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After the atomic bombing of Japan, the U.S. dropped powerful, more sophisticated deadly bombs.
It is 20 years since the criminal attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the world’s mass media remember those unique and unthinkable acts with justified pain and dismay.
However, while they forget and gloss over the horrendous crimes of the U.S. empire throughout history, they beat their chests. It is as if the innocent deaths of other nations do not have the same value as the citizens of the United States of America (USA).
Let us also remember from the most recent history, the countries bombed by the USA, after the abhorrent attack with atomic bombs against the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Thus ended the Second World War and provoked the surrender of Japan.
These powerful bombings, never before or since carried out by any power, were ordered by Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. It is estimated that around 150 to 200 thousand people were killed.
Tens of thousands more were burned by radiation and seriously injured, suffering from terminal illnesses such as cancer. The entire Japanese citizenry was traumatized by this barbaric imperial act, unprecedented in the history of mankind.
After the atomic bombing of Japan, the USA dropped powerful, more sophisticated but deadly bombs on this list of countries, causing millions of deaths and injuries.
No exact official figures are known, but in Vietnam and Iraq alone it is estimated that more than a million people died, mostly defenseless people and civilians.
More than 30 nations have been bombed by the U.S. between 1950 and 2021:
Korea and China- 1950 to 1953
Guatemala-1954
Indonesia- 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala- 1960
Congo- 1964
Laos 1964 to 1973
Vietnam-1961 to 1973
Cambodia-1969 and 1970
Guatemala- 1967 and 1969
Grenada- 1983
Lebanon- 1983 and 1984
Libya- 1986
El Salvador- 1980
Nicaragua- 1980
Iran- 1987
Panama- 1989
Iraq- 1991 (Persian Gulf)
Kuwait- 1991
Somalia- 1993
Bosnia- 1994 and 1995
Sudan- 1998
Afghanistan- 1998
Yugoslavia- 1999
Yemen- 2002
Iraq- 1991 to 2003
Iraq- 2003 to 2015
Pakistan- 2007 to 2015
Somalia- 2007 to 2011
Yemen- 2009 to 2011
Libya- 2011 to 2015
Syria- 2014 to 2016
Afghanistan-2001-2021
The lives of all human beings have the same value and imperial barbarism has a first and last name. Nature has also suffered the onslaught of the US military-industrial-financial complex.
In truth, it is a disgusting business that has left more than a trillion dollars in profits in Afghanistan alone.
Let us not be fooled by the crocodile tears of rulers manipulated by big capital. They have no morals to accuse anyone when they are the main cause of the pain and suffering of millions of people, innocent victims of their wars.
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COVID19/11: Narratives Intertwined is OffG’s new series of short interviews with prominent voices in the alternate media, vocal Covid sceptics and leading figures in the 9/11 truth movement.
The series is intended to both mark the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center collapse, and discuss how that event helped shape the modern world and, in turn, set the stage for the Covid “pandemic”.
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Episode Six of Narratives Intertwined features Elizabeth Woodworth, author and former chief medical librarian for British Colombia.
Elizabeth is author of several articles and books, including 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation (with Dr David Ray Griffin) and Unprecedented Crime: Climate Change Denial and Game Changers for Survival (with Dr Peter Carter).
In her interview she discusses how she woke up to the reality of 9/11 and how potential treatments for Covid19 were discredited in order to force through the emergency use authorization of the Covid mRNA “vaccines”.
You can follow Elizabeth on twitter here and read her article on hyrdoxychloroquine here. Her book 9/11 Unmasked was reviewed by several of our authors [1–2–3] and became the subject of a censorship campaign from Amazon.
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The reported suspected side effects for the four Covid vaccines, which have only been conditionally approved in the EU, are record-breaking after just 8 months. Serious side effects have been reported.
The European Medicines Agency EMA currently lists 904 534 personal suspected cases with a total of 3 478 979 individual side effects for the Covid vaccines (as of September 3, 2021). Almost a third of them are categorized as serious. Thus 262 383 of the 904 534 the cases are severe.
The four Covid vaccines have only received limited approval and the final evaluation reports are not expected until the end of 2022 or 2023.
In the EMA EudraVigilance database, the data for the following vaccines are listed:
The total number of all suspected cases reported to the EMA increased by over 80 percent in the period May 29, 2021 to September 3, 2021. Contrary to some rumours, the majority of the reports are submitted by personnel from the health sector such as clinics or medical practices. With Biontech it is around 46 percent that are reported by EU medical practices or clinics.
This speaks for a solid database. Added to this are the control and monitoring mechanisms of the EMA, which have been tried and tested over many years, in order to secure the best possible data sets.
The reports are usually first sent to the national competent authorities (Germany PEI). These cases are often filtered and then reported to the EMA.
What proportion do the reported suspected cases of Covid vaccinations make up in the EMA database?
If one follows the information in the 2020 annual report, the 904 534 suspected Covid vaccination cases in the period of just 8 months from 2021 account for almost exactly 50 percent of the 1 821 211 suspected side effects of all 5 042 substances listed for drugs as well as vaccinations in 2020.
That is incredibly high.
France singles out Janssen’s product as a problem
A “significant number” of injuries as a result of Janssen’s Covid-19 vaccine, which works with a single dose, has been noted in France, said the Medicines Agency (ANSM) on Monday, which said it would be carrying out more investigations.
“A large number of cases of failure of the Janssen vaccine has been reported, with in particular serious forms (death, resuscitation) as well as an over-representation of patients vaccinated by Janssen in intensive care” in Marseille and Tours, noted the ANSM in its periodic vaccine surveillance report.
Since April, around one million injections of this vaccine (the only one to be administered with a single dose) have been carried out in France. Among all these people vaccinated with Janssen, 32 cases of Covid-19 infection have so far been reported (a rate of 3,78 per 100 000).
Of these 32 cases, 29 were serious and 4 deaths were recorded (people aged 73 to 87). For the 17 cases of infection where the variant was known, it was the Delta variant in each case.
Hospitalized in intensive care despite vaccination
In addition, two hospitals reported an unusually high number of patients vaccinated with Janssen among people hospitalized in intensive care despite vaccination.
In Marseille, out of 7 patients who were fully vaccinated but still admitted to the ICU (that is to say seriously affected), 4 had been jabbed with Janssen. In Tours, this proportion was 50 percent.
All these elements justify “additional investigations” to check whether the failures are more important with Janssen than with the other vaccines available in France.
On August 24, the French National Authority for Health (HAS) recommended that people vaccinated with Janssen receive a booster dose with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) from four weeks after their vaccination.
Several real-life studies have indeed shown that the first dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine provided insufficient protection. No data on this point is available for Janssen, but the HAS considered it likely that this is also the case.
The risk/reward ratio of Covid-19 vaccines is appalling
As the graph in this tweet shows, there are no valid reasons for pursuing mass vaccination against Covid-19.
Regardless of the reported efficacy of vaccines, the data from the most vaccinated nations on Earth indicates that vaccinating nearly all adults will not prevent seasonal waves of infection:
Every one of these nations had dramatically more cases in Aug 2021 than in Aug 2020: pic.twitter.com/LdJaQICT6L
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Critics of the foreign and national security policies of the Joe Biden regime were quick to note that the American soldiers being pulled out of Afghanistan were no doubt a resource that will be committed to a new adventure somewhere else. There was considerable speculation that the new model army, fully vaccinated, glorious in all its gender and racial diversity and purged of extremists in the ranks, might be destined to put down potentially rebellious supremacists in unenlightened parts of the United States. But even given an increasingly totalitarian White House, that civil war type option must have seemed a bridge too far for an administration plagued by plummeting approval ratings, so the old hands in Washington apparently turned to what has always been a winner: pick a suitable foreign enemy and stick it to him.
It is of course generally known that when Joe Biden was running for president, he committed himself to making an attempt to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 which placed limits on the Iranian nuclear program and also established an intrusive inspection routine. In turn, the Iranians were to receive relief from sanctions related to the program. In 2018 President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement based on the false argument that Iran was cheating on the arrangement and was secretly engaged in developing a weapon. Trump’s neocon supporters on the issue also argued without any evidence that Iran was intending to use the agreement as cover for its efforts to accumulate enriched uranium, guaranteeing that they would be able develop a weapon quickly when the inspection regime expires in 2025.
The Trump move was, of course, backed by the Israel Lobby and it was widely seen as deferring to Israeli interests at a time when the agreement was actually good for the United States as it blocked an unfriendly country’s possible nuclear proliferation. Unfortunately, a US government’s bowing to Israel is not exactly unusual and the withdrawal was subject to only limited criticism in the mainstream media.
Joe Biden, who has described himself as a Zionist, is no less prone to pandering to Israel than is Trump. When he raised the issue of JCPOA during his campaign in a bid to appeal to his party’s progressives, he also caveated the move by indicating that the agreement would have to be updated and improved. The talks in Vienna, which Iran and the US are indirectly engaged in, have been stalled for several months due to Iranian elections and over Washington’s insistence that Iran include in the agreement restrictions on the country’s ballistic missile program while also ceasing its alleged interference in the political turmoil in the region. The interference charge relates to Iranian support of the completely legitimate Syrian and Lebanese governments as well as of the Houthi rebels in Yemen who have been on the receiving end of Saudi Arabian aggression supported by Washington.
As Iran insists that any return to status quo ante be based on the existing agreement without any additions, to include relief from sanctions which Washington has rebuffed, it has been clear from the beginning that there is nowhere to go. Recently it has been argued in neocon and media circles (essentially the same thing) that the new conservative president of Iran Ebrahim Raisi means that no arrangement with Iran can be trusted and they point to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that suggest that Iran has started to enrich admittedly small amounts of uranium. To add to the confusion, there have been some reports suggesting that Israel deliberately targeted and destroyed IAEA monitoring equipment in a June raid to make clear assessments of nuclear developments more difficult to obtain.
To finish the charade, which was not expected to result in anything, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, traveling Germany to mend fences over the Afghanistan debacle, has now warned that the US is getting “closer” to giving up on renegotiating the Iran nuclear deal. Blinken declared to reporters that “I’m not going to put a date on it but we are getting closer to the point at which a strict return to compliance with the JCPOA does not reproduce the benefits that that agreement achieved.”
When Blinken refers to benefits he is now of course meaning the full package of demands being made by Washington, which, as noted above, go far beyond the original intention of the agreement. As Iran has repeatedly insisted that it is only willing to discuss the original formulation which would provide for them some sanctions relief, something that Blinken certainly knows, he evades the issue of Washington being the spoiler in the Vienna talks.
Now that Afghanistan has fallen with considerable blowback to the fortunes of the Biden Administration, the situation with Iran becomes potentially more important, even while recognizing the Iran does not threaten the United States or its actual interests in any way. Biden-Blinken are clearly interested in sustaining a purported vital interest in the Middle East so troop levels throughout the region can be maintained. There is a commitment with Baghdad to remove all US “combat troops,” however that will be defined, by year’s end, but there are also American soldiers in Syria fighting a war and large military bases in Kuwait, Doha, and Bahrain. The US also maintains a skeleton presence of air force personnel in Israel as well as large arms supply depots.
To justify all that an enemy is essential and Iran fits the bill. And it should surprise no one that steps are now being taken to confront the evil Persians in their home waters. The United States Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet announced last week that it will create a special new task force that will incorporate airborne, sailing and underwater drones to confront Iran. In the announcement the spokesmen revealed that in coming months drone capabilities would be expanded to cover a number of chokepoints critical to the movement both of global energy supplies and worldwide shipping, to include the crucial Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of all oil passes. It also will presumably include the Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal as well as the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen.
The systems being deployed by what has been dubbed the 5th Fleet Task Force 59 will include some recently developed innovative technologies, to include underwater, long range, and special surveillance drones. Armed drones will use the same platforms and some of the drones will be small enough to be fired from submarines, which will confuse points of origin and permit plausible denial by Washington if they should be used to deter or intimidate the Iranians.
So, the fall of Afghanistan might be seen as welcome after all these years of mayhem, but it may have opened the door to heightened tension in the nearby Persian Gulf. Washington-Biden-Blinken are intent on proving to the world that in spite of Afghanistan the United States is nobody’s patsy. Unfortunately, putting the screws to Iran yet again is no solution to Washington’s inability to perceive its proper role in the world. The lesson that might have been learned in Afghanistan and also Iraq apparently has already been forgotten.
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This article was originally published by The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
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Civil liberties are under attack in Canada and worldwide. On the basis of public health acts and infectious disease laws, limitations to constitutional rights are imposed through emergency orders by Canada’s medical officers of health and by unelected bureaucrats elsewhere.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was written specifically to limit government overreach. In a crisis such as this, it is more important than ever to uphold Charter rights. Whether the COVID-19 mandates and restrictions represent reasonable and necessary limitations has yet to be seen.
Members of the newly formed group Canadian Academics for Covid Ethics and other independent scholars address these questions in a letter to our public health officials. The authors summarize the many uncertainties around the severity of the pandemic, reliance on problematic testing procedures and erratic modeling, ineffective non-pharmaceutical interventions, suppression of alternative treatments, disregard for natural immunity, and the destructive focus on vaccines as the only solution.
The Open Letter has been sent directly to the federal, provincial and Ontario regional Public Health Officers, to ensure that they receive it, and to politicians and the media.
Open Letter to Public Health Officers
After months of fear, misinformation, lockdowns, mandates, and broken trust, Canadians are starting to wake up in disbelief:
What have you done?!
You have convinced and continue to attempt convincing the public that we are in the midst of a major health crisis, and thrust our country into chaos. Meanwhile, all-cause mortality in Canada is in-line with trends from the past several years and indicates no such crisis. You have instilled fear in the general public of COVID-19 by publishing egregious data (such as daily cases and ICU numbers) without putting those numbers into context. How serious are those ‘cases’? How many were asymptomatic? What would similar case numbers be in any past years for other illness such as the flu? How does ICU occupancy compare to previous years? You are misleading the public and priming us for unwarranted future restrictions.
What have you done?!
You have not been transparent about the favourable survival rates from COVID. Instead, you convinced us that a positive test result is a death sentence, when in reality the virus overwhelmingly affects elderly people and those with specific vulnerabilities. COVID remains relatively harmless for the majority of the population.
What have you done?!
You have driven up case numbers by relying on the PCR test, deemed to be inappropriate as a diagnostic tool by its inventor and known to yield too many false positives at the cycle thresholds that have been used. In fact, the WHO recommended, on June 25 of this year, that ‘widespread screening of asymptomatic individuals is not a recommended strategy’. And yet, you insist on driving up the case numbers by mass testing of healthy, asymptomatic individuals. You have made Canadians irrationally fearful of one another, convincing us that asymptomatic transmission is a driver of infections, while multiple studies demonstrate that this is false. Yet, you fail to update the public on the changing science.
What have you done?!
You have coerced an entire population to wear masks, despite the fact that their ability to prevent transmission of COVID-19 has been seriously called into question by recent systematic reviews of the medical literature. This is also readily observed by comparing regions with and without mask mandates. Cloth masks and most mass-produced face masks are not approved medical devices, rather their real purpose appears to be the creation of heightened public anxiety, isolating the wearers, and posturing visual compliance to unfounded public health diktats. This insidious form of psychological control has immeasurable health, social and psychological consequences, especially for children, which you fail to acknowledge.
What have you done?!
You have utilized lockdowns as a sledgehammer to bring down COVID cases, while neglecting the resulting collateral damage from lost livelihoods, stalled cancer and transplant surgeries, and increased rates of depression, drug overdose, and suicide. You have failed to take a holistic approach, and your “cure” is proving far worse than the disease. There are multiple studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, easily seen by simple comparison of jurisdictions that locked down with those that didn’t. You are failing us by failing to understand the evolution of knowledge. We learn by and through mistakes. The ethical principle is to own up to mistakes. Without that first step, ignorance flourishes.
What have you done?!
You have provided madcap computer model predictions to justify lockdowns, proclaiming the lockdowns as successful, when the predictions did not materialize. This is not proof. This is manipulation. Computer models have provided too many nonsensical predictions and should have been ignored. After decades of model refinement, we still cannot accurately predict the weather, even a day in advance. Yet, you present COVID model results as if they are accurate over the span of months.
What have you done?!
You have not provided any solid scientific evidence that any of the measures you have imposed on the public are either necessary or effective. You have ignored a body of scientific literature that does not support your measures, and you have not engaged with experts who have raised concerns or evaluated the same evidence in a way that does not align with your views. You have not allowed public scientific debate on these issues, choosing rather to ignore, censor or smear those brave enough to bring them to the public.
What have you done?!
You have ignored early treatment protocols for safe, effective, and inexpensive treatments of COVID 19 with multidrug therapies, despite the massive evidence both from front-line doctors and meta-analysis of the medical literature, with published studies showing their efficacy around the world. Instead, you have convinced citizens that COVID-19 is a death sentence and that only vaccination, indeed vaccine mandates, will save us. You have withheld important information from the public and from frontline doctors, and more shockingly, you have intimidated, demonized, and threatened with loss of license doctors who have had the courage to prescribe lifesaving treatment to their patients. What a waste of lives!
What have you done?!
You are now relentlessly pushing experimental vaccines on the general population as ‘safe’. Nothing could be further from the truth, as shown by almost 14,000 deaths reported in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Since December of 2020, the number of reported covid vaccine-related deaths are already more than one-and-a-half times the number of deaths reported in conjunction with all other vaccines combined since the implementation of the system in 1990. Furthermore, there is a lack of long-term safety data. These genetic-based therapies only received emergency interim authorization, and have not undergone the same type of review as fully approved products. You are not providing the public with the information they need to be able to give informed consent.
What have you done?!
You forced family and emergency doctors to abandon their Hippocratic oaths to “first do no harm.” You have destroyed the science surrounding COVID and replaced it with baseless behavioural prescriptions. You have divided citizen from citizen, parent from child, brother from sister. Overall, you have participated in destroying a country that was once prosperous, strong and free.
What should you do?
Publicly admit that your recommendations and orders are both harmful and baseless. Retract all of your recommendations and orders immediately. Stop vaccine mandates. Apologize to Canadians and resign.
Anton de Ruiter, PhD
Jan Vrbik, PhD
John Zwaagstra, PhD
Claudia Chaufan, MD, PhD
Maximilian Forte, PhD
Denis Rancourt, PhD
Angela Durante, PhD
Valentina Capurri, PhD
Alexander Andree, PhD
Janice Fiamengo, PhD
Laurent Leduc, PhD
Jens Zimmermann, PhD
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In a “deeply disturbing” speech last week, President Biden exhorted medical coercion of an experimental gene therapy for a virus with a 99% survival rate for a large portion of the population, and for which no one bears financial liability in cases where injuries or deaths occur.
President Biden’s speech last week was stunning. As the Associated Press aptly reported, the president pivoted from a war on the coronavirus to a war on the “unvaccinated.”
Coercing the “unvaccinated” was the president’s first and foremost point — the only way back to normal is through vaccination, testing and masks, he said.
But the president went much further — he vilified the unvaccinated. They are not “doing the right thing.” They are “keeping us from turning the corner.” They are “blocking public health.”
“The refusal [of the unvaccinated] has cost all of us,” Biden said.
Addressing the 80 million refusers, the president said, as if speaking to unruly children, “our patience is wearing thin.”
He went further still, empathizing with the anger and anxiety of those who’ve been vaccinated and thus presumably protected. He threatened, “We cannot let the unvaccinated undo this progress,” although he muddled the words in delivery.
Biden also took a potshot at dissenting doctors, suggesting they are “conspiracy theorists,” not “real doctors.” His comments echoed the calls of others, including the Federation of State Medical Boards, to take away the medical licenses of doctors who dare to raise questions about vaccine safety.
Furthermore, Biden misled the public on vaccine approval. He suggested that because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine on Aug. 23, there’s nothing more for the unvaccinated to “wait for.”
However, the FDA has not licensed the Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (marketed as Janssen) and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, and the licensed Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine is largely unavailable in the U.S.
Here's my latest with @NassMeryl… Buried in fine print of Monday's approval by FDA of Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine are 2 critical facts that affect whether vaccine can be mandated + whether Pfizer can be held liable for injuries.https://t.co/QtpHufCKDI
The president’s speech announced the full weight of the federal government against those who lawfully reject an unwanted, experimental medical intervention. Worse still, he sought to enlist the vaccinated in this divisive and dangerous campaign.
No president should seek to demonize citizens exercising the fundamental human right to informed consent. No president should play doctor and demand 100% vaccination rates.
Medical decision-making must be individual and individualized, and occur in the context of the doctor-patient relationship. No medical intervention can be safe and effective for all, as the president suggested. Science does not support dividing people by vaccination status and discriminating on that basis, as the president purported — nor do law or ethics support damaging discrimination.
The president failed to respect the individual rights to informed consent. The Nuremberg Code, which the U.S. promulgated and has expanded over time, says it best: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
Suggesting the “large majority of Americans” may demonize and marginalize a minority for rejecting experimental medicine is abhorrent.
But what did President Biden really mean when he talked about the “unvaccinated?” Are people who refuse COVID shots actually unvaccinated?
No. The vast majority have had many vaccines during their lifetimes: polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, influenza and a battery of other ones. They simply have chosen not to take experimental COVID shots that have not yet finished phase 3 clinical trials (Moderna’s trials go to 2022, Pfizer’s until 2023) and that have blanket liability protection for manufacturers, healthcare providers and government officials.
They have decided it’s not right for them. Whether it’s because they object to all vaccination, or this one, whether it’s for scientific, religious or medical reasons, whether it’s because they’ve already been injured by a vaccine which puts them at increased risk, or whether they’ve acquired natural immunity because they’ve already had the virus, it’s their right.
Suggesting the government or the majority is entitled to marginalize the minority on COVID vaccination grounds is shocking.
Yet “unvaccinated” is likely to soon mean anyone who’s missing the latest booster dose. By late September, “unvaccinated” or “not fully vaccinated” likely will mean anyone who’s not had two or three doses of a COVID shot, depending on which brand the person took initially. Who knows how many more boosters are in store?
The president’s final blessing to those “on the front lines of this pandemic” and to “our troops” was particularly painful, because it is precisely these people with deep knowledge of the disease and the vaccines who are refusing the shots in large numbers, and who now are at risk of their livelihoods.
These people who put their lives on the line during the pandemic are being asked to lose everything if they exercise their right to refuse this medical treatment.
What can we do?
Understand that you are the unvaccinated, no matter how many vaccines you’ve had. The administration is looking for scapegoats because COVID is still here, and it’s likely to be here for awhile. The “unvaccinated” term is likely to be a moving target, perpetually ratcheting up what it means to be “fully vaccinated” and “unvaccinated.”
Get educated.Sign up for Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) The Defender. It’s free. Tell your friends.
Speak up! If you think mandatory medicine with experimental products is not a good idea, now is the time to speak out. Let your elected officials know, call the White House, go to your school board meetings. Remember Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.”
Act on your conscience. Consider participating in Walk Out Week starting today, Sept. 13. Stay away from medically coercive schools and jobs.
Demonstrate. Show your support for health freedom at peaceful rallies across the country.
Don’t quit your job. If your workplace is mandating vaccination, explore lawful exemptions. If your exemption is denied, force your employer to go through the steps of terminating you. While unpleasant, termination is the only way you can preserve your rights. Lawyers across the country are already bringing lawsuits based on discrimination, the Americans with Disabilities Act, constitutional grounds and others. You may be able to receive back pay and reinstatement if lawsuits succeed. If you resign, you will not be able to vindicate any rights — your departure will be considered voluntary, even if it was not.
Vote your conscience. If you have the opportunity to vote in November, vote your conscience. If your elected officials are not honoring your most precious rights, vote them out!
Based on President Biden’s speech, the next few months may be challenging. Here’s what you can count on from CHD:
We will keep fighting in court against medical tyranny. We will continue lawsuits against the FDA’s faux licensure, against federal censorship and against mandates for vaccines, masks and testing. We will continue to fight for the right to religious and medical exemptions and the right to free and informed consent, unfettered by government diktats.
And foremost we will fight for our future, our children.
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Mary Holland is President and General Counsel of Children’s Health Defense. She has been writing and advocating for better vaccine law and policy for many years, including while she served on the faculty at NYU School of Law from 2002-19. She is co-author of two books on vaccines, Vaccine Epidemic and The HPV Vaccine on Trial, as well as several law review articles.
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Unaware that he was on a hot mic and being broadcast live on a TV station, Israeli health minister Nitzan Horowitz admitted that vaccine passports were primarily about coercing skeptical people to get the vaccine.
“Imposing “green pass” rules on certain venues is needed only to pressure members of the public to get vaccinated, and not for medical reasons, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said on Sunday, ahead of the weekly Cabinet meeting,” reports Jewish News Syndicate.
Unaware that his words were being broadcast live to the nation on Channel 12, Horowitz told Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked that not only should the green pass be removed as a requirement to dine at outdoor restaurants, but also, “For swimming pools, too, not just in restaurants.”
“Epidemiologically, it’s true,” said Horowitz, adding, “The thing is, I’m telling you, our problem is people who don’t get vaccinated. We need [to influence] them a bit; otherwise, we won’t get out of this [pandemic situation].”
The health minister went on to acknowledge that the system wasn’t even being enforced in most venues.
NEW – Israeli Ministry of Health (right) recorded saying to the Minister of Interior (left) "there is no medical or epidemiological justification for the Covid passport, it is only intended to pressure the unvaccinated to vaccinate".pic.twitter.com/c3oAOpZdEE
“There is a kind of universality to the ‘green pass’ system, other than at malls, where I think it should be imposed, [because] now it’s clear that it applies nowhere,” he said.
Israel was once lauded for its successful vaccine rollout and the speed with which it introduced vaccine passports.
The green pass was heralded as an “early vision of how we leave lockdown.” However, the country recently reported its highest ever number of daily COVID cases, with nearly 11,000 infections being recorded.
Although the early threat that the unvaccinated would be banned from entering numerous public venues convinced many younger people to get the vaccine, once it rolled out, the ‘green pass’ system was rarely even enforced and was subsequently scrapped at the end of May.
But once cases started rising again later that summer, Israel’s vaccine passport system was reintroduced and expanded.
Meanwhile, Sweden, which never imposed a hard lockdown, recently banned travelers arriving from Israel from entering the country.
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Los Angeles School Board Mandates Covid Vaccination for 600,000 kids 12 years old and up.
Many will have serious health problems and many will die.It is all for nothing as healthy kids are essentially at zero risk from Covid.
It is a known fact that the Vaccine is a greater danger to the young than the Covid virus.Why are the kids being forced to be vaccinated?The most plausible answer is that the School Board is utterly corrupt and has been bought by Big Pharma.
Many of the sheeple parents who tolerate this will have dead and injured kids on their hands.
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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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Genetically engineered (GE) wheat with a supposedly reduced concentration of acrylamide after baking is to be tested in field trials in the UK. Scientists there have successfully used CRISPR/Cas to block a gene function involved in production of the amino acid asparagine, which is important for the concentration of acrylamide after baking.
However, as reported by Testbiotech, asparagine is also involved in seed germination, the growth of the plants, their stress responses and disease defences. As scientific publications show, the risks are complex and need to be assessed in detail.
The field trials are being organised by Rothamsted Research. Using CRISPR/Cas, their scientists succeeded in reducing the concentration of free asparagine available in the kernels by up to 90 percent. They did this by knocking out several copies (alleles) of a gene (TaASN2-Gen). However, it was found that some lines of this CRISPR wheat almost lost capacity to germinate. The scientists are therefore planning to also grow a version of the wheat in the trials in which fewer copies of the gene have been knocked out.
For comparison purposes they are also planning to grow a conventionally bred wheat showing some genetic alterations (mutations). The pattern of genetic changes in this particular wheat is very different to the genotype of the CRISPR wheat, and the content of asparagine is reduced to a lesser degree.
The genetically engineered plants also show some unintended characteristics since the concentration of several amino acids was unintentionally changed. Furthermore, the concentration of asparagine in the GE plants fluctuates significantly. Therefore, says Testbiotech, more research is needed to determine whether additional unintended effects were caused in the metabolism of the plants. This should include taking all the steps of the genetic engineering process into account.
The first step consisted of introducing the DNA for the gene scissors and an additional gene for herbicide resistance into the plant genome. This was done using a so-called gene cannon (biolistic method). This method is used in “Old GE” and is known to frequently cause unintended changes in the genome. The additionally inserted genes are meant to be removed from the plants through further breeding. Nevertheless, even if this is successful, the genome still needs to be screened for further unintended genetic changes caused by the gene cannon.
Gene scissors also cause unwanted effects associated with risks to health and the environment, such as the insertion of additional DNA in the target region of the genome and production of erroneous proteins. A recent publication describes these on-target effects in detail. However, so far, changes in other sites of the genome (off-target) which can be caused by lack of precision of the gene scissors have not been investigated.
The whole genome of the plants would need to be screened in order to identify all these unintended effects. However, this is a complex undertaking due to the huge size of the wheat genome. Therefore, Rothamsted Research can in no way be sure that the CRISPR wheat only inherits the intended genetic changes. In addition, it is not known how the wheat will react to environmental stress, how it will interact with ecosystems or if it may be safe for consumption and the environment.
Testbiotech concludes that this GE wheat clearly shows how complicated the assessment of the specific risks can be that are caused by the processes of New GE. Without detailed examination, no conclusion can be drawn on safety of the plants. Nevertheless, contrary to all findings, industry is demanding that GE plants should be exempted from detailed risk assessment as long as no additional genes are inherited.
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Once upon a time, there was a cute little shrimp and there were three powerful fat whales. The three whales fought among themselves and one of them killed the other two and then, the victorious whale ate the cute little shrimp.
This is the story of Korea in the latter half of the 19th century. China, Japan and Russia came and they fought to swallow Korea.
Korea was important to them. Russia needed Korea for ice-free ports; China wanted to keep Korea as a vassal country and a buffer zone between Japan and China; Japan badly needed to have Korea as an expressway to China to conquer.
They fought and Japan won the Sino-Japan war (1894-1895) and the Russia-Japan war (1904-1905) and Japan annexed Korea in 1910.
We are now in 2021, more than one century after the trilateral whale fights. A part of Korea is no longer a shrimp; it is grown to be a smart dolphin but surrounded by the same old whales (China, Japan and Russia) in addition to a much larger whale (the U.S.).
A century ago, Korea was destroyed, because the big powers had different interests in Korea. But, now, Korea may be destroyed, because all the big powers have the same interest in Korea, namely the maintenance of tension and the prevention of reunification of Koreas.
In this paper, I will do the following.
First, I will show how Korea was destroyed a century ago by the trilateral fight among China, Japan and Russia. I will show how Japan annexed Korea in an illegal way because of its double victory of war against China and Russia on the one hand and, on the other, because of the betrayal of the pro-Japan traitors.
Moreover, I will discuss how the U.S. let Japan destroy Korea in exchange of Japan’s acceptance of America’s colonization of the Philippines.
Second, I will discuss why Japan, China and the U.S. want to maintain, at the present time, the tension on the Korean peninsula. I will explain why Russia is rather in favour of peace on the Korean peninsula.
Third, I will discuss how Korea can survive in the Sino-American hegemonic war.
Story of Shrimp and Whales in the Latter Half the 19th Century
The geopolitical situation in Northeast Asia in the latter half of the 19th century provided an arena of trilateral fight in which Korea was sacrificed for the greed of China, Japan and Russia.
In 1860, a revolutionary movement took place in Korea. This movement was a political and religious movement; it was called “Dong-hak” meaning Eastern Studies. It embraced several systems of thoughts including the Roman Catholicism designed to teach peasants the need for freeing themselves from the abuse of power of the “Yangban” group (Korean aristocrats).
In 1892, 69,000 peasants revolted and asked the government to punish corrupted bureaucrats, chase foreigners and impose more discipline on the bureaucrats. But, the government refused and the peasants fought to win battles and occupied the city of Jun-joo located in the Southwest region of South Korea.
The panicked government asked China to sent troops to fight the peasants and China sent an important number of troops. But, Japan also sent its troops in accordance with a previous Sino-Japan Treaty, the Li-Ito Treaty (1885) by virtue of which Japan had right to send its troops when Chinese armed forces come to Korea.
The Dong-hak army decided to avoid the war against the combined forces of the Korean government, the Japanese troops and the Chinese troops and the Jun-Joo Treaty was signed and the Dong-hak army was disbanded.
However, the Dong-hak movement succeeded in achieving social reform, according to which the Yangban class system disappeared and the dreadful slave list was destroyed in addition to the land reform in favour of the peasants.
There are several interpretations of the Dong-hak revolt, but, as far as I am concerned, it was the French Revolution of Korean style.
King Gojong asked China to withdraw its army from Korea, which China did. But, Japan kept its troops under the pretext of protecting Japanese citizens.
Two more battalions of the Japanese army came to Korea. From there on, Japan’s unlawful and barbaric behaviour began and nobody could stop it.
In June 1892, the Japanese armed unit invaded the palace and chased away the Min-cabinet which was pro-China and created a pro-Japan cabinet led by Dae-won-gun, farter of King Gojong. And, Japan provoked China in order to make China declare war which Japan was convinced it would win.
The Dong-hak army rose up again to fight the Japanese. In October of 1894, 100,000 Dong-hak troops gathered in Jun-joo and marched toward Seoul.
On the way, they met the combined forces of Korean army and Japanese army and fought for 7 days in the city of Kwang-joo not far from Jun-joo. The Dong-hak army was beaten. The Japanese were too well armed with modern weapons and the Dong-hak troops were literally massacred en masse.
In December, 1894, the Dong-hak leader, Chun Bong-joo was executed and the great revolution of the Dong-hak was over.
It was about this time that a pro-Japan Korean politicians begun to conspire with Japan to take over the power. On May 21, 1894, at dawn, the pro-Japan Group known as “Chin-il-pa:親日派:친일파” plotted with two Japanese battalions and attacked the palace to force the King to transfer power to his father, Dae-won-goon.
The plot was set to eliminate Chinese influence in Korea. Japan attacked without the declaration of war the Chinese navy in Nam-Yang Bay and won almost all the battles on land and sea including the large-scale battle of Pyongyang.
Thus, the short-lasting Sino-Japan War began in July 25, 1894 and China was defeated with humiliation. The war ended with Treaty of Simonoseki on April 17, 1895. China lost Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula and a few other minor territories
In the mean time, Russia became strong and did not hide its ambition to exert influence in Korea. And, in Korea, a pro-Russia group was formed and started to negotiate with Queen Min who helped to form a cabinet with pro-Russian people under Park Jeong-yang.
Dae-won-goon was suspected to be pro-China and he was removed from power.
Japan was worried to lose control in Korea and the new Japanese Consul, MiuraGoro arrived to strengthen Japan’s power. On October 8, 1895, Samurai worriers and Japanese soldiers invaded the palace of Queen Min, captured Queen Min, cut her down with a Japanese sword and threw her into hellish fire.
On February 11, 1896, the Russian Consul brought 100 Russian navy sailors and literally kidnapped King Gojong in complicity with the new queen and put him in the underground floor of the Russian consulate and Russia could obtain a series of concessions to make a fortune. And, a pro-Russia cabinet was formed under Lee Byung-jin, minister of justice.
Russia obtained the management rights of mines and railroads for a large sum of money. For instance, Russia got the right to manage Kyung-in railway, Kyung-ui Railway and the gold mine in Gangwon Province. Some of the managers were non-Russian Europeans.
Many of the pro-Japan ministers were killed by the pro-Russia people in front of a palace. The remaining pro-Japan politicians escaped to Japan to return later back to Korea and sell Korea for their personal greed and ambition.
Under Tsar Nicholas II, Russia began to develop the Eastern region of Russia and it became stronger by the day and Russia’s southward politics began to worry Japan, because Russia could chase Japan out of Korea.
Then something incredible happened! Japan proposed to Russia to divide the Korean peninsula into two halves along the 39th parallel, the southern part to be controlled by Japan, while the northern part to be occupied by Russia.
This was similar to the 1945 division of the Korea peninsula along the 38th parallel in accordance with the Soviet Union-the U.S. agreement.
Russia refused Japan’s proposition, probably because, Russia wanted to have the entire Korea.
The Russo-Japan War was inevitable. Japan sent the ultimatum on February 6, 1904 and two days later Japan attacked the Russian navy near Inchon.
General Nogi Maresuke won the decisive victory by capturing Port Arthur and Admiral Togo Heihachiro destroyed the entire Russian Baltic Fleet near Tsushima Island. These two victories of Japan have made Russia hesitant to continue the war with Japan.
The truth was that Russia had some resources allowing it to continue the war, while Japan had no longer any resources. It was US President Theodore Roosevelt who mediated the end of the war.
The U.S also had interests in the region. Washington did not like Russia’s southward expansion and, in a way, it was important for Japan to win, for Japan could become a useful ally.
In fact, Washington was a conspirator of Korea’s tragedy. There was the Katsura-Taft Agreement which gave free hand to Japan to destroy Korea which the U.S could save.
In July, 1905, Prime Minister Katsura Taro of Japan and the U.S. Secretary of War, William Howard Taft met and agreed that the U.S. recognize Japan’s idea of making Korea its protectorate, while Japan recognizes the Washington’s right to colonize the Philippines.
In a sense, the U.S. was another big whale who played a role of allowing Japan to destroy Korea.
Thus, the Russo-Japan war which started on February 10, 1904 ended on August 10, 1905 with thePortsmouth Treaty which allowed Japan to protect, supervise and colonize Korea.
Shortly after Russia’s defeat, a pro-Japan cabinet took power.
This was the beginning of a half-century of Korea’s nightmare of humiliation and suffering from cruel and brutal Japanese oppression.
On 17 November 1905 Japan imposed the Eulsa Treaty which made Korea Japan’s protectorate in such a way that Korea lost completely sovereignty in foreign relations. Many ministers of the pro-Japan cabinet protested; some of them killed themselves to protest.
But, Treaty was signed by traitors, especially Lee Wan -yong, one of the five ministers who supported the Treaty. Lee was the key person who supported the Korea-Japan Treaty of 1907 which made Japan to control further Korea’s foreign policy.
Finally, in 1910, Lee was the prime minister of the puppet pro-Japan government and signed the illegal and humiliating Korea Annexation Treaty.
For his treachery, Lee was knighted in 1921 by the Japanese emperor; he became Marquis; he became one of the richest men in Korea with confiscated assets including land.
The story we saw illustrates how a week country surrounded by big powers can be destroyed by them, especially, when the country is divided into pro-China group, pro-Russia group and pro-Japan group.
Story of Dolphin and Whales of the 21st Century
We are now in 2021 and more than a century has passed since the Eulsa Treaty of 1905. But, Korea is still surrounded by big powers and it is divided between pro-Japan group of South Korean Conservatives (PJSKC), the pro-Korea South Korean Liberals (PKSKL) and North Korea (NK). Thus there are three Koreas.
Story of PJSKC
Let us begin with the PJSKC group. It is composed of the “chin-il-pa”, that is, pro-Japan group who sold Korea to Japan for personal glory, money and power in the 1900s.
The misfortune of Korea was the fact that they were not punished for their collaboration with Japan and, on the contrary, they ruled South Korea for 58 years out of 73 years since 1948.
They formed the conservative party led by former Japanese officers such as General Park Chung-hee and General Baek Sun-yup who identified themselves more with Japan than with Korea and who have done their best to make South Koreans feel inferior to the Japanese.
For the South Korean conservatives, North Korea is a dangerous enemy which will surely punish the chin-il-pa, if and when Korea is reunited. This is the first reason for the PJSKC’s not wanting peace on the Korean peninsula.
There are three more reasons for chi-il-pa’s wish to have the North-South tension and object the peace on the Korean peninsula.
First, the North-South tension has facilitated their electoral victories by fabricating a fear environment leading to the frightened people’s preference for the conservatives known for its militarism which is supposed to do better job of dealing with North Korean threats, the threats often fabricated by the conservative media led by Cho-Joong-Dong (Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo and Dongah Ilbo).
Second, since the U.S. does not wish to end the Korean War, South Korea being Washington’s forefront military base must do what Washington wants.
Third, the North-South tension justifies the increase of the budget for the purchase of weapons made in Korea or abroad, especially the U.S. It is a known secret that a very large portion of this money goes into the pocket of those involved in weapon deals who are mostly leaders of the PJSKC group.
Story of PKSKL-North Korea
If there are countries which desire peace on the Korean peninsula, they are the PKSKL and North Korea.
The honest efforts to bring peace and prepare for the reunification of Koreas began honestly with the Sun-Shine policy of Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun (1998-2008). These two presidents created a promising foundation for peace through Joint Agreements (2000 and 2007).
But the conservative party of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye did their best in destroying such foundation. By the way, these two former presidents are serving their prison terms for their abuse of power and corruption.
Since President Moon Jae-in of the PKSKL group took over the power in 2017, he had three summits in 2018 and 2019 with Kim Jung-un, President of North Korea and agreed to end the war, eliminate the inter-Korea tension and resume North-South economic cooperation and prepare for the reunification of Koreas.
Unfortunately, the lack of cooperation of Washington and the endless U.S.-led UN sanctions, the inter-Korea peace dialogue and cooperation have become impossible. President Moon has not succeeded in lifting the inter-Korean tension.
Story of Japan
The Case of Japan is complex. To understand Japan’s perception of Korea, in general, and North Korea, in particular, we have to understand the unusual characteristics of Japan’s leaders.
Since Kishi Nobusuke took power in 1957, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has ruled Japan for 58 years out of 64 years. Kishi Nobusuke was the maternal-side grandfather of Shinzo Abe who ruled Japan for 10 years in the 2010s.
Remember this. Kishi was A-class war criminal and sentenced for 5-year prison but liberated after the Americans left Japan. Kishi was one of the most vicious violators of human rights in Manchuria.
He was one of the worst racists; he compared the Chinese people with the Yangtze River which stinks.
He was the right-had man of Tojo Hideki who attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941 without the declaration of War and who put the Japanese people into the hell of the Pacific War.
Over the years, the LDP has become the center of a far-right wing political group which I qualify as the “Neo-Meiji Restoration Group“, or NMRG which has strong attachment to the glory and power of the pre-1945 Japan, which was the continuation of the Meiji Era Japan (1868-1912)
The NMRG has the following characteristics:
It does not recognize the Tokyo War Criminal Trial.
It argues that Japan has never surrendered; Japan has signed the cease-fire. Hence, Japan is still in war with the U.S. and its allies.
Its religion is Shintoism in which the Emperor is god; the Japanese are Emperor’s people, hence, they are divine people who could and did not commit such inhuman crimes as the sexual torture of 200,000 Korean girls, the Nanking Rape and labour slavery of Koreans.
It still believes in the Hakko-Ichi-U, that is, Japan is destined to rule the whole world.
It still has the project of the 1927 Tanaka Memorial which shows the roadmap of Japan’s world conquest starting with the conquest of Korea followed by that of China, Southeast Asia and the U.S.
In short, the ambition of conquering Korea and China is still there. But, to be ready for the eventual invasion of Korea and China, the LDP must remain in power eternally so that Japan can eliminate or modify Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibiting Japan to make war. Here is the famous Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.
“Aspiring sincerely to an international order based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and threat or use of force as means of settling international dispute.” (A part of Article 9 of the Japanese New Constitution of 1947)
However, by virtue of an agreement with the U.S., Japan can join the American forces, if and when the U.S. is in war. In fact, Japan is suspected to hope for joining the U.S. forces attacking North Korea. This will allow the NMRG to satisfy partly its dream of re-conquering Korea and China.
At any rate, Japan does not want peace on the Korean peninsula; Japan wants the North-South tension to continue, because it produces the following benefits.
First, Japan needs North Korea as a threat to Japan, for it provides the occasion to unify voters in favour of the strong LDP. So, North Korea is a good electoral friend of LDP.
Second, the presumed threat of North Korea justifies additional military spending, which helps to build up strong armed forces needed for future invasion of Korea and China.
Third, Washington wishes to maintaining “tension” on the Korean peninsula. Japan being ally of the U.S. it has to go along with Washington’s wish.
Story of China
As for China, it also prefers “tension” on the Korean peninsula for the following reasons:
First, for China, the North-South tension allows China to make North Korea dependent on China for the trade. As much as 90% of trade of North Korea depends on China so that China can exert great influence on North Korea.
Second, for China, North Korea is a precious buffer zone protecting itself from the cultural influences of South Korea and the U.S. Moreover, if hostility occurs between China and the U.S., North Korea could become a military buffer zone.
Third, if peace is established on the Korean peninsula because of the removal of American sanctions, North Korea could become potentially establish closer relations with the US, which in turn would modify Pyongyang’s relations with Beijing. In turn, if this were to happen, North Korea could become a threat to China.
Story of Russia
As for Russia, it has little geopolitical interest in Korea; it has rather geo-economic interests; it wants to build the pan-Korea pipeline to sell Siberian gas. It prefers peace on the Korean peninsula.
Story of the U.S.A.
Washington’s North Korea policy is as ambiguous as its Taiwan policy.
There could be several reasons why Washington has not solved the North Korean issue.
Moreover, it has retained the armistice of the Korean War for 68 years which has contributed to maintaining tension between North and South Korea.
The following reasons are examined below:
First, the U.S. maintains tension on the Korean peninsula partly because of the lobby (bribe) diplomacy of Japan and the PJSKC.
It is a well known fact that Japan and the PJSKC spend billions of dollars to demonize North Korea.
A great number of American and South Korean conservative politicians, academics, think tanks and especially mainstream media are funded by Japan and the PJSKC in order to demonize North Korea. These funds are, to put it bluntly, bribe money. Nobody knows how much.
Moreover, a PJSKC delegation recently went to Washington in order to convince Washington law makers of the need for the sanctions and the maintenance of the state of war on the Korean peninsula.
Second, Another possible reason for Washington’s wish to keep the Korea tension is the presumed threat of North Korean.
Is North Korea really a threat? The combined 2020 GDP of the trilateral alliance, Japan-Korea-the U.S. is USD 27,000 billion against North Korea’s GDP of USD 40 billion.
The combined defence annual budget of the trilateral alliance is almost USD 900 billion as against USD 4 billion in North Korea. How can North Korea be a threat?
Third, The U.S. says that it cannot tolerate the peace dialogue before the denuclearization of North Korea.
But, Washington could have denuclearized North Korea in 1994, 2005 and 2007.
In 1994, North Korea had no nuclear bomb; North Korea was ready to abandon its nuclear project by virtue of the 1994 Framework Agreement. But, Washington was instrumental in foreclosing this solution.
In 2005, Pyongyang was ready to abandon nuclear programmes because of the 2005 Joint Declaration of the 6-Party Talks. President George W.Bush ignored it.
In 2007, Kim Jong-un was ready to denuclearize North Korea because of the Action Plan of the 6-Party Talks. Once again, the U.S. did not take the good opportunity of denuclearization. Did Washington really want denuclearization?
Fourth, in a bitter irony, inter-Korea tension provides a large market for the American defence industry. South Korea spends about USD 7 billion a year to buy American weapons.
Moreover, it is a well known secret that weapon transactions produce large amounts of dark money which goes into the pockets of those involved, including bureaucrats, politicians, business leaders and other members of the corruption community.
Fifth, Washington needs inter-Korea tension to justify the presence of American armed forces in South Korea.
Thus, there are five reasons for Washington’s reluctance to end the Korean War and establish peace in the Korean peninsula.
The second and the third reasons are not very convincing. This leaves three reasons which are likely to be the real reasons, that is, the pressure from PJSKC and Japan, the weapon market attraction and the need for China containment.
How Can Korea Survive?
The future of Korea depends on how Korea deals with the South Korean “chin-il-pa” and the Sino-American cold war.
Integration of the Chin-il-pa
Korea has an important problem to be dealt with. It pertains to the relation between the PJSKC and PKSKL. In other words, how should one deal with the pro-Japan South Korean conservatives who identify themselves more with Japan than with Korea?
The strength of the PJSKC should not be underestimated. In terms of their number, they may represent perhaps 20% of the population. But their strength is their wealth.
They have ruled South Korea for 58 years since 1948; they have created a formidable corruption community and accumulated trillions of USD invested in land, businesses, buildings and other assets in Korea and abroad.
One of the indicators of the nature of the corruption community is the fate of the conservative presidents. Out of 6 conservative presidents who have ruled Korea since 1948, one was kicked out by students; one was assassinated by his CIA director, two were in prison; two are in prison. They have one thing in common; they have been condemned for abuse of power and corruption.
The sad story is that the corruption community is the elite community; they are lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, large companies and media. They commit crimes but they do not go to prison; if they have to go prison, they do not stay there long.
The future of Korea depends on how the people of Korea can clean the corruption community. It is true that, under the leadership of President, Moon Jae-in, important progress has been made in the fight against the corruption community.
Image left, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un (2018)
However, to continue to fight the corruption community, the Democratic Party representing the PKSKL should remain in power for an extended period; the presidential election early next year has vital importance for the survival of Korea as a nation.
If the Liberals maintain power after the presidential election, the liberal government will do address important issues, which previously have not been addressed.
The leaders of the PJSKC should be punished for their betrayal to the Korean race. The remaining members should be made to repent for the anti-Korean activities. They should be pardoned and integrated into the mainstream population. In this way, Korea can free itself from the century-old nightmare of the anti-Korea behaviour of the PJSKC.
Koreas Should be United, if Not Reunified
The survival of Korea surrounded by big powers depends on how well two Koreas are united in dealing with the common challenge, especially the external challenges. Koreans should never forget how they lost their country to Japan because of internal divisions.
Sino-American Cold War
Two scenarios of Sino-American relations can be envisaged.
The first scenario is the case in which China and the U.S. coexist in peace, although they may compete in trade and technology, and China will not be a threat to the U.S. In this case, there is no reason for Washington to block the inter-Korea peace dialogue. This is the ideal scenario for Korea.
The united Korea should undertake the long process of reunification starting with the formation of custom union followed by the creation of common market, labour integration, monetary integration, political integration and finally the reunification of Koreas.
Japan, the PJSKC and some neo-con groups in Washington may object to this process, but united Korea should ignore them. South Korea is now a developed country and it has now resources and power to do so.
The relation of the united Korea with China and the U.S. should be friendly; it should become pro-China and pro-U.S. and it should assume the leadership of fostering cooperative Sino-American relations.
The second scenario is the case is where the Sino-American Cold War continues and even gets hot.
Korea will find itself in a rather delicate situation.
To survive, the united Korea should remain neutral and, in particular, show leadership in collaboration with middle powers such as Canada and Australia and ASEAN countries to prevent the outbreak of a Sino-American war.
We should never forget the inevitable truth that the Sino-American war will kill us all.
The message of this paper may be summarized.
First, the internal political division makes the country vulnerable to foreign powers’ invasion. At the end of the 19th century, the pro-Japan Koreans (chin-il-pa) traitors allowed Japan to humiliate, rob and enslave Koreans for half a century.
Second, the same chin-il-pa has played a major part not only in dividing the Korean peninsula into North Korea and South Korea but also in maintaining the inter-Korea tension and conflict in collaboration with Japan and the U.S.
Third, the survival of the Korean race as a nation depends on how the two Koreans unite themselves, deal with the chin-il-pa and find wisdom and courage needed to survive in the dynamics of the Sino-American hegemonic war.
Finally, I wish to see, once again, a world in which the two super powers and the two civilizations cooperate for the creation of a better world in which love, peace, security and prosperity prevail for all.
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Dr. Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics at Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM) and the advisor to the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of UQAM.
He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Let there be no mistake. What is happening today, before our very eyes, is what happened with human medical experiments during the Second World War. These experiments were without informed consent. Many prisoners were vaccinated with experimental drugs.
After the war, when camps like Dachau were liberated, the survivors were able to identify their persecutors. Some of those rescued are alive today. And today they are fully supportive of Doctors for Covid Ethics (D4CE) in the accusations levelled, not just at the pharmaceutical profiteers and the regulatory authorities under their control, but at parliamentarians who sanction the ongoing global experiment without so much as a word against it.
Let there be no mistake. The emergency acts which were introduced even though there never was an emergency, are going to be useless when the rule of parliament and the rule of law returns. Then those who wittingly allowed these experiments to go ahead will have some life-changing questions to answer. Somebody else will be sitting Klaus Karl Schilling’s chair!
You can download and read the research behind Doctors for Covid Ethics’ Notices of Liability (NOLs) served on every member of the European parliament at the link below under the Posts tab. It also has appended the Holocaust survivors’ endorsement. You will need to click the Home button to take you to the site. Please read! Thanks.
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Comments Off on Human Medical Experiments without Informed Consent: EMA and Members of the European Parliament (MEP) Put on Notice for Crimes Against Humanity
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In a paper published in the Lancet, experts warned there could be risks to boosters if they are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects.
Current evidence on COVID vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international team of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high,” Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, two senior FDA vaccine leaders, wrote in an opinion piece published Monday in the Lancet.
The scientists said the benefits of COVID vaccination outweigh the risks, but there could be risks to boosters if they are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, “especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines).”
“If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate,” the scientists wrote.
The scientists said COVID vaccines continue to be effective against severe disease, including that caused by the Delta variant — but most of the observational studies on which that conclusion is based are preliminary and difficult to interpret due to potential confounding and selective reporting, they said.
As The Defender reported last month, studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed COVID vaccine effectiveness against infection has decreased over time, and is less effective in combating the Delta variant.
Gruber and Krause emphasized “careful and public scrutiny of evolving data will be needed to assure boosting is informed by reliable science more than politics.”
The team wrote:
“The message that boosting might soon be needed, if not justified by robust data and analysis, could adversely affect confidence in vaccines and undermine messaging about the value of primary vaccination. Public health authorities should also carefully consider the consequences for primary vaccination campaigns of endorsing boosters only for selected vaccines.
“Booster programmes that affect some but not all vaccinees may be difficult to implement — so it will be important to base recommendations on complete data about all vaccines available in a country, to consider the logistics of vaccination, and to develop clear public health messaging before boosting is widely recommended.”
The scientists noted boosting may be appropriate for some individuals where a one- or two-dose vaccine did not provide adequate protection — such as immunocompromised people — although they noted people who did not respond robustly to a primary vaccination, may also not respond well to a booster.
Both the FDA and CDC have already signed off on allowing third doses for immunocompromised people. But experts are divided on whether boosters are necessary for the general population.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet Friday to discuss Pfizer and BioNTech’s application to administer their COVID vaccine as a third dose, or “booster” shot, to people ages 16 and older.
The scientists also echoed the views of the WHO in arguing current vaccines could “save more lives” if they are used in people who are not yet vaccinated rather than for boosters.
The WHO last week called for a moratorium on boosters in wealthy nations until at least the end of the year.
In a statement to CNN on Monday, an FDA spokesperson said the new opinion paper does not reflect the views of the FDA:
“As noted in the article, the views of the authors do not represent the views of the agency. We are in the middle of a deliberative process of reviewing Pfizer’s booster shot supplemental approval submission, and FDA as a matter of practice does not comment on pending matters before the agency. We look forward to a robust and transparent discussion on Friday about that application.”
As The Defender reported Sept. 1, Gruber and Krause announced they will leave the FDA this fall, raising questions about the Biden administration and the way it sidelined the agency.
Two of FDA top vaccine regulators will leave the agency this fall, because they don’t believe there is data to support the Biden administration’s push to offer COVID booster shots later this month.https://t.co/eAynNSpeuJ
Gruber and Krause were upset that the Biden administration announced adults should get a booster eight months after they received a second dose — prior to boosters undergoing review or receiving approval by the FDA.
Neither Gruber or Krause believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, sources said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Biden, as pressure on the FDA to quickly authorize them.
As The Defender reported earlier this month, the Biden administration announced a plan to begin offering a third booster dose to people who already received two doses of an mRNA vaccine beginning the week of Sept. 20.
U.S. health regulators have said there isn’t enough data to recommend booster doses for the general population.
Still, the White House has moved forward with its plan to make Americans eligible for a third dose of either Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines eight months after the date of their second injection, even though that plan requires authorization from the FDA and CDC first.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny.
Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail.
Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened through which will pass free men to construct a better society.
Long live Chile!
Long live the people! Long live the workers!” President Salvador Allende‘s farewell speech (before he was assassinated), 11 September 1973.
“It’s hard to find someone with the fighting spirit, courage and the story of Allende. He was a man who actually had the branded name in history: democratically the left came to power, and by bombs he was removed from government.” Senador Pedro Simon
Chile: “Shock Treatment” and the Mechanisms of Economic Repression
Immediately following Allende’s election in September 1970 and prior to his inauguration in November 1970:
“Kissinger initiated discussion on the telephone with CIA director Richard Helm’s about a preemptive coup in Chile. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared. “I am with you,” Helms responded. Their conversation took place three days before President Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to keep Allende from being inaugurated. (National Security Archive)
The CIA was the lead organization behind the imposition of a neoliberal economic agenda in Chile. In August 1972, a year prior to the coup, the CIA funded a 300-page economic blueprint to be implemented in the wake of the overthrow of the Allende government.
The ultimate objective of the September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile was the imposition of the neoliberal agenda (aka deadly “economic medicine”) leading to the impoverishment of an entire nation.
Wall Street was behind the coup, working hand in glove with the CIA, the US State Department and Chile’s economic elites. Henry Kissinger was the Go-Between.
After Allende’s election in November Wall Street’s major commercial banks (including Chase Manhattan, Chemical, First National City, Manufacturers Hanover, and Morgan Guaranty), cancelled credits to Chile. In turn, in 1972, Kennecott Corporation “tied up Chilean copper exports with lawsuits in France, Sweden, Italy, and Germany”. (See John M. Swomley, Jr. “The Political Power of Multinational Corporations,” Christian Century, 91 (25 September 1974), p. 881.
“Regime change” was enforced through a covert CIA military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military takeover, the assassination of president Allende as well as the macro-economic reforms to be adopted in the wake of the military coup.
At the time of the September 11, 1973 military coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile. In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.
Salvador Allende in the defense of the Palacio de la Moneda, September 11, 1973 (left)
When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the September 11, 1973 coup as well as the failed June 29th coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.
Chicago Economics, Chilean Style
Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.
Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys,” many of whom were my colleagues at the Institute of Economics of the Catholic University.
These deadly macro-economic reforms were largely dictated by Wall Street in liaison with the CIA, with “Chicago Economics” providing an ideological “free market” paradigm and justification. Professors Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger of Chicago University were by no means the driving force behind these reforms.
While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty; in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six fold (3700%). Eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.
In November 1973, following the dramatic hikes in the price of food, I drafted in Spanish an initial “technical” assessment of the Junta’s deadly macro-economic reforms.
Together with a medical doctor, colleague and lifelong friend who was teaching at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile, I estimated the impacts of the economic reforms on the levels of undernourishment, which had resulted from the collapse of the standard of living.
In the wake of the military coup and following the engineered hike in food prices, I estimated that approximately 85% of the Chilean population did not meet minimum calorie and protein requirements as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In October 1973, the “official” food price index had increased by 82.3 percent (in relation to September), according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, which had been taken over by the Junta.
The INE figures on the price of food commodities, however, had been falsified. In November, I proceeded to collect and tabulate the actual rate of increase in food prices from directly observed prices in the Santiago Metropolitan area. I discovered a substantial discrepancy in relation to the official statistics.
Food prices had increased by 211.1 percent in October and November 1973 in relation to September, according to my estimates of 31 food categories. (The official November figures pointed to an increase of 88.6 percent in relation to September). And thereafter, it was on the basis of these official (fake) statistics that the movement in real purchasing power was estimated and official wage adjustments were implemented.
Fearing censorship by the Junta led by General Augusto Pinochet, I limited my analysis to the collapse of living standards in the wake of the Junta’s reforms, resulting from the price hikes of food and fuel, focussing on statistical estimates, without making any kind of political analysis.
The Economics Institute of the Catholic University was initially reluctant to publish the report. They sent it to the Military Junta prior to its release.
The opinions expressed in this report are those of the author. Therefore, they are of the author’s responsibility and do not compromise the Institute of Economics
(This was first time that the Institute chose to publish a disclaimer)
I left Chile for Peru in December 1973. The report was released as a working paper (200 copies) by the Catholic University a few days before my departure. In Peru, where I joined the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru, I was able to write up a more detailed study of the Junta’s neoliberal reforms and their ideological underpinnings. This study was published in 1974-75 in English and Spanish.
Economic Repression
By March 1974, food prices in Chile (according to my estimates) had increased by 505.5 percent (since September 1973). Real wages had collapsed.
Chile: The movement of real wages (1970-77) based on official statistics
The above graph (based on official statistics) shows that real wages collapsed by close to 70 percent in relation to the base period (1970), which also corresponds to the beginning of the Unidad Popular (UP) government of Salvador Allende. The collapse in real wages was greater than that indicated by the official statistics.
It is worth noting that in 1971, the Allende government increased real wages by 20%. The collapse from its 1971 level to early 1974 was of the order of 75% based on official statistics of the cost of living. A wage increase was implemented by the Junta in early March of 1974 (see graph above).
The Destruction of Economic Life
The events of September 11 1973 marked me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. Macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” –as claimed by the academic mainstream– nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation.
I also started to understand the role of military-intelligence operations in support of what is usually described as a process of “economic restructuring”. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon so-called “free market” reforms as well-organized instruments of “economic repression.”
Macro-Economics and Geopolitics are intertwined. The economic dimensions of US led wars must be understood. The destruction of economic life in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya constitutes a crime against humanity, i.e. an “Economic Genocide” which consists in destabilizing and deliberately sabotaging a national economy.
Today, wars are being fought in the Middle East. Several Latin American countries are the object of US dirty tricks with a view to implementing regime change.
Poverty is engineered by the IMF’s debt conditionalities.
The prices of food and energy are deliberately manipulated through speculative trade, e.g. on the Chicago and New York mercantile exchanges.
Currency devaluations are engineered through speculative operations on the foreign exchange markets.
While the contemporary mechanisms of intervention (“color revolutions”, “war on terrorism”, economic destabilization, sanctions, etc) are different to those of the 1970s, the ultimate objective is the derogation of national sovereignty and the imposition of neoliberalism:
corporate control, privatization,
the “free market” pillage of natural resources,
deadly economic medicine, austerity measures,
the repeal of social programs,
the deregulation of trade
the collapse of wages,
the instatement of a cheap labor economy,
the transformation of countries into territories.
I recall that in the months leading up to the September 1973 coup in Chile, the distribution of basic consumer goods and food had been deliberately disrupted through market manipulation. No bread, no milk, no sugar were available at government regulated prices. Chile’s escudo was worthless. The black market prevailed.
A similar situation is now unfolding in Venezuela where the national currency has collapsed. Black market prices for food and essential commodities have spiralled. Reminiscent of Chile in 1973, foreign exchange (Forex) market manipulation in Venezuela coupled with sabotage triggers food shortages, poverty and political instability. Concurrent with the engineered collapse of the Bolivar, real purchasing power has plummeted. (see below)
Source: Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2016
Michel Chossudovsky, September 17, 2016
sources:
Michel Chossudovsky, La medicion del ingreso minimo de subsistencia y la politica de ingresos para 1974, Documentos de Trabajo no. 18, Noviembre de 1973.
Michel Chossudovsky, The Neo-liberal Model and the Mechanisms of Economic Repression, The Chilean Case, Research Paper No. 7411, Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, 1974, published in Co-Existence, Vol 12, 1975
Michel Chossudovsky, Hacia el nuevo modelo economico chileno : inflación y redistribución del ingreso, El trimestre económico. Mexico, Vol. 42. 1975, 2, p. 311-347.
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The videos below describe the preparation of the September 11, 1973 military coup and its aftermath.
Video: CIA, Chile and Allende
Chile: The First Start. The Inauguration of Neoliberalism
Comments Off on Chile, September 11, 1973: The Inauguration of Neoliberalism,”Shock Treatment” and the Instruments of Economic Repression: The Junta’s Deadly “Economic Medicine”
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According to the Pentagon’s annual reports on military justice, there have been more than 1.3 million cases of discipline in the U.S. military since 2001, mostly relating to the so-called “War on Terror.” But as The Intercept highlighted, the generals who misled Congress and the American public about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not only avoided repercussions after conducting a disinformation campaign for 20 years, but were instead rewarded for their deceivingly positive assessments. “When they retired with generous military pensions, they landed high-paying jobs on corporate boards, further profiting from their disingenuousness,” Peter Maass wrote in The Intercept.
Following the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on September 11, 2001, then president George W. Bush took his country into destructive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. What also followed the 9/11 attacks was an outpouring of ignorance, racism and violence against supposedly Muslim-appearing Americans. This even culminated in the murder of Indian-born Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh, by 43-year-old Frank Silva Roque who during his arrest shouted slogans like “I am a patriot!”, “I stand for America all the way!” and “I wish that my punishment would be sending me to Afghanistan with a lot of [expletive] weapons.” Sodhi’s murder is considered the first post-9/11 backlash against non-Christian America.
However, Roque’s actions and calls to fight in Afghanistan was not in isolation, and in fact, many Americans with similar extremism joined the military. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw entire infrastructures destroyed, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, millions of refugees, and over $6 trillion of American taxpayer money wasted. Much of this devastation was caused by American soldiers, often with impunity. In fact, the Americans were not alone in such war crimes, with many British, Australian and other soldiers from partnered countries responsible for murder, rape, extortion and theft in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What is most concerning though is that the upper echelons of the U.S. military had little to no concern for the war crimes perpetrated by NATO forces. Instead, they focused on creating a narrative, portraying the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq as constantly improving. Journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” provides evidence that military leaders knew the war in Afghanistan was failing but lied about it. Colonel Bob Crowley claims in the book that “every data point was altered to present the best picture possible” and Whitlock described the military’s positive assessments as “unwarranted and baseless” that “amounted to a disinformation campaign.”
The main question is why the top military leaders were adamant in their claims that the war situation in Afghanistan and Iraq was improving. It can be suggested that their lies about the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq was motivated by self-interest to advance their own careers and capital. They were certainly not going to allow the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as over 1.3 million cases of ill-discipline in the military, including rape, torture and murder, ruin their prospects.
Take for example the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Austin was the assistant commander of the 3rd Infantry Division. The Intercept recounts an exchange in May 2013, just weeks after the U.S. captured Baghdad, between Austin and Dathar Khashab, director of the Daura oil refinery. No matter about Khashab’s insistence that Baghdad was more crime-ridden under U.S. occupation then under Saddam Hussein’s rule, Austin could only say that “two months ago was a brutal dictator who killed thousands of people.”
Austin, who from the very beginning of Iraq’s occupation insisted everything was fine, eventually became the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, then took charge of Central Command that covers all operations in the Middle East, retired with a $15,000 a month pension, and then joined several corporate boards, including the board of directors of United Technologies Corporation, the military contractor that merged with Raytheon in 2020. With these corporate gigs, he became a multimillionaire with a $2.6 million mansion that boasts seven bedrooms, a five-car garage, two kitchens and a pool house in the Washington D.C. area.
Along with Austin was also David Petraeus, who at the start of the Iraq War was a major general. But as The Intercept author recounts, “Petraeus was doing what pretty much every general who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would do, stringing together any data he could find that would masquerade as a narrative of success. The statistics on his PowerPoint were vintage Vietnam — find big numbers and call them victory.”
In 2007, Petraeus was named the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and hailed as a savior. He then went on to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. Although Petraeus assured Congress in 2011 that the situation in Afghanistan was improving, Whitlock’s book notes that “military officers in the field knew the blizzard of numbers meant nothing.”
One of Petraeus’ advisers in Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes, recalled how she suggested ideas to stem corruption in the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, but none of those plans were ever implemented. “I responded to request after request from Petraeus until I realized that he had no intention of acting on my recommendations; it was just make-work,” she wrote.
In late 2011, Petraeus then headed the CIA, but in 2012 was caught sharing highly classified information with his girlfriend and resigned, avoiding felony charges and lengthy prison sentences that haunt the likes of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Following the CIA, Petraeus was rewarded with a lucrative partnership at the private equity giant KKR, securing his wealth in his retirement years.
Effectively, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been allowed to drag on for the second decade because those at the very top of the U.S. military were more concerned about advancing their own careers. By doing so, the U.S. unleashed thousands of soldiers with similar thinking to Frank Silva Roque that wanted to exact revenge on those they held responsible for the 9/11 attacks, thus resulting in countless NATO war crimes against innocent civilians.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccinations for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.
Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate?
Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?
Furthermore, the vaccine passport will effectively be discriminatory since minorities are less likely to get the vaccines. African Americans especially have lower vaccination rates, for good reasons, the US medical establishment experimented on black populations throughout the Cold War and even beyond. It’s not difficult to see the ramifications of bio-digital segregation, one does not need a PhD or medical degree; in fact these “credentials” seem to blinker one’s view in support of this new form of discrimination.
In the view of what we might term the technocracy, or perhaps the emerging biosecurity establishment, it is virtuous to separate the “clean” vaxxed from the supposedly disease-carrying, uneducated, lower classes who won’t take these experimental shots.
All of the power and money, all the “Science ™” snowballed into an unstoppable corporate/government momentum which shows no signs of letting up.
All that propaganda, the deliberate lies about mask efficiency (they don’t work) and vaccine holiness (they don’t prevent transmission) they’ve been shoving down the public’s throats for over a year and a half? Yeah, the nanny-state politico-medical tyrants are not going to give up this narrative without a fight.
They are doubling down on the fear and quest for total obedience and control. It suits late-stage capitalism just fine if small and medium-sized businesses go under and the excess labor supply of the unemployed are evicted and go hungry. They are extraneous to the monopoly cartels which run the “economy”, which is run by giant tech corporations, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, the FIRE sector, and crucially the health care and pharmaceutical corporations, nearly all of which are multinational conglomerates who operate with almost no competition in nearly every industry.
There is no way to fight back against these abuses of power through the court system. In my opinion, the most rational approach would be to boycott, in any way possible, the corporations and public institutions that are going along with vaccine mandates and passports. Part of this involves the vote with your dollars approach. Hurting the corporate lemmings and technocrat sociopaths in their wallets and lack of tax revenues are the only things they will understand.
If you were thinking of traveling to Europe, skip France and Italy. Guess what, if globally millions of tourists suddenly gave the middle finger to these two countries and vacationed elsewhere, the dent in lost revenue and GDP might actually have some effect on the political establishment. In France and Italy citizens are rightly fed up with protests occurring everyday against the passports, and many vaccinated people have burned their vaccine papers in solidarity.
Similarly, if people in the US abstained from traveling to and spending money in NYC and SF, every restaurant owner, museum board, theater, and small business would then put immediate pressure on city, state, and federal politicians to ban vaccine passports, hopefully for good. If millions of people refuse to shop and do business with companies that have mandatory vaccination requirements for their employees, it would also put immense pressure on governments to relent.
Investors should also divest from corporations that insist on mandating vaccines for employees. It may in fact be legal for companies to do so, but it is frankly coercive and is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon; blurring one’s private life and medical choices with public duties to create a new type of “good citizen”, a biopolitical subject serving capitalism with zero critical thinking skills.
For those in the workforce facing mandates, such as federal/state public employees and health care workers, if possible it is definitely worth considering if another career/job can be found. If enough teachers, nurses, etc., quit or go on strike against their employee mandates, pressure can be applied and the mandates could potentially be lifted.
It’s worth pointing out that the goalposts continue to be changed from slowing the pace of transmission to eradicating the virus- from two weeks to flatten the curve (tacitly acknowledging that coronaviruses cannot really be stopped) to mandates for wide swaths of public and private work, as well as military and police presence on the streets of Australia, to name one of the most obvious police state measures. The goalposts are changing to determine our “good citizen” status. Before, one simply had to go along to get along, obey the laws, pay taxes, and keep one’s head down; now, not only are we expected to do and say the right things, but to inject the right experimental drugs into our bodies.
My humble prediction is the goalposts are going to continue to move. The game is akin to the frogs boiling slowly in the pot; by consenting to our own freedom being curtailed and our own imprisonment, the establishment gets what it wants without having to crack down using excessive force and coercion. The innate desire of have access to public spaces, to go on vacation, will lead many people ignorant of the wider implications to accept these new dystopian measures. The horizon of getting “back to normal” will recede faster as new variants naturally emerge, as viruses tend to do, and this will continue to be used as a new scare tactic, even as death rates effectively returned to normal four months ago (May of 2021) in the US, and many other countries show no more excess deaths, or none outside normal yearly variations, as well in 2021.
The virus is now endemic, but the powers that be are going to insist upon using it as a weapon for total control over the population. We’re through the looking-glass; we now have a form of “scientism” which is irrefutable no matter how unsettled the truth really is.
Statistics such as death counts from Covid are unreliable, with doctors confessing to listing Covid-19 as the primary cause of death when it’s not- dying “from Covid” is conflated as dying “with Covid”, and many nurses, doctors, and funeral directors are on record stating that Covid-19 was listed as C.O.D. when no tests were run and also when another condition ultimately led to death. Deaths from the lockdowns are not seriously considered, even though many scientists are on record stating that the lockdowns led to a large chunk of the excess deaths.
Frankly, the near future looks pretty bleak for the US and the chances to have an open, honest dialogue about the seriousness of the pandemic, about the capitalist world system which stands to gain by using a 21st century tech-driven shock doctrine, and the police state that will be built on the back of the panic caused by incessant propaganda.
The fault lines are deepening and Democrats yammer to “trust the science” without any understanding themselves, and are willing to demonize anyone who doesn’t get an experimental jab or wear two masks while alone in their car; while Republicans continue to frame the “reopen the economy” debate in terms of those supposedly wonderful job-creating corporations, all the while being willing to sell the average worker out for an extra buck or two. Both parties are more than willing to screw over the poor, minorities, and working classes; if either cared about their citizens’ lives they wouldn’t throw people out into the streets via the mass evictions that are already underway.
As imperial decline and rot deepens, and the domestic surveillance apparatus pulls its noose tighter against our necks, our best bet to resist these freedom-crushing decrees is to deploy citizen power, mass protests, and coordinated direct action against inhumane vaccine mandates and police state vaccine passports.
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“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs?
The fifty-five delegates who convened in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787 answered this question with a document that called for a federal plan of government, a system of separation of powers with checks and balances, and a procedure for orderly change to meet the needs and exigencies of future generations.
In an ultimate sense, the Constitution confirmed the proposition that original power resided in the people—not, however, in the people as a whole but in their capacity as people of the several states. To bring forth the requisite union, the people through the states would transfer some of their powers to the new federal government. All powers not reserved by the people in explicit state constitutional limitations remained in the state governments.
Although the Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, the fear of the new federal government was so strong that a “bill of rights” was demanded and became an eventuality.
Intended to protect the citizenry’s fundamental rights or “first liberties” against usurpation by the newly created federal government, the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments of the Constitution—is essentially a list of immunities from interference by the federal government.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—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, vaccine mandates, travel lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.
Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.
The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered nearly null and void.
The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.
The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.
The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.
If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.
In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.
Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.
Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.
In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”
Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.
As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.
Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.
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The Biden administration is trying to redefine the meaning of the word “immunity” in its attempt to force the Covid injection on 220,000 U.S. military service members who have already contracted and survived the SARS COV-2 virus that originated in Wuhan, China.
Behind its development is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – with support of the Rockefeller Foundation – and others belonging to the sinister all-digitization, depopulation and eugenics agenda.
According to Gillian McKeith on her Twitter account, USA West Virginia Governor tells some home truths about what’s going on with the double jabbed in his state.
With the “fourth wave” of infections having started in June, the vaccination campaign is put to its first real-world test in combating a new wave of COVID. The results show that vaccination using Pfizer’s two-dose protocol does not appear to prevent infection.
In the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s public announcement mandating a national vaccination program during which he refused to take any questions, there is something ludicrously bizarre for an illegitimate President who is obviously experiencing massive dementia related disorders; for that same feeble minded, mass of confusion to then dictate a national mandate affecting up to 100 million Americans as if he or his executive order are either rational, competent or constitutional.
We are a group of extremely concerned health professionals in the Okanagan Valley, B.C. We have some critical questions regarding COVID-19, specifically about the current reporting of case numbers, statistics, and testing, and the restrictions imposed by your health orders.
Data released by the U.S. Government in their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) continues to show just how deadly the experimental COVID shots are on teenagers and young people.
This injection for COVID-19 is NOT a vaccine and all it has shown as reported by the injection developers, is an effect on reducing mild COVID-19 symptoms (the vaccines do not stop infection, transmission, severe COVID, hospitalization, or death).
Brazil is likely to pass the awful mark of 500,000 COVID-related deaths in the next two days. Only the United States has a higher number of dead across the world.
The biggest lie, which is firmly acknowledged both by scientific opinion and the WHO is that the RT-PCR test used to “detect” the spread of the virus (as well as the variants) is not only flawed but TOTALLY INVALID.
The Chinese authorities announced on January 7, 2020 that they had isolated and identified “a new type of virus”. Then on the 28th of January 2020, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that the novela corona virus had been isolated.
Theodorakis’ works were censored for his political views and activities. He was jailed, tortured, and forced into exile. He was associated with the Greek left for most of his life and was elected to the Greek parliament several times, twice from the leftist/communist platforms.
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In a particular deli store in South Melbourne, a tongue-and-cheek message is attached to the cash register. “Bitcoin accepted there,” it proclaims brightly. Naturally, it is nothing of the sort, a teasing ruse for the punters and those casting an eye in the direction of the store. Cold hard cash remains king, albeit one with a tarnished crown; pandemic times have driven consumers towards such non-intimate transactions as contactless payment.
One country has decided to make using cryptocurrency a reality, sticking its neck out in adopting bitcoin as something akin to an economic messiah. Few thought it would be El Salvador, whose government made the currency legal tender on September 7. To mark the occasion, each citizen signing up to Chivo, the national digital wallet, has received US$30. Foreigners adventurous enough to invest three bitcoins in the country are promised residency.
The introduction was far from spontaneous. The surf town of El Zonte, with its Bitcoin Beach project, began an experiment to adopt the currency in 2018, a venture aided by the Californian cryptocurrency zealot Michael Peterson. Through the Evangelical Christian church, Peterson combined God and crypto, proselytising the value of such currency. Each local family received US$50, and the currency came to be used for such projects as rubbish collecting and lifeguarding.
Leaving aside Bukule’s own wish to mark the history books, this move into the world of digital currency has various motivations. One is the portion of income received from international money transactions from citizens abroad, which amounts to something like a fifth of the country’s GDP. With such transactions come high fees which whittle away the value of the transfer. To this can be added the need for having a bank account. (Only 30% of Salvadorans have one.) Bitcoin alleviates any such need, while also facilitating cheap payments.
Then there is the prevalence of the US dollar, which is also accepted as legal tender. President Nayib Bukele has been keen to give his citizens another option, a move intended to encourage greater expenditure in the country. Over 200 bitcoin machines are being put in place across the country to convert cryptocurrency into dollars.
The introduction of such currency presents a paradox of mighty dimensions. A degree of technological literacy is required, a challenge, to say the least. The Bitcoin law stipulates that “the necessary training and mechanisms” will be supplied by the government to aid Salvadorans access bitcoin transactions. This promises to be a herculean venture, given how many people actually understand the currency works. A survey by the Central American University of 1,281 people found that a humbling 4.8% actually comprehended what the currency was and how it was used. Of those, 68% took issue with using it as a legal tender.
The process of mining bitcoin is also a headache for policymakers, as it requires vast reserves of electricity and poses an environmental challenge. (Elon Musk was at pains to emphasise the latter in reneging on his decision to permit customers to purchase Tesla cars using the cryptocurrency.) The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, looking at figures generated last year, puts the amount of energy used by global bitcoin mining at 105 terawatt hours of electricity.
In June, the state-owned geothermal electric company was instructed by Bukele to come up with a plan to facilitate bitcoin mining “with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions energy from our volcanoes.”
Then comes that testy issue of its status as legal tender. Under general circumstances, currency deemed legal tender must be accepted as payment for a debt. In the absence of a debt, the store owner, retailer or company may accept some other form of payment (credit card, online transactions). El Salvador’s Bitcoin law, however, has muddied matters by stating that “every economic agent must accept bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service.”
Such financial coercion did not sit well. It caused a flurry of protests. Economists squawked in alarm. President Bukele had to relent, issuing a grumpy clarification last month that businesses would not be compelled to accept bitcoin. In doing so, he could not resist a snarky remark that those not seeking to win over customers with the currency were essentially discouraging growth and continuing the daft practise of paying fees on remittances.
The forces of orthodoxy have also baulked. When asked for assistance by El Salvador to implement the bitcoin scheme, the World Bank was dismissive. “While the government did approach us for assistance on bitcoin,” a spokesperson revealed in June, “this is not something the World Bank can support given the environmental and transparency shortcomings.” The International Monetary Fund, severe as ever, disapproves of a currency that presents “macroeconomic, financial and legal issues that require very careful analysis”.
The response to the introduction has been fairly predictable. Bond prices have fallen and bitcoin’s value has fluctuated. The naysayers suggest that the general adoption by residents will be small, fearing the currency’s volatility. Protestors fear that the cryptocurrency will simply enable further corrupt practices to take place.
The converse may also be true: given Latin America’s long history of fiscal instability, banking collapses, and failed economic advisors, bitcoin promises an unorthodox form of insulation from shock. “With bitcoin, for the first time in a very long time, people in Latin America saw an asset appreciate in dollar terms,” Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, chief executive of the Toronto-based digital asset company Ledn remarked. The time for this experiment, on the surface a quixotic one, is nigh.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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The West has been literally swamped by a non-stop propaganda offensive about Uyghur forced labor camps – thoroughly debunked, for instance, here. Now let’s examine the other – Western – side of the story.
In early 2021, Defense for Children (DCI) took the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) to court in New South Wales. DCI’s lawsuit charges that ASPI may have been receiving funds from a number of weapons manufacturers and government agencies in the US and UK profiting from prison labor.
Although lawyers for ASPI assured these funds would be cut off if any serious evidence surfaced, the case got murkier, and there are doubts it will ever go to trial.
Sources that prefer to remains anonymous insist ASPI exercised serious pressure directly on DCI’s headquarters in Geneva to drop the case.
ASPI, based in Canberra, was founded in 2001 – the year of 9/11. Its funding comes from a mixed bag of Australian institutions, especially the Australian Department of Defense, as well as “overseas government agencies”, including the US State Department, the Pentagon and even NATO, which financed a quirky “social media research project”.
The US industrial military complex is well represented by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. Other NATO stalwarts like BAE Systems, Thales and Saab also show up.
The bottom line is that like reams of other Five Eyes think tanks, ASPI is directly funded by corporate Weapons Inc..
ASPI had at least 56 sources of income in 2018-19 – blandly described as either “sponsorships” or “commissioned income.” Yet what raises eyebrows is that a significant part of these funds from at least 11 donors can be directly and indirectly tied to prison labor, which is equated all across the industrialized West as modern slavery.
At least 4 ASPI donors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and BAE Systems – have been connected to the use of prison labor in manufacturing components for their military hardware.
Raytheon, for instance, may have exploited prison labor directly for the assemblage of electronic parts for surface-to-air Patriot missiles. A report showed how “it costs prisoners 23 cents an hour to make parts for the missile”, and prison management is entitled to withhold some or all of the prisoners’ wages at will.
The US federal report on prison labor actually states, unambiguously, that “all able-bodied sentenced prisoners” are required to work. The operative word is “required”.
UNICOR, which operates no less than 110 factories in 65 federal prisons, is blandly described as the trade name for the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) in the US, a “self-sustaining government corporation that sells market-priced services and quality goods made by inmates”. Including, of course, weapons for the industrial-military complex.
According to 2019 figures, the US government – which de facto operates the prison factories – funded ASPI with $1.37 million.
Unisystems, an IT firm that sells interphones for US prisons, also funded ASPI from 2005 to 2019. Inmate labor may be dirty cheap, but if they want to place a call to their lawyers or their family they need to shell out up to $24 for 15 minutes.
BAE Systems funded ASPI between 2014 and 2019. BAE Systems profits from components made by prison labor in the aerospace system of the notorious Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
Weapons Inc. fully in charge
Compounding the picture of a Five Eyes system weaponizing and profiting from serial disasters for years in Afghanistan, the Australian military have also been exposed to serious scrutiny.
On November 2020, Australian Defense Force commander Angus Campbell confirmed Australian Special Forces have been involved in serious crimes in Afghanistan. A long-running inquiry recommended that 25 soldiers, most within the elite SAS, should be investigated for a handful of cases leading to the assassination of 39 Afghan prisoners, including civilians – women and children -, as well as torture of 2 others.
As if accusations of Australian soldiers committing murders in Afghanistan while corporate donors to an Australian outfit profit from prison labor was not a toxic enough mix, the overarching twist is that ASPI happens to be regarded as the most authoritative, “independent” source for Chinese matters in Australia.
Similar to its American counterparts, ASPI as a branch of Weapons Inc. pursues a clear agenda. One vector churns out hefty literature demonizing China – complete with detailed Uyghur “forced labor” reports – and actively promoting the specter of a “China strategic threat”.
The other vector lobbies – what else – for increased defense spending especially in missiles. That’s Quad territory (US, Japan, India, Australia). Quad needs to contain China at all costs.
And that’s what qualifies ASPI as a de facto lobby for Weapons Inc., much more than a think tank.
It gets curioser and curioser when one learns that the Australian government wants to equip itself with the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) manufactured by none other than ASPI donor Lockheed Martin.
So have fun with our little Five Eyes tale, where an Australian “think tank” focused on demonizing China 24/7 gets some of its financial kicks from a Weapons Inc. handsomely profiting from Western prison labor.
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Pepe Escobar,born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture 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.
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In the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s public announcement mandating a national vaccination program during which he refused to take any questions, there is something ludicrously bizarre for an illegitimate President who is obviously experiencing massive dementia related disorders; for that same feeble minded, mass of confusion to then dictate a national mandate affecting up to 100 million Americans as if he or his executive order are either rational, competent or constitutional.
This requirement will apply to over 80 million workers in private sector businesses, the White House said. …
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will require COVID-19 vaccinations for workers in most healthcare facilities … This requirement will impact over 17 million healthcare workers at hospitals and other facilities that take these patients. …
The administration will require that teachers and staff in Head Start Programs, Department of Defense schools, and Bureau of Indian Education-operated schools be vaccinated.
Biden will also call on all states to adopt vaccine requirements for all school employees.
Biden’s plan calls on entertainment venues like sports arenas, large concert halls, and others where large groups of people gather to require that patrons be vaccinated or show a negative coronavirus test in order to enter. (Reuters, emphasis added)
In a frenzy to avoid the constant reminder of his immense lack of leadership that led to the screw up in Afghanistan, as his approval poll numbers tank to nearly unfathomable depths and as the twentieth anniversary of 911 adds more American grief to the entire tragedy, the Biden White House dared to adopt an indefensible malicious policy with the end goal of replacing a constitutional republic with a not-so-benign one-man tyranny.
Even in the early reaction to Biden’s announcement, there is an emerging existential fight of a lifetime brewing; stimulating Americans with massive civil disobedience and widespread constitutional and legal challenges.
Two days after the announcement, the feckless Biden traveled to Denver proving who controls the White House for what was called a “Build Back Better” event although details were not disclosed. BBB is associated with World Economic Forum efforts to preordain a new world economic order while using Covid as the initial precipitating event. In other words, what has been described as a global Covid health crisis is merely the next chapter in the globalist effort to takedown civil society and remake the entire planet into the WEF’s world vision.
Their overall intent has been destroying every shred of a democratic republic and our national sovereignty to be replaced by a totalitarian One World Government. The WEF was created in 1971 to support UN Agenda 21 which has since morphed into UN Agenda 2030.
Adding the finishing touches, the elite media industry, Silicon valley social media conglomerates and the Democratic party are all on-the-ground agents to make that transition a reality. Voila – here we have Biden’s national mandate to force every citizen to be innoculated with a serum of suspicious contents and origin.
In June 2019, the WEF and the UN signed a strategic partnership agreement to outline areas of cooperation to implement Agenda 2030 which reads like an idealistic wish list for every global citizen – until scratching below the surface to its actual implementation.
Immediately after Biden’s press announcement, nineteen Governors and two state attorney generals (all Republicans) announced their opposition.
Most Governors then instructed their Attorneys General to prepare legal action as the Republican National Committee announced a lawsuit and The Daily Wire which has over one hundred employees, announced it will not obey the mandate. Florida Governor Ron diSantis summed up the opposition with “It’s not based on science. He’s saying he’s losing patience with people?… We don’t live with a one-person rule in this country. We live in a Constitutional system.”
Biden‘s lecture to the non-vaxxers sounds as George III might have chastised those pesky colonists. “We’ve been patient, But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden then failed to reveal how all members of Congress and their staff are exempt from the mandates as are US Postal Service employees. None of the thousands of immigrants crossing the southern border or the newly arrived unvetted Afghani immigrants are required to be vaccinated.
Before the announcement, Biden, who finished 76th in his class out of 85 in Syracuse Law School, promised that ‘if Governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as President to get them out of the way.” Former Congressman and White House Senior Advisor Cedric Richman offered further assurance that Biden is willing ‘to run over” any Republican Governors who resist.
What Biden and his Democratic bumblers have forgotten is that they cannot ‘make’ law without the legislative branch and that Biden cannot dictate policy to any State. In other words, no Governor or President can mandate any lockdown without the force of law or those mandates are legally unenforceable. The Democrats, never fans of state’s rights or apparently the Constitution, will be taken to court as a reminder that Amendment X of the US Constitution provides each state with ‘powers not delegated to the United States … reserved to the States, respectively or to the people.”
After Covid, the WEF already has the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as the Great Reset, lined up and ready to impose itself on what remains of American society. For all American citizens, the Biden Mandates threaten the very future of our American tradition, our families and friends. It is the responsibility of all of us to actively engage in the struggle to thwart the globalist agenda from achieving its ultimate goal: a Totalitarian One World Government.
“In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to “robotize” humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul.”
Many thanks to Susan Westall for providing a list of attorneys willing to provide legal guidance against the Biden Mandates.
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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].
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Here’s a study that wasn’t covered at all by the media, despite it’s chilling findings, which cut against claims by American health experts that COVID lockdowns haven’t led to an increase in suicides.
A recent UK study showed 5x as many children have died via suicide since the start of the pandemic than the number who have died from COVID (almost no children – and no healthy children – have died from COVID in the US and UK). And the fact that suicides have increased in Japan over the past year has already been documented.
According to this new study, which was carried out via scientists from a Japanese university along with Japan’s Infectious Diseases Surveillance Center, 2,665 excess cases of mortality were identified between July 2020 and March 2021. The study’s methodology was similar to that from an earlier study. “Excess mortality” was defined as the difference between the actual number of deaths, and the expected epidemiological threshold (assuming the actual number exceeds the expectation).
The study used data from all causes, as reported, from 2005 through February 2021. Deaths reported from across Japan were incorporated.
The total number of estimated EXCESS suicides traced to lockdowns in Japan is >2,600. https://t.co/HXIJtAe5bC
Using their model, the researchers determined that “significant excess mortality attributable to suicide” was seen between July 2020 and March 2021, with the biggest excess seen in October of last year, which we noted at the time.
The number of COVID deaths during that period was 8,153, meaning excess suicide deaths attributable to lockdowns and other pandemic-related circumstances were almost equivalent to one-third of the total deaths from COVID.
The study’s authors concluded that governments should examine cost-effectiveness analysis. The impact on quality of life should be considered among the various drawbacks of lockdowns and other restrictions on economic and social activity as a major part of countermeasures.
“Continued careful monitoring of excess mortality attributable to suicide is expected to be necessary.”
Interested parties can read the study preprint below:
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Data released by the U.S. Government in their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) continues to show just how deadly the experimental COVID shots are on teenagers and young people.
I did another analysis looking at deaths and injuries in the 12 to 19-year-old age group following experimental COVID shots, as compared to all other vaccines that this age group receives before they leave high-school.
Here is the data based on the last VAERS update from this past Friday, 9/10/21.
As you can see, VAERS is reporting that for ages 12 through 19 (I choose to start with age 12 because that is the youngest age that the COVID injections are currently authorized to be injected with), there have been 31 deaths, 181 permanent disabilities, 3,679 ER visits, 1,655 hospitalizations, 331 life threatening events, and 748 reports of heart inflammation (all forms of “carditis”).
(Source. Note that the search separates 12-17 year olds, and 17-44 year olds, although we only searched through age 19, so you need to add the two tables together to get the numbers in the graph above.)
Next, I searched the exact same age group, for the same time period (December 2020 through the most recent data dump on Friday), and excluded COVID-19 shots but included every other vaccine listed. They include these vaccines:
6VAX-F
ADEN
ADEN_4_7
ANTH
BCG
CEE
CHOL
DF
DPIPV
DPP
DT
DTAP
DTAPH
DTAPHEPBIP
DTAPIPV
DTAPIPVHIB
DTIPV
DTOX
DTP
DTPHEP
DTPHIB
DTPIHI
DTPIPV
DTPPHIB
EBZR
FLU(H1N1)
FLU3
FLU4
FLUA3
FLUA4
FLUC3
FLUC4
FLUN(H1N1)
FLUN3
FLUN4
FLUR3
FLUR4
FLUX
FLUX(H1N1)
H5N1
HBHEPB
HBPV
HEP
HEPA
HEPAB
HEPATYP
HIBV
HPV2
HPV4
HPV9
HPVX
IPV
JEV
JEV1
JEVX
LYME
MEA
MEN
MENB
MENHIB
MER
MM
MMR
MMRV
MNC
MNQ
MNQHIB
MU
MUR
OPV
PER
PLAGUE
PNC
PNC10
PNC13
PPV
RAB
RUB
RV
RV1
RV5
RVX
SMALL
SSEV
TBE
TD
TDAP
TDAPIPV
TTOX
TYP
UNK
VARCEL
VARZOS
YF
These are ALL the vaccines listed in VAERS, minus the 3 COVID shots. Some of them are no longer in use, and many of these teenagers do not get, although many from this age group will get “catch up” shots if they missed a shot previously that was scheduled for a younger age.
So by including ALL non-COVID vaccines, we are assured of getting all of the adverse reactions from every other vaccine they receive where an adverse reaction was reported to VAERS.
From all of these vaccines that include every non-COVID shot that 12 to 19 year-olds have received this year so far, there have been 4 deaths, 12 permanent disabilities, 78 ER visits, 36 hospitalizations, and 14 life threatening events during the same time period as the COVID-19 shots were administered. (Source. Note that the search separates 12-17 year olds, and 17-44 year olds, although we only searched through age 19, so you need to add the two tables together to get the numbers in the graph above.)
As you can see, COVID-19 shots given to our teenagers have 7.75 X more deaths, 15 X more disabilities, 47 X more ER visits, and 46 X more hospitalizations than all other FDA-approved vaccines COMBINED that these teenagers are receiving.
This week I also included all cases of “carditis,” inflammation of the heart, since we have seen so many reports of injuries and deaths in this age group related to inflammation of the heart, or “enlarged heart.”
Source: Health Impact News
This age group has already recorded 748 cases of all forms of carditis (source), while cases filed of carditis following all other FDA approved vaccines for the same time period is only 15. (Source.)
That is 50 X more cases of heart inflammation being recorded for this age group after COVID-19 shots, than all other FDA approved vaccines combined.
And actually, that number is probably higher, because there are 1,605 cases of heart inflammation following COVID shots in VAERS where the age is “unknown,” but which most certainly contains a portion from this age group. (Source.)
This is the age group that typically gets the Gardasil HPV vaccine, among others, which prior to COVID was the vaccine that caused the most injuries and deaths in this age group.
Sales of Merck’s Gardasil were up 88% through the the first two quarters of this year, 2021. (Source.) Gardasil is a two-dose or three-dose vaccine. So even though they are pushing the COVID shots for this age group, it is most certainly NOT at the expense of reducing other vaccines, as evidence suggests just the opposite.
This problem of otherwise healthy young people taking a COVID shot and then suffering from heart disease, is a very serious issue.
And the FDA and the CDC know about it. That’s what makes this a criminal issue.
Here is what the CDC reported last week regarding “Myocarditis and Pericarditis After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination.”
As of September 1, 2021, VAERS has received 1,404 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis among people ages 30 and younger who received COVID-19 vaccine. Most cases have been reported after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna), particularly in male adolescents and young adults. Through follow-up, including medical record reviews, CDC and FDA have confirmed 817 reports of myocarditis or pericarditis. CDC and its partners are investigating these reports to assess whether there is a relationship to COVID-19 vaccination. (Source.)
Since they included statistics for 30 and younger, but only for two forms of carditis, “myocarditis or pericarditis,” we ran the same report to include all cases of carditis.
We found another 135 cases, but most of the cases are most definitely myocarditis or pericarditis. Out of the 1,543 cases of heart inflammation reported, 1,146 of those resulted in hospitalization, an extremely high percentage. (Source.)
The FDA and CDC are also correctly reporting that this affects males far more than females. Over 82% of these cases of heart inflammation are being reported in males. (Source.)
Since the CDC is basically admitting all this with their reports, what is their recommendation for the these shots that are destroying the health of our youth?
CDC continues to recommend that everyone aged 12 years and older get vaccinated for COVID-19. The known risks of COVID-19 illness and its related, possibly severe complications, such as long-term health problems, hospitalization, and even death, far outweigh the potential risks of having a rare adverse reaction to vaccination, including the possible risk of myocarditis or pericarditis. (Source.)
Given the fact that the cases reported in VAERS is only a tiny portion of what is represented in the public, most experts agreeing that it is probably less than 10% and as low as 1%, how can they make such a statement when the cases of heart inflammation for these young people is 50 X higher than all other vaccines?
And what is the risk of COVID-19 for this age group?
And we KNOW that these statistics that list COVID-19 as a cause of death are inflated, as federal funding kicks in to record a death as a COVID death leading to massive over-reporting of these deaths, not to mention that the tests to determine if COVID-19 actually exists are highly suspect.
But just by using their own statistics, this age group only represents 0.005% of all COVID-19 deaths.
Based on CDC stats for 2019 for the top causes of death, before COVID started, this age group had a higher risk of death for suicide (which has gone up dramatically since COVID started), unintentional injuries (mostly car accidents probably), cancer, and homicides. (Source. Please note that to make this comparison you have to take the monthly average for each age group and then add together. Total deaths from COVID-19 started in January, 2020, so we are now into the 19th month.)
And now this age group is going to be mandated to get these dangerous shots as a condition for attending school.
This is criminal!
Ok, enough math and cold statistics. Here are some faces and tragic stories in real life about how these shots are affecting these young people and their families.
We start with a video report, which includes a very emotional interview between Alex Jones and Ernest Ramirez yesterday who lost his 16-year-old son after he took a Pfizer shot. Another young man talks about how his competitive sports days at school are ended after taking a COVID-19 shot.
After the video we have a few more stories below.
Oh and by the way, the first story in this video of 16-year-old Ernest Ramirez who died from an enlarged heart, is NOT found in VAERS. There are three deaths listed in VAERS for a form of carditis, and all three are females, even though over 80% of the cases are males.
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Comments Off on Teens 50X More Likely to Have Heart Disease after COVID Shots than All Other FDA Approved Vaccines in 2021 Combined – CDC Admits True but Still Recommends It
September 13th, 2021 by Alliance for Natural Health
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Now doctors are being threatened with the loss of their license if they fail to toe the line of mainstream medicine on how to prevent and treat COVID.
The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) recently announced that doctors who “spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” risk disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the revocation of their medical license. The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) issued a similar warning, stating that physicians who publicly spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic risk losing their board certification. What exactly constitutes “misinformation” is not defined in either case and likely includes anything that doesn’t adhere to what government health authorities dictate. This gagging of free speech about alternative treatments violates patients’ rights and the legal requirements of informed consent.
Who decides what counts as “misinformation”? One thing we’ve learned from the pandemic is that available information can change, often quite rapidly. The CDC’s masking guidelines changed multiple times. Initially we were told that the virus could be spread on surfaces before subsequent investigations revealed that the virus mostly spreads when aerosols and droplets containing the virus are inhaled. As we’ve said before, the Wuhan lab leak theory was first dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but is now acknowledged as a legitimate, even likely, explanation of the virus’ origin. Often the “misinformation” of today becomes the established facts of tomorrow.
Take ivermectin, for example. Informed consent legally requires your doctor to discuss the risks and benefits of alternatives to vaccines to address COVID-19. Would it be misinformation to talk about the successes of ivermectin and the impressive body of evidence that recommends its use to prevent and treat COVID-19? Is a doctor risking their license if they talk about the drop in COVID case counts in South American cities that instituted massive, prophylactic ivermectin distribution campaigns compared to cities that didn’t? Despite this compelling evidence, the FDA stubbornly recommends against using ivermectin for COVID, likely because Big Pharma and their government cronies want mandatory vaccines, not ivermectin, as the answer to COVID because vaccines will make the most money.
The ABEM’s edict against spreading “misinformation” may be in response to the MATH+ protocol developed by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance for hospitalized COVID patients. Their protocol includes proven natural medicines like vitamin C, zinc, melatonin, and vitamin D (in addition to ivermectin and other medicines). Supplements like these are generally not patentable and thus unable to become FDA approved for the treatment of COVID, which requires expensive clinical trials. This is why the FDA and FTC launched a massive censorship campaign to silence discussion of how these “unapproved” medicines can help with COVID. It is shameful that doctors may risk their medical license by discussing these plausible alternatives for addressing COVID.
The vaccination issue has become a highly controversial topic with strong feelings on all sides. The government is recommending COVID vaccination for almost everyone above the age of 12. Informed consent legally requires doctors to discuss the risks and benefits of any medical procedure. Is it spreading “misinformation” to discuss with patients the 488,318 adverse events, including close to 5,000 deaths, reported in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)?
This isn’t hyperbole. We saw one “fact-checker” call out a post citing VAERS data as false because, the fact-checker claimed, VAERS is unreliable and doesn’t establish causation. That is true, but it’s also true that a major limitation of VAERS is that adverse events are severely underreported, perhaps even less than 1 percent. This would mean that VAERS arguably understates the dangers and side effects caused by vaccines. Is it “misinformation” if your doctor informs you of these facts?
Is it “misinformation” if you have an autoimmune condition and your doctor warns that you may be at increased risk of serious adverse events like blood clots, as we discussed in our Right to kNOw campaign? To us, this seems to be legally required by informed consent for vaccination—a complete picture of the benefits but also the risks of vaccination.
It’s easy to see this as a slippery slope, making it a license-threatening offense to discuss ways to boost immune resilience with supplements and other natural medicines.
As we argued with the federal bill that attempts to attack medical “misinformation,” attempts to control the information we are given hands power over to Big Pharma and the one-size-fits-all paradigm. Natural medicine is predicated on the idea that each patient has individual needs based on unique biology and genetics. If doctors aren’t allowed to discuss alternatives to the mainstream medical approach, not only are the legal requirements of informed consent not being satisfied, but integrative doctors’ ability to treat individual patients will suffer.
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According to Gillian McKeith on her Twitter account, USA West Virginia Governor tells some home truths about what’s going on with the double jabbed in his state.
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The Biden administration is trying to redefine the meaning of the word “immunity” in its attempt to force the Covid injection on 220,000 U.S. military service members who have already contracted and survived the SARS COV-2 virus that originated in Wuhan, China.
This has opened the door for a federal lawsuit filed August 30 by two active-duty service members against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Homeland Security Director Xavier Bacerra and U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Janet Woodcock.
The Navy this week gave its sailors 90 days to get the shot and the Army and Air Force were poised Thursday to enforce their own timetables, reported Military.com.
The suit, filed August 30 in U.S. District Court in Colorado, seeks immediate injunctive relief.
The two plaintiffs, Daniel Robert, a 33-year-old drill sergeant at Fort Benning Army base in Columbus, Georgia, and Hollie Mulvihill, a 29-year-old staff sergeant at the Marine Corp base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, are asking the court for a temporary restraining order preventing the forced injections before a full hearing can be scheduled. They are ultimately seeking a permanent injunction and declaratory judgment against Biden’s Department of Defense.
The two defendants represent 220,000 other U.S. military active-duty members who have natural immunity and do not want any of the three synthetic gene-based “vaccines” shot into their bodies.
All three injections, manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, are based on an all-new technology, never before used in any previous vaccine, and have never been tested for the long-term health effects on the human body.
The three shots combined have resulted in an unprecedented number of adverse reactions being reported to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, including over 13,000 reported deaths, more than double the number of all the other vaccines combined since VAERS was established in 1990.
According to the lawsuit, Army Regulation 40-562 is the all-service publication that governs the administration of “Immunizations and Chemoprophylaxis for the prevention of infectious diseases.”
AR 40-562 clearly states that documented survivors of an infectious disease have a “presumptive exemption from vaccination due to natural immunity acquired as a result of having survived the infection,” the lawsuit states.
Army Regulation 40-562 states:
“General examples of medical exemptions include the following …Evidence of immunity based on serologic tests, documented infection, or similar circumstances.”
U.S. Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Dr. Admiral Bret Diroir stated on August 24 in an interview with Fox News:
“So natural immunity, it’s very important… There are still no data to suggest vaccine immunity is better than natural immunity. I think both are highly protective.”
In fact, data exists that would suggest it’s the other way around – that natural immunity far exceeds that of vaccine immunity. A recent study out of Israel showed natural immunity is significantly stronger and lasts longer than the synthetic immunity delivered by the vaccines, protection from which even the CDC has admitted begins to wane after three to five months.
Yet, on the very same day that Diroir was playing up the importance of natural immunity on Fox News, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo mandating the entire Armed Forces be inoculated with the Covid shots.
In that memo, Austin created an all-new concept never before existing in the history of medical science and in complete contradiction to the plain language of the DoD’s own regulations. He said “those with previous COVID-19 infection are not considered vaccinated.”
The lawsuit states that the DoD regulation “contains no such term, nor concept, and the defendant Secretary of Defense’s new definition effectively wipes away the DoD’s own regulation. The secretary of defense is not a doctor, and this declaration has no basis in medical science at all, nor did this instant change to the regulation go through any notice and comment period, nor rulemaking process, nor any process at all. Indeed, the Secretary of Defense simply declared it without a scintilla of evidence to support it.”
Dr. Lee Merritt, a retired U.S. Navy surgeon, speaking at a White Coat Summit of America’s Frontline Doctors in July 2021, said more U.S. service members have likely died of the vaccine in 2021 than the combined total who died of Covid in all of last year. She stated at that conference:
“One of my big problems is our vaccination of the military. I was a 10-year Navy surgeon so I have Navy people and Army people calling me. There were only 20 deaths of all the active duty in 2020 for Covid, in all the services put together. They have a big epidemiological base and they can find out exactly what’s going on. There were only 20 deaths and we are vaccinating everybody. We’ve already had tumors and we’ve had 80 cases of myocarditis, which has a significant five-year mortality rate, I think it’s 66 percent… So, with the vaccination program we have ostensibly killed more of our young active-duty people than Covid did.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs, led by Todd Callender in Denver, stated in the lawsuit that repeated attempts to leave voicemail messages for Austin in an attempt to settle the grievance out of court have been ignored by Austin, leaving them no choice but to file suit.
The lawsuit concludes: “On August 30, 2021, the plaintiffs filed a motion for an emergency restraining order in the form of a stay pendente lite, preventing the Defendant Department of Defense from inoculating them and anyone similarly situated that comprises the class of service members who can document that they previously had Covid-19 and as a result have developed natural immunity that exempts them from inoculation under AR 40-562.”
A lot of active-duty service members and their parents are pinning their hopes on this lawsuit.
“This may be the last stand,” the father of an Air National Guardsman stationed at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township, Michigan, told LeoHohmann.com.
If the lawsuit fails, it is feared that Biden’s Defense Department could try to up the stakes by dishonorably discharging those who reject the jab. So far, the Pentagon has stopped short of such threats and is allowing for religious exemptions.
A movement is afoot in the U.S. House where some lawmakers are getting behind legislation prohibiting dishonorable discharges for troops who refuse the Covid shot.
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., requires only honorable discharges for anyone who is separated from the military over rejecting the injection. It was added to the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill, passed by the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. [See Lawmakers Try to Ban Dishonorable Discharges for Troops Who Refuse Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines, Sept. 2, 2021, by Travis Tritten, Military.com]
“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.
Military.com reported on a Marine corporal who said she was discharged for refusing to wear a mask, possibly the first service member to be pushed out of the military in connection with COVID-19 rules.
According to the Pentagon, roughly 63 percent of all U.S. forces had received at least one dose of the controversial vaccine as of Aug. 18.
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A New York Times analysis of the August 29 US drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, based on military-intelligence sources as well as interviews with survivors and co-workers of the victims, demonstrates that the incineration of ten members of an Afghan family, including seven children, was a wanton act of mass murder.
Despite claims by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the attack followed a rigorous protocol and was a “righteous strike,” the Times report, published September 11, indicates that every step, from the initial identification of the target to the final decision to launch, was carried out in a reckless fashion, entirely indifferent to the human consequences. Every stereotype of punch-button, remote-control warfare is confirmed.
Military-intelligence sources admitted to the Times that they did not know the identity of the driver of the white Toyota Corolla when they gave the orders to strike it with a Hellfire missile, nor did they know who lived in the home where the car had just stopped in the courtyard. The decision to attack was based entirely on the “pattern” of conduct by the driver, who allegedly visited an Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) “safe house,” and was later seen loading heavy objects carefully into his car, in a way that supposedly suggested bomb materials (they were actually water canisters).
The initial claims from the Pentagon were that four ISIS-K militants had been killed, along with three civilians, and that a secondary blast, much larger than the first, had taken place, indicating that the US missile had caused a large cache of explosives to detonate. The actual toll was three adults and seven children, six of them ten or younger, and there was no secondary explosion.
The prime target of the attack, Zemari Ahmadi, the driver of a vehicle that was supposedly being prepared to carry out a bomb attack on US forces at the Kabul airport, was actually a long-time employee of a California-based aid group, Nutrition and Education International. He and another victim, his cousin Naser, had applied to the US Embassy for refugee status in the United States, fearing they would be targeted by the Taliban because they worked for an American non-governmental organization. Instead, they were murdered by the US government.
Ahmadi had gone to his job at the group’s office in Kabul, a longtime location of a US-based organization which would certainly have been known to the US Embassy and US intelligence services, and in the course of the day loaded his car with canisters of water for his family and neighbors, because there was no water service there in the chaos following the collapse of the Afghan government.
When he returned home, which he and his three brothers and their families shared, in the fashion typical of Afghanistan, the children ran out to welcome him—and all were incinerated in the fireball caused by the detonation of a Hellfire missile launched by a circling drone.
The victims included Ahmadi, 43; his sons, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; three nephews, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; his cousin Naser, 30; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya, whose relationship to the family is unclear.
According to information supplied to the Times by military-intelligence sources, Ahmadi was initially identified as a potential target because on his way to work he stopped at a home that had been identified as a “safe house” for ISIS-K, the terrorist group that carried out a suicide bomb attack August 27 at the Kabul airport, killing 13 US soldiers and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
Ahmadi reportedly made three stops on his way to work, two to pick up co-workers, one to visit the home of his boss, the director of the Kabul branch of Nutrition and Education International. How any of these locations—all belonging to employees of a US-based charity—could be identified by US intelligence as havens for terrorism was not explained.
The actual decision to fire at this alleged ISIS-K target was equally unexplained. According to the Times, “Although the target was now inside a densely populated residential area, the drone operator quickly scanned and saw only a single adult male greeting the vehicle, and therefore assessed with ‘reasonable certainty’ that no women, children or noncombatants would be killed, U.S. officials said.”
Eyewitness accounts gave a diametrically opposed picture. The Times report continues:
But according to his relatives, as Mr. Ahmadi pulled into his courtyard, several of his children and his brothers’ children came out, excited to see him, and sat in the car as he backed it inside. Mr. Ahmadi’s brother Romal was sitting on the ground floor with his wife when he heard the sound of the gate opening, and Mr. Ahmadi’s car entering. His adult cousin Naser had gone to fetch water for his ablutions, and greeted him.
The car’s engine was still running when there was a sudden blast, and the room was sprayed with shattered glass from the window, Romal recalled. He staggered to his feet. “Where are the children?” he asked his wife. “They’re outside,” she replied.
The report on the Kabul drone strike does more than expose the monstrous carnage for which the US military-intelligence apparatus is responsible in this instance. There are countless such episodes over the past two decades, always justified in the same fashion: US intelligence identified a terrorist “operative” or “facilitator,” the “pattern of activities” indicated that an attack on a US target was “imminent,” the strike was carried out in a fashion calculated to “minimize civilian casualties,” and all of these actions were taken on the basis of “reasonable certainty.”
Most of these drone-missile strikes have been carried out in rural areas or remote towns inaccessible to media investigation, unlike the Kabul strike which was conducted, in a sense, with the whole world watching. But there is no doubt that if a serious investigation were conducted into any of thousands of such missile strikes, which have incinerated tens of thousands of people in an area stretching from Central Asia to North Africa, the results would be similar to those found by the Times in Kabul.
American imperialism is, in the full sense of the word, a gigantic criminal enterprise. Its leaders should be tried, convicted and punished to the fullest. And its apologists—like the Times itself, on 364 out of 365 days every year—should be branded as such. One day’s truth cannot outweigh the years of deliberate lying and cover-up that have served to conceal from the American people the reality of the imperialist “war on terror.”
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Featured image: US MQ-9 Reaper Drone (Image credit: U.S. Air Force/Paul Ridgeway public domain)
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New data from Israel confirms that four months after mass vaccination the vaccinated public becomes infected with COVID at about the same rate as the unvaccinated.
With the “fourth wave” of infections having started in June, the vaccination campaign is put to its first real-world test in combating a new wave of COVID. The results show that vaccination using Pfizer’s two-dose protocol does not appear to prevent infection.
[The data excludes ages 70+ since many started taking the third injection]
What has become clear is that the vaccinated population became infected at about the same rate as the vaccination rate in a given age group – meaning vaccination did not correlate with a decrease in infection. Sampling bias is also matter for concern, as the unvaccinated are tested far more than the vaccinated due to the Green Passport that requires the unvaccinated to be tested in order to go to indoor events, restaurants, etc. This would indicate that the unvaccinated became infected to a lesser extent than the vaccinated, however, since the Ministry of Health stopped publishing the vaccination status of all those who are tested, the degree to which the selection bias is a factor is unknown.
This data has wide policy implications, including Israel’s decision to start the third injection. Perhaps most significant is that vaccine passports are based on the assumption that the vaccination limits the spread of the virus, which this data shows not to be the case.
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The incipient signs of a US retrenchment from Saudi Arabia have appeared in a series of moves in the past 2-3 weeks. On a parallel track, the Biden Administration is factoring in that new Iranian government is returning to the negotiating table at Vienna on nuclear issues.
The interconnected maneuverings are predicated, indirectly at least at this point, on an expected easing of the US-Iran tensions in a conceivable future.
Without doubt, the Biden Administration has just made a big statement in its regional strategies in West Asia by the removal of the most advanced US missile defence system and Patriot batteries deployed to Saudi Arabia to counter Iran and face down air attacks from Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Riyadh showed its displeasure already by abruptly cancelling a scheduled visit to the kingdom by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin.
The Pentagon cited “scheduling issues” as the reason but the postponement came when Austin was already in the region en route to Saudi Arabia after visiting Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.
Iran’s official news agency IRNA has been quick to zero in on further US moves in Saudi Arabia. An IRNA commentary on Sunday is titled Does US intend to withdraw 20k troops from Saudi Arabia? read more
Meanwhile, in an intriguing coincidence on Friday, the Biden Administration declassified a 16-page FBI report tying the 9/11 hijackers to Saudi nationals living in the US. The NPR has commented:
“The partially redacted report shows a closer relationship than had been previously known between two Saudis in particular — including one with diplomatic status — and some of the hijackers… While the Commission was largely unable to tie the Saudi men to the hijackers, the FBI document describes multiple connections and phone calls.”
Although the FBI document does not draw any direct links between 9/11 hijackers and the Saudi Arabian government as a whole, it validates the arguments in that direction and, together with the public evidence gathered to date, provides a blueprint for how al-Qaida operated inside the US with the active, knowing support of the Saudi government. read more
Interestingly, highly influential sections of the Iranian media have also reported that the US has evacuated three out of the total 13 US military bases in Syria in the most recent weeks.
Of course, these are early days, but if the troop withdrawal continues, the main losers will be the Syrian Kurds, but the regional states too will be called upon to adjust to new realities in Syria. read more
Tehran will be watching the downstream developments closely. Simply put, against this complex regional backdrop, the new government of President Ebrahim Raisi has shown remarkable flexibility in resolving the discord over the overdue servicing of monitoring equipment at the nuclear site at Natanz by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA].
The joint statement issued in Tehran on Sunday following a visit by the IAEA’s Director General Rafael Grossi says:
“IAEA’s inspectors are permitted to service the identified equipment and replace their storage media which will be kept under the joint IAEA and AEOI seals in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The way and the timing are agreed by the two sides.”
This may seem an inchoate baby step, but the discord threatened to snowball into a showdown at the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors this week at which Western powers were threatening to seek a resolution criticising Iran for stonewalling the UN watchdog. (The upbeat tone of Grossi’s public remarks in Tehran was self-evident.)
Indeed, it also has a deeper meaning, not only being the first major nuclear policy decision taken by Raisi but conveying a constructive attitude. Tehran is indeed preparing for the delayed 7th round of the nuclear negotiations in Vienna.
What makes this even more significant is that Russia is coordinating with the US in urging Iran to move in this direction. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in Moscow on Thursday that ways to resume the negotiations in Vienna were discussed during talks with the visiting US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley on September 8-9. He said,
“Importantly, we share with the Americans an understanding on the need to make further progress at the negotiations, which need to resume from the point where the sides stopped in June, when the negotiations were interrupted.”
Russia is of course going the extra league to navigate the nuclear talks. In a significant gesture toward the Raisi government, Russia has allocated a $5 billion loan to Iran for the development of Bushehr nuclear power plant and certain other projects.
Interestingly, these projects include the implementation of the Incheboron-Zahedan railway, which is expected to connect the Russian railway grid with the Iranian ports of Bandar Abbas and Chabahar.
No doubt, Russia is helping Iran’s plans to emerge as a hub in regional connectivity between the Persian Gulf, Africa and South Asia with Afghanistan and Central Asia and Eurasia in general.
It is a realistic estimation that Moscow is in the process of upgrading the trajectory of the Russian-Iranian economic cooperation in expectation of the lifting of sanctions against Iran.President Putin will neither aspire to be the new sherif in West Asia nor indulge in grandstanding, but Moscow will also not fail to notice that the US retrenchment from Saudi Arabia and a US-Iran nuclear deal may potentially open up new avenues to advance Russian interests.
Thus, while one way of looking at the new Russian-Saudi military cooperation agreement signed in Moscow on August 24 could be that Riyadh is signalling willingness to diversify its defence relationships beyond its longtime focus on the US, without question, it also serves as a sign of growth between the Kremlin and the kingdom.
The agreement was signed by Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman, who also happens to be the younger brother of the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. read more
All these successive events through the past couple of weeks ‘post-Afghanistan’, taken together, presage winds of change blowing through the Gulf region.
It seems the Biden Doctrine is off the drawing board, a key characteristic being the focus on vital US national interests.
Fundamentally, the pattern that is emerging in the so-called Greater Middle East is that the US is hunting for a new place in the world and will not be bogged down in open-ended conflicts in any region.
Put differently, apart from the prospects for the conclusion of a US-Iranian agreement on the nuclear issue distinctly looking up, a whole spectrum of strategic choices is appearing on the horizon.
Reports from Tehran suggest that the new Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian plans to visit New York later this month to attend the annual UN GA. Traditionally, it is an occasion when Iran’s diplomacy fires all cylinders.
Amir-Abdollahian is no stranger to American officials. He is an experienced diplomat who worked for the Foreign Ministry from 2005-2016. He had participated in the talks with the US in 2007 in Baghdad, which led to one of those rare moments when the two sides could develop common ground and a pragmatic working relationship in Iraq based on convergence of interests.
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Featured image: Iran’s Vice-President & head of the Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Eslami (second from right) met International Atomic Energy Agency director general Rafael Grossi, Tehran, Sept 12, 2021
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I leave my home 200 km beyond New York City for the three-hour drive into Manhattan. I make my way out of the quiet hills where I live, heading into the metropolis to host my weekly radio programs.
This Tuesday, I will not reach work.
At 9:30 am, just an hour north of my destination, I turn on my car radio. A panicked broadcaster’s voice is reporting the catastrophic event underway in the city.
I pull off the road to listen more carefully. It takes but a moment for me, to register the magnitude of this news. I find myself weeping uncontrollably, bent over the steering wheel.
Cars roll pass. Do their drivers know? Have they too heard? Do they also disbelieve the calamity we have entered? Are they rushing to find a friend to sit with in front of a TV—for the real evidence?
Newscasters repeat: “All bridges and tunnels into Manhattan are closed”.
I decide to continue southwards in the direction of New York City. Sapphire’s apartment is on my way through New Jersey; Kay and Salah live further south. I’ll stop at Paulette’s since her house is the first along my route.
Before restarting the car, I open my cell phone and call my office–the radio station. Silence. All lines are cut. The building from which we broadcast is barely 500 meters from the World Trade Center. Somehow, I do not expect it’s in danger. I need to join my colleagues at work doing what journalists must at such a time. I turn the car radio to 99.5 fm. Ahhh. We are sending out signals. I hear the voices of colleagues: Jose, Sally, Barnard and Deepa. They sound calm, trying to make sense of the terror in the streets below them.
I wish I were with them. Not for the news scoop; there is no scoop on this. Our experienced announcers will use their voices to help our stunned public through this. I want to be with my colleagues to capture the immediacy of this calamity. That’s an essential job of any journalist, especially radio broadcasters in such moments of crisis.
At 20 kilometers from Manhattan, I reach the crest of the hill Mountain View. From here, one can glimpse the far-off skyline of Manhattan. I always find it a breathtaking spectacle; seeing the peaks of identifiable city buildings is reassuring. On this ominous, clear morning, reaching this crest on the road, I slow the car… and gaze southwards. Something is missing. No sign of the two highest towers at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. All I can distinguish in that vicinity is an enormous cloud of smoke seeping skyward. I begin to weep again.
It’s clear I cannot proceed across the George Washington Bridge and I abandon any idea of reaching the radio station. I exit onto Route 4 and within moments, I pull into Paulette’s drive. Rushing inside the house I join her and Robert to witness the catastrophe. All channels–news, food, drama, marketing, sports, history—are focused on one spot in the globe, replaying clips of the planes smashing into those buildings, then the softly, dropping towers, crumbling, sinking to the pavement.
I pull out my phone. Still no connection with the station. I try the number of a colleague living in lower Manhattan. Nothing.
After I manage to reach my family in a faraway city, I call the two guests I’d scheduled for tonight’s broadcast. The shows will be cancelled.
I return to the TV. Paulette and her son and I hardly speak. As I watch the spectacular images (a spectacle indeed) of the impacting planes and the collapsing buildings, I feel sick, weak, stunned. Inside that inferno and among the fuming rubble, thousands of women and men are being incinerated, pulverized. The replays go on. And on. Each cycle takes but a few moments. But this rumble begins to deepen, to build a story and a fear and a boundless anger. I know it will last a generation. I glare at the screen, wanting this to be just a film I can shut off.
Every Tuesday before now, for 12 years, when I reach the city, I park my car uptown, then take the subway train to our downtown studio, exiting through the World Trade Center. Along with millions of commuters I leave the subway line that terminates under that maze of towers. I pass through the busy mezzanine and onto the street to walk to the east end of Wall Street. That place is now a mass tomb.
Those two towers are–were–so colossal; I have always been aware of their immensity. They dwarf everything around, even the 19-story building where I work.
That was yesterday.
Today, the day after, our studios are silent and empty. Other communications centers in the neighborhood are also closed. Was our transmitter damaged, the electricity cut? Were staff forced to evacuate?
My thoughts shift from the dead and dying to the future, not a distant future, but to the coming weeks and months. Already newscasters are speculating that the perpetrators are Arab. This catastrophe is bound to affect all our Arab and Muslim Americans. It is going to bear down on every one of us, wherever we are in the U.S. Not because of more terror attacks here. But because the authorities will launch a hunt. Expansion of intelligence activity across the country is inevitable. How could I imagine the universal ramifications that would ensue?
After earlier, less horrific incidents, the U.S. Congress hastily passed an anti-terrorism law; its negative effect on our civil rights is already apparent. Most Americans are unaware of this because the immediate target of those laws was one community—U.S. Muslims and Arabs.
New regulations were put in place here and abroad. Congress had already granted greatly expanded power to our intelligence agencies; the civil liberties of our people had already suffered.
Thirty hours have passed since that morning. Tuesday night I drove home, mournfully, slowly, silently.
Any neighbors I meet volunteer child-like threats: “We’ll get them”; “Wipe them all out”. They’re afraid.
All of us are afraid:– for our future, the future of this Disneyland of democracy, all the stuff we strive to possess, stuff that we take so much for granted, for ourselves. I think: suddenly all of us feel vulnerable in this “invincible land”.
I know Americans will answer with revenge, not reflection. This is what most frightens me.
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Günther Schneider, a farmer from Binsfeld, Germany, has photos that show what the stream that flows through the village of Binsfeld looks like when aqueous film-forming foam is released from a fire suppression system in hangars on the Spangdahlem Air Base—like a fluffy white ribbon.
All around the meadows, shreds of foam remained like huge snowballs. The toxic substances used in fire-fighting foams on base have contaminated the sewer water, ground water, surface water, and the air, both on and off the base. The foam contains highly toxic per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, (PFAS).
Throughout the world, the U.S. military has taught soldiers to practice putting out super-hot petroleum-based fires using the deadly foams on military installations.
They dug one-meter-deep craters that were 30 to 60 meters in diameter, and they filled them with jet fuel. They ignited the fuel before extinguishing the flames with the PFAS-laden foams. The toxic “forever chemicals” were allowed to leach into the groundwater and pour into sewer systems, thereby contaminating the environment.
The groundwater monitoring program of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the vicinity of the Spangdahlem Air Base found PFAS at concentrations of 1,935 parts per trillion (ppt). The drainage system in Spangdahlem is still spreading the chemicals.
Some U.S. states, like New Jersey, limit two varieties of PFAS found in the poisoned German ground to 14 parts per trillion for Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and 13 parts per trillion for Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). There are about 8,000 types of PFAS and they are all believed to be dangerous.
The chemicals—in the tiniest amounts—are known to contribute to testicular, liver, breast and kidney cancers, as well as abnormalities in the developing fetus and a host of childhood diseases, ranging from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to childhood asthma. Most of the PFAS in our bodies comes from the food we eat, especially fish.
Alexander S. Neu, a member of Die Linke (The Left) in the German Bundestag, along with other Die Linke members of the parliament, have questioned the responsibility for the assumption of environmental damage caused by U.S. troops in Germany.
When the town of Wittlich-Land, close to the sprawling NATO Spangdahlem base, tried to sue the U.S. military for poisoning the town’s sewer system and croplands with PFAS where the contaminated sludge was spread, it discovered it was not allowed to sue the Americans in court.
The poisonous sludge grows poisonous crops. Today, the town incinerates the substances at great environmental and financial cost. The PFAS in the sludge doesn’t burn. Incineration sprinkles tiny toxic particles of PFAS onto homes and fields downwind.
A German brown trout caught in Spanger Bach Creek, near Spangdahlem, was found to contain 82,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. Public health scientists around the world have been warning people not to consume more than 1 ppt of the poisons daily.
Last year, 9,000 kilometers away, a fire suppression system at an aircraft hangar discharged 143,830 liters of the deadly fire-fighting foam from Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa. Carcinogenic clouds of foam soared 30 meters into the sky settling on children at a nearby playground.
Okinawan children play with giant toxic “snowflakes” near the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa. [Photo courtesy of YouTube]
Toshio Takahashia, an Okinawan environmental activist, reported immediately after the incident that frothy foam could be seen pouring from several sewer pipes coming from the Marine Corps base into a a small stream. The deadly bubbles flow to the Hira River through Ginowan City into the East China Sea, poisoning water and fish along the way.
Tomohiro Yara, a representative of the National Diet from Okinawa, reflected the attitude of the Okinawan public when he said, “The U.S. government should take full responsibility for cleaning up soil and water at any military base abroad. We must protect the environment for everyone on the planet.”
Swordtail, pearl danio, guppy, and tilapia caught near the base all contained more than 100,000 ppt of PFAS.
David Steele, Commanding Officer, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, told the Okinawan people, “When it rains it will subside.” Sadly, these are “forever chemicals” and will poison people and the environment for many generations to come. The Americans accept no responsibility for their criminality because they are not required to do so.
Imperial subjects worldwide need only watch this video of a suppression system at McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to witness the criminal assault on future generations in that state. One teaspoon of this foam is enough to poison the drinking water reservoir of a large, modern city. See video here.
The U.S. military has known these chemicals are poisonous since the 1970’s. They have contaminated huge swaths of the earth while using them, and they will continue to use them until they are forced to stop. Much of the world has moved beyond the toxic fire-fighting foams and has begun using extraordinarily capable fluorine-free foams while the U.S. military sticks to its killer chemicals.
The American military is not only at war against many of the world’s people, but it is also at war against its own people. It is a war of poisons. Rather than being fought with bombs and bullets it is fought with an arsenal of toxins. The American military is on a mission (we’re still trying to figure out exactly what it is) and everything is subservient to it. Fetal abnormalities, altered DNA, a host of cancers and childhood diseases are no less a threat to humanity than the American missiles hurled from afar to burn human flesh.
Truths conveyed here are largely unmarketable and unpalatable in the United States of America. The American people must learn to seek truth in media that may not include outlets like the New York Times or CNN.
From Germany and Japan to Maryland, 75 Miles South of Washington
PFAS-laden foam travels across St. Inigoes Creek from Webster Field to my beach in Southern Maryland. [Photo by Pat Elder]
Like Günther, Alexander, Toshio, and Tomohiro, I am also a subject of the American empire. I have no rights or protections from the abuses of the American overlords beyond those of my German and Japanese brethren.
The Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland (Pax River) reported lthat groundwater at Pax River’s Webster Outlying Field contains 84,757 ppt of PFOS. The toxins were detected at Building 8076, also known as Fire Station 3. The level of toxicity is 1,200 times the 70 ppt federal non-mandatory advisory. The groundwater and the surface water from the small naval installation drain into St. Inigoes Creek, a short distance to the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay.
I live on the beach 1,800 feet across a deep saltwater creek from the area where PFAS was routinely released into the environment over many years.
Webster Field is located 12 miles southwest of Pax River in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, about 75 miles south of Washington, D.C.
PFAS Contamination at Webster Field
Webster Field occupies the peninsula between St. Inigoes Creek and the St. Mary’s River, a tributary of the Potomac River. The Webster Outlying Field annex is home to the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, along with Coast Guard Station St. Inigoes, and a component of the Maryland Army National Guard.
Building 8076 is adjacent to the aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) Crash Truck Maintenance Area where trucks using foams containing PFAS were regularly tested. The site is less than 200 feet from St. Inigoes Creek, directly across from my family. The practice, according to the Navy, was discontinued in the 1990’s, although the damage continues. The high PFAS levels recently reported are a testament to the staying power of the so-called “forever chemicals.”
Firehouse 3 Webster Field
Highest Readings
PFOS 84,756.77
PFOA 2,816.04
PFBS 4,804.83
In February 2020, I tested the water on my beach on St. Inigoes Creek in St. Mary’s City for PFAS. The results I published shocked the community. The water was shown to contain a total of 1,894.3 ppt of PFAS with 1,544.4 ppt of PFOS. In early March 2020, immediately before the pandemic, 275 people packed into the Lexington Park Library to hear U.S. Navy representatives dismiss their concerns and defend its use of PFAS.
Many were more concerned with the quality of the waters in the creeks and the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay than the drinking water. They had many unanswered questions for the Navy. They were worried about contaminated seafood.
The results I received were generated by the University of Michigan’s Biological Laboratory using EPA method 537.1.
The Navy has only addressed PFOS, PFOA, and PFBS. It fails to address the levels of 11 other types of harmful PFAS found in St. Inigoes Creek: PFHxA, PFHpA, PFHxS, PFNA, PFDA, PFUnA, PFDoA, PFTrDA, PFTA, N-MeFOSAA, NEtFOSAA.
Instead, Patrick Gordon, NAS Patuxent River Public Affairs Officer questioned the “veracity and accuracy” of my results.
This is pretty much a full-court press, and I don’t stand much of a chance while trying to warn the public. The Navy wants to be left alone. The Maryland Department of the Environment doesn’t give a damn, and neither do the St. Mary’s County and State of Maryland Health Departments.
The five conservative Republican County Commissioners are not leading a charge. Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD 5th District) have been largely silent.
The watermen see a threat to their livelihood. My neighbors say if it were so bad, the authorities would have taken care of it by now.
It’s a lonely, frightening business telling the truth in the land of the free and the brave.
In response to the findings of high levels of the fire-fighting toxins at my beach last year, Ira May, who oversees federal site cleanups for the Maryland Department of the Environment, told the Bay Journal that contamination in the creek, “if it exists,” could have another source. The chemicals are often found in landfills, he noted, as well as in biosolids and at sites where civilian fire departments sprayed foam. “So, there are multiple potential sources,” May said. “We’re just at the beginning of looking at all of those.”
It appears the state’s top environmental official was covering for the military. The nearest firehouse is five miles away, while the closest landfill is 11 miles away. My beach is 1,800 feet from the deadly foam releases.
Fate and Transport of PFAS
It is important to understand the fate and transport of PFAS. The science is not settled. I found 1,544 ppt of PFOS while the Webster Field groundwater on the facility had 84,000 ppt of PFOS.
Our beach sits on a cove north-northeast of the base while the prevailing winds blow from the south-southwest, that is, from the base to our beach. The foams gather with the tide on many days. Sometimes the foam is a foot high and becomes airborne. If the waves are too high the foam dissipates.
Within about one to two hours of high tide, the foams dissolve into water, like dish detergent bubbles left alone in the sink. Sometimes we can see the line of foam begin to form as it hits the shelf of the creek.
For approximately 125 meters the water in front of our house is about 1-1.5 meters deep at low tide. Then, suddenly, it drops to 6-8 meters. That’s where the foams begin to build and move toward the beach. This is 20-30 years after the Navy says they stopped releasing the materials into the ground.
There are other factors to consider regarding the fate and transport of various PFAS in water. For starters, PFOS is the great PFAS swimmer and can travel for miles in groundwater and in surface water. The Germans and the Japanese know a lot about PFOS levels in their rivers near NATO and U.S. bases. They know how poisoned their fish have become.
PFOA, on the other hand, seems to be more stationary and tends to contaminate the land, agricultural produce, beef, and poultry. PFOS moves in the water, as is evidenced in the University of Michigan results of the water in St. Inigoes Creek.
After my water results were dismissed by the state, I tested the seafood from the creek for PFAS. Oysters were found to have 2,070 ppt; crabs had 6,650 ppt; and a rockfish was contaminated with 23,100 ppt of the substances. There has been no official response and no mea culpa from the military.
This stuff is poison. The Environmental Working Group says we ought to keep the consumption of these chemicals below 1 ppt daily in our drinking water. More importantly, the European Food Safety Authority says 86% of the PFAS in humans is from the food we consume, especially the seafood.
The state of Michigan tested 2,841 fish for various PFAS chemicals and found the average fish contained 93,000 ppt of PFOS alone. Meanwhile, the state limits drinking water to 16 ppt of PFOS –while people are free to consume fish containing thousands of times more of the toxins.
The 23,100 ppt found in our St. Mary’s City, Maryland, rockfish may seem low compared to the Michigan average, but Webster Field is not a major airbase and cannot service the Navy’s large fighters, like the F-35.
Larger installations typically have higher PFAS levels. A single F-35 may cost more than $100 million and the Pentagon wants to make sure they’re not destroyed in a hangar fire or a training exercise, so they make a judgment that the value of the jet fighter is greater than the value of a baby in the womb.
Although the Naval Command at the Pax River NAS says, “There is no current complete exposure pathway to people from releases of PFAS to on or off base receptors,” they are only considering drinking water sources, and even this claim may be challenged.
Many homes in the predominately African-American Hermanville community, which straddles the west and south sides of the base, are served by well water. The Navy has refused to test these wells, claiming that all of the PFAS from the base runs into the Chesapeake Bay.
The St. Mary’s County (MD) Health Department says it will not test the wells because it trusts the Navy’s findings regarding the toxic plumes of contamination.
Last month the Navy invited “Residents and other interested parties in the vicinity of NAS Patuxent River and Webster Outlying Field” to attend a virtual meeting on PFAS to be held on April 28th.
The way I see it, everyone on the planet is in the vicinity of these two naval installations 75 miles south of Washington. It would be good for people to join such meetings and post comments. They are poisoning our rivers and our oceans. We are one world, subjects of the American empire, whether we live in Germany, Japan or Maryland.
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Featured image: Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany September 5, 2012 – An American airman takes a sample of wastewater from the wastewater treatment facility. The U.S. Air Force command says the facility removes hazardous chemicals from wastewater before it is released into the environment. Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are not considered to be hazardous substances by the Americans. [Source: U.S. Air Force]
September 13th, 2021 by Voices Of Silenced Okanagan Health Professionals
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We are a group of extremely concerned health professionals in the Okanagan Valley, B.C. We have some critical questions regarding COVID-19, specifically about the current reporting of case numbers, statistics, and testing, and the restrictions imposed by your health orders. While discussion of adjunctive and alternative safe and effective treatments is being stifled, the policies of mandatory experimental vaccines and vaccine passports are being forced upon our province, our country, and many other countries worldwide.
Addressing Dr. Henry, Mr. Dix and Mr. Horgan: We—as healthcare practitioners and citizens—expect and deserve answers that address these concerns directly. Proclaiming that vaccine therapies are “safe and effective” is misleading and sloganistic. The reports of vaccine injuries are increasing every day, yet are being ignored. We are witnessing an increase in Covid illness occurring in fully vaccinated individuals and, irrationally, that is being followed by a promise of mandated boosters.[1] The lack of answers and the vague information being provided over the past 18+ months do not instill confidence in British Columbians.
This lack of transparency has resulted in unprecedented divisiveness amongst citizens, families and friends. There are individuals who are angry that some concerned citizens are not complying and are comparing our current circumstances to the Holocaust. While this may seem extreme, the Holocaust also began with the small removal of freedoms[2], just as we are seeing today. This historical atrocity started out as a slow and seemingly innocent removal of rights by the government, but quickly morphed into media control, divisiveness between groups of people, and limitations to what one select section of society could do. In this way, the ordinary citizen easily became an enemy of the state. Today a one-sided, politically-driven narrative, which is being fuelled by politicians and the media, is causing a similar divisiveness. When only one side of the story is made available to the public, it is easy to understand how individuals can become disgruntled toward other citizens who are fighting to maintain their freedom and bodily autonomy. A political agenda is clearly being pushed here, and the refusal to address questions and concerns of healthcare practitioners and citizens of B.C. speaks volumes. We hope all of B.C. and Canada will carefully consider the information included in this document and join us in demanding clear, direct and truthful answers.
You must recognize and acknowledge the problems our country faces with our media and with our supposed leaders. We are on a dangerous trajectory and we must STOP —NOW! The media’s control of information and the censorship of knowledgeable and experienced physicians, scientists, and lawyers are preventing access to the two sides of the story. The introduction of “Fact checkers”—who are wholly owned by Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Media — being paid to censor anyone who does not support the government narrative. The tools of intimidation, coercion, and bribery are being used to divide our society, and all of this is happening right in front of us. Obviously, this type of behaviour is not a reflection of good people with good ideas; to the contrary, it is criminal activity.
Groups of doctors are forming international networks to investigate public health measures and to raise questions and concerns.[3] We call on all Canadians to join the rapidly growing movement of ordinary citizens who are standing up against tyranny and violation of our human rights and freedoms!
Please answer the 12 questions below directly, clearly and truthfully, with references to the data from the scientific research on which you are basing your decisions and policies:
1.) DEATH PERSPECTIVE – There are currently ZERO deaths from COVID-19 for ages 12-19 in B.C., and 12 deaths in ALL children aged 0-19 in ALL of Canada
Question:
Why are you aggressively pressuring 12 through 19-year-old children to get the experimental COVID-19 vaccine when NO DEATHS have occurred in this age group due to COVID-19 in B.C. to date, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control?[4]
Background:
In general, we have observed extremely low mortality in B.C. and across Canada from COVID-19. As identified in the preceding link, only two COVID-19-related deaths have occurred in the past 18 months in the 0 to 11 age range in BC.
No deaths have occurred in the age range of 12 through 19. In these childhood deaths, the influence of comorbidities was not revealed.
On the BCCDC website[4], in the Situation Report listed below in the footnotes, these statistics can be viewed on page 9.
With only 2 deaths occurring in the 1 million children and adolescents aged 0 to 19 that reside in B.C., why are we even considering mandating vaccinations, masks, isolation, and restrictions at school?
B.C. has a population of 5.17M people. As of August 21, 2021, there have been a total of 1,804 deaths due to—or related to—COVID-19. These deaths occurred over the span of 18+ months dealing with COVID-19 in our province. Further calculation demonstrates that this represents a 0.023% COVID-19 yearly mortality rate for our entire B.C. population. Does an annual 0.023% risk of death, heavily skewed towards the elderly with comorbidities, justify a mandatory vaccine policy and a vaccine passport?
Moreover, in the age range of 0 to 59, there have been 127 deaths related to or from COVID-19 in the entirety of B.C across an 18+ month duration. Why is this information not being openly shared? Does this data not represent a very different reality than we are being led to believe in the media and in your press conferences?
The total number of people that the Government of Canada says died WITH COVID-19 (not necessarily FROM Covid- 19) since the beginning of the pandemic, is 26,873 as of September 3, 2021. You can view these numbers directly on the Government of Canada InfoBase website[5], using the link in the footnote (find Figure 7, and change the drop down to “deceased”). There you will find the breakdown of the 26,873 of total COVID-19 deaths by age group in Canada.
To see these numbers here, we show both the BC and CANADA total deaths, said to be WITH Covid-19, broken down by age, and the percentage of those deaths by age, over the past 18+ months:
It should surprise all Canadians that there has been a total of 12 children between the ages of 0 and 19 across the entire nation that have died WITH (not necessarily FROM) COVID-19 in 18+ months. Co-morbidities have not been made public. With this data, it is reasonable to ask why the government seeks to vaccinate all children to “protect” them? It is obvious that they do not need protection.
If we compare this to the number of 0-19 year olds in Canada who typically die from influenza (the flu) each year, the public health pressure on children to get vaccinated becomes even more troubling. The only breakdown shown for pediatrics (assuming age 0-16) in Canada showed that 10 children died of the flu in 2018 over a 12 month period.[6]
Data for deaths of children from the flu between the ages of 0 and 19 was not shown, which makes it difficult to precisely compare, but the figures are still telling. According to the Government of Canada, ten children 0-16 years old died from the flu in 12 months versus 12 children who died with COVID-19 over the last 18+ months (proportionately 8 children per 12 months). This means that COVID-19 is less dangerous than the flu for this age group. Why then is the Government pressuring children to get vaccinated?
Given 84.3% of all people who are said to have died with COVID-19 are age 70 and over, and 94% of all people who are said to have died with COVID-19 are age 60 and over, how do you justify applying public health restrictions on the rest of the population?
2.) PCR TESTING – Invalid test used to create fear based on 90%+ false positives
Question:
Why are we still using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect COVID-19 cases in B.C.?
Background:
The World Health Organization (WHO) originally stated that PCR tests were the “gold standard” for COVID-19 testing, recommending it as the universal test (as of March 21, 2020 laboratory testing strategy recommendations for COVID-19 interim guidance). Now the WHO admits what scientists have been saying since the beginning of the pandemic, that the PCR test is not an accurate diagnostic tool, and is in fact recommending a completely different testing protocol[7]. Also, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has said that it will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw its emergency use authorization (EUA) of the PCR test as of December 31, 2021[8].
The entire pandemic and associated restrictions are based upon the number of “cases”; however, the number of “cases” is based upon a positive PCR test result. These PCR tests are falsely inflating the “case” numbers of people who are sick with COVID-19. This creates fear and misleading statistics.
It is important to note that the inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, stated many times that “PCR tests cannot be used to detect viruses”[9]. It is now admitted that the PCR cannot tell the difference between a common cold, the flu, or any virus or variant. Also, the PCR cannot differentiate between live and dead matter meaning whether something is infectious or not.
Additionally, former Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer, Dr. Michael Yeadon announced “…this is nothing but fear-mongering based on junk science and fraud.”[10] He too claims that “almost all” of the tests being conducted for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) are “false positives”, a phenomenon that has been observed in Florida and around the world. Yet, we still continue to use PCR tests to manufacture fear and compliance.
Since speaking out, Dr. Yeadon has been censored and smeared in order to prevent the distribution of, and to discredit, the critical information he is sharing. He has risked his reputation, career, and his life to share this information. Dr. Yeadon has joined forces with a group of 160 doctors, who are in agreement with issues of regarding the COVID-19 narrative.[11] Why would these highly credentialed professionals willingly put themselves in this position, where there is so much to lose, and nothing to gain, other than trying to save people from harm?
Dr. Yeadon’s credentials are impressive and include: BSc (Joint Honours in Biochemistry and Toxicology) PhD (Pharmacology), Formerly Vice President & Chief Scientific Officer Allergy & Respiratory, Pfizer Global R&D; Co- founder & CEO, Ziarco Pharma Ltd.; Independent Consultant (Scientist) (United Kingdom).
It is prohibited under the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act of Canada[12] to require someone to take a genetic test such as the PCR test as a condition of their employment or as condition of providing goods or services to that individual. It is also prohibited for any person to collect, use or disclose the results of a genetic test of an individual without the individual’s written consent. Anyone involved in contravening this law is liable to a fine of up to 5 years in jail and up to a $1,000,000 fine.
We note that all of your health orders contravene this law and that you are encouraging employers and business owners to do the same. Why aren’t you advising the public of the legal responsibility and consequences under the GNDA?
3.) CASES – An overused term and count that means nothing in the actual diagnosis of disease
Question:
What actually constitutes a legitimate COVID-19 case?
Background:
You state a case is confirmed based on a positive PCR test; however, as per Question #2, we know these tests are shown to be inaccurate (90% false positives). Moreover, cycling of PCR tests (often in excess of 35+ amplifications) is being used incorrectly for the detection of this virus. With the knowledge of these inflated false positives, we absolutely should not be counting these as “cases”.[13]
4.) SPREAD – Vaccinated individuals spread COVID-19 just as much—or more—than unvaccinated individuals
Question:
What science or information are you relying upon when you say in your health orders that unvaccinated individuals are at higher risk than vaccinated persons of being infected with and transmitting COVID-19, or that the presence of an unvaccinated staff member constitutes a health hazard under the Public Health Act?
Background:
Several studies as well as CDC data demonstrate evidence that vaccinated persons have high potential to spread the COVID-19 Delta variant[14]. It has been well documented that vaccinated people can—and do—spread the virus.[15]
A recently published medical study found that infection from COVID-19 confers considerably longer lasting and stronger protection against the delta variant than the current vaccines do.[16] Vaccinated individuals were found to be 27 times more likely to experience a symptomatic COVID-19 infection than those with natural immunity from COVID- 19.[17] Why are we discriminating against unvaccinated people, when the spread is clearly happening also amongst vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, those that have had a natural COVID-19 infection have been proven to have longer-term and more robust protection compared to those with the vaccine.[18]
5.) VARIANTS – Vaccines are causing the variants, and the vaccinated are more affected by variant strains than those with naturally conferred immunity
Question:
What source are you looking at when you declare that the variant(s) are being caused by unvaccinated individuals?
Background:
Dr. Byram W. Bridle (Professor of Viral Immunology at University of Guelph) explains that similarly to antibiotic resistance, COVID-19 variants are caused by not fully killing the virus, allowing for mutation.[19] Therefore, only individuals who are vaccinated can be creating the variants. As with any variant, as the CDC and WHO also state, mutations lead to a weaker and more transmittable viral strain. That is why the Delta will not have the same potential for causing deaths as the original COVID-19 strain. As evidenced by Dr. Bridle, the continual application of COVID- 19 vaccinations, and furthermore boosters, will exacerbate the development of more variants. Finally, there is no current evidence that suggests that unvaccinated individuals are causing a rise in cases.[20]
6.) VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS – Exposing the true effectiveness rate of vaccines and approval concerns
Question:
Why is the inflated Relative Risk Reduction (RRR) of 94.0% utilized in reporting of vaccine effectiveness instead of the Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) of less than 1.0%? What information are you relying upon when you say vaccines prevent or reduce the risk of infection with covid-19?
Background:
Promoting the RRR instead of the ARR misleads the general population, exacerbating the non-factual concept that these vaccines prevent getting and spreading COVID-19. The National Library of Medicine website linked below states “… the absence of the ARR in COVID-19 trials can lead to outcome reporting bias that affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy.”[21] Saying that vaccinations are 94.0-95.0% effective is very misleading,[22] as people often assume this means they have a 94.0% chance that they will not become sick from COVID-19. This is not true.
To explain how RRR and ARR works in layman’s terms requires much detail. Simplifying this information, RRR signifies the risk of a health event occurring in a group of vaccinated individuals versus a group of unvaccinated individuals. This number is incorrectly interpreted to represent that 94 out of every 100 people vaccinated will be protected from COVID-19. Although this number is compelling, this is an incorrect statement regarding what that 94% means. This number does not tell you what your chances are of becoming sick if you get vaccinated.
The more valuable and accurate value that needs to be used is that of the ARR. The ARR represents the ACTUAL likelihood of disease risk between the placebo (non-vaccinated individuals) and treatment (vaccinated individuals) groups.
The ARR data directly from Pfizer and Moderna was calculated as 0.7% and 1.1% respectively. In contrast, the RRR calculated as 95.0% and 94.0% for Pfizer and Moderna, respectively. See the Abstract in this NIH document that presents the vaccine RRR/ARR data direct from Pfizer and Moderna.[23]
If individuals knew that the current vaccinations only confer a 0.7% to 1.1% reduction in chances of getting ill with COVID-19, would they have still have taken the vaccine given its risks?
It is imperative to clarify that the COVID-19 vaccines do NOT prevent COVID-19, nor do they stop the transmission of COVID-19. The vaccines have only been designed to reduce severity of symptoms in the individual who receives the vaccine. As previously discussed, the virus is still transmissible by both vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals. Breakthrough cases are occurring regularly in fully vaccinated individuals at an increasing rate, which is pushing the requirement for booster vaccinations. The push by Government to require booster vaccinations at this early stage only serves to confirm that the original vaccine program being pushed is failing.[24]
7.) VACCINE SAFETY/INJURY STATS – Missing full details of the magnitude of Vaccine injuries and deaths
Question:
Where is the transparency for the current statistics and details regarding counts of B.C. vaccine-related injuries and deaths?
Background:
Adverse reaction statistics and data is imperative to ensure that British Columbians can exercise their constitutional right to free and voluntary informed consent. This information should be presented daily, alongside the Covid-19 “case” numbers, so people can decide whether they want to freely accept the experimental vaccinations.
The Government of Canada Vaccine Injury website states as of September 3, 2021 that 14,101 adverse reactions have been reported. Of those 14,101 reports of adverse reactions there are currently 3,768 reported as serious. “Serious” adverse reactions include death; however, death counts are not separately recorded on this database.[25] Why is there this lack of transparency?
Specifically, on Sept 3rd, a report quietly released by Public Health Ontario reported 106 youth, under the age of 25, were hospitalized with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination.[26]
These vaccine injuries and deaths are not just in Canada, but all over the world:
(US Vaccine injury reported in VAERS: 650,075, Vaccine deaths: 13,911)[28]
yet the true numbers are not being disclosed accurately—if at all. Investigations show that very few vaccine injuries and deaths are actually approved and reported to government reporting agencies.[29] An article from Harvard states “manufacturers of vaccines must comply with the more expansive requirements of §600.80 of the C.F.R. Because VAERS is a passive reporting system, many adverse reactions to vaccines may not be reported.”[30]
Lastly, the Harvard Pilgrim Study[31] states “Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health.”
Dr. Patrick Phillips, an emergency room physician in Ontario stated that the forms are not easy to fill out, and that they are very cumbersome. Dr. Phillips also had a few reports returned to him marked as ‘invalid’.[32] It is critical to properly compare the risk of COVID-19 to the risk of vaccine injury knowing they are not fully disclosed. This is even more important when we see the pharmacies including more warnings on the Vaccines.[33]
A true clinical trial of this vaccine would include transparency where health officers would clearly provide vaccine injury details and fully track these occurrences without hesitation. Without this information and data, proper free and full informed consent cannot occur. The above included links are just some of the reporting systems, but the numbers are still very high and show much more injury than should be acceptable to any PHO or Government.
8.) PASSPORTS –Will NOT be temporary and soon the 2 shots will NOT be sufficient to obtain a valid passport
Question:
You have recently stated that vaccine passports will be temporary, expiring at the end of January 2022. However, with 1 billion dollars being offered as an incentive by the Government of Canada[34] for provinces who implement this system, it is hard to imagine this system will be scrapped by January 31, 2022, after only 5 months of use. It is difficult to rely on your statement given what you said on May 25, 2021 on television (see 2:52 into the video):
…there is no way that we will recommend inequities be increased by use of things like vaccine passports for services, for public access here in British Columbia, and that’s my advice and I’ve got support from the Premier and I have talked about this Minister Dix and others.”[35]
Prime Minister Trudeau made a similar commitment to Canadians on January 14, 2021 (see 3:30 into the same video).
Current studies (footnoted earlier) show that vaccinated individuals spread COVID-19 as well. This begs the question, if all people spread the virus why are we segregating people?
While it is understandable that fully vaccinated individuals are looking forward to getting their passport so life “can go back to normal” or so they “can travel”, they should be made aware that once a booster is mandated, their passport will no longer be considered valid until they are post 7 days after receiving a booster. Countries around that world that are implementing booster programs are already indicating that boosters will be needed to maintain a valid and up-to-date vaccine passport.[36] The booster system will ensure that this vicious cycle never ends and one will need regular boosters of the vaccine to keep their passport valid.
9.) TREATMENTS – There are better inpatient and at home treatments that can reduce illness severity and death
Question:
Why are we not using approved and well-researched antivirals like FDA approved Ivermectin?[26] Why are we providing no out-patient treatment for at home use when other doctors in many countries are successfully doing so?
Background:
Doctors are avoiding or being prohibited from prescribing pharmaceuticals that are known to help with COVID-19 symptoms that are safe, such as Ivermectin. The negative spin being put on Ivermectin by mainstream media, that it is only used in horses, is not true. These statements being made about Ivermectin are malicious and false as it has been safely and effectively used for years in humans.[37] In 2015 William C. Campbell, emeritus research fellow at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey and Satoshi Omura, professor emeritus at Kitasato University in Japan, jointly received one half of the Nobel Prize for their work with Ivermectin that was discovered in 1975 and approved for safe use in humans in 1987. In delivering his Nobel Prize lecture on December 7, 2015, Dr. Campbell confirmed the safety and effectiveness of using Ivermectin in humans, and noted that part of the ground breaking research was done in partnership with the WHO, the World Bank, and others.[38] It was noted that because of its excellent safety profile and broad spectrum of activity, Ivermectin was catalogued by the World Health Organization as an essential medicine and is regarded by many as a “magic bullet” for global health.[39]
On February 9, 2021, the chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, Haruo Ozaki, announced that Ivermectin seemed to be effective at stopping Covid 19 and publicly recommended that all doctors in Japan immediately begin using Ivermectin to treat Covid 19.[40]
It is interesting to note that only since the covid-19 pandemic began has the WHO changed its stance on the effectiveness of Ivermectin. While the WHO still admits that Ivermectin is on its essential medicines list (and therefore safe), the WHO now simply says that the evidence to support using Ivermectin as an effective treatment for Covid 19 is inconclusive, and that the guideline development group that they convened did not look at the use of Ivermectin to prevent Covid 19. One can only speculate as to why this group was not asked to look at that essential question. The WHO only says that this question was outside the scope of the current guidelines.[41] It would seem that these much more expensive, experimental vaccines that were rushed to market under an emergency use authorization only, without proper testing and scrutiny, would be at least as inconclusive as the safe, tried and tested Ivermectin.
Additionally, Hydroxychloroquine is an approved and well-known treatment. Medical professionals have been coerced and forced to prescribe less efficacious, and even harmful, drugs. Deaths associated with adverse drug events (i.e. related to the use of Remdesivir[42]) should be considered as a separate count from COVID-19 deaths, as those deaths could have been avoided if these effective pharmaceuticals were implemented in a timely manner.
Simple home remedies such as zinc, vitamin D, vitamin C, N-acetylcysteine, and quercetin are also well known and effective at helping COVID-19 patients to recover[43]. Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenko has led the way with these treatments. In contrast, many doctors are still sending patients with COVID-19 home without any of these treatment options.
Why have you not promoted other effective treatment apart from the experimental vaccines, or even healthy lifestyle choices and vitamin D, since it is clear that obesity, high blood pressure and inactivity were largely responsible for COVID-19 related deaths? The opposite has happened with your policies of lockdowns, closures of parks, gyms, and sports programs, and the creation of fear and anxiety through constant media messaging. These all lower the function of the immune system and increase blood pressure, which are undesirable outcomes.
10.) DEFINITION AND COUNTS OF THE VACCINATED VS. UNVACCINATED
Question:
Why have you made the definition of vaccinated and unvaccinated in your public health orders so misleading and contrary to common understanding? Why do use different definitions of what it means to be “vaccinated” in your different health orders that are still in effect?
Background:
In your August 20, 2021 provincial health order, which has already gone missing from the B.C. government website, you define “vaccinated” as any individual who is 14 days post receipt of the full series of a WHO approved vaccine, or combination of approved WHO vaccines. This means that anyone who is sick or hospitalized with COVID-19 within 13 days of their 2nd shot is considered “unvaccinated”. This is just like people who have had one shot, and are counted in the statistics that you put forth. These definitions are very misleading and help promote the false narrative that the unvaccinated are driving the upward trend of “cases”.
You alluded to the fact that boosters are likely to be required in B.C., at least for certain populations. As we are witnessing the rollout in other countries, we predict that the plan will be to require everyone to have a booster, or several boosters, eventually. Once 2 shots are no longer what is recommended as a full series of COVID-19 vaccines approved by the WHO, then no British Columbian will be considered “vaccinated” until a booster vaccine is taken.
Also, it has been noted that the WHO does not approve of mixing and matching vaccines. This is contrary to your definition of “vaccinated” in your current health order wherein you do approve of this practice. The WHO says this should not be done unless supportive evidence is available. What evidence are you relying upon to tell British Columbians that mixing and matching of COVID-19 vaccines is acceptable or safe? The WHO recommends that if someone has mixed and matched 2 different vaccines, no additional doses of either vaccine should be administered to that person.[44] Why are you ignoring this advice? What science are you relying upon?
Finally, Dr. Bonnie Henry, you quietly issued an additional health order on August 31, 2021[45], replacing the August 20, 2021 health order. The new order issued on August 31, 2021 removed some terms and added others which included changing the definition of “vaccinated” from 14 days post a full series of vaccination approved by the WHO, down to 7 days post-vaccination of an approved full series of WHO approved vaccines. Your September 2, 2021 Residential Care Staff Covid-19 Preventative Measures health order[46] uses the same 7 day period. What science are you relying on to justify this change, as you have previously stated that it requires 14 days for the vaccines to work?
11.) TESTING ONLY UNVACCINATED INDIVIDUALS —August 20, 2021, August 31, 2021 and September 2, 2021 Health Orders
Question:
In your public health order dated August 20, 2021—and now August 31, 2021 and September 2, 2021 —you are only requiring unvaccinated individuals to undergo rapid antigen testing and PCR testing. In light of the evidence and scientific research showing that vaccinated individuals are significantly more likely to contract the Delta variant than unvaccinated individuals[47]. You also say in your September 2, 2021 health order that you will not allow any staff member to be hired after October 11, 2021 unless they meet your definition of “vaccinated”. What science are you relying on to justify this policy of testing and discriminating against unvaccinated citizens?
Background:
You continue to state that you are following the science, however, you have yet to provide ANY reference to the science you are following despite being asked for this information numerous times over the last 18+ months. We demand that you be transparent and honest with the public you serve by posting the scientific studies and data you are relying upon to support your policies and health orders on the BC government website alongside your public health orders so we can review this information.
12.) MASKS – under OATH Dr. Bonnie Henry admitted that there is scant evidence that masks are effective at preventing spread of the influenza virus but felt that can be an effective coercive tool when staff refuse to accept a vaccine
Question:
Where is the evidence that your mask mandates in your health orders actually work? You define “face coverings” in your September 2, 2021 health order[48] as including a medical mask, or a non-medical mask, or a tightly woven fabric but does not include a clear plastic face shield. Where is the evidence that a non-medical mask, or a piece of tightly woven fabric, is an effective means of preventing the spread of a virus?
Background:
Dr. Henry’s testimony under oath in 2015[49] in an arbitration hearing in Ontario as an expert witness for the Sault Area Hospital (SAH) and the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) against the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA) is informative. The issue in that arbitration was that the hospital required healthcare workers to wear surgical/procedure masks each year throughout the 5 to 6 month flu season if they had not received the vaccination for influenza. The Nurses Union alleged that the policy was an unreasonable exercise of management rights and a breach of employee privacy rights. At the time that Dr. Henry advocated in favor of the policy, she was the Deputy Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia.
Dr. Henry’s testimony in that arbitration hearing is eerily similar to the narrative she has been telling British Columbians about the Covid 19 virus. Dr. Henry was a strong proponent that there was asymptomatic spread, that unvaccinated nurses and healthcare workers should wear masks, and supported mandating forcing employees to wear masks as a consequence of choosing not to get the vaccine.
On cross-examination Dr. Henry reluctantly admitted (at paragraph 161 of the arbitration decision) that there was not a lot of evidence to support the suggestion that asymptomatic shedding actually leads to effective transmission of the virus.
At paragraph 178 of the arbitration decision, the arbitrator notes that Dr. Henry concluded after admitting that “I am not a huge fan of the masking piece”, that “there is not a lot of evidence to support mask use…”
At Paragraph 219 Dr. Henry’s evidence is summarized in part as follows:
It is a challenging issue and we have wrestled with it. I am not a huge fan of the masking piece. I think it was felt to be a reasonable alternative where there was a need to do-to feel that we were doing the best we can to try and reduce risk. I tried to be quite clear in my report that the evidence to support masking is not as great and it is certainly not as good a measure.
In the arbitration, the Nurses Union submitted that Dr. Henry was instrumental in the introduction of the “vaccinate or mask” policy in British Columbia (paragraph 256) and therefore Dr. Henry’s objectivity was suspect. The arbitrator preferred the evidence of other experts over Dr. Henry and her colleagues’ evidence.
The arbitrator noted that Dr. Henry defended the vaccine or mask policies as a way of preventing transmission from unvaccinated healthcare workers to their patients before symptom onset, or in cases of asymptomatic infection (paragraph 287). However, the arbitrator also noted (at paragraph 294) that while Dr. Henry stated there was “some evidence that people shed prior to being symptomatic and some evidence of transmission” but “there is not a lot of evidence around these pieces”. Two other experts who testified on behalf of the hospital, one of whom Dr. Henry acknowledged her expertise, both admitted that the evidence of asymptomatic spread was “scant”.
The arbitrator held (at paragraph 297), while “bearing in mind the concessions made about the quality of the evidence by Dr. McGeer and Dr. Henry”, that the following opinion of another expert was more accurate:
Although symptomatic individuals may shed influenza virus, studies have not determined if such people effectively transmit influenza… Based on the available literature, we found that there is scant, if any, evidence that asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic individuals play an important role in transmission.”
The arbitrator held that the patient safety purpose and effect of masking was not established on the evidence and that the “vaccine or mask” requirement was reduced to a “coercive tool”, a situation that would be troubling if made out. The arbitrator also noted (at paragraph 326) Dr. Henry’s recognition that the wearing of a mass could be reasonably regarded as a “consequence” for failure to consent to vaccination.
The arbitrator concluded (paragraph 327) that the vaccine or mask policy did not provide a legitimate accommodative purpose for healthcare workers who conscientiously object to immunization, but rather more closely resembled an unacceptable Hobson’s choice (free choice). The arbitrator did not accept the argument that requiring unvaccinated staff to wear a mask may encourage truly voluntary immunization, nor did the arbitrator accept that the continuance of the minority employee group who choose to mask disproves the effectively coercive aspect of a vaccine or mask policy. The arbitrator noted that one of the nurses told her managers that “I felt I was being publicly put on display for choosing not to get the flu shot. I told her I felt I was being bullied into it and harassed.”
The arbitrator concluded that the vaccine or mask policy was unreasonable and contravened KVP principles. Similar findings were made by another arbitrator in 2018 involving the St. Michael’s Hospital and the Ontario Hospital Association v. The Ontario Nurses Association.[50][51]
The vaccine or mask policy in issue in the Ontario Nurses arbitrations is very similar to what is going on in British Columbia with covid-19. Just as the arbitrator found that a masking policy amounted to a coercive tool that was troubling, your policies requiring rapid antigen testing, PCR testing, and masking as a condition of employment, is nothing more than a coercive tool to pressure people to accept the experimental vaccine. As the arbitrator held in 2015, a policy with this purpose is “troubling”.
You stated numerous times in your television briefings in 2020 that masks were not effective at preventing the spread of the Covid 19 virus.[52] Now you claim that masks do work and that you never said they did not. There is a glaring discrepancy between the statements that you made under oath in 2015, and in your television briefings in 2020, compared to what you are saying now in your current health orders in 2021.
Please refer to the additional published studies confirming masks are not effective.[53][54] Also, Dr. Byram Bridle’s video also demonstrates that wearing 5 masks do not stop droplets from escaping and certainly do not prevent the Covid-19 virus from passing through a non-medical mask or tightly woven clothing.[55]
Requiring people to wear masks harms the user by reducing availability of oxygen, increasing bacterial growth within the fabric of the masks, leads to social issues for individuals that cannot mask for medical reasons, creates waste of materials and money, and contributes to further pollution and negative environmental impact.
Please provide the evidence you are relying upon that prove masks work.
Call To Action:
Dr. Henry, Mr. Dix and Mr. Horgan, the citizens of this province call on you to answer to these questions, directly and truthfully. British Columbians will no longer tolerate the trampling of our rights, segregation, and division amongst neighbors and families. We respect different perspectives and opinions; however, everyone deserves to see the scientific evidence you are relying upon to justify your public health orders. All British Columbians thank you in advance for your much-anticipated response.
To our fellow British Columbians, you are our friends and family, and we need you to carefully consider the information above and be open to what is being said. We urge you to join us in fighting for the restoration of our freedoms and putting an end to the restrictions that have no basis in science and are designed only to promote fear and division and to give the government control over our lives.
Now is the time to take a stand, before it is too late.
Please share this with all your friends, family, media and everyone you can think of.
Sincerely,
Voices Of Silenced Okanagan Health Professionals
A concerned group of health professionals who choose to remain anonymous due to threats of discipline and termination, by our own various professional governing bodies, for all who dare to question the B.C. government narrative on COVID-19 policies.
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COVID vaccine passports “may increase the risk of disease spread,” according to a WHO report funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, among others.
“A health pass based solely on individual vaccination status may increase the risk of disease spread” — World Health Organization
Last week the World Health Organization (WHO) published the 99-page “Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status [DDCC:VS]: Technical Specifications and Implementation Guidance” to assist member nations in implementing vaccine passport rollouts.
The guidance report warns that due to scientific uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 jabs, “Use of a DDCC:VS as a health pass based solely on individual vaccination status may increase the risk of disease spread.”
Why?
According to the report, “Use of a DDCC:VS as a health pass raises a distinct set of risks because of current scientific uncertainties regarding COVID-19 vaccines.
“While COVID-19 vaccines have demonstrated efficacy and effectiveness in preventing severe disease and death, the extent to which each vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to susceptible individuals remains to be assessed.
“How long each vaccine confers protection against severe disease and against infection, and how well each protects against current and future variants of SARS-CoV-2 needs to be regularly assessed.”
“The extent to which each vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to susceptible individuals remains to be assessed” — World Health Organization
Who benefits most from a vaccine passport that has to be regularly updated with booster shots for years to come — the people or governments and corporations?
Dr. Christina Parks, PhD cellular & molecular biology, testifies against mandated domestic vaccine passports in Michigan US
“A health pass raises a distinct set of risks because of current scientific uncertainties regarding COVID-19 vaccines” — World Health Organization
Vaccine passports are a means of manipulating human behavior. The WHO calls this incentivizing.
But when does incentivization become coercion?
According to the WHO, “The creation of a DDCC:VS following vaccination for each individual may incentivize more people to receive a vaccine to access the benefits of a DDCC:VS.”
Here we see the incentive being access to the benefits of vaccine passports.
What are those benefits?
In a word, freedom — freedom to participate in the daily life of society.
This is why citizens all over the world are rising up against vaccine passports; they don’t want their freedom to be dependent upon their compliance to a government-mandated medical procedure.
“We find that the introduction of vaccine passports will likely lower inclination to accept a COVID-19 vaccine” — Survey pending publication in the Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine
The plan to introduce vaccine passports as a means of incentivizing people to get vaccinated appears to be backfiring and having the complete opposite effect, according to a new survey set to be published in the Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine journal.
Led by Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the survey concluded:
“We find that the introduction of vaccine passports will likely lower inclination to accept a COVID-19 vaccine once baseline vaccination intent has been adjusted for.
“Notably, this decrease is larger if passports were required for domestic use rather than for facilitating international travel.”
The World Health Organization came to a similar conclusion.
According to the WHO guidebook, the introduction of vaccine passports “may also increase vaccine hesitancy because of privacy and otherconcerns thatthe vaccination record could be linked to personal data and be used for functions other than those originally intended (e.g. surveillance of individual health status), or be used by unintended third parties (e.g. immigration, commercial entities, researchers).”
Here, the WHO acknowledges that people are catching on to the idea that vaccine passports look to be part of a larger scheme that borders on a social credit system.
“Vaccination records can also provide proof of vaccination status for purposes not related to health care” — World Health Organization
Mandatory vaccinations and digital health passports have almost nothing to do with public health and everything to do with social control through digital identity schemes that determine which goods and services a citizen can access.
Knowing full-well that the COVID injections have never been proven to prevent human-to-human transmission, governments around the world are making it next to impossible for citizens to live a normal life without some type of health passport.
Once vaccine passports are normalized into digital identity schemes, they can be used for any given “crisis,” such as another deadly virus, variants, climate change, housing, or obesity.
From there, digital identities can be extended to all walks of life with restrictions on what you can buy, where you can travel, what information you are allowed to receive, and other goods and services you wish to access.
Vaccine passport data may be used for surveillance purposes
Vaccine passports may actually increase the spread of COVID
Vaccine passport mandates may increase vaccine hesitancy
Despite its own warnings, the WHO still went ahead and published 99 pages to guide governments in their vaccine passport rollouts.
The guidebook was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government of Estonia, Fondation Botnar, the State of Kuwait, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is a founding partner of the ID2020 Alliance, which is building “a new global model for the design, funding, and implementation of digital ID solutions and technologies.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on its own provides more funding to the World Health Organization than all of the countries the WHO serves save one — the United States.
The Gates Foundation is also a core partner of another major WHO donor — GAVI: the vaccine alliance — another founding partner of the ID2020 Alliance.
GAVI also gives more money to the WHO than most of its own member States.
But not to worry, the WHO guidebook assures, “The views of the funding bodies have not influenced the content of this document.”
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“Now at the end of my life, at the time of reckoning, the details fade from my mind and remain the big picture. So I see that my most critical, strong and mature years were spent under the banner of the KKE. That is why I want to leave this world as a communist”. — From the personal letter by Mikis Theodorakis sent to Dimitris Koutsoumbas, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), dated October 5, 2020.
On Thursday, September 2, renowned Greek composer and political activist Michail “Mikis” Theodorakis died in Athens at 96 of cardiopulmonary arrest. Mikis was a legendary composer and was active in the Greek resistance (1941–1944) during World War II and the resistance against the Greek military junta (1967-74).
Theodorakis’ works were censored for his political views and activities. He was jailed, tortured, and forced into exile. He was associated with the Greek left for most of his life and was elected to the Greek parliament several times, twice from the leftist/communist platforms. Throughout his life, he opposed imperialism, fought for peace and the cause of the working class. He has also received many international honors, including the Lenin peace prize.
Greece will mark three days of mourning to honor the life and career of Mikis Theodorakis. Progressive sections in Greece and abroad, including the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL), condoled his death.
Music in the key of struggle
Born in Chios, Theodorakis was interested in music from an early age and took his first lessons in Patras and Pyrgos. In the 1940s, he studied at the Athens Conservatoire. He conducted his first concert at the age of seventeen. He founded his first orchestra while in Crete and became the head of the Chania Music School. Theodorakis and his wife Myrto Altinoglou moved to Paris in the 50s, studying and working more on music.
Mikis Theodorakis’ association with politics started in Athens in 1943 and was closely intertwined with his musical work. He became a member of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the military wing of the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM), which resisted the axis forces in Greece during World War II. During the Greek Civil War, he was arrested, exiled to Icaria and Makronisos, and was brutally tortured. Following his return from Paris, outraged by the killing of leftist MP Grigoris Lambrakis by far-right extremists in 1963, Theodorakis formed Lambrakis Democratic Youth and was elected to Greek Parliament in 1964 from the United Democratic Left panel.
At this moment, his compositions based on poems brought about a cultural revolution in the country. He developed his “metasymphonic music” by mixing the symphonic elements with popular songs, western symphonic orchestra, and popular Greek instruments. He founded the Little Orchestra of Athens and the Musical Society of Piraeus and organized many concerts in Greece.
He gave the score for the film Zorba the Greek in 1964. Around the time, Mikis also composed the renowned “Mauthausen Trilogy,” also known as “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” based on poems on the holocaust written by Greek poet Iakovos Kambanellis. Critics call it Theodorakis’ best work ever.
Mikis Theodorakis during a concert at the Panionios Stadium in 1975. Photo: 902.gr
When the military junta came to power in 1967, Theodorakis went underground and organized the Patriotic Front. In response, the Greek military junta banned his works and proceeded to arrest Theodorakis and imprisoned him. In 1968, Mikis and his family were brought to Zatouna, and the junta interned him at the Oropos concentration camp. However, international pressure by famous artists and politicians mounted, and forced the Greek authorities to allow them to leave the country in 1970.
While in exile (1970-74), Mikis traveled extensively to campaign against the Greek military junta. He met many leaders from the developing world during this period, including Salvador Allende, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Tito, Olof Palme, and Yasser Arafat.
He composed political songs and performed worldwide to raise international public opinion against the Greek military junta. During this period, he also gave music to Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and Yiannis Ritsos’s Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland. In 1974, he returned to Greece and focused on more symphonic compositions and operas during the 80s and 90s. He also served as the General Musical Director of the Choir and the two Orchestras of the Hellenic State Radio (ERT).
Upon his return to Greece in 1974, Mikis became active again in Greek politics in close association with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He was elected again to the Greek parliament in 1981 and 1989 (with the backing of New Democracy (ND). He also served as a Minister (1990-1992) in the cabinet of Konstantinos Mitsotakis.
Mikis Theodorakis and Giannis Ritsos at the 4th KNE-Odigits Festival in Peristeri. Photo: 902.gr
Throughout his life, Mikis remained a staunch opponent of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and helped compose the Palestinian national anthem. He vociferously criticized the NATO-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the US aggression on Iraq. Mikis extensively campaigned for Greece-Turkey friendship, peace and unity in the ethnically divided island of Cyprus. He criticized the Greek government for the loan debt accrued from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
On September 2, the central committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) said that “impulsive, inspired and ignited by the passion of offering to the people, Theodorakis managed to fit in his majestic work the whole epic of the popular struggle of the 20th century in our country. After all, he was part of this epic.”
“His music broke the borders of the country, as its language has the universality of the common sufferings, the hopes, the visions that are shared by all the peoples, all the humble ones of the earth,” added the KKE.
The Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) of Cyprus bid farewell to Mikis, saying that “Mikis Theodorakis’s relationship with Cyprus was special and in every test of the Cypriot people he gave us a thunderous presence, supporting our struggle in every way he could.”
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Paula Tucci of Stand Up Canada discusses How to Protect Yourself from MEDICAL ABUSE and Notices of Liability.
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FiercePharma, the pharmaceutical’s trade publication, reported yesterday that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was adding Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) as a side effect to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot.
This comes two months after the FDA issued a similar warning for GBS on the Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 shots.
Two months after the FDA flagged Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for the rare nerve disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) Europe’s drug regulator has done the same for AstraZeneca’s COVID shot.
The European Medicines Agency will now list GBS as a possible and “very rare” side effect of Vaxzevria, which is administered as a two-dose regimen.
GBS is a condition in which the immune system attacks nerves and can cause temporary paralysis and breathing problems. Along with the warning, the EMA recommends that AZ vaccine recipients should seek medical attention if they feel weakness and paralysis in the extremities. (Source.)
The paralysis is not always “temporary,” however, and based on years of statistics on vaccine injuries, especially for the flu shot, the evidence suggests that it is not that “rare” at all.
In this segment of 60 Minutes from 1979, Wallace interviews a woman who took the Swine Flu vaccine and suffered permanent damage with paralysis from GBS after getting the flu shot. She represented thousands of victims who suffered from this paralysis who were trying to sue the government for damages.
Once the National Vaccine Injury Compensation program was put into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986, the Department of Justice was required to issue a quarterly report on vaccine injuries and deaths that were settled in the Vaccine Court.
We started publishing these reports every quarter starting in 2013, and you can find a list of them here.
In all of these quarterly reports, the seasonal flu shot was the most compensated vaccine for injuries and death, and in most quarters GBS was the number 1 side effect.
Here is an example of one report we covered in 2014 that showed how many people were injured or killed by the flu shot with GBS being the main side effect (please note this article is 7 years old so some of the links are broken now): Victims Crippled and Killed by the Flu Shot Compensated by U.S. Government
That same year, a nurse’s aide who was crippled with GBS due to the flu shot that she was mandated to receive as a condition of employment, sued the government and settled the case for $11.6 million. (Again, this article is 7 years old and the link to the original article no longer works. You can find it on Archive.org though.) Nurse’s Aide Awarded $11.6 Million for Being Paralyzed by Mandatory Flu Vaccine
We actually had a reader contact us years ago who went into an emergency room with symptoms of GBS, and that reader told us that the first question the ER doctor asked her was: “Did you recently get a flu shot?”
This is further evidence that GBS is not so rare as the pharmaceutical companies and the CDC would like us to believe.
GBS is almost always diagnosed based on the symptoms, and it shares the same symptoms of several other illnesses, including Transverse Myelitis (another common vaccine side effect including COVID-19 shots), Acute Flaccid Myelitis, and Polio.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, was originally thought to be afflicted with Polio which gave him permanent paralysis and forced him into a wheel chair, but in recent times many people believe he actually had GBS. (One source here.)
So what about COVID-19 shots?
GBS is now acknowledged as a side effect for at least 2 of them, but since it shares symptoms that are almost identical to other labeled illnesses, how many injuries are we seeing with “Polio-like” symptoms?
If you search the VAERS database for adverse reactions to all the current COVID-19 shots, you won’t find much for “polio.” After all, we eliminated Polio through vaccination, right?
How about if we search for GBS, Transverse Myelitis, Acute Flaccid Myelitis? I ran those searches, and here are the results:
The search returned 1,158 cases, including 20 deaths, 304 permanent disabilities, 155 life threatening events, and 831 hospitalizations.
However, if we do a search just on all symptoms of “paralysis,” to catch all the possible disease names that might be associated with something that might be similar to GBS or Polio, we cast a much wider net with many more results:
This search, which does not include GBS, Transverse Myelitis, or Acute Flaccid Myelitis, returns another 5,145 cases, with another 52 deaths, 546 permanent disabilities, 1,472 ER visits, 1,142 hospitalizations, and 219 life threatening events. (Note: I did not include all different kind of paralysis in the graphic, but you can see them here.)
So after reviewing the data regarding GBS, and other disease names that exhibit similar symptoms to GBS, the question that begs to be answered is: Was Polio really eliminated by vaccines? Or did they just simply rename the symptoms to make it look like Polio was eradicated?
Because Polio is always referred to as the “Gold Standard” example of how vaccines eliminated one of the worst viruses of the 20th Century.
The person who has spent much of her career studying Polio and Polio vaccines and has presented some of the most comprehensive information based on facts and the medical literature, is Dr. Suzanne Humphries.
She presented her research, titled: “Smoke, Mirrors, and the ‘Disappearance’ of Polio,” in 2012 at the Association of Natural Health Conference. It is still on YouTube (we have it in this 2013 article), but the lighting is bad and it is over an hour long.
Brad Kaye edited it down to just 30 minutes and replaced most of the graphics on his YouTube channel, but because YouTube is now purging anything critical of vaccines from its platform, we have a copy on our Rumble and Bitchute channels as well.
There is one section in the longer version that I wish had been kept, and that is a major section on the wonders of breastfeeding, and how children who were breastfed as opposed to infant formula fed, did not get Polio. But you can watch that section here in the longer version, and if it is removed from YouTube just let us know, as we have a back-up copy we can publish if need be.
Oh, and when people who believe Polio was eliminated through vaccines tell you: “You don’t see any iron lungs around anymore, do you?” – you can tell them: “Yes, that’s true, because that was old technology. What has replaced iron lungs today are ventilators.”
Yes, the same ventilators that Congress and President Trump spent $BILLIONS on in 2020, many of which are still sitting in warehouses today unused. Yes, the same ventilators that hospitals today get huge financial kickbacks from the government every time they put a patient on it following “COVID-19 protocol”, and which few patients survive.
Those ventilators are what have replaced “iron lungs.”
This is a video you are absolutely going to love and learn much from if you have never seen it before.
It has all the ingredients to cook up a “virus” and full-blown “pandemic”: labeling a “virus,” huge controversies over being able to actually test for that virus and identify it, a huge outbreak near a laboratory that was apparently trying to weaponize the virus, silencing and discrediting doctors with opposing views, massive government spending on advertising to convince the public that this virus was going to wipe out humanity if people did not go out and get the vaccine they created for it, using celebrities to endorse it, and catastrophic injuries and deaths resulting from a rushed to market new experimental vaccine.
Sound familiar? The playbook doesn’t change much over the years.
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Rep. Sara Hannan, a Juneau Democrat, appeared to praise the Nazis today in her floor speech about how their experiments on unwilling human victims led to scientific breakthroughs.
“If we go back to the Nuremberg Code and look at some of the experiments conducted by the Nazis and know that there were violations of human dignity, of scientific methodology, yet they produced results,” Hannan said.
She was trying to make the case for following science when it comes to vaccinations and how important science is in general.
Hannan was speaking during the “special orders” part of the House floor session, when she made the remarks, acknowledging the work of Nazis in Germany leading up to World War II.
She then mentioned the late Dr. William Mills.
“A very famous Alaskan doctor – Dr. Mills – who was an expert – word-renown – on frostbite and survival, frequently told that he came to that research as a young doctor looking at science that was conducted on humans, and knowing that it was done in these horrific conditions, yet knowing that it could still benefit us to look at the results of that,” Hannan said.
“And he became this renowned expert on frostbite, knowing that the science was developed by the Nazis – was horrifically done on people who were not voluntary scientific experiments, subjected to conditions where they were placed – where body parts were freezed and they were broken off.”
She seemed to be arguing that the Covid-19 vaccine may have been experimental, like the Nazi work on frozen limbs, but that it led to good outcomes. Listen to her speech to try to discern the entire context, which seems to argue the ends justify the means in science:
Like with the Nazis and their “science,” the forcing of vaccines on people is considered by many to be a violation of the Nuremberg Code.
Hannan then went on to contradict herself on her argument as she acknowledged that settled science last year claimed the Covid-19 virus could be picked up from surfaces, while this year, science says that is not the case.
“Sometimes bad science tells us a lot. But just because you don’t like the conclusions of scientific work doesn’t mean it’s experimental,” Hannan said.
But it was the comment that gave a nod to Nazi scientists that caught the attention of critics, who say that Hannan is a social justice warrior who often talks about Nazis, although never in such complimentary terms.
She was responding to Republicans in the House who wanted the House to reaffirm the Nuremberg Code, but Speaker Louise Stutes referred the matter to three committees. Republicans objected to the ruling of the chair but the majority agreed with Stutes, 17-16, with Republican Rep. Kelly Merrick of Eagle River voting with the Democrats to bury the matter in committees that are not meeting.
The vote to bury the Sense of the House in supporting the Nuremberg Code into three committees.
Rep. Sarah Vance had spoken on the topic of medical free choice just before Hannan’s remarks:
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Comments Off on Video: Rep. Sara Hannan: Praises Nazi Experiments on Jews? “Produced Results”, So Follow the Science When it Comes to the Covid Vaccine
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When people ask me what I think of “9/11” my answer is the official explanation leaves too many questions unanswered, such as:
1. Why was the discussion only about who did it and how did they do it but never about why did someone do this? If you look at the fact that the objects of the attacks were the centers of the US/world’s financial, military and political power – and not just a train station or some infrastructure – you’d have a diagnostic indicator.
2. Why did no US Airforce plane take off from St. Andrews Air Base? The standing mission of it is to keep the air space over Washington clean and shoot down anything that should not be there within 2-3 minutes?
3. Why did the World Trade Center Building 7 collapse the way it did, nothing hitting it?
4. The hole in the Pentagon looked more like done by a missile than a huge passenger plane to me.
5. Why, according to CBS, were members of Bin Laden’s family the first/only to be evacuated and take off from a US airport on the 12th (or later, sources vary)?
6. Why was no employee fired in consequence of the fact that no defence measures were taken on 9/11?
7. Why was 9/11 immediately defined as an act of war and NATO’s “musketeer” paragraph activated when obviously it wasn’t – no military persons were involved, no weapons except box cutters used and no international border trespassed?
8. Why was a comprehensive motive analysis never applied: Who could have an interest in doing this terrible act when seen in the light of what later transpired: the attack on Afghanistan when no Afghan person was involved in 9/11 and that attack marking the beginning of the Global War On Terror, GWOT – now in its 20th year and no end in sight?
9. It’s hard to believe that a huge operation such as this attack could have been planned and the people trained for it without anybody in intelligence, surveillance and security intercepting it (or the system has been incredibly inefficient).
10. Why are so many people who have questioned the official story accused of being conspiracy theorists, a clearly derogatory term that serves to stifle further discussion?
The consequences
1. GWOT – history’s most stupid war
As mentioned, we have had to witness the incredibly counterproductive Global War On Terror that has only increased terrorism by a factor of 40 at the price of the lives and unspeakable suffering of millions of people in one country after the other. (Go to the Cost of War Project at Brown University and consult the Global Terror Index). And the end of that self-defeating war is nowhere to be seen.
2. Human rights and freedom – “fearology”
In the name of protecting citizens, formally democratic governments have clamped down on human rights andfreedoms which they used to be proud of championing vis-a-vis so-called authoritarian governments. When people are getting sufficiently frightened that a terrorist lurks around any corner, they willingly accept giving up their rights and freedoms as a price for such “protection.”
3. The surveillance society
We have been forced to now live in a surveillance society. Anybody who remembers how easy it was to board a passenger plane before 9/11 and can compare that with today’s departures knows what it means. In the name of fighting terrorism, we citizens are checked, tracked and censored in all kinds of ways – in real life and online. Where do we not have surveillance cameras now? The West has gone down an Orwellian path towards the authoritarian surveillance state as a response to less than 3000 innocent people being killed.
4. The United States is declining and will fall as the Evil Empire
This trend is caused by an incredibly low level of intellectualism in its foreign policy circles. The idea of starting a war on and occupation of Afghanistan was politically, militarily and morally wrong from Day One – the predictable end result seen on August 15, 2021. And the idea of fighting terrorism by killing terrorists was as anti-intellectual and wrongheaded as it would be to try to eradicate a disease by killing those who suffer from it.
Sadly, NATO members, allies and friends of the United States mindlessly followed suit without asking a single question. Global leadership in the GWOT has been a manifest disaster. And the world sees it.
Interesting too?Distance yourself from US Iran policies or be responsible for the next catastrophe in the Middle East
5. Trust has disappeared
The immensely important trust between citizens, institutions and government has decreased as markedly as tragically. Each of us is treated as potential terrorists and the open society has closed – codes, pins, face recognition and God knows what types of documentation is now needed to process the simplest everyday transactions such as picking up a parcel at the post office. Before 9/11, it was enough that I was a known face, now personal relations and trust is zero – or rather has been squeezed out. Any stranger, asylum seeker or person in trouble could be a terrorist in disguise, right?
A particularly serious loss of trust is that related to our media. After September 11, 2001, media censorship and self-censorship has increased tremendously. You’re now supposed to frame or cancel, omit aspects and expertise and ask only politically correct questions.
6. The term terrorism now covers only small-group terrorism, not state terrorism
Before 9/11, the discourse on nuclear weapons contained the concept of “balance of terror”. That was logical because one element in all definitions of terrorism is to harm or kill innocent civilians to achieve a political goal. Nuclear weapons cannot be used without killing thousands or millions of innocent civilians and, therefore, nuclear weapons are terrorist weapons – mega-terrorist weapons.
This means that each and every contemporary nuclear weapons state bases itself on and embraces the essential component of the philosophy of terrorism. However, that term has been disappeared and “terrorism” is now used exclusively about small groups such as Al Quaeda, ISIS, etc. State terrorism has thereby been disappeared too. And this does not relate only to nuclear weapons. When millions of people have been wounded, killed or had their living conditions deliberately destroyed as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. because of US/NATO interventionism, it is evident that we can talk of state terrorist policies. So too when it comes to the long-term effects of tight economic sanctions. More people have been killed by 13 years of the sanctions on Iraq than by military violence.
There are surely other phenomena – all negative, destructive – that can be perceived as consequences of 9/11 and the response to it. But these will do here.
What should have been done?
The question hardly a handful have asked over 20 years! What should – and could – the US have done instead in the wake of the 9/11 attacks?
All you need to have is a little imagination: Imagine that the US had not had the military capacity to bomb and occupy thousands of kilometres away? Imagine a similar attack had taken place in Sweden, in proportion to the population size, it would mean 81 Swedes killed. What would a country like Sweden – or any other country lacking a global military capacity – have done in response to a 9/11?
1. Asked the reasonable question: “Why us?” Researchers including experts on global affairs and terrorism would have been mobilised, domestically as well as globally (and of curse also analysed who did it and how).
2. Asked the United Nations, the Security Council and various UN organisations to condemn the attack and deliberate on how all member states could help prevent attacks like this in the future.
3. Such a country would have asked why its intelligence and defence system had not seen it coming and why those it cooperated with had conveyed no early warnings.
4. It would have set up a state commission to investigate what happened and decided on what must be improved in its own policies, likely leading to expanding and upgrading its embassies, intelligence and police activity, border controls etc.
Interesting too?Nobody’s Century: Deglobalization and its Discontents
5. It would have sought global cooperation about intelligence, early warning and research.
6. If the perpetrators were identified, this country would seek cooperation with others in arresting them and bring them to justice – domestically or internationally. Depending on the circumstances, the arrest would likely be the only instance of the use of military force.
7. Starting a global war on terror, in general, would never even have been discussed among its alternatives or policy choices.
Enough as an illustration! The US could have done something like that but didn’t.
In summary…
The US chose to handle 9/11 the militarist way it did because it could. Where boots go in, brains go out.
The degree to which the GWOT is out of proportion as a “response” to 9/11 – and thereby one serial violation of international law – is hardly ever mentioned.
There is of course no way you can meet such a challenge and succeed by employing a predominantly militarist approach and ignore every diagnosis. And there is no way you can avoid persistently to investigate causes if you want solutions: Why do some people become terrorists? – that is, try to understand terrorism as a social-psychological, cultural and political, albeit criminal, phonomenon.
The United States chose the overwhelmingly wrong “re-sponse” ignoring deliberately all the “Whys?” – including the possibility that 9/11 itself could be a re-action to US global policies. It chose not to understand where in a deeper social science sense terrorism may come from and chose to mis-use the terrible even – and the world’s sympathy – as a pretext to start a series of wars from which only one little but stunningly powerful group benefited namely the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, while the rest of h world have lost.
This MIMAC is, beyond doubt, the largest single reason the US is declining and will fall, sooner rather than later.
The US response to 9/11 has created much more harm to the US itself and the world than anything that happened – whatever it was – on 9/11. Millions have come to suffer and died as a revenge for less than 3000 indeed tragic deaths. But how much have we cared to lots of other 3000 people perishing here and the around the world?
But if there were terrorists who wanted to destroy the United States on 9/11, the US itself certainly became their best helper.
Why has the world stood by so mindlessly and tragically when the Bush Administration chose such a disastrous policy when other policies would have been more moral and effective?
Perhaps one answer is that they did not have the intellectual capacity and the needed civil courage to oppose the false, immoral but very Western dichotomisation he promoted: You are either with us – US – or with the terrorists?
They should have been with the world.
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On the eve of the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, AE911Truth will hold a free online preview of its new film by Dylan Avery, The Unspeakable.
The screening will begin at 8:00 PM Eastern on the homepage of AE911Truth.org. Afterwards, longtime 9/11 Truth advocate Rosie O’Donnell will host a Q&A with three of the film’s protagonists: 9/11 family members Bob McIlvaine and Drew DePalma and architect Bill Brinnier. They will be joined by 9/11 family member Michele Little.
The film will be released on YouTube one week later — Friday, September 17 — and will play at the Village East in New York City September 17–23.
Bob McIlvaine, Drew DePalma, and Bill Brinnier were all slated to appear in a 30-minute section of the final episode of Spike Lee’s HBO docuseries, NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½, which airs on the night of September 11th. The entire section was excised from the film amid a wave of media backlash calling for it to be censored.
The Unspeakable — whose title could not be any timelier — will give these courageous individuals a voice on the 20th anniversary of the death their loved ones, allowing viewers everywhere to hear their stories.
We invite you to attend this special screening on the eve of the 20th anniversary and to stay for what promises to be an illuminating Q&A. Visit AE911Truth.org at 8:00 PM EDT on September 10, 2021.
About ‘The Unspeakable’
The Unspeakable is a feature-length documentary that follows four families in their ongoing struggle to find the truth about the death of their loved ones 20 years ago in the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Interwoven with their stories are the elucidating words of psychologist Robert Griffin, who guides the audience through an exploration of trauma and the healing power of bringing suppressed truths to light.
Also in the film, renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht reviews the autopsy report of Bobby McIlvaine, whose father — as profiled in this month’s cover story of the The Atlantic — has long held that Bobby was killed by an explosion while entering the North Tower lobby.
Bob McIlvaine shares the autopsy report of his son, Bobby, who perished on 9/11.
Matt Campbell and Maureen Campbell, brother and mother, respectively, of British 9/11 victim Geoff Campbell. On August 26, 2021, their family filed an application with the attorney general for England and Wales seeking a new inquest into Geoff’s death.
Drew DePalma, father of two, lost his mother, Jean DePalma, on September 11, 2001. He was 17 at the time.
Architect Bill Brinnier lost his best friend, Frank DeMartini, on September 11, 2001. DeMartini was the World Trade Center construction manager.
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1) the injection must provide you antibody immunity to a pathogen (virus or bacterium)
2) the antibodies produced post injection must be shown to confer protection from that virus or bacterium
3) the injection must demonstrate it reduces hospitalizations or deaths from the pathogen
4) the injection must demonstrate it reduces severe symptoms of the pathogen
5) the injection must demonstrate it stops you from carrying the pathogen
6) the injection must show it stops transmission of the pathogen from you to others
Examining these criteria
Let us examine these criteria further to discuss if these have been met to be a ‘vaccine’:
1) We have found now that the injection does not confer antibody immunity to the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2); it promotes antibodies to the ‘synthetic spike protein’ that your cells have built; that spike protein is not specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus
2) The antibodies produced has to give you protection from the pathogen (SARS-CoV-2 virus); but it has not been shown in any study to do this and the vaccine developers have stated this openly, they do not know if the injection will give protection
3) The injection was not studied to show that it reduces hospitalizations or deaths; the studies conducted were not designed to assess this and it was not assessed; they stated they do not know
4) The injection was not studied to show that it reduces severe symptoms
5) The injection was not studied to show that it stops you carrying the pathogen
6) The injection was not studied to show that it stops transmission from one person to the next person
So are these injections vaccines?
The conclusion therefore is NO. This injection for COVID-19 is NOT a vaccine and all it has shown as reported by the injection developers, is an effect on reducing mild COVID-19 symptoms (the vaccines do not stop infection, transmission, severe COVID, hospitalization, or death); it is best described as a gene delivery platform; and the studies conducted by the injection developers were not set up to show any of the above 6 mentioned criteria; these injections for COVID-19 do not prevent transmission and were not designed to do this. We were told that they (developers) are measuring to see if the injection ‘attenuates’ symptoms. Again, this injection does not stop transmission or infection, including the Delta variant.
Are these injections effective at immunizing against covid?
We even have clear evidence from the CDC who reported on an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 infections, including COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections, associated with large public gatherings — Barnstable bounty, Massachusetts, in July 2021. “469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents who had traveled to the town during July 3–17; 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients. Cycle threshold values were similar among specimens from patients who were fully vaccinated and those who were not”.
Gazit’s Israeli study (reported on August 25th 2021) may be the nail in the coffin for it shows that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity”. The findings suggest that natural infection contributes to far greater immunity than the injection.
Adding to this, an August 10th 2021 LANCET journal publication by Chau et al. looking at transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant among vaccinated healthcare workers in Vietnam, further ransacks the COVID-19 injection landscape and throws it into turmoil in terms of disastrous findings. 69 healthcare workers were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. 62 participated in the clinical study. Researchers reported “23 complete-genome sequences were obtained. They all belonged to the Delta variant, and were phylogenetically distinct from the contemporary Delta variant sequences obtained from community transmission cases, suggestive of ongoing transmission between the workers. Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020”.
The British Public Health System, Public Health England (PHE), in their latest iteration of the spread and analysis of the Delta variant (report 21), throws this injection into more disarray when they showed that approximately 60% of the deaths post Delta variant infection have occurred in double vaccinated persons.
We even have reports now that those who received the third booster shot in Israeli have become infected. The injections are not working and some even argue never worked since inception. And while you struggle to wrap your minds around why now a 3rd booster, Israel is now telling its population to prepare for a 4th booster.
We have also seen that Gibraltar and Iceland have had 90% of their populations injected, yet have experienced explosive rises in COVID-19 infections.
These findings raise very urgent and serious questions for the injection developers and clearly show that the injections have failed. Definitely for the Delta variant which predominates.
The authorities involved in the COVID-19 injection development even stated that it ‘may reduce symptoms’; there is no mention that it will stop you from dying from the infection or stopping severe symptoms etc.; it was never meant to protect you and when the media and lead public health officials make these statements, they are being duplicitous and deceitful to the public; the studies post injection roll-out, that appear to suggest that it reduces (stops) transmission, I argue are sub-optimal and potentially misleading; I argue that the RT-PCR test was likely manipulated and adjusted to reduce the cycle count thresholds (Ct) to provide a negative test as needed to show that the injection is working; you adjust the Ct during the emergency) to an elevated threshold to drive infection counts (most likely false-positive, 90-100%) to show that the pandemic is worsening, and you reduce it to say infections are down. We have no evidence that any of the 6 criteria to be a vaccine, are met.
These are not vaccines
This is not a vaccine and has not been proven to be one, and no amount of wishing it was and hoping it was, can make it a vaccine.
Moreover, these injections were sub-optimally studied and particularly as to the safety portion of the studies. We do not have proper duration data to show the safety; we have not ‘excluded harms’ with these injection studies; we have no safety profiles; our children must never be injected with these as we do not know what will happen medium and long-term and these injections are not needed given our children’s near statistical zero risk of infection, of transmitting the virus, and severe outcome if infected. You must understand, mRNA technology has never been successfully utilized to show its capacity to reduce the incidence of infectious diseases in human beings, EVER! We have no history of this, and we do not know what takes place after the lipid nano-particles (LNP) and messenger RNA (mRNA) enters your cells/body. We do not know if the mRNA is ‘turned off’ and spike protein is no longer produced etc. We do not know where the spike protein goes after being produced and for how long.
The appropriate reproductive toxicity studies, the teratogenicity studies, the pharmacodynamic studies, and the pharmacokinetic studies etc. were not done. The spike protein on the viral ball is the portion of the virus that causes the devastating trauma and illness from severe COVID-19. This spike protein is what kills you and devastates your vasculature, ravaging the endothelial layer of the vasculature. End-stage severe COVID-19 illness is a blood clotting vascular illness. You do not die when your lungs fail in end-stage COVID-19 because there is virus in the lungs. No, you die because of the millions of micro-thrombi (blood clots). The spike protein that our cells produce post injection (though not exactly alike the authentic spike protein on the viral ball), is pathogenic and toxic. It is deadly.
Conclusion
Then why would we inject something that causes severe illness (damages our vasculature) if infected, now as part of an effort to inoculate/inject to prevent the severe illness? This makes absolutely no sense. Why did the developers use the spike as the target for the immune response when it confers a very narrow ‘spike-specific’ immunity with a very immature immunity library?
I close by asserting that a vaccine was never needed for this emergency and what was produced has now shown itself to be failing with double-injected persons becoming infected with the Delta variant, with severe adverse effects and even death.
We have to put the brakes on this vaccine roll-out and stop. This injection program must be stopped so that we can understand why these harms and deaths have accrued and must only be targeted to the highest-risk persons where the risk-benefit calculation skews the decision toward the injection; this injection is completely contra-indicated for children and essentially for all persons under 70 years of age who are not at risk. At the least, the injection developers, the CDC, and FDA must ensure the immediate implementation of data safety monitoring, ethical review boards, and critical event review boards etc. Ideally, the injection program must be stopped entirely given what we are seeing. These injections must not be given to pregnant women or women of child-bearing age, children, teenagers, or COVID-recovered persons or suspected COVID-recovered persons. Under no condition, as there is tremendous danger from these injections.
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Paul E. Alexander, PhD, Health Research Methodologist, Evidence-Based Medicine, Clinical epidemiologist, Former WHO-PAHO and US Health and Human Services, (HHS) consultant/senior COVID Pandemic advisor, Former McMaster A Professor, Evidence-Based Medicine
Howard Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C), Professor of Periodontology, Faculty of Dentistry, Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
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“The history of medicine is littered with wonderful early results which over a period of time turn out to be not so wonderful – or in fact even adverse…there are a whole string of recent examples where preliminary data led to a lot of excitement and caused changes in clinical practice and then eventually we realised they had done more harm than good. Why is it we never learn these lessons?” (Richard Horton, editor The Lancet)(1)
The pharmaceutical industry makes drugs for medical purposes. The industry campaigns hard for stronger patents throughout the world. Even mainstream economists are highly critical of patents in medicine. In some cases, patented drugs sell for thousands of times as much as they would cost if there were no patents. The industry illustrates some of the points discussed in earlier posts about corporate power and corporate crimes.
Researching The Wrong Problems
Most drug research has focused on rich-world problems. The aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres, (MSF) said that only 21 of the 1,556 drugs brought onto the global market from 1975 to 2004 were aimed at fighting ‘neglected’ diseases, meaning diseases mostly found in poor countries. Drug companies spend much more time researching lifestyle drugs, such as Viagra, rather than tuberculosis, because that is where the profits are. Yet we could treat many of the major health problems in poor countries for a relatively low cost.(2) In 2006 the World Health Organization (WHO) began to address this problem, but current funding is still inadequate.(3)
Social Costs, Private Profits
The early stages of drug research and development are often funded publicly, with universities and governments throughout the world paying much of the costs.(4) Corporations often become involved only after early tests show promise. As one commentator pointed out:
“The whole ecosystem in which innovation is housed – patents, copyright, finance, universities, research, knowledge transfer, ownership rules, regulation to ensure common standards – is co-created between the public and the private.”(5)
However, the companies that receive the patents keep the profits. Once they have a patent for a drug, companies can charge whatever will maximize their profits. In other words, whatever richer people can afford to pay. In an extreme case, a drug called Cerezyme cost over $200,000 for a year’s treatment, even though almost all of the development had been funded publicly.(6) Healthcare systems in rich countries end up rationing drugs because of their cost.
Under these circumstances, allowing private companies to keep all of the profits from patented drugs makes no sense. It is yet another way in which the whole economy is rigged to transfer immense wealth into the hands of executives and shareholders of big companies.
Depriving Poor Countries of Medicines
Where a medicine could benefit millions of people in poor countries, it needs to be made available as cheaply as possible. However, the big pharmaceutical companies who have the patents for these drugs want to control their availability and charge the highest prices.
The World Trade organization (WTO) enforces patents through an agreement called TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property).(7) However TRIPS does allow poor countries to make cheap copies of important medicines, and there have been some important legal rulings in countries such as India to enable this.(8) Despite that, pharmaceutical companies are still blocking access to medicines throughout the world.(9) Most poor countries are forced to submit to high prices due to threats from the US, Britain, and other advanced nations.
The South African leader, Nelson Mandela, tried to obtain lower-price HIV drugs to treat AIDS. Western companies wanted to charge $15,000/year, whereas an Indian company could make the same medicines for $300/yr. Mandela was threatened with sanctions after drug companies lobbied the US government.(10) Millions of people died in Africa because they were unable to afford over-priced medicines.
“The real issue for the multinationals (drug companies) is not the poor-country markets, which are financially small, but the poor-country examples. How will thousands of people in rich countries, especially the U.S., be persuaded to accept death from cancer and other diseases because they cannot pay the tens of thousands of dollars a year that a new generation of treatments will cost, if companies in India could manufacture and sell the same medicines for a small fraction of the price?”(11)
Many Medicines Are Overpriced Junk
A large proportion of new drugs are no more effective than existing drugs.(12) The US National Institute of Health (NIH) carried out a large study published in 2002 to see if existing drugs for high blood pressure worked. Some of the drugs were among the world’s biggest sellers, yet the study found that old-fashioned diuretics worked as well or better than anything else. The diuretics cost $37 per year. The other drugs tested cost $230 – $715 dollars per year, yet doctors were mostly prescribing the more expensive drugs.(13)
Huge amounts of money have been spent on diabetes drugs, such as Avandia, that turned out to be ineffective.(14) When they were first introduced, they were initially promoted as lifesaving. The flu drug, Tamiflu, had minimal value, but massive stockpiles were purchased against H1N1 influenza in 2009 due to misleading research data and corporate lobbying.(15) The manufacturer, Roche, withheld data to mislead everyone. This should be considered a serious crime, but is not actually illegal.
More Spent on Marketing Than on Research
If a drug is really effective, it requires no marketing. Proper scientific studies demonstrate the benefits, and doctors and healthcare networks all over the world will use it. However, because most drugs are not very effective, companies need to spend huge amounts ‘persuading’ doctors to prescribe them. This includes gifts, holidays and other inducements (a euphemism for bribes). Many doctors are happy to go along with this. In some countries there is also a great deal of more general advertising. In total, more is spent on marketing than on research. This marketing is ultimately paid for by the people who buy the drugs, making them much more expensive.
Many new drugs are copycat drugs. In other words, variations of existing drugs. Good examples are Cialis and Levitra, which are variations of Viagra. Huge sums are spent on marketing these drugs, but if they did not exist, nobody would miss them.
Fraud and Deception are Widespread
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. All big pharmaceutical companies have been convicted of selling harmful, sometimes fatal drugs.(16) The industry has been fined over $50 billion during the last twenty years.(17) In 2012, the pharmaceutical company Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) was fined £3 billion in the US for misselling drugs; for fraud, bribery and overcharging; for paying lavish inducements to doctors; for covering up negative research evidence; and for making false claims about medicines. GSK has also been fined in India, South Africa and the UK.(18) Although these figures sound large, they are not enough to deter the companies from continuing to commit these crimes. The sales of a single drug can be worth many times these amounts, so as far as the companies are concerned, crime pays.(19) No individual is prosecuted for criminal offences. In 1997 some pharmaceutical companies were fined for operating a global price-fixing cartel.(20) One author has gone so far as to say that the official definition of organized crime closely describes the activities of the drug companies.(21)
The industry has a long history of exaggerating the benefits of their drugs, understating the downsides, and hiding negative results. A recent study showed that in the real world, medicines tend to be 4 times more harmful than the manufacturers claim.(22) Adverse effects hospitalise a quarter of a million people in the UK and 2 million in the US each year. There were 55,000 deaths from the pain-relief drug, Vioxx, but the data was withheld by the manufacturer, Merck.(23) Large numbers of heart attacks, strokes and deaths were caused by the diabetes drug, Avandia.(24) One expert commentator stated that:
“Until more meaningful penalties and the prospect of jail time for company heads who are responsible for such activity become commonplace, companies will continue defrauding the government and putting patients’ lives in danger.”(25)
Numerous studies have found that when corporations foot the bill, research is more likely to come up with results that support new drugs. In other words, there is now overwhelming evidence that drug companies manipulate the research.(26) Companies test their own medicines, so testing is cleverly designed to emphasize benefits and understate harms. Negative trials have not always been published. They can get away with this because of inadequate regulation.
Regulatory Capture
The pharmaceutical industry spends more than any other industry on lobbying the US government, spending $280 million in 2018.(27) The purpose of this is to ensure that there is very little regulation of the industry. The US regulator is called the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is underfunded, has shown little interest in safety, and has no ongoing, long-term safety analysis.(28) It also has serious conflicts of interest, with many staff connected to the industry. The former FDA chief went to work for the drug company, Pfizer.(29) Many former members of the US congress have taken jobs as lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry.
Astonishingly, the regulatory situation in Britain is even worse. The UK regulator (MHRA) has not successfully prosecuted a single firm, and the fines total just £73,300. The regulator boasted in 2012 of having given 467 warnings and 151 cautions(30) but these have no effect. Laws and regulations are not enforced, and conflicts of interest exist throughout the whole drug approval system.(31)
Not Fit For Purpose
Most people in Britain, and other countries that have something similar to a National Health Service, are unaware of how appalling the pharmaceutical industry is, because they don’t have to pay for medicines themselves. The media rarely discuss the extra costs incurred by the health service because of corporate profiteering. The focus of the drugs system is on corporate profit, not on medical need. The pharmaceutical industry is a glaring example of an industry that is ‘not fit for purpose’. It fails most people in both rich and poor countries. One leading expert, Ben Goldacre, has said that “medicine is broken.”
A nationally run system could provide the same medicines for a fraction of the price. There would be no copycat drugs, no expensive marketing, no lobbying, no legal battles over patents, and no depriving poor countries of medicines. A proper international system could focus on medicines needed in poor countries and make them available as widely as possible, at the lowest possible price. If we want to deal with global poverty we will have to devote significant resources to those diseases where there will be little profit.
The propaganda surrounding pharmaceuticals has not been totally successful, due to media discussions about the need for cheap medicines in poor countries. However, the propaganda around patents for medicines in rich countries has been very successful. The mainstream media rarely challenge the patent system, or discuss the scale of fraud by the industry, or explain that medicines could be researched and produced far more cheaply by other means. The possibility of a government-run pharmaceutical industry is something that is never discussed.
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom
Belinda Linden, ‘Basic Blue Skies Research In The UK: Are We Losing Out?’ Journal of Biomedical Discovert and Collaboration, 29 Feb 2008, at www.j-biomed-discovery.com/content/3/1/3
11) John S. James, ‘India Changes Patent Law To Meet WTO Treaty, Making New Medicines Less Available To Most People, Other Countries’, Dec 2004, at www.aidsnews.org/2004/12/india-patent.html
28) Donald W. Light et al, ‘Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs’, The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 1 Oct 2013, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/jlme.12068
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Brazil is likely to pass the awful mark of 500,000 COVID-related deaths in the next two days. Only the United States has a higher number of dead across the world.
Currently averaging 2,500 deaths a day, Brazil’s P1 variant has long been identified as a highly virulent cause for concern, prompting travel bans to most countries.
But researchers in Sao Paulo, one of the worst-hit cities in the country, say the P1 variant has started infecting and killing pregnant women and their unborn children in startling numbers.
Currently 42 pregnant women die every week from COVID-19; many more women are being intubated and their premature children delivered by caesarean section without consultation with obstetricians, according to medical researchers at the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory.
Dr Rossana Pulcineli Vieira Francisco from the observatory said: “The virus transmissibility is higher with this variant and I think the big problem is that the health system for maternal care in Brazil is very bad.
“In some states the patient starts treatment in one hospital, a general hospital, and when her condition starts to worsen, and she needs to deliver the baby, she will be transported while intubated because they’re not at the right hospital to do the delivery.”
This, she believes, is part of the reason Brazil is seeing a higher rate of maternal mortality.
She says obstetricians and intensivists should be working together to find the right outcomes for mother and child, otherwise it will be very difficult to stop maternal mortality during COVID.
“I think we have more cases because of the variant, and because our maternal health system is very fragile, we have this result.”
People queueing for a COVID vaccine jab in Sao Paulo, but overall rollout in Brazil is slow
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She says that what are called “breakthrough cases” and Delta variant cases are affecting mainly the vaccinated and are in fact adverse reactions to the vaccinations.She says hospitals and hospital doctors will not acknowledge the fact of adverse reactions and report adverse reactions to the vaccine as new Covid cases.The more Covid cases and Covid deaths, the more money the hospital makes, so reporting adverse vaccine reactions as new Covid cases is the way hospitals are maximizing their profits.Obviously, a hospital doctor who disagrees is out of a job.In other words, the truth about Covid and the vaccine is too costly to the hospital to be acknowledged.
The interviewed nurse says that half of the nurses at the hospital where she works are about to lose their jobs, because they refuse to be vaccinated.We have seen, she says, the terrible effects of vaccination on patients and are unwilling to do this to ourselves. Many nurses want to quit regardless, because they cannot stop doctors from making people ill by vaccinating them. Medicine, it seems, has ceased to be about health.
This hospital’s policy is essentially the policy of all the hospitals.It suits NIH, CDC, and FDA, because it protects the vaccine’s reputation and that of the regulators who approved its emergency use, and it protects Big Pharma’s profits, some of which flow back to the regulators.
As Stew Peters sums up the interview, it is murder for money.
The nurse says that the only treatment the hospital gives Covid patients is Remdesivir and puts patients on ventilators.Remdesivir has serious adverse effects of its own, and ventilators are a known killer of Covid patients.
Asked about Ivermectin, hospitals refuse to use it even if a doctor prescribes it for a patient.As I reported, at another hospital a wife had to get a court order that the hospital had to give the dying husband treatment with Ivermectin.But the hospital dragged its feet, and apparently Big Pharma got to the judge and he withdrew his order.The patient has likely been murdered by the refusal of treatment with Ivermectin. For hospitals, it is Big Pharma protocol over life.
Contrast this with the successful widespread use of Ivermectin in India to control Covid, and the decision by the Tokyo Medical Association to recommend that all doctors treat Covid patients with Ivermectin. See this.
The conclusion is that when it comes to Covid treatment, the American medical system is the most backward one in the world.
Unfortunately, the presstitutes will not report any of this, and unfortunately most Americans are too busy wasting their time in the ways they do to save their lives by watching a 15 minute interview.
The Covid lie began with the PCR test run at high cycles that made the test unreliable and a generator of a high rate of false positives.This is how the “pandemic” was created.Millions of people who did not have Covid were reported as having Covid because of the false positives generated by the PCR test.This intentional lie was used to create the fear that drove people to be guinea pigs for a dangerous experimental “vaccine.”
Fear was also driven by financial incentives given to hospitals. Covid deaths meant bonus payments.This cleverness gave hospitals incentives to report all possible deaths as Covid deaths.The flu season, heart attacks, cancer, pneumonia, all became Covid deaths.The greatly exaggerated figure was used to heighten the fear factor.
In truth the people dying were people with Covid and co-morbidities, and they were dying because they were not being treated except with ventilators, which turned out not to be a treatment that addresses Covid.
Known and safe treatments were withheld, because otherwise emergency use could not be granted the pending vaccines.Emergency use authorization is dependent on the absence of treatments that cure.This is why in the US and Europe HCQ and Ivermectin, both long approved, long in use, and so safe that they are available for over-the-counter purchase in most of the world, were demonized as “dangerous,” “unapproved,” and it is why false stories financed by Big Pharma are spread, such as this one — see this — which convince people that there is no alternative to the “vaccine.”
The vaccine is not a vaccine.It is an effort to substitute experimental RNA technology for a vaccine, and it has failed big time.What was yesterday “fully vaccinated” is today unvaccinated.A booster shot is needed, and Fauci now says one will be needed every 8 months or despite numerous shots you will be unvaccinated.In Israel where 84% are “vaccinated,” the pandemic among the vaccinated is so great that the Israeli health czar already has Israelis on a second booster. It seems humanity is to become a pin cushion for vaccine needles.
The so-called vaccine not only fails to protect, it produces serious and deadly adverse effects.Indeed, the likely case is that the great majority of what are said to be new Covid cases are in fact adverse reactions to the vaccine.This would explain why the great majority of what are labeled new Covid cases are among the “fully vaccinated” and why new cases rise with vaccination.See the Israeli table for example.
If already there are variants, it is highly likely that they are results of the vaccine which top rank scientists believe enables the virus to escape immune response.In other words, the more vaccination, the more variants, the more Covid spreads.
It would be impossible to design a greater failure or a greater threat to public health and civil liberty than the mRNA vaccines and the campaign behind them.Many distinguished experts have reached this conclusion and speak it, but they are censored.Why?Is it only because they threaten vaccine profits?
Despite the massive undeniable total failure of the Covid Vaccine, there is enormous pressure from everywhere for universal vaccination.Biden wants it mandated by the Labor Department that every firm with 100 employees requires vaccination as a condition of employment. Hospitals and HMOs are requiring it of their doctors and nurses.Universities are refusing to allow unvaccinated students to even take online courses! See this.There are calls to deny unvaccinated people access to restaurants, hotels, public transportation, sports events, hospitals, and even visits to their own doctor and dentist.A Covid Passport which has to be updated every 8 months means endless paperwork.Every time you turn around it is time to get a new passport.
The pressure is unrelenting. If you make a purchase from a pharmacy in the state of Georgia, it will be handed to you in a red and white bag reading in giant letters: “I said Yes to the Vaccine to Help End the Pandemic.”“Covid Vaccine is safe,” declares the bag. “Side effects are mild and last a day or two.”Now do your part to control the pandemic—Get Vaccinated.Department of Public Health, Government of Georgia.
This from a public health department despite the fact that vaccinationdoes not protect, requires endless booster shots, and is causing a pandemic of adverse reactions and new variants!
The only possible conclusion is that either public officials, employers,and university administrators are so completely stupid that they cannot fathom the clear evidence or they want more adverse vaccine reactions, more new variants, and more Covid cases.
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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.
Featured image is from America’s Frontline Doctors
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According to Reuters, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the city of Muzaffarnagar in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 5 September. Hundreds of thousands more turned out for other rallies in the state.
Rakesh Tikait, a prominent farmers’ leader, said this would breathe fresh life into the Indian farmers’ protest movement.
He added:
“We will intensify our protest by going to every single city and town of Uttar Pradesh to convey the message that Modi’s government is anti-farmer”.
Tikait is a leader of the protest movement and a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union).
Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been encamped on the outskirts of Delhi in protest against three new farm laws that will effectively hand over the agri-food sector to corporates and place India at the mercy of international commodity and financial markets for its food security.
Aside from the rallies in Uttar Pradesh, thousands’ more farmers recently gathered in Karnal in the state of Haryana to continue to pressurise the Modi-led government to repeal the laws. This particular protest was also in response to police violence during another demonstration, also in Karnal (200 km north of Delhi), during late August when farmers had been blocking a highway. The police Lathi-charged them and at least 10 people were injured and one person died from a heart attack a day later.
A video that appeared on social media showed Ayush Sinha, a top government official, encouraging officers to “smash the heads of farmers” if they broke through the barricades placed on the highway.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar criticised the choice of words but said that “strictness had to be maintained to ensure law and order”.
But that is not quite true. “Strictness” – outright brutality – must be imposed to placate the scavengers abroad who are circling overhead with India’s agrifood sector firmly in their sights. As much as the authorities try to distance themselves from such language – ‘smashing heads’ is precisely what India’s rulers and the billionaire owners of foreign agrifood corporations require.
The government has to demonstrate to global agricapital that it is being tough on farmers in order to maintain ‘market confidence’ and attract foreign direct investment in the sector (aka the takeover of the sector).
The farmers’ protest in India represents a struggle for the heart and soul of the country: a conflict between the local and the global. Large-scale international agribusiness, retailers, traders and e-commerce companies are trying to displace small- and medium-size indigenous producers and enterprises and restructure the entire agrifood sector in their own image.
By capitulating to the needs of foreign agrifood conglomerates – which is what the three agriculture laws represent – India will be compelled to eradicate its buffer food stocks. It would then bid for them with borrowed funds on the open market or with its foreign reserves.
This approach is symptomatic of what has been happening since the 1990s, when India was compelled to embrace neoliberal economics. The country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which rides roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.
The authorities know they must be seen to be acting tough on farmers, thereby demonstrating a steely resolve to foreign agribusiness and investors in general.
The Indian government’s willingness to cede control of its agrifood sector would appear to represent a victory for US foreign policy.
“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports… It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.”
On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture. In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms.
Smashing protesters’ heads
A December 2020 photograph published by the Press Trust of India defines the Indian government’s approach to protesting farmers. It shows a security official in paramilitary garb raising a lathi. An elder from the Sikh farming community was about to feel its full force.
But “smashing the heads of farmers” is symbolic of how near-totalitarian ‘liberal democracies’ the world over now regard many within their own populations.
The right to protest and gather in public as well as the right of free speech has been suspended in Australia, which currently resembles a giant penal colony as officials pursue a nonsensical ‘zero-COVID’ policy. Across Europe and in the US and Israel, unnecessary and discriminatory ‘COVID passports’ are being rolled out to restrict freedom of movement and access to services. And those who protest against any of this are often confronted by a massive, intimidating police presence (or actual police violence) and media smear campaigns.
Again, governments must demonstrate resolve to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘4th Industrial Revolution, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term its political and media lackeys use to disguise the restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
This too, like the restructuring of Indian agriculture – which will affect India’s entire 1.3-billion-plus population – is also part of a US foreign policy agenda that serves the interests of the Anglo-US elite.
COVID has ensured that trillions of dollars have been handed over to elite interests, while lockdowns and restrictions have been imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners have been the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers have been small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled and often died for. If a masterplan is required to deliver a knockout blow to small enterprises for the benefit of global players, then this is it.
Professor Michel Chossudovskyof the Centre for Research on Globalization says:
“The Global Money financial institutions are the ‘creditors’ of the real economy which is in crisis. The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.”
“The COVID-19 crisis has severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which are in emerging and developing countries.”
Among the most vulnerable are the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who are working in sectors experiencing major job losses or have seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of the workers affected (1.25 billion) are in retail, accommodation and food services and manufacturing. And most of these are self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.
India was especially affected in this respect when the government imposed a lockdown. The policy ended up pushing 230 million into poverty and wrecked the lives and livelihoods of many. A May 2021 report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.
The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.
Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.
To survive Modi’s lockdown, the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.
Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.
Meanwhile, the rich were well taken care of. According to Left Voice:
“The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.”
Michel Chossudovsky says that governments are now under the control of global creditors and that the post-Covid era will see massive austerity measures, including the cancellation of workers’ benefits and social safety nets. An unpayable multi-trillion dollar public debt is unfolding: the creditors of the state are Big Money, which calls the shots in a process that will lead to the privatisation of the state.
Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Chossudovsky says a new generation of billionaire innovators looks set to play a critical role in repairing the damage by using the growing repertoire of emerging technologies. He adds that tomorrow’s innovators will digitise, refresh and revolutionise the economy: but, as he notes, let us be under no illusions these corrupt billionaires are impoverishers.
With this in mind, a recent piece on the US Right To Know website exposes the Gates-led agenda for the future of food based on the programming of biology to produce synthetic and genetically engineered substances. The thinking reflects the programming of computers in the information economy. Of course, Gates and his ilk have patented or are patenting the processes and products involved.
For example, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes ‘custom organisms’, recently went public in a $17.5 billion deal. It uses ‘cell programming’ technology to genetically engineer flavours and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create ‘natural’ ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavours for ultra-processed foods.
Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered ‘cell programs’ (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. It plans to charge customers to use its ‘biological platform’. Its customers are not consumers or farmers but the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.
Gates pushes fake food by way of his greenwash agenda. If he really is interested in avoiding ‘climate catastrophe’, helping farmers or producing enough food, instead of cementing the power and the control of corporations over our food, he should be facilitating community-based and led agroecological approaches.
But he will not because there is no scope for patents, external proprietary inputs, commodification and dependency on global corporations which Gates sees as the answer to all of humanity’s problems in his quest to bypass democratic processes and rollout his agenda.
India should take heed because this is the future of ‘food’. If the farmers fail to get the farm bills repealed, India will again become dependent on food imports or on foreign food manufacturers and lab-made ‘food’. Fake food will displace traditional diets and cultivation methods will be driven by drones, genetically engineered seeds and farms without farmers, devastating the livelihoods (and health) of hundreds of millions.
This is a vision of the future courtesy of Klaus Schwab’s (of the elitist World Economic Forum) dystopic transhumanism and the Rockefellers’ 2010 lockstep scenario: genetically engineered food and genetically engineered people controlled by a technocratic elite whose plans are implemented through tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.
Since March 2020, we have seen the structural adjustment of the global capitalist system and labour’s relationship to it and an attempted adjustment of people’s thinking via endless government and media propaganda.
Whether it involves India’s farmers or the frequent rallies and marches against restrictions and COVID passports across the world, there is a common enemy. And there is also a common goal: liberty.
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Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Researh Associate of the Centre for Globalization in Montreal.
The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
On the fateful day of 9/11, the world watched scenes of destruction so wild that one would think it straight out of a Hollywood production. Beamed live from New York everyone saw the Twin Towers pulverized into a heap of dust.
Many people have only vague memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks. I do not think this is entirely due to the frailties of memory. These attacks have, due to the disastrous failure of the operation’s narrative, been ushered down the memory hole by the FBI.
The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
Two news items published in these days by the Washington Post – “9/11 families say Biden not welcome at memorial events unless he releases government evidence” and “Biden signs executive order requiring review, release of some classified 9/11 documents” – open other deep cracks in the official version.
Republicans clapped back over the Biden administration’s unprecedented ‘jab or your job’ Executive Order for federal workers and contractors, and a ‘jab or test’ mandate for corporations with over 100 employees. 600,000 postal workers are oddly exempt.
In the U.S., Operation Warp Speed is the federal effort that fast-tracked COVID-19 jab candidates to market. Gene transfer technology platforms emerged as the frontrunners, including adenoviral DNA platforms or messenger RNA (mRNA) platforms designed to deliver genetic material to the human body.
Behind The Headlines’ Dan Cohen explains a little known effort to train Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in propaganda, and how that effort created a blueprint for the White Helmets in Syria.
President Biden is expected to announce today he will impose new vaccination mandates as part of a plan to “return to normal.” When asked if the plan would have an immediate and broad effect on Americans, the White House told reporters: “It depends on if you’re vaccinated or not.”
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, we bring to your attention previous Global Research articles on the big lie surrounding the 9/11 official narrative and the endless war crimes committed under the guise of America’s Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
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.
In the 20 years since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has spent more than $21 trillion at home and overseas on militaristic policies that led to the creation of a vast surveillance apparatus, worsened mass incarceration, intensified the war on immigrant communities, and caused incalculable human suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — which is the U.S. government agency that investigated the World Trade Center’s destruction — the Twin Towers came down “essentially in free fall.”
The official narrative claims that 19 hijackers representing Al Qaeda took over 4 commercial aircraft to carry out attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.
At 5:21 in the afternoon of 9/11, almost seven hours after the Twin Towers had come down, Building 7 of the World Trade Center also came down. The collapse of this building was from the beginning considered a mystery.
The first step is to ask specific, well-formulated questions. What do we need to know? We need to know things like how explosives got into the WTC, how the North American air defenses failed, how the U.S. chain of command and communication systems failed, how the alleged hijackers got away with so much, and how the planes were hijacked.
Angle pointed out that for the east penthouse of the building to fall as it did, you would have to remove the columns supporting it high in the building, rather than low in the building, which is where NIST claims these columns buckled. However, Angle noted, there were no fires on the upper floors to cause the cause the columns just below the penthouse to fail.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
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First published by ae911truth.org and Global Research on September 12, 2018
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One of the more perplexing aspects of 9/11 is how the public was so quickly and thoroughly convinced that the airplane impacts and ensuing fires—and not the explosions that so many witnesses reported—had caused the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
People who have only a passing familiarity with the historical record of 9/11 might assume, understandably, that everyone has always believed, from day one, that the towers came down as a direct result of the airplane impacts.
Closer examination of the record, however, shows that officials in at least three government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks—the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY)—said they suspected that the buildings had been brought down with explosives. In addition, many individuals in the news media commented throughout the morning that explosives appeared to be involved.
For anyone attempting to quell suspicions that explosives were used, the simplest tactic would have been to trust that as soon as Al Qaeda was blamed for the attacks—which it was, within hours after the event—members of the media and government would conclude that Muslim terrorists would not have been able to plant explosives in the buildings without being detected; ipso facto, explosives could not have been used to bring them down.
The clearest example of someone ignoring their initial observation after learning the official narrative was structural engineer Ronald Hamburger, who worked for FEMA on the first official investigation of the collapses. Hamburger told TheWall Street Journal on September 19, 2001,
“‘It appeared to me that charges had been placed in the building.’ . . . Upon learning that no bombs had been detonated, [Hamburger said,] ‘I was very surprised.’”
But in response to all those people who early on voiced their suspicion that explosives had brought down the Twin Towers—before the official narrative was promulgated—anyone needing to quell suspicions about controlled demolition would find it necessary to gently dismiss such concerns.
‘It just pancaked’
Dick Cheney and Eric Edelman converse in the PEOC on 9/11.
One government official who openly speculated about the possibility of explosives being used at the World Trade Center was Eric Edelman, Vice President Dick Cheney’ Deputy Chief of Staff on 9/11. He was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) with his boss as the events unfolded that morning. In a little-known interview with Newsweek Magazine on October 25, 2001, he gave this account of his and Cheney’s reaction to watching the Twin Towers go down:
“Some of us, when the Trade Center came down, and then the second one came down, some of us I think were a bit stunned by how, the way it came down. As you recall from seeing the tapes, it almost looked like (inaudible) charges on each floor to bring it to the ground. Some of us were speculating that maybe, you know, there was some kind of charge on the ground or in the building. You know, we were dealing with all sorts of speculation.
“But [Cheney] basically said, well, just the way it looks to me, it just pancaked and (inaudible), top (inaudible) came down; just pancaked the rest of the building. His sense of all this was pretty impressive, I have to say—not just because I work for him.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller in the PEOC on 9/11.
It is impossible to know whether Cheney had inside information on the Twin Towers’ demolition and was intentionally steering his colleagues away from that suspicion or whether he was reacting genuinely to what he observed. Either way, given that he had unprecedented power in the White House and that he was the man in charge on 9/11, his instant dismissal of the possibility of controlled demolition undoubtedly had some effect on the direction of various investigations that were just getting underway.
Of course, one of those investigations was being conducted by the FBI. Later that day, FBI Director Robert Mueller would join Cheney in the PEOC. It just so happens that the FBI’s “working theory” of the attacks was that explosives had been used to bring down the Twin Towers. We know as much, because USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley provided this report on the day of 9/11:
Kelley: “Apparently, what appears to have happened is that at the same time two planes hit the building, that the FBI most likely thinks that there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building which also exploded at the same time and brought both of them down.”
USA Today Anchor: “Now that’s the first time we’re hearing that. So two planes and explosives that were in the building, is that correct?”
Kelley: “That is the working theory at this point. That is still unconfirmed, but that is what the FBI is going on at this point.”
But at some point and for some unexplained reason, the FBI apparently abandoned its “working theory.”
‘We don’t know of an additional explosion’
Had the FBI continued to pursue the explosives theory, it would have been corroborated by many officials and firefighters in the FDNY. Consider that at around 11:55 AM, approximately 90 minutes after both towers had disappeared from the New York skyline, NBC’s Pat Dawson gave this extensive report on his conversation with the FDNY’s Deputy Assistant Chief of Safety, Albert Turi:
Dawson: “Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department, who was obviously one of the first people here on the scene after those two planes were crashed into the side—we assume—of the World Trade Center towers, which used to be behind me over there. Chief Albert Turi told me that he was here just literally 10 or 15 minutes after the events that took place this morning, that is, the first crash. . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 o’clock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device—that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices he thinks, that took place after the initial impact, he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building.”
Turi was just one of many in the FDNY to suspect that explosives were planted in the Twin Towers. Others included firefighters Tyrone Johnson and Jimmy Grillo, whose battalion was stationed in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel as they witnessed explosions coming from the neighboring towers. They gave this account just after the collapse of both towers:
Johnson: “We was in an explosion. We was in the lobby and it—the third explosion, the whole lobby collapsed on us. . . .”
Reporter: “Was that a secondary explosion?”
Johnson: “Yes, it was. Definitely a secondary explosion. Because we was inside waiting to go upstairs, and on the way upstairs, the whole fucking thing blew. . . . Everybody was inside the building waiting to go upstairs, and it just let loose. Everything just let loose inside the building.”
Reporter: “So what you’re telling me is that there was a plane, whatever hit the building, and then the secondary explosion?”
Johnson: “It was like three explosions after that. We came in there after the fire. We came when the fire was going on already. We was in the staging area inside the building, waiting to go upstairs. Then the explosions. Then the whole lobby collapsed inside. . . .”
Grillo: “People don’t understand. There may be more. Any one of these fuckin’ buildings could blow up. This ain’t done yet.”
More than 100 other FDNY personnel, who were stationed outside the towers, said they, too, witnessed phenomena they believed to be explosions—or they surmised that the towers had been brought down with explosives. A small sampling of those eyewitness accounts includes Captain Karin Deshore, Fire Marshal John Coyle, and Firefighter Christopher Fenyo:
Deshore: “Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.”
Coyle: “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards . . . because the debris from the tower had shot out far over our heads. . . . Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”
Fenyo: “At that point [after the collapse of the South Tower] a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges. . . . [M]any people had felt that possibly explosives had taken out 2 World Trade, and officers were gathering companies together and the officers were debating whether or not to go immediately back in or to see what was going to happen with 1 World Trade at that point.”
Despite the fact that most members of the fire department thought the buildings were leveled with explosives—and many of them had directly witnessed what they believed were explosions—Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerikboth denied having any information about secondary explosions at a press conference that afternoon, with FDNY Commissioner Thomas Van Essen standing by their side:
Reporter: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought down the two buildings yet? Was it caused by the planes or by something else? There were second explosions.”
Mayor Giuliani: “We believe it was caused by the after effects of the planes hitting the buildings. We don’t know of an additional explosion after that.” (While Giuliani is talking, he turns to Kerik, who shakes his head and appears to mutter the words, “No, nothing like that.”)
Was this a case of Giuliani, Kerik, and Van Essen simply not being in contact with the Deputy Assistant Chief of Safety and other members of the fire department? Were they truly unaware of the numerous reports of explosions from first responders and civilians—reports so ubiquitous that the journalist who posed the question treated the explosions, as well as the belief that they had brought down the towers, as established fact?
It is safe to say that Giuliani, Kerik, and Van Essen were probably better positioned than any other human beings on 9/11 to receive and make sense of all the eyewitness reports of explosions. Indeed, their roles put them in a perfect position to formulate and announce a coherent narrative of what these witnesses were saying had just happened. Yet they professed to have no knowledge of such information.
Whether or not the mayor and his two commissioners knew more than they were admitting, Giuliani’s assertion that it was the “after effects of the planes hitting the buildings” and not secondary explosions that brought down the Twin Towers was broadcast worldwide to millions of people, including members of the media who were just beginning to assemble an account of what had taken place that morning.
‘Simply the planes hitting the buildings’
A less-known government official who also waved off the idea of explosives bringing down the Twin Towers—but who was equally involved in protecting the nation, New York City, and the World Trade Center from terrorist attacks—was counterterrorism expert Jerome Hauer.
According to his biography on the Chertoff Group website, Hauer was “Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Senior Advisor to the Secretary for National Security and Emergency Management during the events of September 11, 2001 and the nation’s anthrax crisis.” Mere months earlier, in January 2001, Hauer had been hired to run a new crisis management group at Kroll Associates, the security consulting firm that had designed the security system for the World Trade Center complex in response to the 1993 bombing. And before that, from 1996 to 2000, he had been Mayor Giuliani’s Director of the New York City Office of Emergency Management. In fact, under Hauer’s watch, the OEM installed its Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7 in June 1999.
On the morning of 9/11, Hauer was a guest on CBS News with Dan Rather, who, like many other television anchors and reporters, speculated that the buildings had come down due to explosives. Their conversation went like this:
Rather: “Based on what you know—and I recognize we’re dealing with so few facts—is it possible that just a plane crash could have collapsed these buildings, or would it have required the sort of prior positioning of other explosives in the building? What do you think?”
Hauer: “No, my sense is that just, one, the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane filled with fuel hitting that building that burned. The velocity of the plane certainly had an impact on the structure itself. And then the fact that it burned, and you had that intense heat, probably weakened the structure as well. And I think it was simply the planes hitting the buildings and causing the collapse.”
Taken together, we have the two government officials most responsible for directing the response to 9/11—Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani—dismissing the notion of controlled demolition within hours after the event. Add to them a man—Jerry Hauer—whose job at various times was to plan for terrorist attacks against the nation, the city, and the World Trade Center complex itself.
It’s possible that all three of them were reacting candidly to what they observed and to the information available to them. If that’s the case, it’s quite unfortunate. Each was in a position to shape the course of ongoing investigations, and it’s undeniable that an unbiased investigation would not have ruled out the possible use of explosives at that point in time.
It’s also possible that one or more of them knew in advance that the Twin Towers were going to be demolished and that they were involved, whether directly or peripherally, in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the murder of thousands of people.
Certainly, we know that a cover-up was carried out in the succeeding months and years. The removal of evidence, the FEMA investigation, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the NIST investigation were key elements of that cover-up. But, looking back, we might wonder if the most critical stage of the entire cover-up was in the minutes and hours immediately following the devastating destruction.
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).
This is Part One of a three-part re-evaluation of 9/11 in light of startling new evidence that may change many minds about the so-called “craziness” of those who have refused to accept the “official” government story of this traumatic and defining event, which has so tragically misdirected U.S. policy for the past 20 years
Authors’ Note: Everything, we are told, changed in September of 2001. It has been twenty years since the terror spectacle of 9/11. On this grim anniversary, we offer some big picture analysis—a series of articles reflecting on the extent to which everything did and did not change as a result of 9/11. Begun months ago, and building on years of scholarship by the authors, the occasion is all the more salient given some strange synchronicity. Specifically, we have just witnessed the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul. And in the wake of this spectacle, the Biden administration announced plans to declassify information pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Saudi role in the attacks.
These events highlight the fact that despite all the investigations and research around the events of September 11, 2001, much remains obscured. As such, this series presents a deeper exploration into the tragic events and catastrophic consequences of 9/11. In this first installment, we examine how the U.S. for decades has utilized Islamic terrorists as assets for its own ends. In Part 2, we look at how CIA figures actively prevented other government agencies from exposing the al Qaeda presence in the U.S. prior to the attacks. In the third and final article, we explore the deep political and historical implications of the U.S. government’s “emergency” powers in order to offer some conclusions about 9/11.
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Project Censored interview: Listen to Peter Dale Scott, Aaron Good and Ben Howard discuss the article with Mickey Huff.
Domestically, the attacks led to substantial changes in the federal government, the most obvious being the creation of a new cabinet-level department with the grave charge of securing “the homeland.”
Perhaps of greater consequence were the ways in which 9/11 further accelerated the abrogation of civil rights and the rule of law in the U.S.
Beginning with the Cold War and previously justified by the “global communist conspiracy,” the security organizations of the federal government had a long and prolific history of operations and episodes that appear straightforwardly illegal. On U.S. soil, these include McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, propaganda campaigns, and the surveillance and infiltration of groups engaging in constitutionally protected political activity.
Internationally, the U.S., since the end of World War II, has repeatedly violated the UN Charter which outlaws even the threat of aggression against other nations. Having been ratified by Congress, the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause establishes that the treaty is “the highest law in the land.”
Therefore, the post-World War II U.S. government has violated not just international law, but its own Constitution as a matter of course in the daily execution of its foreign policy.
On the basis of this domestic and international lawlessness, it has been argued by one of our co-authors, Aaron Good, that the maintenance of U.S. hegemony since World War II has entailed exceptionism—the institutionalization of a “state of exception” whereby the state exercises prerogative to override legal restraints on the basis of this or that emergency.[1]
Following 9/11, these trends worsened dramatically.
Introduced after 9/11 and passed by Congress in the wake of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks,[2] the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act) kicked off a period in which U.S. civil liberties were drastically eroded.
President Bush signing the USA PATRIOT Act. [Source: Britannica.com]
The NSA launched a massive campaign of warrantless surveillance. Foreign nationals deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” were detained indefinitely. State and local police forces became militarized to an historically unprecedented extent.
In 2012, the U.S. assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed by a U.S. strike.
In 2017, al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter was killed in a U.S. raid. All three were U.S. citizens.
The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gave the government the power to detain American citizens indefinitely. In the wake of the controversial 2012 NDAA, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) inquired as to whether “the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”
After responding by asserting that such has not happened and is not intended to happen, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder added that a U.S. President could “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”[3]
The 9/11 Wars
Outside of the U.S., the consequences of the 2001 terror attacks were even more dramatic.
Most notably, the U.S. launched the two “9/11 Wars.” The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have killed over a million people, displaced tens of millions, and cost trillions of dollars—all with no discernable improvement to U.S. national security.
Furthermore, both wars were launched on very dubious grounds.
None of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers were Afghan nationals; most of them were from Saudi Arabia.
Alleged 9/11 hijackers. None came from Afghanistan. [Source: pix11.com]
The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.[4]
In mid-October of 2001, President Bush refused a Taliban offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the moderate, Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference in order to stand trial for the attacks.[5]
The deceptions that led to the Iraq War are so infamous that they need not be restated here in any detail. The Bush administration relied on tendentious, erroneous, and even fabricated[6] intelligence to argue that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda.
As mentioned at the outset, it has often been asserted that 9/11 “changed everything.” Over time, even mainstream commentators eventually had to acknowledge that the U.S. overreacted to the attacks in harmful ways.
In this context, it should be noted that both of the 9/11 Wars were long in planning within the deep state—or if one prefers, within the U.S. foreign policy establishment or foreign policy blob.
Beginning in 1997, the CIA and Pentagon were working with the Uzbek security services to prepare for operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.[7] Getting closer to September 2001, that year had seen a series of negotiations between the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition regarding the creation of a new unity government in Afghanistan.
According to attendee Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs, “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid … And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.”
Naik also stated that Tom Simons, a U.S. representative at the talks, told them that “‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’”[8]
Such would apparently come to pass after the negotiations broke down. On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet authorized the drafting of a new National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). This document, NSDP-9, called for a sizable covert action initiative which included U.S. ground troops and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was dead set against U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan but, on September 9, 2001, he was conveniently assassinated, likely with U.S. complicity on some level.[9]
The next day, on September 10, a second NSDP-9 related meeting was held, focusing on various details of the U.S. military and political plans for Afghanistan.[10]
The long-running campaign for regime change in Iraq was even more visible. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, asserting that “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”[11]
While Clinton apparently bowed to neoconservative pressure in signing the Iraq Liberation Act, those forces were in the driver’s seat of the incoming George W. Bush administration. According to Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, Bush was set on invading Iraq from the earliest days of his presidency. Said O’Neill, “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”[12]
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the U.S. Grand Strategy
In truth, the 9/11 Wars were both prescribed by the U.S. hegemonic grand strategy consensus that was emerging throughout the 1990s. The energy heartlands of Western and Central Asia were very much on the minds of key figures ranging from Establishment realists like Zbigniew Brzezinski to the neoconservative imperialists most famously represented by the notorious Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
In 1997, Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard in which he stated that for the U.S., “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.” Since the non-Eurasian U.S. was preeminent in the region, he argued that “[American] global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”[13] His book even included a helpful map of the proposed Unocal pipeline through Afghanistan.[14]
Meanwhile, Iraq is mentioned 25 times in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the imperial manifesto published by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century.[15]
It is also worth noting that in years prior to 9/11, these Establishment realists and the neoconservatives were bemoaning the fact that it would be difficult to mobilize public opinion for the militarism that would be needed to maintain American primacy well into the 21st century.
Brzezinski wrote that the U.S. was likely to “find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”[16] He also wrote that “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”[17]
This is congruous with the infamous and oft-cited passage in PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses which stated, “[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[18]
Islamist Terror and Anglo-U.S. Geopolitics
The modern phenomenon of Islamist terror derives in large part from Western imperialism—most significantly, British and American interventions. For example, Britain supported the reactionary Wahhabist Saudi monarchy and, in 1928, essentially created the Muslim Brotherhood (via the British Suez Canal Company) for the express purpose of countering Egyptian nationalists and leftists.[19]
In the 1930s, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna created the organization’s “Secret Apparatus,” described by Robert Dreyfuss as “an underground intelligence and paramilitary arm with a terrorist wing.” The Muslim Brotherhood worked against the political enemies of Egypt’s (British puppet) King Farouk and was even a major presence at the King’s 1937 coronation where its members provided “order and security.”[20]
After World War II, the most prominent Middle Eastern statesmen were nationalists of a secular bent—Nasser and Mossadegh. Thus, it was no coincidence that Egypt and Iran experienced paramilitary violence from Islamist terror groups backed by the West.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood tried at least twice to assassinate Nasser. The main international leader of the Brotherhood in the 1950s was Said Ramadan, a man who visited Eisenhower in the White House.
Said Ramadan is second from the right in this 1953 photo. He was part of a Muslim delegation that visited the White House and met President Dwight Eisenhower. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
Ramadan was likely recruited by the CIA prior to—or shortly after—that visit.[21] A writer in the New York Review of Books flatly stated, “By the end of the decade, the CIA was overtly backing Ramadan.”[22]
In Iran, the CIA bankrolled the militant Warriors of Islam, an outfit described as a “terrorist gang” in an official CIA history. In 1953, various street thugs organized by the CIA created chaos in Tehran, even pretending to be communists whilst attacking mullahs and blowing up a mosque.[23]
Led by the U.S. and aided by various Islamists in the decades after World War II, the West largely succeeded in undermining nationalist governments in the Middle East—Iran and Egypt most notably.
Fundamentalist Islam, Petrodollars, and the Evolution of the Deep State
Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. deepened its relationship with fundamentalist Islam. In 1972, the CIA-founded Asia Foundation began to fund Afghan Islamists at Kabul University, including a young Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [24]
Interestingly, 1972 was also the year that the Center for Afghanistan Studies was founded at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). Its website boasts that the Center’s “initial partnership with Kabul University would give UNO the experience necessary to establish many other collaborations around the world. At the time [of its founding], Afghanistan was a peaceful country. . . . [T]here was no war and the future looked bright. No one could foresee the history-making events that Afghans and Nebraskans would share.“[25]
Faculty at Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha. [Source: unomaha.edu]
The Center helped shape that future, in part by creating textbooks for Afghan children. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the CIA cut-out USAID paid the Center $51 million to produce the books in Afghan languages. As described by historian Peter Kuznick,
Page after page was filled with militant Islamic teaching and violent images. Children learned to count using pictures of missiles, tanks, land mines, Kalashnikovs, and dead Soviet soldiers. [One passage] shows a soldier adorned with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov. Above him is a verse from the Koran. Below is a statement about the mujahideen, who, in obedience to Allah, willingly sacrifice their lives and fortunes to impose Sharia law on the government. Students learned to read by studying stories about jihad. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they continued using the same violent jihadist texts, simply removing the human images, which they considered blasphemous.[26]
But let us return to the obscure early 1970’s. In 1973, Sardar Daoud overthrew the Afghan monarchy. Soon after, the U.S. began funding opposition figures in the country, including the radical Islamic Party. Beginning in September, the CIA, regional allies (Iran and Pakistan), and Islamist Afghan groups staged a series of raids and failed coups against Daoud. Subsequently, the U.S. State Department identified Muslim Brotherhood members as leaders of a failed rebellion in Afghanistan against Daoud. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the Brotherhood members, fled to Pakistan where he was received by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In 1978 and 1979, U.S. state department memos acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood were beneficiaries of U.S. anti-communist ventures in Afghanistan.[27]
Around this time, Zbigniew Brzezinski began pressing his “arc of crisis” strategy, asserting that the U.S. could dominate the Middle East by using political Islamism against leftist and nationalist movements.[28]
This led to President Carter’s fateful July 3, 1979, decision to authorize direct CIA funding of the Afghan mujahideen. As a result, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December.[29]
Meanwhile, economic and political events were bringing about major changes to the international monetary system and the American deep state.
When Vietnam War spending led to the end of the Bretton Woods gold-backed dollar, the U.S. was rescued from a difficult financial situation in large part by the “oil shocks”—unprecedented skyrocketing oil prices. The oil shocks were in all likelihood orchestrated by the U.S.
As Yanis Varoufakis summarizes:
[The notion] that the OPEC countries pushed the dollar price of oil sky high against the will of the United States … runs counter to logic and evidence. [How else to explain that America’s] closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increases but led the campaign to bring them about? [How do we explain the U.S.] scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed prices? … Indeed, the Saudis have consistently claimed that Henry Kissinger, keener to manage the flow of petrodollars to America than to prevent the rise of energy prices, was encouraging them all the way to push the price of oil up by a factor of between two and four. So long as oil sales were denominated in dollars, the U.S. administration had no quarrel with the oil price increases.[30]
With the resulting massive accumulation of petrodollars by Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Middle East became an even more essential pillar of U.S. hegemony. Major oil producers like the Saudis and Iran used these dollars to buy U.S. Treasuries, invest in Western (especially U.S.) banks, and purchase arms from U.S. and British companies.
Beyond shoring up the dollar-dominated post-Bretton Woods monetary system, the wealth of these countries—along with their ties to U.S. economic elites and to the U.S. national security state—allowed them to play important roles in the evolution of a supranational American deep state. Powerful actors associated with the CIA needed to ensure that the post-Watergate intelligence investigations in Congress could not derail U.S. covert-operation capabilities.
President Nixon shaking hands with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia following talks at the Risal Palace in Riyadh in July 1974. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
To this end, the CIA-connected Saudi arms tycoon Adnan Khashoggi—along with intelligence officials from France, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Morocco—established the Safari Club. Prince Turki Al Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, explained it thusly:
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.[31]
Theodore Shackley, left, was a key CIA contact for the Safari Club. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Another former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham, was an early insider with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank that came to play an important role in the financial side of the U.S.-dominated covert netherworld.
This milieu—which included the Safari Club, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi’s enterprises—was described by our co-author Peter Dale Scott as being
part of a supranational deep state, whose organic links to the CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is clear however that decisions taken at this level by the Safari Club and BCCI were in no way guided by the political determinations of those elected to power in Washington [and were instead] expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions in Washington.[32]
In the latter half of the 1970s and in the 1980s, BCCI would play a key role in facilitating the financing of various covert operations and illicit enterprises. This institutional evolution represented by BCCI and the Safari Club should be placed in the context of key U.S. intelligence creations.
In his dissertation, Aaron Good wrote,
The embryonic [i.e., early-Cold War] deep state had seminal parapolitical institutions including banks (e.g., Castle Bank and Nugan Hand) or privatized paramilitary / intelligence outfits like the World Commerce Corporation and the various Anti-Communist Leagues. The late 1970s saw more powerful iterations, most notably the BCCI-Safari Club milieu which brought together right-wing Republicans, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and networks of wayward and disaffected spooks. With Reagan’s victory, many of these players were brought in from the cold.[33]
This is all to say that while Vietnam, Watergate, and the post-Watergate intelligence revelations all may have appeared as setbacks for U.S. imperialism and its covert apparatus, the outcome was quite opposite. The U.S. became even more dominant with the emergence of the post-Bretton Woods dollar and oil-dominated system. The clandestine realm, dominated by the U.S., became even more powerful and less accountable.
“Reaganism” and Beyond: America’s Deniable Islamist Proxies
With the right-wing Ronald Reagan in the White House, those scattered deep state elements were brought back into the fold. To employ a hyperbolic metaphor: It was as if Sauron and the One Ring had finally been reunited.
In 1981, after twisting some arms in the Senate, President Reagan secured the $8.5 billion sale of Boeing AWACS to Saudi Arabia. A number of sources reported that the deal included a promise from the Saudis to fund Reagan’s covert operations in such a way as to avoid congressional oversight.[34]
Ronald Reagan applauds as Saudi King Fahad speaks at a ceremony at the White House in February 1985. [Source: twitter.com]
The Saudis would go on to play key roles in the creation and funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and in the Iran-Contra scandal. To summarize: In the wake of Watergate and the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, the end result was essentially an evolved deep-statesystem that was even more opaque and less accountable to any lawful public authority.
As referenced above, the Saudis would play a key role in the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, the funding of Islamist militants in Afghanistan to inflict a costly blow against the Soviet Union. Repeating a pattern from the war in Southeast Asia, the U.S. allies in this conflict became the world’s top heroin traffickers—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar first and foremost among them. Sometimes called the “Arab Afghans,” the fighters and their Saudi-led logistical support networks would evolve into al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
Ronald Reagan meeting with mujahideen leaders in the White House in 1983. [Source: wikipedia.org]
It was in this post-Cold War era that the U.S. began to use Arab Afghan / mujahideen assets in a number of conflicts in regions that had previously been under Soviet influence. An example was an early 1990s operation in Azerbaijan.
The murky Azerbaijan affair involved the U.S. oil majors, military / intelligence veterans like Richard Secord, and Islamist Arab Afghans—some of whom were recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The dénouement was the installation of a regime in Baku that broke with Russia and brought in Western oil companies.[35]
Islamist militants were also used to advance U.S. aims in Bosnia. Some of these fighters were trained by an Egyptian, Ali Mohamed, from the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. The Egyptian terrorist leader Omar Abdel-Rahman (aka the “blind sheikh”) played a lead role from his headquarters in Brooklyn, with Saudi and U.S. assistance.[36]
In North Africa, another notable U.S. adversary was a recurrent target of Islamist violence in the 1990s. Specifically, al-Qaeda assets were directed against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. A whistleblower from Britain’s MI5 revealed that, in 1996, MI6 officers attempted to use Islamist militants to assassinate the Libyan head of state. The operation failed, with Qaddafi unharmed and a number of militants killed in the process.[37]
The Crucial Pre-9/11 Years
Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there was disagreement over Central Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. A relatively dovish side was represented by Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott. In a July 1997 speech, Talbott explicitly warned against any sort of Central Asian “Great Game,” proposing instead the promotion of mutually beneficial cooperative arrangements in the region.[38]
Also in that same year, Pentagon and CIA elements were using NATO to effect, contra-Talbott and the State Department, a “forward strategy” in Central Asia. Under the auspices of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the U.S. military nurtured “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region” by launching a series of training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz military forces.[39]
These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces. A deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[40] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard singled out for its geopolitical importance,[41] became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises.[42]
While the energy angle is clearly discernible in these operations, counterterror was also a pretext for U.S. intelligence activities in the region. Building from the foundational 1997 arrangement, the CIA had been working with the U.S. military and Uzbek military/intelligence forces with the ostensible aim of apprehending Osama bin Laden in neighboring Afghanistan.[43]
In hindsight, 1998 was the year when matters became even stranger. To put a finer point on the energy angle: Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney that year declared that he “[could] not think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”[44]
The U.S. fixation on Central Asia transcended partisanship. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated before an audience in Tashkent, “While you are geographically distant from the United States, you are very closely connected to our most vital national interests.” Presumably, Albright was obliquely referring to the $8 billion that U.S. oil majors had invested in Central Asian oil and gas.[45]
However, the U.S. military and intelligence presence in the region increasingly came to be overtly predicated on counterterror operations. Yet, at the same time—similar to the U.S. operations in Bosnia a few years earlier—the ostensible Arab Afghan/al-Qaeda arch-enemies of the U.S. were in the Balkans acting in ways that furthered U.S. geopolitical goals.
Specifically, al-Qaeda forces were working in concert with the U.S.-backed terrorist/mafia organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). U.S. military intervention in Kosovo took place through most of 1998 and the first half of 1999. Interpol in 1999 reported that an elite KLA unit in Kosovo was being led by Muhammad al-Zawahiri—a top al Qaeda lieutenant and the brother of current al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.[46]
The Zawahiri-KLA issue is something that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated and explained. Besides the Kosovo-al-Qaeda angle, an honest investigation would have looked into the U.S.-Azeri-al-Qaeda connections. The links represent important historical background, given that Baku, Azerbaijan, was one of the main hubs for al-Qaeda around the time of the August 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[47]
While all of this was taking place in the years preceding 9/11, the U.S. and its oil majors were trying to strike a deal for a pipeline through Afghanistan. Notably—and as we detailed in our previous article—the Taliban failure to arrive at a workable pipeline deal acceptable to the U.S. coincided with further U.S. military and intelligence operations geared toward Afghanistan.
In 1999, two CIA counterterrorism officials—Cofer Black and Richard Blee—negotiated a deal with Uzbekistan.[48] This new liaison agreement apparently expanded upon the 1997 arrangement and expanded the targets to include not just bin Laden, but the Taliban government as well.[49]
Also, in 1999, CIA’s Richard Blee met with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and agreed to lobby Washington for increased support for Massoud. Massoud’s remote mountain redoubt of Panjshir was vital to American planning, because by this time it was the only major area not yet dominated by the Taliban. But Massoud himself presented problems to many in Washington.
According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, Massoud was “intensely disliked by the State Department for his … closeness to Iran.”[50] Most significantly, Massoud was dead set against U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[51] Yet in 2000, the preparations against Afghanistan rolled on, ramping up as U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began working directly with the military of Uzbekistan.[52]
October of 2000 saw the bombing of the USS Cole by al-Qaeda forces off the coast of Yemen. In response, Richard Blee pressed the lame duck President Clinton to authorize expanding the Uzbek venture into a joint attack force that would include the Northern Alliance. Clinton refused. Under the new Bush administration, U.S.-led talks with the Taliban resumed. Despite open threats to the Taliban made by U.S. representatives at the talks, no political and/or pipeline deal was struck.
On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet held a meeting on NSPD-9, a plan for military action against Afghanistan. On September 9th, the main obstacle for any U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was removed when Northern Alliance chief Ahmed Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
The murder was ordered by the “blind sheik” Abdel-Rahman, a prisoner in U.S. custody. Abdel-Rahman was under close U.S. surveillance; so was his contact with Muslim radicals abroad, a New York postal worker named Ahmed Abdel-Sattar. Thus, the U.S. government almost certainly knew about the order and apparently allowed the assassination to happen.[53]
The next day, September 10th, Bush officials held another meeting to discuss the NSPD-9 plans for military action against Afghanistan. On the following day, the world witnessed the terror spectacle of September 11, 2001.
*
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Aaron Good is Editor at Large for CovertAction Magazine. His revised doctoral dissertation, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is to be published by Skyhorse in the spring of 2022. You can follow Aaron on Twitter: @Aaron_Good_
Ben Howard is an independent researcher. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and daughter. You can follow Ben on Twitter: @housetrotter.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and poet. Peter has written many important books on the CIA and the so-called “deep state,” including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California, 1993); The War Conspiracy, rev ed. (Skyhorse, 2008); The Road to 9/11 (University of California, 2007), American War Machine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) and The American Deep State (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). You can follow Peter’s work at: peterdalescott.net.
Notes
Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): 4–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399715581042. ↑
In the wake of 9/11, many letters containing weaponized anthrax were mailed to a number of Americans, including media figures and elected officials. Several people were killed and many more were injured. The attacks were erroneously linked to Iraq and contributed to the campaign for the launching of the Iraq War. They also served to hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act since two of the targets were U.S. senators who were holding up passage of the bill. Though the letters were deceptively drafted to look like they were drafted by Islamist terrorists, the source of the Anthrax was later determined to be the U.S. government. The U.S. attempted to pin the blame for the false flag anthrax letter attacks on a “lone nut” U.S. scientist named Steven Hatfill. When he succeeded in proving his innocence, another “lone nut” U.S. scientist, Bruce Ivins, was identified as the culprit. The case was brought to an end when Ivins died as the result of an apparent suicide, but many observers do not believe that Ivins could have done what the government was accusing him of. See Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2014). ↑
Most infamous was the use of a document about uranium from Niger that had already been deemed a forgery before being cited by the president in a speech during the run-up to the Iraq War. ↑
Nasser Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” in Europe and Asia: Perspectives on the Emerging International Order, V.P. Malik and Erhard Crome, eds. (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 153. ↑
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 214, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch5.htm. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30. ↑
Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” 153. ↑
Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36, citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1997. ↑
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 459. ↑
Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” 17. Massoud also had strong supporters at State, notably former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Peter Tomsen. The real split was over Pakistan, and over the pro-Pakistan CIA. Massoud was taking aid from India, while Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, partly to develop a strong Muslim radical presence against Karimov in Uzbekistan. When the DOD came in, this split was subordinated to the goal of bringing in U.S. troops. But what to do about Pakistan divided Washington then and still does. ↑
Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-598, 796 n25. Journalist Pepe Escobar also confirmed this to our coauthor Aaron Good in personal correspondence. ↑
Ricks and Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan.” ↑
Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑
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According to recent polls about 15% of all American and British people think that the attacks in America on 9/11, (2001), were orchestrated by people within the U.S. Government. Among young people in Britain aged between 16 and 24, about 25% think that the attacks were an ‘inside job.’ Polls in other countries show similar or even greater numbers of people who either partially or completely disbelieve the official story of what happened on 9/11. These figures represent millions of people around the world. Yet in the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, no single serious mention of this was to be found in all the immense amount of media coverage given to the anniversary. I only know of one exception. In his blog [an internet special interest website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Ed.] for the New York Times, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that “What happened after 9/11…was deeply shameful… the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons. The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned.” Krugman has been mercilessly vilified in the U.S. media for his remarks. There is plenteous evidence, however, regarding the truth of Krugman’s comments about the 9/11 attacks being ‘used to justify a … war the Neocons wanted to fight’. The main part of this article will look into this evidence – and then also begin to look at the even more disturbing claims not mentioned by Krugman.
The end of the Cold War and the ‘New American Century’
As the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the frozen stalemate in world politics that had existed since the end of World War Two thawed, a severe unease at the chaos that might result was felt at high levels of power and influence in American foreign policy and government. This unease was answered by an unprecedented and absolute determination for America to remain now the world’s single superpower and for American policy to now literally dominate the entire globe.
In 1986, William Kristol, an influential policy-maker in the government of George Bush Senior, declared that the aim of American foreign policy should be to achieve a: “global unilateralism”. In 1989, another columnist, Charles Krauthammer, wrote an article entitled: “Universal Dominion.” America, he stated, must now unambiguously take the lead in the new “unipolar world”. “The alternative to unipolarity is chaos’”, wrote Krauthammer, and said that what was needed was the USA: ”unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” In 1992, the last year of George Bush Senior’s presidency, ideas such as this were aired for the first time in official government policy. Dick Cheney, the then secretary of defense, together with his undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad drafted a document for the Pentagon called: Defense Planning Guidance. The document was leaked to the Press, whereupon both its tone and its content caused such a strong negative reaction that the Bush administration quickly attempted to distance themselves from it. The document has been described, quite objectively, as: ‘in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.’[1]
Dick Cheney is seen as having been the prime creator of this ‘unipolarist blueprint’, helped by his above-mentioned colleagues. Between 1993 and 2001 they – and many other ‘neoconservatives’, or ‘neocons’ as they are often referred to, such as Donald Rumsfeld and William Kristol – lost their positions in government during the eight-year presidency of Bill Clinton. During their period in opposition, however, these neocons from the administration of George Bush Senior were the opposite of inactive. They laid plans and drew up manifestoes for global American domination, which later, during the presidency of the second George Bush (2001-2009), were eventually carried out as fully- fledged U.S. policy.
One of the most significant – and disturbing – activities of the neoconservatives during the Clinton presidency was the creation of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. The project, in other words, for an American 21st Century – with America, as sole superpower, exercising dominion over the entire ‘unipolar world’. Among the founders of the PNAC were those who would hold the highest positions during the Presidency of George W. Bush: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, as well as Jeb Bush, George Bush’s brother and Dan Quayle, who had been vice-president under George Bush Senior. The (PNAC) was founded by William Kristol (known at one point as ‘Dan Quayle’s brain’) and Robert Kagan. It also included other key policy makers and thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, whose book The End of History set out the view that after the Cold War there were no more ideological struggles to be fought, for Western secular democracy must now be seen as valid for all places and all peoples.
The PNAC’s founding principles stated: ‘The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership… Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.’
In September 2000, three months before George Bush became President, and provided the PNAC with its long-awaited moment to try and make their ideas into official government policies, the PNAC published a 76-page document: Rebuilding American Defenses. After an introduction, proposing that the document be seen by the incoming administration as “a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans”, the opening chapter made the document’s intentions completely clear and threw down its gauntlet. To paraphrase: the supremely opportune moment after the Cold War for achieving and maintaining American hegemony across the globe had been shamefully let slip by the Clinton Administration, and without drastic and urgent measures might be lost altogether.
The chapter stressed once again the difference of America’s military priorities today compared with those during the Cold War: “America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals.” (The document’s seemingly innocuous tone should not fool anyone who calls to mind the vast numbers of deaths caused by the military might and ‘firepower’ by which this ‘international security environment’ is actually ‘preserve(d).’)
Continuing in the same tone, it outlined four main tasks for the U.S. military:
To secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace’.
To deter the rise of a new great superpower competitor.
To defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.
To preserve American pre-eminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies.
We will return to this fourth point, which plays a hugely important role in the PNAC’s “roadmap”, but to carry out all four would obviously demand a massively increased U.S. Defense Budget. The PNAC document therefore set about to demonstrate the utter necessity, as they saw it, for such a budget to be granted.
First of all the document launched an attack against the Clinton administration’s “decade of defense neglect.” The document pointed to the fact that at the time of writing: “America spends less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product on national defense, less than at any time since before World War II.” Under Clinton: “approximately $426 billion in defense investments have been deferred, creating a weapons procurement ‘bow wave’ of immense proportions.”
The challenge was then thrown down to the next president of the United States: “he must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership, or he must pull back from the security commitments that are the measure of America’s position as the world’s sole superpower… This choice will be among the first to confront the president.”
“The transformation of war made possible by new technologies.”
The fifth chapter of Rebuilding American Defenses addresses the fourth task referred to above. In brief – and as, after the huge numbers of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan we increasingly hear called for today – a new form of warfare was seen as necessary, different from that carried out by conventional ground, sea and air forces. Namely, the possibility both to detect and to intercept, from space, any enemy missile the moment it has been launched. To this end: “The first element in any missile defense network should be a galaxy of surveillance satellites with sensors capable of acquiring enemy ballistic missiles immediately upon launch. Once a missile is tracked and targeted, this information needs to be instantly disseminated through a world-wide command-and-control system, including direct links to interceptors.” (My italics.)
The PNAC describes the need, in this context, for “three new missions” in order “to maintain American military preeminence that is consistent with the requirements of a strategy of American global leadership”. These are – 1: “Global missile defenses.” 2: “Control of space and cyberspace… An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.” And 3: “a two-stage strategy for transforming conventional forces” – a first transitional stage, followed by “true transformation, featuring new systems, organizations and operational concepts”.
It does not demand much imagination to envisage the unprecedented amounts of extra Defense expenditure this would involve, or the problems the PNAC would be likely to face from international treaties concerning missile proliferation, or indeed from “ordinary citizens” concerning the presence of a new “galaxy of surveillance satellites.” Even the PNAC themselves acknowledged this.
The expressed need for an event like 9/11
The opening words of the chapter had expressed unequivocally: “To preserve American military pre-eminence the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies”. But how, given the obstacles mentioned in the last paragraph, could the need for this central element of the PNAC’s Defense Plan gain acceptance – and so become reality? And do this quickly, moreover, for, as the PNAC never stopped restating, the opportunity was fast running out for America to secure its role as the world’s single superpower. There was, in fact, only one way the PNAC could envisage which would enable this to happen. Only some massive, catastrophic event, which would be etched into people’s minds and psyches, might so change things that the currently prevailing obstacles of funding, international law and public opinion might be overcome. This led to the document’s most ominous statement: “(T)he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Remarkable as these words are for expressing the need, in advance, for an event such as 9/11, they are in fact only one of several such comments made between 1997 and 2000 from people at the highest levels of U.S policy making. Enter Philip Zelikow – the person who, after 9/11, would be given the main responsibility by the Bush Government for overseeing and authoring the 9/11 Commission Report – the supposedly complete and unbiased official report into the events of 9/11.
Zelikow, together with Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor at the time of 9/11, had played hugely significant roles in forming U.S. policy regarding the direction it took at the close of the end of the Cold War. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final end of the Soviet Union (1989-1991) Rice was Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council. In this capacity she helped to determine U.S. policies in favour of German reunification, aided by Zelikow, who was later to be described in the Washington Post as: “a one-person think-tank for Rice.”[2] In 1995 he and Rice co-wrote a book called: Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Zelikow was also the director of a major ‘think-tank’ on addressing the ending of the Cold War, called the Aspen Strategy Group. This counted among its members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other founder members of the Project for the American Century.
In 1997 Zelikow co-edited a book called Why People Don’t Trust Government, in which he described that history, far from being definable as truth, is in fact “defined… by those critical people and events that… form… the public’s presumptions about its immediate past… Such presumptions are beliefs thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and shared in common within the relevant political community.” (These remarks are of great interest coming from the person who would be given responsibility for the official ‘presumptions’ about 9/11.)
The need to imagine an event like 9/11
After this, Zelikow became project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group. (This stemmed from the Kennedy School of Government’s project: Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century.)
Zelikow co-authored an article on the work done by the group, entitled: Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy, which was published in the November/December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs. The article stated:
“(T)he danger of Catastrophic Terrorism is new and grave… The objective of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group is to suggest program and policy changes that can be taken by the United States government… to prepare the nation better for the emerging threat of Catastrophic Terrorism.”
The title of the article’s first section described the first thing the authors saw to be necessary: Imagining the Transforming Event. The authors couldn’t help mentioning the assistance already given for this by Hollywood movies:
“Long [a] part of Hollywood’s and Tom Clancy’s [author and scriptwriter for espionage and military techno-thriller storylines. Ed.] repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism is a real possibility. In theory, the enemies of the United States have motive, means, and opportunity… A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly kill thousands, or tens of thousands. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or the distribution of a deadly pathogen, the chaos and devastation would have gone far beyond our meager ability to describe it.”
Friend and colleague of many of the founders of the PNAC, Zelikow then reiterated the need for the U.S. to transform its conventional approach to warfare, especially as others were already doing this: “Practically unchallengeable American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes this country’s enemies toward the unconventional alternatives.”
A fascinating footnote inserted at this point appears to point to the presence of highly detailed research into all aspects of such “threat scenarios” which would never be widely known about:
“The most detailed and credible threat scenarios, based on close analysis of specific vulnerabilities, should not be published at all. These would be indispensable but quite sensitive documents to be prepared by relatively small groups of knowledgeable officials and expert consultants.”
The article then urged readers to: “imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination.” It then went into considerably more detail than the PNAC document had as to the exact consequences that would ensue from such an event – fitting in very many ways to the event that did take place three years later on 9/11:
“An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history… Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great “success” or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a ‘before’ and ‘after.’ ”
The article then reiterated the PNAC’s demands for necessary changes in defence policy and massive increases in defence funding: “The threat of catastrophic terrorism is therefore a priority national security problem…” The threat thus deserves the kind of attention we now devote to threats of military nuclear attack, as in(…) the resources we devote to defense.”
Further expressions of the need for a “New Pearl Harbor”
The third person who spoke in this way was Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote that in America “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion… except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”
Both economic and human sacrifices would need to be made for “imperial mobilization”, and the only thing that would make the American people willing to make these would be “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” Earlier on in the book, Brzezinski, like both Zelikow and the PNAC, had named the great precedent in recent American history where a reluctant public had completely changed its views and given its support to a massive war effort – when they had supported: “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
A fourth example is Donald Rumsfeld, founder member of the PNAC which had described the urgent need for a “transformation of warfare”, involving, among other things, the ability to intercept ballistic missiles from space. In preparation for putting this into practice, in 1998 Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. In late 2000 he further chaired the U.S. Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization. This latter so-called “Rumsfeld Commission”, announced identical needs, not surprisingly, to those expressed by the PNAC: military “transformation” and the “weaponization of space.” Yet again, the problem was raised of such essential changes being blocked by “resistant bureaucracies”. Yet again, the image was given of what might prove the only possible means to effect such change: “The question is… whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people – a “Space Pearl Harbor” – will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.”[3] Rumsfeld chaired this commission right up until the end of December 2000, when he was nominated U.S. Secretary of Defense in the new presidential administration of George Bush.
‘No Defense’!
One may well have imagined that with George Bush as President, Dick Cheney as Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and Paul Wolfowitz as Rumsfeld’s deputy – all the PNAC’s hopes might now be fulfilled. But, during the first nine months of 2001, the leading neocons found, to their horror, that their demands for massive increases in Defense Funding received no more support than they had under Clinton. Having spent eight years in opposition, preparing for this moment and being, by their own admission, the opposite of pacifist in their approach, they were furious at having their expectations thwarted in this way.
On July 23rd, 2001, the main founders of PNAC, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, wrote an article in The Weekly Standard[4] called ‘No Defense.’ From its opening words its message could not have been clearer:
“Here’s some unsolicited advice for two old friends, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz: Resign… (I)t may be the only way to focus the attention of the American people – and the Bush administration – on the impending visceration of the American military. If our suggestion sounds extreme, consider the following… A few weeks ago Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld went to the White House to present his Fiscal Year 2002 budget request… Rumsfeld was mauled… This was the third time in six months that Rumsfeld had had his head handed to him on a platter… Those of us who expressed concern about the Bush administration’s shorting of the military were told not to worry… But (n)ow it’s clear that there is no real prospect for a meaningful defense increase – this year, next year, or for the remainder of Bush’s first term.”
Kristol and Kagan went on: “(T)he consequence of an underfunded military will be the steady erosion of our ability to defend all of America’s vital interests, not only in Europe but in Asia and in the Persian Gulf as well… It now seems certain that the Bush administration will officially abandon the so-called ‘two-war’ standard that has served since the Cold War as the rule of thumb for what is needed for American global pre-eminence.”
[The ‘Two-War’ standard relates to America’s policy at this time of retaining a force capable of rapidly and decisively conducting two large regional wars. Ed.]
Towards the end of the article they then laid down their challenge to the Bush administration:
“Perhaps it’s an isolationist’s dream. For everyone else it’s a nightmare. It ought to be George Bush’s nightmare. For if the president does not reverse course now, he may go down in history as the man who let American military power atrophy and America’s post-Cold War pre-eminence slip away.”
This ‘nightmare’ scenario could clearly not be allowed to continue: “Surely George W. Bush did not seek office to preside over the retrenchment of American power and influence. Surely Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not come back to the Pentagon to preside over the decline of the American military.”[5]
‘No Defense’ (July 2011) may have been offering one last chance to those capable of providing the necessary increases to the American Defense Budget. It sounds far more, though, like a clear call to action, in the face of the certainty that these increases would not be granted. Another article in the Weekly Standard, published on the day before 9/11, (Sept 10th, 2001), stated categorically that all chance of any such increases was over. The article, called ‘The Phony Defense Budget War’ was written by Gary Schmitt, Co-Chairman of the PNAC, and Tom Donnelly, the chief author of Rebuilding America’s Defenses which had mentioned that without “an event like a new Pearl Harbor” the PNAC might never see its aims realized.
The article repeated its own and Donald Rumsfeld’s diagnosis of the present crisis: “Over the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons research and procurement has been deferred… The challenge of transformation is real. ‘The proliferation of weapons with increasing range and power into the hands of multiple potential adversaries means that the coming years will see an expansion of risk’ to American cities’, warns Rumsfeld.”
The article’s conclusion then gave its verdict on the “disgraceful” failure of the U.S. Government to respond to that crisis:
“(T)he promise of conventional-force transformation, global missile defenses protecting America and its allies, and control of space will be deferred until the distant future… As Rumsfeld himself recently said, ‘Each year we put off these critical investments, each year we kick the can down the road, we are digging ourselves deeper and deeper in the hole’… (T)he president and the Congress, Republicans and Democrats – (are all now) irresponsibly kicking the can down the road. A pretty disgraceful performance all around, but particularly disappointing for an administration that assured us help was on the way.”[6]
September 11th, 2001 – ‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century’
For the neocons, though, even if for nobody else, help already was on the way. The events of the following day, September 11th, 2001, as we know, changed everything. Hard as it may be for many people to look past the immense personal tragedy and suffering wrought by the events of 9/11, we must recognize that 9/11 for the neocons was the ‘Pearl Harbor’ moment they had been waiting for.
They themselves were the first to note this. President Bush was reported to have written in his diary that evening: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today.”[7] Donald Rumsfeld admitted that 9/11 created: “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”[8] Philip Zelikow – who, remember, would later be given responsibility for the 9/11 Commission Report – the supposedly unbiased report into what took place on 9/11 – authored in 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, stating: “The events of September 11th, 2001… opened vast, new opportunities.”
Within one day, all the expressed intentions of the neocons suddenly proved possible and many received almost immediate public and government support. With regard to Defense Spending the Pentagon was immediately granted by Congress an extra $40 billion, with far more to follow. According to Zelikow, writing this September, 2011: “Measured in constant dollars, spending on national defence in the last ten years has gone up about 67 per cent.”[9](!) The wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq had also been on the neocons’ agenda and the obstacles to fighting them were immediately removed. These wars in turn made possible the much called for military “transformation” or RMA – “revolution in military affairs.” As Andrew Bacevich writes: “After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually fighting it. This created an opening for RMA… War plans… became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by… Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.”[10]
This “transformation”, as we quoted earlier, demanded the ‘control of space and cyber-space’, necessitating a “galaxy of surveillance satellites.” The huge U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), brought in with incredible speed after 9/11, and under whose restrictions everyone in America has since then had to suffer, instigated a gigantic increase in both public and private surveillance. Last but not least, the neocons had admitted that much of what they intended encountered difficulties from – frankly – inconvenient international treaties about what was permissible and impermissible regarding rules of war, interrogation, surveillance, etc.
The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, authored by Zelikow, took unprecedented new steps, permitting the U.S., for example, to take preemptive military action against enemy threats, even ‘before (these threats) are fully formed.’ As David Ray Griffin writes: ‘This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principles of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behaviour.’[11] This viewpoint, that as regards international politics, America needs only be obedient to itself, has all too frequently been encountered since that time. Already in March 2001 PNAC member Charles Krauthammer had starkly and brutally expressed it: “The U.S. can reshape, indeed remake reality on its own… America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms… and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”[12]
Merely a coincidence?
Let us briefly recapitulate: individuals and groups at the highest levels of American policy-making and power had announced unambiguously what role in world politics they saw it necessary for the U.S. to play after the end of the Cold War. Namely: “undisputed masters of the world.” (Krauthammer.) Four of the most influential of voices – Donald Rumsfeld, Philip Zelikow, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Project for the New American Century – had even declared that it might take an event something like a ‘New Pearl Harbor’ to create the support both from government and from the public necessary to bring this about. With the start of the Bush Presidency, at the beginning of 2001, these individuals and groups then moved into leading postions of power. To begin with, as they had predicted, little public support could be found for the huge defense budget increases and military (and security) changes and actions they envisaged. Then… 9/11 happened. A “watershed event in America’s history.” (Zelikow – Catastrophic Terrorism.)
Almost immediately all their plans were able to be realized, and have continued being implemented until today.
Were the crime of 9/11 to be investigated like any other murder inquiry, where it would be foolish just to accept whatever may appear to have happened, there is little doubt as to which direction one would first wish to look in for suspects. For those who not only had a motive for the event, but had openly expressed this motive and who had, in fact, achieved from the event everything they had hoped. (The PNAC would certainly be one such starting place. Nine days after 9/11, they wrote an open letter to George Bush which began: “We write to endorse your admirable commitment to ‘lead the world to victory’ in the war against terrorism.” They outlined all the actions that would “constitute the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion” and stated: “We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.”)[13]
Of course, there was no question whatsoever of the events of 9/11 being investigated like an ordinary murder inquiry. The whole reason that the event galvanized public opinion in the way it had been predicted it might, was because of the utterly overwhelming impression it produced that America was under full-scale attack from foreign Islamic terrorists, providing full justification, therefore, for the “global war on terror” that was announced.
Thinking the unthinkable
But… slowly at first, then gradually snowballing to the percentages mentioned in this article’s first paragraph, people started to look more closely at what had happened on September 11th, 2001, not just blindly accepting what appeared to have happened, employing their wide awake faculties of thinking and perception. As they did so, they began to realize that the never to be forgotten images of the Twin Towers almost exploding before people’s eyes, pulverizing into huge, surging dust clouds, then collapsing straight downwards at almost free-fall speed, with the colossally thick and strong steel core of the buildings – built to withstand almost anything – bursting and shattering into small pieces, could not have been brought about through the fires, however horrific, caused by the aeroplanes plunging into them. No steel-framed buildings have ever, before or since, collapsed in this way as the result of fires.
There are, as everyone who has even lightly researched the issue will know, scores of other contradictions and anomalies regarding the official reports about what happened on 9/11. People can – and should – read or view these and think them through for themselves.
There is one event, however, that occurred on 9/11, whose official explanation is so obviously impossible that it has, rightly, been seen as the one unmistakable ‘smoking gun’ pointing to U.S. complicity, at the highest levels, with what took place on that day. As everyone will remember who watched the events on television, there were three buildings in New York that collapsed on 9/11. After the collapse of the Twin Towers, a third building also came down, another massive steel-framed skyscraper, known as World Trade Centre 7. It had not been hit by any planes. There had been fires in the building caused by burning debris falling from the neighbouring Twin Towers. But its fires were not remotely comparable to those in the two buildings hit by aeroplanes – (WTC1 and WTC2.) Yet this whole vast skyscraper, WTC7, collapsed “into its own footprint” in a matter of seconds – 6 1/2 seconds! For the first eight stories it fell at what has officially been recognized as ‘freefall speed’. Television commentators on the day unhesitatingly pointed out that there was only one thing they had ever known to make buildings collapse in this way: carefully planned controlled demolition, using explosives.
Not only have many firefighters and demolitions experts confirmed this view, but an ever increasing number of professional scientists, engineers and architects have also now demonstrated in great detail – for anyone willing to consider the evidence – that the collapse of WTC7 was unquestionably caused by controlled demolition.[14] Architect Richard Gage, for example, founder of Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, shows in a ten minute video clip how the collapse of WTC7 provides evidence of all ten features of a standard controlled demolition.[15] Another short video: ‘Architects and Engineers: Solving the Mystery of WTC7’ presents the voices of many scientists, architects and engineers on the issue, such as Kamal Obeid, who describes the utter impossibility that fire could have made every single core column of the building collapse simultaneously, as had to happen for it to fall as it did.[16] And once we see that the collapse of WTC7 could only have been caused by controlled demolition, we also see that a different kind of controlled demolition[17] is the only thing able to explain the explosive pulverization and collapse of the Twin Towers themselves.
This research has greatly increased, over the years, in its thoroughness and exactitude, thanks to the work, for example, of physics professor, Steven Jones or of architect Richard Gage, so that everyone now can, and should, examine this evidence for themselves. I have merely pointed to the existence of this evidence in relation to Building 7. The official reports about all the other events of 9/11 have also been subjected to detailed examination, revealing many other glaring inconsistencies and falsifications. Most of these can be looked into, for example, in David Ray Griffin’s groundbreaking book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004) where he presents what he calls prima facie evidence and then, in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, (2007), where, by also examining the inevitable attempts to ‘debunk’ this research, he is able to describe the evidence for U.S. complicity in the events of 9/11 – in other words that it was an ‘inside job’ – as being “overwhelming”.
9/11 and the Threshold of Knowledge
Time-wise, though, we have jumped ahead of ourselves, for it would be absurd not to recognize the immense hurdles – both in the outer world and within themselves – that individuals had to, and still have to overcome, before first of all imagining, and then becoming able to accept that only ‘insider’ U.S. involvement is able to explain the events of 9/11. David Ray Griffin describes this well: “It seemed to me simply beyond belief that the Bush administration – even the Bush administration – would do such a heinous thing. I assumed that those who were claiming otherwise must be ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the derogatory sense – which means, roughly, crackpots… I fully sympathize, therefore, with the fact that most people have not examined the evidence. Life is short and the list of conspiracy theories is long and we must all exercise judgement about which things are worth our investment of time. I had assumed that conspiracy theories about 9/11 were below the threshold of possible credibility.”[18] Physicist David Chandler also describes how: ‘It took some kind of consciousness-raising on my part before I was willing to look at the possibilities.’[19] Richard Gage describes how for a long time he had simply accepted the official story. And then how, when he realized that he wasn’t being responsible if he didn’t try and take stock of the inconsistencies that were being reported, he had the experience of waking up again to his usual ability to bring his own thinking to bear on his perceptions and experience. And once he did so, as an architect with years of experience behind him in designing steel-framed buildings, like the boy able to see quite clearly that the “emperor has no clothes”, he realized that of course fires could never have led WTC7 to collapse in the way it did; that of course the only explanation for the phenomena everyone witnessed is controlled demolition.
And once people began waking up to this, they woke up to very much else as well, such as all the intentions described in the main part of this article. And millions of people, the world over, are also now waking up to or are already awake to all this. Meanwhile, the ‘official’ view remains impervious to these developments. The 9/11 Commission Report, headed by Philip Zelikow, did not even include a mention of the anomalies in the collapse of WTC 7. In a recent issue of Prospect magazine, in an article entitled: ‘Ten years after 9/11 what have we learned?’ Zelikow merely writes: “The historical work of the commission about what happened before and on 9/11 does not yet need any significant amendment.”[20] Zelikow was publically challenged as to why his report had included no discussion of Building 7, for example, and he answered, significantly, that many things were not discussed in the report, for “you couldn’t have sustained the narrative.”21 We will discuss this comment further in Part Two of this article, look further at how the 9/11 Truth Movement and the official “narrative” have developed, and also attempt to see a wider perspective or ‘narrative’ which is able to include all that has been pointed to in this article.
*
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This was first published in New View magazine, issue 61, Autumn 2011.
Notes
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
Close Adviser to Rice Plans to Resign, Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, November 28, 2006.
Report of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management andOrganization.
The neoconservative journal started by William Kristol and financed by Rupert Murdoch.
‘No Defense’ on PNAC website: ‘Defense and National Security’ section – 2001:http://www.newamericancentury.org/defensenationalsecurity2001.htm
Same as note 5 – ‘The Phony Defense Budget War.’
According to the Washington Post, January 27th, 2002.
New York Times, October 12th, 2001.
‘The twilight war. Ten years after 9/11, what have we learned?’ Philip Zelikow. ProspectMagazine, September, 2011.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, p.173.
‘Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq’, David Ray Griffin.Available on the web at ‘Information Clearing House.’ I am greatly indebted to Griffin’s wonderfully clear and thorough piece which has been the source for several of the quotations in the present article.
‘Bless our Pax Americana’, Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, March 22nd, 1991.
Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism, September 20, 2001. ‘Letters/Statements’section of PNAC website.
See “9/11 Blueprint for Truth Video” in 10, 30 or 60 minute version – Architects andEngineers for 911 Truth website: http://www.ae911truth.org See: ’Videos by AE911Truth’.
Same as note 14.
15-minDocumentary: “Architects & Engineers: Solving the Mystery of WTC 7” at http://www.ae911truth.org.
WTC7 first exploded at its base, whereas with WTC1 and WTC2 the collapse began at the tops of the buildings.
The New Pearl Harbor – Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 – David Ray Griffin – Foreword by Michael Meacher, MP – Arris Books, 2004 – pp. xvii-xviii.
See Video in note 16.
See note 9.
See: ‘Zelikow’s parallel universe’ – Snowshoe films – after
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The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
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This Article was first published by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2012
A decade has passed since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and many people feel that we have still not had a real investigation into what really happened that day.
Indeed, a growing number of citizens believe that the probe into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) was at best incomplete and at worst fraudulent. These critics include the 1,600-plus architects and engineers who have signed the AE911Truth petition demanding an unbiased, independent investigation into the attacks.
By contrast, Popular Mechanics (PM) has been the primary cheerleader in the mainstream media defending the NIST reports ever since its book, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To the Facts, was published in 2006.
For the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, PM put out a second version of its book, which it updated in an attempt to dismiss new findings that corroborate the controlled demolition hypothesis. The main revisions concern the collapse of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7.
The revised version of Popular Mechanics’ book Debunking 9/11 Myths, far right, continues to defend myths that are scientifically impossible.
Our 10-part series, which starts with Part 1 today, demonstrates that PM has still not adequately explained the numerous anomalies surrounding the collapse of the Twin Towers (WTC 1 and 2) and WTC 7—anomalies that prove the structures were destroyed with explosives.
World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2
The introduction to PM’s chapter on the collapse of the Twin Towers briefly discusses the main theory put forward by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement: “The buildings were brought down intentionally—not by hijacked airplanes, but by government-planted bombs or a controlled demolition” (pg. 28).
PM then goes on to give a few examples of people promoting this theory. One of the people they cite is a Danish writer named Henrik Melvang, who, according to PM, “markets his book and video claiming the Apollo moon landings were a hoax” (pg. 28). This is obviously an attempt on PM’s part to portray those who question the collapse of the Towers as conspiracy theorists who have irrational beliefs.
PM also cites Morgan Reynolds, the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor during President George Bush’s first term, as someone who believes that the three WTC towers were destroyed through controlled demolition.
We must ask ourselves why PM would choose to cite these people as examples of those who question the cause of the collapse of the Towers. Why didn’t the book cite anyone with experience in the fields of engineering and building construction? According to PM, it’s because the 9/11 Truth Movement doesn’t have any technical credentials. In its 2011 book, PM writes:
Though Reynolds and a handful of other skeptics cite academic credentials to lend credence to their views, not one of the leading conspiracy theorists has a background in engineering, construction, or related fields (pg. 28-29).
This statement is by far one of the most off-the-mark passages in PM’s book. One need only look at what most consider the lead organization in the 9/11 Truth community, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, to see that there are currently over 1,600 professional architects and engineers with backgrounds in engineering, architecture, and building construction who question the destruction of the three WTC high-rises. How can PM possibly have omitted mention of more than a thousand experts who all contend that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down with explosives? In PM’s entire 216-page book, there is not a single mention made of AE911Truth or its founder, architect Richard Gage.
When one looks back at their 2006 book, we can see that this exact same statement appears on the exact same pages. This fact shows how PM has decided to structure their new book: i.e., update it only where it benefits them. As we will see, this tactic is used more than once in PM’s grossly flawed book.
1.1 The Empire State Building Accident
PM discusses the incident in 1945 when a B-25 bomber lost in the fog crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. They claim that “some conspiracy theorists point to [this incident] as proof that commercial planes hitting the World Trade Center could not bring down the towers” (pg. 29).
To counter this assertion, PM compares the construction of the Towers to the construction of the Empire State Building, calling the former structures “in some ways more fragile” (pg. 30).
They also quote structural engineer Jon Magnusson, who says, “These structures look massive, but they’re mostly air. They are air, punctuated with thin layers of concrete and steel” (pg. 30).
While it is true that the Towers were mostly empty space by volume, this is the case with any large skyscraper. The idea that they were in some way less structurally sound than the Empire State Building is contradicted by a variety of technical sources, including this telegram written by Richard Roth, partner at Emery Roth & Sons, which was the architectural firm that designed the Twin Towers:
THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT BY THE FIRM OF WORTHINGTON, SKILLING, HELLE & JACKSON IS THE MOST COMPLETE AND DETAILED OF ANY EVER MADE FOR ANY BUILDING STRUCTURE. THE PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS ALONE COVER 1,200 PAGES AND INVOLVE OVER 100 DETAILED DRAWINGS.
…
4. BECAUSE OF ITS CONFIGURATION, WHICH IS ESSENTIALLY THAT OF A STEEL BEAM 209′ DEEP, THE TOWERS ARE ACTUALLY FAR LESS DARING STRUCTURALLY THAN A CONVENTIONAL BUILDING SUCH AS THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGWHERE THE SPINE OR BRACED AREA OF THE BUILDING IS FAR SMALLER IN RELATION TO ITS HEIGHT.
…
5. THE BUILDING AS DESIGNED IS SIXTEEN TIMES STIFFER THAN A CONVENTIONAL STRUCTURE. THE DESIGN CONCEPT IS SO SOUND THAT THE STRUCTURAL ENGINEER HAS BEEN ABLE TO BE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE IN HIS DESIGN WITHOUT ADVERSELY AFFECTING THE ECONOMICS OF THE STRUCTURE.1
It is quite apparent that the Towers were extremely well built—and may have been even more structurally sound than the Empire State Building. Even supporters of the official conspiracy theory, such as Thomas Eager, praise the buildings’ structural integrity: “The towers withstood the initial impact of the aircraft. . . . [T]he buildings had more than 1,000 times the mass of the aircraft. . . . [T]his ability to withstand the initial impact is hardly surprising” [Eagar and Musso, JOM, 53 (12) (2001), pp. 8-11].
Next PM quotes WTC assistant structural engineer Leslie Robertson’s comment that the Towers were only designed to take the impact of a Boeing 707, but did not take into consideration the fires that would be produced by the jet fuel. After 9/11, Robertson noted, “I don’t know if we considered the fire damage that [a plane strike] would cause” (pg. 31).
However, someone evidently did consider that problem, and that someone was John Skilling, the original WTC lead engineer. When interviewed in 1993, Skilling told the Seattle Times:
“We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side. . . . Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed. [But] the building structure would still be there.”2
Although PM mentions John Skilling briefly in their book, they make no mention of this statement from him. Apparently, PM felt no need to quote the lead WTC engineer on his views about the structural strength and stability of the Towers.
Interestingly, PM quotes a few sources who, after 9/11, claimed that the Towers were doomed once the planes impacted the buildings, yet virtually every engineering source quoted before9/11 said just the opposite.3
1.2 Widespread Damage
The next section of PM’s book deals mainly with the damage to the lobby floors of the Towers and mentions the assertion by the 9/11 Truth Movement that lobby destruction proves explosives were planted in the buildings. The argument that the PM book puts forward is different: It claims that the jet fuel from the planes traveled down through the elevator shafts and caused explosions that damaged the lobby.
The walls and trees in the lobby of one of the Twin Towers show no evidence of being burned by a jet fuel fireball, which Popular Mechanics claims was the cause of an earlier explosion.
Although viewpoints differ within the 9/11 Truth Movement4 regarding the cause of these explosions, some features of the lobby damage indicate that they were not due to a fireball explosion from the jet fuel. For example, the white marble walls show no signs of being exposed to fire. Also, the plants next to the blown-out windows show no signs of having been burned.
And at least one explosives expert said he does not believe the damage was caused by the jet fuel traveling down the elevator shafts, based on the appearance of the lobby.5
Whether or not the lobby damage is indicative of explosives, however, is essentially irrelevant to the discussion of the Towers’ demolitions, since the collapse sequence started above the plane impact zone, not at the lower levels. The lobby damage is not necessary to prove the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolition; there are far more obvious indicators of demolition that will be discussed later in this report. The fact that PM claims that the jet fuel travelled down the elevator shafts is actually more damaging to their case, for it shows that not all of the fuel from the planes contributed to the fires that allegedly brought the Towers down.6
This section of PM’s book also discusses the testimony of firefighter Louie Cacchioli, one of over one hundred first responders who said that there were bombs in the WTC. PM counters this by asserting that members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have taken his quotes out of context. Though Caccholi himself does not believe explosives were placed in the buildings, numerous quotes from firefighters and first responders strongly indicate that explosives were placed in the buildings.7
*
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Notes
1 Quoted from: City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, pg. 134-136
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**
Michel Chossudovsky’s Presentation to the 9/11 International Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF) November 2012
***
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The following text was first presented at the International Conference on “9/11 Revisited – Seeking the Truth”, Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), Kuala Lumpur, November 2012
Introduction: Commemorating 9/11
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point.
Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 era is marked by the outright criminalization of the US State, including its judicial, foreign policy, national security and intelligence apparatus.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
In assessing the crimes associated with 9/11 in the context of a legal procedure, we must distinguish between those associated with the actual event, namely the loss of life and the destruction of property on 9/11, from the crimes committed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 “in the name of 9/11”.
The latter build upon the former. We are dealing with two related dimensions of criminality. The crimes committed “in the name of 9/11” involving acts of war are far-reaching, resulting in the deaths of millions of people as well as the destruction of entire countries.
The 9/11 event in itself– which becomes symbolic– is used to justify the onslaught of the post 9/11 US-NATO military agenda, under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), not to mention the ushering in of the Homeland police state and the repeal of civil liberties.
The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 broadly consist of two intimately related processes:
1. The launching of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification to Wage a War of Conquest. This GWOT mandate was used to justify the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The GWOT mandate has since extended its grip to a large number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the US and its NATO allies are intervening selectively under a counterterrorism mandate.
2. The derogation of civil liberties and the instatement of an Orwellian police state apparatus within Western countries. In the US, the introduction of the PATRIOT legislation and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks set the stage for the subsequent restructuring of the judicial and law enforcement apparatus, culminating in the legalization of extrajudicial assassinations under an alleged counter-terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks constitute what is referred to in intelligence parlance as a “massive casualty producing event” conducive to the deaths of civilians.
The dramatic loss of life on the morning of 9/11 resulting from an initial criminal act is used as a pretext and a justification to wage an all out war of retribution, in the name of 9/11 against the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, namely the “state sponsors of terrorism”, including Afghanistan, Iraq as well as Iran.
We are dealing with a diabolical and criminal project. The civilian deaths resulting from the 911 attacks are an instrument of war propaganda, applied to build a consensus in favor of an outright war of global domination.
The perpetrators of war propaganda are complicit in the conduct of extensive war crimes, in that they readily justify acts of war as counter-terrorism and/or humanitarian operations (R2P) launched to protect civilians. The “Just War” (Jus ad Bellum) concept prevails: The killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq are “rightfully” undertaken in retribution for the deaths incurred on 9/11.
Evidence is fabricated to the effect that the “state sponsors of terrorism” had committed, on the morning of 9/11, an outright act of war against the United States.
Realities are turned upside down. The US and its allies are the victims of foreign aggression. America’s crimes of war in Afghanistan and Iraq are committed in the name of 9/11 under a counter terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks are used to harness public opinion into supporting a war without borders. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” are set in motion.
Video: Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation to the Kuala Lumpur 9/11 Revisited Conference, November 19, 2012
Chronology of Events
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The war cabinet had decided to launch an an illegal and criminal war on Afghanistan, based on essentially two interrelated concepts:
1. The 9/11 attacks although allegedly conducted by Al Qaeda were upheld as an all out military attack by a foreign power.
2. Afghanistan in allegedly supporting Al Qaeda, was responsible for an act of military aggression directed against the United States of America.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. In taking on this stance they provided legitimacy to the conduct of war crimes. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America. The post 9/11 era was also characterised by the development of Islamophobia, including routine ethnic profiling directed against Muslims.
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. Rawalpindi is “military city” which hosts the Headquarters of the Pakistani military including its intelligence apparatus. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
CBS News footage of the Rawalpindi, Pakistan, hospital where bin Laden was allegedly treated the day before 9/11.
[Source: CBS News, above video no longer available, Sept 2017, see video below]
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “It’s like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
Recovering from his hospital treatment in Rawalpindi on the 10th or 11th of September (unconfirmed), how could Osama have coordinated the 9/11 attacks?
How could Afghanistan be made responsible for these attacks by Al Qaeda? Bin Laden is a national of Saudi Arabia who, according to CBS News, was not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan at the time of the attacks.
September 12, 2001: The Invasion of Afghanistan: NATO’s Doctrine of Collective Security
The immediate response of the US and its NATO allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who at the time of the attacks was in Pakistan, protected by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus. In a bitter irony, the Pakistani government and military, which had facilitated bin Laden’s hospitalization in Rawalpindi on September 10, offered to assist the US in “going after bin Laden”. An agreement to this effect was reached on September 12 in Washington between the head of Pakistan’s military Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmed and Secretary Colin Powell.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Afghan government was complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan (taken by the war cabinet at 11pm on September 11), invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The War on Afghanistan: First Stage of the “Global War on Terrorism”
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away.
Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. Was the war on Afghanistan already in an advanced state of readiness prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?
In other words, the 9/11 attacks were used as a means to trigger a military agenda which was already on the drawing board of both the Pentagon and NATO.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Immediately following 9/11, the PATRIOT legislation was adopted. The Homeland Security apparatus was launched, with a view to “protecting Americans against terrorists”. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty: NATO’s Legal Argument
In invoking Article 5 on the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council endorsed a criminal military agenda, in derogation of international law.
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, responded to the decision of the War Cabinet taken a few hours earlier at 11pm on 9/11, adopted the following resolution:
“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)
In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) was considered as an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security.
Under no stretch of the imagination, can the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
“Use of Armed Force” only “If It is Determined…”
There was an “if” in the September 12 resolution. Article 5 would apply only if it is determined that Afghanistan as a Nation State was complicit or behind the 9/11 attacks.
In practice, the “if” had already been waived prior to 9/11. The entire NATO arsenal was already on a war footing. In military terms, NATO and the US were already in an advanced state of readiness. Known to military analysts, but never revealed in the Western media, the implementation of a large scale theater war takes at least one year of advanced operational planning, prior to the launching of an invasion.
The use of article 5 of the Washington Treaty had in all likelihood been contemplated by military planners, as a pretext for waging war, prior to 9/11.
There was, however, no official declaration of war on September 12th. The Alliance waited until 3 days before the invasion to declare war on Afghanistan, an impoverished country which by no stretch of the imagination could have launched an attack against a member state of “The North Atlantic area”.
The September 12 resolution of the Atlantic Council required “determination” and corroborating evidence, that:
1) Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden with the support of a foreign power had ordered the “attack from abroad” on the United States of America;
2) The terrorist attacks of 9/11 constituted a bona fide military operation (under the provisions of Article 5) by an alleged foreign country (Afghanistan) against a NATO member state, and consequently against all NATO member states under the doctrine of collective security:
“Article 5 and the case of the terrorist attacks against the United States: The United States has been the object of brutal terrorist attacks. It immediately consulted with the other members of the Alliance. The Alliance determined that the US had been the object of an armed attack. The Alliance therefore agreed that if it was determined that this attack was directed from abroad, it would be regarded as covered by Article 5. NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, subsequently informed the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the Alliance’s decision.
Article 5 has thus been invoked, but no determination has yet been made whether the attack against the United States was directed from abroad. If such a determination is made, each Ally will then consider what assistance it should provide. In practice, there will be consultations among the Allies. Any collective action by NATO will be decided by the North Atlantic Council. The United States can also carry out independent actions, consistent with its rights and obligations under the UN Charter.
Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to the situation. This assistance is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. Each individual member determines how it will contribute and will consult with the other members, bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
By invoking Article 5, NATO members have shown their solidarity toward the United States and condemned, in the strongest possible way, the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September.
If the conditions are met for the application of Article 5, NATO Allies will decide how to assist the United States. (Many Allies have clearly offered emergency assistance). Each Ally is obliged to assist the United States by taking forward, individually and in concert with other Allies, such action as it deems necessary. This is an individual obligation on each Ally and each Ally is responsible for determining what it deems necessary in these particular circumstances.
No collective action will be taken by NATO until further consultations are held and further decisions are made by the the North Atlantic Council. (NATO, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report
The final decision to invoke Article 5 in relation to the 9/11 attacks came three weeks later upon the submission to the NATO Council of a mysterious classified report by a US State Department official named Frank Taylor. The report was submitted to NATO on October 2nd, 5 days before the commencement of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.
Frank Taylor was working in the US State Department. He had been entrusted with the writing of a brief to establish whether the US “had been attacked from abroad”, pursuant to the North Atlantic Council’s resolution of September 12 2001.
US Ambassador at Large and Co-ordinator for Counter-terrorism Frank Taylor briefed the North Atlantic Council on October 2nd, five days before the commencement of the bombings.
The classified report was not released to the media. And to this date, to our knowledge, it has remained classified.
NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson casually summarised the substance of the Frank Taylor report in a press release:
“This morning, the United States briefed the North Atlantic Council on the results of the investigation into who was responsible for the horrific terrorist attacks which took place on September 11.
The briefing was given by Ambassador Frank Taylor, the United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-terrorism.
This morning’s briefing follows those offered by United States Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and illustrates the commitment of the United States to maintain close cooperation with Allies.
Today’s was classified briefing and so I cannot give you all the details.
Briefings are also being given directly by the United States to the Allies in their capitals.
The briefing addressed the events of September 11 themselves, the results of the investigation so far, what is known about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida organisation and their involvement in the attacks and in previous terrorist activity, and the links between al-Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The facts are clear and compelling. The information presented points conclusively to an al-Qaida role in the September 11 attacks.
We know that the individuals who carried out these attacks were part of the world-wide terrorist network of al-Qaida, headed by Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants and protected by the Taliban.
On the basis of this briefing, it has now been determined that the attack against the United States on September 11 was directed from abroad and shall therefore be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack on one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
I want to reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO Allies in the campaign against terrorism.” (Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General, statement to the NATO Council, State Department, Appendix H, Multinational Response to September 11 NATO Press http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10313.pdf, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
In other words, 2 days before the actual commencement of the bombing campaign on October 7, the North Atlantic Council decided, based on the information provided by Frank Taylor to the Council “that the attacks were directed from abroad” by Al Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, thereby requiring an action on the part of NATO under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty ( NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009):
NATO action under article 5, was outlined in an October 4 decision, 3 days before the commencement of the bombings.
Two days later, on 4 October, NATO agreed on eight measures in support of the United States, which were tantamount to an illegal declaration of war on Afghanistan:
to enhance intelligence sharing and co-operation, both bilaterally and in appropriate NATO bodies, relating to the threats posed by terrorism and the actions to be taken against it;
to provide, individually or collectively, as appropriate and according to their capabilities, [military] assistance to Allies and other states which are or may be subject to increased terrorist threats as a result of their support for the campaign against terrorism;
to take necessary measures to provide increased security for facilities of the United States and other Allies on their territory;
to backfill selected Allied assets in NATO’s area of responsibility that are required to directly support operations against terrorism;
to provide blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other Allies’ aircraft, in accordance with the necessary air traffic arrangements and national procedures, for military flights related to operations against terrorism; to provide access for the United States and other Allies to ports and airfields on the territory of NATO nations for operations against terrorism, including for refuelling, in accordance with national procedures;
that the Alliance is ready to deploy elements of its Standing Naval Forces to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to provide a NATO presence and demonstrate resolve; and that the Alliance is similarly ready to deploy elements of its NATO Airborne Early Warning Force to support operations against terrorism. NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009 emphasis added)
Press reports of Frank Taylor’s brief to the NATO Council were scanty. The invocation of Article 5, five days before the bombings commenced, was barely mentioned. The media consensus was: “all roads lead to Bin Laden” as if bin Laden was a Nation State which had attacked America.
What stands out are outright lies and fabrications. Moreover, prior to October 2nd, NATO had no pretext under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty to intervene militarily in Afghanistan.
The pretext was provided by Frank Taylor’s classified report, which was not made public.
The two UN Security Council resolutions adopted in the course of September 2001, did not, under any circumstances, provide a justification for the invasion and illegal occupation of a UN member country of 28 million people. (see Security Council resolution 1368 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts, Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts).
UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) called for prevention and suppression of terrorist acts, as well suppression of the financing of terrorism:
“(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;
…
“3. Calls upon all States to:
“(a) Find ways of intensifying and accelerating the exchange of operational information, especially regarding actions or movements of terrorist persons or networks; forged or falsified travel documents; traffic in arms, explosives or sensitive materials; use of communications technologies by terrorist groups; and the threat posed by the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups;
“(b) Exchange information in accordance with international and domestic law and cooperate on administrative and judicial matters to prevent the commission of terrorist acts;
“(c) Cooperate, particularly through bilateral and multilateral arrangements and agreements, to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against perpetrators of such acts;
…
“4. Notes with concern the close connection between international terrorism and transnational organized crime, illicit drugs, money-laundering, illegal arms-trafficking, and illegal movement of nuclear, chemical, biological and other potentially deadly materials, and in this regard emphasizes the need to enhance coordination of efforts on national, subregional, regional and international levels in order to strengthen a global response to this serious challenge and threat to international security;
Nowhere in this resolution is there any mention of military action against a UN member State.
The US led war on Afghanistan, using 9/11 as a pretext and a justification is illegal and criminal.
The US and NATO heads of state and heads of government from 2001 to the present are complicit in the launching of a criminal and illegal war.
The Big Lie: Al Qaeda Made in America
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
Both the 9/11 Commission Report as well as the Western media have largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks. The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “Global War on Terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
This is why a legal procedure directed against the actual perpetrators of 9/11 is absolutely essential.
History of Al Qaeda
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
”The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Iraq: Alleged State Sponsor of the 9/11 Attacks
The formulation of a war of retribution conducted in the name of 9/11 was not limited to Afghanistan.
In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. .,.. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America. President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Barely two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, September 11, 2001 was mentioned abundantly by president Bush. In the weeks leading up to the March invasion, 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (See . The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com, March 14, 2003)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (image below) was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
Iran: Condemned by a New York City Court for Supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 Attacks
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 9/11 Commission’s recommendation was that this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
In the December 2011 court judgment (Havlish v. Iran) “U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran), Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their intelligence counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Realities are turned upside down. Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command:
“Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.” (http://www.debka.com/article/21255/ Debkafile, August 31, 2011).
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-and-natos-pan-arab-terrorist-blitzkrieg/
“Crimes against Civilization”
9/11 mythology has been the mainstay of war propaganda, which in itself constitutes a criminal act under international law.
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
Muslims are presented as the perpetrators of the 9/11, thereby unleashing a Worldwide demonization campaign.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council. All these various bodies are complicit in a criminal project.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally. According to the media, “Muslims were behind the attacks”, thereby justifying a war of retribution against Muslim countries.
Racism and Islamophobia are an integral part of war propaganda.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion.
It prevents people from thinking. It strikes at the core of human values. In a sense, it destroys civilization.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The criminality underlying post 9/11 propaganda is of much broader nature, affecting people’s mindsets, redefining fundamental social, political and institutional relations.
“Crimes against Civilization” have been committed.
9/11 mythology precipitates the World into barbarity.
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.
This article was first posted on Global Research on February 20, 2019
The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile in 1973 was to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.
Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.” “While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen. From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty.
In 1973, I was teaching economics at the Catholic University of Chile. I lived through two of the most brutal US sponsored military coups in Latin America’s history: Chile, September 11, 1973 and less than three years later, Argentina, March 24, 1976 under Operation Condor, which initiated Argentina’s Dirty War: “La Guerra Sucia”.
And today, the Trump administration is threatening to invade Venezuela with a view to “restoring democracy”, replacing an elected president (casually described by the Western media as a “dictator”) by a US proxy.
In recent developments, throughout Latin America, progressive governments are being destroyed, a new wave of neoliberal economic policies has been launched. Strong economic medicine has been imposed (Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Peru) under the helm of the Washington consensus.
In Chile, president Sebastian Pinera has ordered the military to open fire on protesters.
Michel Chossudovsky, October 24, 2019, September 11, 2021
***
Author’s Introduction
Forty-eight years ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.
The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.
The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot.
Is Washington’s ongoing initiative directed against Venezuela modelled on Chile?
In early 1970s, in a note to the CIA in relation to Chile, Henry Kissinger recommended “Make the economy scream.” Visibly the same concept has been applied to Venezuela, with advanced techniques of financial warfare, which were not available in the 1970s.
The US sponsored Pinochet dictatorship prevailed during a period of 16 years. During this period, there was no initiative on the part of the US to call for the replacement of the dictatorship by a duly elected government.
In 1989, elections were held and parliamentary democracy was restored. Continuity prevailed. Patricio Aylwin of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) who was elected president in 1989 had endorsed a “military solution” in 1973. He was largely instrumental in the breakdown of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats (DC). In August 1973, Patricio Aylwin provided a Green Light to the Chilean Armed Forces led by Augusto Pinochet on behalf of the DC.
The following texts shed light on the Chilean Coup d’Etat. The first text first published in 2003 serves as an introduction to the text I wrote in Chile in the month following the September 11 1973 military coup, which describes the chronology of the 1973 military coup.
Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup. The Imposition of a Neoliberal Agenda,
Global Research, Montreal, 20o3
The Ingredients of a Military Coup
Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, September 1973
Today our thoughts are with the people of Latin America in their ongoing struggle against neoliberalism and US imperialism.
****
Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup. The Imposition of a Neoliberal Agenda
Introduction
In the weeks leading up the 1973 coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. While the undercover role of the Nixon administration is amply documented, what is rarely mentioned in media reports is the fact that the military coup was also supported by a sector of the Christian Democratic Party.
Patricio Aylwin, who became Chile’s president in 1989, became head of the DC party in the months leading up to the September 1973 military coup (March through September 1973). Aylwin was largely instrumental in the break down of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats. His predecessor Renan Fuentealba, who represented the moderate wing of the Christian Democratic (PDC), was firmly against military intervention. Fuentealba favored a dialogue with Allende (la salida democratica). He was displaced from the leadership of the Party in May 1973 in favor of Patricio Aylwin.
The DC Party was split down the middle, between those who favored “the salida democratica”, and the dominant Aylwin-Frei faction, which favored “a military solution”.
On 23 August 1973, the Chilean Camera de Diputados drafted a motion, to the effect that the Allende government “sought to impose a totalitarian regime”. Patricio Aylwin was a member of the drafting team of this motion. Patricio Aylwin believed that a temporary military dictatorship was “the lesser of two evils.”
This motion was adopted almost unanimously by the opposition parties, including the DC, the Partido Nacional and the PIR (Radical Left).
The leadership of the Christian Democratic Party including former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, had given a green light to the Military.
And continuity in the “Chilean Model” heralded as “economic success story” was ensured when, 16 years later, Patricio Aylwin was elected president of Chile in the so-called transition to democracy in 1989.
At the time of the September 11, 1973 military coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile. In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.
Salvador Allende in the defense of the Palacio de la Moneda, September 11, 1973 (left)
When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the tragic events of September 11, 1973 as well as the failed June 29th coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.
In the days following the military takeover, I started going through piles of documents and newspaper clippings, which I had collected on a daily basis since my arrival in Chile in early 1973. Some of this material, however, was lost and destroyed in the days following the coup.
This unpublished article (below) was written forty-five years ago. It was drafted on an old typewriter in the weeks following the September 11, 1973.
This original draft article plus two carbon copies were circulated among a few close friends and colleagues at the Catholic University. It was never published. For 30 years it lay in a box of documents at the bottom of a filing cabinet.
I have transcribed the text from the yellowed carbon copy draft. Apart from minor editing, I have made no changes to the original article.
The history of this period has since then been amply documented including the role of the Nixon administration and of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the plot to assassinate Allende and install a military regime.
Chicago Economics: Neoliberal Dress Rehearsal of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)
The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile was ultimately to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. The latter, in the case of Chile, was not imposed by external creditors under the guidance of IMF. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military coup. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.
Augusto Pinochet, 1973
Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.”
While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty; in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six fold (3700%). Eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.
I completed my work on the “unpublished paper’ entitled “The Ingredients of a Military Coup” (see text below) in late September.
In October and November, following the dramatic hikes in the price of food, I drafted in Spanish an initial “technical” assessment of the Junta’s deadly macro-economic reforms. Fearing censorship, I limited my analysis to the collapse of living standards in the wake of the Junta’s reforms, resulting from the price hikes of food and fuel, without making any kind of political analysis.
The Economics Institute of the Catholic University was initially reluctant to publish the report. They sent it to the Military Junta prior to its release.
I left Chile for Peru in December 1973. The report was released as a working paper (200 copies) by the Catholic University a few days before my departure. In Peru, where I joined the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru, I was able to write up a more detailed study of the Junta’s neoliberal reforms and its ideological underpinnings. This study was published in 1975 in English and Spanish.
Needless to say, the events of September 11 1973 also marked me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. Macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” –as claimed by the academic mainstream– nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation.
I also started to understand the role of military-intelligence operations in support of what is usually described as a process of “economic restructuring”. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” reform as a well-organized instrument of “economic repression.”
Two years later, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with the 1976 military coup d’État. Tens of thousands of people were arrested; the “Desaparecidos” were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was “a carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile. And behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed, this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.
The IMF’s deadly economic prescriptions under the “structural adjustment program” had not yet been officially launched. The experience of Chile and Argentina under the “Chicago boys” was “a dress rehearsal” of things to come.
In due course, the economic bullets of the free market system were hitting country after country.
Since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the same IMF economic medicine has routinely been applied in more than 100 developing countries. From my earlier work in Chile, Argentina and Peru, I started to investigate the global impacts of these reforms. Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.
I should mention that the ongoing US-led economic destabilization of Venezuela including the manipulation of the foreign exchange market, leading to the collapse of the national currency the Bolivar and the dramatic hikes in the prices of essential consumer goods, bears a canny resemblance to the months preceding the September 1973 military coup in Chile.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 11 September 2003, updated 11 September 2018, September 11, 2021
The transition to a right-wing military regime in Chile on September 11 [1973] has resulted after a lengthy and drawn-out process of economic boycott, subversion within the Armed Forces and political opposition to Allende’s Popular unity government.
In October 1970, General René Schneider was assassinated in a plot of the ultra-right together with seditious elements of the Armed Forces led by General Roberto Viaux. The assassination of General Schneider was part of a coordinated plan to prevent Parliament from ratifying Allende’s victory in the September 1970 presidential elections.
Last year’s [1972] October strike which paralyzed the economy for over a month, was organized by the gremios (employers’ organizations together with opposition labor and self employed organizations), the Partido Nacional and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. Some sectors of the Christian Democratic Party were also involved.
The October Strike had initially been planned for September 1972. “Plan Septiembre” was apparently postponed due to the sudden dismissal of General Alfredo Canales from the Armed Forces. Canales together with Air Force General Herrera Latoja had earlier been in touch with Miguel Ubilla Torrealba of the nationalist front Patria y Libertad. Ubilla Torrealba was said to have been closely connected to the CIA. Despite General Canales premature retirement from the Armed Forces, Plan Septiembre was implemented in October beginning with a transport strike. The Right was hoping that those elements of the Armed forces, which had been inspired by General Canales would intervene against Allende. The October “Patronal” strike (employers and self-employed) failed due to the support of the Armed Forces headed by General Carlos Prats, who had integrated Allende’s cabinet as Minister of the Interior.
The June Failed Coup
On June 29, 1973, Coronal Roberto Souper led his tank division in an isolated attack on La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, in the hope that other units of the armed forces would join in. The June coup had initially been planned for the morning of September 27 by Patria y Libertad as well as by several high ranking military officers. The plans were found out by Military Intelligence and the coup was called off at 6pm on the 26th. A warrant for the arrest of Coronal Souper had been issued. Confronted with knowledge of his impending arrest, Colonel Souper in consultation with the officers under his command, decided to act in a most improvised fashion. At 9 am, amidst morning rush hour traffic, Tank Division Number Two drove down Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago’s main down-town avenue towards the Presidential Palace.
While the aborted June Coup had the appearance of an insolated and uncoordinated initiative, there was evidence of considerable support in various sectors of the Navy as well as from Air Force General Gustovo Leigh, now [September 1973] member of the military junta [on 11 September General Leigh integrated the military Junta headed by General Pinochet]. According to well-informed sources, several high ranking officers in the aero-naval base of Quintero near Valparaiso had proposed the bombing of State enterprises controlled by militant left wing groups, as well as the setting up of an air corridor to transport navy troops. The latter were slated to join up with the forces of Colonel Souper in Santiago.
The June trial coup was «useful» indicating to the seditious elements within the Chilean Armed Forces that an isolated and uncoordinated effort would fail. After June 29, the right-wing elements in the Navy and the Air Force were involved in a process of consolidation aimed at gaining political support among officers and sub-officers. The Army, however, was still under the control of Commander in Chief General Carols Prats, who had previously integrated Allende’s cabinet and who was a firm supporter of constitutional government.
Meanwhile in the political arena, the Christian Democrats were pressuring Allende to bring in members of the Military into the Cabinet as well as significantly revise the programme and platform of the Unidad Popular. Party leaders of the government coalition considered this alternative [proposed by the Christian democrats] as a « legalized military coup» (golpe legal) and advised Allende to turn it down. Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Socialist Party had demanded that an endorsement of the programme of the Popular Unity coalition by the military be a sina qua non condition for their entry into the Cabinet. Upon the impossibility of bringing in the Military into the Cabinet on acceptable terms, Allende envisaged the formation of a so-called “Cabinet of Consolidation” composed of well known personalities. Fernando Castillo, rector of the Catholic University and a member of the Christian Democratic Party, Felipe Herrera, President of the Inter-|American Development Bank and other prominent personalities were approached but declined.
“The Dialogue”
Pressured by economic deadlock and the transport strike, inflation of more than 15 percent per month and mounting political opposition, Allende sought in the course of July [1973] to resume the political dialogue with the Christian Democratic Party. After the March [1973] parliamentary elections, Patricio Aylwin had replaced Renan Fuentealba [May 1973] as leader of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Fuentealba, who represented the progressive wing of the Christian Democratic (PDC), was known to be in favor of a rapprochement with Allende. In other words, this rightward shift and hardening of the Christian Democrats in relation to the Unidad Popular, contributed to reinforcing their tacit alliance with the ring wing National Party. This alliance was initially intended as an electoral pact in the March [1973] parliamentary elections in which the Unidad Popular obtained 43 percent of the popular vote.
The Dialogue between Allende and Alwyin was a failure. Aylwin stated :
I have no trust in the democratic loyalty of the Marxist parties because they do not believe in Democracy. They have an inherent totalitarian conception. We are convinced that the democratic path will not solve the underlying economic problems…
The Communist Party Senator and prominent intellectual Volodia Teitelbaum response was:
The Christian Democrats are not that innocent. Basically they are in favor of a coup d’Etat because it constitutes a means to conveniently obtaining political power. The Christian Democrats have moved to the Right. They are not interested a Dialogue which implies a consolidation of revolutionary changes
While the Right was becoming more cohesive, a political split of the Left was imminent. The Communist Part sided with Allende’s constitutional strategy while a section of the Socialist Party (Allende’s own Party) led by Carlos Altamirano and the MAPU (Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitaria -initially a group of Christian Democrats which joined the Unidad Popular in 1969) led by Oscar Garreton, signified their distrust in “bourgeois legality” and the constitutional process and moved increasingly closer to the leftist revolutionary front Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). MIR maintained ideological and strategic relations with Cuban revolutionary groups as well as with the Bolivian and Uruguayan Tupamaros. While endorsing many features the programme of the Unidad Popular, the MIR rejected Allende’s “Chilean Road to Socialism” :
We must create popular power (poder popular) based on the industrial belts (cordones industriales).
The cordones industriales were organized and politicized labor groups. Together with MAPU, MIR was in the process of developing the Grupos de Accion Urbana (Urban Action Groups), with the task of educating and preparing the masses for armed resistance in the case of a military coup.
Purges in the Armed Forces
In August [1973], the Armed forces initiated a series of violent search and arrests directed against the MIR and state enterprises integrated by the industrial belts (cordones industriales). These searches were conducted in accordance with the Fire Arms control Act, adopted by [the Chilean] Congress after the October [1992 employers] strike and which empowered the Armed Forces [bypassing the civilian police authorities] to implement (by Military Law) the control of fire arms. [The objective of this measure was to confiscate automatic weapons in the members of the industrial belts and curb armed resistance by civilians to a military coup]. Meanwhile, right-wing elements in the Navy and Air Force were involved in actively eliminating Allende supporters by a well organized operation of anti-government propaganda, purges and torture. On August 7 [1973], the Navy announced that a “subversive left wing group” integrated by MIR had been found out. Meanwhile, according to reliable sources, a seditious plan of the Right with the intent to bring down Allende’s government, using the Navy to control the entry of supplies into the country, had been discovered. Sailors and officers [within the Navy], who knew about these plans, were tortured and beaten.
The Role of the Political Right
[In August 1973], high ranking military officers and members of Patria y Libertad, met with Senator Bulnes Sanfuentes of the National Party. Admiral Merino now [September 1973] a member of the Junta participated in meetings with members of National Party, senators of the Christian Democratic Party and staff of the US embassy. In fact towards mid-August [1973], In FACT, towards mid-August, a motion declaring US ambassador Nathaniel Davis as persona non grata was drafted by a parliamentary committee of the Unidad Popular. Furthermore, the Armed Forces were colluding with the Ultra-Right by setting up a so-called Base operacional de Fuerzas especiales (BOFE) (Operational Base of Special Forces). BOFE units were integrated by member of the nationalist front Patria y Libertad.
BOFE units were paramilitary divisions receiving material and financial support from the Armed forces. They were intended to undertake subversive and terrorist activities, which the Armed Forces could not openly undertake. BOFE was responsible for the many bomb attacks on pipelines, bridges and electric installations in the months preceding the military coup of September 11 [1973].
General Prats’ Resignation from the Armed Forces
On August 9, Allende reorganized his cabinet and brought in the three joint chiefs of staff, Carlos Prats (Army), Cesar Ruis Danyau (Air force) and Raul Montero (Navy) into a so-called “National Security Cabinet”. Allende was only intent upon resolving the Transport Strike, which was paralyzing the country’s economy, he was anxious to gain whatever support was left within the Armed Forces.
The situation was not ripe for a military coup as long as General Carol Prats was member of the cabinet, commander in Chief of the Army and Chairman of the Council of Generals. Towards mid-August, the armed forces pressured Allende and demanded Prats’ resignation and retirement ” due to basic disagreements between Prats and the Council of Generals”. Allende made a final attempt to retain |Prats and invited General Prats, Pinochet (now [September 1973] head of the Military Junta), Bonilla now Minister of the Interior), and others for dinner at his private residence. Prats resigned officially on August 23, both from the Cabinet and from the Armed Forces: “I did not want to be a factor which would threaten institutional discipline.. or serve as a pretext to those who want to overthrow the constitutional government”
The Generals’ Secret Meeting
With General Carlos Prats out of the way, the road was clear for a consolidated action by the Army, Navy and Air Force. Prats successor General Augusto Pinochet convened the Council of 24 generals in a secret meeting on August 28. The purpose and discussion of this meeting were not made public. In all likelihood, it was instrumental in the planning of the September 11 military coup. The reshuffle of Allende’s National Security Cabinet took place on the same day (28 August). It resulted after drawn out discussions with party leaders of the Unidad Popular coalition, and in particular with Socialist Party leader Carlos Altamirano.
The following day, August 29, Altamirano in a major policy speech made the following statement:
We hope that our Armed Forces have not abandoned their historical tradition, the Schneider Doctrine … and that they could follow a course leading to the installation of a reactionary Brazilian style [military] dictatorship … We are convinced that our armed forces are not prepared to be instrumental in the restoration of the privileges of the financial and industrial elites and landed aristocracy. We are convinced that if the Right wing golpe (coup) were to succeed, Chile would become a new Vietnam.
On the weekend preceding the military coup, leaders of the National Party and Christian Democratic Party made major political statements, declaring Allende’s government illegal and unconstitutional. Sergio Onofre Jarpa of the National Party declared:
After the Marxist downfall, the rebirth of Chile! … We will continue our struggle until we see out of office those who failed to fulfill their obligations. From this struggle, a new solidarity and a new institutional framework (institucionalidad) will emerge.
A few days later, the Presidential Palace was bombed and Allende was assassinated. The “rebirth” of Chile, and a new institutional framework had emerged.
Michel Chossudovsky
Santiago de Chile, September 1973
Selected References on the Role of Henry Kissinger in the 1973 military coup
USA Regrets Role in Chile’s September 11 Tragedy: US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, admitted Washington’s participation in Chile coup of 1973, Pravda, 17 March 2003,http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/9766_chile.html [this statement was made barely a week after the military occupation of Iraq by US and British troops.]
Authors Writings on the Chilean Military Junta’s Economic Reforms
Capital Accumulation in Chile and Latin America”, Yale University Lecture Series on Post-Allende Chile, North South, Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. IV, vol. XIII, no. 23, 1978, also published in Economic and Political Weekly.
“Acumulación de Capital en Chile”, Comercio Exterior, vol. 28, no. 2, 1978 (Spanish version of above article)
“Chicago Economics, Chilean Style”, Monthly Review, vol. 26, no. 11, 1975, in Spanish in a book published in Lima, Peru,
“Hacia el Nuevo Modelo Economico Chileno, Inflación y Redistribución del Ingreso, 1973-1974”, Cuadernos de CISEPA, no. 19, Catholic University of Peru, 1974, Trimestre Economico, no. 166, 1975, 311-347.
“The Neo-Liberal Model and the Mechanisms of Economic Repression: The Chilean Case”, Co-existence, vol. 12, no. 1, 1975, 34-57.
La Medición del Ingreso Minimo de Subsistencia y la Politica de Ingresos para 1974, documento de trabajo no. 19, Institute of Economics, Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, 1973, p. 37. (Initial text on the economic reforms of the Chilean Military Junta published in December 1973)
The following article published seventeen years ago, in August 2004 refutes the 9/11 Commission script as to what actually happened on the planes.
Much of this detailed information was based on alleged cell phone conversations between passengers and family members. Yet the technology to use a cell phone on a plane above 8500 feet did not exist in September 2001.
The 9/11 Commission’s Report provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.
In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones.According to the Report, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was only recovered in the case of one of the flights (UAL 93).
Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission has built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles” (Report, Chapter 1, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.pdf ).
The Technology of Wireless Transmission
The Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.
Some of the conversations were with onboard air phones, which contrary to the cell phones provide for good quality transmission. The report does not draw a clear demarcation between the two types of calls.
More significantly, what this carefully drafted script fails to mention is that, given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet:
“Wireless communications networks weren’t designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they’re surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground
Expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry casts serious doubt on “the findings” of the 9/11 Commission. According to Alexa Graf, a spokesman of AT&T, commenting in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks:
“it was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations… From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude”
While serious doubts regarding the cell calls were expressed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a new landmark in the wireless telecom industry has further contributed to upsetting the Commission’s credibility. Within days of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July, American Airlines and Qualcomm, proudly announced the development of a new wireless technology –which will at some future date allow airline passengers using their cell phones to contact family and friends from a commercial aircraft (no doubt at a special rate aerial roaming charge)
“Travelers could be talking on their personal cellphones as early as 2006. Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls.” (WP, July 27, 2004)
Aviation Week (07/20/04) described this new technology in an authoritative report published in July 2004:
“Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring [July 2004] ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones inflight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hr. proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.
For the test flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, the aircraft was equipped with an antenna in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This “pico cell” transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network”
Needless to say, neither the service, nor the “third generation” hardware, nor the “Picco cell” CDMA base station inside the cabin (which so to speak mimics a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) were available on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The 911 Commission points to the clarity and detail of these telephone conversations.
In substance, the Aviation Week report creates yet another embarrassing hitch in the official story.
The untimely July American Airlines / Qualcomm announcement acted as a cold shower. Barely acknowledged in press reports, it confirmed that the Bush administration had embroidered the cell phone narrative (similar to what they did with WMDs) and that the 9/11 Commission’s account was either flawed or grossly exaggerated.
Altitude and Cellphone Transmission
According to industry experts, the crucial link in wireless cell phone transmission from an aircraft is altitude. Beyond a certain altitude which is usually reached within a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are no longer possible.
In other words, given the wireless technology available on September 11 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude.
The only way passengers could have got through to family and friends using their cell phones, is if the planes were flying below 8000 feet. Yet even at low altitude, below 8000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality.
The crucial question: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed?
While the information provided by the Commission is scanty, the Report’s timeline does not suggest that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. In fact the Report confirms that a fair number of the cell phone calls were placed while the plane was traveling at altitudes above 8000 feet, which is considered as the cutoff altitude for cell phone transmission.
Let us review the timeline of these calls in relation to the information provided by the Report on flight paths and altitude.
United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 175 departed for Los Angeles at 8:00:
“It pushed back from its gate at 7:58 and departed Logan Airport at 8:14.”
The Report confirms that by 8:33, “it had reached its assigned cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.” According to the Report, it maintained this cruising altitude until 8.51, when it “deviated from its assigned altitude”:
“The first operational evidence that something was abnormal on United 175 came at 8:47, when the aircraft changed beacon codes twice within a minute. At 8:51, the flight deviated from its assigned altitude, and a minute later New York air traffic controllers began repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to contact it.”
And one minute later at 8.52, Lee Hanson receives a call from his son Peter.
[Flight UAL 175] “At 8:52, in Easton, Connecticut, a man named Lee Hanson received a phone call from his son Peter, a passenger on United 175. His son told him: “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit—An attendant has been stabbed— and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines—Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to LA.
Press reports confirm that Peter Hanson was using his cell (i.e it was not an air phone). Unless the plane had suddenly nose-dived, the plane was still at high altitude at 8.52. (Moreover, Hanson’s call could have been initiated at least a minute prior to his father Lee Hanson picking up the phone.)
Another call was received at 8.52 (one minute after it deviated from its assigned altitude of 31,000 feet). The Report does not say whether this is an air phone or a cell phone call:
Also at 8:52, a male flight attendant called a United office in San Francisco, reaching Marc Policastro. The flight attendant reported that the flight had been hijacked, both pilots had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and the hijackers were probably flying the plane. The call lasted about two minutes, after which Policastro and a colleague tried unsuccessfully to contact the flight.
It is not clear whether this was a call to Policastro’s cell phone or to the UAL switchboard.
At 8:58, UAL 175 “took a heading toward New York City.”:
“At 8:59, Flight 175 passenger Brian David Sweeney tried to call his wife, Julie. He left a message on their home answering machine that the plane had been hijacked. He then called his mother, Louise Sweeney, told her the flight had been hijacked, and added that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers.
At 9:00, Lee Hanson received a second call from his son Peter:
It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed—They seem to have knives and Mace—They said they have a bomb—It’s getting very bad on the plane—Passengers are throwing up and getting sick—The plane is making jerky movements—I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane—I think we are going down—I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building—Don’t worry, Dad— If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.
The call ended abruptly. Lee Hanson had heard a woman scream just before it cut off. He turned on a television, and in her home so did Louise Sweeney. Both then saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.50 At 9:03:11, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. All on board, along with an unknown number of people in the tower, were killed instantly.”
American Airlines Flight 77
American Airlines Flight 77 was scheduled to depart from Washington Dulles for Los Angeles at 8:10… “At 8:46, the flight reached its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.”
At 8:51, American 77 transmitted its last routine radio communication. The hijacking began between 8:51 and 8:54. As on American 11 and United 175, the hijackers used knives (reported by one passenger) and moved all the passengers (and possibly crew) to the rear of the aircraft (reported by one flight attendant and one passenger). Unlike the earlier flights, the Flight 77 hijackers were reported by a passenger to have box cutters. Finally, a passenger reported that an announcement had been made by the “pilot” that the plane had been hijacked….
On flight AA 77, which allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, the transponder was turned off at 8:56am; the recorded altitude at the time the transponder was turned off is not mentioned. According to the Commission’s Report, cell calls started 16 minutes later, at 9:12am, twenty minutes before it (allegedly) crashed into the Pentagon at 9.32am:
” [at 9.12] Renee May called her mother, Nancy May, in Las Vegas. She said her flight was being hijacked by six individuals who had moved them to the rear of the plane.”
According to the Report, when the autopilot was disengaged at 9:29am, the aircraft was at 7,000 feet and some 38 miles west of the Pentagon. This happened two minutes before the crash.
Most of the calls on Flight 77 were placed between 9.12am and 9.26am, prior to the disengagement of automatic piloting at 9.29am. The plane could indeed have been traveling at either a higher or a lower altitude to that reached at 9.29. Yet, at the same time there is no indication in the Report that the plane had been traveling below the 7000 feet level, which it reached at 9.29am.
At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Barbara Olson called her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. [using an airphone]
UAL flight 93 was the only one of the four planes that, according to the official story, did not crash into a building. Flight 93 passengers, apparently:”alerted through phone calls, attempted to subdue the hijackers. and the hijackers crashed the plane [in Pennsylvania] to prevent the passengers gaining control.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_flight_93 ). Another version of events, was that UAL 93 was shot down.
According to the Commission’s account:
“the first 46 minutes of Flight 93’s cross-country trip proceeded routinely. Radio communications from the plane were normal. Heading, speed, and altitude ran according to plan. At 9:24, Ballinger’s warning to United 93 was received in the cockpit. Within two minutes, at 9:26, the pilot, Jason Dahl, responded with a note of puzzlement: “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”70 The hijackers attacked at 9:28. While traveling 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio, United 93 suddenly dropped 700 feet. Eleven seconds into the descent, the FAA’s air traffic control center in Cleveland received the first of two radio transmissions from the aircraft….”
At least ten cell calls are reported to have taken place on flight 93.
The Report confirms that passengers started placing calls with cell and air phones shortly after 9.32am, four minutes after the Report’s confirmation of the plane’s attitude of 35,000 feet. In other words, the calls started some 9 minutes before the Cleveland Center lost UAL 93’s transponder signal (9.41) and approximately 30 minutes before the crash in Pennsylvania (10.03)
“At 9:41, Cleveland Center lost United 93’s transponder signal. The controller located it on primary radar, matched its position with visual sightings from other aircraft, and tracked the flight as it turned east, then south.164 “
This suggests that the altitude was known to air traffic control up until the time when the transponder signal was lost by the Cleveland Center. (Radar and visual sightings provided information on its flight path from 9.41 to 10.03.)
Moreover, there was no indication from the Report that the aircraft had swooped down to a lower level of altitude, apart from the 700 feet drop recorded at 9.28. from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet:
“At 9:32, a hijacker, probably Jarrah, made or attempted to make the following announcement to the passengers of Flight 93:“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting.
We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” The flight data recorder (also recovered) indicates that Jarrah then instructed the plane’s autopilot to turn the aircraft around and head east. The cockpit voice recorder data indicate that a woman, most likely a flight attendant, was being held captive in the cockpit. She struggled with one of the hijackers who killed or otherwise silenced her.
Shortly thereafter, the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones. These calls between family, friends, and colleagues took place until the end of the flight and provided those on the ground with firsthand accounts. They enabled the passengers to gain critical information, including the news that two aircraft had slammed into the World Trade Center.77…At least two callers from the flight reported that the hijackers knew that passengers were making calls but did not seem to care.
The hijackers were wearing red bandanas, and they forced the passengers to the back of the aircraft.80 Callers reported that a passenger had been stabbed and that two people were lying on the floor of the cabin, injured or dead—possibly the captain and first officer. One caller reported that a flight attendant had been killed.81 One of the callers from United 93 also reported that he thought the hijackers might possess a gun. But none of the other callers reported the presence of a firearm. One recipient of a call from the aircraft recounted specifically asking her caller whether the hijackers had guns.
The passenger replied that he did not see one. No evidence of firearms or of their identifiable remains was found at the aircraft’s crash site, and the cockpit voice recorder gives no indication of a gun being fired or mentioned at any time.
We believe that if the hijackers had possessed a gun, they would have used it in the flight’s last minutes as the passengers fought back.82 Passengers on three flights reported the hijackers’ claim of having a bomb. The FBI told us they found no trace of explosives at the crash sites. One of the passengers who mentioned a bomb expressed his belief that it was not real. Lacking any evidence that the hijackers attempted to smuggle such illegal items past the security screening checkpoints, we believe the bombs were probably fake. During at least five of the passengers’ phone calls, information was shared about the attacks that had occurred earlier that morning at the World Trade Center. Five calls described the intent of passengers and surviving crew members to revolt against the hijackers. According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted. At 9:57, the passenger assault began. Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones in order to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows:
“Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door. Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din.
We cannot identify whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained. In response, Jarrah immediately began to roll the airplane to the left and right, attempting to knock the passengers off balance. At 9:58:57, Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door. Jarrah continued to roll the airplane sharply left and right, but the assault continued. At 9:59, Jarrah changed tactics and pitched the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. The recorder captured the sounds of loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates.
At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the airplane. Five seconds later, Jarrah asked, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” A hijacker responded, “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.” The sounds of fighting continued outside the cockpit. Again, Jarrah pitched the nose of the aircraft up and down.At 10:00:26, a passenger in the background said, “In the cockpit. If we dont we’ll die!” Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled,“Roll it!” Jarrah stopped the violent maneuvers at about 10:01:00 and said, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!” He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit,“ Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” to which the other replied, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” The passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:23, a hijacker said, “Pull it down! Pull it down!” The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them. The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right.
The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest. ”With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington D.C. Jarrah’s objective was to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House. He was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United”
The Mysterious Call of Edward Felt from UAL 93
Earlier coverage of the fate of UAL 93 was based in part on a reported cell call from a passenger named Edward Felt, who managed to reach an emergency official in Pennsylvania. How he got the emergency supervisor’s number and managed to reach him remains unclear.
The call was apparently received at 9.58 am, eight minutes before the reported time of the crash at 10.06 am in Pennsylvania:
“Local emergency officials said they received a cell phone call at 9.58 am from a man who said he was a passenger aboard the flight. The man said he had locked himself in the bathroom and told emergency dispatchers that the plane had been hijacked. “We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” he was quoted as saying. A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane had been stabbed. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey.”
The alleged call by Edward Felt from the toilet of the aircraft of UAL 93 was answered by Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor in Pennsylvania who took the call.
It is worth noting that Glenn Cramer was subsequently gagged by the FBI.” (See Robert Wallace`s incisive analysis published in Sept 2002 by the Daily Mirror, (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/WAL403A.html ).
Ironically, this high profile cell call by Ed Felt, which would have provided crucial evidence to the 9/11 Commission was, for some reason, not mentioned in the Report.
American Airlines Flight 11
Flight 11 took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14. The Report outlines an airphone conversation of flight attendant Betty Ong and much of the narrative hinges upon this airphone conversation
There are no clear-cut reports on the use of cell phones on Flight AA11. According to the Report, American 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46.
Concluding Remarks
A large part of the description, regarding the 19 hijackers relies on cell phone conversations with family and friends.
While a few of these calls (placed at low altitude) could have got through, the wireless technology was not available. On this issue, expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry is unequivocal.
In other words, at least part of the Commission’s script in Chapter 1 on the cell phone conversations, is fabricated.
According to the American Airline / Qualcomm [2004] announcement, the technology for cell phone transmission at high altitude will only be available aboard commercial aircraft in 2006. This is an inescapable fact.
In the eyes of public opinion, the cell phone conversations on the Arab hijackers is needed to sustain the illusion that America is under attack.
The “war on terrorism” underlying the National Security doctrine relies on real time “evidence” concerning the Arab hijackers. The latter personify, so to speak, this illusive “outside enemy” (Al Qaeda), which is threatening the homeland.
Embodied into the Commission’s “script” of 911, the narrative of what happened on the plane with the Arab hijackers is therefore crucial. It is an integral part of the Administration’s disinformation and propaganda program. It constitutes a justification for the anti-terror legislation under the Patriot acts and the waging of America’s pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 9/11 Report’s Footnotes on the Cell Phone Conversations
emphasis added
70. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; Commission review of Aircraft Communication and Reporting System (ACARS) messages sent to and from Flight 93 (which indicate time of message transmission and receipt); see UAL record, Ed Ballinger ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001. At 9:22, after learning of the events at the World Trade Center, Melody Homer, the wife of co-pilot Leroy Homer, had an ACARS message sent to her husband in the cockpit asking if he was okay. See UAL record,ACARS message, Sept. 11, 2001.
71. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; FAA report,“Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001,” Sept. 17, 2001; NTSB report, Air Traffic Control Recording—United Airlines Flight 93, Dec. 21, 2001.
72.The 37 passengers represented a load factor of 20.33 percent of the plane’s seating capacity of 182, considerably below the 52.09 percent for Flight 93 on Tuesdays in the three-month period prior to September 11 (June 11–September 4, 2001). See UAL report, Flight 93 EWR-SFO load factors, undated. Five passengers holding reservations for Flight 93 did not show for the flight.All five were interviewed and cleared by the FBI. FBI report,“Flight #93 ‘No Show’ Passengers from 9/11/01,” Sept. 18, 2001.
73. INS record,Withdrawal of Application for Admission for Mohamed al Kahtani,Aug. 4, 2001.
74. See FAA regulations,Admission to flight deck, 14 C.F.R. § 121.547 (2001);UAL records, copies of boarding passes for United 93, Sept. 11,2001.One passenger reported that ten first-class passengers were aboard the flight. If that number is accurate, it would include the four hijackers. FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001;UAL record, Flight 93 passenger manifest, Sept. 11, 2001.All but one of the six passengers seated in the first-class cabin communicated with the ground during the flight, and none mentioned anyone from their cabin having gone into the cockpit before the hijacking.Moreover, it is unlikely that the highly regarded and experienced pilot and co-pilot of Flight 93 would have allowed an observer into the cockpit before or after takeoff who had not obtained the proper permission. See UAL records, personnel files of Flight 93 pilots. For jumpseat information, see UAL record,Weight and Balance Information for Flight 93 and Flight 175, Sept. 11, 2001;AAL records, Dispatch Environmental Control/Weekly Flight Summary for Flight 11 and Flight 77, Sept. 11, 2001.
75. Like Atta on Flight 11, Jarrah apparently did not know how to operate the communication radios; thus his attempts to communicate with the passengers were broadcast on the ATC channel. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.Also, by 9:32 FAA notified United’s headquarters that the flight was not responding to radio calls.According to United, the flight’s nonresponse and its turn to the east led the airline to believe by 9:36 that the plane was hijacked. See Rich Miles interview (Nov. 21, 2003); UAL report, “United dispatch SMFDO activities—terrorist crisis,” Sept. 11, 2001.
76. In accordance with FAA regulations, United 93’s cockpit voice recorder recorded the last 31 minutes of sounds from the cockpit via microphones in the pilots’ headsets, as well as in the overhead panel of the flight deck. This is the only recorder from the four hijacked airplanes to survive the impact and ensuing fire.The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found,and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,”Dec. 4, 2003; see also FAA regulations, 14 C.F.R. §§ 25.1457, 91.609, 91.1045, 121.359; Flight 93 CVR data. A transcript of the CVR recording was prepared by the NTSB and the FBI.
77. All calls placed on airphones were from the rear of the aircraft. There was one airphone installed in each row of seats on both sides of the aisle.The airphone system was capable of transmitting only eight calls at any one time. See FBI report of investigation, airphone records for flights UAL 93 and UAL 175 on Sept. 11, 2001, Sept. 18, 2001.
78.FAA audio file, Cleveland Center, position Lorain Radar; Flight 93 CVR data; FBI report, “CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.
79. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Sept. 11, 2001, through June 11, 2002; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Sandy Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001, through Oct. 4, 2001.Text messages warning the cockpit of Flight 93 were sent to the aircraft by Ed Ballinger at 9:24. See UAL record, Ed Ballinger’s ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001.
80.We have relied mainly on the record of FBI interviews with the people who received calls. The FBI interviews were conducted while memories were still fresh and were less likely to have been affected by reading the accounts of others or hearing stories in the media. In some cases we have conducted our own interviews to supplement or verify the record. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham,Sandy Bradshaw,Marion Britton,Thomas Burnett, Joseph DeLuca,Edward Felt, Jeremy Glick,Lauren Grandcolas, Linda Gronlund, CeeCee Lyles, Honor Wainio.
81. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Thomas Burnett, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Marion Britton, Sept. 14, 2001, through Nov. 8, 2001; Lisa Jefferson interview (May 11, 2004); FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001; Richard Belme interview (Nov. 21, 2003).
82. See Jere Longman, Among the Heroes—United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (Harper-Collins, 2002), p. 107; Deena Burnett interview (Apr. 26, 2004); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001; Lyzbeth Glick interview (Apr. 22, 2004). Experts told us that a gunshot would definitely be audible on the CVR. The FBI found no evidence of a firearm at the crash site of Flight 93. See FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11).The FBI collected 14 knives or portions of knives at the Flight 93 crash site. FBI report, “Knives Found at the UA Flight 93 Crash Site,” undated.
83. FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001.
84. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93.
85. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93. For quote, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Philip Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001; Philip Bradshaw interview (June 15, 2004); Flight 93 FDR and CVR data.At 9:55:11 Jarrah dialed in the VHF Omni-directional Range (VOR) frequency for the VOR navigational aid at Washington Reagan National Airport, further indicating that the attack was planned for the nation’s capital.
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After a “long-winding road”, hostilities in Syria’s Daraa province might be nearing their end.
On September 8th, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) began working to establish permanent positions inside the southern part of Daraa city, known as Daraa al-Balad.
The SAA is going to establish at least 9 posts in the southern part of the city as per the August 31st reconciliation agreement, brokered by Russia.
The SAA entered Daraa al-Balad early in the day. Forces from the Russian Military Police and the 8th Brigade, a unit of the 5th Corps that is dedicated for former rebels in Daraa, facilitated the deployment of the army.
Immediately, a combing operation was carried out, clearing several hideouts and exploding an IED presumably placed for an impromptu attack.
The army also opened the main route leading to Daraa al-Balad, allowing hundreds of civilians who were displaced as a result of the clashes to return.
As for now, more than 900 gunmen in Daraa al-Balad have handed over their weapons and joined the reconciliation process. Those who refuse the agreement will be deported to opposition-held areas in northern Syria.
Meanwhile in Central Syria, efforts to contain ISIS are on-going but not as successful as the SAA and Russia would hope.
On September 7, ISIS cells carried out a large-scale attack against the SAA and allies in the eastern countryside of Homs.
The attack targeted a network of positions near the border with Deir Ezzor, where the militants are concentrated. ISIS terrorists have been clashing with pro-government fighters for a few hours then withdrew back to their hideouts.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 6 pro-government fighters were killed and 8 others were wounded as a result of the attack.
Three days earlier, a similar attack by ISIS cells targeted a number of positions near the town of Ithriyah in the eastern countryside of Hama. The attack claimed the lives of eight Iranian-backed fighters who were supporting the SAA.
Over the last few days, Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of air strikes on ISIS hideouts in the region. At least nine terrorists were killed in the process, but militant attacks still continue.
Syrian government forces and their allies have been operating against ISIS cells in the central region for more than two years now. The terrorist group’s insurgency has slowed down but attacks still happen somewhat regularly. It is unlikely that they will stop anytime soon, unless a massive combing operation is carried out.
The issue is that the SAA and the Russian Aerospace Forces are dealing with several hot spots in different Syrian regions. These include the so-called “moderate opposition” in Greater Idlib, the Turkish Army, the factions it backs and their fights against the Kurds, as well as containing ISIS in the central regions.
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Republicans clapped back over the Biden administration’s unprecedented ‘jab or your job’ Executive Order for federal workers and contractors, and a ‘jab or test’ mandate for corporations with over 100 employees. 600,000 postal workers are oddly exempt.
The sweeping new vaccine requirements, which completely ignore tens of millions in America who have recovered from Covid-19 and have natural immunity, will affect as many as 100 million Americans.
Biden on people who haven't gotten vaccinated:
"We've been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us." pic.twitter.com/Hj4jnmWpuX
In response, the Republican National Committed (RNC) vowed to sue Biden once the mandate goes into effect, with President Ronna McDaniel tweeting that Biden lied.
“Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied,” McDaniel said in a statement, adding “Now small businesses, workers, and families across the country will pay the price.”
Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied.
When his decree goes into effect, the RNC will sue the administration to protect Americans and their liberties. pic.twitter.com/XinwFw4bam
“President Biden is so desperate to distract from his shameful, incompetent Afghanistan exit that he is saying crazy things and pushing constitutionally flawed executive orders. This is a cynical attempt to pick a fight and distract from the President’s morally disgraceful decision to leave Americans behind Taliban lines on the 20th anniversary of 9/11,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) told the Daily Caller.
Meanwhile, Republican governors across the country have issued statements vowing to sue, or otherwise oppose, the vaccine mandate after Biden threatened them during Thursday’s announcement.
“Let me be blunt,” said Biden. “My plan also takes on elected officials in states that are undermining you in these life-saving actions. Right now local school officials are trying to keep children safe in a pandemic while their governor picks a fight with them and even threatens their salaries or their jobs. Talk about bullying the schools.”
“If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I will use my power as president to get them out of the way,” he added.
Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp also responded to Biden’s remarks.
“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” Kemp tweeted.
I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration.
Alabama Governor Key Ivey also released a statement declaring her intention to fight the mandate.
Once again, @POTUS has missed the mark. His outrageous, overreaching mandates will no doubt be challenged in the courts. Read my full statement below. #alpoliticspic.twitter.com/9BNbvenVEJ
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon also issuing a statement saying: “Not now, and not ever.”
Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee also stated his broad opposition to the federal mandate.
“The Constitution won’t allow this power grab, and in the meantime, I will stand up for all Tennesseans,” Gov. Lee wrote.
For a fight that requires working together, a lot of cynical and divisive edicts came out of the White House today pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, businesses against employees, and the federal government against states.
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The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
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Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist who warns that COVID-19 vaccines not only are failing but are putting lives at risk
McCullough believes if the proper safety boards had been in place, the COVID-19 vaccine program would have been shut down in February 2021 based on safety and risk of death
By January 22, 2021, 186 deaths had been reported after COVID-19 vaccination — more than enough to reach the mortality signal of concern
In his practice, McCullough is seeing an array of neurologic syndromes in people who’ve been vaccinated, with symptoms including blindness, paralysis, difficulty swallowing, headaches, ringing in the ears, myocarditis and more
McCullough also mentions antigenic, or immune, escape, which he believes is driving the creation of COVID-19 variants and making the pandemic worse instead of better
Dr. Peter McCullough has an impressive list of credentials1 — he’s an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist and is the editor of two medical journals and published hundreds of studies in the literature. He’s also among those brave and courageous persons speaking out about the dangers of COVID-19 jabs, and putting his medical license and future livelihood at risk by so doing.
“There’s a hunting that’s going on here that’s very disturbing,” McCullough said in an episode of Perspectives on the Pandemic.2 He was referring to state medical boards hunting down doctors and their and threatening revocation of their licenses based on the spreading of unidentified “misinformation.”
“This is absolutely astonishing that this is happening over a fair exchange of ideas,” he said. What is Dr. McCullough sharing that the powers that be don’t want you to hear? It’s about COVID-19 injections and, to sum it up in a sentence, “It’s not working and it’s causing tremendous damage.”
COVID Jab Efficacy and Safety Overstated From the Start
In the U.S., Operation Warp Speed is the federal effort that fast-tracked COVID-19 jab candidates to market. Gene transfer technology platforms emerged as the frontrunners, including adenoviral DNA platforms or messenger RNA (mRNA) platforms designed to deliver genetic material to the human body.
Once the mRNA is injected, the body then takes up the genetic material and changes in some way. These technologies have been under study for years, in most cases being designed to replace a defective gene, which could potentially be used for cancer treatment, for example. Except historically, “all failed,” McCullough said.
In November 2020, however, Pfizer, in a joint venture with Germany-based BioNTech, announced that their mRNA-based injection was “more than 90% effective” in a Phase 3 trial.3 This does not mean that 90% of people who get injected will be protected from COVID-19, though, as it’s based on relative risk reduction (RRR).
The absolute risk reduction (ARR) for the jab is less than 1%. “Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the jab, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a jab, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs,” researchers wrote in The Lancet Microbe in April 2021.4
Nonetheless, the jabs received emergency use authorization. By giving the emergency authorization, not approval, the jab administration constituted a research trial, with the sponsors being the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. According to McCullough:5
“We’ve never had two government bodies together be a sponsor of a major research program. Shockingly, they did not have, and to this day they’ve never put together, an external critical event committee, an external data safety monitoring board or a human ethics committee. They had these committees in the registrational trials … and these are standard.
Every large clinical investigation has these three committees … I chair many of these committees for pharmaceutical companies and the National Institutes of Health. Americans should have had at least weekly, if not monthly, reviews of safety to ensure Americans that the jabs are safe.”
By March 2021, McCullough Was Worried
Initially, McCullough said, it seemed like the experimental jabs might be safe, and about 70% of his patients had received one by December 2020. But by March 2021, he was uncomfortable with what he was seeing. From December 14, 2020, through March 8, 2021, more than 92 million doses of COVID-19 jabs were administered in the U.S.
He cited data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which showed that during that time, there were 1,637 reports of death in people who had received a COVID-19 jab. The CDC and FDA said none of them was related to the jab but, according to McCullough, by January 22, 2021, 186 deaths had been reported — more than enough to reach the mortality signal of concern to stop the program.
“With a program this size, anything over 150 deaths would be an alarm signal,” he said. The U.S. “hit 186 deaths with only 27 million Americans jabbed.” McCullough believes if the proper safety boards had been in place, the COVID-19 jab program would have been shut down in February based on safety and risk of death.
Such was the case in 1976, when a fast-tracked injection program against swine flu was halted after an estimated 25 to 32 deaths.6 Yet, despite a much larger death toll, COVID-19 jabs continues. As of August 6, 2021, VAERS COVID-19 data showed 12,791 deaths related to the jabs, according to McCullough, and tens of thousands of hospital and clinic visits.7
In an analysis of COVID-19 vaccine death reports from VAERS, researchers found that 86% of the time, nothing else could have caused the death, and it appears the vaccine was the cause.8
The researchers noted, “The sample contains only people jabbed early in the program, and hence is made up primarily of those who are elderly or with significant health conditions. Despite this, there were only 14% of the cases for which a COVID injection reaction could be ruled out as a contributing factor in their death.”9
Further research shows, McCullough stated, and this is a very important point that I want you to understand and remember: that 50% of the deaths occurred within 48 hours of getting the shot, while 80% occurred within a week. An informal survey on Twitter, to which 10,000 people responded, also asked whether respondents knew someone who died after a COVID-19 jab.
Twelve percent said they did. “When people see others in their circle dying, you can’t stop that type of organic COVID jab hesitancy,” McCullough said. Other confirmed adverse effects of the COVID jabs include myocarditis and blood clots.10
An Incredible Violation of Human Ethics
Your body recognizes the spike protein in COVID-19 jabs as foreign, so it begins to manufacture antibodies to protect you against COVID-19, or so the theory goes. But there’s a problem. The spike protein itself is dangerous and known to circulate in your body at least for weeks and more likely months11 — perhaps much longer — after the COVID jab.
In your cells, the spike protein damages blood vessels and can lead to the development of blood clots.12,13 It can go into your brain, adrenal glands, ovaries, heart, skeletal muscles and nerves, causing inflammation, scarring and damage in organs over time.
In his practice, McCullough is seeing an array of neurologic syndromes in people who’ve been injected, with symptoms including blindness, paralysis, difficulty swallowing, headaches, ringing in the ears, myocarditis and more. Other research suggests that the heart, brain, immunologic system and hematologic system may be most at risk from the jabs.14
Children, who are at extremely low risk from COVID-19, receive no benefit from the jab, nor do those who have already had COVID and have immunity, McCullough said, calling the situation “a catastrophe in real time” that’s violating human ethics:15
“We’ve seen an incredible violation of human ethics. No one, for an investigational product, under any circumstances, should receive any pressure, coercion or threat of reprisal for not participating in the research.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 jab received FDA approval on August 23, 2021, but prior to this, million-dollar raffles, free tuition, bonuses and other bribes like free beer and doughnuts were offered to entice people to get injected. When that didn’t work, mandates increased, including for many health care workers, and hundreds of U.S. colleges16 are also requiring students to get jabbed in order to attend.
Vaccinated People Are Getting COVID Anyway
Media reports keep referring to the pandemic as a crisis of the unvaccinated, which is simply inaccurate, since COVID-19 continues to affect and spread among those who have been vaccinated. July 30, 2021, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) posted online details of an outbreak of COVID-19 that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts — 74% of the cases occurred in fully vaccinated people.17
So-called “breakthrough infections,” which used to be known as vaccine failures, were reported by the CDC far earlier, though, including in their May 28, 2021, MMWR, which documented 10,262 breakthrough infections reported January 1 to April 23, 2021, across 46 states.18
This, they believed, was “likely a substantial undercount,” but rather than continuing to assess the situation, they stopped monitoring most COVID-9 infections among vaccinated people:19
“Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance.”
McCullough also mentions antigenic, or immune, escape. If you put a living organism like bacteria or viruses under pressure, via antibiotics, antibodies or chemotherapeutics, for example, but don’t kill them off completely, you can inadvertently encourage their mutation into more virulent strains. Those that escape your immune system end up surviving and selecting mutations to ensure their further survival.
COVID-19 has a high capacity for mutation but, if the virus isn’t under pressure, it won’t necessarily see a need to select mutations to, for instance, become more infectious. But if you put it under pressure, as is occurring during the mass vaccination campaign, this may change. McCullough stated:20
“If we keep this up with the injections, there is going to be one variant after another … We’re playing with fire here with this mass vaccination … My interpretation as an internist and cardiologist — I’m a trained epidemiologist, I’ve literally done a year of intense COVID research and training — I’m going to tell you, I think this Delta outbreak that we have right now is the product of mass vaccination.
If we didn’t have the jab, we would have been better off. We had already treated this down to a very acceptable level.”
How to Break Through the Trance
McCullough believes many health care providers and the U.S. public are in a vaccination trance. It defies logic and commonsense how public officials and hospital executives can see the vaccines failing to work, can see the rising cases of adverse effects and deaths, and yet increasingly issue vaccine mandates or recommend the vaccine to groups for which it clearly shouldn’t be, like pregnant women. McCullough likens it to a form of psychosis or a group neurosis.
The U.S. public, however, has seen so much fear, hospitalization and death during the pandemic that they may have been prepared to accept casualties associated with the vaccines. Still, a sizable number of Americans aren’t being fooled.
“We’re at this pressure point, and I think right now, in talking to American people in my circles, they’re ready to take a time out,” McCullough said. If it means taking a sabbatical from work or delaying school for a year, many Americans are willing to do it to avoid getting vaccinated. “The only way to stay healthy right now is to stay away from this vaccine. If you get COVID-19, get to one of these treatment networks and get immunity on the other side.”21
McCullough is a proponent of early treatment of COVID-19 and believes treatment options have been suppressed to allow for mass vaccination:22
“I think we’ve completely suppressed any form of treatment or help to people in order to promote the vaccine. Now the vaccine doesn’t work completely and it’s, frankly, dangerous. We’re down to almost one message: Take the jab or else … It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.
We’re going to have to see what this is going to look like. I think the next month or so is going to be incredibly interesting and it’s going to be ominous.”
McCullough believes that eventually people will break out of the jab trance and realize that the answer isn’t these injections, while the handling of the pandemic, including mass jabs, will become a course in violation of human ethics and the Nuremberg code. With fear, isolation, hospitalizations and deaths still occurring, however, it may take years before the fog is lifted.
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Behind The Headlines’ Dan Cohen explains a little known effort to train Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in propaganda, and how that effort created a blueprint for the White Helmets in Syria.
By now, everyone knows about the White Helmets – the State Department’s propaganda operation to manufacture consent for the U.S.’s dirty war on Syria. But long before the White Helmets were the Afghan mujahideen.
Quick review: The White Helmets were presented as laudable rescue teams who operated in opposition-held territory in Syria.
They also embedded with jihadist groups like al Nusra – al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. And were financed by U.S. government bodies like USAID.
This turned Syria into a made-for-TV warzone, pumping decontextualized war porn into American minds through cable news and Netflix “documentaries.”
This propaganda appealed to the conscience of Western liberals to get them to support U.S. military attacks on Syria such as Donald Trump’s bombing of Douma or Khan Sheikoun. Or, during the Obama era, the Pentagon and CIA arming competing militias and warlords who were consumed by jihadist groups committed to exterminating minorities.
Syria was version 2.0. The original was in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Back then, the U.S. was seeking to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist government that had come to power in the Saur Revolution. It is well known that the U.S. began funding the mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalist holy warriors who were united with the U.S. in their belief that godless communism was the ultimate evil. Of course, we all know how that alliance turned out.
But at the time, the U.S. public wasn’t interested in Afghanistan – a country seven thousand miles away that everyday Americans couldn’t find on a map – and news barely covered it.
In 1982, the U.S. government sent Hollywood star Kirk Douglas to Peshawar, Pakistan to film a Thanksgiving special in which he met with mujahideen leaders and showed the horrors of the Soviet intervention and the plight of Afghan refugees.
But after that effort flopped, the now-defunct U.S. propaganda arm known as the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, tried its hand. USIA Director Alvin Synder came up with the idea of training mujahideen in “journalism” and providing them with video cameras. The articles and footage they provided would bolster the U.S. government’s narrative of the Soviet intervention as an invasion of a godless evil empire and the Afghan holy warriors as freedom fighters that America had to support.
Congress passed legislation to train the mujahideen and allocated half a million dollars to set up a journalism school for them. This was done in conjunction with Boston University. The Afghan Media Resource Center was born. Its policy manual specified that every employee must be obedient to the Islamic faith and “must honestly and generously sacrifice for holy jihad and take an active share in Afghanistan’s independence struggle.”
The trainees were sent to the Afghan battlefield, where they captured the realities of war: dead soldiers on both sides, unspeakable tragedies. Cable news outlets like CBS and CNN began to air the footage, and U.S. officials credited their efforts for the eventual Soviet withdrawal.
With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other, the mujahideen propagandists interviewed warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of a guerrilla group known as The Islamic Party and CIA favorite, to whom Washington funneled more than a billion dollars to as he became the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar had a reputation for spraying acid in the faces of women who dared be in public without covering their heads. His indiscriminate shelling of Kabul during the war against the Soviet-backed government killed 50,000 and earned him the nickname the “Butcher of Kabul.”
In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. designated Hekmatyar a global terrorist as his forces waged a fierce insurgency against the U.S. occupation.
There’s Haji Zaman, a mujahideen commander and drug lord whom, decades later, the U.S. accused of helping Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
Then U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Peter Tomsondescribed mujahideen leader Mullah Mulang in glowing terms, saying “He is a very patriotic Afghan; he has contributed a lot to the jihad; he said he is looking forward to contributing more in the future.”
Here’s a photo of Jalaluddin Haqqani. A CIA asset during the anti-Soviet jihad, he founded the Haqqani network, which would become one of the U.S.’s fiercest enemies in Afghanistan.
Decades later, this propaganda formula would be applied to Syria, but in a much more sophisticated way. The U.S. and EU funded media trainers and provided cameras for propagandists to embed with anti-government armed groups including the Syrian al Qaeda branch, al Nusra. In Afghanistan, there was the Afghan Media Resource Center.
In Syria, there were numerous media branches. The Aleppo Media Center – funded by the Washington-based Syrian Expatriates Organization, which famously posted videos of Omran Daqneesh – the four-year-old boy who, against his father’s wishes, became a central part of the war propaganda effort. The person who took the infamous photo of Daqneesh – who became known in U.S. media as “Aleppo boy” – was Mahmoud Raslan.
Raslan was also a member of a U.S.-funded armed group, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, that beheaded10-year-old Palestinian boy Abdallah Issa.
There was Syria Direct – funded by the State Department, as well as French and Australian embassies. Syria Direct trained numerous journalists whose articles were furnished to U.S. media outlets like USA Today, CNN, and Radio Free Europe.
Propaganda has been a key component of every war the U.S. has waged from Vietnam to Grenada to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These efforts become more sophisticated and insidious over time. Without them, the U.S. permanent war state simply couldn’t operate.
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Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets at @DanCohen3000.
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