prescribing coercive measures such as lockdown, quarantine, muzzling or gene therapy serums, then it should be conveyed to him that the levers of power were already occupied years ago by corrupt, immoral, petty and mendacious political actors because they willingly implement the orders of the ruling psychopaths. These currently include the media stoking of irrational fears, the destruction of the middle class, the abolition of cash, total control as well as the reduction of the population and the isolation of “undiscerning” people in special “quarantine camps”. But these lackeys must one day step down. Evil will not triumph because man, though irritated, is good and social by nature.

If anyone thinks, in connection with the prescribed political coercive measures and the upcoming compulsory vaccination, that politicians and citizens would be well advised to trust the expert opinions of medical practitioners of all stripes, then they should be reminded that no profession was as deeply involved in the atrocities of German Nazis as doctors. In a sense, they formed the backbone of German Nazis crimes.

If fellow citizens do not know or do not want to admit that free countries and free governments are being deliberately destroyed by unscrupulous great powers and that the public is being deceived about this, then they are advised to read John Pilger’s article in “Global Research” about the decades of suffering of the Afghan people: “The Great Game of Breaking Up Countries”. The award-winning journalist pleads for taking the truth about the past seriously so that all this suffering never happens again. Yet Afghanistan is only one of many examples of the brutal campaigns of conquest and economic warfare of the empire.

If fellow human beings hope that the current crimes against humanity will soon come to an end, then they should be gently prepared for the fact that subsequent coercive measures are already planned to curb the allegedly man-made climate change. At the same time, they should be given hope as more and more people around the world are waking up and standing up against the gigantic hoax and crimes.

If a fellow citizen finds himself in a seemingly hopeless economic, financial and social plight because of the inhuman machinations of the authorities, then he is strongly advised to turn to fellow human beings, because the principle of “mutual aid” (Kropotkin) as well as social feelings and communal bonds play just as great a role in the human world as the will to power and self-interest.

But if anyone wants to drive fellow human beings to revolt against the power of the state, then they must be strongly advised not to do so, because the power of the state is well armed and the blood and freedom of others must be treated with care.

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Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a Psychologist and educationalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

On August 31, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. stepped up to the White House podium, squared his shoulders, looked the American public straight in the eye — and told them the biggest lie of his Presidency (so far).

What he said was:

“Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history.”

But the U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end on August 31. It has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that may be less visible—and therefore more politically sustainable.

It will also continue to destabilize the Middle East, immiserate and enrage its 246 million inhabitants, and fuel a massive new influx of violent jihadists recruits—formidably armed with our own abandoned weaponry and bent on revenge against America for the deaths of their families and friends. This will, of course, require the U.S. to launch even more drone bombing missions, which will kill even more Afghan people.

That is the perfect recipe for perpetuating the “forever wars” that Biden promised to end. But it is also a perfect reassurance to the military-industrial-intelligence complex, to which Biden promised, at a June 2019 campaign fundraiser, that “nothing would fundamentally change.”

In his speech on August 31, Biden himself admitted,

“We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.”

Five days before, on the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after a suicide bomb was detonated at the gate of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of Afghans trying to flee their country and killing 13 U.S. soldiers, President Biden spoke to the world, “outraged as well as heartbroken,” he said.

Many of us listening to the president’s speech, made before the victims could be counted and the rubble cleared, did not find comfort or hope in his words. Instead, our heartbreak and outrage were only amplified as Joe Biden seized the tragedy to call for more war.

“To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he threatened. “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities. We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing.”

The president’s threatened “moment of our choosing” came one day later, on Friday, August 27, when the U.S. military carried out a drone strike against what it said was an ISIS-K “planner” in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province.

The U.S. military’s claim that it knows of “no civilian casualties” in the attack is contradicted by reports from the ground. “We saw that rickshaws were burning,” one Afghan witness said. “Children and women were wounded and one man, one boy and one woman had been killed on the spot.”

Fear of an ISIS-K counterattack further hampered evacuation efforts as the U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens to leave the airport. “This strike was not the last,” said President Biden. On August 29, another U.S. drone strike killed a family of ten in Kabul.

Image on the right: Predator drone firing over Afghanistan. [Source: wikipedia.org]

The first lethal drone strike in history occurred in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, when the CIA identified Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “or 98-percent probable it was he,” but the Hellfire missile launched by a Predator drone killed two unidentified men while Mullah Omar escaped.

These two recent instances of “force and precision” ordered by Biden twenty years later marked the presumed end to the war there just as it had begun. The intervening record has not been much better and, in fact, documents exposed by whistleblower Daniel Hale prove that the U.S. government is aware that 90% of its drone strike victims are not the intended targets.

Zemari Ahmadi, who was killed in the August 29 drone strike in Kabul along with nine members of his family, seven of them young children, had been employed by a California based humanitarian organization and had applied for a visa to come to the U.S., as had Ahmadi’s nephew Nasser, also killed in the same attack.

Nasser had worked with U.S. Special Forces in the Afghan city of Herat and had also served as a guard for the U.S. Consulate there. Whatever affinity the surviving members of Ahmadi’s family and friends might have had with the U.S. went up in smoke, that day. “America is the killer of Muslims in every place and every time,” said one relative who attended the funeral, “I hope that all Islamic countries unite in their view that America is a criminal.” Another mourner, a colleague of Ahmadi, said “We’re now much more afraid of drones than we are of the Taliban.”

The fact that targeted killings like those carried out in Afghanistan and other places from 2001 to the present are counterproductive to the stated objectives of defeating terrorism, regional stability or of winning hearts and minds has been known by the architects of the “war on terror,” at least since 2009.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we have access to a CIA document from that year, Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool. Among the “key findings” in the CIA report, analysts warn of the negative consequences of assassinating so-called High Level Targets (HLT). “The potential negative effect of HLT operations, include increasing the level of insurgent support …, strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”

The obvious truths that the CIA kept buried in a secret report have been admitted many times by high-ranking officers implementing those policies. In 2013, General James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, reported in The New York Times, “We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”

In a 2010 interview in Rollingstone, General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, figured that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” By the general’s equation, the U.S. created a minimum of 130 new enemies for itself in the strikes ordered by President Biden on August 27 and 29 alone.

When the catastrophic consequences of a nation’s policies are so clearly predictable and evidently inevitable, they are intentional. What has happened to Afghanistan is not a series of mistakes or good intentions gone awry, they are crimes.

In his novel, 1984, George Orwell foresaw a dystopian future where wars would be fought perpetually, not intended to be won or resolved in any way and President Eisenhower’s parting words as he left office in 1961 were a warning of the “grave implications” of the “military-industrial complex.”

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange noted that these dire predictions had come to pass, speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the U.S. and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

No, the war is not over. From a nation that should be promising reparations and begging the forgiveness of the people of Afghanistan comes the infantile raging, “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay” and while pledging to perpetuate the conditions that provoke terrorism, the parting taunt “and to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet.”

That the U.S. is not done with Afghanistan is seen further in the scramble to recruit new intelligence assets such as Ahmad Massoud, 32, commander of the Tajik-dominated National Resistance Front (NRF), which continues to fight a low-level insurgency in the Panjshir Valley against the Pashtun-led Taliban, who are viewed as a proxy of the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Massoud is the son of the legendary anti-Soviet fighter, Ahmad Shah Massoud, whom the CIA financed and equipped in the late 1990s before acquiescing to his assassination two days before the 9/11 attacks because he was against a full-fledged U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan.

The CIA’s nefarious activities in Afghanistan and perpetuation of the drone war are little debated in the simplistic dualism of U.S. partisan politics where the issue seems to be only whether the current president should be blamed or should be given a pass and the blame put on his predecessor. This is a discussion that is not only irrelevant but a dangerous evasion of responsibility. Twenty years of war crimes makes many complicit.

In 1972, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

All of us in the U.S., the politicians, voters, tax payers, the investors and even those who protested and resisted it, are responsible for 20 years of war in Afghanistan. We are also all responsible for ending it–definitively.

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Brian Terrell is a peace activist. He can be reached at: [email protected].

---

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.

This is an all-male, overwhelmingly Pashtun (there’s one Uzbek and one Tajik) cabinet essentially rewarding the Taliban old guard. All 33 appointees are Taliban members.

Mohammad Hasan Akhund – the head of the Taliban Rehbari Shura, or leadership council, for 20 years – will be the Acting Prime Minister. For all practical purposes, Akhund is branded a terrorist by the UN and the EU, and under sanctions by the UN Security Council. It’s no secret Washington brands some Taliban factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and sanctions the whole of the Taliban as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization.

It’s crucial to stress Himatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, is Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). He can’t be a Prime Minister; his role is that of a supreme spiritual leader, setting the guidelines for the Islamic Emirate and mediating disputes – politics included.

Akhunzada has released a statement, noting that the new government “will work hard towards upholding Islamic rules and sharia law in the country” and will ensure “lasting peace, prosperity and development”. He added, “people should not try to leave the country”.

Spokesman Mujahid took pains to stress this new cabinet is just an “acting” government. This implies one of the next big steps will be to set up a new constitution. The Taliban will “try to take people from other parts of the country” – implying positions for women and Shi’ites may still be open, but not at top level.  

Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, who so far had been very busy diplomatically as the head of the political office in Doha, will be deputy Prime Minister. He was a Taliban co-founder in 1994 and close friend of Mullah Omar, who called him “Baradar” (“brother”) in the first place.

A predictable torrent of hysteria greeted the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as Acting Minister of Interior. After all the son of Haqqani founder Jalaluddin, one of three deputy emirs and the Taliban military commander, with a fierce reputation, has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head. His FBI “wanted” page is not exactly a prodigy of intel: they don’t know when he was born, and where, and that he speaks Pashto and Arabic.

This may be the new government’s top challenge: to prevent Sirajuddin and his wild boys from acting medieval in non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and most of all to make sure the Haqqanis cut off any connections with jihadi outfits. That’s a sine qua non condition established by the China-Russia strategic partnership for political, diplomatic and economic development support.

Foreign policy will be much more accommodating. Amir Khan Muttaqi, also a member of the political office in Doha, will be the Acting Foreign Minister, and his deputy will be Abas Stanikzai, who’s in favor of cordial relations with Washington and the rights of Afghan religious minorities.

Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of Mullah Omar, will be the Acting Defense Minister.

So far, the only non-Pashtuns are Abdul Salam Hanafi, an Uzbek, appointed as second deputy to the Prime Minister, and Qari Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik, the acting Minister of Economic Affairs, a very important post.

The Tao of staying patient  

The Taliban Revolution has already hit the Walls of Kabul – who are fast being painted white with Kufic letter inscriptions. One of these reads, “For an Islamic system and independence, you have to go through tests and stay patient.”

That’s quite a Taoist statement: striving for balance towards a real “Islamic system”. It offers a crucial glimpse of what the Taliban leadership may be after: as Islamic theory allows for evolution, the new Afghanistan system will be necessarily unique, quite different from Qatar’s or Iran’s, for instance.

In the Islamic legal tradition, followed directly or indirectly by rulers of Turko-Persian states for centuries, to rebel against a Muslim ruler is illegitimate because it creates fitna (sedition, conflict). That was already the rationale behind the crushing of the fake “resistance” in the Panjshir – led by former Vice-President and CIA asset Amrullah Saleh. The Taliban even tried serious negotiations, sending a delegation of 40 Islamic scholars to the Panjshir.

But then Taliban intel established that Ahmad Masoud – son of the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, assassinated two days before 9/11 – was operating under orders of French and Israeli intel. And that sealed his fate: not only he was creating fitna, he was a foreign agent. His partner Saleh, the “resistance” de facto leader, fled by helicopter to Tajikistan.

It’s fascinating to note a parallel between Islamic legal tradition and Hobbes’s Leviathan, which justifies absolute rulers. The Hobbesian Taliban: here’s a hefty research topic for US Think Tankland.

The Taliban also follow the rule that a war victory – and nothing more spectacular than defeating combined NATO power – allows for undisputed political power, although that does not discard strategic alliances. We’ve already seen it in terms of how the moderate, Doha-based political Taliban are accommodating the Haqqanis – an extremely sensitive business.

Abdul Haqqani will be the Acting Minister for Higher Education; Najibullah Haqqani will be Minister of Communications; and Khalil Haqqani, so far ultra-active as interim head of security in Kabul, will be Minister for Refugees.

The next step will be much harder: to convince the urban, educated populations in the big cities – Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif – not only of their legitimacy, acquired in the frontlines, but that they will crush the corrupt urban elite that plundered the nation for the past 20 years. All that while engaging in a credible, national interest process of improving the lives of average Afghans under a new Islamic system. It will be crucial to watch what kind of practical and financial help the emir of Qatar will offer.

The new cabinet has elements of a Pashtun jirga (tribal assembly). I’ve been to a few, and it’s fascinating to see how it works. Everyone sits on a circle to avoid a hierarchy – even if symbolic. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion. This leads to alliances necessarily being forged.

The negotiations to form a government were being conducted in Kabul by former President Hamid Karzai – crucially, a Pashtun from a minor Durrani clan, the Popalzai – and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, and former head of the Council for National Reconciliation. The Taliban did listen to them, but in the end they de facto chose what their own jirga had decided.

Pashtuns are extremely fierce when it comes to defending their Islamic credentials. They believe their legendary founding ancestor, Qais Abdul Rasheed, converted to Islam in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, and then Pashtuns became the strongest defender of the faith anywhere.

Yet that’s not exactly how it played out in history. From the 7^th century onwards, Islam was predominant only from Herat in the west to legendary Balkh in the north all the way to Central Asia, and south between Sistan and Kandahar. The mountains of the Hindu Kush and the corridor from Kabul to Peshawar resisted Islam for centuries. Kabul in fact was a Hindu kingdom as late as the 11^th century. It took  as many as five centuries for the core Pashtun lands to convert to Islam.

Islam with Afghan characteristics

To cut an immensely complex story short, the Taliban was born in 1994 across the – artificial – border of Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan as a movement by Pashtuns who studied in Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.

All the Afghan Taliban leaders had very close connections with Pakistani religious parties. During the 1980s anti-USSR jihad, many of these Taliban (“students”) in several madrassas worked side by side with the mujahideen to defend Islam in Afghanistan against the infidel. The whole process was channeled through the Peshawar political establishment: -overseen by the Pakistani ISI, with enormous CIA input, and a tsunami of cash and would-be jihadis flowing from Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.

When they finally seized power in 1994 in Kandahar and 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban emerged as a motley crew of minor clerics and refugees invested in a sort of wacky Afghan reformation – religious and cultural – as they set up what they saw as a pure Salafist Islamic Emirate.

I saw how it worked on the spot, and as demented as it was, it amounted to a new political force in Afghanistan. The Taliban were very popular in the south because they promised security after the bloody 1992-1995 civil war. The totally radical Islamist ideology came later – with disastrous results, especially in the big cities. But not in the subsistence agriculture countryside, because the Taliban social outlook merely reflected rural Afghan practice.

The Taliban installed a 7^th century-style Salafi Islam crisscrossed with the Pashtunwali code. A huge mistake was their aversion to Sufism and the veneration of shrines – something extremely popular in Islamic Afghanistan for centuries.

It’s too early to tell how Taliban 2.0 will play out in the dizzyingly complex, emerging Eurasian integration chessboard. But internally, a wiser, more traveled, social media-savvy Taliban seem aware they cannot allow themselves to repeat the dire 1996-2001 mistakes.

Deng Xiaoping set the framework for socialism with Chinese characteristics . One of the greatest geopolitical challenges ahead will be whether Taliban 2.0 are able to shape a sustainable development Islam with Afghan characteristics.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Latest news reports of a cluster of ivermectin overdoses in Oklahoma were debunked by the hospital. Not one such case. The doctor who fabricated the story hadn’t work there in two months.

On February 4, 2021, Merck, which is readying release of its new COVID-19 treatment drug, molnupiravir, issued a press release about that new drug’s competition, ivermectin.¹ Merck itself had developed ivermectin, now off-patent, for human use, securing FDA approval in 1987, and distributed most of its 3.7 billion doses safely used worldwide since.^2-4 It was thus curious that Merck’s press release about use of ivermectin for COVID expressed “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”_¹

Recently, many news reports^5-8 picked up on Merck’s theme, lambasting the use of a dangerous horse de- wormer by gullible consumers. The most recent were by the BBC,⁹ Rolling Stone,¹⁰ The Guardian,¹¹ MSN¹² and others, about Oklahoma hospital facilities being strained with ivermectin overdoses, delaying other emergency care. The hospital system in question debunked the story, noting that it had not one case of ivermectin overdosing and that the doctor who fabricated the story hadn’t worked there in two months.^13,14

These false alarms about ivermectin safety, echoing Merck’s, are scientific nonsense. Ivermectin is FDA approved for human use,⁴ its discovery honored with the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine, for “improving the health and wellbeing of millions,” with “limited side effects.”¹⁵ One of the safest modern drugs, it is well tolerated even at very high doses (details below). By a quirk of molecular biology, ivermectin binds to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and obstructs the morbidity of the virus.^16-18 It thereby also obstructs Merck’s anticipated billions in revenues from its new COVID entry. As to Merck’s past playbook for such obstacles, consider its $410 million disinformation campaign for its deadly drug Vioxx,¹⁹ withdrawn in 2004.

“Dodge Ball Vioxx.” In a scathing critique of Merck’s duplicitous promotion of Vioxx,²⁰ Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of Lancet, noted how Merck prepared a sales presentation, entitled “Dodge Ball Vioxx,”²¹ with instructions for dodging awkward inquiries from physicians. To the question, “I am concerned about the cardiovascular effects of Vioxx?” the answer that Merck instructed was: “DODGE!”

“Neutralize,” “discredit,” “destroy.” Merck knew early of Vioxx’s cardiovascular risks, which resulted in up to 139,000 heart attacks and strokes, 30-40% of them likely fatal.^22,23 Merck not only concealed some such deaths,^22,24but it systematically attacked those who warned of these fatal risks. It created a spreadsheet that named Vioxx critics and noted plans for each, including “neutralize,” “neutralized” or “discredit.”^25,26 Merck also listed its staff assigned to each critic—an entire “task force” to one. On October 15, 2001, one Merck executive emailed another: “We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.”^1,26

Regulatory Capture.²⁷ Horton, the Lancet editor, noted the role of the FDA in enabling Merck’s Vioxx scandal. The FDA saw “the pharmaceutical industry as its customer,” not the US public.²⁰ When an associate FDA director, David Graham, MD, blew the whistle on Vioxx’s deadly record, he was subjected to threats, abuse, and lies orchestrated by his FDA superiors.²⁸ The FDA Commissioner who approved Vioxx resigned and then went on to become senior counsel for Merck’s PR firm.²⁸ Horton summarized, “with Vioxx, Merck and the FDA acted out of ruthless, short-sighted, and irresponsible self-interest.”²⁰

Good journalists get extremely angry when they’ve been had. The major media do not generally spew scientific nonsense. It would appear to take a budget on the order of the $410 million for Merck’s prior Vioxx promotion¹⁹ to get incisive, respected journalists such as Paul Waldman of the Washington Post²⁹ and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC³⁰ to be duped into echoing Merck’s February PR claim that ivermectin is unsafe. Yet good journalists get extremely angry when they’ve been had. Any newsroom can fact check that ivermectin is FDA approved for human use, Nobel prize-honored, developed by Merck, now molnupiravir’s competitor, and extremely safe. Such brazen overreach can easily backfire into focus on Merck’s prior drug misinformation campaign. It takes rare PR brilliance for Merck, with its new drug release pending, to prompt a searing revisit of its past tactics in promoting its deadly drug, Vioxx.

On the science behind ivermectin and COVID-19, including clinical, animal, and molecular studies, see this recently published review.¹⁸ Its lead author is a prominent clinical researcher at Yale. Two coauthors are in the line of the only two Nobel prize-honored treatment breakthroughs for infectious diseases since the one for streptomycin in 1952. Notably, coauthor Thomas Borody in 1990 published the first clinical trial for the cure for H. pylori (peptic ulcers).³¹ That cure consisted of three repurposed inexpensive drugs: two antibiotics and bismuth.¹⁸ It was adopted immediately in Australia, in 1990, saving an estimated 18,000 lives.³² A decade later, after the patents for the billion dollar palliative drugs, Tagamet and Zantac, expired, that cure became the standard of care for peptic ulcers in the rest of the world.¹⁸

Ivermectin safety. Ivermectin is well tolerated even at ten times the standard dose of 200 μg/kg,^33,34 and at high doses, in particular, for COVID-19 treatment.^35,36 Cancer patients who took ivermectin at five times that standard dose daily for up to 180 consecutive days had no serious adverse effects from it, in experimental protocols with harsh additional drugs.³⁷ Of 19 patients who took extreme overdoses up to 1,000-fold that standard dose of either ivermectin or the closely related abamectin, all using veterinary forms, only one 72-year-old male who took 440 times the standard dose died.³⁸

As noted, ivermectin is FDA approved for human use,⁴ and as is the case with all but one of current COVID- 19 treatment drugs, is used off-label for COVID treatment. More generally, 21% of all drug prescriptions in the US are off-label.^39,40Since many news reports have hopelessly confounded the human and veterinary forms of ivermectin, this clarification is useful. Only human drug forms of ivermectin can be recommended for human use. Products for external animal use generally contain ingredients unfit for human consumption. The injectable liquids typically contain glycerol formal, which tastes nasty but is not toxic; these can be overdosed if not dispensed carefully. Most COVID-19 patients facing life-and-death decisions without access to the human drug have used the 1.87% horse paste in a squeeze tube for oral animal ingestion.

Do no harm. It should be noted that in the US, the standard treatment recommendation for the early stage of COVID is palliative, to take Tylenol.⁴¹ (Note, incidentally, that in the US, acetaminophen (Tylenol) overdoses account for more than 100,000 calls to poison control centers, 56,000 emergency room visits and an estimated 458 deaths from acute liver failure each year.⁴²) Therefore, per the Hippocratic oath of do no harm, given the safety of ivermectin and solid indications of clinical efficacy against COVID-19,¹⁸ it is unconscionable to place obstacles to such clinical use. It is clear that the quest for profits has at times subverted public health, for example, with Merck’s Vioxx, and with the ten-year delay in the deployment of the cure for peptic ulcers until the patents for two billion-dollar drugs expired. It behooves all parties to study the science and refrain from and rectify misleading, negative reports about ivermectin.

*

Below are links to key documents, including internal files from Merck and publications from major scientific journals as relate to the above.

1. Merck press release of April 28, 2000: University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, qqqw0217. “In response to speculative news reports. Merck & Co., Inc. today confirmed the favorable cardiovascular safety profile of Vioxx.”¹
2. Seife, Oct 1, 2016. Scientific American. How the FDA Manipulates the Media. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals.”⁴³
3. Moynihan 2009. Court hears how drug giant Merck tried to “neutralize” and “discredit” doctors critical of Vioxx.²⁶

4. Horton 2004, Lancet. Vioxx, the implosion of Merck, and aftershocks at the FDA.²⁰
5. Merck’s sales presentation, “Dodge Ball Vioxx.”²¹ University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, nghw0217, 2007.
6. Testimony of David J. Graham, MD, Associate Director for Science and Medicine, FDA, Office of Drug Safety.²²
7. Curfman et al., 2000. Expression of concern: Bombardier et al., “Comparison of upper gastrointestinal toxicity of rofecoxib and naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.²⁴
8. Gotzsche, 2017, with forewords by Richard Smith, past editor-in-chief, The British Medical Journal, and Drummond Rennie, deputy editor, JAMA. Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.²⁸ Excerpts from Chapter 19.
9. List of doctors, Neutralize/discredit. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, pmhw0217, 2007.²⁵
10. Email from Douglas Alan Greene to Barry J. Gertz, October 14, 2001. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, khpd0217.⁴⁴
11. Topol, 2004, New England Journal of Medicine. Failing the Public Health — Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA.⁴⁵
12. Eric Topol loses provost/chief academic officer titles at Cleveland Clinic and Lerner College, Medscape, December 11, 2005.⁴⁶ “Dr Eric Topol may no longer be the provost of the medical college he helped establish and has lost his title as chief academic officer at the Cleveland Clinic, a result of institutional ‘reorganization,’ the renowned cardiologist was told one week ago today. Topol was informed that the change was ‘effective immediately,’ despite the fact that the board of trustees will only today be voting on the restructuring plan. Conspicuously, Topol’s ostensible loss of authority . . . came days after a federal jury heard Topol’s videotaped deposition in the latest Vioxx lawsuit. In it, Topol accused Merck of ‘scientific misconduct’ and testified that Merck’s former chair, Raymond Gilmartin, had in the past called fellow Harvard MBA alumnus Malachi Mixon, the chair of the clinic’s board of trustees, to complain about Topol’s vocal anti-Vioxx stance.”
13. 2001 Profit Plan for Vioxx. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, mxpd0217, September 1, 2000.¹⁹
14. Grant, The Scientist, April 29, 2009. Merck published fake medical journal.⁴⁷ It had the appearance of a peer reviewed journal, but was instead a marketing tool.
15. Letter from James Fries, MD, to Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of Merck, January 9, 2001, University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, ltgw0217.⁴⁸ As described in a letter from a Stanford University professor, James Fries, MD, to the CEO of Merck, Merck “employees have systematically attacked those investigators or speakers who expressed what Merck staff felt were critical opinions.” Fries noted individual cases of eight scientists with academic appointments jeopardized, speaking engagements canceled.
16. NPR, November 10, 2007. Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Vioxx.⁴⁹

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David E. Scheim, PhD, US Public Health Service, Commissioned Corps, Inactive Reserve Blacksburg, VA, [email protected]

Notes

1. Merck Statement on Ivermectin use During the COVID-19 Pandemic. February 4, 2021: https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/.
2. Yagisawa M, Foster PJ, Hanaki H, et al. Global Trends in Clinical Studies of Ivermectin in COVID-19. The Japanese Journal of Antibiotics. 2021;74(1).
3. Crump A, Ōmura S. Ivermectin, ‘wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective. Proc Jpn Acad Ser B Phys Biol Sci. 2011;87(2):13-28.
4. Juarez M, Schcolnik-Cabrera A, Dueñas-Gonzalez A. The multitargeted drug ivermectin: from an antiparasitic agent to a repositioned cancer drug. Am J Cancer Res. 2018;8(2):317-331.
5. Lavender P. FDA Warns Against Using Livestock Drug To Treat COVID-19. Huffington Post. August 21, 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fda-covid-ivermectin_n_61214f75e4b0caf7ce312ec1.
6. Wade P. The FDA Is Begging You Not to Take Horse Dewormer for Covid-19. Rolling Stone. August 21, 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fda-horse-dewormer-covid-fox-news-1215168/.
7. Medina E. Health officials warn people not to treat Covid with a drug meant for livestock. New York Times. August 21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/world/ivermectin-fda-covid-19-treatment.html.
8. Politi D. Health Officials Warn Against Using Ivermectin forCOVID-19 Amid Rise in Poisonings. Slate. August 21, 2021. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/fda-warn-ivermectin-covid-poisonings- mississippi.html.
9. Ivermectin: Oklahoma doctor warns against using drug for Covid treatment. BBC. September 4, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58449876.
10. Wade P. Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says. Rolling Stone. September 3, 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics- news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/.
11. Pengelly M. Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says. The Guardian. September 4, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/oklahoma-doctor-ivermectin-covid-coronavirus.
12. Teh C. Oklahoma’s ERs are so backed up with people overdosing on ivermectin that gunshot victims are having to wait to be treated, a doctor says. MSN. September 5, 2021. https://www.msn.com/en- us/health/medical/oklahomas-ers-are-so-backed-up-with-people-overdosing-on-ivermectin-that-gunshot- victims-are-having-to-wait-to-be-treated-a-doctor-says/ar-AAO38Tm?li=BBnb7Kz.
13. Lie But Fake News Ran with It Anyway. MSNBC-TV. September 5, 2021. https://msnbctv.news/2021/09/05/oklahoma-dr-jason-mcelyea-spreads-fear-porn-that-people-taking- ivermectin-are-flooding-local-hospitals-turns-out-to-be-complete-lie-but-fake-news-ran-with-it-anyway/.
14. Carroll C. Rolling Stone‘s ivermectin fiction shows why Republicans don’t trust media. Washington Examiner. September 5, 2021. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/rolling-stones-ivermectin- fiction-shows-why-republicans-dont-trust-media.
15. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – Press release. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet; October 5, 2015: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/press-release/.
16. Lehrer S, Rheinstein PH. Ivermectin Docks to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Receptor-binding Domain Attached to ACE2. In Vivo. 2020;34(5):3023-3026.
17. Zaidi AK, Dehgani-Mobaraki P. The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2: An evidence-based clinical review article. The Journal of Antibiotics. 2021;10.1038/s41429-021-00430-5.
18. Santin AD, Scheim DE, McCullough PA, et al. Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19. New Microbes and New Infections. 2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2021.100924:100924.
19. 2001 Profit Plan for Vioxx, September 1, 2000. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=mxpd0217. Accessed September 6, 2021.
20. Horton R. Vioxx, the implosion of Merck, and aftershocks at the FDA. Lancet. 2004;364(9450):1995-1996.
21. Merck Presentation re: dodge ball. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=nghw0217. Published 2007. Accessed September 6, 2021.
22. Testimony of David J. Graham, MD, Associate Director for Science and Medicine, FDA, Office of Drug Safety. US Senate Finance Committee; November 18, 2004: https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/111804dgtest.pdf.
23. Bhattacharya S. Up to 140,000 heart attacks linked to Vioxx. New Scientist. January 25, 2005. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6918-up-to-140000-heart-attacks-linked-to- vioxx/#ixzz75GQgdWKg.
24. Curfman GD, Morrissey S, Drazen JM. Expression of concern: Bombardier et al., “Comparison of upper gastrointestinal toxicity of rofecoxib and naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis,” N Engl J Med 2000;343:1520-8. N Engl J Med. 2005;353(26):2813-2814.
25. List of doctors — Neutralize/discredit. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/drug/docs/#id=pmhw0217. Published 2007. Accessed September 6, 2021.
26. Moynihan R. Court hears how drug giant Merck tried to “neutralise” and “discredit” doctors critical of Vioxx. British Medical Journal. 2009;338:b1432.
27. Baxter LG. Chaper 2: Understanding Regulatory Capture: An Academic Perspective from the United States. In: Pagliari S, ed. The Making of Good Financial Regulation: Towards a Policy Response to Regulatory Capture. Guildford, Surrey, UK: Grovesnor House Publishing Ltd; 2012.
28. Gotzsche P. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. 1st edition ed: CRC Press; 2017:238-240,247.
29. Waldman P. Opinion: How right-wing media and social isolation lead people to eat horse paste. Washington Post. August 31, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/how-right-wing-media- social-isolation-lead-people-eat-horse-paste/.
30. Maddow R. New facet of Covid crisis: Misguided people taking ivermectin anti-parasite animal drug. MSNBC. August 28. 2021. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-facet-of-covid-crisis- misguided-people-taking-ivermectin-anti-parasite-animal-drug-119660101526.
31. George LL, Borody TJ, Andrews P, et al. Cure of duodenal ulcer after eradication of Helicobacter pylori. Med J Aust. 1990;153(3):145-149.
32. Eslick GD, Tilden D, Arora N, et al. Clinical and economic impact of “triple therapy” for Helicobacter pylori eradication on peptic ulcer disease in Australia. Helicobacter. 2020;25(6):e12751.
33. Guzzo CA, Furtek CI, Porras AG, et al. Safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of escalating high doses of ivermectin in healthy adult subjects. J Clin Pharmacol. 2002;42(10):1122-1133.
34. Navarro M, Camprubí D, Requena-Méndez A, et al. Safety of high-dose ivermectin: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. 2020;75(4):827-834.
35. López-Medina E, López P, Hurtado IC, et al. Effect of Ivermectin on Time to Resolution of Symptoms Among Adults With Mild COVID-19: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2021;10.1001/jama.2021.3071.
36. Krolewiecki A, Lifschitz A, Moragas M, et al. Antiviral effect of high-dose ivermectin in adults with COVID- 19: A proof-of-concept randomized trial. EClinicalMedicine. 2021;37.
37. de Castro CG, Jr., Gregianin LJ, Burger JA. Continuous high-dose ivermectin appears to be safe in patients with acute myelogenous leukemia and could inform clinical repurposing for COVID-19 infection. Leuk Lymphoma. 2020;61(10):2536-2537.
38. Chung K, Yang CC, Wu ML, et al. Agricultural avermectins: an uncommon but potentially fatal cause of pesticide poisoning. Ann Emerg Med. 1999;34(1):51-57.
39. Radley DC, Finkelstein SN, Stafford RS. Off-label prescribing among office-based physicians. Arch Intern Med. 2006;166(9):1021-1026.
40. Stafford RS. Regulating Off-Label Drug Use — Rethinking the Role of the FDA. N Engl J Med. 2008;358(14):1427-1429.
41. Managing COVID-19 at Home. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; August 17, 2021: https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/patient-education/managing-covid-19-home.
42. Lee WM. Acetaminophen and the U.S. Acute Liver Failure Study Group: lowering the risks of hepatic failure. Hepatology. 2004;40(1):6-9.
43. Seife C. How the FDA Manipulates the Media. Scientific American. October 1, 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-fda-manipulates-the-media/.
44. Email from Douglas Alan Greene to Barry J. Gertz, October 14, 2001. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/drug/docs/#id=khpd0217. Accessed September 6, 2021.
45. Topol EJ. Failing the Public Health — Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA. New England Journal of Medicine. 2004;351(17):1707-1709.
46. Wood S. Eric Topol loses provost/chief academic officer titles at Cleveland Clinic and Lerner College. Medscape. December 11, 2005. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/788062.
47. Grant B. Merck published fake journal. The Scientist Magazine. April 29, 2009. https://www.the- scientist.com/the-nutshell/merck-published-fake-journal-44190.
48. Letter from James Fries, MD, to Raymond Gilartin, CEO of Merck, January 9. 2001. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/drug/docs/#id=ltgw0217. Accessed September 6, 2021.
49. Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Vioxx. NPR. November 10, 2007. https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-vioxx.

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On September 5, the government of the United Kingdom confirmed that Brits will soon need to show proof of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” in order to enter nightclubs and large venues.

U.K. vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi had earlier stated that a “vaccine passport” scheme like this would never be implemented, calling the idea of it a “conspiracy theory.” That has since changed, apparently, as Zahawi is now planning to force the jabs upon people who wish to do fun things.

Businesses that refuse to obey Zahawi’s orders face being shut down for non-compliance. Zahawi plans to aggressively police them all to ensure that every venue is checking vaccine passports at the door before allowing people to enter.

“When the evidence that you are presented is so clear cut and that we want to make sure the industry doesn’t have to go through [an]open-shut, open-shut sort of strategy, then the right thing to do is to introduce that by the end of September, when all over-18-year-olds have had their two jabs,” Zahawi is quoted as saying, pretending to be a scientist.

“One thing that we have learned is that in large gatherings of people, especially indoors, the virus tends to spike and spread.”

Zahawi is a liar who pretended to oppose vaccine passports

Back in January, Zahawi emphatically wrote on Twitter that the British government has “no plans to introduce vaccine passports,” later calling them “discriminatory.” When asked if he could be held to this promise, Zahawi responded with, “Yes you can.”

Zahawi reiterated at the time that forcing people to get injected in order to live their lives represents discrimination and would thus never be tolerated. That was a bald-faced lie, we now know.

The U.K. is moving in the same direction as France, which recently imposed a much stricter vaccine passport scheme that requires proof of vaccination to even just shop at the grocery store.

Protesters have taken to the streets in Paris and elsewhere in defiance of the order, which was issued by Emmanuel Macron as a way of “flattening the curve” of the so-called “delta variant.”

In the United States, a handful of cities, including New York and New Orleans, are similarly requiring proof of injection in order to enter certain businesses. This is creating a two-tiered society of apartheid between the “fully vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated,” which are now afforded different rights.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) published a lengthy article describing how this series of “missteps” by the government is “the wrong path.” And it “could get worse” if people let it, the EFF warns.

“… imposing such systems on the world will lock out hundreds of millions of people from being able to obtain visas or even travel,” the group says.

“These new trust-based systems, if implemented in a way that automatically disqualifies people who received genuine vaccinations, will cause dire effects for years to come. It sets up a world where certain people can move about easily, and those who have already had a hard time with visas will experience another wall to climb.”

The only real solution is for citizens of the world to resist this type of tyranny with full force. The medical fascists will never get away with their little vaccine passport schemes if We the People just say no to it, no matter the cost.

“Resistance is necessary!” wrote one commenter at The Epoch Times. “Stand against tyranny.”

Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccine” tyranny is shredding the social fabric of countries all around the world. The latest news about this can be found at Fascism.news.

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“The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.

They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.

They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. “

North Atlantic Treaty April 4, 1949, preamble [1]

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Originally composed of twelve nations on the date of its signing in April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) now encompasses thirty members. [2]

NATO’s purpose as an institution was to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means. The organization’s literature claims that while it seeks peaceful resolutions in troubled regions or countries, it boasts a military power apparatus capable of executing “crisis-management” operations made possible either by a United Nations mandate, or by the famous Article 5 of the Washington treaty essentially saying an attack against one nation is attack against all of them.[3][4]

Today, NATO operates an a budget of €258.9 million for civil purposes and €1.61 billion for military purposes. It’s military spending equals 57% of the global Normal total and defence spending of the constituent nation states are aiming for a target of 2% of their GDP by 2024.[5][6][7]

The organization was largely conceived principally as a bulwark against the formidable Soviet Union. Yet now more than 30 years since the Soviets collapsed, NATO is still active and expanding!

NATO has a history of waging warfare since the fall of the Berlin Wall and principally to further the interests of the Anglo-American head-honchos. In 1999 the war on Yugoslavia was waged illegally without a mandate from the United Nations, or a credible threat to any other country. In 2001, the war on Afghanistan was waged on the premise that the country via the terrorists on its soil attacked America – a charge that was never proved.

In 2011, NATO took charge of the no-fly zone over Libya which led to the destruction of that country. Today, it continues to perform war-game exercises ever closer to Russia’s frontiers dragging the world to the brink of confrontation.

Canadians have a positive opinion of their nation’s foreign policy. The nation’s apparent reluctance in joining the coalition to join the 2003 Iraq War, for example, is a sign that Canadians are not gung-ho about joining every US military adventure and only do so when the threats to democracy and human rights are high enough. But as NATO continues to demand more and more expenses at the cost of properly addressing social and environmental hazards, with the increasing use of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions, and with the spectre of nuclear weapons being used in a future military confrontation, it is time Canada really asked itself if it was time to bolt this gang of New World Order warlords.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we present another panel discussion courtesy of The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute entitled Why Canada Should Leave NATO.

The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is a non-partisan organization which seeks to inform people living in Canada about the country’s diplomatic, aid, intelligence, trade and military policies abroad which are at odds with their self-portrait as a benevolent force around the world. Its director is Bianca Mugyenyi who will function as the moderator for the discussion.

s

  s

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

 Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of numerous works of Russian and Soviet history, international security, military history, and military ethics.

Ludo De Brabander is a Belgian writer and spokesman for the Belgian peace organisation Vrede vzw. He writes opinion pieces for Vrede, Uitpers, Knack.be, De Wereldmorgen and Mo.

Tamara Lorincz is a PhD student in Global Governance at the Balsillie School for International Affairs (Wilfrid Laurier University). Tamara graduated with an MA in International Politics & Security Studies from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom in 2015. Tamara is currently on the board of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the international advisory committee of Global Network Against Nuclear Power and Weapons in Space.

Bianca Mugyenyi is an activist, a journalist and the director of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. 

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Notes:

1. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm
2. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm
3. https://www.nato.int/nato-welcome/index.html
4. ibid
5. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_180185.htm#:~:text=NATO%20Allies%20have%20agreed%20the%20civil%20and%20military,a%20military%20budget%20of%20%E2%82%AC1.61%20billion%20for%202021.
6. “The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database” ; Milexdata.sipri.org. 2021.
7. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112985.htm

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***

 

CADTM: In late August 2021 the IMF announced that it would supply the global economy with US$650 billion to meet urgent needs. This would be achieved through an increase in Special Drawing Rights. What exactly does that mean?

Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help. Loans must be repaid with interest and are tied to conditions that reinforce neoliberal policies.

On 23 August 2021, Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director, stated: “The largest allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in history—about US$650 billion—comes into effect today. The allocation is a significant shot in the arm for the world and, if used wisely, a unique opportunity to combat this unprecedented crisis.” She added that the allocation of SDRs “will provide additional liquidity to the global economic system – supplementing countries’ foreign exchange reserves and reducing their reliance on more expensive domestic or external debt. Countries can use the space provided by the SDR allocation to support their economies and step up their fight against the crisis.” [1]

When it announced an additional $650 bn in SDRs, the IMF made it known that member countries could draw on this amount but have to be aware that they cannot claim more than what is allowed by their economic and political weight represented by their quota-shares in the IMF. For instance: the USA have quota-shares of 17.43 while the Democratic Republic of the Congo has only 0.22 quota-shares, i.e. 80 times less. However, the DRC has some 100 million inhabitants and the USA only around 330 million.

CADTM: Are the SDRs a debt towards the IMF?

Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: The SDRs are an international reserve asset designed to supplement the official reserves of the 190 IMF member countries and provide liquidity in the event of a balance of payments crisis, i.e. when a government no longer has sufficient financial resources available in foreign currency to meet its financial commitments outside its borders, including debt service.

As such they are not a debt towards the IMF either. SDRs are not a currency: you cannot carry out any transaction with them. Their value is determined by a basket of currencies consisting of the US Dollar, the Euro, the Chinese Yuan, the Japanese Yen and the British Pound. SDRs, on the other hand, can be traded against one or more foreign currencies through central banks. In this instance SDRs become a debt, not towards the IMF, but towards the institution with which they were traded. SDRs are not a gift.

To put it in other words, a country that does not have sufficient reserves in one or more foreign currencies to repay its external public debt to one or more of its creditors will be able to use all or part of the SDRs allocated to it to make debt service payments.

CADTM: For the IMF, this increase is of course a “landmark”. While the SDR allocation is not new, its amount is unprecedented. In what way can this allocation benefit the concerned countries?

Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: To go along with the IMF, we could say that this SDR allocation is free of policy conditionalities and is not directly counted by the IMF as a debt. But while this allocation may at first sight represent a breath of fresh air for the countries of the South, the reality is quite different.

CADTM: What do you mean? Is this a deceptive kind of help?

Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: Absolutely! We can point to at least four limitations to this allocation.

We can start with the distribution of those $650 bn. As mentioned above, SDRs “are being distributed to countries in proportion to their quota shares in the IMF.” Consequently, among the 190 member countries, the 135 developing countries share $275 bn, i.e. hardly 40% of the allocation, while the 55 rich countries will receive some $375 bn. Moreover, there are strong income inequalities among developing countries, which reinforce inequalities in the distribution of the allocation.

The 29 low-income or poor countries, with 700 million inhabitants, receive less than $21 bn. This is a paltry amount compared with the $450 bn they need to help their economies over the next five years, according to the IMF.

So the allocated amount is questionable. Those $275 bn represent less than 8% of the external public debt and 25% of developing countries’ external public debt servicing from 2020 to 2022. Compared with the thousands of billions of euros and US dollars, respectively, released since the beginning of the pandemic by the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve, and with the actual needs of the countries of the South, the allocation of 275 billion dollars is derisory.

Another element that must not be forgotten is the political consequences of this allocation. Since the global crisis of 2007–2008, the IMF has once again become inescapable and is present in a majority of countries in the South. To use this allocation is to reinforce the central position of an institution that has constantly failed since its creation, both because of its anti-democratic functioning and its deadly neoliberal ideology. The situation is similar for the 55 richest countries. Negotiations are already underway to redistribute part of the 375 bn they have received to the countries of the South. But note that the proposal that is currently dominating the debate is a fool’s game. The rich countries would demand interest on a share of the SDRs that were allocated to them for free. Not to mention the very likely strategic and trade agreements signed under the table with the governments of the South, who have their hands tied given their critical situation.

Last but not least, we must be aware of what the allocation will be used for. Currently over 25% of countries of the South dedicate more resources to debt servicing than to health care expenditure. And at the same time, neither the initiative to suspend debt servicing, nor the Common Debt Framework or the Disaster Response and Assistance Trust Fund established in 2020 can meet the demand. Moreover, private creditors, who are a large majority, have not yet granted any relief or cancellation of their debts. In such circumstances, the allocation is likely to be used first to directly or indirectly repay private creditors. The current dominating logic for countries of the South is to preserve their trustworthiness on financial markets and with investors. As they give in to the blackmail of creditors and rating agencies, States are clearly undermining international law, human rights and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

For instance, the president of Mexico has already announced that he would use SDRs to repay the country’s external debt instead of using them to fight the impact of the pandemic. Yet there have been more than 260,000 deaths in Mexico due to the coronavirus.

CADTM: Your observation seems implacable. But what other solutions do countries of the South have?

Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: What is obvious is that in spite of the unprecedented nature of the crisis and of successive alarming statements, no current international institution has been able to implement unconditional debt cancellation.

Nothing has changed over the years for countries of the South and their populations. They have nothing to expect from international financial institutions like IMF and WB. They have to take sovereign measures, which is perfectly possible. Under international law, there are strong legal arguments that can support a unilateral decision to suspend payment, including state of necessity and fundamental change of circumstances. When a state invokes these arguments, it does not matter whether the debt is legitimate or not. Even if the debt claimed is legitimate, this does not prevent the country from suspending payment. With the help of the people and international solidarity, this is the only way to end the crisis.

*

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Translated by Christine Pagnoulle and Snake Arbusto

This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.

Milan Rivié of CADTM Belgium, [email protected], Twitter: @RivieMilan

Notes

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2021/08/23/pr21248-imf-managing-director-announces-the-us-650-billion-sdr-allocation-comes-into-effect

Featured image: MD Kristalina Georgieva conversation with World Bank’s David Malpass” by International Monetary Fund is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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***

 

Doctors at Houston Methodist Hospital have discovered cases of a new variant of COVID-19 among patients being treated for the virus, the hospital confirmed Monday to KPRC 2. This new variant is the “Mu” variant.  But that’s not the only interesting thing about this story, which is likely a psychological operation.

Does anyone remember this?

Houston Faces Massive Nurse Shortage After 150 Nurses, Hospital Workers Fired for Vaccine Refusal

Since the World Health Organization has designated “Mu” as a variant of interest to push the fear-mongering and keep the scamdemic narrative alive, doctors at Houston Methodist confirmed cases of the Mu variant in roughly 50 patients. How did they confirm those cases of Mu? According to the Tennessean, you can’t.  Tests are not designed to tell you which variant of the coronavirus you have. They can indicate whether you have been infected with the virus. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests are detecting all viruses, meaning the common cold and flu, which is how they were able to rename both of those to COVID and eradicate the flu.

“We had our first case of Mu back in May,” said Dr. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist and a clinical pathologist.

Long said doctors didn’t refer to those cases as the so-called “Mu” variant until the World Health Organization designated the variant as such last week.

“Once the WHO declared that this would be the Mu variant, we went and looked and saw that we had had a few cases here and there dating back all the way till May,” Dr. Long said. –Click2Houston

The most important thing they need you to know about “Mu” is that it can escape vaccine-induced immunity. Considering the shots everyone has taken aren’t vaccines, that means everyone can get it.

WHO Says “Mu” Variant Is Probably “Vaccine-Resistant”

Keep an eye on this new scariant. Once the “vaccinated” start really getting sick, whether it’s from the “vaccine” or not won’t make a difference. It’ll be labeled a COVID-19 death and they may blame it on the Mu variant.  Delta is still circulating the news too, but they need to keep that fake strain relevant to convince people to take the shots since they have already told them the “vaccines” offer protection from Delta.

Stay alert and aware. Continue to hone your critical thinking skills.  The lies will never end.

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Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

 

The regional states will be shell-shocked by the brazen way Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), coerced the Taliban to announce an interim government that is guaranteed to preserve Rawalpindi’s control over the levers of power in Kabul.

There are several things to be noted about the so-called interim government announced by the Taliban on September 7. The “moderate” Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, supposedly number 2 in the Taliban hierarchy, has been designated to serve as First Deputy to Mullah Hasan Akhund who will be the acting prime minister.

Baradar who led the Taliban delegation at the Doha talks and was earlier mentioned widely as the likely head of the new Taliban government, has been pigeonholed — assigned to a titular post which will be, typically, an overly restrictive one.

Mullah Akhund will wield the baton. Now, he is one of the most enigmatic figures in the Taliban movement, rarest of rare exceptions of a shadowy figure who did not participate in the “jihad” against the Soviets in the 1980s but only to emerge as the powerful “ideologue” of the movement to serve on the shura councils.

He is singularly credited with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 and had a pivotal role in the development of the Taliban’s religious identity rooted in the brand of strict Islamist ideology, known as Deobandism.

Akhund dictated the ideological justification for the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan governments. Significantly, he operated almost entirely in exile from Pakistan through the past 20-year period.

Akhund’s impeccable Pashtun lineage is drawn from the powerful Durrani tribe from Kandahar, which, historically, anointed the Afghan rulers. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime (where he had served as foreign minister), Akhund landed with the powerful position as the head of the Rahbari Shura council of leaders, often called the “Quetta Shura”, which the ISI put together to plot the Taliban’s second coming to power.

The sidelining of Baradar is to be attributed to the political tension between him and the Haqqani Network. The ISI has had the final say in the matter. Baradar’s conciliatory politics with Karzai had earlier cost him 8 years’ incarceration in an ISI jail — until President Trump wanted him in Doha. The ISI never trusted him.

The most startling thing about Akhund is that his entrenched beliefs include treating women as mere chattels of men to bear children and treating ethnic and religious minorities as a lower form of life.  He has been hard as rock on issues of civil rights. His edicts in the 1990s, adopted by the Taliban, included the banning of women’s education, enforcing gender segregation and the adoption of strict religious garb.

In retrospect, Baradar served merely as the facade of reason before the international community in Doha. With Akhund on one side and Sirajuddin Haqqani, Interior Minister-designate on the other side, he finds himself between the rock and a hard place.

Sirajuddin is unquestionably the blue-eyed boy of the ISI. His appointment is horrible news for New Delhi. But the big question for the future is about the US’ equation with the Haqqani Network. The mythology harps on the FBI notification of a “reward of up to $10 million for information leading directly to the arrest of Sirajuddin Haqqani” and its clarion call, “If you have any information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.”

The FBI calls Sirajuddin “a specially designated global terrorist” with close ties to the al-Qaeda but the charges against him are unsubstantiated and remain vaguely worded. Thus, Sirajuddin is “wanted for questioning in connection with the January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed six people, including an American citizen. He is believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Haqqani also allegedly was involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2008.”

At the same time, the farcical FBI notice also says, “Haqqani is thought to stay in Pakistan, specifically the Miram Shah, North Waziristan, Pakistan, area.” read more

If the US could nab Osama bin Laden from a Pakistani cantonment town, why should it have  outsourced the task as in the Wild West — posting a notice in every bar and brothel?

The point is, State Department’s archival materials also show that the US and the Haqqanis go back a long way. The Mujahideen group of Jalaluddin Haqqani was actually the only group in the 1980s jihad, which was trusted by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to be allowed to have direct dealings with the CIA. The CIA of course described him as a “unilateral” asset who in turn received tens of millions of dollars in cash directly.

Indeed, when the time came for the CIA to transfer Osama bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan, it was to the safe custody of none other than Jalaluddin that the fugitive was left. Such was the bonding!

True, Jalaluddin subsequently refused to betray bin Laden and, possibly, helped him to evade the American net in the fastness of the Tora Bora mountain caves in December 2001. But, apparently, the two sides since moved on.

In fact, Lieutenant General John Nicholson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during hearings when he was picked to lead the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan in January 2016 that the US counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan were not targeting the Haqqani network of militants. To quote the general, “They are not part of that designation right now…The Haqqanis are principally a focus of the Afghan security forces.”

Nicholson gave a laboured explanation that the US counterterrorism actions focused on al-Qaida and Islamic State. The US expected Pakistan to put enough pressure on the Haqqanis to prevent cross-border attacks! read more

The four star general indulged in this sophistry full 8 years after the Haqqani Network’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is a matter of shame and disgust, nothing less, that India’s Afghan policies all along toed the US strategies in Afghanistan — right up to this day so much so that Prime Minister Modi is reportedly looking forward to discussing with President Biden on the sidelines of the Quad summit in DC how the coordination can be strengthened in the current circumstances.

By the way, who is Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister-designate in the interim government?

Ambassador Peter Tomsen, US Special Envoy on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, has written in his classic work The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powersthat then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf personally called US President George W Bush on or about November 2001 for a VIP airlift out of Kunduz which was besieged by the Northern Alliance militia under Rashid Dostum (with support of US Special Forces) in the downstream of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney expressly approved Musharraf’s personal request. The well-known investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later wrote based on briefing from ex-CIA sources that US Central Command set up a special air corridor out of Kunduz to ensure the safety of the Pakistani military flights.

Close to a thousand people were evacuated, including al-Qaeda members, in the Kunduz airlift (known famously as the “Airlift of Evil”) to remote bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. And the grapevine is that one of the VIPs so evacuated was Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, apart from senior Pakistani military officials. The ISI saw greater destiny for Muttaqi!

Can Pakistan get away with all this? This interim government won’t fly easily, but it won’t wither away either, although it can be recast. The regional capitals will react — Tehran and Moscow (and possibly even Beijing.) They have been taken for a ride by the Pakistani narrative of “inclusive government”.

Pakistan dared to push the envelope with the cool assessment that the US and its Western allies will engage with the Taliban once the dust settled down. The visit by the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb on 3rd September to Islamabad was the clincher. read more

On September 5, Gen. Hameed took off for Kabul. By September 7, we already saw the Taliban’s response to his dog whistle.

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Featured image is a screenshot from a South Front video

Agenda ID2020 of the “One World Order”: The 101 to Understanding Its Implications

By Peter Koenig and Dr. Vernon Coleman, September 08, 2021

Agenda ID2020 – is hardly mentioned by any media, let alone the mainstream. Agenda ID2020, if carried out, is the ultimate control by a small elite – of the One World Order (OWO), also called the New World Order (NWO) – over the world population.

Video: Dr. David Martin on Canada’s Role in Producing the Weaponized “COVID” Injections Which Have Seriously Harmed and Killed Many

By Dr. David Martin and Vaccine Choice Canada, September 08, 2021

Ted Kuntz of Vaccine Choice Canada talks with Dr. David Martin, an articulate man whose testimony about the pandemic has shocked the world. David revealed with undeniable evidence that the COVID pandemic has been planned for decades.

100+ Ontario Youth Sent to Hospital for Vaccine-Related Heart Problems, Report Shows

By Megan Redshaw, September 08, 2021

As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis in people under the age of 25 in Ontario — slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents, the Toronto Sun reported.

Video: Why Vaccine Passports Are Illegal in Canada

By Nicholas Wansbutter, September 07, 2021

Nicholas Wansbutter, a criminal defense lawyer and host of Don’t Talk TV, talks about vaccine passports in Canada. According to him, vaccine passports are extremely problematic for two reasons: 1) issue of consent and 2) human rights implications.

Police, Firefighters in LA Form Group to Resist Vaccine Mandates

By Steve Watson, September 08, 2021

Police and firefighters in Los Angeles have formed a resistance group against COVID vaccine mandates for state workers in the city, stating that they aim to “maintain human rights, constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties as sovereign natural free human beings, and American citizens.”

Australia’s Health Chief Dr. Chant: COVID Will be with Us “Forever”, People Will Have to “Get Used to” Endless Booster Vaccines

By Paul Joseph Watson, September 08, 2021

Australian health chief Dr. Kerry Chant says that COVID will be with us “forever” and people will have to “get used to” taking endless booster vaccines.

200,000 Unvaccinated Military Members Denied Temporary Restraining Order as Commanders Threaten Those Who Refuse COVID-19 Vaccines

By Brian Shilhavy, September 08, 2021

Several military members told Health Impact News today that their commanders are coercing members of their unit to get the COVID-19 shot TODAY (September 7, 2021) or face the consequences of disobeying a direct order.

BRICS’ Influence Grows as Three New Members Join the New Development Bank

By Paul Antonopoulos, September 08, 2021

The New Development Bank (NDB) was created by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in 2015. The BRICS bank, as it is more commonly known, invests mainly in developing economies in areas such as transportation, water and sanitation, clean energy, digital infrastructure, social infrastructure and urban development.

Investigating the Mass Hysteria Over 1 Degree in Climate Change Since 1850

By Mish, September 08, 2021

The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C.

The Pandemic, “Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified’: Our Response

By David Skripac, September 07, 2021

Instead of coming to terms with how we are destroying our habitat, instead of learning the lessons nature has been trying to teach us over the past 18 months, we have ignored the wreckage and have refused to be taught. If anything, humanity has only intensified its war against nature during the past year’s pseudo pandemic. 

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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***

 

“Ethics 101. Dr. Julie Ponesse, professor of Ethics at the University of Western Ontario, provides a lesson in courage and integrity.”

On September 7, 2021, Julie Ponesse, Ethics Professor Huron College University of Western Ontario, London, ON Canada was dismissed for not submitting to medical experimentation.

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***

 

The Afghanistan Resistance’s last and only stronghold was “conquered” by the Taliban.

Initially Taliban plans were to peacefully take Panjshir and quell the resistance through negotiation, but that failed. After a series of clashes Islamic group took control of the last area that it hadn’t captured yet.

The leaders of the resistance have not been detained nor killed, and they claim that the fight will continue.

Regardless, the Taliban announced an acting government and are moving forward with the creation of an Islamic Emirate.

The members of the government were expected for a while, albeit with a bit of a shuffle of their positions. The cabinet shows that the Taliban truly believe that individuals who were blacklisted by the US, UN and others can introduce an adequate, reformed governance.

Another potential explanation is that the Islamist group is so confident in its own capability that they are acting to spite the US, UN and EU, and to gather more Muslim supporters through their impunity.

Several members of the new interim cabinet were announced. The head will be Mohammad Hasan Akhund, a former leader of the group’s chief council, formed in Pakistan by Taliban leaders after the United States’ invasion in 2001.

Between 1996-2001 he was foreign minister and then deputy prime minister in the Taliban regime. Mullah Akhund is a close associate and adviser of the Taliban’s very first leader and is included in a UN sanctions list.

Abdul Ghani Baradar, expected by many to be Afghanistan’s leader, will be Deputy Prime Minister. He was the Taliban’s political office head.

Acting Second Deputy Prime Minister is Abdul Salam Hanafi. He was Baradar’s deputy in Taliban affairs.

The interior minister position is assumed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the founder of the Haqqani network. The network is one of the most brutal branches of the Taliban and Haqqani has a leading position of the FBI’s most-wanted list for terrorism.

Acting Defence Minister is Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob. He is the son of the Taliban founder, and was in charge of Taliban military operations since 2020.

Acting head of intelligence is Abdul Haq Wasik. A Guantanamo Bay prisoner for 12 years, who was exchanged for US servicemen captured by Haqqani militants.

During official conference, chief spokesperson of the Taliban Zabihullah Mujahid named 33 members of “the new Islamic government”. He added that the remaining posts will be announced after careful deliberation, repeating that this was not final.

That doesn’t mean that there will be elections, but likely the Taliban will try to draft people from other ethnic groups, as most of the government is Pashtun.

Meanwhile, discontent is spreading in Kabul. Hundreds of citizens marched in provincial capitals, including the capital Kabul, where people gathered in front of the Pakistan embassy, protesting against Pakistan’s involvement in Afghan affairs. Many of the protesters were women who held banners calling for a balanced government that includes Afghanistan’s women.

According to the footage from the spot, the crowd managed to break through the armed cordon and enter the embassy’s territory.

The protests were not violently quelled, and the Taliban shot in the air to disperse the crowd. This, however, doesn’t mean a new page has been turned and the Islamist group has decided to allow freedom of speech and expression. Some journalists were prevented from filming the protest, many of them claimed that they had been beaten and their gear had been taken away.

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The only conclusion that can confidently be arrived at right now is that the Hybrid War on Brazil never really ended but simply evolved, recently influenced to an uncertain extent by the US’ own domestic political changes brought about by similar processes as well as the changing geopolitics of the New Cold War.

Is Bolsonaro Following In Trump’s Footsteps?

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro‘s supporters rallied throughout the country on their nation’s independence day following his call to send a strong message to what he claims is a cliquish elite that’s secretly opposing his agenda. He blames his currently low approval ratings and attendant re-election challenges next year on their alleged efforts. Bolsonaro also believes that the electronic voting machines planned to be used during that time might be rigged and is thus demanding paper ballots instead. His ability to inspire massive rallies over such contentious political issues raises concerns among some that he might be trying to replicate the so-called “insurrection” that former US President Donald Trump was accused of earlier this year.

The Relevance Of Hybrid War Theory

There are two interpretations of what’s happening: it’s either a “Democratic Security” exercise aimed at preserving the country’s democratic fundamentals (as imperfectly as they presently exist) or subverting them through a “self-coup” that could even set the pretext for what some fear might be an actual military coup in his support. Both explanations share their common origin in HybridWar theory, especially its Color Revolution dimension of instrumentalizing protest movements. In its most popular form, an external actor exploits preexisting identity tensions (in this case political and socio-economic ones) for strategic ends via these means, but the technology has proliferated to the point where domestic actors like Bolsonaro can now employ it too.

Miller’s Suspicious Detainment

Adding a wrinkle to that strategic observation is this week’s temporary detainment of Jason Miller, Trump’s former spokesman and current CEO of the new social media platform Gettr, at the alleged behest of one of the Supreme Court justices presently investigating Bolsonaro. Miller was in the country to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) there and personally met with Bolsonaro during his trip. Speculation abounds about whether Miller might have potentially sought to advise the Brazilian leader about his rumored plans, be they of a “Democratic Security” or “self-coup” nature, hence the alleged reason why he was temporarily detained for questioning.

Ideological Collusion (And If So, Between Whom)?

This development raises more questions than it answers. It remains unclear whether there’s any collusion between Miller and Bolsonaro, let alone what the latter might even be planning and whether Miller might be acting as a proxy for Trump and/or other Americans ideologically aligned with the Brazilian leader. Considering that Miller and those who he’s associated with back home aren’t on positive terms with incumbent US President Joe Biden’s administration, it also makes one wonder whether his detainment might have been coordinated with some American political officials, whether to send a message to him and/or as part of an unstated but jointly waged struggle against those who represent the ideologies that they’re opposed to.

Complicated US-Brazilian Ties Under Biden

Biden is completely against the phenomenon of so-called “Trumpism” that Bolsonaro represents, though his administration has also reportedly tried to convince the Brazilian leader to ban Huawei in exchange for his country becoming a NATO partner. US-Brazilian relations are complicated despite Washington being responsible for Bolsonaro’s rise to power in the first place through its earlier Hybrid War on Brazil that was mostly waged through lawfare, Color Revolution, and of course infowar means. The US always demands that its “partners” fully comply with its demands and is thus very perturbed that Trumpist Bolsonaro of all leaders doesn’t have more of an aggressive policy towards China despite having previously campaigned on such.

Trouble Brewing

Pragmatic agricultural-resource-technological ties that ultimately bolster Brazilian strategic sovereignty are responsible for why that hasn’t happened, contrary to many observers’ expectations who thought that the seemingly ideologically obsessed Bolsonaro would sacrifice these interests in the name of a US-backed anti-Chinese crusade. Concurrent with this, there’s no denying that he’s become genuinely unpopular over the past year as a result of his controversial policies, which instead of dividing the electorate as potentially planned in order to more effectively rule them in a Machiavellian fashion actually seem to have had the opposite effect. This raises the odds that former President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva might win if he decides to run next year.

What Exactly Is “Democratic Security”?

Returning to the article’s question of whether Bolsonaro’s rallies represent a “Democratic Security” exercise or preparation for a “self-coup”, more insight should be shared about what these concepts represent, both in general and in the Brazilian context. The first refers to the instrumentalization of protest movements for the purpose of upholding the political system as it’s understood (key word) to be, whether this is objectively the case or simply the way in which relevant actors perceive it. For instance, the “Stop The Steal” rallies that ultimately inspired the 6 January events were premised on pressuring officials to reverse what their participants sincerely believed to be a rigged election. Bolsonaro’s emerging narrative implies something similar.

And What’s A “Self-Coup”?

The second concept concerns the instrumentalization of protest movements to either directly subvert the political system contrary to how it’s understood (once again, that’s the keyword) to be, whether this is objectively the case or simply the way in which it’s perceived. Continuing with the Trump example, his opponents claimed that the participants of the 6 January events sincerely desired to overthrow the constitutional order after storming the Capital no matter how practically impossible it was for such a single act to achieve that outcome. In the Brazilian context, something similar might be in the works for those same ends with similarly impossible odds of success or perhaps to serve as the pretext for a pro-Bolsonaro military coup.

Entrenched Elite

There are some broader themes that these strategic thoughts touch upon which should also be addressed. Firstly, it’s ironic that Bolsonaro is waging an increasingly intense political war against what he claims is a cliquish elite that’s secretly against him since such an elite had previously helped him rise to power with American backing. It’s unclear to what extent they’re truly sabotaging his agenda and how much such claims might just be self-interested rhetoric to excuse his declining approval rating, but there should be no denying that much of the elite is indeed corrupt and potentially still under US influence. On that topic, another theme is worthwhile pondering, and that’s the extent of US influence over recent events.

The Influence Of The New Cold War

Although Bolsonaro is a fiercely pro-US leader, he nevertheless has serious ideological differences with the Biden Administration, both in general and in particular when it comes to Brazil’s role in the New Cold War between the US and China. His refusal to completely bend to his patron’s political will with respect to banning Huawei in exchange for his country becoming a NATO partner must have sent alarm bells ringing in Washington. Bolsonaro’s ties with Miller-connected Trump and other US conservatives fertilize the ground for rumors to abound about whether there might be some collusion between these ideologically allied movements. This also raises questions about whether the Biden Administration might have played a role in Miller’s detainment.

US-Backed Lawfare 2.0?

Building upon that train of thought is the third theme that should be explored more deeply by intrepid observers and it’s whether the US is once again instrumentalizing its lawfare tools in the Brazilian Supreme Court against the country’s incumbent leader. This possibility is in spite of Bolsonaro originally being brought to power partially as a result of such means “hacking” Brazil’s democracy and the its former government’s own “Democratic Security” rallies at the time (albeit of a much less threatening nature) failing to offset this course of events. To be absolutely clear, this doesn’t imply that the current opposition is colluding with the US but it does suggest that the US might be deliberating whether its interests could best be served through them instead.

The Opposition’s Response

This leads to the fourth theme of wondering how the opposition will react to these increasingly complicated developments. Genuine grievances against Bolsonaro and his (former?) US backers veritably exist and none of the above-mentioned concerns should ever be exploited to discredit that. Nevertheless, the scenario is now emerging whereby it’s possible that the US might be preparing for – if not actively working towards – a post-Bolsonaro future considering his low approval ratings as of late and especially his refusal to ban Huawei. Whether through legitimately democratic means during next year’s elections or via lawfare and possibly even fraud, it can’t be discounted that the US is now once again working towards regime change in Brazil.

The Military Factor

The next point to ponder is what role the military might play in shaping the strategic situation. While Bolsonaro-led Brazil is considered to be firmly in the US’ camp, it’s still thus far refusing to go as far as sanctioning Huawei and thus risking the complete rupture of its ties with China which have so far helped preserve some degree of strategic sovereignty. Some speculate that certain influential military forces are opposed to this Faustian deal despite they themselves generally being pro-US in nature, just not to the ultra-extreme point of sacrificing their country’s objective interests for their partner’s sake. It remains to be seen whether they’d play a positive or negative role in Bolsonaro’s speculative plans ahead of next year’s elections.

The Two Most Important Variables

The two most important variables to watch are therefore the lawfare and military ones since these will likely be the decisive factors determining whether Bolsonaro’s “Democratic Security” or “self-coup” plans succeed. If they’re both on the same side against him, then he stands no chance of pulling either scenario off, but if they remain divided as seems to be the case at least at this moment, then the situation will remain much more dynamic and thus uncertain, especially when considering the fact that the opposition will likely stage their own “Democratic Security” rallies in an attempt to thwart what they believe is his planned “self-coup”. The self-sustaining cycle of both sides instrumentalizing protest movements will contribute to Brazil’s destabilization.

“The New Normal”

Intense political warfare, even if only of a mostly non-kinetic nature for now at least, might very well become the so-called “new normal” in the coming future unless something major happens to drastically shift the scales of success in one or another direction. This could be the Supreme Court doing something serious against Bolsonaro and/or the military getting more directly involved, whether in Bolsonaro’s support or against him. The only conclusion that can confidently be arrived at right now is that the Hybrid War on Brazil never really ended but simply evolved, recently influenced to an uncertain extent by the US’ own domestic political changes brought about by similar processes as well as the changing geopolitics of the New Cold War.

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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.

Featured image is from OneWorld

Foresight by Geopolitical Analyst Peter Koenig.

Incisive article published on August 17, 2020

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Agenda ID2020 – is hardly mentioned by any media, let alone the mainstream. Agenda ID2020, if carried out, is the ultimate control by a small elite – of the One World Order (OWO), also called the New World Order (NWO) – over the world population. It is a mechanism that would allow controlling every movement of each one of the 7.9 billion people of planet earth, including everyone’s health records, cash flows, bank accounts, as well as our behavior in this ultra-controlled society – which I refrain from calling civilization anymore.

Sounds crazy. Yes, but that’s the plan. No conspiracy theory.

That is the absurd dream of a few multi-billionaires, including Bill Gates. And the tool for such a control is a universal covid vaccine. See this article for an overview of what might happen:  “The Corona Virus Covid-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is Agenda ID2020”:.

“What is the infamous ID2020?  It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. … The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.

Let Dr. Vernon Coleman describe in simple terms the mechanisms that mankind  – you and me – might be confronted with, if the super power elite, the NWO has its way. Watch this 10- min. video on controlling the people – vaccines, microchips and electromagnetic fields (EMF) – an old science turned new…

Wikipedia describes Dr. Vernon Coleman as an English author, columnist and former general practitioner.

He has written over 100 books, including works about human health, politics, cricket, and animal issues, and a range of novels.

It is High Noon, but never too late to Act in solidarity, despite covid-dictated ‘wanton social distancing’, and prevent this human disaster.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO); RT; Countercurrents, Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press; The Saker Blog, the and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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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Police and firefighters in Los Angeles have formed a resistance group against COVID vaccine mandates for state workers in the city, stating that they aim to “maintain human rights, constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties as sovereign natural free human beings, and American citizens.”

As reported in the LA Times, two separate police and firefighters groups have come together to oppose vaccine mandates.

‘Firefighters 4 Freedom’ issued a statement on its website noting

“Our goal is to stop the mandated vaccinations for all City employees as well as the citizens of this great country. We want to bring education and truth to the people without being censored.”

The statement further notes that the group believes in “the right to work, freewill, personal choice, medical freedoms, and consent without coercion, retaliation, threats, disciplinary action, or termination.”

Firefighters 4 Freedom, a group of LA city firefighters and police officers, plans to sue the city over the new requirement that city employees be vaccinated. https://t.co/JItyzZBs6J

— Dakota Smith (@dakotacdsmith) September 4, 2021

It continues,

“This is not a vaccine versus non-vaccine issue, this is not a left verse right political issue. This is a human rights issue.”

“We hope you stand with us, for we believe all members and citizens have the freedom of choice and natural rights. Your body, your choice. My body, my choice,” the statement concludes.

Meanwhile, LAPD officers have joined the movement under the banner ‘Roll Call 4 Freedom’.

LAPD Sgt. Veronica Saucedo stated that

“We are supportive of individual rights, personal choice and for managing our own health.”

The development comes in the wake of first responders in Oregon bringing a lawsuit against the state and the governor for imposing vaccine mandates.

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Featured image is from CounterPunch

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Several military members told Health Impact News today that their commanders are coercing members of their unit to get the COVID-19 shot TODAY (September 7, 2021) or face the consequences of disobeying a direct order.

One member stated that when they went by the local pharmacy in a drug store, there were many military members lined up to get the shots today, fearful of the consequences if they don’t.

And this is in spite of the fact that military officials are saying publicly that service members still have 2 to 3 months to comply, according to Military.com.

Sailors and Marines Have 90 Days to Get Vaccinated or Face Punishment

2 Sep 2021
Military.com | By Konstantin Toropin

Sailors and Marines now have 90 days to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk disobeying a lawful order, a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the maritime branches’ top leaders said in a series ofmessagesreleased Tuesday and Wednesday.

Airmen Have Less than Two Months to Get Fully Vaccinated

7 Sep 2021
Military.com | By Stephen Losey

The Department of the Air Force has set a tight two-month deadline for active-duty troops to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Those who don’t get the shot in time could be punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Airmen and Space Force Guardians must be fully vaccinated – including a two-week period after a final shot – by Nov. 2, the Air Force said in a press release Friday. Air National Guardsmen and reservists have until Dec. 2.

Apparently the military commanders are following their own schedule, regardless of what is being stated publicly by the various branches.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives have now proposed legislation that would prevent the military from issuing dishonorable discharges for service members who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine.

Lawmakers Try to Ban Dishonorable Discharges for Troops Who Refuse Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines

2 Sep 2021
Military.com | By Travis Tritten

House lawmakers have backed legislation prohibiting dishonorable discharges for troops who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, as the Navy gave its sailors 90 days to get the shot this week and the Army and Air Force were poised Thursday to enforce their own timetables.

Legislation sponsored by Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., an Army veteran, requires only honorable discharges for anyone who is separated from the military over refusing to be vaccinated. It was added to the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill, passed by the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

“No American who raises their hand to serve our Nation should be punished for making a highly personal medical decision,” Green said in a statement after the committee vote.

However, service members are telling Health Impact News that this is what some of them are being threatened with, dishonorable discharge, while others have said they have been threatened with demotions and being barred from reenlisting.

Judicial System Again Fails to Protect Constitutional Rights of Citizens by Denying 200,000 Unvaccinated Military a Temporary Restraining Order

On August 17, 2021, two military members filed a lawsuit in federal court in the State of Colorado, claiming that they represented 200,000 service members who were not vaccinated for COVID-19, but that they had previously contracted COVID-19 and recovered, and that therefore there was no need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, as they had “natural immunity.”

On August 24, 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a Memorandum for “SENIOR PENTAGON LEADERSHIP COMMANDERS OF THE COMBATANT COMMANDS DEFENSE AGENCY AND DOD FIELD ACTIVITY DIRECTORS” which stated:

I therefore direct the Secretaries of the Military Departments to immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19. (Source.)

So on August 31, 2021, Todd Callender, counsel for the military Plaintiffs, filed a motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to stop this directive from being enforced, which was heard by Judge Raymond P. Moore, who then denied the TRO on September 1, 2021.

The Plaintiffs had expert testimony from an affidavit by Dr. Peter McCullough, stating that “people who have the naturally created antibodies resulting from contracting and recovering from the Virus” should not be vaccinated because “it will do more harm than good.”

Judge Moore rejected his testimony and the evidence provided by the plaintiffs, because it was contrary to what the CDC states.

But Plaintiffs ignore all contrary opinion evidence, including obviously relevant guidance from the Centers for Disease  Control and Prevention (“CDC”) recommending vaccination regardless of whether a person has already had COVID-19 because research has not yet shown people are protected once they recover from the virus.

See Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination, CDC Website, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html (last visited Sept. 1, 2021).

The Court is not compelled to view Plaintiffs’ evidence in a vacuum or an echo chamber. As a result, the evidence cited by Plaintiffs coupled with their unsubstantiated insistence on their own natural immunity is insufficient to establish a clear and unequivocal right to a TRO under the circumstances of this case. (Read full opinion here.)

Again, to expect relief from COVID-19 vaccine mandates from the judiciary is just not reasonable. The system is rigged. They will quote the CDC, Anthony Fauci, and a whole host of other corrupt government agencies and leaders to deny facts and keep the COVID-19 narrative going that benefits the Pharmaceutical industry and their Wall Street Billionaires and Bankers.

The judiciary works for these Wall Street Billionaires and Bankers, not for the public.

Mass non-compliance is what is needed now, and while there are signs that those in law enforcement and other government agencies are now forming groups to resist (See: Police, Firefighters In LA Form Group To Resist Vaccine Mandates, for example), where are the military commanders who take seriously the oath they took to protect this country and their citizens??

One of the military members that Health Impact News corresponded with today wrote:

As much as I value my uniform, my time in service and fighting back against such obvious abuses of power I’m coming more and more to the realization that this is the new world order, so to speak.

These vaccines aren’t going away no matter how long or how bitterly we fight this in the courts.

It’s time to tell the system to go **** itself and start figuring out how to best take care of ourselves and our families outside of the system.

Our military leadership has no concern for our wellbeing and they have made it clear that they will punish those who can’t see things from their perspective.

I signed up to defend the Constitution and freedom and now my military leadership is intent on violating both. I’m no longer interested in serving my country in this capacity. It’s time to leave while I can still walk to the door.

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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)

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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Australian health chief Dr. Kerry Chant says that COVID will be with us “forever” and people will have to “get used to” taking endless booster vaccines.

The New South Wales Chief Health Officer made the alarming comments during a recent press conference.

“We need to get used to being vaccinated with COVID vaccines for the future … I can’t see COVID is not going to be with us forever,” said Chant said during a press conference last week.

Dr Chant
“We need to get used to being vaccinated with covid vaccines for the future “ pic.twitter.com/WKkvfvDOE9

— Razorback1111 (@razorback11111) August 30, 2021

“As a public health doctor we always want to have diseases go, to be totally eliminated, but that is not on the horizon in the near future,” she continued. “Booster doses and repeat doses will be part of it.”

“I can assure you that the commonwealth government has purchased large quantities of vaccine into 2022 and this will be a regular cycle of vaccination and revaccination as we learn more about when immunity wanes.”

In a separate answer to a reporter, Chant again asserted that people “will be getting vaccinated regularly” against COVID.

Dr Chant ,
“What I really need to do is get that second dose into people “ pic.twitter.com/qmvGTDGPKd

— Razorback1111 (@razorback11111) September 2, 2021

Given that Australians were previously told authorities “wouldn’t hesitate” to go door to door to carry out COVID tests, what’s to stop them doing the same thing for vaccines?

As we previously highlighted, the infamously stern-faced Chant previously warned Aussies that they shouldn’t even be talking to their own friends and neighbors, even if they’re wearing a mask.

“Whilst it’s human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that,” said Chant.

“So even if you run into your next door neighbor in the shopping center…don’t start up a conversation, now is the time for minimizing your interactions with others, even if you’ve got a mask, do not think that affords total protection,” she added.

Australia continues to pursue a disastrous ‘zero COVID’ policy enforced via endless lockdowns that have characterized the country as a “prison island” with no escape anywhere on the horizon.

Anyone who challenges the policy via protests faces fines of up to $11,000 dollars while police have also carried out home visits to people who merely promote anti-lockdown demonstrations via social media.

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Featured image: Dr Kerry Chant PSM, is NSW Health’s Chief Health Officer and Deputy Secretary, Population and Public Health and has been leading the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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A report released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) showed the incidence of heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination was significantly more prevalent in young people.

As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis in people under the age of 25 in Ontario — slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents, the Toronto Sun reported.

There were 31 cases in the 12- to 17-year age group and 75 cases in 18- to 24-year-olds. Eighty percent of all cases were in males.

“The reporting rate of myocarditis/pericarditis was higher following the second dose of mRNA vaccine than after the first, particularly for those receiving the Moderna vaccine as the second dose of the series (regardless of the product for the first dose),” the report stated.

PHO added the reporting rate for heart inflammation in those 18 to 24 was seven times higher with Moderna than with Pfizer. Pfizer is currently the only vaccine authorized for use in 12- to 17-year-olds in Ontario.

In early June, PHO issued an Enhanced Surveillance Directive, requiring Public Health Units to prioritize follow-up for any reports of myocarditis or pericarditis following any COVID mRNA vaccine and to notify PHO of the report.

Since the start of the COVID immunization program in Ontario on Dec. 13, there have been a total of 314 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis following receipt of mRNA COVID vaccines.

As of Aug. 7, there had been a total of 202 emergency room visits across all age groups for heart inflammation following vaccination, with 146 leading to hospitalization. Three cases resulted in ICU admission.

The report concluded that “COVID-19 vaccines continue to be recommended and are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infection and severe outcomes from COVID-19 disease, which is also associated with a risk of myocarditis.”

Ontario’s Ministry of Health last week said there are only two valid medical exemptions from COVID-19 vaccinations — an allergic reaction to a component of the vaccine, or if an individual develops myocarditis or pericarditis after the first dose of the vaccine.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to researchers at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Pericarditis is often used interchangeably with myocarditis and refers to inflammation of the pericardium, the thin sac surrounding the heart.

According to the most recent data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. — there have been 482 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis in 12- to 17-year-olds with 474 casesattributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.

There have been 4,100 total reports of myocarditis and pericarditis in all age groups with 3,194 cases attributed to Pfizer and 1,090 cases attributed to Moderna.

Citing risk of heart inflammation, UK advisory panel will not recommend COVID vaccines for healthy 12- to 15-year-olds

Britain’s vaccine advisers last week said they would not recommend vaccination of healthy 12- to 15-year-olds against COVID, preferring a precautionary approach due to the potential for vaccinated teens to develop heart inflammation, Reuters reported.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation also said children were at such a low risk from the virus that vaccines would offer only a marginal benefit.

The British government said it would consult medical advisers to look at other factors before making a final decision. The UK’s four chief medical officers have been asked to consider the wider impact on schools and society.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation did advise widening the existing vaccine program to include an extra 200,000 teenagers with specific underlying conditions, including chronic heart, lung and liver conditions that put the teens at much higher risk of COVID than healthy children.

Myocarditis not a ‘mild’ adverse reaction

On Aug. 13, The Defender reported a previously healthy 14-year-old, Aiden Jo, developed severe myocarditis after receiving Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Another sad story! Mom so proud that her 14-year-old son could get the COVID vaccine… but now doctors confirm her son meets the criteria for having post-vaccine myocarditis.

SUBSCRIBE #TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66Edfiw5https://t.co/CmRUHc8QMr

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2021

Aiden’s mother said she was aware of the potential side effect of heart inflammation, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it was “very rare and mild.”

“What they didn’t explain is that mild means hospital care and follow-up care indefinitely,” she said. “Aiden’s cardiologist told us no case of myocarditis is ‘mild.’ That’s like saying a heart attack is mild.”

Frightening if true… pic.twitter.com/SU6GXBSzqC

— Osler (@osler78) August 26, 2021

On June 22, The Defender reported an 18-year-old from Arkansas, Isaiah Harris, had a heart attack after receiving his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Harris was hospitalized for four days with acute myocarditis, and doctors said he would have to be on total bed rest for six months and take medications to numb his heart. Harris had no pre-existing conditions prior to suffering a heart attack.

The Defender also reported on a 19-year-old college student who died of heart-related problems after taking the Moderna vaccine, and a 13-year-old who died in his sleep from a heart problem three days after taking the Pfizer vaccine.

On June 23, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices held a meeting to discuss cases of myocarditis.

Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a pediatrician who has seen many patients experience vaccine adverse events in her practice, said she was surprised that some committee members seemed to be making the assumption that the cases of myocarditis and pericarditis would not cause long-term harm.

“We simply do not have the evidence to make COVID vaccine decisions on that assumption,” Mumper said.

Mumper said she is worried there will be many more cases of heart inflammation as the vaccine is rolled out to younger and younger children.

Heart inflammation following COVID vaccines more frequent than expected

U.S. public health officials claim cases of myocarditis and pericarditis following COVID vaccination are rare — but research published online in the Journal of the  American Medical Association (JAMA) shows they may happen more frequently than reported.

Researchers conducting the study reviewed 2,000,287 electronic medical records (EMR) of people who received at least one COVID vaccination.

The records, obtained from 40 hospitals in Washington, Oregon, Montana and California, showed 20 people had vaccine-related myocarditis (1.0 per 100,000) and 37 had pericarditis (1.8 per 100,000).

A report published in June by the CDC, based on data from VAERS, suggested an incidence of myocarditis of about 4.8 cases per 1 million following receipt of an mRNA COVID vaccine.

A study published in JAMA Aug. 4, showed a “similar pattern [to the CDC study], although at higher incidence [of myocarditis and pericarditis] after vaccination, suggesting vaccine adverse event under-reporting.”

According to Tracy Høeg, physician, epidemiologist and associate researcher at UC Davis, the results of the JAMA study are telling, as recent rates correlate with vaccination, not COVID itself.

The researchers calculated the average monthly number of cases of myocarditis or pericarditis during the pre-vaccine period of January 2019 through January 2021 was 16.9 compared with 27.3 during the vaccine period of February through May 2021.

The mean numbers of pericarditis cases during the same periods were 49.1 and 78.8, respectively.

The authors said limitations of their analysis include potential missed cases outside care settings and missed diagnoses of myocarditis or pericarditis, which would underestimate the incidence, as well as inaccurate EMR vaccination information.

“Temporal association does not prove causation, although the short span between vaccination and myocarditis onset and the elevated incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis in the study hospitals lend support to a possible relationship,” the authors wrote.

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Data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that between Dec. 14, 2020 and Aug. 27, 2021, a total of 650,077 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 13,911 deaths — an increase of 284 over the number of deaths reported the previous week.

There were 85,971 reports of serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 1,505 compared with the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” filed in VAERS, 514,270 adverse events, including 6,296 deaths and 39,947 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020 and Aug. 27, 2021.

Of the 6,296 U.S. deaths reported as of Aug. 27, 13% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 18% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 32% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 366.5 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of Aug. 27. This includes: 208 million doses of Pfizer, 145 million doses of Moderna and 14 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

The data come directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System(VAERS), the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

This week’s U.S. data for 12- to 17-year-olds show:  

• 18,523 total adverse events, including 1,091 rated as serious and 18 reported deaths. Two of the 18 deaths were suicides.

The most recent reported deaths include a 15-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 1498080) who previously had COVID, was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in May 2021 and died four days after receiving his second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on June 18, when he collapsed on the soccer field and went into ventricular tachycardia; and a 13-year-old girl (VAERS I.D. 1505250) who died after suffering a heart condition after receiving her first dose of Pfizer.

• Other deaths include two 13-year-old boys (VAERS I.D. 1406840 and 1431289) who died two days after receiving a Pfizer vaccine, a 13-year-old boy who died after receiving Moderna (VAERS I.D. 1463061), three 15-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1187918, 1382906 and 1242573), five 16-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1420630, 1466009, 1225942, 1475434, and 1386841) and three 17-year-olds (VAERS I.D. 1199455, 1388042 and 1420762).
• 2,715 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds with 99% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 457 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) with 450 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 97 reports of blood clotting disorders, with all cases attributed to Pfizer.

This week’s total U.S. VAERS data, from Dec. 14, 2020 to Aug. 27, 2021, for all age groups combined, show:

• 20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
• 54% of those who died were male, 43% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
• The average age of death was 73.1.
• As of Aug. 27, 3,389 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 1008 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
• Of the 2,689 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 50% were attributed to Pfizer vaccinations, 43% to Moderna and 7% to J&J.
• 545 reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, with 39% of cases attributed to Pfizer, 34% to Moderna and 26% to J&J.
• 139,180 reports of anaphylaxis with 42% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine, 51% to Moderna and 7% to J&J.
• 8,751 reports of blood clotting disorders. Of those, 3,721 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 3,188 reports to Moderna and 1,794 reports to J&J.
• 2,242 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis with 1,411 cases attributed to Pfizer, 741 cases to Moderna and 83 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.

Two top FDA officials resign amid White House booster controversy

As The Defender reported Sept. 1, two of the FDA’s top vaccine officials announced they will leave the agency this fall, raising questions about the Biden administration and the way it sidelined the agency.

According to an email sent Aug. 31 by Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, to staff members, Dr. Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s vaccines office, will quit at the end of October, and her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, will leave in November.

Gruber and Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a COVID booster eight months after they received a second shot, people familiar with the decision told The New York Times.

Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the sources said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them.

U.S. health regulators also said there isn’t enough data to recommend boosters for the general population, yet the White House has moved forward with its plan to offer a third dose of Pfizer or Moderna by the week of  Sept. 20 — even though that plan requires authorization from the FDA and CDC first.

FDA advisory committee to hold meeting on COVID vaccine boosters, days before White House scheduled the roll-out to begin

The FDA announced its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will hold a virtual advisory meeting Sept. 17, to discuss Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID application for boosters — just days before the shots are to become available to the general population.

The committee’s director, Dr. Peter Marks, said “a transparent, thorough and objective review of the data by the FDA is critical so that the medical community and the public continue to have confidence in the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

The FDA plans to livestream the meeting on the agency’s YouTube channel. The meeting also will be webcast from the FDA website.

Moments before the FDA released the announcement, Moderna said it had submitted an application to offer booster doses of its COVID vaccine, CNN reported.

According to CDC data, 955,000 Americans have already received additional vaccine doses, though it’s unclear how many of those were technically authorized.

CDC endorses full approval for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine

An advisory panel to the CDC last week unanimously endorsed the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID vaccine for people 16 years and older, and the CDC immediately adopted the committee’s recommendation.

The endorsement by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices came after the FDA on Aug. 23 granted full approval to Pfizer’s “mRNA vaccine, which is being marketed as Comirnaty.”

The CDC statement made no mention of the Comirnaty brand, but referred to Pfizer-BioNTech’s “licensed” vaccine — even though the FDA approval was limited specifically to the drugmaker’s Comirnaty vaccine.

UK panel does not recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children 12 to 15 years old

Britain’s vaccine advisers said they would not recommend vaccination of healthy 12- to 15-year-olds against COVID, preferring a precautionary approach due to the potential for vaccinated teens to develop heart inflammation, Reuters reported.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation also said children were at such a low risk from the virus that vaccines would offer only a marginal benefit.

The British government said it would consult medical advisers to look at other factors before making a final decision. The UK’s four chief medical officers have been asked to consider the wider impact on schools and society.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation did advise widening the existing vaccine program to include an extra 200,000 teenagers with specific underlying conditions, including chronic heart, lung and liver conditions that put those teens at much higher risk of COVID than healthy children.

More than 100 Ontario youth sent to hospital for vaccine-related heart problems 

A report released last week by Public Health Ontario showed the incidence of heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination was significantly more prevalent in young people.

As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis in people under the age of 25 in Ontario — slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. Thirty-one cases occurred in the 12- to 17-year age group and 75 cases in 18- to 24-year-olds. Eighty percent of all cases were in males.

According to the report, the rate of heart inflammation was higher following the second dose of an mRNA vaccine, particularly for those receiving the Moderna vaccine as the second dose of the series, regardless of the product used for the first dose.

Public Health Ontario added the reporting rate for heart inflammation in those 18 to 24 was seven times higher with Moderna than with Pfizer. Pfizer is currently the only vaccine authorized for use in 12- to 17-year-olds in Ontario.

Largest observational study shows natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity

According to a new study comparing natural immunity gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection to vaccine-induced immunity afforded by the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, people with natural immunity had longer lasting and stronger protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization from the Delta variant.

The study, published Aug. 25 on medRxiv, is the largest observational study to date and used data from Israel — one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world.

Researchers examined medical records of 673,676 Israelis 16 years and older — charting their infections, symptoms and hospitalizations between June 1 and Aug. 14, when the Delta variant predominated in Israel.

The study found in two analyses that people who had never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but were vaccinated in January and February were six to 13 times more likely to experience breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to unvaccinated people who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers also found a significantly increased risk of asymptomatic disease in those who had been vaccinated.

Woman experiences rapid onset of rare brain disease after second Pfizer shot, dies within three months

Cheryl Cohen (VAERS ID 1535217), a healthy 64-year-old woman from Florida, died three months after her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine from sudden-onset Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease(CJD), a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder she developed soon after she was vaccinated.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni Cohen said her mother experienced her first episode indicating something was neurologically wrong with her 11 days after her second Pfizer dose. Her initial symptoms included severe headaches, mass confusion and brain fog.

After being hospitalized for 10 days, Cohen returned home where her symptoms progressed and her condition rapidly deteriorated. On June 19, Cohen was hospitalized again for a severe headache, after which she was diagnosed with CJD. She died July 22.

Cohen’s medical team said the onset of CJD could be tied to the COVID vaccine. Dr. Andrea Folds, one of the internal medicine physicians from Aventura Hospital who oversaw Cohen’s case, wrote a case report. The report, submitted Sept. 2 to American College of Physicians Journal, is awaiting approval for publication.

WHO says it’s monitoring a new COVID variant called ‘Mu’

The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring a new COVID variant called “Mu,” which the agency says has mutations that have the potential to evade immunity provided by a previous COVID infection or vaccination, CNBC reported.

Mu — known by scientists as B.1.621 — was added to the WHO’s list of variants “of interest” on Aug. 30, the international health organization said in its weekly COVID epidemiological report published late Tuesday.

The variant contains genetic mutations that indicate natural immunity, current vaccines or monoclonal antibody treatments may not work as well against it as they do against the original ancestral virus, the WHO said.

The Mu strain needs further study to confirm whether it will prove to be more contagious, more deadly, or more resistant to current vaccines and treatments.

183 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries

According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”

On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. We have made repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions.

Despite multiple phone and email communications with many people at the CDC, and despite being told that our request was in the system and that someone would respond, we have not yet received answers to any of the questions we submitted. It has been 183 days since we sent our first email to the CDC requesting information.

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

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Judge Michael A. Oster Jr. wrote in the decision that “there can be no doubt” the medical and scientific communities do not support ivermectin, a drug best known as a horse de-worming medication, as a treatment for COVID-19.

Although he said he was sympathetic to the plaintiff’s situation, Oster wrote that “public policy should not and does not support allowing a physician to try ‘any’ type of treatment on human beings” and that the broader rights of the hospital and whether providers should be mandated to deliver care they believe unnecessary needed to be considered alongside patient autonomy.

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The New Development Bank (NDB) was created by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in 2015. The BRICS bank, as it is more commonly known, invests mainly in developing economies in areas such as transportation, water and sanitation, clean energy, digital infrastructure, social infrastructure and urban development. On September 2, NDB President Marcos Troyjo announced that the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay and Bangladesh were the first members of the bank’s expansion.

“New members will have in NDB a platform to foster their cooperation in infrastructure and sustainable development,” said NDB President Marcos Troyjo in a statement. “We will continue to expand the bank’s membership in a gradual and balanced manner.”

The UAE, Uruguay and Bangladesh will become fully fledged members once internal processes of the NDB is complete. However, the NDB’s ambitions do not end there, and according to Brazilian newspaper Estadão, a fourth partner, likely from Africa, should be announced by the end of the year. In fact, the Shanghai-based bank anticipates three to four new members per year, reaching up to 20 members in the coming years.

Although BRICS is obviously already represented in South America and South Asia by Brazil and India respectively, the accession of Uruguay and Bangladesh into the NDB allows the bank to act on a regional scale. It also opens the possibility for future membership in BRICS. With NDB members neighboring each other in South America and South Asia, the bank has the possibility to finance binational projects that promotes regional economic and transportation integration.

For his part, Emirati Minister of State for Financial Affairs, Obaid Humaid Al Tayer, said:

“The United Arab Emirates membership in the New Development Bank represents a new step to enhance the role of the UAE economy on the global stage, especially in light of the great capabilities and expertise that the country possesses in supporting infrastructure projects and sustainable development. This monumental step would not have been achieved without the vision and direction of the UAE leadership, who believe in the importance of supporting development projects around the world, especially in emerging economies.”

The UAE has undergone a massive transformation in the past quarter of a century, turning desert wastelands into thriving economic hubs and progressing from reactionary Salafi ideology to one of tolerance and open-mindedness. As recently as the beginning of the Syrian War in 2011, the UAE was backing jihadist groups, but in a matter of only a few years reverted from this policy and became far more moderate and independent in their decision making and pursuit of partnerships.

Originally a major oil exporter, and still is, the UAE has now diversified its economy so that it is in line with the UN 2030 agenda to end poverty and hunger, protect human rights and gender equality, and protect the planet from degradation. The UAE has immense resources that can be directed towards projects that are in line with not only the UN’s vision, but also the NDB’s.

BRICS signed an agreement on Tuesday involving 28 projects in the fields of computer programming, technical services, culture, art, economy, commerce, logistics and transportation – with a total value of more than $2.1 billion. The UAE’s contribution to such projects will be fundamental in deciding whether the mega-rich Arab country should ascend into BRICS and not only the NDB.

The selection of the UAE, Uruguay and Bangladesh as the first three non-founding partners of the NDB indicates the intentions of BRICS – regional expansion with a focus on economic and transportation cooperation. This cooperation, as well as integration, is especially crucial as the world struggles to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic fallout. Because of this, the NDB will likely focus in the short to medium term on the rejuvenation of member countries following the pandemic, particularly in transitioning to a digital economy and green energy.

It was estimated that emerging economies needed about $2 trillion in infrastructure investments per year for the next 20 years to maintain growth rates, however, commercial banks have refused to meet the gap. Essentially, the NDB partly fills the gap that Western financial institutions refuse to do.

By positioning itself to take advantage of a unique opportunity to project a new vision for financing, the NDB is challenging the dominance of Western financial institutions and also progressing the prestige of BRICS in its endeavour to advance a multipolar world order. The accession of the UAE sees one of the Middle East’s most influential countries join the NDB, whilst Uruguay and Bangladesh open the path for regional integration under the context of BRICS, something that has not occurred since the group was established in 2006.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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U.S. Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman recently returned from a tour of Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the United Arab Emirates. On the following Monday, the U.S. State Department issued a statement that it had imposed sanctions on Eritrean Defense Forces Chief of Staff General Filipos Woldeyohannes. Several days later, the UN Security Council (UNSC) met yet again about the Ethiopian civil war. I spoke with Eritrean American peace and justice activist Elias Amare about these developments.

Ann Garrison: Elias, what was your takeaway from the August 26th UN Security Council meeting ? Did you hear anything we haven’t heard there since the TPLF launched the war last November?

Elias Amare: There was nothing new. It was a continuation of what the US has been trying to do at the UNSC. The US and its Western European allies have been trying to pass some kind of resolution censuring Ethiopia that will lead towards military intervention, but so far, they have not succeeded. Why? Because China and Russia have been blocking it. They say that this is Ethiopia’s internal affair, and we shouldn’t engage in any undue interference. Everyone is saying the same thing they have been saying all along.

The only new thing I heard is that now they are going farther with the “African solutions for African problems” angle that they keep talking about. The African Union is going to appoint the former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, as the High Representative for the Horn of Africa to try some kind of mediation.

But this is not really new. When the conflict started nine months ago, for example, the South African president tried some kind of mediation, but Ethiopia was strong and adamant that this is an internal matter. So what will Obasanjo accomplish? Not much, in my opinion, but we will see.

AG: I heard some Western members of the UNSC call on Eritrean troops to withdraw from Tigray, as usual. But I didn’t hear anyone say that they have withdrawn. Are they still there? Or do you know?

EA: I don’t think Eritrean troops are there. I’m not on the ground, but all information is that they withdrew in June. They are, however, continuing to monitor the border with Tigray in case the TPLF attack.

You remember how the TPLF started this by attacking an Ethiopian federal army base last November. Then, in order to widen the war, they launched rocket attacks into Eritrea. Not once, not twice, not three times, but 15 times. They fired rockets at civilian targets in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, 15 times. Thank God the rockets didn’t hit any civilian population and no harm was done. But they tried and that pushed Eritrea to take measures to protect itself and to neutralize the heavy weaponry in the hands of the TPLF.

Once that mission was accomplished, Eritrea withdrew, in June. The latest statement from the US State Department says that Eritrea withdrew in June, but that now they have reentered, but look at what Samantha Power’s been saying all along: Eritrea must withdraw! Eritrea must withdraw! So how is it that they now acknowledge that Eritrea had withdrawn in June and yet for the past three months they have been harping on this withdrawal issue? I don’t think they’re serious. They’re just creating a pretext to punish Eritrea.

AG: They’ve been demanding that Eritrea withdraw, but now they’re alleging that Eritrea withdrew in June and it’s re-entering.

EA: Yes.

AG: A week or so ago US Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman returned from a trip to Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the United Arab Emirates. Then, on the following Monday, the State Department announced that it was sanctioning Eritrean Defense Forces Chief of Staff General Filipos Woldeyohannes. What do you make of this?

EA: It’s just another bullying tactic. The target is ultimately the Ethiopian government. They want to frighten the Ethiopian government into accepting the TPLF as an equal and sitting down to negotiate with them, so they are adding sanctions on Eritrea first. The EU already sanctioned officials in Eritrea, but now the US is too. Basically, the language is, “If you don’t oblige, the same thing will come to you.”

AG: The US has already sanctioned Ethiopian officials.

EA: Yes, but this is a threat that there’ll be more sanctions, and maybe an arms embargo.

As to the consequences of these Magnitsky Act sanctions on General Filipos Woldeyohannes, their immediate impact is nil because the general doesn’t have any assets to freeze in foreign banks. He is a poor man, like all Eritrean leaders, who live a very modest life, a clean, corruption-free life, on their salaries.

AG: It’s hard to think of wars that were ended by negotiations rather than the victory of one side or the other. Do you think this push for negotiations is real or just another form of warfare and interference by the US?

EA: It’s intervention or ramping up for a humanitarian military intervention, as they call it, preparing the pretext for war. How can Ethiopia negotiate with a military force that attacked it internally? That was a treasonous act. The Ethiopian Parliament passed a resolution condemning it and designating the TPLF a terrorist organization.

The TPLF is guilty of heinous crimes, and no nation or political system would ever tolerate an attack on one of its army bases. Negotiation would make Ethiopia vulnerable to more terrorist acts from all corners of the country.

Ethiopia is in transition. It is consolidating its nascent democracy. The TPLF was in power for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018, and during those years it committed massive atrocities, horrendous crimes against the people until, finally, the people forced them from power.

Now the TPLF are attempting to seize power again, and to widen the conflict, to involve Eritrea and other neighboring countries. This would set a very dangerous precedent, not only for Ethiopia but also for the whole African continent. Why the US is insisting on this path is beyond me, but their immediate objective seems to be resuscitating or rescuing their longtime puppet and proxy, the TPLF.

The TPLF are criminals who must be brought to justice. Many of their leaders have already been apprehended, but some remain in Tigray or on other battlefronts. The government forces withdrew from Tigray and declared a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire in June, but the TPLF continued to fight and encroached further beyond its home base into the Afar and Amhara Regions. They are continuing to commit atrocities against the civilian population.

In the West, the crimes of the TPLF are hidden or glossed over, while the Ethiopian government and army are the targets of a massive media disinformation campaign.

The Western corporate media is incredible, outright brazen in the way it continues to manufacture stories of massacres and rapes and what have you, the same way they did in Libya and in Syria, where they manufactured the White Helmets, chemical weapons attacks, and what have you.

The pattern is the same and it continues.

AG: Have you seen any evidence that the TPLF actually want to negotiate?

EA: Why should they? They’re being protected and coddled by their Western backers, with Samantha Power in the lead. Their army is being sustained by food aid meant for the needy. Their troops are found with high energy biscuits meant for malnourished children. This is food aid that they snatched away from the population.

They have political and diplomatic cover from the West and the Western press, so they’re continuing their brazen, belligerent attacks. They may say that they want to negotiate but that they have preconditions. Outrageous preconditions .

Then they turn around and say, “We will march all the way to the capital, Addis Ababa, overthrow this regime, and then settle accounts with Eritrea.”

They have raised a huge army. They are forcing children into conscription, and the West is looking the other way. So this is their last gambit. In the past month, they have tried everything they can, but the tide is turning on them now. They are on the run.

We hear these cries to negotiate, to give the TPLF respect and protection, whenever they are in danger of being decimated. Then the humanitarian interventionists call for a ceasefire and negotiations. But the TPLF are committing horrendous atrocities and nobody says anything. These double standards have been there for the past nine months since the TPLF ignited the conflict.

AG: Do you expect any kind of US or proxy military intervention beyond what’s already happened?

EA: Well, all the signs are there. I cannot ignore the warning signs, the rhetoric seems to be heading towards that, but the population of Ethiopia and Eritrea are determined, and they have stood united.

After the Afghanistan debacle, the shambolic retreat, the US may want to create yet another war. The actors are the same in these forever wars that benefit only the military industrial complex. So with the ending of Afghanistan, they may be looking at the whole Horn of Africa. Who knows?

AG: Afghanistan doesn’t seem to have ended, though it may be a drone war going forward.

EA: Yes, you’re right. It’s an ending that hasn’t ended yet. That might make them hesitant to get overly involved in a new conflict, but again, who knows?

I think the public can have influence, but the corporate media is hopeless. Before the wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, there were massive disinformation campaigns from the corporate media, but we in the peace movements have to continue exposing these lies. We have to bring the truth forward to make peace possible.

AG: Thank you, Elias, for speaking to Black Agenda Report.

EA: Thank you. I’m glad we’re able to continue the relationship with Black Agenda Report. For many years, Glen Ford was our only friend in the US media, as I wrote in “Farewell to Glen Ford, a True Friend of Eritrea.”

AG: One of the last things Glen said to me was that he was glad I was staying on top of this because he’d been too sick to, so I’m glad to carry it on.

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Eritrean American Elias Amare is a journalist and a longtime peace and justice activist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He and his work can be found on Twitter, @eliasamare .

Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. You can support her independent journalism on Patreon . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

Featured image: Elias Amare enjoyed a long friendship with Glen Ford, who was Eritrea’s only media ally for many years. (Source: BAR)

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Inquiring minds are diving into the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Please consider the Climate Change 2021 Report, the Physical Science Basis.

Key Snips 

1. Global surface temperature was 1.09 [0.95 to 1.20] °C higher in 2011– 2020 than 1850–1900, with larger increases over land (1.59 [1.34 to 1.83] °C) than over the ocean (0.88 [0.68 to 1.01] °C). The estimated increase in global surface temperature since AR5 is principally due to further warming since 2003–2012 (+0.19 [0.16 to 0.22] °C). Additionally, methodological advances and new datasets contributed approximately 0.1ºC to the updated estimate of warming in AR6
2. The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C.
3. Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15 to 0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1] mm yr between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to 4.2] mm yr between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).
4. In 2011–2020, annual average Arctic sea ice area reached its lowest level since at least 1850 (high confidence). Late summer Arctic sea ice area was smaller than at any time in at least the past 1000 years (medium confidence). The global nature of glacier retreat, with almost all of the world’s glaciers retreating synchronously, since the 1950s is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years (medium confidence).
5. It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades, and the latitude where tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific reach their peak intensity has shifted northward; these changes cannot be explained by internal variability alone (medium confidence). There is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in the frequency of all-category tropical cyclones.
6. Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.
7. It is very likely that heavy precipitation events will intensify and become more frequent in most regions with additional global warming. At the global scale, extreme daily precipitation events are projected to intensify by about 7% for each 1°C of global warming (high confidence).
8. It is virtually certain that global mean sea level will continue to rise over the 21st century. Relative to 1995-2014, the likely global mean sea level rise by 2100 is 0.28-0.55 m under the very low GHG emissions scenario (SSP1-1.9), 0.32-0.62 m under the low GHG emissions scenario (SSP1-2.6), 0.44-0.76 m under the intermediate GHG emissions scenario (SSP2-4.5), and 0.63-1.01 m under the very high GHG emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5), and by 2150 is 0.37-0.86 m under the very low scenario (SSP1-1.9), 0.46- 0.99 m under the low scenario (SSP1-2.6), 0.66-1.33 m under the intermediate scenario (SSP2-4.5), and 0.98-1.88 m under the very high scenario (SSP5-8.5) (medium confidence).

Changes in Global Surface Temperatures

Key Snip Synopsis

• Temperatures have risen a a best estimate of 1.07°C since 1850 due to man-made causes.
• The sea rise between 1971 and 2006 was 1.3 mm per year. That’s 0.0511811 inches per year.
• The sea rise between 2006 and 2018 was 3.7 mm per year. That’s 0.145669 inches per year.
• Under all emissions scenarios, global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century.

Future Emissions Projections 

Future Emissions Projections Table

Future Emissions “What If?”

• If by some miracle we follow the SSP 1-1.9 row in the table, the current best estimate is temperatures will rise anyway until 2100 by 1.4 degrees.
• According to row SSP 2-4.5, if there is no further progress at all until 2050, temperatures would only rise an additional 1.3 degrees vs SSP 1-1.9.
• Under SSP 1-2.6, there’s a mere 0.4 degrees difference from a very radical effort to cut emissions to 0 by 2050!

Media Can’t Handle the Climate Truth

Please consider the WSJ Op-Ed Media Can’t Handle the Climate Truth

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

The U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

You might not wish this on your least-favorite planet, but compare it with media coverage of the U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2018, which paraded as a nearly foregone conclusion a temperature increase of 6.1 degrees.

This week’s massive rainstorm in the Northeast reflexively was described as a consequence of climate change. Never mind that heavy rains always happened and, in any case, climate policy can’t be a solution for a New York City storm-drain system designed not to withstand a five-year storm, let alone a 100-year storm.

Or take the U.S. government’s claim that July was the hottest month on record. Unmentioned in any news report that I could find, the margin of error in this measurement was 10 times as large as the purported difference over the previously claimed hottest month of July 2016.

Code Red For Humanity?

The words most quoted in the press weren’t found in the U.N. report or even its executive summary. They were the claims of a pair of U.N. officials that the report heralded a “code red for humanity” and, even more devoid of meaning, that “no one is safe” from a warming planet.

Even if you believe the science, the one thing neither the media nor any panels like to discuss is costs.

Economically Crazy

Stunningly Absurd Green New Deal

On February 7 2020, AOC unleashed her Stunningly Absurd “New Green Deal”.

1. Upgrade all existing buildings in the US
2. 100% clean power
3. Support family farms
4. Universal access to healthy food
5. Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure
6. Remove greenhouse gasses form the atmosphere
7. Eliminate unfair competition
8. Affordable access to electricity
9. Create high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
10. Guaranteeing a job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States

A think-tank led by a former Congressional Budget Office director has come up with a price of the New Green Deal: AOC’s Green New Deal Price Tag of $51 to $93 Trillion vs. Cost of Doing Nothing

More $90 Trillion Solutions

In 2015, Business Insider noted A Plan Is Floating Around Davos To Spend $90 Trillion Redesigning All The Cities So They Don’t Need Cars

The $90 trillion proposal came from former US vice president Al Gore, former president of Mexico Felipe Calderon, and their colleagues on The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

50 Years of Dire Climate Forecasts

Let’s review 50 Years of Dire Climate Forecasts and What Actually Happened

1. 1967 Salt Lake Tribune: Dire Famine Forecast by 1975, Already Too Late
2. 1969 NYT: “Unless we are extremely lucky, everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years. The situation will get worse unless we change our behavior.“
3. 1970 Boston Globe: Scientist Predicts New Ice Age by 21st Century said James P. Lodge, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
4. 1971 Washington Post: Disastrous New Ice Age Coming says S.I. Rasool at NASA.
5. 1972 Brown University Letter to President Nixon: Warning on Global Cooling
6. 1974 The Guardian: Space Satellites Show Ice Age Coming Fast
7. 1974 Time Magazine: Another Ice Age “Telling signs everywhere. Since the 1940s mean global temperatures have dropped 2.7 degrees F.”
8. 1974 “Ozone Depletion a Great Peril to Life” University of Michigan Scientist
9. 1976 NYT The Cooling: University of Wisconsin climatologist Stephen Schneider laments about the “deaf ear his warnings received.”
10. 1988 Agence France Press: Maldives will be Completely Under Water in 30 Years.
11. 1989 Associated Press: UN Official Says Rising Seas to ‘Obliterate Nations’ by 2000.
12. 1989 Salon: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019 said Jim Hansen the scientist who lectured Congress in 1988 about the greenhouse effect.
13. 2000 The Independent: “Snowfalls are a thing of the past. Our children will not know what snow is,” says senior climate researcher.
14. 2004 The Guardian: The Pentagon Tells Bush Climate Change Will Destroy Us. “Britain will be Siberian in less than 20 years,” the Pentagon told Bush.
15. 2008 Associate Press: NASA Scientist says “We’re Toast. In 5-10 years the Arctic will be Ice Free”
16. 2008 Al Gore: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013.
17. 2009 The Independent: Prince Charles says Just 96 Months to Save the World. “The price of capitalism is too high.”
18. 2009 The Independent: Gordon Brown says “We have fewer than 50 days to save our planet from catastrophe.”
19. 2013 The Guardian: The Arctic will be Ice Free in Two Years. “The release of a 50 gigaton of methane pulse” will destabilize the planet.
20. 2013 The Guardian: US Navy Predicts Ice Free Arctic by 2016. “The US Navy’s department of Oceanography uses complex modeling to makes its forecast more accurate than others.
21. 2014 John Kerry: “We have 500 days to Avoid Climate Chaos” discussed Sec of State John Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabious at a joint meeting.

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***

 

As a matter of ritual, every U.S. president invariably gets up on his lectern and extols the United States as the greatest country in the world, claiming it has a duty to export its superior governing institutions all around the world.

Yet citizens of the nation’s capital are exposed to toxins in their daily lives, including from military bases, and live in a very unhealthful environment. And their government consistently looks the other way—largely because elected officials are too timid to confront the military establishment or corporations that produce pollutants because they bring so many jobs to their district or state.

In late July, the District of Columbia’s Statehood Green Party (“Green Party”) sent a letter to Tommy Wells, Director of the Washington, D.C., Department of Energy & Environment, warning of unregulated Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination in the nation’s capital.

The left-wing party cited a study by the Sierra Club and the Ecology Center that found astronomical levels of toxic PFAS produced by DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in Bloom Soil Conditioner.

The product, sold in hardware stores in the District, contains 100% sewer sludge, euphemistically referred to as “biosolids.”

The firm SGS AXYS Analytical Services measured levels of PFAS chemicals in the soil products from nine garden fertilizers in eight states and the District of Columbia. Total PFAS ranged from 38,000 parts per trillion (ppt) to 223,000 ppt.

Bloom Soil Conditioner was the most contaminated at 223,000 ppt for all PFAS tested. The Bloom product contained 23,800 ppt of Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and 22,100 ppt of Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), two of the most toxic varieties of PFAS.

Ann Wilcox, a longtime DC Statehood Green Party leader and 2020 candidate for DC Council, said, “Our preliminary inquiry shows that PFAS are dangerous chemicals that must be regulated by the DC Government. We call on DC authorities to conduct comprehensive testing for PFAS in DC soil, water, and fish.”

Sewer sludge is poisonous and we are spreading it over our gardens and farm fields. The rains come and the waters drain into the aquifer and run into surface water. Both paths ultimately lead to human consumption. The stuff does not break down. PFOS may be the most frightening of all varieties of PFAS because it travels far in water and wildly bioaccumulates in fish.

The D.C. Government’s toxic sludge is spread on the city’s school gardens.

People catch catfish and bass in the Potomac just south of DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. They catch it and they eat it. What’s in the fish? Nobody gives a damn.

Michigan tested 2,841 fish for PFAS last year and found the average fish contained 80,000 ppt of PFAS. Almost all of it was PFOS. The state limits PFOS in drinking water to 16 ppt, but people can eat the contaminated fish on an unregulated basis.

Source: michiganradio.org

Ann Wilcox sounded an alarm on the quality of the water in the Potomac River in Washington. “We’re deeply concerned with the levels of PFAS in the wastewater that enters the Potomac from Blue Plains—and its impact on the fish.”

PFAS are unregulated by the U.S. government and the D.C. government, meaning that military and industrial sites are legally allowed to flush PFAS chemicals down wastewater drains where they settle in the solid materials during wastewater treatment.

Sonya Lunder, Senior Toxics Policy Adviser for the Sierra Club, said, “EPA and states must take swift action to enact strong standards to safeguard us from toxic PFAS continuing to flow into our wastewater and keep contaminated sewage wastes out of home gardens and farmlands.”

The Green Party is working in the nation’s capital to do the same.

*

The following is the Green Party’s compelling critique of DC Water’s website pertaining to PFAS, followed by an investigation of potential sources of PFAS entering Blue Plains.

DC Water – WHAT ARE PFAS/WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?

PFAS are a group of more than 3,000 man-made chemicals that are fire, oil, grease, water and stain resistant, and are found in a wide array of consumer and industrial products, including non-stick cookware, stain repellant, dental floss, cleaning products, and cosmetics.

Over the last 70 years, PFAS, like Teflon, have been used around the world to enhance everyday products. Exposure to humans can occur by eating, inhaling, or even touching the product. Some PFAS are now known to be bad for human health. While there are hundreds of banned PFAS, there are thousands more in existence, and more than 600 still used commercially in the United States.

Green Response – There are nearly 8,000 PFAS varieties that have been developed, while only two, PFOS and PFOA, are included in the EPA’s Lifetime Health Advisory of 70 ppt for drinking water.

The U.S. government, the DOD, and manufacturers like 3M have known these chemicals are harmful for 50 years. The use of aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF is one the most likely sources of PFAS in our drinking water. AFFF is the active ingredient in fire-fighting foams used by the four branches of the military, as well as the Coast Guard, and, very likely, DC Fire.

Source: credit-suisse.com

Consuming seafood caught from waters contaminated with PFAS is the primary source of the contamination in our bodies. The European Food Safety Authority EFSA estimates that fish and other seafood account for up to 86% of dietary PFAS exposure in adults. Foods grown in soils treated with sewer sludge, euphemistically called “biosolids,” are the second most prevalent pathway for human exposure.

Water is a distant third, although it is still a significant source for contamination. The people catching catfish and bass and other species from the Anacostia and Potomac rivers are likely to be the most endangered, although we can’t say for sure until a robust testing regime is carried out by a truly independent firm for the surface waters and aquatic life in the District.

DC Water – WHY ARE PFAS A PROBLEM?

PFAS do not break down or go away in the environment. In fact, these compounds have been found in rainwater samples, and one or more PFAS is found in the blood of most Americans, at low levels.

However, this does not mean they will cause a health problem. Research is ongoing to understand the human health effects from the compounds, and the EPA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describe the health effects from exposure to low environmental levels of PFAS as uncertain.

Green Response – It’s time to update your website. New findings confirming disastrous health impacts are being published almost every day. In May 2021, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), published its Toxicological Profile for Perfluoroalkyls. They summarize their findings:

“Evidence from epidemiological studies suggest associations between perfluoroalkyl exposure and several health outcomes including liver damage, increases in serum lipids, thyroid disease, immune effects, reproductive toxicity, and developmental toxicity. The primary health effects observed in laboratory animals are liver, developmental, and immune toxicity.”

Pub Med, a publication of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine, is an amazing resource https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Simply search for an individual PFAS by its acronym. For instance, a search for PFOA returns 3,210 results, like this: J Endocrinol Invest 2017 Feb;40(2):105-121. doi: 10.1007/s40618-016-0572-z. Epub 2016 Nov 11. Thyroid disruption by perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) F Coperchini 1, et al.

No one should have PFAS in their blood. The toxins don’t break down in our bodies and they typically bioaccumulate. PFAS are a very real threat to the residents of Washington, D.C. The Environmental Working Group says we ought to limit PFAS consumption in water to 1 part per trillion per day.

DC Water – HOW DOES PFAS GET INTO WATER SUPPLIES?

The main sources of PFAS contamination in water are industries that make or use PFAS in their products, and military bases and airfields that have conducted fire-fighting training. The PFAS gets into wastewater and stormwater and runs off into streams, rivers or groundwater.

Green Response – DC Water left out landfills and transfer stations, both present and past.

In 2019, three mattresses, two box springs, two couches, and one chair were pulled out of the waste stream at the Coventry Landfill in Vermont and tested for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals. Small swatches of fabric were analyzed and found to contain a combined concentration of 1,215,330 ppt of PFAS. (See Appendix C)

Source: pcconcstruction.com

DC Water – WHAT ABOUT THE DISTRICT’S DRINKING WATER?

In 2014, DC Water and other utilities that use water from the Potomac River tested drinking water supplies for several PFAS. No detectable levels of these compounds were found in D.C.’s drinking water. These test results were published at www.dcwater.com/UCMR3results (Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, UCMR3)

Newer, more precise methods of testing have been developed since the 2014 testing to detect extremely low levels of PFAS. The Environmental Working Group recently released a study which detected PFAS in District drinking water at levels well below any established EPA health advisory for these compounds.

Green Response—At the time of the UCMR3 monitoring, the laboratory minimum reporting levels required by EPA for the six PFAS compounds tested varied from 10 ppt to 90 ppt per compound. Some of the laboratories that analyzed the samples taken during UCMR3 achieved lower reporting limits than those required by EPA, but only reported concentrations greater than EPA’s required reporting limits.

The PFAS levels in Washington, D.C., in 2014 are likely much higher than the 21.7 ppt officially announced. People in Washington, D.C., who have been drinking the city’s water for many years have accumulated high levels of PFAS in their bodies.

---

UCMR3

Detection Detection

PFAS Min. Limits – 2014 Min. Limits Today

PFOA 20 ppt 2 ppt

PFOS 40 ppt 4 ppt

PFHxS 30 ppt 3 ppt

PFHpA 10 ppt 2 ppt

PFNA 20 ppt 2 ppt

PFBS 90 ppt 9 ppt

---

To take this to mathematical extremes, the chart illustrates that samples collected in 2014 could have contained values up to the following levels that would not have been reported:

PFOA 19
PFOS 39

PFHxS 29

PFHpA 9
PFNA 19
PFBS 89

---

Massachusetts is one of several states to establish maximum contamination levels for PFAS in drinking water. The state limits the following six compounds to 20 parts per trillion: PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, PFNA, PFHpA, and PFDA.

All of D.C.’s water comes from the Potomac so we must analyze that source. There are military installations, industrial sites, and wastewater treatment plants up and down the Potomac north of Washington that discharge PFAS into the river, although we do not have test results. Maryland owns the Potomac and has not been forthcoming. [NOTE: I’m not sure what he means by Maryland “owns” the Potomac. It starts in West Virginia and forms the border between West Virginia and Virginia for some of its flow; most of it flows through Maryland into the Chesapeake.]

The Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant

There does not appear to be any type of regulatory oversight in the District of Columbia for PFAS. There is no mention of PFAS in the current Blue Plains #DC0021199 Authorization to Discharge under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit.

Filtrate treatment facility at Blue Plains. [Source: pconstruction.com]

PFAS is not monitored in the influent, effluent, or sludge at Blue Plains. See “Our Pretreatment Program Protects Your Waterways.” Then download this spreadsheet report:

The following military sites are known to use PFAS and discharge waste to Blue Plains:

• Joint Base Andrews (through Piscataway WWTP, then to Blue Plains)
• Naval Support Activity Bethesda, MD
• Fort Detrick – Forest Glen
• Naval Research Lab
• Naval Support Facility Carderock
• Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling

PFAS have been found contaminating groundwater at or near a number of airports and military air bases that use or used PFAS-containing foam to suppress fires. In this 2013 photo, a fire crew at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware responded to a massive inadvertent foam release from a hangar fire suppression system. [Source: stardem.com]

Documentation of PFAS use at military installations in the Washington, D.C. area:

Joint Base Andrews

Andrews sends sewage to Piscataway WWTP and the Piscataway WWTP sends its sewage to Blue Plains.

The Air Force has contaminated the groundwater at Joint Base Andrews with 39,700 parts per trillion of PFAS chemicals according to a report released by the Air Force in May 2018. The base, known as the “Home of Air Force One” is located about ten miles southeast of Washington.

The base pollutes the Potomac and Patuxent rivers. Groundwater from numerous sites on base where PFAS-laden foams were used move east toward the Patuxent as well as west toward the Potomac.

Meanwhile, surface water from the base travels to Piscataway Creek, Cabin Branch Creek, Henson Creek, and Meetinghouse Branch, emptying waters into both rivers. PFAS may travel for miles. It contaminates fish and sickens people who consume it.

Areas where carcinogenic fire-fighting foams were routinely used are shown in red.  Fire Training Area  (FT-04) is shown at the southeast corner of the runway.  Groundwater there was found to contain extremely high levels of PFAS. [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]

The Burn Pits

Fire training areas (FTAs) consisted of a 200-300-foot diameter burn pit. During fire training activities, the burn pit was saturated with water before an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 gallons of flammable liquids were added to the burn pit and ignited.

They used oil and mixed it with jet fuel.

Thousands of gallons of foam solution were applied during a given event, while a teaspoon of the substance is capable of poisoning a city’s entire drinking water reservoir.

The fire training area shown above at the southeast corner of the runway was used for fire training activities from 1973 to 1990. Weekly exercises were conducted consisting of igniting combustible liquids in the burn pit and extinguishing the resulting fire with AFFF.

Huge mushroom clouds of toxic chemical smoke and dust would form. The Air Force did not bother to track the quantity of AFFF used during these exercises.

Excess fluids generated during the exercises flowed across the burn area. Residual foam and water passed into the gravel bottom leaching pond. Liquids typically seeped through the gravel into the ground, but the leaching pond often became plugged, causing the pond to overflow onto the ground surface in the area.

The pit was also used for time and distance testing for fire trucks using AFFF. Historically, testing is conducted several times a year to test the fire truck settings to ensure proper equipment operation, especially at a distance.

The Air Force made a mess of things just a few miles south of Washington, using the carcinogenic foams at multiple locations at JB Andrews:

• Several Fire Training areas;
• Hangars 16, 11, 6, 7;
• Fire Station Building 3629;
• Former Hale Berry Farm; abd
• Former Brandywine DRMO Yard (8 miles from base).

Burn pit exposure video. [Source: vetshq.com]

The Brandywine Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office (DRMO)

The Brandywine site is an inactive DOD facility on eight acres approximately eight miles south-southeast of Joint Base Andrews. Records indicate there were two burn pits used for disposal and burning of waste. PFAS was also found due to improper storage of AFFF. Groundwater and surface water from the site drain into the Potomac River. The Air Force has promised to investigate the lethal plume in the future.

Naval Support Activity, Bethesda, Maryland

Bethesda is included in a database compiled by the Department of Defense Environmental Restoration Program (DERP – no longer online) showing sites with potential PFAS contamination. The former lab disposal area has been designated as an area of concern (AOC). Bethesda is responsible for base operational support for its major tenant, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Fort Detrick Annex, Forest Glen, Maryland

The Army is conducting a preliminary assessment of PFAS usage at the Forest Glen Annex, Silver Spring. The facility is located just a few hundred feet from Rock Creek, a major tributary of the Potomac River. [NOTE: Being a resident of this area, I would drop the reference to “Forest Glen” as a location and just use “Silver Spring.” In other words, in the sub-head use “Silver Spring” (as the location) instead of “Forest Glen” but keep the reference to the “Forest Glen Annex” (because that’s more like a title). “Forest Glen” is a very small section of the city of Silver Spring.]

Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland

The Army is conducting a preliminary assessment of PFAS contamination at their bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, 45 miles north of Washington. The Fort Detrick Wastewater Treatment Plant is a secret federal facility and it discharges wastewater into the Monocacy River, a major tributary of the Potomac River.

Fort Detrick’s treatment plant is a frightening cauldron.

“For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” – Shakespeare, from Macbeth.

The Army has been using PFAS since the early 1970s but recent public scrutiny has put these practices under the microscope. We still do not have data on PFAS in sewer sludge, wastewater, surface water, or fish from the Fort Detrick facility. It is kept a secret at Fort Detrick, like the details of the bioweapons program.

Although America’s mainstream media prefer not to shine light on Fort Detrick, the cancer cluster surrounding the base makes for a compelling graphic.

Fort Detrick cancer clusters. [Source: kristenrenee.org]

Source: paenvironmentaldaily.blogspot.com

Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C.

We have no information on PFAS contamination at the Washington Navy Yard, located on the Anacostia River, close to its confluence with the Potomac. It is one of the most contaminated patches of real estate in the country. The ground adjacent to the river is contaminated with tetrachloride, cyanide, perchloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, dichloroethene, vinyl chloride, lead, and heavy metals, acids, cleaners, caustics, iridite and alkaline, lead, chromium, cadmium, antimony, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins.

To explore this dynamic website deeper, click on source. [Source: propublica.org]

Meanwhile, the D.C. government says it is OK to eat four servings per month of sunfish, or three servings per month of blue catfish or white perch, or two servings per month of largemouth bass, or one serving per month of brown bullhead catfish or channel catfish caught from the Potomac or the Anacostia rivers. The public is told not to consume eel, carp or striped bass from the District’s waters. The District’s fish advisory does not mention PFAS because it is not considered to be a hazardous substance by the D.C. or federal governments.

The Naval Research Laboratory, Chesapeake Bay Detachment

The NRL-CBD, as the Navy prefers to call it, is located in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, about 30 miles from D.C. The Navy disclosed in May that the base was found to have more than 8,000,000 ppt of PFOS/PFOA in the soil. This is likely be the highest concentration of carcinogens in the environment anywhere on earth.

The runoff from the base drains into the Chesapeake Bay. Streams leaving the base en route to the bay contain more than 5,000 ppt of PFAS, contaminating much of the central region of the Chesapeake. The Wisconsin Department of the Environment says 2 ppt of PFAS in surface waters endanger public health due to the bioaccumulative nature of these chemicals in fish.

Scientists and arsonists from the Washington Navy Yard have descended on the little town of Chesapeake Beach since 1968 to ignite enormous fires and douse them with carcinogenic foams. Aqueous film-forming foam containing PFAS has been in use here longer than anywhere.

Naval Support Facility Carderock

The DOD has identified the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as an installation with a “known or suspected release of PFOS/PFOA.” No other information is known on this base regarding PFAS contamination. The facility is adjacent to the picturesque C&O Canal and the Potomac River five miles north of Washington.

Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling [Source: ucsusa.org]

Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling

The sewage from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling is sent to Blue Plains which is located immediately south of the base on the Potomac River. We do not know how much PFAS is contained within the sewage.

The U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center contains no record of PFAS contamination present in the groundwater, soil, etc., at the old Bolling AFB site. To gain a perspective of the nature of the problem, see this list of the 100 most contaminated military sites across the country.

The Army’s burn pit at Fort Meade, located on the Little Patuxent River 22 miles northeast of Washington, is heavily contaminated. The groundwater contains 89,000 ppt of PFOS/PFOA. Several states limit the sum of these compounds to less than 20 ppt in groundwater.

The Army reported in 2018 that PFAS was not migrating off-site. This is pretty tough to believe, considering the migration of these chemicals has been documented from more than a hundred U.S. military installations around the world.

It would not be difficult for environmentalists to test the surface water flowing out of the base and test the private wells near the facility to confirm this. The State of Maryland, however, has shown no interest in tangling with the DOD in this regard. The Little Patuxent River runs alongside the burn pit.

The White Oak – Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division Detachment in Silver Spring, Maryland

White Oak is a former Navy laboratory for naval surface warfare research that closed in 1997. The Pentagon reported in 2018 that the facility had contaminated groundwater with a concentration of 1,365 ppt of PFOA + PFOA.

AFFF was used at the Site 5 and Site 7 burn pits. A preliminary assessment has been completed and some soil and groundwater sampling has been done, although those results have not been made public.

We should expect results from a new round of testing soon. The facility lies in an area of gently rolling hills, adjacent to Paint Branch, a tributary of the Anacostia River in Washington. The creek dominates the local drainage patterns.

More in the region

Bay Head Road Annex, Annapolis, is a former facility used by the Naval Weapons Facility. AFFF was used for fire training on a concrete burn pad, leaving groundwater concentrations at 70,000 ppt. The site is now home to the Children’s Theater of Annapolis. Waters drain into the Chesapeake Bay. PFAS has also been found at the Naval Support Activity Annapolis (NSAA), and the David Taylor Research Center, Annapolis. The Navy has not published the levels of contamination there.

Numbered sites identify potentially lethal contamination. The burn pit is located at the newly added Site 71 at Indian Head. [Source: worldbeyondwar.com]

Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head, Maryland, is one of the most severely contaminated patches of ground anywhere on the planet. It has been used as an explosives training and dumping ground for the Navy since the Spanish-American War. The facility is located 25 miles south of Washington on the Potomac River.

The Navy has reported that there are five sites that “have the potential to be contaminated with PFAS.” The public has been promised data on PFAS levels by August of 2021. The media leaves this place alone while the public is not engaged.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head, Maryland, is one of the most severely contaminated patches of ground anywhere on the planet. [Source: wikipedia.org]

And who knows if the local community would be concerned that a Norwegian firm, NAMMO, has been invited by the Navy to manufacture and then test its rockets in the river? The weapons manufacturer brings jobs to the D.C. area.

For his part, Maryland’s Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer, ”celebrates” the environmental catastrophe. In 2017 he attended a ceremony at Indian Head where he said “This new partnership (with the Norwegian arms maker, NAMMO) comes amid celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of explosive ordnance disposal in the Navy, which we’ve been celebrating since August.” [NOTE: I’m guessing that the words in parentheses should probably be inside brackets because they were not part of the original quote.]

The Norwegians are extremely sensitive about testing these weapons in their own waters. NAMMO manufactures lead-free bullets for the Norwegian military.

Wherever weapons systems are tested, we find high levels of PFAS contamination.

(See Norwegian missile maker to open plant at Navy facility in Indian Head)

Loading Norwegian rockets to be tested in the Potomac River from the Indian Head Surface Warfare Center. Norwegians are sensitive about testing ballistics in their environmentally pristine fjords. [Source: Photo courtesy of Pat Elder]

The Naval Air Station NAS Patuxent River

Pax River, as it is known, is 75 miles southeast of Washington. The base recently reported PFAS with a concentration of 37,000 parts per trillion in the groundwater adjacent to the Chesapeake Bay. Pax River recently dumped 2,500 gallons of super-concentrated AFFF into the local St. Mary’s County wastewater treatment plant.

The overhead suppression system accidentally went off, a regular occurrence in the hangar on base and in facilities around the world. The treatment facility promptly pumped the super-concentrated toxins through pipes two miles into the middle of the bay where charter fishing boats bring anglers to fish for the contaminated striped bass, known as rockfish, in the Chesapeake region.

See “The Captain and the Foam: The Navy is misleading a maryland community on PFAS dangers” and “Interview with George Erichsen, Director, St. Mary’s County (MD) Metropolitan Commission.“

Highly toxic PFAS foam gathers on the beach 1,800 feet across St. Inigoes Creek from Webster Field, shown in the background. [Photo by Pat Elder]

Webster Field Annex of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station

Webster Field reported 87,000 ppt of PFAS in the groundwater leaching into a tributary of the Potomac close to the Chesapeake Bay about 80 miles south of D.C. Rockfish near the base contain 23,100 ppt of the toxins. The crabs and oysters are poisoned as well. Despite pressure from the public, the Maryland Department of Health has not posted health warnings regarding PFAS levels in seafood or the foam. Children have been seen playing in the foam on the state’s beaches.

See “30 Questions for the Navy, EPA, and Maryland Department of the Environment regarding recent disclosures of PFAS contamination from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Mary’s County, Maryland.“

Aberdeen Proving Ground

Aberdeen has been used by the Army since World War I. It is located on the Chesapeake Bay, 70 miles northeast of Washington. The Army has reported several areas of PFAS contamination although they have yet to divulge the levels. A kayak trip last summer by the author and others revealed that Channel Creek, which flows into the Gunpowder River near its mouth with the Chesapeake, was fully covered in several inches of foam.

From the Green Party

We don’t know whether these facilities deliver PFAS-laden sewage or leachate to Blue Plains, although this is a common practice nationwide. Leachate is contaminated liquid that moves through the soil and into groundwater and surface water.

We don’t know the levels of these chemicals in the river and in aquatic life. We don’t know the levels of PFAS contamination in the sludge leaving the plant that is likely spread on agricultural fields. We don’t know where the sludge is spread and the levels of contamination in the soils and agricultural produce grown on the contaminated farms. We want to find out.

Six directors of environmental agencies in New England wrote a historic letter to incoming EPA chief Michael Regan in early February 2021.

The environmental chiefs pleaded with the EPA to step up to develop PFAS surface water standards and fish consumption guidance values. They made it clear that wastewater treatment plants are the source of much of the PFAS contamination crisis.

PFAS entering wastewater treatment facilities from commercial, military, industrial, waste, and residential sources is not removed from the effluent at Blue Plains or anywhere else. Special Projects Manager Ned Beecher of the North East Biosolids & Residuals Association (NEBRA) says all wastewater contains PFAS.  He would know.

The EPA hasn’t been much help. The EPA’s interim guidance on PFAS tells us they’re not sure how to manage PFAS. They’re uncertain about how to handle wastewater saturated with PFAS. They don’t know very much about incineration and how bad it likely is.

They don’t know the extent of PFAS-tainted leachate that seeps from landfills, and the EPA is not sure about the contamination caused by spreading PFAS-poisoned sewer sludge on farm fields. They just don’t know what to do, so they’ve decided not to regulate the stuff in any meaningful way, while agreeing to study it more. It’s been their playbook since way before the Trump disaster. We’ll see if the Biden administration gets tougher.

The point here is that it is up to the D.C. government to take measures to protect public health from the ravages of these chemicals.

The Fort Totten Transfer Station houses roughly two-thirds of the District’s waste while the Benning Road Transfer Station receives the other third. 3,000 tons a day are shipped to Covanta Fairfax Waste-to-Energy.

Fort Totten Transfer Station. [Source: zerowaste.dc.gov]

Covanta says its plant takes non-hazardous waste – otherwise destined for the landfill – and incinerates it to generate electricity. If we consider the couch and the carpet from Vermont’s landfill, it is certain Covanta is burning hazardous waste and sprinkling toxic powder on communities in Fairfax County. We say PFAS is hazardous. The EPA does not, so Covanta can burn it.

The District also sends waste with unspecified amounts of PFAS to the following locations:

• Annapolis Junction Transfer Station, Jessup, MD
• GeoCycle Waste to Energy, 2175 Gardner Blvd, Holly Hill, SC
• Covanta Energy Corporation Waste to Energy, Lorton, VA
• Alexandria Waste to Energy, Alexandria, VA
• Wheelabrator Baltimore Waste to Energy, Baltimore, MD

We have so many questions.

How is the leachate handled from these stations and from retired landfills? Specifically, where does the leachate from the old landfill at Joint Base Anacostia Bolling go? Are industrial discharges to Blue Plains coming from JB Anacostia-Bolling? Where does the leachate from the old Kenilworth Landfill go?

Ann Wilcox, with the DC Statehood Green Party, said she expects a response to the letter from Tommy Wells, D.C.’s environmental chief.

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Pat Elder is a peace and environmental activist who has run for Congress on the Green Party ticket in Southern Maryland. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image: D.C. Water treats wastewater from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia at the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. [Source: dcwater.com]

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Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) are keeping busy by continuing their strike activity from August into September.

In the early hours of September 6, the VKS bombarded militant hideouts near the villages of Kansafrah, al-Fterah and Ain Larouz in the Jabal al-Zawiyah region in the southern countryside of Idlib.

On the previous day, strikes targeted the towns of al-Bara, Kafryadin and Sheikh Sndian in Idlib, as well as Kabani in Lattakia.

In al-Bara, one of the airstrikes hit a target located right next to an observation post of the Turkish military.

Sources close to the al-Qaeda-linked Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the de-facto ruler of Greater Idlib, claimed that the VKS strikes were a response to a recent incident.

According to these unconfirmed claims, HTS’s special forces and snipers killed three soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army’s elite 25th Special Forces Division and a Russian service member who attempted to infiltrate the frontline.

On September 4th, VKS strikes hit many of the same positions, such as fortified posts, trenches and tunnels near the towns of Kansafra, Ain La Rose, al-Bara and Urum al-Jawz in the al-Zawiya Mountain area.

Russian warplanes have been pounding militants’ positions in Greater Idlib daily for several weeks.

This deterrence, however, is not working as on September 3rd, HTS carried out 35 shelling attacks from Greater Idlib, according to the Russian Reconciliation Center in Syria.

At least three service members of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) were wounded.

The SAA also return fire on a regular basis, alongside the VKS’ airstrikes.

On September 6th, Syrian artillery hit militant positions in Kansafra in Jabal al-Zawiyah in southern Idlib.

The situation in Greater Idlib is likely to remain tense and the exchanges of fire will continue.

The SAA and VKS continue targeting militant positions in Syria’s Idlib on a daily basis, while HTS and the other so-called “moderate opposition” groups continue violating the ceasefire.

Turkey and Russia signed the ceasefire agreement back in March of 2020, and Ankara’s forces, the militants it backs and the HTS-led militants in Greater Idlib have not kept it for a single day since then.

Turkey’s interests are also being continuously targeted, as on September 5th, an explosion took place in the outskirts of the city of Afrin, which is under the control of Turkish forces and their proxy factions.

Following the explosion, the Turkish-backed factions were put on high alert.

They then immediately accused the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Kurdish factions of carrying out the attack.

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Reuters exclusively reported on the transcript and audio recordings of the last phone call between US President Joe Biden and former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on 23 July that it received from an unnamed source on the condition of anonymity. The outlet purports that the American leader made a quid pro quo offer of military support to his Afghan counterpart against the Taliban in exchange for Mr. Ghani lying about to the public about state of his country’s military preparedness against the group.

This evokes very strong shades of former US President Donald Trump’s phone call last year with incumbent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. At that time, the American leader implied what Congress interpreted as the quid pro quo of his country’s military aid to the Ukrainian government on the condition of it investigating the corruption that Biden’s son Hunter was allegedly involved in there. Trump was ultimately impeached as a result of that phone call, but it’s unclear whether the same humiliating fate awaits Biden.

According to Reuters, Biden said the following:

“We will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is…I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”

In other words, Biden wanted Ghani to lie otherwise the US wouldn’t provide any more close air support for his country’s forces.

It should also be pointed out that the potential strikes that Biden was promising in this quid pro quo would have violated the US’ February 2020 peace deal with the Taliban. This makes his call doubly scandalous because not only was he doing the same thing that got Trump impeached by offering a quid pro quo of military aid in exchange for a foreign leader doing him a public favor, but he would have also risked the Taliban carrying out reprisal attacks against US forces in Afghanistan and thus endangering his troops’ lives.

Reuters’ report exposes the dark reality that America’s leaders want to hide from the world. It actually appears to be the rule, not the exception, that presidents attach political strings to the military aid that they provide to their nominal allies. Trump’s scandal was exploited by the then-opposition for political purposes related to influencing the upcoming presidential elections at the time and tarnishing his reputation as revenge for him consistently fighting against their agenda. That’s the only reason why it was even made public.

The situation is somewhat different with Biden though since the next presidential election is three years away though the midterm ones will be held next year. Even so, the implied purpose behind leaking his conversation with Ghani doesn’t seem to have been related to electoral motivations but might have arguably been patriotic ones as perceived from the American perspective. Even though it would have been a violation of the Doha Deal, Biden might have successfully stemmed the Taliban’s advance had he bombed them without preconditions.

His decision not to do so due to Ghani failing to fulfill his end of the deal by refusing to include former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Biden’s proposed press conference that Reuters also reported about resulted in the Taliban taking over Afghanistan and dealing the most humiliating blow ever to America’s reputation. It directly led to the chaotic situation outside the Kabul Airport that was soon thereafter exploited by ISIS-K during its terrorist attack that killed over 190 people including 13 US troops.

By contrast, Trump’s quid pro quo with Zelensky didn’t lead to any loss of life, especially not of American citizens or fleeing refugees. It can therefore be said that the Biden-Ghani call might be more damning than the Trump-Zelensky one. The first-mentioned was leaked for pressing electoral reasons while the latter was likely released in order to provide evidence for what some Republicans have described as Biden’s “dereliction of duty” while threatening to impeach him for the Afghan fiasco last month.

The whistleblower responsible for providing Reuters with this damning information wanted Americans to know that everything might have been different during the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan had Biden remained loyal to his Afghan allies and bombed the Taliban to prevent their ultimate takeover of Kabul. They evidently wanted to imply that Biden has the blood of 13 US troops on his hands. If the same standards that were applied to Trump are applied to Biden, then he might also be impeached, but only if the Democrats also support it.

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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.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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My first life was lived as a Russian. It was a kind of fictional life because I wasn’t born there. But my parents were born in Russia, and had to leave it because they were on the wrong side of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. My grandmother, my sweet Babushka who lived with us, told me I was Russian, and I believed her. Actually, she was misguided because her side of the family was from Ukraine. Yet the family language was Russian, a language well suited for all the stories of war, revolution, civil strife, hunger and desolation I heard in my childhood.

My real life started in Yugoslavia. At least I have a birth certificate stating as much, even though the country itself no longer exists. In Former Yugoslavia, then, it was my turn to witness war, revolution, civil strife, hunger and desolation: World War II was in progress and Yugoslavia was occupied by the Germans and bombed by everyone else. And the resistance movements that were fighting the Germans were also fighting each other.

Like Babushka, Mother turned out to be a good story teller. We learned to run from bombs into holes in the ground known as shelters, and Mom called it an adventure. And getting a bag of potatoes after a long wait on the food line she called a triumph. But when Dad disappeared for months, then showed up unexpectedly on Christmas Eve of 1943, we all called it a miracle.

My next life found me in Germany. There was no revolution or civil strife because the Germans knew exactly who they were – and started World War II to prove it. And because we lived behind barbed wire first in a Forced Labor Camp, and later in refugee camps known as Displaced Persons camps, it was clear that we were “the other.”

My next life lasted about nine years, and took its course in Morocco. The German language was displaced by French and Arabic. If there was hunger and desolation, it didn’t concern us. The Arabs lived in their Kasbahs perched high on bare mountain tops or in medieval sections of towns called Medinas. They only came to the European sections to clean houses or do the landscaping. My job was to learn French and to stick it out in boarding school. I managed it by and by and French books became a sort of home country, the source of all knowledge and understanding.

I did pick up some Arabic (you do need to communicate with the help) but it was taken for granted that that language would not disclose great treasures of knowledge and understanding. So, when evidence of rebellion, civil strife, and war broke out all around us, we were as unprepared as my family had been back in the days of the Russian Revolution.

It was time to move on again, and this took us all the way to Australia. This latest life segment proved a striking reversal of the previous one. My knowledge of Russian, Serbo-Croatian, German and French, with Latin and ancient Greek thrown in for good measure, proved useless in Australia. I was now a dumb immigrant, and it was my turn to clean other people’s houses. It wasn’t hunger and desolation exactly, but it was humiliating now that I was twenty years old, and thought of myself as pretty cool. Was it my turn to create survival stories the way Babushka and Mother had done? Or maybe take a page out of those French books, and strive for existential insight from scrubbing toilets?

Just the same, the French language was a catalyst for yet another life. A borrowed life to be sure, because it was a marriage gift from a francophone boy from Belgium named Rick De Roeck. He was a corporate brat, and his parents had been transferred to the United States. Belgium remained in limbo, and we became accidental Americans. We pursued our education and Rick got a job with General Motors, and after I got my PhD, I taught my various languages at various institutions of higher learning.

It looks like this American life is going to be my last. My children and grandchildren are typical monolingual Americans. We have typical middle-class problems, like which car to buy, which health insurance to pick, or how many likes we register on Facebook. Am I counting my blessings? Sure I am. Just the way my parents were counting on blessed Tsar Nicholas II to hold it together in Russia back in the day. Should I be counting on Trump or on Biden to keep it going?

But should I not know better after all those trial lives? Had I really forgotten how it was when bombs were exploding over my head and barbed wire defined my world and food was on my mind all the time because my stomach was empty? Or how they laughed at me in Australia because I didn’t know English? Or, for that matter, how imitating my elders, I rolled my eyes when the Moroccans spoke funny French?

But do war, revolution, civil strife, hunger and desolation really happen when they happen somewhere else – when they happen to others, say in Yemen? Or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Libya, or Syria, or elsewhere in Africa or Latin or Central America? But the alarm had already rung in my head when NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. Belgrade may have been “somewhere else” to Americans, but not to me. When I heard on NPR our missiles striking Belgrade, I became the three-year old girl crouching in a cellar in Belgrade in 1941, and it felt like I was bombing myself.

I now felt the urge to put it all together and tell my story. I wanted to ring the alarm so my American kids don’t have to suffer the consequence of their blessed ignorance. And that story – my memoir, had to retrace the long struggle of stepping out of the comfort zone of received opinion: whether the pieties of my Russian family, or the complicities of colonization and empire, or the Reality Show of the American Dream.

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Galina Litvinov De Roeck was born in Bihach, Bosnia. Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from CUNY. Taught French, German and Russian language and literature at various institutions of higher learning, now retired.

Published scholarly articles in her field. Memoir is available at PRAV Publishing and Amazon.

All images in this article are from the author

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Ted Kuntz of Vaccine Choice Canada talks with Dr. David Martin, an articulate man whose testimony about the pandemic has shocked the world. David revealed with undeniable evidence that the COVID pandemic has been planned for decades.

Watch the discussion below.

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Our thanks for Truth Comes to Light for mirroring this video from VCC.

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“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

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

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

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

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

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This year marks a seminal turning point in human history. For the first time since human civilization began, our species is being genetically modified. Vaccine manufacturers have now made it possible for the human genome to be permanently altered—and humanity’s relationship with nature forever changed—by means of an experimental pharmaceutical injection that is being falsely referred to as a “vaccine.”

In light of this defining event, I believe we must take a sober look at the motives and acts that are revamping humanity as we know it. Simultaneously, we must examine our increasingly destructive treatment of the natural world. 

In order to investigate the many variables that are hastening the demise of humanity and sabotaging our unique role as stewards of the earth and its billions of plant and animal species, I have divided this study into four main parts, which will appear as separate articles: 

In Part I: The Microbiome and The Virome, we will discover that we are literally swimming in a vast sea of genomic information that was essential for life to begin and flourish on this precious earth and that is still trying to help all species survive. The matrix of organisms that make up the microbiome have built a viromic information stream that has allowed for adaptation and biodiversity to occur on the planet. And that very same viromic information stream is responsible for building the human species.

In Part lI: Our War Against Nature, we will explore how our own reckless behaviour is destroying the environment, thereby moving us toward the sixth mass extinction. By that I mean, I will be covering the real environmental catastrophe, not the billionaire-funded “global warming/climate change” hoax initiated by the Club of Rome and further promulgated by the World Economic Forum (WEF). 

In Part III: What Happened in 2020, we will examine how this real environmental devastation has contributed to the “pandemic” that was rolled out in 2020, that led to the mass experimental injections of unknown substances into human “subjects” in 2021, and that has no foreseeable end. (I put “pandemic” in quotes because of its fraudulent character. Indeed, it is more accurately and aptly described as a plandemic, a scamdemic, a pseudo pandemic or any other term indicating fakery.)  

In Part IV: Our Response, we will analyze the irresponsible and irrational response of most people on the planet to this so-called pandemic. 

Read parts I and II here:

“Our Species is Being Genetically Modified”: Humanity’s March Toward Extinction? Analysis of the Microbiome and Virome

By David Skripac, August 15, 2021

Our War Against Nature. Humanity’s March Toward Extinction?

By David Skripac, August 20, 2021

 

Part IV

The Pandemic, “Our Species Is Being Genetically Modified’: Our Response

Instead of coming to terms with how we are destroying our habitat, instead of learning the lessons nature has been trying to teach us over the past 18 months, we have ignored the wreckage and have refused to be taught. If anything, humanity has only intensified its war against nature during the past year’s pseudo pandemic. 

For example, since January of last year, 129 billion face masks (most of them made from polypropylene) and 65 billion latex gloves have been disposed of every month, according to a study published by the ACS Publications’ Environmental Science & Technology journal.

A significant portion of this waste will eventually end up in the world’s oceans, where it will take the form of polluting microplastics. Then there are the billions upon billions of plastic and paper food containers that have been used—and discarded—as a result of the pandemic-created surge in takeout food orders once restaurants were closed to dine-in customers. 

And that’s only part of the environmental damage being wrought by this scam of all scams. Governments around the world—notably, in China and Italy—are spraying cancer-causing biocides into the atmosphere. That final act of madness, an effort to contain or destroy the unjustifiably feared virus, subjects pedestrians to still more harmful chemicals. These disinfectants will eventually end up in the tap water of millions of households. In short, we have no idea of the consequences that biocides may be having on the microbiome and on our long-term health. 

Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of medical professionals and scientists around the world have dared to stand on their oath to do no harm and to follow their conscience by telling the truth about the devastating consequences of adhering to the fake pandemic’s mandates. 

These brave men and women—all of them are either physicians or PhDs and thus use the title “Dr.”—include:

Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine technology;

pediatrician Lawrence Palevsky;

primary care physician Vladimir Zelenko; former NIAID scientist Judy Mikovits; attorney,

physician, and America’s Frontline Doctors founder Simone Gold; family physician Stephen Malthouse;

microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi;

associate professor of viral immunology Byram Bridle; pediatrician Paul Thomas;

cardiologist Richard Fleming; emergency room and family physician Patrick Philips;

pathologist Roger Hodkinson;

and former Pfizer Chief Science Officer Mike Yeadon, to name but a few. 

Each has raised serious concerns about the potential side effects these never-tested-or-approved-or-used “vaccines” may have on human health. And, for speaking out, each is being threatened and censored and worse.

Collectively, their apprehensions range from

(1) the possible effects that Lipid Nano Particles (LNPs) may be having on the human brain to

(2) how the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) may be causing anaphylactoid immune reactions to

(3) how the artificially induced spike proteins that travel throughout the human body may be producing blood clotting disorders in different parts of the body to

(4) how these excess spike proteins, which are a neurovascular toxin to the body, may be causing myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) in children and young adults.

One way medical practitioners are being bullied is through the strong-arm tactics of the agencies that licence them to practice.

For instance, Canada’s College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) issued an ominous statement in late April 2020 threatening to remove the licence to practice medicine of any doctor who publicly spoke out against—or even raised questions about—the harmful side effects of lockdowns and/or the COVID vaccines that they witnessed while working on the frontlines in their local hospitals and communities. In the US, the process of removing a doctor’s license is slightly different, but the end result is the same.

Each state has its own Medical Board that can temporarily suspend a medical license without a hearing if “the Board finds that Licensee’s conduct has breached the standard of care and has placed the health and safety of many of his patients at risk of harm.”   

Other attempts to prevent vital scientific information from reaching the public include the discrediting and stifling of medical practitioners, doctors, and scientists by Big Tech mainstream social media platforms like Google’s YouTube.

This should come as no surprise, since Google, which was created by the CIA, also has major ties to pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), registered in England. These individuals are also being deplatformed from Facebook—another DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)/CIA–created private company—as well as by Instagram, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linkedin, and Twitter.

Worse yet, doctors have faced extreme censorship for providing evidence that there are indeed viable, effective, and inexpensive treatments for COVID-19—treatments that obviate the need for a “vaccine.”

For instance, all of the physicians mentioned above, plus hundreds more from many countries, have not only praised but have repeatedly demonstrated the effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other remedies like Ivermectin, azithromycin, doxycycline, and zinc, in treating their COVID-19 patients. They have proven, for example, that CQ and HCQ, when administered in small prescribed doses, exert relatively few to no adverse effects. Numerous studies out of South Korea, China, and France bear further witness to that fact. 

Nevertheless, government health agencies—the FDA, the NIH, and the CDC in the US, the MHRA in the UK, and Health Canada—as well as the WHO continually ban these inexpensive treatments, try to discourage people from using them, and, with the mainstream media’s complicity,  make provably false claims about them. 

To find out why this suppression of effective treatments is occurring, we need look no further than the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for Vaccines (EUA) to Prevent COVID-19 that was issued in October 2020. On page six of this document, under Section lll, Criteria and Consideration for the Issuance of an EUA for a COVID-19 Vaccine, the last bullet point clearly states that the FDA may issue an EUA only if the FDA has determined that “there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.” This statement means that the entire premise of the EUA is based on a presupposition that there is no alternative intervention available. 

In reality, there are several inexpensive off-patent products to choose from, as we cited above—and as the FDA well knows. However, if it were to allow a cheap and readily available product like HCQ to dominate the market, the pharmaceutical industry—which appears to dictate policy to the FDA—would stand to lose billions in sales of COVID-19 vaccines. 

Is greed behind Big Pharma’s suppression of information on the alternative products? Most assuredly. And will Big Pharma’s cozy relationships with government agency officials and with the media (the latter being largely dependent upon pharmaceutical advertising for its existence) prevent word of these alternative products from ever reaching the majority of public? It would seem so. In other words, the EUA would not have been issued had the truth about alternative products been allowed to be widely shared.   

But because that truth has been suppressed, “COVID-19 vaccine” deaths are mounting.

As of August 2021, at least 21,000 people in the 27 countries comprising the European Union (EU) have died from being injected with these gene-altering devices, according to data collected by EudraVigilance. In the US, meanwhile, more than 13,000 people have succumbed to the shots, according to the data supplied to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The US figure is shocking: It means that these experimental injections have caused more deaths in a 6-month period than has the combination of 70 different approved vaccines in circulation over the last 30 years. As if that weren’t bad enough, a Harvard Study concluded that only 1% of injuries and deaths from all vaccines in the US are ever reported to VAERS. Even if the reporting is as high as 10%, that’s still low compared to the actual statistics. 

And yet, the COVID-19 gene-modification injections are still being aggressively pushed by the propagandists and their unscientific, unproven theories—and this despite the evidence that asymptomatic spread is not possible; that we do not need the injections and that they are neither safe nor effective; that COVID-19 is nowhere near as life-threatening as it was predicted to be; and that children need no protection from this virus. Besides, in spite of their insistence, there is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19.

Governments around the world continue to bribe and coerce citizens—in direct violation of the Nuremburg Code and only ostensibly “in the interest of public health”—into taking these injections. Those of us who have been researching and reading about this subject since its inception know that it has never been about preserving public health. It has always been about the goal of implementing a global biosecurity plan and a transhumanist control grid that, if allowed to come to fruition, would signify the end of the human species. 

This largely manufactured crisis has provided the perfect launching pad for biodigital convergence to take place. For those of you who think the notion of combining the human body with digital systems is hyperbole or fantasy, may I draw your attention to the “Exploring Biodigital Convergence” document issued February 11, 2020, by Policy Horizons Canada. The document indicates that the Canadian policy steering committee has discussed the frightening concept of altering the evolution of the human body through the integration of biological and digital nano-technologies. Indeed, it turns out that the broad genetic modification of the human species being engineered by the experimental COVID-19 injections is just the first phase of this transhumanist convergence. 

As if the Canadian document were not alarming enough, elsewhere an even greater menace to humanity is being rolled out. In May of 2021, the UK Ministry of Defence issued a “Human Augmentation—The Dawn of a New Paradigm” document. It was worked on by the UK’s Development, Concept and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defence Planning. Their purpose is “to understand the future implications of human augmentation (HA), setting the stage for more detailed defence research and development.”

By incorporating research from German, Swedish, Finnish, and UK defence specialists, the DCDC project attempts to better apprehend how emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, and bioinformatics, can further enhance security and defence capabilities. Although it is being touted as a strategic tool for military use, HA will undoubtedly, like the development of so many military programs throughout history, be eventually deployed for use in the civilian sector.     

I must say in no uncertain terms: The transhumanist projects in Canada, in the UK/Europe, and likely surreptitiously in other countries, combined with our willful destruction of the ecosystem, are the two greatest existential threats facing humanity today. Perhaps ever. 

Concluding Remarks

We are being relentlessly bombarded by a belief that lays blame squarely on one ancient virus (including its variants) as the sole culprit causing a global health crisis. Yet there exists not a shred of evidence proving that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease named COVID-19. This myopic view is preventing us from understanding the true, helpful nature of viruses, as we have detailed above. For, viruses are our friends. 

Moreover, this view is blinding us to the real ecological disaster unfolding around us, which viruses are trying to help us uncover and recover from.

Not only is humanity marching towards its own extinction but it is also moving rapidly away from science and is instead suffocating in technocratic anti-science dogma—a dogma that has turned into a rigid religion whose adherents worship many deities, two of whom are named “Vaccines” and “Technology.”   

As I explained at the beginning of this article (Part I), we are living in unprecedented times, in which humans can be genetically altered beyond recognition and the natural world is being ravaged almost beyond repair. 

Yet, though these threats are lethal, there are also signs of hope. It is not too late to envision another possible path—one that does not point to our doom but, rather, invites us to accept that humanity has been made, from the beginning, to be an intrinsic part of nature. If we learn from the errors of our ways, we have a window of opportunity to step back from the abyss of transhumanism and species extinction. We can instead embrace our beautiful planet with all of its glorious biodiversity—an earth teeming with abundant life that offers a glimpse of the perfect universe made by God, Spirit, and bestowed on divinity’s spiritual creation. 

Let us allow our good earth and our innate goodness to be made apparent instead of obscured and eventually annihilated.

Earth and every man, woman, child, and creature inhabiting it are actually infinite, eternal, divine ideas created by an infinite, eternal, divine Mind. It is time for us to acknowledge this truth—and demonstrate it in our lives.

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David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in aerospace engineering. During his two tours of duty as a captain in the Canadian Air Force, he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Using an inquisitive mind, a keen eye for detail, and problem-solving skills honed during his university years and throughout his career, David devoted over one hundred hours to researching the latest scientific findings in the fields of virology and microbiology to bring this article to fruition. 

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The facts:

Gibraltar has had a 99% vaccination rate since June 1.  The consequence has been a 2,500 percent daily increase in Covid cases.  As the vaccine is useless, why the push for mandatory vaccination and Covid passports?  It makes no public health sense.

See this.

THE BIG PHARMA SHILLS

Fauci:  “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”

Walensky:  “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”

German Health Minister:  “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”

See this

Notice how the shills speak identical words on cue every day.

There are two reasons for Covid infections.  One is the mRNA vaccine which spreads Covid.

The other is the refusal of the Western medical establishment to prevent and treat Covid with HCQ or Ivermectin.

The massive outbreak of new Covid cases in the most vaccinated countries–Israel 84%, Iceland 95%, Gibraltar 99%–has made it completely clear that the mRNA vaccine does not protect against Covid infection.  Fauci, a life-long shill for Big Pharma, is delighted.  His solution to the failure of the “vaccine” (it is not a vaccine) is more vaccine.  Booster shots are needed, he says, every 5 to 8 months to keep Covid at bay.  In other words profits forever for Big Pharma.

But the failure of the mRNA vaccine is far more serious than the failure to protect. The vaccine itself (1) causes illnesses and deaths identical to Covid illnesses and deaths as the massive number of deaths and health injuries in the adverse vaccine reaction databases indicate,  (2) the “vaccine” creates variants capable of escaping immune response, and (3) the vaccinated are contagious and dangerous to the unvaccinated.

In other words, the so-called breakthrough cases that are now overwhelming the most vaccinated countries are caused by vaccination.  To continue jabbing people risks such death and injury and counterproductive totalitarian policies as to lead to societal collapse.

This is the conclusion of a number of top scientists and medical authorities who are far superior in their knowledge than Big Pharma shills like Fauci and Walensky and the completely stupid American media who keep repeating “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” when the outbreaks are centered among the vaccinated in the most vaccinated countries.

We have to ask if it is possible even for American journalists to be as stupid as they present themselves to be, or are they being paid to lie?  We know that Fauci and Walensky benefit from vaccine profits.  Somehow this conflict of interest does not enter public discussion. Where are the indictments for Fauci and Walensky?

Indeed, all facts are censored, suppressed, and kept out of public discussion.  That is the function of  “social media,” CNN, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post and the rest of the presstitutes.

The “Covid crisis” is from start to finish a manufactured crisis.  The purpose of the mRNA vaccine is to worsen the crisis, which will lead to more counterproductive measures that threaten not merely freedom but life itself.

It has been proven in India and Africa that Ivermectin used as a preventative prevents Covid outbreaks, and Ivermectin has been proven as a cure by the success of many doctors who have used Ivermectin to cure their patients of Covid. Ivermectin is a safe and effective cure.

If you need more evidence of Ivermectin’s effectiveness beyond the chart with which this article begins, here is the Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association announcing in a press conference that Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for Covid infection and recommending that all doctors in Japan immediately begin using Ivermectin to treat Covid patients, see this.

Yet Western public medical authorities–not Japanese, Indian, and African– and presstitutes continue to lie through their teeth that Ivermectin is unsafe.  Do they tell this lie just for profits, or is a darker agenda afoot?

HCQ is another proven preventative and cure and it also is demonized as dangerous. HCQ needs to be taken early when symptoms first appear. Ivermectin is effective also at later stages of the virus.

If you come down with Covid and have co-morbidities  or a compromised immune system, do not go to a hospital.  They will put you on a ventilator and kill you.  You will not get treatment with known safe and effective cures.  Instead go to Japan, or India, or any of the African countries marked in blue in the opening chart, or cross the border into Mexico and purchase Ivermectin formulated for humans over the counter from a pharmacy. In the US try to get in contact with Frontline Doctors who are overwhelmed with pleas for help from Americans totally abandoned by the American Medical Establishment.

It is only in the English speaking countries, the US,  Western Europe, and in Israel that the population is unable to get effective and safe treatment for Covid infection.  These are the betrayed people who are being infected again and again with deadly mRNA “vaccine.”  The insane Israeli “Covid Czar” is advocating a 4th booster shot of the identical vaccine that has caused tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of health injuries, the same vaccine that has filled Israeli hospitals with fully vaccinated patients.  In the US the Big Pharma shill Fauci says it will be booster shots every 8 months.  This means endless adverse reactions to the “vaccine” and endless appearance of new “variants.”  But it means endless profits for Big Pharma, and that is all that is important.

The Covid policy being implemented in the West has no logic and no basis in any known facts.  What is going on?

Doctors and scientists  have reported the effectiveness of HCQ and Ivermectin, which have such safe records of use over decades that in countries not controlled by pharmaceutical companies they are available for over-the-counter purchase just like aspirin.  Yet the corrupt American medical establishment declares the proven preventatives and cures to be “unsafe,” and the mRNA vaccine that is spreading Covid is declared to be the answer.

What is the agenda?  Clearly, it is not the health of the public. Obviously, they want more variants, more Covid cases, more deaths and health injuries with which to scare the sheep, sell more vaccine, and impose more violations of civil liberty.

How can it be that in “free and democratic America” truth and facts are excluded from the discussion and have no impact on Covid policy?  How can it be that the leading scientists and medical practitioners who issue warnings against the growing vaccine catastrophe are censored and threatened with losing their medical licenses and employment?  What is happening in America is worse than what happened to Soviet geneticists under Lysenko.

Indeed, the ideologue Fauci is America’s Lysenko.  Under Lysenko’s rule, Soviet agriculture was destroyed and millions starved to death.  The real scientists who understood that Lysenko was a crank paid with their lives and careers.  3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned. In the campaign to suppress scientific opponents other scientists were executed. The president of the Agriculture Academy was sent to prison where he died, while Soviet genetics research was  destroyed. Research and teaching in the field of other biological disciplines, such as  cell biology and neurophisiology, deemed inconsistent with the Lysenko narrative were  banned.

This is what is happening today in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.  Real experts are discredited, and in their place we have CNN and other Big Pharma shills.

How can it be that in the midst of Covid infection disinformation is intentionally spread online by such sites as Coronavirus World Updates?  In my opinion, Coronavirus World Updates is an Internet lie sheet sponsored by greed-driven Big Pharma for the purpose of spreading disinformation in order to discourage people from seeking out and obtaining effective treatment for Covid infection. 

On September 4 the scare hype from the disinformation site was a fake story picked up from Rolling Stone magazine about the danger of Ivermectin, one of the safest medicines known taken weekly in most of Africa as a preventative and treatment for River Blindness.  The dishonest article, which had to be retracted (see this), quoted a doctor who blamed Ivermectin for people overdosing themselves  by taking dosages formulated for large animals such as horses. It turns out that the doctor made up the entire story. See this.

People cannot get safe and effective treatment for Covid, because an incompetent and corrupt medical system  will only vaccinate, refuses to treat Covid infection with appropriate doses of HCQ or Ivermectin, spreads fake stories to scare people away from successful treatment, and seeks to take away the medical licenses of the doctors who are actually saving lives.

One wonders how much the doctor was paid by Big Pharma for his fake story. See this.

It wasn’t only Rolling Stone and Coronavirus World Updates that reported the fake story.  The entirety of the prestitute media was involved, see this.

Why do the presstitutes work with Big Pharma, Fauci and Walensky to deceive people, prevent them from safe treatment, and cause death and injury to large numbers of people?  Here is a Big Pharma shill setting you up for booster shots, see this.

Is it the smell of incompetence or the smell of evil that rises from the American medical profession and its presstitute shills?

If  “our medical authorities” don’t succeed in stamping out our lives with the mRNA vaccine, they obviously have something else waiting to unleash to do the job, see this.

It turns out that the director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is not a doctor, but he is a friend and protege of  Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, who intends to impose on the world, using the orchestrated Covid fear, the “Great Reset,” which means the termination of life as humanity has known it. Here the two  are together, see this.

Let’s close this column with factual information from Doctors for Covid Ethics, see this.

If you want to ruin your health and perhaps terminate your life, take the death shot.

Alternatively, organize. Demand accountability for Biden, Fauci, Walensky, Big Pharma, and the presstitute media.  These sordid criminals have massive numbers of deaths and permanent health injuries on their greed-driven hands.  These are the people who should be indicted, tried, convicted, and executed for mass murder and mass injury.

But there is little prospect of this happening.  Instead, the people will be murdered and injured for profit. That is always the fate of sheeple who in their stupidity trust “authorities.”

Despite all the evidence that mRNA vaccines fail to protect against Covid infections,  cause massive adverse health effects, and create variants that escape immune response, a massive number of health care providers and employers are requiring inoculation as a condition of employment.

The Becker Hospital Review provides a list of the health care providers who mandate inoculation with the dangerous jab as a condition of employment and as a requirement for patients who seek treatment for any illness, see this.

These  dumbshit employers do not have the necessary IQ to be able to function in the world. They are so totally stupid that they do not realize that it is only the vaccine companies, not them, that have immunity from liability for harm from the emergency use authorized vaccine.  If these  employers mandate vaccination, or universities do so for their students, they are liable for injuries and deaths caused by the mandated “vaccine.”

The hospitals are doubly  stupid. There is already a shortage of experienced nurses. Now large numbers are quitting or being fired for having too much sense to take the jab after seeing the adverse consequences of Covid vaccination. This problem is not limited to the US. For example, UK health care workers leave industry en masse after being told to get vax or quit– see this.

Healthy people face a minuscule  threat of death or serious injury from Covid.  Vulnerable people with co-morbidities can be safely and securely put on preventative doses of Ivermectin or HCQ.  There is no reason, other than pure negligence of the medical profession, for vulnerable people to even catch Covid.  There is certainly no reason for them to die because the medical profession withholds treatment with known cures.

It is astonishing that people in Africa subject to River Blindness and malaria are a hundred times safer from Covid than Americans and Western Europeans.

What a joke the Western world is.  Little wonder it is in a state of collapse.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The ignominious US withdrawal from Afghanistan has blown a global hole in the post-1945 American Century system of elaborate world domination, a power vacuum that likely will lead to irreversible consequences. The immediate case in point is whether Biden’s Washington strategists—as he clearly makes no policy—have already managed to lose the support of its largest arms buyer and regional strategic ally, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since the first days of Biden’s inauguration in late January, US policies are driving the Saudi monarchy to pursue a dramatic shift in foreign policy. The longer-term consequences could be enormous.

Within their first week in office the Biden Administration indicated a dramatic shift in US-Saudi relations. It announced a freeze in arms sales to the Kingdom as it reviewed the Trump arms deals. Then in late February US intelligence issued a report condemning the Saudi government for the killing of Saudi Washington Post journalist Adnan Khashoggi in Istanbul in October, 2018, something the Trump Administration refused to do. That was joined by Washington’s lifting the anti-Saudi Yemeni Houthi leadership from the US terrorist list while ending US military support to Saudi Arabia in its Yemen war with Iran-backed Houthi forces, a move that emboldened the Houthis to pursue missile and drone attacks on Saudi targets.

Post-911 Pentagon Policy

While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has so far been careful to avoid a rupture with Washington, the motion of his feet since the Biden regime shift in January has been significant. At the center is a series of secret negotiations with former arch-enemy Iran, and its new President. Talks began in April in Baghdad between Riyadh and Teheran to explore a possible rapprochement.

Washington geopolitical strategy for the past two decades has been to fire up the conflicts and bring the entire Middle East into chaos as part of a doctrine first endorsed by Cheney and Rumsfeld after September 11, 2001, sometimes referred to by the George W. Bush Administration as the Greater Middle East. It was formulated by the late US Admiral Arthur Cebrowski of Rumsfeld’s post-911 Pentagon Office of Force Transformation. Cebrowski’s assistant, Thomas Barnett, described the new strategy of deliberate chaos in his 2004 book, The Pentagon’s New Map : War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, just after the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq. Recall that no one ever found evidence of Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Barnett was a professor at the US Naval War College and later strategist for the Israeli Wikistrat consultancy. As he described it, the entire national boundaries of the post-Ottoman Middle East carved out by the Europeans after World War I, including Afghanistan were to be dissolved, and present states balkanized into Sunni, Kurd, Shiite, and other ethnic or religious entities to ensure decades of chaos and instability requiring a “strong” US military presence to control. That became the two decades of US catastrophic occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. It was deliberate chaos. Secretary of State Condi Rice said in 2006 that the Greater Middle East aka New Middle East would be achieved through ‘constructive chaos’. Because of a huge backlash from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region the name was buried, but the chaos strategy remains.

The Obama “Arab Spring” Color Revolutions, which were launched in December 2010 with the CIA and Clinton State Department destabilizations of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya by US-backed networks of the Muslim Brotherhood, were further implementation of the new US policy of chaos and destabilization. The proxy US invasion of Syria then followed, as did Yemen with the covertly US-backed Houthi revolution against Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012.

The ongoing Teheran vs Riyadh conflict has its roots in that Cebrowski-Barnett Pentagon-CIA strategy. It marked and fed the split between pro-Muslim Brotherhood Qatar and anti-Brotherhood Riyadh in 2016, after which Qatar sought support from Iran and Turkey. It has marked the bitter proxy war in Syria between forces backed by Saudi Arabia against forces backed by Iran. It has marked the Saudi vs Teheran proxy war in Yemen, and the political stalemate in Lebanon. Now the Saudi regime under MBS appears to be embarking on a major turn away from that Shiite-Sunni war for domination of the Islamic world by pursuing peace with its foes including Iran.

Teheran is key

Under the Trump Administration, policy shifted from an apparent US backing of Iran under Obama with the 2015 nuclear JCPOA, and to the disadvantage of Saudis and Israel, over to a one-sided Trump-Kushner backing for Saudi Arabia and Israel, exiting the JCPOA, and imposing draconian economic sanctions on Teheran and other moves last embodied in the ill-conceived Abraham Accords aimed against Teheran.

MBS and the Saudis are clearly reading the handwriting on the wall from Washington and are moving to defuse multiple zones of conflict which had led it down a US-scripted dead end. Washington under Trump had fed MBS with arms galore (paid for with Saudi petrodollars) to fuel the conflicts. It has been a catastrophe for the Saudis. Now as it became clear that a Biden Administration also means no good for them, MBS and the Saudis have begun a strategic pivot towards ending all its conflicts within the Islamic world. The key to it all is Iran.

Back-channel talks

In April the Saudis began the first of what now have been three bilateral negotiations on stabilizing their relations with Iran, back-channel secret talks first in Iraq, then Oman. Baghdad has a major stake in such a peace as US policy in Iraq since 2003 has been to create chaos by pitting a majority Shiite against a 30% minority Sunni to sow civil war. In July Prime Minister al Kadhimi secured a Biden pledge to end US troop presence by year-end.

The Teheran-Riyadh back-channel talks reportedly involve Iran’s stance towards Washington under Biden Pentagon policies, as well as Iran’s willingness to de-escalate military presence in Syria and Yemen and Lebanon. Indirect talks between the US and Iran about a return to the 2015 nuclear deal were suspended after the Iranian elections in June. Iran also announced it was stepping up uranium enrichment.

The Saudi-Iran talks have included high-level persons from both sides, including Saudi chief of General Intelligence Directorate Khalid al-Humaidan and Iranian Deputy Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council , Saeed Iravani. Ongoing protests inside Iran over the economic costs of deployment of troops and aid to groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and Houthis in Yemen, are reportedly growing. This, at a time economic hardships caused by the US sanctions are severe, creates a strong incentive for Teheran to eventually compromise in a rapprochement with Riyadh. If it happens it will be a huge blow for US regional chaos strategy.

While no agreement is yet at hand, a fourth talk has just been announced which indicates a will to forge a compromise as soon as the government of newly-elected Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is approved by the Majlis or parliament. A deal will not be easy, but both sides realize the status quo is a lose-lose proposition.

At the same time Iran under Raisi is playing hardball with Biden negotiators. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is reportedly demanding that the Biden administration lift all sanctions on Iran and compensate it for the damage they caused, and have Iran recognized as a nuclear threshold state with the ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a short time. The US sanctions imposed in 2018 have caused a 250% annual rise in food prices and a free fall in the currency as oil revenues have plunged. Raisi is under enormous domestic pressure to change this, though Biden’s Washington to date refuses to lift sanctions as precondition to resuming JCPOA talks.

For Teheran the question is whether it is better to trust a rapprochement with the Saudi-led Arab Sunni Gulf states, or rely on Washington whose track record of broken promises is underscored by their catastrophic exit from Kabul.

Most recently Teheran has mended relations with the Afghan Taliban and US military equipment from Afghanistan taken by Taliban reportedly has been seen in Iran, suggesting a close Iran-Afghan cooperation that further works against Washington. At the same time Iran has agreed a $400 billion, 25-year economic strategic cooperation with China. However so far Beijing is apparently being cautious not to challenge US sanctions in any major way and is also pursuing closer ties with Saudi Arabia, Gulf Arab states as well as Israel. A Saudi-Iran rapprochement would further ease pressures on Iran.

The dramatic collapse of US presence in Afghanistan gives all parties a clear idea that, regardless of who is US President, US institutional powers behind the scenes pursue an agenda of destruction, and can no longer be relied on to be true to their promises of support.

The implications of a genuine Saudi-Iran agreement would be a major pivot in geopolitical terms. In addition to ending the Yemen war and the proxy Syrian war, it could end the destructive stalemate in Lebanon between Iran-backed Hezbollah and major Saudi interests there. Here is where the recent arms talks between Riyadh and Moscow become more than interesting.

Russia’s pivotal role

Into this geopolitical cocktail of competing interests, the role of Russia becomes strategic. Russia is the one major foreign military power that has aimed at ending the Sunni-Shiite proxy wars and creating stability across Eurasia into the Middle East, a direct challenge to Washington’s Cebrowski-Barnett strategy of deliberate instability and chaos.

In April this year Russian President Vladimir Putin and a delegation of business leaders made a rare visit to Riyadh, the first by Putin in 12 years. It was billed as an energy partnership meeting, but clearly was far more. Deals worth $2 billion were reported with agreements covering oil, space and satellite navigation, health, mineral resources, tourism and aviation. Both countries agreed to cooperate to stabilize oil prices, a major step. Putin and MBS stressed that oil and natural gas would continue to play a major role for years to come, a slap in the face of the Davos Great Reset green agenda. Russia’s RDIF Sovereign Wealth Fund also opened its first foreign office in Riyadh.

Taken alone it was interesting, but the fact it has been followed four months later by a visit by Saudi Arabia’s Vice Minister of Defense Prince Khalid bin Salman to Russia to the annual International Military Technical Forum (ARMY 2021) near Moscow, gives new significance to growing Saudi-Russian ties as well at a time Biden & Co. are “recalibrating” US-Saudi ties as the State Department put it, whatever that means. Khalid tweeted, “I signed an agreement with the Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Colonel General Alexander Fomin between the Kingdom and the Russian Federation aimed at developing joint military cooperation between the two countries.” Bin Salman also added, “Met with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu to explore ways to strengthen the military and defense cooperation and discussed our common endeavor to preserve stability and security in the region.” Notably, Russia has conducted joint military exercises with Iran for the past several years and is also well suited to foster a Saudi-Iran detente.

The Moscow talks came only weeks after the Pentagon and Biden Administration announced it was removing eight Patriot anti-missile systems from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, and Iraq, as well as removing a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system from the Saudi Kingdom, and accelerating the withdrawal of US troops from the region, moves that hardly boost confidence in Washington as protector of Saudi Arabia. The world’s finest anti-missile defense technology, the S-400 air defense system, happens to be made in Russia, as do a broad array of other military equipment.

All these moves by the Saudis are clearly not going to lead to an overnight break with Washington. But clear is that the Saudi monarchy has understood, especially in the wake of the abrupt Biden abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban, that continued dependence on a US security umbrella it has enjoyed since the 1970’s oil shocks, is a fading illusion. MBS clearly realizes that he has been played by both Trump and now Biden. The tectonic plates of Middle East and Eurasian geopolitics are shifting and the implications are staggering.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

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

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

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 Ministries of Finance and Agriculture have advanced plans to buy out hundreds of farmers and, if necessary, expropriate them, in order to quickly reduce nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands.

This is apparent from documents that have been viewed by NRC. The cost of this operation could amount to 17 billion euros. The plans point to a rigorously different approach, in which coercion is no longer taboo.

“The other scenario, from the Ministry of Agriculture, is even more ambitious and foresees a major transformation of the Dutch agricultural sector. The government also buys the land from the farmers, which can then be used for more sustainable forms of agriculture: fewer animals [IAF: moving to WEF’s “post-animal economy”], less environmental pollution. That costs a lot of money: up to 17 billion.”

Read this article on NRC in Dutch.

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Cook County, Illinois, Judge James Shapiro reached a new low in covid tyranny by forbidding Rebecca Firlit from seeing her 11-year-old son until she receives a covid vaccine. Judge Shapiro is not alone in abusing judicial power to force individuals to get vaccinated. Judges across the country have ordered defendants to get covid vaccines, sometimes as a condition of avoiding prison. This outbreak of judicial tyranny is a symptom of the authoritarianism pandemic that is the real threat to America.

Corporations are imposing requirements, including that employees show proof of vaccination, pay more for health insurance if they have not had a covid vaccine, and undergo regular (in some cases weekly) covid tests. An increasing number of state and local governments are requiring their employees and even people working in some private jobs to take covid vaccines, as well as imposing vaccine passport requirements on people generally.

President Biden has urged employers to implement vaccine mandates, and government is working with its big tech allies to develop “model” vaccine passports.

Government approved model vaccine requirements combined with government officials encouraging their adoption send the message to businesses that imposing vaccine requirements on their employees, and maybe their customers as well, is a good way to stay in the politicians and bureaucrats’ good graces.

An effective way for the US government to “encourage” adoption of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports is denying federal funds to businesses, states, local governments, and other institutions that refuse to require employees, customers, or other people to prove they are vaccinated. This will result in vaccine requirements while enabling government to claim it is not forcing vaccines on anyone.

President Biden is already planning for the US government denying Medicare and Medicaid funding to nursing homes that do not require their employees to prove they are vaccinated. This could result in staff shortages at nursing homes. A short-staffed nursing home poses a much greater risk to residents than a nursing home with a staff comprised of healthy, unvaccinated individuals. Texas is experiencing a nursing shortage thanks in part to hospitals firing unvaccinated nurses.

Health care workers have good reason to resist vaccine mandates. Many individuals have died or suffered other adverse effects — including miscarriages — after receiving a vaccine.

Some people try to justify vaccine mandates and vaccine passports by saying that, by risking infecting others, unvaccinated individuals endanger other people. However, the federal Centers for Disease Control recently admitted that covid vaccines do not prevent the spread of infections. In addition, the claim that we are having a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” relies on data collected from early in the year — before many Americans had taken covid vaccines.

An important objection is that, if government can force people to take a potentially dangerous vaccine to protect against a hypothetical harm to others, the same reasoning would support the imposing of many additional liberty violations. These could include, for example, “red flag” laws and other forms of gun control, restrictions on access to “extremist” ideas, or a system of mass surveillance to prevent possible future acts of violence. The argument that government can use force to prevent hypothetical harms renders restraint on government power meaningless.

It is imperative that we support the growing resistance to vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. We must also expand the resistance to covid authoritarianism to resistance to all forms of government infringements on liberty.

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The self-destruct sequence that will bring down the death cult cabal of anti-human globalists has already been activated. With hilarious fake news attempts like the recent Rolling Stone hit piece against ivermectin, the cabal media is self-destructing by the day. With endless fiat currency printing by the Fed, the entire financial underpinning of illegitimate Big Government is imploding. And with the laughable, desperate attempts to imply covid vaccine “approval” while pushing utterly unproven booster shots backed by no supporting data whatsoever, Big Science is ripping its own eyeballs out and throwing them across the room.

We are witnessing the total self-destruction of Big Pharma, Big Science, Big Media and Big Government, all as they trip over each other trying to discredit ivermectin and vitamin D while pushing vaccine death shots and medical authoritarianism. All they’ve really accomplished, however, is the accelerated awakening of the masses as they witness the authoritarian lunacy and junk science death cult that’s paraded all around us, falsely claiming our freedoms have to be obliterated in the name of “safety.”

In Victoria, Australia, by the way, lunatic Premier Daniel Andrews just declared that unvaccinated people will be “locked out” of all health care and hospital services. Given how toxic, deadly and incompetent mainstream doctors have become, that’s probably a blessing. Perhaps the free people of Australia will finally turn to nutrition and natural medicine, and they will therefore outlive the vaccine zombies who are committing medical suicide.

AMA releases document teaching doctors how to deceive patients with disinformation that may KILL them

The American Medical Association — which is now engaged in training its members to lie to patients as they murder them — has released an eyebrow-raising document that claims, “rampant disinformation” is, “eroding public confidence in science and undermining trust in physicians and medical institutions.” And to reacquire that lost trust, the AMA proceeds to teach doctors how to lie to the world about covid.

On page 9 of the document, doctors are told to replace the phrase “hospitalization rates” with the claim that all hospitalized patients are “deaths,” thereby wildly exaggerating covid deaths in order to achieve mass hysteria. Make no mistake: This is the AMA directly instructing doctors to lie about covid deaths. This is straight up medical fraud.

Similarly, doctors are also told to replace the word, “lockdown” with “stay-at-home order,” because that somehow sounds less totalitarian.

In the same document, on page 8, doctors are instructed on how to block, deflect and redirect questions to cover up the truth about vaccine injuries and deaths. They are specifically instructed to change the subject and reject questions from reporters or patients, while pushing AMA-approved “official” propaganda by claiming it’s all based on “facts,” not “science” or “medicine.”

In essence the AMA is now attempting to transform doctors into propaganda puppets for the global depopulation agenda. Practicing real medicine is no longer the priority of the AMA, it seems. Rather, physicians must practice lying in order to remain an AMA member in good standing.

Here’s a section from the document, entitled, “COVID-19 Language Swaps”

The AMA just provided evidence that can be used to prosecute its own corrupt officials for crimes against humanity

What’s just as disturbing in all this is how the AMA appears to have no realization that by posting this document, the AMA admits its own complicity in crimes against humanity. This is sometimes called “saying the quiet part out loud,” and this document that instructs doctors to lead patients to their own death can be used as evidence in international war crimes tribunals that seek the arrest and prosecution of AMA leaders who are taking part in this murderous scheme.

I first learned about this extraordinary AMA document by watching Dr. Bryan Ardis interviewed by Stew Peters (both are Brighteon.TV show hosts). This amazing interview, shown below, delves into even more detail about the AMA’s bold deception and how it recruits physicians to be propagandists carrying out medical genocide against humanity:

I also cover the topic in more detail in my Sep. 6th Situation Update podcast, which reveals extremely positive information about how we prevail by rejecting the medical death cult that’s right now destroying its own credibility (while killing its own advocates with bioweapons death shots):

Stay informed and keep your courage intact. The death cult medical genocide system is imploding right now, and you simply need to make sure they don’t take you down with them.

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It is more than difficult to grasp that Americans of the Democratic ilk remain unable to see through the illegitimacy of the Biden regime; especially in view of the Afghanistan catastrophe. To suggest that Dems are myopic to political reality; as they remain victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome and willfully ignorant of the fact that the country is experiencing an escalation of multiple crisis occurring simultaneously. And that these crises, deliberate and intentional, are focused on destroying American sovereignty as well as our guaranteed freedoms and privileges set in place since George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

We now know that the Dem reality is sufficiently skewed as to represent a startlingly different truth of how the world operates and that today’s Dems are no longer the same party many of us signed up for years ago. Since the 2016 election, they have revealed themselves to be more akin to liberal fascists offering a kind of benign tyranny with rough edges as they espouse a view that all areas of life must be subject to the State’s dictates; its purpose to assure a uniformity of national intent to align with their version of a perfect world order.

I can attest to the fact that many Dems do not follow politics closely enough to grasp what has happened to the anti-Vietnam war party or the party that once cherished civil liberties. They are the Facebook wing of the Democratic party who are addicted to playing social media on a daily basis and by rote, without any intellectualizing, remain devoted to what was once a proud Democratic party tradition. Those days are over as the party has succumbed to its darker impulses of totalitarian control over every aspect of social and political order.

Many moons ago as I joined the legislative staff at Friends of the Earth in Washington, DC, its founder, David Brower, took me aside for a teaching moment about what to expect in Congress. Brower, who was an internationally respected environmental leader, was subject of John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Arch Druid” and had been executive director at the Sierra Club before founding FOE. In a nutshell, Brower suggested that I would always know where the Republicans stood on any issue. They would let me know upfront where their line was, when and where they might consider crossing it but that I would never be in doubt about what the Republican position was – and I could take that to the bank.

On the other hand, Brower asserted that the Democrats would tell me what I wanted to hear. They would then proceed to do exactly as they wanted whether or not it fit with our environmental agenda, with no apology or forewarning, with no opportunity to influence the outcome. No, I thought, that can’t be right. The Dems were the white hats; it was the R’s who could not be trusted. But Brower, who was then regarded as a Democratic icon, was firm and certain. He was speaking from a sometime bitter experience in dealing with partisan politics. The full truth of Brower’s warning stayed with me over the years and, more recently, has been born out in spades.

During my years in DC, my issue was nuclear energy which was then a hot-button issue with an active anti-nuke presence throughout the country.  In those days, there were still enough Dems who could be counted on to be critical of the then powerful commercial nuclear industry and to oppose the experimental Clinch River Breeder Reactor (CRBR).  The CRBR which would be fueled by and create its own weapons-grade plutonium, was proposed to be the next generation of electricity after the current light water reactors.

It was a time when we could still count on a Democratic Governor; in this case Gov. Scott Matheson of Utah, to resist the Department of Energy’s misguided plan to build a high level nuclear waste repository on the border of Canyonlands National Park. In a dramatic scenario that rivaled a Hollywood inspired script, the morning that a Temporary Restraining Order was placed on DOE preventing their contractors from setting up to conduct an ‘experimental’ drilling program, Matheson immediately  sent out the State Police to pull the trucks over and send them home; thus removing the Canyonlands location at Six Shooter Peaks from further DOE consideration.

By the time of the 2000 election, I had left DC and had seen enough to question the Democratic choice of Al Gore as their candidate against GW Bush. I knew Gore from his days in the House, but not well as I found him to be aloof and not friendly although allegedly we were on the same side. I soon discovered that was not true. As fate would have it, the CRBR was to be located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee which was in Gore’s House district. So Mr. Environment proved to be no hard core environmentalist at all as he supported CRBR every step along the way until it was defunded by a bi-partisan coalition with the National Taxpayers Union in 1985.

I was living in Colorado by then which was then still a red-purple state with an easy decision to vote for neither Bush nor Gore. Ralph Nader was on the ballot as a Green candidate and I had known Ralph in DC to be a credible man of integrity and still believe he would have been an excellent non partisan President. So as Bush ‘won’ the 2000 race, what difference did it really make as the Dems supported his attack on Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction, his attack on Afghanistan, the alleged War on Terror and supported the Patriot Act.

In 2008 there was an opportunity to support Obama’s “Change you can believe” which never convinced me and proved to be another shallow empty promise. Obama dropped more bombs, invaded more countries, began war in four countries living in peace in 2008, appointed HRC as Secretary of State and prosecuted more Americans under the Espionage Act than any other President.

By the time 2016 rolled around, it was a foregone conclusion that I would not be voting for Hillary and, to my amazement, I almost immediately lost every Democratic friend I had. There was no discussion or communication allowed; they are unable to critically or analytically think for themselves, preferring to echo meaningless headlines – I was either in or I was out.

When HRC crossed the line declaring a ‘basket of deplorables’ who held “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” views which she determined to be “irredeemable,” Trump’s promise of no new foreign wars won me over. By the time of Russiagate, I was lost to the Dems forever.

The rest, as they say, is history. Today, as our country experiences the disintegration of one emergency into a full-fledged crisis of epic proportions, the Democrats, as partners in running the government, have no policy ideas to contribute or sense of doing what is right for the country. The Dems have abandoned America in favor of an illusory doomed fantasy of a socialist/communist world with no understanding of its true future implications of less freedom, less happiness, more censorship, increased inflation with a lower standard of living and more State control with a ‘free’ economy where nothing is ‘free’.

It frightens the hell out of me to acknowledge that the Democrats, like any good fascists, love their political party more than they love the country of their birth.

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected]. 

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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***

 

Mainstream western media outlets are continuing to mourn the United States and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan after a twenty-year occupation.

Scenes of a rapid pullout combined with the chaotic situation at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul exposed to the world further that Washington had lost yet another imperialist war.

From the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to Cable News Network (CNN), MSNBC and Fox, commentators are questioning the wisdom of the administration of President Joe Biden in his decision to exit Afghanistan militarily. Even the purported “liberal” networks are resurrecting the war hawks such as John Bolton and H.R. McMaster as “expert commentators”, whose failed extremist policies are in line with the “war on terrorism” and its concomitant disastrous social consequences.

Evidently, the corporate and government-controlled media in the U.S. and Western Europe are inextricably linked to the military-industrial and intelligence complex. The only institutions which benefited from the endless wars of the previous two decades are the defense industries which have supplied the weapons that have killed and maimed untold numbers both abroad and within the U.S. itself. The Pentagon often provides military equipment to domestic police agencies which are then turned against antiracist demonstrators fighting to end law-enforcement misconduct.

This failed Afghan intervention was a major element of the so-called “war on terrorism”, a global initiative launched in 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the hijacked airplane attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside of the nation’s capital. These events, which caused the deaths of 3,000 people and the injuring of many others, prompted the U.S. Congress to pass a series of draconian bills, the most well known of which is the Patriot Act.

Over the last two decades the focus of foreign policy under Democratic and Republican administrations have centered on the notions of the U.S. being a fortress state. The then President George W. Bush, Jr. in 2001 said during a nationally televised address in the aftermath of 9/11 that “either you are with us or with the terrorists.”

Source: Global Times

This mentality has resulted in a general decline in the status and well-being of people in the U.S. and around the globe. The enlistment of young people within the armed forces accelerated after the 9/11 attacks setting the stage not only for the bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, it fueled further wars in Iraq and Haiti during 2003-2004.

Hundreds of Muslims were arrested and placed in prison with long sentences simply because they were politically expendable. The irrational ideas that the source of instability within U.S. society was to be found among people with origins in Asia and Africa who adhered to the Islamic faith, continued to permeate the corporate and government-controlled media for many years after September 11.

Although the Republic of Cuba is a sovereign socialist state in the Caribbean, the U.S. still occupies a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Cuba has repeatedly asked Washington to leave the base, yet the imperialists remained and to add insult to injury, they created a prison at this location to house what the Pentagon and State Department describes as “enemy combatants.”

This category was created to avoid the guidelines involving the detention of prisoners of war. The U.S. was waging a war on the world while denying on a legal and political basis this reality in an attempt to avoid scrutiny.

During the immediate post-9/11 period, the U.S. suggested that the repressive measures enacted through the Patriot Act would only apply to Muslims suspected of terrorist activities within the country and abroad. However, it became quite obvious that the enhanced authority of the security apparatus which consolidated and created new law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would have an impact on police departments as well.

There was a marked increase in repressive measures carried out by local and state law-enforcement. The number of people incarcerated in jails and prisons continued to escalate exponentially.

Between 2013-2020, there was the reemergence of mass demonstrations and urban rebellions against racist police repression. Cities such as Ferguson, Baltimore and later Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, New York City, Oakland, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, Atlanta, along with many others became centers of resistance against unjustified police killings and the deployment of state and federal forces to quell and monitor unrest.

Successive administrations beginning with the Bush regime right up to the current Biden presidency have failed to adequately address the domestic crises of institutional racism, national oppression and economic exploitation. At present with the roll back of jobless benefits and the expiration of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium on evictions due to the economic decline which engulfed the U.S. since March 2020, there will be a new wave of millions imperiled by the lack of a sustainable safety net for the majority of working and oppressed people inside the country.

Economic Impact of the “War on Terrorism”

A website entitled “Costs of War” emanating from Brown University calculated that the losses to the U.S. and world economies as a result of the unbridled imperialist militarism of the Pentagon and NATO stands at approximately $8 trillion. These funds could have been utilized to rebuild the infrastructure and societal institutions in the West and other geo-political regions. (See this)

Business Insider which monitors developments in the U.S. economy including the expenses associated with the Department of Defense, said of the situation prevailing after two decades of military conflict and occupation, that: “The estimate factors in ‘future costs for veteran’s care, the total budgetary costs and future obligations of the post-9/11 wars.’ The report attributes $2.3 trillion to the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone, $2.1 trillion to the Iraq and Syria war zone, and $355 billion to other war zones. Dr. Neta C. Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project, in a statement said the project’s accounting ‘goes beyond the Pentagon’s numbers because the costs of the reaction to 9/11 have rippled through the entire budget.’” (See this)

Moreover, the human costs of the “war on terrorism” is discussed in this same Business Insider report noting the number of deaths and the displacement of tens of millions of people internationally. The crises of African, Asian and Latin American dislocations as refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) have not abated in Central Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean and on the borders with the U.S. The political debates generated by the large influx of migrants from former colonial and oppressed nations has created deep divisions within the western imperialist states.

Business Insider says later in the report that in these critical matters: “Costs of War also estimates that the war on terror, which will mark its 20th anniversary in a few weeks on September 11, has directly killed 897,000 to 929,000 people — including at least 387,072 civilians. Crawford said this is ‘likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life. ‘It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost,’ Crawford added. In a report released last year, Costs of War estimated that the war on terror has displaced at least 37 million people on top of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in direct war violence.”

The rise of neo-fascist parties in Europe, a vote in 2016 in Britain that led to the withdrawal by the UK from the European Union (EU) as well as the ascendancy of the one-term presidency of Donald J. Trump, has weakened the capacity of these imperialist centers to address and effectively resolve the current COVID-19 pandemic. Massive unemployment and dislocation within the labor markets will continue to influence the mitigation efforts aimed at ending the pandemic.

A New Imperialist Frontier on the Horizons

Many observers and analysts do not believe that the U.S.-NATO defeat in Central Asia will end imperialist wars. There are discussions underway within the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department to mobilize and redirect resources towards China, Russia and Iran.

All three nations have expressed a willingness to work with the Taliban and the government it is attempting to establish in Afghanistan. Contrarily, the EU has stated categorically that it will not recognize any Afghanistan government which is dominated by the Taliban. Such a scenario may provide additional openings for Moscow, Beijing and Tehran to consolidate their relations with Afghanistan along with other nations within Asia.

The Biden administration has not lifted any of the sanctions and tariffs imposed upon Russia, China and Iran. Cuba, which is located only 90 miles from the shores of Florida in the U.S., has been subjected to a renewed destabilization campaign against the socialist government of President Miguel Diaz-Canel. These methods of tackling the declining influence and authority of U.S. imperialism will only result in the further alienation and isolation of Washington on a global scale.

Antiwar, anti-imperialist, social justice, national democratic and Left currents in the U.S. must militantly oppose the prospects for military conflict against those states which are identified by Washington as adversaries. The largest enemy of progress and stability for the proletariat and oppressed peoples domestically and internationally stems from the role of Washington and Wall Street in their quest for new avenues of exploitation and domination.

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

Featured image is from the author

---

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

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 escalation of hostilities in Yemen is a fact, as Ansar Allah are attempting to capture Marib city once again.

On September 5^th, the Houthis (as Ansar Allah are known) claimed they had attacked several targets in eastern, western and southern Saudi Arabia as part of a large-scale operation.

A total of 16 missiles and drones were launched during the course of the operation.

Specifically, eight Samad-3 suicide drones and a Zulfiqar ballistic missile targeted vital facilities of oil giant Aramco at Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia’s main oil port on the Persian Gulf, in the Eastern province.

Two Samad-3 suicide drones and five Badir artillery rockets were fired at different facilities of Aramco in the western Saudi province of Makkah as well as in the southern provinces of Jizan and Najran.

The Saudi-led coalition claimed that its air-defenses had interpreted three ballistic missiles and three suicide drones, footage allegedly proving this fact was released.

Still, explosions were reported on the ground in several areas.

The usual, regular Houthi attack includes just a few missiles or one drone, but this is much more significant, after a lull in a fighting in August.

The previous such operation took place in March 2021 and also boasted more than a dozen missiles and drones being launched by Ansar Allah.

Meanwhile, in southern Yemen’s Aden, which serves as the capital of Yemen’s puppet government, a Saudi-led coalition commander was assassinated by an IED that struck his vehicle.

It is unknown who was behind the attack that killed Major General Musa Mohsen al-Mashdali on September 4. Suspicions either point towards the Houthis or the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC).

The STC is conditionally part of the Saudi-backed coalition but mostly operates towards its own interest and those of the UAE, as such clashes of interests and of forces have happened in the past.

A final option is that an ISIS attack left him killed, as a result of the poor security measures in the areas under Saudi control.

Around Marib city, fighting is almost constant, with a back-and-forth on the ground between Ansar Allah and the Saudi-led coalition.

Riyadh’s forces continue carrying out at least 10 airstrikes on various Houthi positions each day, while Yemen’s movement responds with frequent drone and missile attacks on targets within the Kingdom.

Neither are quite successful, as the airstrikes usually cause no casualties, while Saudi Arabia boasts of intercepting most, if not all of the Houthis projectiles.

It is now just a matter of time until various international organizations, as well as NGOs begin calling for the Houthis to halt their attacks as a “humanitarian disaster” is looming over Yemen each time Ansar Allah has any success.

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The Great Reset has been called a conspiracy theory by many, despite specific plans published on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website and partnerships between the WEF and global organizations like the United Nations and World Health Organization

An investigative report asserts that the ongoing restructuring of processes that control food and data are upending traditional practices so private corporations have more control and influence than democratically elected government

A 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 vaccine

Employees of six major hospitals in Cincinnati, Ohio, have filed a lawsuit, hoping to stop the mandated vaccine, which health experts are promoting with inconsistent messages, first claiming it does not stop community transmission; yet, requiring it for employment under the guise of preventing the spread of infection

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Over the past year and a half, I’ve written many articles detailing the evidence supporting the claim that the COVID pandemic is a ruse to usher in a new system of global centralized governance by unelected leaders, the so-called Great Reset.

The recent release of the House Foreign Affairs Committee report¹ entitled, “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” presented solid evidence that many of the “conspiracy theories” about the virus were in fact true. For example, using some intelligence reports and other public documents, the committee found that:²

“… we now believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak. We also believe the preponderance of the evidence proves the virus did leak from the WIV and that it did so sometime before September 12, 2019.”

They presented evidence of genetic modification and wrote this:³

“This report also lays out ample evidence that researchers at the WIV, in conjunction with U.S. scientists and funded by both the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government and the U.S. government, were conducting gain of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV …

In many instances, the scientists were successful in creating ‘chimeric viruses’ — or viruses created from the pieces of other viruses — that could infect human immune systems.

With dangerous research like this conducted at safety levels similar to a dentist’s office, a natural or genetically modified virus could have easily escaped the lab and infected the community.”

The idea of the Great Reset may feel like a conspiracy theory, especially if life as you know it where you live has not dramatically changed. You still go to work, buy food, go to the gym, go out to eat and attend events. There may be people wearing masks, and you may see or hear news reports about vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, but it hasn’t reached your employer and you may not be personally affected … yet.

But, make no mistake, unless we all do our part to peacefully protest the changes being planned, write to our legislatures, and talk to our neighbors and friends, what is happening in New York,⁴France,⁵ Germany⁶ and Israel,⁷ will soon be knocking on your front door.

Does ‘Great Reset’ Sound Like a Conspiracy? It May Be Worse

An article titled, “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better” appeared in Forbes Magazine⁸ in November 2016. It was written by Ida Auken, a member of the Denmark Parliament⁹ and agenda contributor at the World Economic Forum (WEF).¹⁰

The article was frightening in the simplistic way it describes the dissolution of society as we know it. And, as time marches forward, we see more evidence of what the WEF has proposed as “perfect sense”¹¹ coming true.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested in September 2020 what other world leaders have also promoted¹² — that the COVID-19 virus, that has killed and devastated the health of many people, provided the world is an:¹³

“… opportunity for a reset … our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”

More than 20 world leaders came together to suggest, “At a time when COVID-19 has exploited our weaknesses and divisions, we must seize this opportunity and come together as a global community for peaceful cooperation that extends beyond this crisis.”¹⁴ And while that sounds noble, altruistic and humanitarian, it is the plan for the future that is in stark contrast to the statement.

Ivan Wecke, a journalist from Open Democracy, did a deep dive into some of what lies behind the WEF’s Great Reset plan and found what he called something “almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.”¹⁵

Although Wecke discounts the plans of the Great Reset to abolish private property, use the virus to solve overpopulation and enslave the remainder of humanity as “nebulous and hard to pin down,” he goes on to illustrate in detail how the fundamental structure of the world that controls food and data, and ultimately humanity, is being upended and restructured so that private corporations have more control and influence than governments.

It comes down to “stakeholder capitalism,” which are the magic words that Klaus Schwab, WEF chairman, has been promoting for decades, and is a central theme in the organization’s Great Reset plan.¹⁶ The concept as Wecke describes it is to transform global capitalism, so corporations create value for stakeholders.¹⁷

These stakeholders can be consumers, employees, communities and others. This will be carried out through multi-stakeholder partnerships of governments and private-sector businesses across the globe. As he dug deeper into the concept, it became more apparent that this means giving corporations more power and taking that influence away from democratically elected institutions.

The initial plan was drafted after the 2008 economic crisis and included the vision that governments around the world would be only one influencer in a multi-stakeholder model. When he asked himself who would be the other nongovernmental stakeholders, Wecke only had to look at the WEF partners that meet each year in Davos, Switzerland.

These partners are some of the biggest companies in oil, food, technology and pharmaceuticals. In other words, the companies that could ultimately restructure society and control the supply chain are those that provide everyday necessities. These proposed concepts appear to have started taking shape in a strategic partnership agreement which the WEF signed with the United Nations in 2019.

Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability from the University of Massachusetts¹⁸ calls this move an inroad to creating a place for corporations inside the United Nations.¹⁹

The WEF is using the concept of multi-stakeholders to change the current system that countries use today to work together. This multilateral system may not always be effective and may have too many layers of bureaucracy, but Wecke says it is “theoretically democratic because it brings together democratically elected leaders of countries to make decisions in the global arena.”²⁰

Big Tech May Run the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation

What’s really happening here, though, is the move toward placing unelected stakeholders in positions of power does not deepen democracy but, rather, puts decision making in the hands of financially focused corporations. As Wecke points out, this will have real-world implications for how medications are distributed, food systems are organized and how Big Tech is governed.

Under a democratic rule of law, six corporations already control 90% of the news media consumed by Americans. Tech Startups calls this an “illusion of choice and objectivity.”²¹ How much more propaganda will be thrown in the face of consumers when Big Tech is monitoring and controlling Big Tech?

The year 2030 holds significance for the WEF’s vision²² which is to scale technology and facilitate “inclusive growth.” In the fall of 2021, the UN will bring together the Food Systems Summit to achieve sustainable development goals by 2030.²³ Yet, Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International, a human rights organization focused on food and nutrition, told Wecke:²⁴

“’Abandoning pesticides is not on the table. How come?’ asks Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International, a human rights organisation focused on food and nutrition.

‘There is no discussion on land concentration or holding companies accountable for their environmental and labour abuses.’ This fits into a bigger picture Monsalve sees of large corporations, which dominate the food sector, being reluctant to fix the production system. ‘They just want to come up with new investment opportunities.’”

Wecke also dug into a long list of participants in the 2020 Roadmap For Digital Cooperation²⁵ and found influencers included Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the WEF.²⁶ The functions for the group appear to be vague, but if the group comes to fruition, it will be a decisive victory for those Big Tech companies that have been pushing to expand their power,²⁷ are fighting antitrust rules²⁸ and are facing accusations of tax evasion.²⁹

The move by the UN and WEF has not gone unnoticed. A group of more than 170 civil organizations have signed an open letter³⁰ detailing why they oppose the plan. At a time when stronger regulations are needed to protect consumers, it appears that the new UN digital roadmap may be seeking less.

Firing the Unvaccinated Is the Start of the Great Job Reset

Finally, Wecke addresses the issue of global vaccine distribution.³¹ Instead of the World Health Organization, which is “the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system,”³² being responsible for vaccine access, another initiative was created called COVAX. According to the WHO, COVAX is co-led by the WHO, UNICEF, CEPI and GAVI.³³

As a quick reminder, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have strong ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the WEF and are connected with large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and more.³⁴

The influence these groups have on the global distribution of the COVID vaccine may have been best illustrated when South Africa and India requested a temporary lift on the rules governing intellectual property to increase manufacturing and distribution to developing countries. Wecke reports³⁵ that although the WHO director-general publicly said that he backed a proposal, others in the COVAX initiative strongly opposed it, and it didn’t happen.

There appears to be enough vaccines available in industrialized nations for the WEF to support any and all employees being fired if they choose not to take the vaccine. The National File³⁶ published a tweet the WEF made in May 2021 which said, “Get your COVID-19 jab — or you could face consequences from your employer #COVID19 #JobsReset21.”

Additionally, the WEF had posted an article³⁷ on their website that made a variety of claims about the percentage of companies that would require employees to be vaccinated and juxtaposed mental health concerns and burnout through the pandemic with being unvaccinated in the article.

After intense backlash, the tweet was deleted and replaced with a question, “Will employees be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination?”³⁸ The new post quickly filled with screen shots of the original post.

Two Cities Promising to Fire Employees

Even before the FDA announced their approval of the Pfizer vaccine,³⁹ Cincinnati, Ohio, area hospital systems had announced that starting October 1, 2021, all health care workers and volunteers are required to be vaccinated. Among those participating in the vaccine mandate are the University of Cincinnati Health, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the Christ Hospital Health Network.⁴⁰

Health care workers in Cincinnati have now filed a lawsuit against six of the hospital systems saying requiring vaccines for employment is unlawful and violates workers’ Constitutional rights. The lawsuit says, “When there was no vaccine, the workers had to go to work. They were heroes. Now that there is a vaccine, they have to get the vaccine or be fired. Now they are ‘zeros.’”⁴¹

April Hoskins is a lab assistant at St. Elizabeth Edgewood who has worked for 20 years in family practice and hospital oncology. She told a reporter from WLWT5,⁴² “You’ve trusted us this whole time to take care of these patients, unvaccinated, without the proper PPE. And now out of nowhere, you have to get it or you’re going to be terminated? Like, something is wrong with that picture.”

August 23, 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all public school teachers and staff would be required to have at least one dose of the vaccine by September 27, 2021, or they would no longer have a job. Not soon afterward, the United Federation of Teachers union issued a statement from union president Michael Mulgrew reiterating their desire and priority to keep the students and teachers safe. He went on to say:⁴³

“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the UFT and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration.”

It Is Important to Point Out the Inconsistencies

This was the second announcement from de Blasio, who first mandated vaccinations for approximately 400,000 employees in the Department of Education, New York Police Department and the Fire Department of New York.⁴⁴ In tandem with New York, California Long Beach Unified School District also announced mandatory vaccinations, as has Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for all Chicago Public School employees by October 15, 2021.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also announced mandatory vaccinations or twice-weekly testing requirements for all state employees, effective October 18. It is clear that as different states and municipalities add their own mandates, it’s essential to be aware of what is happening in your local and regional areas, as well as to speak up at public meetings and demand public hearings on the matter.

The mayor of Orland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, describes an example of how decisions behind closed doors can have a different outcome than those in public.⁴⁵ He also says what is happening now is about “our processes, Constitutionality and the rule of law.”

The inconsistencies from health experts are deafening. Even the World Health Organization advises people who are vaccinated to continue wearing masks due to the Delta variant because “vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission.”⁴⁶ Simultaneously, the public is told that everyone needs the vaccine to prevent spread of the infection⁴⁷ and if you have the vaccine, you can still spread the virus and put others at risk.⁴⁸

Each person has a responsibility to speak up, share information and ensure that as people make up their minds about vaccination, vaccine passports, civil liberties and the right to free speech, they have all the information they need and not just what’s shared in mainstream media.

To that end, I encourage you to share my articles with your friends and family. As you know, they are removed from the website 48 hours after publication. Please copy and paste the information, with the sources, and share it!

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Notes

^1, 2, 3 House Foreign Affairs Committee, August 2021

⁴ Spectrum News NY1, August 13, 2021

⁵ Schengenvisainfo, August 10, 2021

⁶ AP News, June 10, 2021

⁷ BBC, July 26, 2021

^8, 11 Forbes Magazine, November 10, 2016

⁹ National File, November 16, 2020 image

¹⁰ World Economic Forum, Ida Auken

¹² The Hill, June 25, 2020

¹³ YouTube, September 20, 2020, Minute 1:55

¹⁴ BBC, March 30, 2020, para 6 under the bullets

^{15, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 31, 34, 35} Open Democracy, August 16, 2021

¹⁶ World Economic Forum, June 3, 2020

¹⁸ Transnational Institute, Harris Gleckman

²¹ Tech Startups, September 18, 2020

²² World Economic Forum, 2030Vision

²³ United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021

²⁵ United Nations Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation

²⁷ The Guardian, August 1, 2021

²⁸ Politico, July 30, 2021

²⁹ The Guardian, May 31, 2021

³⁰ Just Net Coalition

³² United Nations, World Health Organization

³³ World Health Organization, COVAX

^36, 38 National File, May 18, 2021

³⁷ World Economic Forum, May 17, 2021

³⁹ U.S. Food and Drug Administration, August 23, 2021

⁴⁰ Cincinnati Enquirer, August 5, 2021

^41, 42 WLWT5, August 25, 2021

⁴³ United Federation of Teachers, August 23, 2021

⁴⁴ CBS, August 24, 2021

⁴⁵ Facebook, Keith Pekau, Bullying, Shaming and Intimidation of Illinois Families

⁴⁶ CNBC June 25, 2021

⁴⁷ Infection Control Today, July 27, 2021

⁴⁸ U.S. News, April 12, 2021

Featured image is from Mercola

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Sustainable Pulse interview with Lee A. Evslin, M.D., author of the new eye-opening book Breakfast at Monsanto’s and board-certified pediatrician and Fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Sustainable Pulse: What led to your interest in Monsanto and specifically glyphosate herbicides – is this interest related to your work as a pediatrician?

Dr. Lee A. Evslin: In 2012, the Island of Kaua’i became embroiled in one of the most divisive controversies in its history. Four chemical seed companies and a coffee company were reported to be spraying eighteen tons of restricted use pesticides per year in fields close to several small towns. They were even spraying large amounts less than 100 feet from the open widows of a middle school. The Island’s County Council tried to pass legislation requiring buffer zones and the right to know what was being sprayed, and where. The chemical-seed companies mounted an aggressive defense of their right to not be regulated by the county. They bused in hundreds of blue shirted employees to the hearings. The concerned citizens often wore red shirts, and the tensions were high.

Also in 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a policy statement. The opening lines included the concept that there is growing concern about the adverse health consequences of chronic low-level pesticide exposure in children. Low-level meaning the type of exposure you might get from living near agricultural fields, or from pesticides in your food, or from playing in fields, homes, or playgrounds that have been recently sprayed.

In 2014, I was invited to join a Hawai’i state-sponsored fact-finding task force. We were asked to examine the possible health and environmental consequences of the intensive pesticide spraying on Kaua`i. The committee met extensively over a period of 14 months. I became deeply concerned by the disconnect between what the chemical companies were saying about the safety of their products and the dangers that were so clearly demonstrated in the medical and scientific literature. Two pesticides particularly drew my attention. They were the toxic insecticide, chlorpyrifos, and the herbicide, Roundup. After the task force concluded its review and published recommendations, I continued my research and legislative activism. Hawai’i became the first state in the union to ban chlorpyrifos and my Roundup research turned into this short book.

SP: Are other pediatricians aware of the serious issues surrounding glyphosate and other harmful pesticides?

DLAE: The pediatricians on the island joined me in our testimony to the County Council and the Hawaii Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics submitted testimony to the State Legislature concerning chlorpyrifos. The 2012 AAP policy statement outlining the dangers of low-level cumulative exposure of pesticides was an eye-opener for most pediatricians. We were taught about poisoning from drinking a pesticide or being inadvertently sprayed. Most of us had not given much thought to the possible dangers of chronic low-level exposure. I think there is a growing understanding by pediatricians about the dangers of environmental toxins and probably not nearly enough concern about our daily exposure to Roundup-like chemicals in our diet, yards, and parks.

SP: Your book offers a powerful review of the scientific evidence linking glyphosate to adverse effects on humans and other life forms – however how did you make sure to not cherry pick your sources and did you have a particular view on the subject before you studied the evidence and wrote the book?

DLAE: I first became concerned about glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) such as Roundup when I learned that glyphosate had been patented as an antibiotic. My earliest research centered on this chemical’s ability to alter the balance of bacteria in and on our bodies. I then reviewed Dr. Nancy Swanson’s study. Her team graphed the large number of medical conditions that increased in prevalence in lock step with the increasing use of these herbicides.

A correlation in time never proves that one event causes another but if there are mechanisms that might demonstrate a connection, those mechanisms should be explored. The more I looked at the scientific research on GBHs, the more I realized that most of the more recently published research shows these chemical formulations to be toxic. I also discovered that the majority of studies reported to show safety were done decades ago, were often done with less sophisticated testing modalities, and because they were paid for by Monsanto and other corporate bodies, many of the studies are not even available for review by the public.

When I was reviewing the academic literature, I made sure to explore evidence across the spectrum. I wanted to understand what published scientific research said about the safety of these increasingly common chemicals.

SP: Do you believe your book will lead to change – how do you see your work affecting the conversation surrounding glyphosate and other toxic chemicals?

DLAE: I have heard great comments from readers, many who have stated that my book is enjoyable and easy to read despite its scientific orientation. The book is short, to the point, and compelling. It clearly calls for greater scrutiny and regulation. Roundup-like chemicals are the most heavily sprayed herbicides in history. Studies from around the world show that the populations of many countries have some glyphosate in their bodies most of the time. It is time for all of us to be concerned and I hope my book helps raise the level of awareness.

SP: Do you have any other books in the pipeline as we would love to find out more about this and other subjects that have caught your attention?

DLAE: In the last eighteen months, I have been mostly involved in COVID related research activities. I was hoping that we would soon move on from the devastating effect of this pandemic, but unfortunately COVID is not done with us.

I do believe though, that these Roundup-like herbicides may have made COVID worse in America. The book outlines the real possibility that these chemicals play a role in our twin epidemics of obesity and chronic diseases. People with chronic diseases and obesity are among those who become the sickest and die the most often from this virus.

SP: What do you believe others in the medical world can do to change the public’s level of knowledge on exposure to glyphosate?

DLAE: I would love to see the day come that a routine part of a medical history includes documenting exposures to possible toxins including pesticides. This is beginning to happen but is not yet sufficiently widespread. I would also like to see the increased ease of testing and reporting on the quantities of pesticides (including glyphosate) in our food and in biologic samples such as urine, hair, and blood.

The more we can measure, the better we can regulate and set policies. The evidence of toxicity is much too strong to continue to treat chronic pesticide exposure as a safe aspect of modern life.

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Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russian gas giant Gazprom, is starting to settle payments for the jet fuel it supplies in China in yuan, instead of in U.S. dollars, the company’s Alexander Dyukov has said.

Russian oil firms have sought for years to shift away from U.S. dollar payments for deliveries, while China intends to make the yuan a more widely used currency internationally.

Analysts say the settlement of jet fuel payments in yuan is also part of a broader strategy of the Russian companies to diminish the risk of U.S. sanctions against them.

As of September, Gazprom Neft is starting to move settlements for jet fuel of aircraft flying to and from China away from the U.S. dollar and in either Russian rubles or Chinese yuan, Dyukov said on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Friday.

“We begin in September and we can move all aviation fuel settlements in China into yuan by the end of the year,” Dyukov said, as carried by Russian news agency TASS.

Gazprom Neft is not the first and only Russian oil firm looking to move away from the U.S. dollar in transactions for oil deliveries.

Two years ago, Russia’s largest oil company Rosneft set the euro as the default currency for all new exports of crude oil and refined products, as the state-controlled giant looked to switch as many sales as possible from U.S. dollars to euros in order to avoid further U.S. sanctions against it.

Russia and China will increasingly use the ruble and the yuan in bilateral trade, especially in energy, Yang Jin, a Russian affairs specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told South China Morning Post on Monday.

“It can expand the international influence of the yuan and the rouble … and help resist the external risks of sanctions,” Yang told the outlet.

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The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States as journalist Ben Norton recently noted, characterizing Karzai as “a former US puppet who later turned against the US, and knows many of its secrets.”

So what exactly is ISIS-K and what is its history? After ISIS’s Afghanistan variant became a household name overnight following a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed more than 170 people and wounded more than 200, the group’s history demands renewed scrutiny.

Back in May, I tweeted that “I must not be the only one expecting a so-called ‘rise of ISIS’ in Afghanistan in the near future…”

I wrote this because mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries: the “counterterrorism mission,” or the “terrorist threat.” And it has been a long time since the Taliban has taken credit for any such acts.

In fact, all the way back in August 2016 — a little over five years ago — Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Iranian media that “In cooperation with the nation, [the Taliban] has prevented the terrorist group from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.”

Whoops pic.twitter.com/uOxOysjO4w

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) August 28, 2021

The strongest argument in favor of a US withdrawal put forward by the Biden Administration is that the United States completed its counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan. The attack by “ISIS-K” on the Kabul airport collapses this argument, and so it benefits those who would prefer to see Afghanistan permanently occupied by the US.

It’s also not the actions of a calculating terrorist group: why commit mass violence at such a critical juncture? Why do it when all eyes are on Afghanistan and many in the Pentagon, in NATO, are looking for any excuse to invade again?

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was even able to interview a “senior ISIS-K commander” two weeks before the attack who made these points. The “commander” told CNN that the group was “lying low and waiting for its moment to strike.”

While the US-backed government was still in power in Kabul, the ISIS-K “commander” told Ward that “it’s no problem for him to get through checkpoints and come right into the capital.” He even let the CNN crew film his entrance into the city.

In the absurd interview, CNN sat in a hotel room with the supposed ISIS-K leader and protected his identity. Ward asked him comically upfront questions like “are you interested, ultimately, in carrying out international attacks?”

Screenshot from CNN’s interview.

In response to a question about their plans for expansion in Afghanistan following a US withdrawal, the “commander” said “instead of currently operating, we have turned to recruiting only, to utilize the opportunity and to do our recruitment. But when the foreigners and people of the world leave Afghanistan, we can restart our operations.”

What changed?

This is not to say definitively that the ISIS-K attack was a false flag, but there are many holes in the narrative that demand scrutiny. It is worth noting here that the US is in charge of security at the airport until August 31, while the Taliban controls the surrounding area.

Moreover, the United States had advanced knowledge of the attack.

“Because of security threats outside the gates of Kabul airport, we are advising US citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time,” read an August 25 security alert on the US Embassy in Afghanistan website. “US citizens who are at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate now should leave immediately.”

Britain and Australia issued similar warnings of a “high threat of a terrorist attack” and a “very high threat of a terrorist attack” respectively.

The following day, a suicide bomber blew himself up and killed scores of people. Additionally, US forces reportedly gunned down a large number of people as well. “Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast,” tweeted BBC correspondent Secunder Kermani, who reported from the area.

The very next day after the attack, the United State Central Command announced that “US military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan.”

In short, the US knew an attack was coming, the attack happened, and then within 24 hours the US announced that they killed the perpetrator, saying “initial indications are that we killed the target.”

NYT Live Update from 40mins ago: following the failure to act on intelligence and prevent 'ISIS-K' from carrying out a suicide bombing that the US had advanced knowledge of, US forces in Afghanistan are conducting "controlled demolitions" in CIA bases in the country 🤔 pic.twitter.com/B37fHB67bh

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) August 28, 2021

Then on Saturday, US forces demolished a CIA base in the country.

These facts give us more questions than answers. Why was the US unable to prevent the attack? Giving the military and intelligence community the benefit of doubt that they didn’t know who was going to attack and therefore could not have prevented it, how did they figure it out so quickly after the attack? If it was the CIA, which is more than likely, who provided this information, why is the military destroying CIA infrastructure that could plausibly play a role in helping to figure such things out? This is an especially troubling question considering that less than a few hours before the New York Times reported that US troops destroyed a CIA base, President Biden said that military commanders informed him that another attack on the airport is “highly likely” in the next 24-26 hours.

Long Running Accusations of Support

Researcher and commentator Hadi Nasrallah noted on Friday that the leader of the Middle East resistance group Hezbollah “said that the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran.”

Hezbollah is not the first player in the area to make the accusation of the US setting up a ratline via helicopter flights to Afghanistan for ISIS: Russia and Iran, which borders Afghanistan, have been for some time.

As Hadi Nasrallah noted, Syra and Iraq have said more or less the same, with Syrian state media SANA saying in 2017 reporting that “US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an ‘unknown area.’”

In 2017 and 2020, Syria’s SANA reported that that US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an “unknown area”. The same thing was reported for years in Iraq by the PMU along with reports that US helicopters dropped aid for ISIS.

— Hadi Nasrallah (@HadiNasrallah) August 28, 2021

As Hadi Nasrallah pointed out, “the same thing was reported for years in Iraq by the [Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces] along with reports that US helicopters dropped aid for ISIS.”

Back in 2017 and 2018, Iranian and Russian officials had questions of their own. Chief of Iranian General Staff Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri accused the US of “relocating members of the Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group to Afghanistan after their defeats in Iraq and Syria” in early February of 2018.

“The Americans point to (the existence) of tensions in the southwest Asia region as an excuse for their presence in the region,” Major General Baqeri told reporters.

The following month, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the longtime foreign minister of Iran who departed from the post earlier this year, said

“we see intelligence, as well as eyewitness accounts, that Daesh fighters, terrorists, were airlifted from battle zones, rescued from battle zones, including recently from the prison of Haska [Meyna].”

Iran and Russia have “consistently allege[d]” that unmarked helicopters were flying into regions of Afghanistan where ISIS had a foothold. But as Javad Zarif pointed out in March 2018,

“this time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison. Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

As the US government propaganda outlet Voice of America wrote at the time in 2018, “the terrorist group uses Nangarhar as its main base to launch attacks elsewhere in Afghanistan.” This is the same province the US struck with an unmanned drone the day following the attack on the airport.

As Voice of America noted, the National Security Advisor of the recently-collapsed Afghanistan government offered Russian and Iranian delegates “joint investigations into allegations of unmarked helicopters flying IS[IS] fighters to battle zones in the country.”

In February 2018, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov implored the US to answer the question.

“We still expecting from our American colleagues an answer to the repeatedly raised questions, questions that arose on the basis of public statements made by the leaders of some Afghan provinces, that unidentified helicopters, most likely helicopters to which NATO in one way or another is related, fly to the areas where the insurgents are based, and no one has been able to explain the reasons for these flights yet,” Lavrov said. “In general [the United States] tries to avoid answers to these legitimate questions.”

Later that month, Lavrov had more to say on the issue: “According to our data, the IS[IS] presence in northern and eastern Afghanistan is rather serious. There are already thousands of gunmen.”

“We are alarmed as, unfortunately, the US and NATO military in Afghanistan makes every effort to silence and deny [ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan],” he added.

These mysterious dead-of-night helicopter flights even raised the eyebrows of the fallen US puppet government. All the way back in May 2017, a local official in the Sar-e-Pul province said two military helicopters landed in the dead of night.

“According to the report we have received from the 2nd Battalion of the Afghan National Army, which fights on the first line of the battle in Sar-e-Pul, two military helicopters landed in a stronghold of the enemy at 8pm last Thursday,” Mohammad Zahir Wahdat, the governor of the province, told Afghan media.

Following Lavrov’s comments in 2018, General John Nicholson, the commander of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, said that Russia was exaggerating the threat of ISIS in Afghanistan.

“We see a narrative that’s being used that grossly exaggerates the number of Isis [Islamic State group] fighters here,” Gen. Nicholson told the BBC. “This narrative then is used as a justification for the Russians to legitimize the actions of the Taliban.

This talking point was reinforced by Navy Captain Tom Gresbeck, the public affairs director of NATO’s Afghanistan mission, who said that US forces have “no evidence of any significant migration of IS-K foreign fighters. We see local fighters who switch allegiances to join ISIS for various reasons, but the Russian narrative grossly exaggerates the numbers of ISIS fighters that are in the country.”

It appears that this week, the United States may be forced to eat its words.

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