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Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility is an incredibly important piece of infrastructure for Tehran’s interests.

One of its most important roles is that of providing leverage when the Islamic Republic is on the Nuclear Deal negotiating table.

Natanz was largely built underground to withstand enemy airstrikes.

Back in 2002, when it was established it became a focal point of Western fears regarding the potential of Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons.

Despite many accusations, mostly from Israel, Iran maintains that it develops its enriched uranium for peaceful purposes.

The fact that it also applies pressure on the other signatories on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known as the Iranian Nuclear Deal) is an added, and needed bonus.

The Natanz facility was subject to an alleged cyber-attack on April 11th.

This led to a large blackout, and was considered a significant strike against Tehran.

Iran’s nuclear program spokesman, Ali Akbar Salehi, confirmed that the electrical disruption at Natanz was a deliberate act of sabotage, calling it “nuclear terrorism.”

Israel’s officials refused to provide any comment, and disregarded the incident.

Israeli media, however, continue citing anonymous sources, claiming that it had been a Mossad operation, and that it had achieved great success.

The timing of the attack was also said to not be incidental, coming the day after Iran celebrated its National Nuclear Technology Day.

Iran itself didn’t blame Israel, but in statements, officials said that the attack came from those who oppose Tehran’s negotiations with the West.

The United States and the Islamic Republic have been involved in indirect negotiations in rescuing the Nuclear Deal.

Anything conclusive is still far off.

For any real progress to occur, Iran requires from the Biden Administration to lift all sanctions against it, related to the Nuclear Deal or otherwise.

The result is a standstill, in which Iran refuses to accept the US back into the deal with significant concessions, and Washington not in a hurry to fulfill any demands.

Tehran then continues incrementing various reductions of its commitments to the Iran Nuclear Deal, in loosely permitted margins.

In this way, it not only attempts to gain leverage over the US, but also tries to push the EU signatories into entering into discussions with Washington to salvage the deal.

The United States has admitted, without specifying clearly, that some sanctions that are inconsistent with the Nuclear Deal and could be lifted.

Iran likely did not appreciate such a concession.

Tehran, still, shouldn’t hold its breath, since the enemies of any such progress are many, and it is not put out of the question that if Israel was actually behind the incident in Natanz, that some from Washington’s fold were also present in the plot.

Still, Israel and also many in the US oppose any form of normalization between Tehran and Washington, and the continuous MSM reports that attempt to stir the pot stand testament to that.

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The Trudeau government’s refusal to sign the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty is both unpopular and hypocritical.

According to a poll released last week by Nanos Research, 55% of Canadians “support” and 19% “somewhat support” signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The same percentage agreed, or somewhat agreed with Canada signing a treaty that became international law in January even if Washington pressures Ottawa not to.

The poll commissioned by the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition, Simons Foundation Canada and Collectif Échec à la guerre also found that Canadians are concerned about the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Eighty percent of the 1007 people asked said the world should work to eliminate nuclear weapons while only 9% considered it acceptable for countries to have nuclear weapons for protection.

The poll highlights the unpopularity of the government’s position towards a treaty designed to stigmatize and criminalize nukes in a similar fashion to the UN landmine treaty and Chemical Weapons Convention. Canada was one of 38 states to vote against — 123 voted in favour — holding the 2017 UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination. Justin Trudeau then refused to send a representative to the TPNW negotiating meeting, which two-thirds of all countries attended. The PM went so far as to call the anti-nuclear initiative “useless” and since then his government has refused to join the 86 countries that have already signed the treaty. At the UN General Assembly in November Canada voted against 118 countries that reaffirmed their support for the TPNW.

The Liberals have taken these positions as they’ve publicly expressed a desire to abolish these ghastly weapons. Just before the TPNW entered into force at the start of the year Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Rob Oliphant said “we are committed to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.” In October, Global Affairs declared, “Canada unequivocally supports global nuclear disarmament.”

In isolation the gap between the Liberals’ nuclear weapons pronouncements and actions is striking. But if one broadens the lens, the hypocrisy is substantially more astounding. The Trudeau government says its international affairs are driven by a belief in an “international rules-based order” and “feminist foreign policy” yet they refuse to sign a nuclear treaty that directly advances these stated principles.

The TPNW has been dubbed the “first feminist law on nuclear weapons” since it specifically recognizes the different ways in which nuclear weapons production and use disproportionately impacts women. Additionally, the TPNW strengthens the international rules-based order by making weapons that are immoral also illegal under international law.

Fortunately, the NDP, Greens and Bloc Québécois all actively support the TPNW. The recent Nanos poll suggests five times more Canadians would vote for a party that supports the Treaty than would vote against one for doing so.

By signing the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty the Trudeau government can fulfill both Canadians wishes and their stated foreign-policy rhetoric.

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Featured image is from Flickr

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This article was originally published in 2018.

A San Francisco jury has found that the widely used herbicide, glyphosate (also known as Roundup) can cause cancer.

The jury returned its verdict in the case of a former groundskeeper, Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson, who developed terminal cancer after regular exposure to the herbicide.

It ordered the agrochemical giant Monsanto to pay $39.2 (£30) million in compensatory damages and $250 (£195) million in punitive damages for failing to warn consumers that exposure to Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

Mr Johnson filed the lawsuit against St. Louis-based Monsanto Company on January 28, 2016, alleging that exposure to the Roundup herbicide he sprayed while working as a groundskeeper for the Benicia Unified School District caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).

His case was the first of its kind to proceed to trial due to his terminal diagnosis.

After 8 weeks of trial proceedings, the jury found unanimously that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer caused Mr Johnson to develop NHL, and that Monsanto failed to warn of this severe health hazard. Importantly, the jury also found that Monsanto acted with malice, oppression or fraud and should be punished for its conduct.

Secret documents revealed

Despite the world’s foremost authority on cancer—the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—listing glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2015 Monsanto has continued to promote glyphosate as safe.

This is a line that the company has maintained for years, yet a mountain of testimony and documents was admitted during the trial. Johnson’s attorneys proved through testimony from Monsanto’s witnesses that company employees “ghostwrote” scientific articles and paid outside scientists to publish the articles in their name.

Internal documents also revealed that a scientific advisor hired by Monsanto told the company that past testing for Roundup was insufficient because glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, was tested in isolation without the other chemical ingredients that make up the Roundup formulation.

“Many of these confidential Monsanto documents were unsealed for the first time,” said co-lead counsel David Dickens. “They show that Monsanto knew that its testing was insufficient and that there was a synergistic effect when glyphosate is combined with surfactants which help the glyphosate penetrate both plant and animal cell walls.”

In other now-public documents, Monsanto employees reacted to California EPA’s listing of glyphosate as a carcinogen by calling Californians “liberals and morons,” overwhelming Monsanto like a “zombie movie” that they had to take out one at a time starting with the 2016 presidential election.

Co-lead trial counsel Brent Wisner said the verdict was a result of newly-revealed, confidential company documents.

“We were finally able to show the jury the secret, internal Monsanto documents proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to require labelling, we are proud that an independent jury followed the evidence and used its voice to send a message to Monsanto that its years of deception regarding Roundup is over and that they should put consumer safety first over profits.”

Heart-wrenching testimony

In addition to hearing from expert witnesses, the jury listened to heart-wrenching testimony from Lee Johnson and his wife, Araceli.

Araceli recalled for the jury the many sleepless nights Lee spent crying in bed when his children were not around. “He tried to hide it, and I think he tried to show that he was strong,” she said. “He tried to be positive; he wanted to be…for us and the kids.”

After her husband began chemotherapy, Araceli took a second job working 14-hour days to help pay the family’s rising medical bills while still driving her two sons an extra 45 minutes to Napa Valley School District in hopes of providing them better educational opportunities.

When Lee took the stand, he told the jury how scared and confused he was after receiving the news that he had cancer. He also described the times he contacted Monsanto to see if the skin lesions he developed were related to his use of Roundup. When he did not hear back from the company, he continued to use the herbicide.

Most notably, Johnson testified that he would never have used Roundup if he had known of the dangers, and accused Monsanto of concealing Roundup’s safety risks to continue profiting from its billion-dollar herbicide.

“I never would’ve sprayed that product on school grounds or around people if I knew it would cause them harm,” Johnson said during emotional testimony. “It’s unethical. It’s wrong. People don’t deserve that.”

More trials to come

Amazingly the jury in this trial was not allowed to see many of the internal documents that were uncovered during the trial. However, all these documents are now in the public domain and will inform the trials of more than 4,000 people from across the US who have also filed suit against Monsanto based on allegations linking Roundup to cancer.

Monsanto is expected to appeal the San Francisco court’s decision. In the meantime, the next Roundup cancer trial against Monsanto is another state case and is scheduled to begin in October in St. Louis, Missouri with dates for further cases to be announced in the next couple of months.

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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

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On the 9^th of April 2021, Ramsey Clark passed away in the States. He was ninety four. The former US Attorney-General had spent decades in the struggle for human rights both when he was in government and after he ceased to be Attorney-General. He had been in the forefront of so many human rights causes that it will not be possible to offer some reflections on them in a single obituary.

In this short tribute, I have chosen to highlight some of his outstanding achievements. At some point in the future, one hopes that some better qualified person will analyse in depth his impact upon American society and global politics.

It was Sara Founders, his close associate, herself a renowned activist, who conveyed news of his demise to me. I was deeply saddened by the news. The entire JUST family shares my profound sorrow.

JUST salutes Ramsey Clark as one of the greatest champions of social justice and human rights of our time. He fought for the marginalised and oppressed within his own country and in the world at large. His record of service to the weak and the vulnerable, whoever they were and wherever they were found, is without parallel.

JUST and I had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Clark when he visited Malaysia in the early nineties. We had invited him to speak on the Gulf War. His honest, candid views on the War and what its real motives  were and how it served the vested interests of  a  few made a deep impression on the audiences he spoke to.

Ramsey will be remembered as a fearless opponent of US hegemony and its devastating impact upon people everywhere.A person of admirable courage, he was willing to sacrifice his own well-being and face grave dangers and immense hardships as he attempted to defend the victims of US hegemony. For the people of Cuba and Palestine and numerous other such places, Ramsey Clark was the voice of justice, the unflinching spokesman of the downtrodden who could not be silenced by the might of power.

Many will also  honour him as  the US Attorney-General who supervised the drafting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which empowered the African American population as never before. He also enforced the desegregation of schools across the South. It is not widely known that Clark had also espoused the cause of another voiceless community in the US, namely native Americans.

The voice of the voiceless is no more. But the legacy of Ramsey Clark will live on.  He will continue to inspire all those who are committed to justice and human dignity for centuries to come.

May God Almighty place him among the righteous in the hereafter.

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Dr Chandra  Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia.

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The CDC announced today that deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines, following experimental COVID injections, have now surpassed 3000 deaths since December of 2020, when the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID shots were given emergency use authorization (EUA) by the FDA.

This was reported on the CDC website today, on their “Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination” page.

They report that 3,005 people have now died following COVID-19 experimental “vaccines.” (Note: not all of these deaths they are reporting have been entered into the VAERS database yet. Additional data is entered into VAERS every Friday.)

The CDC wants the public to think that this is an insignificant number, since over 189 million doses of COVID-19 emergency use injections have now been administered to the public.

But to put this into perspective, these 3,005 deaths now exceed the total number of deaths following ALL vaccinations from August of 2007, through the end of November, 2020, just before the experimental COVID shots started.

That is a time period of over 13 years, with 3,001 deaths following ALL vaccinations administered during that time frame.

Source

And yet, the CDC’s position has not changed. According to the CDC, all of these deaths following COVID-19 injections are “coincidences” and have nothing to do with the shots.

A review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths. (Emphasis theirs. Source.)

In spite of this, earlier today, the FDA and CDC temporarily halted injections of the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccines due to many reports of blood clots in the brain.

And blood clots are not the most common injuries being recorded following COVID experimental injections where the patient dies. Only two or three people have died in the U.S. from blood clots following the J&J injections.

Deaths by heart attack (cardiac arrest), for example, is much more prevalent, with 188 recorded deaths so far following COVID injections (source), including 7 heart attack fatalities following J&J shots. A total of 54 deaths have been recorded so far following J&J shots through April 1, 2021, with only 1 of those attributed to blood clots.

But these blood clot “clusters” are reportedly so rare among the general population, especially in the kind of clusters seen following J&J injections, that almost everything else has been ruled out, leaving the “vaccines” as the most likely cause.

Don’t expect the FDA to permanently stop the J&J injections, however. They are going to revise the guidelines given to healthcare people giving the J&J shots, so they know how to better treat these blood clots when they see them.

Since they are so rare and apparently unique to the AstraZeneca and J&J adenovirus “vaccines,” this will probably be viewed as another opportunity for Big Pharma to develop more new drugs to treat these unique blood clots.

And there were major supply issues in the U.S. for the J&J doses, so this will now allow U.S. COVID mass vaccination plans to use more of the Pfizer and Moderna experimental mRNA shots.

However, just as the UK has so far refused to stop injecting people with AstraZeneca shots that are causing blood clots, even as dozens of other countries have, expect the U.S. to take the same approach with the J&J shots and put them back into the market as soon as more doses are produced and become available.

And these 3,005 deaths that the CDC is reporting today are not the total deaths occurring following COVID-19 injections, as the VAERS system is a “passive” reporting system, and there is no way to know how many actual deaths are occurring and never being reported.

Here is a piece that MSNBC did back in 2009 discussing the limitations of the CDC VAERS database. This is from our Rumble channel, and it will also be available on our Bitchute Channel soon.

Click here to watch the video.

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There is hope that we may come to grips with this covid-chaos – worldwide deliberate systematic destruction of social systems and economies, country by country. The rendering of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, extreme poverty, abject famine and death – millions and millions of people died from this invisible enemy, the corona hoax in the past 15 months, mind you not from corona or covid-19, or SARS-CoV-2, but from the covid fraud’s collateral damage.

There is hope that we may regain our senses our freedom, maybe even our sovereignty as humans and sovereignty as nations – as independent individual nations. No One World Order (OWO), no Global Reset – and the disappearance for good of the nefarious World Economic Forum (WEF). And no longer a forced masquerade and social distancing and prohibition of meeting with family and friends, and with people in general – senseless and harmful quarantines; rules unconstitutionally imposed by most every government and if not obeyed, punishable with hefty fines and even prison. The regaining of long-lost solidarity.

Elite-made misery is what the last 13 months, since about March 2020, have brought us, people of the entire globe. It came as a shock – and the shock waves are still noticeable… by fear, a tremendous fear – fear from death, fear from an enemy, a virus which nobody has seen, but which is said to be mortal – yet, true science – which is not listened to and censured throughout the western world – determined that mortality from  this so-called corona virus is between 0.03% to 0.08 %, about equivalent to the common flu (See Dr. Antony Fauci “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted NIAID / NIH 28Febr2020 in NEJM).

The shock – even according to the “Shock Doctrine” (Naomi Klein, 2008) – will ebb off – and HOPE will surface – and will grow. That’s what is happening these days. And this even as the “Dark Cabal” intends to dismantle Human Rights, the long and elaborate work of HRs organizations – abolish HRs with the stroke of an arbitrary judgement by a bought or threatened court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), allowing nations to legally impose vaccination for the “common good of the people”. Thereby, they are setting a precedent for other basic HRs being outright killed. See this.

Hope emanates from the relentless work of doctors for the truth around the world and foremost of lawyer Dr. Reiner Füllmich, leader of the independent German Corona Investigative Committee.

Dr. Füllmich is advancing his agenda of one or several Class Action Suits in the US and Canada, as well as lawsuits against individuals and institutions in Europe and the US. He warns that the current geopolitical changes in the world are to be regarded as crimes against Humanity, since they are not based on science nor reason. Watch the video below.

Since March 2020, the world is in the grip of a small, extremely wealthy economic cabal.

Their names must not be mentioned. Those concerned know who they are – and how they are tyrannizing the entire globe – all 193 UN member countries – and, of course, first of all, the entire UN system.

The very world system that was created after WWII to preserve peace on earth, to fight for Human Rights, equality among races, cultures, religions, geographic regions and countries – though not easy – it is a noble task that only people with integrity in their veins can tackle.

There is no shortage of people with leadership capacity and integrity. But they are unfortunately not suitable for the (mostly western) corrupt system that has been growing exponentially during the past couple of hundred years.

All good intentions aside, many of the leaders of the UN and its sub-organizations got their jobs through nepotism or corruption. Or they were corrupted once in their office. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for a small so-called, self-declared elite, a materially rich and immoral group to take over the command of the world.

At the same time they corrupt, coerce or threaten all 193 UN member governments into following their dictate: creating an OWO, abolishing differences in culture, races, history, languages, colors – and well – believes, religious or non-religions – and finally forging a fully digitized world, where humans are implanted with electromagnetic fields, so they can be surveyed and manipulated by this elite and its servants, and, thus, transform humans into “transhumans” (Klaus Schwab in the 4th Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset).

A key premise to reach this objective is a much smaller world population. Which can be easier manipulated. Natural and especially unrenewable resources would be lasting longer for the elite, so that they may maintain their exquisite lifestyle a bit longer – sharing “their” stolen resources with fewer people.

If the principal eugenists that are part of this diabolical cabal have their way – world population should be reduced.

Around the time, when the 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, with its even more infamous “Lock Step” Scenario, precisely the scenario of which we are living the beginning right now, Bill Gates talked on a TED show in California, “Innovating to Zero” about the use of energy.

He used this TED presentation to promote his vaccination programs, literally saying, in substance:

If we do a real good job on new vaccines …. we could lower the world population by 10% to 15%.

TED Talk at 04:21:

(See Exact quotation, screenshot of Transcript below)

 

On the way to this diabolical objective, for which they have set themselves a ten-year goal, i.e. the UN Agenda 2030, they plan to transfer the remaining people’s resources and assets from the bottom to the top. Again, the UN body is in the forefront. They – their leaders – acquiesce to these demands.

This agenda was born during the first so-called environmental conference in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro – officially called the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3-14 June 1992. Everybody with a name in international diplomacy and international organizations – financial institutions and corporate interests was present, to grab a piece of the pie. The conclusions of this conference were planned decades in advance by numerous interim conferences and summits.

The ultimate conclusions, were environmental concerns, like in the fake “Global Warming”, Climate Change, Overpopulation and an invisible enemy, a virus-strike at once the entire planet – all merged to give us the horror scenario we are living now.

After a year the first shock waves have passed, even though the corrupted governments, particularly in the Global North, steamroll over any evidence that this is all a criminal swindle.

In the long-run to no avail, as truth will prevail. Those politicians – and leaders (sic) – of the participating 193 Governments, they are all aware of the game and the massive crime being perpetrated on humanity, on the very people who elected them and pay for their salaries and social benefits. These politicians must be called to justice as the truth will surface and prevail.

Hope – manifests itself also on a more modest, but nonetheless convincing and encouraging scale – people want to live, they want their stolen lives back, they want to enjoy living, being again their sovereign selves.

They want to dance again, with even the police participating – see this encouraging 6 min youtube of people randomly coming together in the Gare de l’Est of Paris on 8 April 2021 – to dance and sing to a spontaneously appearing band, manifesting resolutely for the almost lost “Joie de vivre”. Encouraging. To be repeated throughout the world.

Le Retour ! “DANSER ENCORE” – Flashmob – Gare de l’Est – 8 Avril 2021

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

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

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark delivers an address on the threat of war in the Asia-Pacific at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on August 1, 2013.

The speech is part of a series of events held in Pyongyang, Seoul and Tokyo around the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice agreement on July 27, 1953.

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VIDEO

Produced by James Corbett

 

Total Lockdown, Everything Closed: Urgent Appeal by German Medical Lawyer Dr. Beate Bahner

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel and Dr. Beate Bahner, April 13 2021

First published by GR on July 3, 2015

Earlier this week, I wrote about a deal reached that would soon be pumping out medical microchip implants. Meet the new face of medicine that polygamously marries Big Pharma, biotech, nanotech and wireless remote technology. Maybe hooking oneself into the Internet of Things will be an additional app, although this sounds like a passive form of medicine where someone else gets to call the shots, so to speak.

The same developers who are bringing wireless remotely controlled microchip implants are actually focusing on their first flagship product: Gates Foundation-funded birth-control microchip implants.

Wireless technology allows the remotely controlled chip to turn a woman’s ability to conceive off or on at will – temporary sterilization. Of course with remote technology funded by eugenics depopulation fanatics, the first questions should always be, “the ability to conceive by whose will?” This would be the complete antithesis of female empowerment or a “woman’s right to choose” – would it not?

The encryption is alleged to be so safe, that cyberhackers cannot break entry – that means you too.

The chip can be implanted into the hip, arms or beneath the back. Mum was the word during the last few years of development until it was finally publicly confirmed that the beta testing for the birth control chip would be starting towards the end of this year. Indeed, human volunteers will be sought for real-life chip testing.

TWCN Tech News reports more details on the microchip birth-control implant:

The birth control chip is the brain child of a professor, Robert Langer, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bill Gates and Melinda foundation has funded the research and the prototype is ready for human testing. The chips will be ready for sale by the year 2018 according to Robert Langer. The institute’s Chip Foundation and Bill Gates’ foundation have been working on the birth control chip for past three years.

The chip’s size is 20mm by 20mm by 7mm. The reservoirs of hormones would be stored on a microchip of 1.5cm. The chip’s data would always be encrypted so that others (cybercriminals or hackers) cannot access the information contained in the chip or misuse/alter or destroy it.

[…]

The release of hormones will be done by melting a part of solid hormonal stock using a small electric shock which won’t be noticed by humans.

[…]

The safety tests would begin by the end of year 2015 and Robert Langer is confident that the chips will hit market sometime in 2018.

As usual, “The main target” for the testing phase of the chips are women in third-world countries. That means African and Indian women will be human guinea pigs, subject to more of Gates’ polio vaccine tests. Or deaths/paralysis in Pakistan and more paralysis in Africa. But, I’m sure they will go back and make sure those women can conceive again, right? No one is admitting who is actually in control of the wireless capabilities of the implant that is allegedly impenetrable by hackers. Who does a woman see to have her ability to conceive turned back on? That would be an important piece of information, correct?

Interestingly, this news came right on the heels of New Zealand academic higher-ups seriously suggesting the temporary sterilization of all young teen girls – at least in New Zealand.

Brave New World much?

Headlines were simply calling it “free contraception” and recommending the temporary chemical shutting off of young female fertility for society’s sake. No thought whatsoever to looking to solve the source of “the problem” if it even should be looked at so harshly, or to the health of developing teen girls. And just like Gates’ moves in India, no real thoughts go to solving issues of impoverishment which historically, lead to blooming birth rates and medical birth issues. Why better people’s lives when there is so much control in remotely and wirelessly deciding if a woman can conceive?

Pregnancy costs too much….it’s inconvenient…it’s bad for mother and child, and other dehumanizing reasons were given. Ethics, compulsory slippery slopes and STD concerns aside, critics zeroed in on health and environment concerns regarding chemicals. Isn’t it convenient that Gates’ birth-control microchip should launch to save the world from those critiques? Who needs artificial hormones when wireless voltage and gold are there to alchemically or A.I.-chemically create “an artificial organ” through biotech, according to one of its developers. This is where Woman meets Machine to reproduce. Now there is no reason to protest – temporary sterilization for all!

How is that for female empowerment? It requires permission…

This writer’s sentiments align with the anti-eugenics op-ed piece by Leading Edge, that said:

For me, one of the most troubling aspects of this proposal is the way in which it so flippantly treats normal healthy female fertility as if it were something that needs to be shut down or medicated against – like we would a disease, or some other physiological problem.

Indeed, is the human body really worth altering to the point of switching on and off like it’s an inconvenient afterthought? Why go against who you are – you are not a disease. At least you deserve to be thought of as a glorious human being, and not something to be eradicated. Worse yet, why let someone else take the wheel from a remote location?

Image by Heather Callaghan

Heather Callaghan is an independent researcher, natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

Caccia F-16 Usa, inviati dalla base di Aviano, sono impegnati in «complesse operazioni aeree» in Grecia, dove ieri è iniziata l’esercitazione Iniochos 21.

Essi appartengono al 510th Fighter Squadron di stanza ad Aviano, il cui ruolo è indicato dall’emblema: il simbolo dell’atomo, con tre fulmini che colpiscono la terra, affiancato dall’aquila imperiale. Sono dunque aerei da attacco nucleare quelli impegnati dalla US Air Force in Grecia, che ha concesso nel 2020 agli Stati uniti l’uso di tutte le sue basi militari.

Partecipano all’Iniochos 21 anche cacciabombardieri F-16 e F-15 di Israele ed Emirati Arabi Uniti. L’esercitazione si svolge sull’Egeo a ridosso dell’area comprendente Mar Nero e Ucraina, dove si concentra la maxi esercitazione Defender-Europe 21 dell’Esercito Usa.

Queste e altre manovre militari, che fanno dell’Europa una grande piazza d’armi, creano una crescente tensione con la Russia, focalizzata sull’Ucraina. La Nato, dopo aver disgregato la Federazione Iugoslava inserendo il cuneo della guerra nelle sue fratture interne, si erge ora a paladina dell’integrità territoriale dell’Ucraina.

Il presidente del Comitato Militare della Nato, il britannico Stuart Perch capo della Royal Air Force, incontrando a Kiev il presidente Zelenskyy e il capo di stato maggiore Khomchak, ha dichiarato che «gli alleati Nato sono uniti nel condannare l’illegale annessione della Crimea da parte della Russia e le sue azioni aggressive nell’Ucraina orientale».

Ha così ripetuto la versione secondo cui sarebbe stata la Russia ad annettersi con la forza la Crimea, ignorando che sono stati i russi di Crimea a decidere con un referendum di staccarsi dall’Ucraina e rientrare nella Russia per evitare di essere attaccati, come i russi del Donbass, dai battaglioni neonazisti di Kiev.

Quelli usati nel 2014 quale forza d’assalto nel «putsch» di piazza Maidan, innescato da cecchini georgiani che sparavano sui dimostranti e sui poliziotti, e nelle azioni successive: villaggi messi a ferro e fuoco, attivisti bruciati vivi nella Camera del Lavoro di Odessa, inermi civili massacrati a Mariupol, bombardati col fosforo bianco a Donetsk e Lugansk.

Un sanguinoso colpo di stato sotto regia Usa/Nato, col fine strategico di provocare in Europa una nuova guerra fredda per isolare la Russia e rafforzare, allo stesso tempo, l’influenza e la presenza militare degli Stati uniti in Europa.

Il conflitto nel Donbass, le cui popolazioni si sono auto-organizzate nelle Repubbliche di Donetsk e Lugansk con una propria milizia popolare, ha attraversato un periodo di relativa tregua con l’apertura dei colloqui di Minsk per una soluzione pacifica.

Ora però il governo ucraino si è ritirato dai colloqui, col pretesto che rifiuta di andare a Minsk non essendo la Bielorussia un paese democratico. Allo stesso tempo le forze di Kiev hanno ripreso gli attacchi armati nel Donbass.

Il capo di stato maggiore Khomchak, che Stuart Perch ha lodato a nome della Nato per il suo «impegno nella ricerca di una soluzione pacifica del conflitto», ha dichiarato che l’esercito di Kiev «si sta preparando per l’offensiva nell’Ucraina orientale» e che in tale operazione «è prevista la partecipazione di alleati Nato».

Non a caso il conflitto nel Donbass si è riacceso quando, con l’amministrazione Biden, ha assunto la carica di segretario di Stato Antony Blinken. Di origine ucraina, è stato il principale regista del putsch di piazza Maidan in veste di vice-consigliere della sicurezza nazionale nell’amministrazione Obama-Biden.

Quale vice-segretaria di Stato Biden ha nominato Victoria Nuland, nel 2014 aiuto-regista dell’operazione Usa, costata oltre 5 miliardi di dollari, per instaurare in Ucraina il «buon governo» (come lei stessa dichiarò).

Non è escluso che a questo punto abbiano un piano: promuovere una offensiva delle forze di Kiev nel Donbass, sostenuta di fatto dalla Nato. Essa metterebbe Mosca di fronte a una scelta che tornerebbe comunque a vantaggio di Washington: lasciar massacrare le popolazioni russe del Donbass, o intervenire militarmente in loro appoggio. Si gioca col fuoco, non in senso figurato, accendendo la miccia di una bomba nel cuore dell’Europa.

Manlio Dinucci

First published by GR on August 8. 2015 reviews the history of eugenics and the role of the United Nations

 

From the ancient Acropolis in Athens, to the city in the sky in Peru; the only time many people hear about UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – is in relation to their world heritage programme. What must be documented however, are the views and opinions of UNESCO’s first Director-General, Julian Huxley.

Born in London in 1887, Huxley (pictured to the left) was an evolutionary biologist, philosopher, author and internationalist, who served as the head of UNESCO from 1946 to 1948. The brother of Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley, and the grandson of “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, the former UNESCO chief was from a family deeply entrenched within the British elite. Huxley was also a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), in addition to being an influential figure in popularising the movement of transhumanism.

But what most concerns us here is his devotion to the religion of the global elite; namely eugenics. Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, serving both as vice-president and president of the society in his lifetime. He wrote numerous essays throughout his life, writing extensively on eugenics and the need to depopulate the planet. In a 1964 essay titled: The Humanist Frame, the former UNESCO head reveals his desire to decrease the global population:

The world has to achieve the difficult task of reversing the direction of its thought about population. It has to begin thinking that our aim should be not increase but decrease – immediate decrease in the rate of population-growth; and in the long run, decrease in the absolute number of people in the world.

In another essay titled: The Crowded World, Huxley is even more explicit in stating his views. He argues that “eugenics can make an important contribution to man’s further evolution,” and that the human race must discourage “genetically defective or inferior types from breeding.” He then moves on to call for the “regulation and control of human numbers,” in addition to a “world population policy:”

Above all we need a world population policy – not at some unspecified date in the future, but now… We want all the international agencies of the U.N. to have a population policy.

Huxley believed that UNESCO should play a pivotal role in advancing the cause of eugenics, writing in a 1946 paper titled: UNESCO, its Purpose and its Philosophy:

At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable. (p.21).

The UN and Population Control

UNESCO is just one agency of the UN, with many other departments advocating population control – including the UN Population Fund. Many top UN officials have been vocal proponents of reducing the world’s population, often citing the faux issue of man-made global warming as the justification. In 2013 for instance, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), Christiana Figueres, stated that “we should make every effort” to reduce the world’s population.

A resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1997 once again reveals the desire of the UN to depopulate the planet (emphasis added):

On a more positive note, population growth rates have been declining globally, largely as a result of expanded basic education and health care. That trend is projected to lead to a stable world population in the middle of the twenty-first century (8.)… The current decline in population growth rates must be further promoted through national and international policies that promote economic development, social development, environmental protection, and poverty eradication, particularly the further expansion of basic education, with full and equal access for girls and women, and health care, including reproductive health care, including both family planning and sexual health, consistent with the report of the International Conference on Population and Development (30.).

But how can the elite reduce the global population?

In reality, there are very few (if any) viable ways to morally and humanely reduce the world’s population, without engaging in genocidal and nefarious policies. Covertly sterilizing people would of course be one of the most nefarious strategies for depopulating the planet, but also one of the most effective strategies at the disposal of the psychopathic elite.

In 2014, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association (KCDA) accused UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) ofsterilizing millions of girls and women through an anti-tetanus vaccination program. The KCDA claims that the vaccines had an undeclared anti-fertility agent added to them. Muhame Ngare, the spokesperson for the KCDA, stated that: “This WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus, but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine.”

Many individuals around the world strongly suspect that the primary objective of certain vaccination initiatives is to covertly depopulate the planet. This argument was further strengthened in 2010, when Bill Gates – the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds a plethora of vaccination initiates across the planet (including Gavi) – gave a talk at the 2010 TED conference. In the talk, Gates stated that “vaccines” are one tool that could be used for global population control:

First we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people; that’s heading up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really good job on new vaccines, health care [and] reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent (4.30 into the video).

Despite many departments of the UN seeming benign and altruistic, there are far more nefarious forces at play than initially meets the eye. Huxley was one of the ideological founders of UNESCO and the UN in general, with his malevolent views concerning population control and eugenics shared by many individuals who are currently part of the global elite.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report. 

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

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Downing Street’s dodgy dealings with Citigroup and Greensill show just how far the British government is willing to go to line the pockets of banks and other financial firms while bleeding taxpayers dry. 

The collapse of UK-based supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital continues to reverberate. In Germany the private banking association has paid out around €2.7 billion to more than 20,500 Greensill Bank customers as part of its deposit guarantee scheme after the bank collapsed in early March. But the deposits of institutional investors such as other financial institutions, investment firms, and local authorities are not covered. Fifty municipalities are believed to be nursing losses of at least €500 million.

Greensill’s biggest source of funds, Credit Suisse, has seen its share price plunge by almost a quarter. This is due not only to the fallout from Greensill’s collapse but also the impact of losses at its prime brokerage division caused by the stricken U.S. hedge fund Archegos, which are expected to reach €4 billion. The lender has warned of “considerable uncertainty” regarding the valuation of its supply chain finance fund. More than $5 billion of the roughly $10 billion invested in the fund remains outstanding.

Credit Suisse had assured clients in marketing documents that the debt in the supply chain fund was “low risk”. In one factsheet, it also said: “The underlying credit risk of the notes is fully insured by highly rated insurance companies.” At the beginning of March, that turned out not to be true. Some clients whose money remains trapped in the fund have threatened to sue.

Greensill’s biggest client, Anglo-Indian steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Gupta’s GFG Alliance reportedly owes Greensill more than €3 billion. It began defaulting on its obligations after Greensill stopped lending to the group at the beginning of March. At the end of March Gupta requested a £170 million emergency loan from the UK government, which was duly rejected. Greensill’s administrator, Grant Thornton, has been unable to verify invoices underpinning some of the loans to Gupta. Companies listed on the documents denied ever having done business with the metals magnate.

Now the fallout is beginning to splatter the British government, which invited Greensill to participate in its Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS). This is despite the fact the company:

a) wasn’t a bank; and

b) was quite clearly already in deep financial trouble. Greensill’s participation in CLBILS allowed it to extend even more loans, this time government backed, to Gupta’s empire.

Taxpayers will now probably end up holding the bag for those loans.

Special Treatment, Frantic Lobbying

Greensill Capital was the only non-bank financial firm to administer the emergency coronavirus loan schemes. The Treasury has admitted that Greensill was exempt from the capital adequacy and stress tests that would safeguard the public from risk when using other lenders. The apparent reason for this special treatment was that former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who had joined Greensill as an advisor in 2018, was frantically lobbying Chancellor of Exhchequer Rishi Sunak to hand government loans to the embattled financial firm even as it spiralled toward bankruptcy.

Cameron is believed to have held share options in Greensill Capital worth tens of millions of pounds. Now they’re worth nothing.

Cameron’s ties with Greensill’s eponymous founder, Lex Greensill, date all the way back to 2011, when Cameron’s then-cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, brought Greensill — then the head of Citi’s supply chain finance division — into 10 Downing Street as a special advisor. Greensill was still on Citi’s payroll when he joined the government. As an expose in The Sunday Times reveals, his brief was to convince ministers and senior civil servants to hire Citi to extend early payment to many of the government’s biggest suppliers.

Citigroup’s pitch was to pay the state’s suppliers in sectors where it apparently paid late, such as pharmacists awaiting NHS prescription fees.

[Maurice Thompson, the British boss of Citigroup who would later become chairman of Greensill Capital’s supervisory board] claimed this would help business owners — offering them an alternative to expensive loans — and the government. It would also be a smart investment for Citi: paying tens of billions of pounds in invoices on behalf of the most reliable of clients, the state, and taking a cut along the way.

This was not about finding a solution to a government problem, but rather a government problem that would fit Citi’s — and later Greensill’s — particular solution. The plan met stiff opposition in certain quarters. Given that government can borrow at ultra-low interest rates, some began asking why it needed to bring in Citigroup, or any investment bank for that matter, to pay its bills. Surely it made more sense to find a way to expedite its payments to suppliers rather than pay an intermediary to do so on its behalf.

Citi aimed to start small, by paying pharmacists that supplied the NHS, but its ambition was sweeping. It sought to roll out supply chain finance across the UK’s public sector, “paying invoices covering GPs, dentists, opticians, physiotherapists, the Ministry of Defence, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Royal Mail and even the BBC.”

Dodgy Dealings

A group of civil servants tried to thwart the plan. But Greensill enjoyed the backing of Heywood, Britain’s “most powerful civil servant” at the time. Heywood gave Greensill his own team and access to any department he wished to address. He also made him a senior advisor and crown representative to Her Majesty’s Government on supply chain finance.

What really irked some civil servants was the ambiguity of Greensill’s position. After Greensill had left Citibank, months after joining Downing Street, and set up his own supply chain finance firm (Greensill Capital) “it was unclear whose interests he was advancing: his former employer’s, his own firm’s or, as one would expect, the taxpayer’s.” Even more dubious was the way in which the government assigned projects to Citi (and later Greensill Capital), reports the Sunday Times.

At the time the pharmacy scheme was announced, there was no detail about who would benefit from it. The government never formally announced or published details of the policy.

 It is only thanks to the legal small print sent to pharmacists that details have emerged. For the first five years the scheme was operated by Citigroup. Then it was awarded to Greensill Capital, which ran it until the company’s collapse last month. The scheme has since been nationalised.

The precise circumstances in which the work was awarded to Citigroup remain unclear. The law states that unless the government is procuring services in an emergency, such as buying PPE during a pandemic or a helicopter in the middle of a war, it must create open and fair competition for companies that hope to deliver them.

However, last night the government admitted it did not sign a contract for Citigroup’s services. Nor did it create an open competition so that other banks could bid for the work. Despite the warnings of Peilow, it was handed out directly to Citi via an existing and secretive relationship between the bank and the Government Banking Service.

This chimes with an email sent by Greensill on November 12, 2012. He wrote: “It is important to note that there is no formal contract with Citibank with respect to the provision of supply chain finance.” He added: “This situation is entirely normal in the private sector as the bank is providing financing to our suppliers, not us.”

What is not normal is that a Wall Street bank was allowed to handle billions of pounds of NHS cash without a contract. Even by the government’s own standards it was exceptional: in 2018 it created a formal procurement process before handing the scheme to Greensill.

The evidence points to a stark conclusion: in the face of staunch opposition from civil servants, the government secretly gave a scheme to Citigroup, which came up with the idea, after its former head of supply chain finance, Greensill, drove the policy through Whitehall.

The only point of this scheme was to create easy money for financiers while bleeding taxpayers dry. As such, this scandal is not just about the losses taxpayers will have to bear as a result of the government’s underwriting of Greensill’s emergency loans to Gupta; it’s about the money that’s already been squandered by the government’s wholly unnecessary use of supply chain finance in the first place.

It’s all eerily reminiscent of the disastrous Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Over decades successive Tory and Labour governments signed off on hundreds of debt-financed projects for which the rate of interest could be as much as 2 to 3.75 percentage points higher than the cost of government borrowing. It was a giant cash cow for the government’s corporate and banking partners. In 2018 it was estimated that the government would end up paying private companies £199 billion, including interest, between April 2017 until the 2040s for existing deals, in addition to some £110 billion already paid — for 700 projects worth around £60 billion!

The senior politicians and civil servants get rewarded for their loyalty later down the line. The civil servant in charge of all the government’s commercial contracts during Cameron’s administration, Bill Crothers, became a director at Greensill in 2016, a year after leaving government. In 2017 Lex Greensill was awarded the  CBE for services to the British economy in Queen Elizabeth II’s 2017 Birthday Honours. A year later his company won a juicy government contract.

Happy Camping With Bin Salman

As for Cameron himself, he joined Greensill as a a special adviser in 2018, two years after leaving politics. In February 2020 he and Lex Greensill went on a camping holiday with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, little more than a year after bin Salman had arranged the murder of Washington Post and Middle East Eye columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The holiday appears to have reaped dividends. In June 2020, a senior Greensill Capital executive spoke publicly about the company’s partnership with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, describing it as “part of the family” of the sovereign wealth fund.

According to most reports Cameron did nothing wrong. Last week he was cleared of breaking lobbying rules after it was concluded that as an employee of Greensill, he was not required to declare himself on the register of consultant lobbyists. But his already tarnished reputation is in tatters and he could face an investigation. Cameron himself refuses to even respond to the lobbying allegations. His ear-splitting silence speaks volumes about the state of British politics today.

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With a new Cold War heating up between the U.S. and Russia and China, Witness for Peace Southwest, Addicted to War and CodePink organized a Truth Commission on the original Cold War on March 21st, which brought together the testimony of historians, activists and others who lived through the period.

Following a hearing three years ago, the Zoom event was hosted by Frank Dorrel, publisher of the popular anti-war text Addicted to War, and Rachel Bruhnke, a high school Spanish teacher and member of Witness for Peace Southwest.

See webinar here. [Source: freepress.org]

In her opening remarks, Bruhnke emphasized that the Cold War should rank as one of three great crimes in U.S. history, the first two being the genocide of the native Americans, and enslavement of African-Americans.

Bruhnke said that the aim of the Truth Commission was to “expose U.S. illegal and immoral actions in the name of anti-communism” and “150-year drama of red-baiting,” and to “unravel the web of lies.”

The truth-telling will help “enhance public understanding of today’s domestic and international events,” and avert new catastrophes.

Truth Commissions in countries that experienced large-scale atrocities, like Argentina, South Africa, Guatemala, and South Korea have helped pave the way for national reconciliation and led to a repudiation of past crimes so they would not happen again.

Ideally, this would happen also in the U.S.

An Avoidable Conflict

One of the first speakers at the Cold War Truth Commission, Dr. Peter Kuznick, Director of Nuclear Studies at American University and author of the best-selling book, An Untold History of the United States with Oliver Stone (2013), emphasized that the Cold War could have been prevented.

Near the end of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to sustain the spirit of cooperation between the U.S. and the USSR at the Yalta Conference where both countries agreed to accept each other’s sphere of influence in its respective domains (the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the U.S. in Western Europe).

The day before his death on April 12, 1945, Roosevelt cabled Prime Minister Winston Churchill that he wanted to “minimize the general Soviet problems as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out.”

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta conference. [Source: biography.com]

Nine months earlier, at the 1944 Democratic Party convention at Chicago Stadium, party bosses plotted behind the scenes to replace Henry Wallace with Harry S. Truman as Vice President, despite Wallace’s overwhelming popularity.

Wallace was a progressive anti-fascist who favored sustaining Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Henry Wallace surrounded by supporters at the 1944 Democratic Party convention. [Source: reformation.org]

Truman, by contrast, was a provincial who owed his career to the corrupt Pendergast political machine in Missouri, and was easily manipulatable.

At the convention, Florida Senator Claude “Red” Pepper was five seconds away from rubber stamping Wallace’s nomination when a mysterious blackout halted the day’s proceedings, and allowed for a night of back-room horse-trading by party power-brokers that doomed Wallace.

The result was the advent of the Cold War that cost millions of lives and warped democratic development. Its ominous first salvo was the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 140,000 civilians and poisoned countless more.

When the U.S. Invaded Russia

In 1917, the Woodrow Wilson administration first precipitated conflict with Russia when it sent 10,000 troops there in an effort to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution.

This forgotten military intervention was waged illegally, without the consent of Congress, and in violation of international law.

It was driven by an aversion to the Bolshevik nationalization decree, which threatened more than $650 million in U.S. investments (equivalent to over $11 billion in 2021 dollars adjusted for inflation).

The United States, as well as Britain, Canada, France and Japan, fought on the side of white counter-revolutionary generals, who “represented the minority and ancient imperialists who were obstinately impervious to the new Russia flaming in revolution against age-long abuses and tyranny,” as a Lieutenant in the 339^th U.S. infantry put it.

Advertisement for war bond used to support the U.S. invasion of Russia. [Source: smithsonianmag.com]

These white generals committed atrocities that “would have been considered shameful in the Middle Ages,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Eichelberger.

General William S. Graves, the commander of U.S. forces in Siberia, expressed doubt if “history will record in the past century a more flagrant case of flouting the well-known and approved practice in states in their international relations and using instead of the accepted principles of international law, the principle of might makes right.”

Today, less than ten percent of U.S. citizens have any knowledge of the U.S. invasion of Russia, which does not fit into the dominant triumphalist narrative about the Cold War that the Truth Commission was designed to counteract.

Special Economic Interests

Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner(2017), stressed at the Truth Commission the role of special economic interests in driving forward the Cold War.

Ellsberg stated that his view of the conflict changed a few years ago when he read Frank Kofsky’s book, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

In this book, Kofsky showed how American aerospace corporations, concerned about the loss of government contracts following the end of World War II and facing bankruptcy, successfully lobbied for the Truman administration to establish a permanent warfare economy.

The lobbying was successful because of a sophisticated public relations campaign that convinced the public of the danger of the Soviet Union and the need for permanent war readiness.

According to Ellsberg, a large part of the Cold War was to provide an annual subsidy for the aerospace industry.

Ellsberg said that “these are the people we [in the peace movement] are confronting—the largest defense contractors [Lockheed, Boeing or Raytheon] and the profits [for war scares and mobilization], jobs, campaign donations, and the revolving door between the large military contractors and Pentagon.” (See Christian Sorensen’s CAM article for more details on War Profiteers)

With a new Cold War now going forward, the Pentagon’s doomsday arsenal could cause a nuclear black winter, which almost came to pass during the 1^st Cold War.

Reclaiming the Lost Victims

Carol Francis, a retired L.A. teacher and veteran of the U.S.-Cuba solidarity movement, pointed out in her talk that the red-baiting practices associated with McCarthyism originated in the 1850s—just after the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

Political dissidents in Europe and the U.S. at that time were labeled derisively as communists and blacklisted from respectable professions as were abolitionists and anti-slavery activists.

During the 1950s, people involved in Hollywood film productions were a main target of red-baiting because of the glamour of the movie industry and its influence in shaping public opinion.

Film historian Ed Rempell detailed how the silent movie star Charlie Chaplin was denied re-entry into the United States after he had produced a film ridiculing Adolf Hitler and generated a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file of more than 2,000 pages.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) also targeted Marty Bookman, screenwriter of the Oscar winning 1939 film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” whose message about a young congressman fighting corruption was considered subversive in the 1950s.

According to Rempell, the blacklist not only ruined individual careers and undermined the First Amendment, but also fostered conservatism and conformity in U.S. culture, which is what societal elites wanted.

HUAC hearing, 1947. [Source: pinterest.com]

Greg Godels, an author at Marxism-Leninism Today, wants us to remember not only the well-known figures who were victims of the blacklist, but the countless Communist Party and other political activists who suffered from the impact of McCarthyism—whether as a result of lost jobs, public shaming, loss of their families, or from unjust imprisonment.

Godels’ talk focused on the forgotten victims of McCarthyism in his hometown of Pittsburgh—a center of McCarthyite repression. One was Leon Swimmer, a baker who tried to integrate the city’s pools. Two others were Allen Thomas and Joseph “Sonny” Robinson, leaders of the local steelworkers’ union and Communist Party USA, who had illegal items planted in their lockers so that they would be fired and arrested.

When Thomas appealed to his union, they asked him if he supported the second front in World War II against Germany. Thomas replied that he was really for a second front in Mississippi, which Godels said went over like lead.

Besides the honorable victims, Godels said that we should also remember the snitches—men like Harvey Matusow, Max Vetick and others who were later exposed as liars and alcoholics, but whom the government relied upon.

The FBI’s dubious role in the red scare should also never be forgotten, and the FBI never lionized.

Immoral U.S. Foreign Policy

The immorality of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was spelled out by Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the global network against weapons and nuclear power in space, who in his talk discussed Operation Paperclip, in which U.S. government agencies smuggled Nazi scientists and war criminals into the U.S. after World War II in order to gain a military-technological edge over the Soviets.

The most famous such scientist was Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi SS Major who recruited slave labor from Buchenwald concentration camp for the development of the V-2 rocket at the Mittelwerk underground factory in Nordhausen, and was appointed to direct the Marshall Space Flight Center at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Von Braun’s boss, Major General Walter Dornberger, also became a leader in the U.S. space program and Vice President of Bell Aerospace Company.^[1]

Walter Dornberger, left, with Wernher von Braun, after their surrender to the Allies in Germany in May 1945. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Stating that he had already lost two world wars and didn’t come to the U.S. to “lose a third,” Dornberger drafted a blueprint for the development of an orbital battle station at the top of the earth’s gravity well—a dream that has come to be fulfilled with the Trump administration’s new space command.

CovertAction Magazine’s Executive Editor Chris Agee testified at the Truth Commission about his father, Philip Agee, who became a CIA case officer and then whistleblower after he overheard screams of people being tortured while he was meeting with the Uruguayan chief of police in Montevideo. When Mr. Agee asked who the victims screaming were, the police chief responded that “they were the people you gave us [the police] last week.” Their ranks included trade union activists and other leftists organizing for better socio-economic and political conditions in Uruguay.

To give one example, one of Mr. Agee’s job, Chris said, was to plant an incriminating message in the toothpaste tube of a Cuban diplomat so that he would be apprehended—all in an effort to undermine interstate relations with the Cuban revolution.

Chris shared three principle ideas that guided his father: (1) the Cold War myth was a ruse to distract the population from understanding U.S. plutocratic imperial interests while hiding the true goals of third world revolutionary movements, (2) the need to struggle for internationalist worker solidarity and (3) raise awareness and organize through political activism for a more just world, politically, social and economically.

As his father stated toward the end of CIA Diary: On Company Business—his tell-all book where he named all the agents and their activities—he came to learn that instead of working toward building democracy and freedom around the world, as he had been led to believe through his training and indoctrination, he really served as a secret policeman for multinational corporate interests whose aim was to secure cheap access to labor, raw materials, foreign markets and U.S. geo-political control. While distracting attention away from real human needs, the Cold War myth served the military industrial complex with huge military budgets and provided the means for that geopolitical control.

The examples are endless: Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Angola, Nicaragua…and so on. Chris encouraged people to read Killing Hope written by William Blum, who worked with CovertAction Magazine for many years, and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the latter book his father gave him at a young age to debunk the myths of the Cold War bi-polar model taught in his high school.

After blowing the whistle on the Agency, Mr. Agee lived in exile for the rest of his life, causing young Chris’ life to be upended.

CovertAction Magazine’s co-founder, Louis Wolf, gave testimony about his time in Laos with the International Voluntary Services (IVS) from 1964 to 1967 digging wells, distributing seeds for fertilizer, and teaching English.

Wolf commented that, during his free time, he would share a drink with American pilots, who would routinely ‘dump’ their ordinance in Laos rice paddies because they could not otherwise land safely. In the name of fighting communism, more tonnage of bombs was dropped on Laos than in all theaters of World War II, with unexploded ordinance still contaminating large portions of the country.

Third World Victims

The Cold War provided a convenient pretext for an intensified war on the Third World. Any regime promoting independent economic development and control over its natural resources was labeled as communist and targeted for regime change.

CodePink founder Medea Benjamin spoke at the Truth Commission about her experiences as a nutritionist in the 1970s and early 1980s in Mozambique, whose promising experiment with socialism under Samora Machel was cut short by Machel’s assassination in 1986.

With covert U.S. assistance, apartheid South Africa supported RENAMO terrorist forces, which used the veneer of anti-communism to commit horrific atrocities and further destroy the country.

Nuri Ronaghy, a longtime peace activist, testified about the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil but was branded as a communist.

Ronaghy’s brother, a physician, was almost executed in the aftermath of the coup, and her family had to flee Iran.

Mossadegh was replaced by the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who mobilized Iranian resources to attack Dhofar in western Yemen following the coup, killing 30,000 people.

During his 25-year reign (1953-1979), the Shah killed so many people that the most famous song of the era was called “kiss me goodbye.”

When Ronaghy returned to Iran in the 1970s, she was sent to the infamous Evin prison where thousands were tortured and executed by the Shah’s secret police created by the CIA, known as SAVAK.

While in the prison, Ronaghy witnessed from her cell political prisoners being sent for torture and then returning unable to walk.

She also recounted how, during the 1979 Iranian revolution, U.S. agents burned a theater in Abadan where politically active youth watched movies.

Alicia Rivera testified after Ms. Ronaghy about her experience in El Salvador during the 1980s, where the Reagan administration supported right-wing death squads to counter the leftist Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement (FMLN).

Rivera fled the country after many people she had grown up with and their parents were killed.

She had gone to Catholic school and to the church of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who promoted liberation theology, which used the gospel as a basis for fighting for social justice.

Romero was branded as a communist and assassinated by neo-fascists backed by the CIA in 1980 as he was delivering a sermon. The Cold War resulted in at least 75,000 deaths in El Salvador, 8,000 more “disappeared” and one million displaced. Cold Warriors in Washington nevertheless considered the country a great model and called for the “Salvador option” in Iraq.

Making Losers of Us All

The Cold War Truth Commission offered strong evidence in favor of Mikhail Gorbachev’s maxim that “the Cold War made losers of us all.”

One of the speakers, Chris Venn, a peace activist from California, spoke about the epidemic of homelessness in the U.S. in the 1980s that resulted from President Ronald Reagan’s cutbacks to the budget of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development while his administration was funding vast military arsenals to fight the supposedly “evil” Soviet empire.

Nadya Williams spoke about her father’s blacklisting and premature death resulting from the CIA’s murderous 1965 coup in Indonesia, which resulted in over two million deaths and the imprisonment of tens of thousands more for decades under the most inhumane conditions.

The Truth Commission included testimonies from youth activists, film clips, and speeches from dissident voices like Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General of the United States, Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award-winning author unjustly incarcerated for more than 40 years, and S. Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran who lost his legs in 1987 to a purposely speeding train while trying to block arms shipments to the Contras, a right-wing terrorist army setup and armed by the U.S. to sabotage the socialist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

S. Brian Willson lies on the ground after being run over by a train carrying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. [Source: blog.pmpress.org]

One of the clips spotlighted the noble efforts of Father Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran, to shut down the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia. The School of the Americas has trained some of the worst dictators and assassins in Latin American history.

Another clip featured music from Gil Scott-Heron, who warned about how U.S. foreign policy was turning the planet into a cemetery and commented that there was no money to be made in peace.

“The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting”

The Czech philosopher Milan Kundera famously stated that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The Cold War Truth Commission is of special importance today because of the new Cold War between the U.S., Russia and China which has already broken out.

Many of the speakers conveyed their dismay with President Joe Biden’s statements calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer,” and with the dangerous escalation of U.S. missile emplacements in Eastern Europe and expansion of NATO toward Russia’s border, as well as with the fervent anti-Chinese rhetoric coming out of the White House.

While the Cold War Truth Commission may not be able to reverse the insanity of current U.S. policies, it has at least helped to ensure that a truthful history will be preserved.

It can also help lay the foundation for a resurgent left-wing movement that is guided by the wisdom and spirit of its Cold War-era predecessor.

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Notes

[1] For more on Paperclip, see Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 2014).

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***

Everyone is talking about DNA/RNA vaccines. Can they alter our own genetic codes?

The vaccine lobby says “Never!” I, however — laboring beneath the weight of a Ph.D. in virology — would instead quote Gilbert and Sullivan: “Well, hardly ever.”

Most people don’t know very much about DNA or RNA, so I’ll start with a 30-second chemistry discussion. DNA and RNA are both polymers, long strings (in this case, very long strings) composed of seemingly endless repetitions of a single basic chemical building block, called a nucleotide.

The resulting structure is often likened to a string of pearls, or to the rungs of a very, very long ladder. A single human cell contains some 6 billion nucleotide building blocks in its chromosomes.

In the picture below, the DNA basic building block is on the left, and the RNA building block is on the right. Take a look and see whether or not you can discern the difference:

Don’t see much difference? That’s because there isn’t much. The red asterisk (*) shows the primary difference. RNA has an extra “O” (the abbreviation for an Oxygen atom). That’s about it.

Viruses have no lives of their own. They can grow only in host cells, such as, for example, your cells. In order for a virus to infect you, it needs to recognize a “receptor” on your cell surfaces. If — and only if — the virus can recognize such a receptor, then it has its own clever way of attaching itself to that receptor and sneaking its DNA (or RNA — viruses can have either one) into your cells.

Once inside, the DNA (or RNA) virus chromosome proceeds to reproduce itself, giving rise to hundreds or thousands of exact copies. These are then turned into complete virus particles by being covered with a protective protein coat. Next, the cell is broken open and the new progeny viruses disperse, infecting hundreds or thousands of other cells.

It’s easy to see how a viral infection can spread like wildfire in your body.

Even though the chemical differences between DNA and RNA are relatively small, the cell is smart enough to instantly recognize those small differences and act accordingly.

DNA is replicated in our cells by means of an enzyme called “DNA polymerase.” RNA, however, will not ordinarily be replicated by our cells because that’s simply not the way things work. So how does the RNA virus reproduce?

Some RNA viruses have an enzyme called “reverse transcriptase,” which begins each new viral life cycle by converting the virus’ RNA chromosome into DNA. This DNA copy can then be replicated by the cell’s own DNA polymerase-based system.

But other RNA viruses, including the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus, bring in their own special reproductive enzyme called “RNA polymerase,” which has the ability to directly produce numerous copies of the virus’ own RNA chromosome without any help from the cell’s native DNA polymerase system.

Now let’s speak for a moment about alteration of our genetic code. The interaction between a virus and the host cell is generally classified as being one of two distinct types of interaction.

Historically, the first type of interaction (discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) was what we now call, in retrospect, a “productive infection.” Here the virus reproduces and kills the cell, releasing the many progeny as described above.

It was only in the later years of the 20th century that it became clear that there is a second sort of interaction, very different in nature, known as a “transforming” interaction (also called a “latent” infection). In a transforming interaction there is no virus growth at all. Instead, the single chromosome of the virus uses its bag of genetic tricks to insert itself into one of the 46 chromosomes of the host cell. There the viral DNA remains, sometimes forever.

In some species, such as herpesviruses, the virus’ chromosome just sits there, inside the host chromosome, apparently doing nothing — unless and until some sort of stimulus causes it to “pop out” again and begin growing. This produces a “cold sore” of the lips (herpesvirus type 1) or genitalia (herpesvirus type 2).

A large number of publications have documented that many — perhaps most — human beings have, within their nervous systems, cells which quietly harbor latent herpesvirus infections, even though the majority of humans will never get a cold sore. It is a known fact that herpes type I, in the latent state, resides in the trigeminal ganglion, inside the skull near the spinal cord. It is believed to be perfectly harmless in this latent state.

Other viruses, however, are not harmless in the latent state. A good example is SV-40, a DNA virus which is known to be capable of causing cancer in many mammalian species. SV-40 infects cells, but it usually doesn’t grow. Instead, it inserts its own chromosome into one of the cell’s chromosomes (a process called “integration”), and from that new base of operations it converts the cell from a normal cell, which is subject to normal forms of growth control, to a malignant cell which respects none of the host organism’s growth controls, and thereby causes cancer. This alteration, from normal to cancerous, is referred to as a “malignant transformation.”

But the term “transformation” does not automatically connote malignancy. Although a “transformation” may be harmful in any number of ways (and not solely limited to cancer), it might in other cases be entirely inconsequential (as far as the eye can see). In special cases, it might even be beneficial.

Curiously, however, even now — 68 years after the publication of the “Watson-Crick double-helix” structure for DNA — the dream of curing disease via human genetic re-engineering, employing custom-made viruses, remains in its infancy.

On the other hand, certain questionable forms of hastily-contrived human genetic experimentation, empowered by “executive orders,” and facilitated by “fast-track” bypassing of safety protocols, have become alarmingly commonplace.

Can a DNA-based vaccine ‘transform’ a human cell into something genetically different?

With all this in mind, we can now ask the question of whether or not a DNA-based vaccine might “transform” a human cell into something genetically different.

This is no small question, because if the answer is “yes,” and if the transformation proves to be harmful, then that harm may be passed to every subsequent generation — forever.

From 1972-1978, I was an M.D. – Ph.D. student at the New York University School of Medicine. Our lab addressed a question which was current at that time: In “productive infections,” where a virus replicates in cells and ultimately destroys them, might there nevertheless be integration of viral DNA into the host cell chromosomes?

We asked that question because, at that time in virological history, it had become abundantly clear that many different types of viruses could transform many different types of cells into malignant cancer cells. Those cells, if transplanted into animal hosts, would then form cancerous growths which would quickly kill the animal.

This sort of virus-mediated malignant transformation always began with the insertion (i.e., integration) of viral DNA into the chromosomes of the host cells. (Yes, I’m talking about that which the vaccine companies “assure” us will not follow vaccination with their “fast-tracked” new products).

Once these viral genes take up residence in host cell chromosomes, they are thereby empowered to seize control of the cell’s metabolism, perverting it to their own purposes.

So the question virologists were asking in the 1970s was this: Is the insertion of viral genes into host cell chromosomes a process uniquely associated with cancerous transformations? Or might the insertion of viral genes into host cell chromosomes take place in any and every sort of viral infection, whether it was a “productive” infection leading to virus multiplication and cell death, or whether it was a “transforming” infection where there was no virus multiplication at all?

We looked into this question by studying the infection of mammalian cells by herpesviruses. In the end, we published three papers, all in leading virology journals. These papers, listed below, are very difficult reading for anyone not familiar with the peculiar jargon of the field. But for those who are interested, here are the three references:

1. Rush MJ & Biegeleisen K.  Association of Herpes simplex virus DNA with host chromosomal DNA during productive infection. Virology, 69:246-257 (1976).  https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6822(76)90211-7.
2. Rush MJ, Yanagi K & Biegeleisen K.  Further studies on the association of Herpes simplex virus DNA and host DNA during productive infection.  Virology, 83:221-225 (1977).  DOI:  10.1016/0042-6822(77)90227-6.
3. Yanagi K; Rush MG; Biegeleisen K.  Integration of herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA into the DNA of growth-arrested BHK-21 cells. Journal Of General Virology, 44(3):657-667 (1979).  DOI: 10.1099/0022-1317-44-3-657.

The first paper proved that herpesvirus genes are integrated into host cell chromosomes, but left some important questions unanswered concerning the physico-chemical nature of the linkage between viral and host DNA.

By the third paper, however, all reasonable doubt about the integration of viral DNA into host chromosomes had been laid to rest.

Another line of investigation going on at about the same time, in the laboratory of W. Munyon, led to the same conclusion. Munyon and his associates studied an enzyme called “thymidine kinase.” What that enzyme does is extraneous to this discussion. What matters is that the gene for the enzyme is normally found in human chromosomes, and also in herpesvirus chromosomes.

Munyon and his team had a mutant strain of cells that lacked the thymidine kinase gene. They infected those cells with herpesvirus that had been irradiated, and thereby rendered incapable of multiplying in and killing the cells.

But the virus did, nevertheless, carry in its own thymidine kinase gene. Upon infection, the cells were shown to suddenly have acquired that enzyme, even though they were mutants who had none of their own. Because the virus had been irradiated, it did not kill the cells, which continued growing in the laboratory.

Eight months — which is hundreds of generations — later, the progeny of those cells were still producing thymidine kinase!

So if a DNA vaccine company alleges that their vaccine will cause my cells to temporarily manufacture corona spike protein, but will not permanently “transform” my cells in any other way, what am I to think?

Or, perhaps I’m not supposed to think?

So far we’ve talked only about herpesvirus. The new Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses “reproductively incompetent” genetically engineered adenovirus as the carrier for the corona spike protein gene.

Should we worry? After all, unexpected integration of viral genes may be peculiar only to herpesvirus, and not adenovirus, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. What I did not realize, at the time I was doing my own Ph.D. research on herpesvirus, was that other labs were conducting the same type of research on the adenovirus. Here’s an example of that work:

Schick J, Baczko K, Fanning E, Groneberg J, Burgert H, & Doerfler W (1975).  Intracellular forms of adenovirus DNA: Integrated form of Adenovirus DNA appears early in productive infection.  Proc Nat Acad Sci USA, 73(4):1043-1047.  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.73.4.1043.  PMID: 1063388.  PMCID: PMC430196.

Like coronavirus, there are dozens of known adenovirus types, most of which are classified as “cold viruses.” But some adenoviruses cause much more serious disease, including cancer.

In the 1970s, the adenovirus researchers were asking the same questions that the herpesvirus workers were asking. And they were coming up with the same answers: In “productive infection,” where adenovirus was supposed to only replicate and destroy the cell, there was indeed extensive integration of viral genes into the host cell chromosomes — even though there was no obvious biological reason for the virus to do that.

No guarantees, despite what vaccine makers say

It seems that in many, perhaps most viral infections, integration of viral DNA into the host cells is a very real possibility. When this occurs, there is absolutely no way to “guarantee” that the genetic code of the host cell will not be re-written.

The question then arises: If this is the case, why do vaccine manufacturers “assure” us that their marginally tested products are genetically “safe?”

I would suggest three possible explanations, all equally reprehensible:

1. It may be that the scientists in these companies simply do not know the history of this field. What can one say? “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
2. It may be that anything in industry which does not improve the quarterly profit report is at great risk of being ignored.
3. It may be that calling a new vaccine “safe,” in the pharmaceutical world, means little more than that the company has the legal resources to deal with any liability claims that arise.

Which of these three possible explanations is the correct one? Or is it all three?

In any event, you now know why I shall not take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

What about RNA vaccines?

We’ve been discussing DNA vaccines. What about RNA vaccines, such as Pfizer and Moderna?

Although I have no personal experience working in the lab on genetic transformation of human cells by RNA viruses, it is appropriate to comment briefly on that subject before closing.

The RNA vaccines are alleged by their promoters to be genetically “safe” because RNA cannot be directly incorporated into human chromosomes.

Is that true? Yes. But does that make them “safe?” Perhaps not.

What the vaccine companies forgot to tell you is that our cells have several types of “reverse transcriptase” of their own, which can potentially convert the vaccine RNA into DNA.

In December 2020, a team of researchers from Harvard and MIT (Zhang et al) posted an article at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-hosted bioRxiv preprint server showing that, in all probability, incorporation of coronavirus spike protein genes, into the chromosomes of infected cells, does indeed take place, and is mediated by the so-called “LINE-1” type of human reverse transcriptase. (For more on the Harvard-MIT study and its implications, read this article previously published by The Defender).

To be clear, this was not a vaccine study, but a study in which cells were deliberately infected with whole, non-inactivated virus, as happens in nature, and which apparently can result in genetic transformation of the cells after all.

This, suggested the authors, may account for the now-frequent observation of COVID-19 test “positivity” in people who are clearly not sick. That is, the bodies of such people are continually manufacturing corona spike protein, from the viral genes which have been permanently incorporated into their genetic codes.

It could be said, in defense of the genetics-based-vaccine lobby, that since infection with whole, functional coronavirus clearly appears capable of transforming the human genetic code, causing our cells to forever manufacture the viral spike protein, there may therefore be some justification in mimicking this natural transformation via an unnatural RNA vaccine.

In condemnation of that lobby, however, we cannot overlook the obviously unwarranted assurances of vaccine manufacturers that alteration of our genetic code “will not happen.” Such a statement casts doubt on (a) their competence in their own field, and (b) their willingness to accept the consequences of their own actions.

Moreover, reverse transcription is a known means of normal human chromosome-to-chromosome gene mobility, a fascinating process whose study goes back to the pioneering work of Barbara McClintock in the 1930s. It has thus been well-known, for the better part of a century, that the effects of moving genes around will very much depend on where they are moved, and on exactly and precisely what is moved.

In the case of the current vaccine-borne corona spike protein gene, no one has any clue as to where in our genomes it will wind up, or what it will do when it gets there.

There is a corona vaccine, Novavax, which contains no genetic material at all (i.e., no DNA or RNA), but rather consists solely of the corona spike protein. Of all the available vaccines, this is the one least likely to cause human genetic harm. But almost no one gets it, because it’s not available in most countries. Why not?

There are also at least two corona vaccines (Sinopharm, Sinovac) which are made from whole inactivated virus, analogous to the polio vaccines of the 20th century. This is a tried and tested form of technology, but very few people get those vaccines either.

Instead, we’re all being pressured into taking hastily prepared genetic vaccines, which are likely to transform our heredity, permanently. Is there any reason for this, other than countless billions of dollars in windfall profits?

It is my view that the massive and barely studied global human genetic experiment going on right now is the biological equivalent of a drunk driver, speeding down the highway with impunity at 60 mph — at night without headlights — because he says that “he knows the road.”

Most sensible people are wary about “GMO,” even in food. Now we’re going to genetically modify ourselves? Why? What madness is this?

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Ken Biegeleisen, M.D., Ph.D., has studied virology and is the author of multiple studies on virology and DNA/protein structure.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

Despite various official efforts, including regular payment of maternal capital to stimulate birth rates and regulating migration policy to boost population, Russia is reportedly experiencing decreasing population. According to the Federal State Statistics Service, Russia’s population currently stands at approximately 144 million, down from 148.3 million.

Experts at the Higher School of Economics believe that regulating the legal status of migrants, majority of them arriving from the Commonwealth of Independent States or the former Soviet republics, could be useful or resourceful for developing the economy, especially on various infrastructure projects planned for country. These huge human resources could be used in the vast agricultural fields to boost domestic agricultural production. On the contrary, the Federal Migration Service plans to deport all illegal migrants from Russia.

Within the long-term sustainable development program, Russia has multibillion dollar plans to address its infrastructure deficit especially in the provinces, and undertake megaprojects across its vast territory, and migrant labor could be useful here. The government can ensure that steady improvements are consistently made with the strategy of legalizing (regulating legal status) and redeploying the available foreign labor, majority from the former Soviet republics rather than deporting back to their countries of origin.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has been credited for transforming the city into a very neat and smart modern one, thanks partly to foreign labor – invaluable reliable asset – performing excellently in maintaining cleanliness and on the large-scale construction sites, and so also in various micro-regions on the edge or outskirts of Moscow.

With its accumulated experience, the Moscow City Hall has now started hosting the Smart Cities Moscow, international forum dedicated to the development of smart cities and for discussing about changes in development strategies, infrastructure challenges and adaptation of the urban environment to the realities of the new normal socity.

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia lacks sufficient number of migrants to fulfill its ambitious development plans. He further acknowledged that the number of migrants in Russia has reduced significantly, and now their numbers are not sufficient to implement ambitious projects in the country.

“I can only speak about the real state of affairs, which suggests that, in fact, we have very few migrants remaining over the past year. Actually, we have a severe dearth of these migrants to implement our ambitious plans,” the Kremlin spokesman pointed out.

In particular, it concerns projects in agricultural and construction sectors.

“We need to build more than we are building now. It should be more tangible, and this requires working hands. There is certainly a shortage in migrants. Now there are few of them due to the pandemic,” Peskov said.

Early April, an official from the Russian Interior Ministry told TASS News Agency that the number of illegal migrants working in Russia decreased by 40% in 2020 if compared to the previous year. It also stated that 5.5 million foreign citizens were registered staying in Russia last year, while the average figure previously ranged between nine and eleven million.

On March 30, 2021, President Vladimir Putin chaired the tenth meeting of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations via videoconference, noted that tackling the tasks facing the country needs not only an effective economy but also competent management. For a huge multinational state such as Russia, it is fundamentally, and even crucially important, to ensure public solidarity and a feeling of involvement in the life, and responsibility for its present and future.

At this moment, over 80 percent of Russian citizens have a positive view on interethnic relations, and it is important in harmonizing interethnic relations in the country, Putin noted during the meeting, and added “Russia has a unique and original heritage of its peoples. It is part of our common wealth, it should be accessible to every resident of our country, every citizen, everyone who lives on this land. Of course, we will need to review the proposal to extend the terms for temporary stay of minors of foreign citizens in the Russian Federation.“

President Vladimir Putin has already approved a list of instructions aimed at reforming the migration requirements and the institution of citizenship in Russia based on the proposals drafted by the working group for implementation of the State Migration Policy Concept of the Russian Federation for 2019-2025.

“Within the framework of the working group for implementation of the State Migration Policy Concept of the Russian Federation for 2019-2025, the Presidential Executive Office of the Russian Federation shall organize work aimed at reforming the migration requirements and the institution of citizenship of the Russian Federation,” an official statement posted to Kremlin website.

In addition, the president ordered the Government, the Interior and Foreign Ministries, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Justice Ministry alongside the Presidential Executive Office to make amendments to the plan of action for 2019-2021, aimed at implementing the State Migration Policy Concept of the Russian Federation for 2019-2025.

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research.

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On Sunday 11 April 2021, Dr Beate Bahner, a lawyer, member of the Lawyers for Medical Law and member of the Lawyers for the Right to Enlightenment, made an urgent video appeal to all Germans. Quote:

“If one in 1,000 tests positive – or 100 in 100,000 – then there is a threat of total lockdown. Do you know what that means? – Everything closed: schools, restaurants, shops, factories, playgrounds, cinemas, museums…. Everything. You can no longer meet, neither with family nor with friends. You are locked in – watching the world on a screen, behind your computer or TV. Your life is being taken away from you by the government, by Frau Merkel.

There hasn’t been anything like this since the Second World War.

Do you know what that means? Even if 100 out of 100,000 test positive, it doesn’t mean that the 100 are sick. On the contrary. 99.9% are healthy, don’t notice their “infection”. Moreover, PCR tests are totally unsuitable for detecting a corona virus. All doctors, all virologists, all scientists worthy of the name know this by now. Mrs Merkel and her government know this too. But they lie to scare you – to restrict you, to steal your freedom, what is left.

Germany – Wake Up! If you let them do this to you, it’s over. Then you – Germany – will never know freedom again. Germany – Wake Up!”

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Is the once flourishing fatherland – the land of poets and thinkers – being dealt the death blow?

There is no doubt that the so-called world elite is already in the process of destroying the previous world order in order to replace it with a new one – a satanic one. And with the help of compulsory mass vaccinations, according to ex-Pfizer vice-president Dr Mike Yeadon, a mass depopulation is also being prepared (1). Only the thoughts are still free. The general digitalisation mania has not yet robbed us of all humanity and degraded us to totally monitored robot people.

Therefore, we should spread the appeal of the courageous lawyer Dr. Beate Bahner and have it translated into our national language – as long as it is not too late. Let us live up to our responsibility and stop playing the diabolical game of fear! Let’s say NO loudly!

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) https://unser-mitteleuropa.com/ex-pfizer-vizepraesident-die-regierungen-luegen-euch-an-und-bereiten-eine-massenentvoelkerung-vor/

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***

As someone with a background in foreign policy and international affairs, I am often asked to discuss the ramifications of having Joe Biden as the so-called leader of the Free World.

While it is easy to get carried away debating the merits of a heavily compromised man being the physical representation of the Free World, and how cringeworthy and depressing that is, I can’t help but get stuck on the possibility that the term itself is no longer viable.

“What Free World?”

The Free World is a term that was originally used to describe the Allied powers during WWII, but it is most applicable here when discussing what united the anti-Soviet bloc to the United States during the Cold War. It was these “Western world” values of free speech, free media, the freedom of assembly, and freedom of association that united our sovereign states against the evils of Communism.

COVID Mania has turned the world’s sovereign states into one tyranny after another. And the authoritarian forces of the world won this second “Cold War” against its citizens without firing a shot. Some appear to be under the impression that the ruling class, which just finished the fastest roll up of power in human history, will simply return these stolen liberties when the “national emergency” comes to an end. I’m not particularly convinced that this is the case.

As John Adams once said, “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

In the United States, our federalist system allows for pockets of freedom in places like Florida, Texas, South Dakota and the like. But dare to protest in the Nation’s Capital today and you’ll quickly find yourself on an FBI watchlist, and almost certainly, with a future date in our nation’s kangaroo court system. We continue to see authoritarian states implementing “vaccine passports” and other discriminatory measures in the name of a virus. Throughout most population centers in the United States, there are still heavy “COVID restrictions” on society and the economy. Our nation is no longer united behind these “Free World” concepts, and they are now only considered virtuous ideas in the aforementioned pockets of freedom in America. In the rest of the country, it has been made crystal-clear that your rights do not supersede a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate.

Now observe the devastation in the rest of the Anglosphere:

The United Kingdom has placed its citizens under indefinite confinement. Their “COVID restrictions” have lasted well over a year, and there is no end in sight.

After massive, sustained protests, #UK PM Boris Johnson threatens stricter lockdowns https://t.co/cLeDFqPNJY

— The HighWire (@HighWireTalk) September 22, 2020

Canada, which has also been under a strict lockdown for over a year, has mutilated the free press while simultaneously transforming into a Chinese state colony. Under the “leadership” of Justin Trudeau, Canada has essentially outlawed freedom of movement, free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly in the name of a virus.

After the Christians tore down the fence that the government had built around the Edmonton church, the police sent in 200 heavily-armed riot police. That’s the church building you see there. This is China stuff, Iran stuff. But it’s happening in Canada. pic.twitter.com/jYs8E1oXGh

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) April 11, 2021

New Zealand, another nation that is cozying up to Beijing, is committed to a “Zero COVID” self-siege that has blockaded the island nation from the world for over a year. Citizens who test positive for COVID-19 are forcibly sent to quarantine camps. The government has recently considered legislation punishing people for the act of acquiring COVID-19.

We told you. We TOLD you.

If you give a tyrant an inch, they will take a mile.

New Zealand has announced "quarantine camps" where people can be forcibly relocated. pic.twitter.com/XrcigHHDKD

— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) October 27, 2020

States in Australia have implemented some of the most intrusive lockdowns in the world. In Victoria, lockdowns meant citizens were only allowed to leave their homes for one hour a day, and they were not allowed to travel outside of a certain radius from their homes. The act of protesting is illegal, and it will be met by riot police.

Victoria has recorded one new local case of COVID-19 as it begins a stint of at least five days in lockdown. https://t.co/ssbRglnzos

— SBS News (@SBSNews) February 12, 2021

As for other NATO members, and other bumper sticker labeled liberal democracies in the “Free World,” actual freedoms remain difficult to identify. Germany, France, and Italy just entered another round of rights restricting lockdowns, and countless more “Free World” nations continue chipping away at personal freedoms.

Covid-19: France enters third national lockdown amid ICU surge https://t.co/QV85AapE4B

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 3, 2021

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition has drafted legislation that would shift the power to impose COVID-19 restrictions to the federal government from regional leaders to combat a surge in infections.https://t.co/eMkYLC7kAM

— Stars and Stripes (@starsandstripes) April 11, 2021

Making things all the more confusing (and eye opening), people living in countries long considered adversarial, authoritarian nations (like Russia, China, Belarus, etc) are enjoying more freedoms than your average citizen in the West. Belarus never implemented lockdowns. Russians have treated their restrictions in a very lax manner. China has been open for well over a year.

After months of protests and a year of pandemic, Lukashenko held "a ball for the youth" last night in Minsk. Unreal. pic.twitter.com/iJUwV61Rom

— Scott Rose (@rprose) December 30, 2020

The Western values that some of us hold near and dear to our hearts are not shared by our ruling class. The Free World, as a united force, was indeed very sick for the better part of the 21st century, but it has finally died from COVID-19. The concept only lives on in our imaginations and memories. The COVID era has exposed that these values that supposedly united the West are nothing more than a facade.

However, there are reasons for optimism. There are millions and millions of us who have witnessed the atrocities committed by governments over the course of the past year, and have become “red-pilled” to the threat posed by these authoritarian forces. Like-minded people can and will build a new coalition that stands behind our unalienable rights. Whether that comes in the form of an alliance of nation states or a more independent movement of citizens around the world remains to be seen. The demand for the recognition of basic human freedoms will soon become too obvious to ignore. There are many paths for a new Free World to emerge, but for now, the old Free World as a uniting force for Western values is a relic of history.

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***

Iran has said talks will still go ahead in Vienna in spite of an attack on its nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Israel was behind the cyber-attack but stressed Iran would not fall into the trap of halting talks. Indeed, efforts to move beyond the Trump legacy in relation to the JCPOA last week have been constructive. Shuttle (or rather hotel hopping) diplomacy between Iran and America with France, Germany, UK, China, Russia and EU negotiators acting as go between have brought the sides closer to agreement. All sides have been willing to engage. The Americans – the Biden administration – fronting a deeply divided nation successfully navigated the dangerous rocks of the domestic audience. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Abbas Araghchi later reported there were signs that the Americans would be willing to lift all the sanctions in one go to return to the JCPOA. Talks resume this week.

It is inevitable though that as the two sides inch toward making workable compromises that will lead to the reinstatement of the JCPOA, enemies of the deal will do their utmost to derail it. As well as Israel, Saudi Arabia and US neocons are poised to oppose. For this reason, at the outset of the talks the Iranians passed their concerns to the Austrian police and security services, warning that the Albanian based Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorist cult would be sure to lob a symbolic stink bomb or two to toxify the atmosphere. Forewarned, Austrian police were able to curtail MEK activity [People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran] except for one lone MEK protestor who managed to shout at Araghchi and his colleague as they emerged from the building to get into their car.

This alone was such a trivial incident that analysts examining the talks in Vienna may be forgiven for missing the significance of this small detail. But there it was, hidden in plain sight, the west’s go to tool for regime change. The MEK, as ever, threatening to hijack the Iran agenda. It is beyond a joke that this rogue group which is infamous for using violence – whether in terrorist attacks in and beyond Iran, against its own members and former members, in the service of Israeli assassinations and false ops – and which threatens mass suicide whenever it feels existentially threatened, should be free to deploy ‘protesters’ to interrupt these high-level talks in Europe.

How come the MEK is still tolerated?

It’s certain that the Biden administration officials did not want the MEK to interfere in these efforts to engage Iran in talks. It’s even likely that that the majority of Republicans would not condone this. The MEK has become synonymous with Donald Trump’s approach to Iran – fabricate and inflate the threat posed by Iran to the Middle East (read Israel and Saudi Arabia), and threaten war and punish the whole country with extreme sanctions. This cannot be and was not the American opening position in Vienna this week.

Even Facebook has tired of them and their ilk. Last week, Facebook blocked 300 MEK-linked accounts; though this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of MEK’s social media presence. After 2017, the MEK took advantage of the Trump administration’s confrontational approach to Iran and built a slave camp in Albania under the auspices of the CIA in which it housed a click farm and troll accounts to unduly influence western opinion on Iran. It was in this camp, remember, that Rudi Giuliani symbolically spat on and tore up a copy of the JCPOA document. However, it is worth noting that the majority of the MEK’s propaganda sites and social media accounts are in English.

Their Farsi presence is negligible. The few Farsi sites they have are only viewed in the hundreds by their own supporters. Among the 80 million population of Iran the MEK are either unknown or hated as a treacherous group that sided with Saddam Hussein to attack their homeland in the 80-88 war. For a group which has spent millions of dollars and uses click farm slaves to convince western policy makers that the group is the vanguard of regime change, they have not shown any evidence that anyone in Iran is behind them – or even aware of them. So, to answer the question, ‘why are the MEK still here in 2021?’ It’s not because they are successful, it’s because no one has chosen to stop them.

As the Vienna talks demonstrate, rolling back the Trump administration’s errors in relation to Iran can be difficult. In some cases, such as the assassination of general Qasem Soleimani, impossible. But direct talks are not the only means to that end. We wrote in January that a quick, effective and pain free policy win for Biden on Iran would be to return to the Obama administration’s plan to dismantle the MEK in Albania. This would achieve several outcomes. It would signal to the Iranian people that America will not pursue a foreign policy based on terrorism and violence against them. It would free the two thousand slave members of the MEK in Albania and allow them to return to their families and civilian life. It would help stem an inflow of some foreign funds into America that is used to skew analysis and policy making on Iran. (The MEK is funded largely by Saudi Arabia and amplifies its anti-Iran propaganda.) It would also, and this is relevant at this moment, rob the Iranian hardliners of their weapon; the MEK is used as the stick to beat the west over ‘terrorist interference’ in the country, as indeed happened in Vienna. If compromise is to be reached, the Iranians should at least not be given grounds by the MEK presence there to complain of American double standards.

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Massoud Khodabandeh is a Director of Middle East Strategy Consultants. Born in Tehran, he gained a MSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the U.K. where he became politically active for the Mojahedin-e Khalq before the Iranian Revolution. He rose to the top levels of the MEK and was Massoud Rajavi’s personal assistant and chief of security and member of the NCRI before leaving the MEK in 1996. After 2003 he began working with the authorities in Iraq to bring about a peaceful solution to the impasse at Camp Liberty and help rescue other victims of the Mojahedin-e Khalq cult. Since the MEK transferred to Albania in 2016, his activity has been focused on Albania and the European Union where he has been consulted by committees and political groups and parties. As an acknowledged expert on the MEK, Khodabandeh is a regular writer and contributor on Middle East issues in print, broadcast and documentaries. He co-authored the book ‘The Life of Camp Ashraf – Victims of Many Masters” with his wife Anne Singleton, who was also involved with the MEK as a foreign national.

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***

For more than a decade Bill Gates has funneled millions of dollars into a scientifically mad scheme allegedly to study the possibility of “manmade global cooling.” The project, led by a Harvard physicist, proposes to send satellites into the atmosphere in order to drop tons of chemicals in an attempt to block the sun. Now a strong resistance within Sweden has forced Gates & co. to abandon the planned Swedish satellite launch. This latest adventure in geoengineering by Gates shows what an unscientific enterprise the global warming charade is. As Gates no doubt well knows, in fact the Earth has slowly been cooling as we enter what some astrophysicists estimate could be several decades of global cooling caused by a Grand Solar Minimum cycle we entered in 2020.

On April 2 the Swedish Space Agency, announced that the program, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), funded by Bill Gates, has “divided the scientific community” and will therefore not be carried out. SCoPEx was a scheme funded for several years by personal funds from Gates to test the feasibility of dimming the sun via manmade geoengineering.

The plan is to drop sulphate aerosolor calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere from high altitude balloons in a madcap scheme to try blocking the sun and thereby “prevent “ global warming. The Swedish agency decided to cancel the experiment because of a major opposition from not only the scientific and environmentalist community, but also indigenous Swedish Saame or Laplander people who are reindeer herdsmen and feared the particles could cause severe or unknown environmental pollution to their herds. Notably, the Saami Council warned that the Gates experiment “essentially attempts to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles.”

Since at least 2010 Gates has called for manmade dimming of the sun. He has given a reported $4.6 million to Harvard physicist David Keith to advance the scheme. Keith has been an advisor to Gates since 2005. Along with Chevron, Gates is also a major investor in Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, a Canada-based Direct Air Capture firm. Direct Air Capture is another mad scheme, a process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the ambient air, using large fans to push ambient air through a filter where it is treated with caustic solvent to extract CO2. It involves staggering amounts of water and energy, and a land area the size of India by some estimates. By conservative estimates carbon capture to reach zero CO2 from fossil fuels would run more than $5 trillion yearly even if it was possible on a mass scale. Keith seems happy to play with such bizarre projects on the tab of billionaire pseudo-scientist Gates.

In a 2010 TED talk, Gates answered a question on solar blocking to try to offset global warming. He stated then,

“Do we have to start taking emergency measures to keep the temperature of the earth stable?… There is a line of research on what’s called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together.”

Keith said despite the Swedish setback the group will look for support in the Biden Administration to do the tests in the US. The USA National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published a report calling for $100-200 million to be pumped into “solar geo-engineering” over the next five years.

Geo-engineering very real

Until recently the US Government has denied conducting geo-engineering and has labelled any discussion of such projects as “chemtrail” spraying of the skies as “conspiracy theory.” Now they seem to be more open about what have been highly classified geo-engineering projects. In November 2017 the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives held the first hearings on “Geo-engineering: Innovation, Research, and Technology.” The panel discussed the need for further research into solar reflection geo-engineering, known as stratospheric aerosol injection.

One substance being considered for the Gates project and other such sun blocking schemes is what is called coal fly ash, the residue left in a coal power plant after burning coal. However, coal fly ash, which in modern coal plants is captured and disposed safely, if seeded in clouds to dim the sun, could bring a toxic acid rain to Earth.

According to the Physicians for Social Responsibility,

“Depending on where the coal was mined, coal ash typically contains heavy metals including arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium, as well as aluminum, antimony, barium, beryllium, boron, chlorine, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, thallium, vanadium, and zinc.”

The group notes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found that,“If eaten, drunk or inhaled, these toxicants can cause cancer and nervous system impacts such as cognitive deficits, developmental delays and behavioral problems. They can also cause heart damage, lung disease, respiratory distress, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in children.” That is not minor.

Grand Solar Minimum

There is much that can be said against the Gates-Harvard project. The statement by the Saami Council that the Gates-Keith sun-blocking enterprise is an attempt “to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles,” is the most relevant, and for reasons not being discussed as widely as it should.

What the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) refuses to discuss is the relation between the sun and climate changes on Earth. By far the greatest factor in Earth climate change and weather is the sun and its cycles of solar eruptions and cyclically also lack of same.

The  fundamental point about changes today in climate is that the Earth is in the early stage not of global warming, but of a global cooling period, called by astrophysicists a Grand Solar Minimum. If this is correct, it portends the most dramatic and by far most dangerous climate change imaginable. According to NASA our planet entered what they estimate will be the strongest solar minimum cycle in some 200 years.

What Al Gore and others try to keep hidden is the fact that the Earth is not warming since around 2000, and since summer 2020, has entered what will be a cooling phase lasting some predict until around 2055. Historically periods of Grand Solar Minimum, taking place every 200 years or so, create highly unstable weather patterns, prolonged major floods, massive crop failures and wild swings in temperature (both up and down),as well as jet stream disturbances, which create singular heat waves and wild fires among other extreme events. These effects have also all been registered during periods at least a century before invention of the internal combustion engine.

What no Global Warming computer model is capable of is to incorporate the effects of our sun on Earth’s climate, this despite well-documented scientific evidence that solar cycles are the greatest factor in changing climate over years. In fact they do not even try to.

Solar eruptions known popularly as sunspots rise and decline in 11-and 22-year cycles roughly. On top of these cycles are 100-year and 200-year grand cycles. Since June 2020 we have begun such a Grand Solar Minimum, one in which sunspot activity could likely decline to zero for several decades.

Volcanoes and the Sun

Increasing scientific research is finding  that while the driving mechanism is not entirely clear, periods of solar minimum and, especially of Grand Solar Minima, are also associated with dramatic increase in earthquakes and of volcanic activity.

A group of Japanese scientists led by Toshikazu Ebisuzaki examined the timing of 11 eruptive volcanic events that produced silica-rich magma from four volcanoes in Japan. They found that “Nine of the 11 events occurred during inactive phases of solar magnetic activity (solar minimum), which is well indexed by the group sunspot number. This strong association between eruption timing and the solar minimum is statistically significant to a confidence level of 96.7.” That is a very high correlation.

Some 200 years ago we had the last Grand Solar Minimum period, known to scientists as the Dalton Minimum, in the beginning of the 19th century. In 1816, the cloud cover across the planet was so severe that it was known  as the Year With No Summer.The Dalton Minimum lasted from circa 1790 – 1820. In 1815 a huge volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history, spewed so much volcanic ash into the atmosphere that in 1816 Thomas Jefferson recorded in his weather diary in Virginia the absence of summer sun.  It triggered extreme weather and harvest failures in many areas around the world. Frost and snow in North America during June 1816 destroyed most agriculture crops. Globally it was the worst famine of the 19th Century. The huge volumes of volcanic ash in the atmosphere lasting more than one year from Tambora reflected significant amounts of solar radiation, causing unseasonably cool summers that contributed to food shortages.

The evidence that we are in the early stages of a Grand Solar Minimum similar to that of the 19th Century or worse is compelling. Sumatra’s incredibly active Sinabung Volcano has exploded in spectacular fashion March 2, sending volcanic ash 40,000 feet high into the atmosphere.Particulates ejected to altitudes above 32,800 feet (10 km) –and into the stratosphere– have a direct cooling effect on the planet. Iceland, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, and other eruptions in recent weeks suggest we may be in for far more dramatic climate shocks than the self-appointed global climate czar Bill Gates admits. Gates, the Davos World Economic Forum and countless grant-hungry climate “scientists” refuse to consider the solar reality, instead pursuing such mad projects as chemical dimming of the sun. The trillions of dollars projected to be spent on inefficient solar and wind energy, indicates their agenda has nothing to do with health of the planet, nor of us. We can be sure those scientists who advise Gates re fully aware of solar cycles.Give them credit on one point, they are masters of deception.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

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

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

First published on Global Research on February 7, 2021

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization,

‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’

According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world.

Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions.

And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthro-imperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that

‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds.

In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies.

We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

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The above is excerpted from Vandana Shiva’s book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Making Peace with the Earth; Soil Not Oil; Globalisation’s New Wars; Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard; and Who Really Feeds the World?. Her latest book is Oneness vs the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 2020).

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).

***

In official documents released by the U.K. government, models for the planned “third wave” of COVID-19 predicted that any hospitalizations and deaths would be “dominated” by people who had already been vaccinated.

On March 31, the U.K. Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O), released the latest document containing modeling predictions about the effect that the gradual easing of restrictions would have on the spread of infection, and subsequent hospitalizations and deaths. The data are taken from forecasts provided by Warwick University, Imperial College London, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

A surprising statement was contained in the document, as the various institutions predicted the impact of a “third wave” of the virus upon the country’s health service, and the result on the population.

“The resurgence in both hospitalizations and deaths is dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60 percent and 70 percent of the wave respectively. This can be attributed to the high levels of uptake in the most at-risk age groups, such that immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals.”

A subsequent paragraph reaffirmed this admission, noting that in the predicted third wave, “most deaths and admissions in a post-Roadmap resurgence are in people who have received two vaccine doses.”

The document attempted to explain its prediction of how “vaccinated” individuals could account for a substantial majority of predicted hospital admission and deaths, by blaming these statistics on age, and the probability of 10 percent of people being left without protection against infection after the virus: “This is because vaccine uptake has been so high in the oldest age groups (modeled here at 95 percent in the over 50-year-olds). There are therefore 5 percent of over 50-year-olds who have not been vaccinated, and 95 percent x 10 percent = 9.5 percent of over 50-year-olds who are vaccinated but, nevertheless, not protected against death.”

However, despite this, SPI-M-O did not cast any aspersions on the injections themselves: “This is not the result of vaccines being ineffective, merely uptake being so high.”

The reasoning used in this line appears in stark contrast to that used throughout the majority of the last 12 months, when deaths occurring in 28 days after a positive COVID-19 test (which incidentally have been widely decried as completely unreliable), are deemed to be due to the virus, yet SPI-M-O decided not to make any correlation between the injections and the predicted deaths.

Sharing SPI-M-O’s document on Twitter, Joel Smalley of the anti-lockdown research group HART commented:

“In their forecast, the key metrics of hospitalisations and deaths are dominated (60 percent-70 percent) by those who are fully vaccinated. Yeah, no typo. Because vaccine failure in the most at-risk where uptake is high will be more serious than susceptibility of the lower-risk unvaccinated.”

While these paragraphs (32, 55, and 56) seem to suggest that the elderly who have had the injections would account for the majority of hospitalizations and deaths, in paragraph 31, SPI-M-O differentiated between the causation of potential new infections, and those affected by the third wave.

The section in question blamed the “resurgence” on “some people (mostly children) being ineligible for vaccination; others choosing not to receive the vaccine; and others being vaccinated but not perfectly protected (including those who have only received one dose, rather than two).”

Although the worrying statement amount the majority of deaths found among the injected populace comes as part of modeling, SPI-M-O’s statement reflects the growing discussion on the significant amount of adverse effects and deaths after COVID-19 injections.

In a strongly worded letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), a London-based consultant warned about the “unprecedented” levels of sickness among health care staff after the injection.

In addition to mentioning the high levels of staff falling sick, Dr. K. Polyakova mentioned how some were developing “neurological symptoms which is having a huge impact on the health service function. Even the young and healthy are off for days, some for weeks, and some requiring medical treatment. Whole teams are being taken out as they went to get vaccinated together.”

“What is to say that there are no longitudinal adverse effects that we may face that may put the entire health sector at risk?” she asked.

Her warning is seemingly being proved increasingly and sadly true, as disproportionately numerous reports of deaths after injections are quietly amassing.

By March 28, there were over 556,609 adverse side effects reported in the U.K. after the injection since the rollout began December 8. A total of 786 people had died after the injections, with some 5,899 cardiac disorders and 116 cardiac arrests also occurring.

An additional 92 people became blind, 55 spontaneous abortions occurred, and 9,998 psychiatric disorders were recorded.

There were 6,740 blood disorders, 608 cases of anaphylactic reactions, with 77 instances of anaphylactic shock, and 2,003 immune system disorders.

Indeed, as data from the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) shows, 2,342 people have died after the injections in the United States by April 1. A total of 56,869 adverse reactions were reported, with 4,872 of them requiring a hospital visit.

Given that only 11,050 deaths after injections have been reported to VAERS since records began in 1990s, this means that since the rollout began December 14, deaths after COVID-19 injections have already accounted for more than 20 percent of the 21-year records.

With figures such as these, the COVID-19 injections are seemingly far more harmful and deadly than the initial polio vaccines launched in 1955. After the administration of the Cutter Polio vaccine, 51 children were paralyzed and five died, prompting the vaccine recall.

Similar prompt action was seen in 1976 in response to Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) that came following a Swine Flu vaccine.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention records that the “increased risk was approximately one additional case of GBS for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine.” Given that more than 40 million people were having the swine flu jab, “federal health officials decided that the possibility of an association of GBS with the vaccine, however small, necessitated stopping immunization until the issue could be explored.”

So far, there have been 90 instances of GBS reported in the U.K. after COVID-19 injections, meaning that there is one reported case of GBS in every 6,185 reactions.

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Over the weekend, Iran marked National Nuclear Technology Day.  The stars of the show were going to be new advanced centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.  Unfortunately, the stars did not shine and President Hassan Rouhani and his officials were left with a reminder of the previous time the centrifuges at Natanz crashed.  In 2010, a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear program is said to have destroyed a fifth of the Iranian centrifuges, using the Stuxnet virus. 

A sequence of events have been viewed cumulatively as suggesting that this was no error of engineering so much as plain sabotage.  Israel was again the central agent of perpetration, a not implausible accusation given its relentless efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  The latest came last November, when Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was slain by a gun operated by artificial intelligence.  At this feat, Brigadier-General Ali Fadavi was almost admiring in description: the gun had “focused only on martyr Fakhrizadeh’s face in a way that his wife, despite being only 25 cm away, was not shot.”

Itamar Eichner of YNet was happy to indulge in questions regarding the latest incident at Natanz.  Was the politically troubled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raising a toast with officials of Mossad, the IDF and Shin Bet ahead of Independence Day auspicious?  And why did US Defence Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III pay a visit to Israel on April 11, the day the attack took place?  Defence analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, also of YNet, suggested that it was “reasonable to assume that the problem … might not have been caused by an accident, but by deliberate sabotage intended to slow the nuclear race accelerated by the negotiations with the US on removing sanctions”.

Israeli and US officials have confirmed that Israel did play a role, though the speculation as to what actually happened at Natanz remains a feast of various courses.  The Times of Israel provided some detail: a bomb had been planted in advance at the nuclear enrichment facility near the main electricity line, more than implying that Iran’s nuclear program has been infiltrated and compromised.  According to Channel 13 news, the device went off on Sunday at 4 in the morning, after which the facility was evacuated.  The bomb crippled the entire facility, leading Channel 13 defence analyst Alon Ben-David to conclude that this was “the worst attack that Iran’s nuclear program has suffered … at the most important Iranian nuclear facility.”

An unnamed Israeli intelligence official told the Kan news that the damage to the site was “extensive” in nature, having affected various types of centrifuges. Others read from the same script in their assessments to Channel 13, citing “severe damage at the heart of Iran’s enrichment program.”  In the New York Times, another intelligence official explained that the remotely detonated device had disabled both primary and backup electrical systems.

Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, preferred to minimise the effect of the blast, claiming on April 12 that the explosion had been “small” and took place “at the electricity distribution centre”.  The damage caused could be “quickly repaired.”

But as with the killing of Fakhrizadeh, some officials could not help but be impressed by the manner of execution, inadvertently confessing to the sheer seriousness of it.  “The enemy’s plot was very beautiful,” came the reflection from Fereydoun Abbasi, head of the Iranian Parliament’s energy committee.  “I’m looking at it from a scientific point of view.  They thought about this and used their experts and planned the explosion so both the central power and the emergency power cable would be damaged.”

Such violent behaviour on Israel’s part is heavily leveraged against the relationship with the US.  While the Biden administration moves in a constipated fashion towards re-establishing a patchy dialogue with Tehran over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) talks, Israel persists in remaining a spoiler. The nagging question was whether Israel was unilaterally roguish in order to purposely disrupt such incipient diplomacy, or whether the White House had given a barely noticeable nod of approval for the operation.  Doing so would make Israel the agent of disposition, thereby weakening Tehran’s future discussions on the nuclear agreement.

The White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, for her part, was not giving much away, showing that transparency remains, at least in certain areas of the Biden administration, aspirational.  “The US was not involved in any manner,” she stated during her April 12 press conference.  “We have nothing to add on speculation about the causes or the impacts.”  As for planned talks to re-establish the nuclear deal, the Press Secretary claimed that discussions would still proceed on Wednesday in Vienna, expected “to be difficult and long.  We have not been given any indication about a change in participation for these discussions.”

Iranian legislators have been none too impressed, insisting that the country’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suspend talks.  Abbas Moghtadaei, deputy chairman of the Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, suggested that talks undertaken “under pressure have no meaning.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh did not shy back from calling the attack “a crime against humanity” though it was not a crime with much effect.  “All decommissioned centrifuges are IR1 and will be replaced with new centrifuges.”  Such an act of “nuclear terrorism” triggered Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which permits sovereign states to defend its territory when attacked.

Revenge will come in cold and calculated doses: an assault on Israeli-owned shipping; harrying missile fire from bases in Yemen or Syria; the use of drones on specific Israeli targets.  On this, Ben-David had a bland observation to make.  “Yesterday signifies that the faceoff between Israel and Iran has escalated to a higher level.”  Of even greater concern to Tehran is the obvious point, openly admitted by Moghtadaei, that there have been “very obvious security infiltrations.”  Charges of incompetence and treason have begun to thicken the atmosphere.

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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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***

Ramsey Clark was a founder of the International Action Center and inspired the political activists who used its structure to defend liberation struggles, oppose U.S. wars of aggression, defend political prisoners whether in U.S. prison-industrial complex or in the U.S.-backed dictatorships worldwide. IAC militants joined international delegations that defied the blockade of Cuba and sanctions on Iraq, contested the U.S.-NATO war on Yugoslavia or joined the wave of resistance then sweeping Laten America. 

He guided the production of hundreds of books and videos, mass meetings, internet campaigns and demonstrations the IAC organized.

The IAC is collecting tributes and statements about Ramsey Clark’s contribution. 

Please send your memories to: [email protected]

We salute Ramsey Clark, who died April 9, 2021, an outspoken defender of all forms of popular resistance to oppression, a leader always willing to challenge the crimes of U.S. militarism and global arrogance. He remained optimistic that the power of people could determine history. His courageous voice will be missed.

Ramsey Clark will be remembered by people and struggles around the world as a prominent  individual who used his name, reputation and legal skills to defend people’s movements and leaders who the corporate media had thoroughly demonized.

Clark’s early belief in the U.S. role turned, through harsh experience and observation of what he considered U.S. war crimes, to a determination to challenge U.S. policy and defend the victims of U.S. aggressions regardless of personal cost. His actions, leadership and writings showed his political development over the past 60 years, above all, his actions.

Born into a prominent Texas family in 1927, his father Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, Ramsey was raised to believe in the power of U.S. laws. He came of age at the apex of U.S. power at the end of World War II and experienced the U.S. empire’s long decline and decay. He was appointed assistant attorney general in 1961 during the John F. Kennedy administration and attorney general during the Lyndon Johnson administration in 1967.

The 1960s power of the Civil Rights Movement and Black liberation struggle demanded sweeping change in government. As attorney general Clark enforced desegregation of schools across the South and  supervised the drafting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968. He drafted housing legislation and enforcement of Indigenous Nations Treaty rights.

Unlike nearly every other Cabinet level official, who leveraged their post into a multi-million dollar career after leaving government, Ramsey Clark leveraged his role as former attorney general to act for the impoverished and voiceless.

Vietnam, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela 

In 1972 he traveled to North Vietnam during President Richard Nixon’s bombing campaign. He was in Tehran, Iran in 1979 on days when millions of Iranians braved machine guns of the Savak Police and overturned the brutal U.S. backed shah and his whole regime. He visited Cuba numerous times to challenge the U.S. blockade and express deep admiration for the dramatic changes the Cuban Revolution made possible.

Along with demonstrations of tens of thousands against U.S. wars in 1991 and 2003, Ramsey Clark headed significant mass meetings in Solidarity with Cuba at Javits Convention Center in 1992 and with Bolivarian Venezuela at Town Hall in 2005,

Clark stood by the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the struggle for liberation of El Salvador in the 1980s against a U.S. backed dictatorship. He traveled to Panama after the December 1989 U.S. invasion to document the enormous toll in life.

While many embraced the collapse of the Soviet Union as ending the Cold War and ushering in an era of peace and prosperity, Clark held the view that this would lead to endless wars of U.S. expansion and an effort to recolonize many countries.

Opposed U.S. war on Iraq

At great personal risk Ramsey Clark traveled to Iraq during the height of the 1991 U.S. bombing. Extending personal courage to political and legal skill, he wrote a 19-point indictment of the Bush administration for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity that resonated around the world.

The indictment became the basis of a Commission of Inquiry that held mass popular hearings in 19 countries and 26 U.S. Cities. Ramsey attended every mass hearing. The final tribunal was held in New York City in February 1992 before thousands of people and international delegates. The events drew strong media coverage around the world, and total censorship in the corporate U.S. media.

During the years of the deadliest sanctions on Iraq that caused the death of a half-million Iraqi children within four years, Ramsey brought international delegations each year to challenge and expose the impact of the sanctions.

These fact-finding and human rights delegations almost always included videographers, journalists and photographers to document the impact on defenseless civilian populations. He encouraged others to also organize solidarity delepations.

Following the 2003 U.S.-British invasion and occupation of Iraq and under even more dangerous conditions, Clark traveled to Iraq numerous times. He provided legal defense for Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s captured president, who the U.S. and its Iraqi lackeys put on a show trial.

Though the outcome was inevitable, Clark was determined to expose that the real crime was the U.S. destruction of Iraq and was unapologetic for his defense of Saddam Hussein. Three of his Iraqi defense lawyers were assassinated for their role defending him. Saddam Hussein was executed on Dec. 30, 2006.

Sudan, Yugoslavia

In 1998 the U.S. bombed a small pharmaceutical plant producing the only anti-malaria drugs in Sudan claiming it was a secret VX Nerve gas facility. Ramsey immediately organized doctors, pharmacists and videographers to expose this crime against the civilian population.

In the biggest and most dangerous aggression in European borders since 1945, the U.S., determined to expand the NATO military alliance into the Balkans and Eastern Europe, launched the 1999 war to dismember and destroy Yugoslavia, during the Bill Clinton administration. Ramsey Clark was in Yugoslavia twice during the 78 days of relentless U.S. bombing, expressing solidarity with people under attack documenting that the Pentagon consciously targeted civilians.

Clark gave priority to visiting bombed schools, hospitals, market places, water purification plants, grain silos and pharmaceutical plants, as he did in other countries the U.S. bombed. Following the war, he drew up a public indictment of Clinton and other leaders of NATO countries and inspired a mass People’s Tribunal on U.S. war crimes in Yugoslavia, whose final hearing was in June 2000.

Clark dared to meet with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia during the U.S. bombing and later at the Hague after the kidnapped president faced an international kangaroo court the U.S. established to try Yugoslav leaders. Ramsey’s view was that the wrong leaders were being charged. According to his indictment for the 2000 tribunal, Clinton should have been in the dock, along with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the corresponding leaders of Germany, Britain, France and other NATO powers.

U.S. political prisoners 

While much of Ramsey Clark’s work focused on defense of nations under attack by the U.S., he also defended dozens if not hundreds of political prisoners of the empire, in and outside the United States. These included Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier; Imam Jamil Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown), who is held in a Super Max prison. He and Lynne Stewart were willing to defend Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. (For her role, Stewart was charged and imprisoned).

He supported independence for Puerto Rico and freedom for its many political prisoners. He traveled to Peru to defend U.S. citizen Lori Berenson, held by Peru’s dictatorship and to the Philippines. He defended Jose Maria Sison against “terrorism” charges. Clark publicly supported Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman tortured in Afghanistan and serving 86-year sentence in U.S. Federal prison as well as Mumia Abu-Jamal Pennsylvania State Prison.

He traveled to Nepal when a revolutionary upheaval brought in a new government and to DPRK North Korea to protest against U.S. war games and nuclear threats.

Solidarity with Palestine

When Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was targeted by U.S. and Israeli forces, Clark met with him in Lebanon, and later traveled to Gaza under total Israeli shutdown and met with Hamas leadership.

Clark’s long years of support of the Palestinian struggle for liberation meant Zionist forces always denounced him.

Clark denounced every aspect of the “U.S. War on Terror” as a War Against Islam with endless military operations, sanctions, drone strikes, regime change operations, assassinations, secret detentions and a series of bases throughout Africa to Central Asia and the Gulf States.

In 2011, NATO imperialists took advantage of an opening provided by the Arab Spring and the mass upsurge that overthrew the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, to open a 220-day bombing of Libya and murder Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. This destroyed the country with the highest standard of living in Africa.

U.S. imperialism then turned its full efforts into pulling down the government of Syria. Ramsey traveled to Syria several times in an effort to again focus attention on the impact of U.S. subversion on civilians. Traveling at personal risk, Clark exposed what U.S. sanctions, the arming of tens of thousands of mercenaries and then bombing vital infrastructure was doing to whole countries.

Even as decades rolled by Ramsey maintained an intense schedule of listening to and involving activists in challenging projects, along with speaking, traveling and consulting with peoples under attack.

 

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Sara Flounders is Co-Director of the International Action Center where this article was originally published. 

Featured image: Ramsey Clark was renowned for being a strong advocate in defense of people at disadvantage against the U.S. establishment at home and abroad. | Photo: Twitter/@NehandaRadio

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Concerns over adverse reactions, blood clots, reports of breakthrough COVID cases in vaccinated people, vaccine contamination and scrutiny over CEO pay have plagued the roll-out of the company’s COVID vaccine.

It’s been a bumpy ride for Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) COVID vaccine rollout.

At the beginning of the month, the vaccine maker had to throw out 15 million doses of its vaccine after they were contaminated with AstraZeneca vaccine ingredients at an unapproved manufacturing plant. The setback contributed to last week’s announcement that the company won’t be able to deliver on its promise of 24 million additional doses of its one-shot vaccine by the end of April.

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In the Middle East, tensions between Israel and Iran are escalating, but at the same time changing their focus. Recently, both countries have faced each other more frequently at sea, carrying out dangerous maneuvers and reporting the occurrence of several attacks against vessels on both sides, with emphasis on the Israeli attacks, which become more powerful day after day. Apparently, what was previously a conflict focused on aerial bombing and intelligence and espionage operations is becoming a naval war, marked by constant displays of force.

Last Tuesday, April 6, an Iranian ship was attacked in the Red Sea with an Israeli mine in an unusual operation, totally atypical by the standards of the Iran-Israel conflict. The ship hit in the operation was called “Saviz”, a commercial civilian vessel that did not pose any danger to maritime security in the region and was not spared from Israeli reprisals, whose levels of aggressiveness rise quickly.

The purpose of these operations is to implement a policy that Tel Aviv has been adopting in recent times with regard to its relations with Iran: to show strength whenever possible and to warn the enemy country that at any moment Israel can hit it. At sea, where violence has increased recently, this tends to generate more violence precisely against vessels with no offensive potential, such as commercial ships, as the objective is no longer to neutralize the enemy country, but to intimidate it in all ways.

For years, the Israeli Navy’s stance on Iran has been to maintain a systematic interception of all vessels transporting military material in support of Tehran-friendly organizations abroad, such as Hezbollah and other Shi’ite militias. However, the stance has become a little different since 2017, when Israel decided to adopt the policy called “war between wars”, a military tactic where low-intensity operations are carried out more frequently, the purpose of which is to issue constant warnings to enemy countries – which, it is hoped, will also respond with high frequency and low intensity operations, generating a “mild” and “symbolic” conflict. That is why the targets of the Israeli Navy are currently multiple, as the Tel Aviv plan is no longer to obtain effective military results, but to show Tehran how its vessels are not safe at any time.

Although this type of policy generates great international discomfort, with constant news of destroyed vessels, it is possible that, in practice, tensions will turn into a “symbolic naval war”, where the displays of force are constant, but do not rise to the level of a real conflict. This type of confrontation could at the same time neutralize the threats of war between the two countries and raise tensions, creating a constant uncertainty about the near future.

However, it should be noted that the intensity of the attacks can have serious economic implications. From the moment that Israel encircles Iran by sea, destroying all its commercial vessels, Tehran is more and more threatened. By targeting Iranian maritime trade, Israel is damaging the economic and social stability of Iran and all countries that negotiate with Tehran and this will certainly be responded in an equivalent manner. Therefore, although many experts currently believe in the merely symbolic effect of a naval confrontation, the situation could worsen and the violence could escalate at any time if the structure of Iranian maritime trade is really damaged, creating internal economic problems.

Iran’s future stance in the face of Israeli provocations will depend, above all, on the outcome of the country’s elections, which will take place in June. Until then, it is very unlikely that there will be an increase in violence or an open confrontation, as Tehran will be focused on resolving its internal issues and perhaps the certainty that it will not have responses with an equivalent strength is why Israel has been tightening its operations recently.

But that will certainly change. Having consolidated the new government, nothing will prevent Teheran from seeking retaliation for its vessels and this is something that is already in the forecasts of Israeli strategists, who may advise their military to decrease the frequency of attacks. With that, little is likely to change in practical effects, but until the elections take place in Tehran, Israel will progressively surround Iran by sea.

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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***

Like proverbial bad pennies, the neocon imperialists who plagued the Barack Obama administration have turned up in force in Joe Biden’s State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given more than winks and nods to the dastardly duo of Victoria Nuland, slated to become Blinken’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three position at the State Department, and Samantha Power, nominated to become the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Nuland and Power both have problematic spouses who do not fail to offer their imperialistic opinions regardless of the appearance of conflicts-of-interest. Nuland’s husband is the claptrappy neocon warmonger Robert Kagan, someone who has never failed to urge to prod the United States into wars that only benefit Israel. Power’s husband is the totally creepy Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama’s White House “information czar” and advocated government infiltration of non-governmental organizations and news media outlets to wage psychological warfare campaigns.

True to form, Blinken’s State Department has already come to the aid of Venezuela’s right-wing self-appointed “opposition leader” Juan Guaido, whose actual constituency is found in the wealthy gated communities of Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates in south Florida and not in the barrios of Caracas or Maracaibo.

Blinken and his team of old school yanqui imperialists have also criticized the constitutional and judicially-warranted detention of former interim president Jeanine Áñez, who became president in 2019 after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of President Evo Morales was overthrown in a Central Intelligence Agency-inspired and -directed military coup. The far-right forces backing Áñez were roundly defeated in the October 2020 election that swept MAS and Morales’s chosen presidential candidate, Luis Arce, back into power. It seems that for Blinken and his ilk, a decisive victory in an election only applies to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not to Arce and MAS in Bolivia.

It should be recalled that while Blinken was national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration, every sort of deception and trickery was used by the CIA to depose Morales in Bolivia and President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In fact, the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, claimed its first Latin American political victim when a CIA coup was launched against progressive President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Today, Honduras is ruled by a right-wing kleptocratic narco-president, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother, Tony Hernández, is currently serving life in federal prison in the United States for drug trafficking. For the likes of Blinken, Power, Nuland, and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, who currently serves as “domestic policy adviser” to Biden, suppression of progressive governments and support for right-wing dictators and autocrats have always been the preferred foreign policy, particularly for the Western Hemisphere.

For example, while the Biden administration remains quiet on right-wing regimes in Central America that are responsible for the outflow of thousands of beleaguered Mayan Indians to the southern U.S. border with Mexico, it has announced that Trump era sanctions on 24 Nicaraguan government officials, including President Daniel Ortega’s wife and Nicaragua’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, as well as three of their sons – Laureano, Rafael, and Juan Carlos – will continue.

Biden’s Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama’s. Biden and Brazilian far-right, Adolf Hitler-loving, and Covid pandemic-denying President Jair Bolsonaro are said to have struck a deal on environmental protection of the Amazon Basin ahead of an April 22 global climate change virtual summit called by the White House. A coalition of 198 Brazilian NGOs, representing environmental, indigenous rights, and other groups, has appealed to Biden not to engage in any rain forest protection agreement with the untrustworthy Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has repeatedly advocated the wholesale deforestation of the Amazon region. Meanwhile, while Biden urges Americans to maintain Covid public health measures, Bolsonaro continues to downplay the virus threat as Brazil’s overall death count approaches that of the United States.

Blinken’s State Department has been relatively quiet on the Northern Triangle of Central America fascist troika of Presidents Orlando of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Instead of pressuring these fascistas to democratize and stop their genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples of their nations, Biden told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he would pump $4 billion into supposed “assistance” to those countries to stop the flow of migrants. Biden is repeating the same old American gambits of the past. Any U.S. assistance to kleptocratic countries like those of the Northern Triangle has and will line the pockets of their corrupt leaders. Flush with U.S. aid cash, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador will be sure to grant contracts to greedy Israeli counter-insurgency contractors always at the ready to commit more human rights abuses against the workers, students, and indigenous peoples of Central America.

Biden is also in no hurry to reverse the freeze imposed by Donald Trump on U.S.-Cuban relations. Biden, whose policy toward Cuba represents a fossilized relic of the Cold War, intends to maintain Trump’s freeze on U.S. commercial, trade, and tourism relations with Cuba. Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish Cuban-American expatriate, is expected to reach out to right-wing Cuban-Americans in south Florida in order to ensure Democratic Party inroads in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. Therefore, even restoring the status quo ante established by Barack Obama is off-the-table for Biden, Blinken, and Mayorkas. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Cuban-American and ethically-challenged Democrat Bob Menendez, has stated there will be no normalization of pre-Trump relations with Cuba until his “regime change” whims are satisfied. Regurgitating typical right-wing Cuban-American drivel, Mayorkas has proclaimed after he was announced as the new Homeland Security Secretary, “I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.” The last part of that statement was directed toward the solidly Republican bloc of moneyed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Bolivian interests in south Florida.

While Blinken hurls his neocon invectives at Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he remains silent on the repeated foot-dragging by embattled and highly unpopular right-wing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on implementing a new Constitution to replace that put into place in 1973 by the fascist military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The current Chilean Constitution is courtesy of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy “Svengali,” the duplicitous Henry Kissinger, an individual who obviously shares Blinken’s taste for “realpolitik” adventurism on a global scale.

While Blinken has weighed in on the domestic politics of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he has had no comment on the anti-constitutional moves by Colombian far-right authoritarian President Ivan Duque, the front man for that nation’s Medellin narcotics cartel. It would also come as no surprise if Blinken, Nuland, and Power have quietly buttressed the candidacy of right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso, who is running against the progressive socialist candidate Andrés Arauz, the protegé of former president Rafael Correa. Blinken can be expected to question the results of the April 11 if Lasso cries fraud in the event of an Arauz victory. Conversely, Blinken will remain silent if Lasso wins and Arauz cries foul. That has always been the nature of U.S. Western Hemisphere policy, regardless of what party controls the White House.

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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.

Featured image: Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE

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***

We met before sunrise, just Richy, the cameraman, myself and Sousath, my Lao contact. We’d only packed the most essential gear to film, loaded everything in the car and set off. Our destination: the former CIA air base of Long Cheng. Between 1962 and 1975, Long Cheng became one of the busiest airports in the world and had a population of more than 50.000 people. It was the heart of the Secret War, waged by the US against communist forces in Laos. Yet Long Cheng was never marked on any map.

Today, Long Cheng lies inside the Xaisomboun Special Zone, a restricted military area which is off-limits to outsiders.

It wasn’t until 2003 that it emerged that small scale fighting between remnants of a former CIA secret army of Hmong hill tribe fighters and the Laotian military had continued around Long Cheng since US withdrawal from southeast Asia in 1975.

TIME Asia first reported the disastrous fate of the CIA’s forgotten army holed up in the Lao jungles for over 30 years. Philip Blenkinsop, the first photojournalist to meet the rebels, won a World Press Photo Award for his images, yet the US media failed to pick up the story and it was largely ignored elsewhere.

Instead of opening Long Cheng in order to explain what was triggering current events, the Laotians kept access to the zone restricted.

It seemed neither the US nor Laos wanted to be reminded of the war, as its last scenes played out virtually unnoticed. The war, which had been secret in its inception, seemed destined to remain largely just so.

In April 2008 the National Security Archives published further details of how the American Special Forces began training Laotian tribesmen in unconventional warfare as early as 1959. The US Air Force even considered using nuclear bombs during the first Laos crisis in 1960. In 1965 an inner circle at the US State Department vetoed a plan to use Air America planes in an active combat role for fear that pilots “would confirm to the Communists the company’s paramilitary nature”.

By making a film about Long Cheng, once the biggest secret site of the CIA, I wanted to shed some light on a dark chapter of America’s involvement in Indochina.

On my journey through the United States, Thailand and Laos I met many former CIA agents, US pilots, aid workers, Hmong fighters, journalists and historians who told me of their time in Laos in the 60s and early 70s.

Without exception they shared the view that the war in Laos is a forgotten war.

But this is not the only tragedy, this small landlocked southeast Asian country had to suffer in its recent past.

Laos was the victim of the biggest air war in history, making it the most bombed country on the planet per capita, with 2,1 million tons of bombs– more than the entire payload dropped on Germany, Japan and the Pacific theatre combined during WWII.

What’s more, most of the bombs were dropped in secret. During the war, even the name of the country in which it took place was classified and referred to as ‘the other theatre’.

For five years, Congress and the American people knew nothing of their government’s executive branch doings.

When it was finally revealed in 1971, that two consecutive presidents, the State Department, the CIA and parts of the US Air Force had been waging a massive air war in a country next to Vietnam, a country which most Americans had never heard of, the news was overshadowed by Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia and US death tolls in South Vietnam. The war wasn’t secret anymore, but “officially unacknowledged”.

At that time large parts of Laos had already been destroyed, yet it took another 4 years for the war to stop. Subsequently, following the communist victory in 1975, the country disappeared from the world map. Isolated from the outside world for almost 20 years, few stories had emerged from behind the Laotian bamboo curtain until 2003.

It was the big day, the day I had been waiting for three years. Just before we left, we snapped a picture of ourselves.

‘I hope it won’t be the last one’, I caught myself thinking.

You never knew. Even with the right contacts things could go wrong.

The last film team that had tried to enter the Xaisomboun Zone were caught up in a shoot-out between Hmong resistance fighters and the Lao authorities and were sentenced to 15 years in Lao prison.

Not a nice thought. Luckily, their embassies and Reporters without Borders put pressure on the Lao authorities and they were freed after two weeks.

But even a fortnight in a Lao prison was nothing to look forward to, and I had to take any footage we were about to shoot back out safely, otherwise there would be no film.

Nobody spoke for the first half hour of the trip. Even Sousath, usually a talkative man, was subdued. He had told me the night before, that he couldn’t be hundred per cent sure that we’d make it to Long Cheng.

Ever since Long Cheng was built, the air base has been off-limits to the outside world. “For a period in history it was the most secret place on earth”, Chris Robbins writes in his account of the Secret War, The Ravens.

Long Cheng was the physical heart of the largest covert operation the CIA had ever conducted. In its heyday, the remote valley served as the main air hub for clandestine supply and bombing missions against the communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army which the CIA ran with a proxy army of 30,000 Hmong guerrillas commanded by a young Hmong general, Vang Pao.

Image on the right: Bomb craters in northern Laos (Source: Legacies of War)

What’s more, Long Cheng became a major distribution centre of the international opium and heroin traffic.

“Hmm. Maybe difficult to go there,” Sousath had said when I’d first met him in 2002 to ask for his help.

“You have to wait for the right time.”

Finally, after many attempts to make contact with the right person at the right desk in the Laotian administration, the time had come and we were on the road.

Today, the scars of war are visible everywhere in northern and eastern Laos. Huge bomb craters dot the landscape; houses are built from war scrap. People continue to be killed and maimed by UXO. Many decades after the war ended, its leftovers still take their toll.

“What had started as a low-key air supported guerrilla war turned into something completely different,” claims Fred Branfman.

In 1969 Branfman was an aid worker for USAID in Laos when he heard about the secret US bombing campaign from refugees who had come to the Laotian capital from the Plain of Jars in northern Laos.

Shocked that an entire air campaign could be kept secret from the world for five years Branfman interviewed over 2,000 refugees from the Plain of Jars and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

His collection of eyewitness accounts was later published as Voices from the Plain of Jars and is a collection of essays and drawings that tell about unimaginable atrocities.

In order to verify the refugees’ accounts, Branfman visited the war room of the US airbase in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. Here he spoke to the bombing officer in charge, who admitted that the Air Force didn’t always check for civilians before they gave permission to bomb.

Collecting evidence, Branfman recorded pilot radio frequencies with conversations that backed up his claims and journalist Sydney Shanberg published Branfman’s account in The New York Times

Yet, the bombing continued.

Branfman is still angry, when he talks about events that happened over 40 years ago: “The stories I was hearing from the refugees, reminded me of an aerial hunting safari, only that we slaughtered herds of people instead of animals! In many ways the secret war in Laos is the progenitor of warfare in the 21st century. Think about it, an automated air war of a high-tech battlefield in the sky above one of the least developed nations on earth. The executive branch of the US taking war making into its own hands, excluding Congress and the press and the American people, outsourcing the war effort so as not to be accountable for their actions.“

Image below: Fences made of clusterbomb casings (Source: Legacies of War)

During the film shoot I spoke to many Laotians who expressed with calm voices what they had seen.

“The bombs fell like the monsoon, we could only farm at night” remembers a farmer from Phonsavan.

“The first time I saw a plane I thought it was a god, and then it spew fire and I was very scared. There was even fire in the river and all the fish were dead.”

One grandmother, involuntarily mimicking a weapons buff, tells me of T-28 training bombers, supersonic F-4 Phantom jets, cluster bombs, napalm, 500 pound bombs, 750 pound bombs, and the ultimate horror, B52 arclight strikes. “You cannot hear the bombers, but suddenly the whole world around you explodes. At first we didn’t even know who was doing this to us, where they were coming from, and why they wanted to kill us.”

In the first years of John F Kennedy’s presidency, few people saw Vietnam as the source of any major international crisis. Instead, it was Laos that seemed the mostly likely scene of superpower conflict and regional unrest. In 1954, after the Indochina war had ended and the French had left, Laos was declared neutral in Geneva. However, the left wing forces of the Pathet Lao, who had withdrawn to two northern provinces under the Geneva Agreement, were still armed and regarded a potential threat to US security.

At the heart of Kennedy’s doctrine lay the US mission to fight for freedom and keep a perceived global onslaught by the communist bloc at bay. In order to be able to gain political leverage on the global stage, intelligence was spiced up and distorted by the US executive branch. Kennedy devoted an entire press conference on Laos during which he presented a fake map which omitted CIA allied Hmong forces in the hills around Long Cheng and alleged an illegal takeover of northeast Laos by North Vietnamese troops.

In 1962 Laos was declared neutral once more and both the US and the Soviet Union withdrew all military advisors. From then on, stories in the US media about Laos’ military struggles were supplemented by reports about the human aid program the US was conducting in Laos and the war unfolded in secret.

As early as 1960, the CIA had started secretly supplying and training a guerrilla army of ethnic Hmong in the hills around the Plain of Jars, confirms Hmong General Vang Pao.

“Bill Lair and a Thai general came to see me and asked me what I needed to fight the communists. I told them 5000 guns and food and radios. We didn’t even talk about money then! We hated the communists, we embraced democracy.”

Until June 4, 2007 Vang Pao, who was evacuated from Long Cheng in 1975 and later emigrated to the US, preached the Hmong dream of a return to a Laos free of communism to thousands of his expatriate fellow fighters.

Then Federal agents arrested the former general and eight other Hmong in California, along with a former US Army Ranger who had once been involved in covert operations in Vietnam, and charged them with plotting terrorist attacks.

Allegedly the group had conspired to smuggle hundreds of AK-47s, C-4 plastic explosives and Stinger missiles to Vang Pao’s Hmong insurgents into Laos in order to overthrow the Laotian government. In a spectacular assault, the carnage of which would have rivaled 9/11, their operation manuals claimed, government buildings in the Laotian capital were to be bombed.

Up to this point, the US media have presented Hmong general Vang Pao as a decorated war hero, who had helped America during the Vietnam War.

Earlier last year, the school board of Madison named an elementary school after the Hmong General, only to reverse their decision after the arrest.

Five years ago when a park in Madison, Wisconsin was to be named after Vang Pao, a University Professor objected publicly: Alfred McCoy, whose book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade is considered a landmark study, in part on the Secret War in Laos. Vang Pao happens to be a major character in McCoy’s book, which suggests that the Hmong leader had once played a central role in the international heroin trade, trafficking opium and heroin from laboratories in Long Cheng to South Vietnam. Towards the end of the war one third of the entire US army in South Vietnam had become addicted to heroin.

In Laos, while researching the narcotics trail, McCoy witnessed how Vang Pao recruited children for his secret army by starving their villages or threatening to bomb them, if parents would not provide their boys.

“Vang Pao had the power to do so, because he controlled all the air power out of Long Cheng,” says McCoy.

Air America – at the time the biggest commercial airline in the world – was officially running the aid mission in Laos and was secretly owned by the CIA – a fact unknown at the time. Working closely with Vang Pao, Air America provided the rice and weapons drops for the Hmong villages across Laos and flew soldiers of the CIA’s secret army into battle. CIA agents under USAID and Air America cover oversaw and coordinated the fighting. Towards the end of the war, when most Hmong men of fighting age had been killed, 30,000 Thai mercenaries were flown into Laos by the CIA.

Because of his strong ties to the agency, however, Vang Pao never faced any threat of arrest for his ties to the drug trade, McCoy writes. Perhaps the former general’s legendary impunity explains why he might have gotten involved in a harebrained scheme to overthrow the Communist regime in Laos, an effort that US federal agents posing as gun dealers immediately infiltrated. Had the scheme gone forward, it would have stood virtually no chance of succeeding. During an interview with Vang Pao several months before his arrest, I told him of my plan to go to Long Cheng. A brief smile crosses his hardened face. “I’d like to go back there myself, but I can’t, nobody can go, there is still fighting there. The Lao government won’t let any outsider see it.”

When we reach Xaisomboun, the capital of the former military zone, soldiers with AK 47s patrol the market square, surrounded by dilapidated wooden shacks. The ground is muddy.

“Just like Texas some time ago.” Sousath remarks half-seriously. Trucks of soldiers come and go, buses leave for surrounding villages, and it feels as if we have reached a frontier of some sorts.

In Xaisomboun, electricity is readily available, but in the hinterland there is only rural Laos. As it gets dark, we meet the regional army commander for drinks. He confirms that there are still renegade Hmong hiding in the surrounding hills and claims that the Lao army does not shoot at them.

“Why should we kill our own people? I am Hmong myself.”

We both know that the refugees in the camps behind the Thai border tell a different story.

The governor of the Xaisomboun Zone joins us. A small soft-spoken lowland Lao in his mid-fifties, he happily chats away in a low voice and offers to guide us into Long Cheng with an armed escort, just to make sure.

At the crack of dawn we’re on the road. The sky is gunmetal grey and we are speeding along a bumpy dirt road. Long Cheng lies 80 km further into the jungle.

I was surprised how candidly some former CIA agents spoke to me about the political and covert moves of the US government in the 50s and 60s in order to bring Lao politics under American control. Such moves included the rigging of elections and supporting coup d’états by secretly providing weapons to competing army generals. Even competing schemes of the CIA and State Department about who should be Prime Minister in Laos were layed out before me. In no time, the formerly neutralist Laotian Prime Minister was leaning so far to the US side, that Laotian neutrality had become a farce.

Declassified memos show that in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson demanded jets of the US Air Force to fly lower on their “aerial reconnaissance flights” over Laos in order to provoke ground fire.

“What has become clear and was admitted publicly by US embassy officials in Laos later on, is that the aerial reconnaissance flights were just a military euphemism for bombing runs in search of targets of opportunity” says Fred Branfman.

“There was a gradual build up and the real heavy bombardments started after President Johnson had declared a bombing halt over North Vietnam in November 1968 and diverted the planes into Laos because, to quote Monteagle Sterns, a U.S. Embassy official, ‘we couldn’t just let the planes sit there.’”

The ugly truth is, that during the war the US used Laos as a testing ground for their new weapons arsenal: All kinds of cluster bombs, millions of galloons of defoliants, laser guided missiles to hit people hiding in caves, helicopter gun ships with electronic mini-guns that fired 5,000 rounds a minute, equipped with people sniffers, which detected mammal urine on the ground and shoot at everything that moves in the night – buffaloes, refugees and soldiers alike. The aerial bombardment carried on for five years around the clock, until Congress learned about its own government’s activities. It took two more years for Congress to realise that over 100,000 refugees from northern Laos were the result of secret US bombings and it took another two years until 1973, when the large scale bombing was stopped. By then, 700,000 people had become refugees and hundreds of thousands had been killed and wounded – out of a population of 3 million. For Laos, this meant total catastrophe.

When we get to Long Cheng, it’s plain to see that the CIA’s golden age has passed. Once a high-tech oasis in the jungle with allegedly more antennas than trees, the village is now derelict. A few Lao troops are stationed here in what looks like another village in the middle of nowhere. The CIA buildings lie in ruins and a few cows feed off overgrown parts of the runway. Vang Pao’s house is sealed off.

We drive to the end of the runway. From here the landing strip looks like an aircraft carrier rammed right into the mountain. It’s a sight that I have come across many times studying old photos in US archives. In my mind, the runway has become an icon of the covert war. Dark clouds hang low over the karst formations.

As I look back over the tarmac across the valley of Long Cheng Alfred McCoy’s words echo in my mind:” If the United States is guilty of war crimes, not just mad minutes of soldiers in Vietnam breaking down under stress, but systemic war crimes of policy by commanders, that war crime was the bombing of northern Laos. We destroyed a whole civilization; we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost!” 

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CHD Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Joseph Mercola discuss how the narrative perpetuated by Big Pharma and Big Tech — that “vaccines are the only way to restore normalcy” — is leading to the destruction of our Constitutional rights.

In the latest episode of “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedy interviews Dr. Joseph Mercola on the fear-driven COVID-19 narrative, ongoing efforts to resist government restrictions and the loss of freedom seen around the world.

Highlights from their wide-ranging discussion include:

• Notes about the soon-to-be-released book “The Truth About COVID-19,” by Mercola and Ronnie Cummins. Kennedy, who wrote the forward to the book, says the pandemic is being used to shift wealth upwards, abolish civil rights and destroy democracy. The official release of the book is April 29.
• The massive effort from the get-go to sell the idea that the only possible way to control COVID was through masks and lockdowns.
• How the public was largely conditioned to believe the world needed to wait on a vaccine for any meaningful intervention against COVID.
• How government officials and the media suppressed information about potential treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
• How personal data collected by Google over the past nearly two decades is being used to manipulate public behavior.
• How Google searches steer people away from anything that goes against Pharma’s narrative including natural health, chiropractors and nutrition.

Click here to watch the interview.

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed that governments around the world require payment of at least a uniform “global minimum corporate tax.” A motivation for Yellen’s push for a global minimum corporate tax is fear that the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the US corporate tax will cause some American corporations to flee the US for countries with lower corporate taxes.

President Biden wants to increase corporate taxes to help pay for his so-called infrastructure plan. The plan actually spends more on “progressive” priorities, including a down payment on the Green New Deal, than on infrastructure.

Much of the spending will benefit state-favored businesses. For example, the plan provides money to promote manufacturing and electric vehicles. So, the idea is to raise taxes on all corporations and then use some of the received tax payments to subsidize government-favored businesses and industries.

The only way to know the highest valued use of resources is by seeing what goods and services consumers voluntary choose to spend their money on. A system where the allocation of resources is based on the preferences of politicians and bureaucrats — who use force to get their way — will be less efficient than a system where consumers control the allocation of resources.

Thus, the greater role government plays in the economy the less prosperous the people will be — with the possible exception of the governing class and those who make their living currying favor with the rulers.

Yellen’s global corporate tax proposal will no doubt be supported by governments of many European Union (EU) countries, as well as the globalist bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For years, these governments and their power-hungry OECD allies have sought to create a global tax cartel.

The goal of those supporting global minimum taxes enforced by a global tax agency is to prevent countries from lowering their taxes. Lowering corporate and other taxes is one way countries are able to attract new businesses and grow their economies. For example, after Ireland lowered its corporate taxes, it moved from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to having one of the EU’s strongest economies. Also, American workers and investors benefited from the 2017 tax reform’s reduction of corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Yellen and her pro-global tax counterparts deride tax competition between countries as a “race to the bottom.” In fact, tax competition is a race to the top for the countries whose economies benefit from new investments, and for the workers and consumers who benefit from new job opportunities and new products. In contrast, a global minimum corporate tax will raise prices and lower wages, while incentivizing politicians to further increase the minimum.

A global minimum corporate tax will also set a precedent for imposition of other global minimum taxes on individuals. This scheme may even advance the old Keynesian dream of a global currency. The Biden administration is already taking steps toward a global currency by asking the International Monetary Fund to issue more special drawing rights (SDRs).

Global tax and fiat currency systems will only benefit the world’s political and financial elites. In contrast, regular people across the world benefit from limited government, free markets, sound money, and reduced or eliminated taxes.

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If there were a prime example of all that is wrong with modern-day agriculture, Iowa would be a strong frontrunner. In 2019, the state had 3,963 large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — which refers to those with 1,000 animals or more — up from 789 in 1990.¹ The average large hog CAFO in Iowa has at least 2,500 pigs, while some house 24,000.

As the leader among hog-producing states, Iowa had more than 22.7 million hogs in 2017, which produce 68 billion pounds of manure annually — at least 68 times the amount of fecal waste produced by Iowa’s 3.15 million residents, the Environmental Working Group reported.²

By 2021, the number of hogs in Iowa had grown to 25 million, according to an editorial by Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake Times,³ who noted, “To feed those hogs, we cultivate 92% of the state’s acres to grow corn and soybeans, the most of any state.”

When you add in the massive amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and waste runoff, this industrial agriculture system — which exists not only in Iowa but throughout the world — is responsible for environmental destruction and exploitation.

‘We Cannot Handle This Load’

Cullen details the atrocities of modern agriculture, which is polluting rivers and ruining water supplies. In the U.S., agriculture poses the greatest threat to water quality and is single-handedly impairing drinking water supplies across the country. The key culprits are nitrogen, phosphates and other toxins that run off from industrial cropland (i.e., genetically engineered corn and soy) and CAFOs.

In the Midwest, Iowa is at the heart of the storm, as the leader in U.S. corn and soy production and a major producer of CAFO hogs, eggs, cattle and chickens. In fact, more than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for agriculture,⁴ much of it bordering key waterways.

More than half (58%) of the rivers and streams in the state fall short of federal water quality standards, making them unsuitable for swimming and fishing, while another 23 percent are “potentially impaired.”⁵

Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources states that 92% of the nitrogen and 80% of the phosphates in waterways are the result of industrial farms and CAFOs.⁶ The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also states that manure from industrial agriculture is the primary source of nitrogen and phosphorus in U.S. waterways.⁷

The resulting damage includes an excess of nutrients that lead to algae overgrowth, depleting the water of oxygen and killing fish and other marine life in expansive dead zones.

This, combined with the excess fertilizers applied to monocrops like corn and soy, sends a steady stream of nitrogen and phosphorus to both surface and groundwater, spreading potentially disease-causing organisms and unsustainable amounts of nutrients along the way. Cullen noted:⁸

“Along with Illinois, we are contributing the most to the slow death of the Gulf of Mexico from suffocation by excess nitrogen fertilizer. We kill the weeds with cancer-causing chemicals to grow the corn that feeds the hogs that pollute the rivers, and it is an article of faith that there is nothing we can do about it.

… The legislature set it up so that nobody could keep track of the confinements or their manure plans. The state confined feeding coordinator was eliminated. Inspection occurs on complaint. That is how it is intended. There are no limits on how many hogs can come in. They just keep coming … We cannot handle this load.”

Iowa CAFO Expansions Ruining Watersheds

Northwest Iowa’s watersheds are burdened by nitrate pollution — the result of unconstrained CAFO expansion. Areas with the highest density of livestock have the highest nutrient levels in waterways, including the Raccoon River.⁹

In December 2020, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and Food & Water Watch sued the state for not protecting residents’ right to clean water and argued that the increasing number of hog farms, with few pollution restrictions, were contaminating the river with manure and fertilizer runoff.¹⁰ The North Raccoon watershed had 261 CAFOs in 2006, which increased to 619 in 2021.¹¹

While new CAFOs are required to have a manure management plan on file with the county, farmers are legally allowed to spread up to 240 pounds of nitrogen per acre, which is 70% more nitrogen than most corn corps need.¹² According to Cullen, “The agricultural industrial complex, tightly intertwined by chemistry to the military one … leaves farmer, laborer, land and community as assets to be exploited. That is what has happened in Iowa.”¹³

In 1949, Iowan Aldo Leopold published an essay titled, “The Land Ethic,” which calls on people to be morally responsible for the natural world.¹⁴

“Everything he suggested came true: The rivers have lost their former lives, the soil is washing down them and in dominating the landscape we diminish ourselves. He suggested that we live as citizens of the land rather than over it,” Cullen said.¹⁵ But while efforts to support regenerative agriculture are growing, there are still many hurdles standing in the way.

Gates Ag One: Digital Farming

While pretending to save the world through philanthropy, Bill Gates is entering every field that has to do with sustaining life but, for over a decade, has undermined vitality in all its forms, in an effort to seize control over and profit from it. In my interview with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she spoke about Gates Ag One,¹⁶ which is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto is also headquartered.

“Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He’s written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,¹⁷ ‘Gates to a Global Empire,'” she said. This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.

So far, Shiva’s organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates’ surveillance system. The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don’t actually know agriculture.

This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold back to the farmers. It’s evil genius at its finest.

Through his funding, Gates now also controls the world’s seed supply, and his financing of gene editing research has undercut biosafety laws across the world. As explained by Shiva, the only country that doesn’t have biosafety laws is the U.S. “The rest of the world does because we have a treaty called the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety,” she says.

“While he created the appearance of philanthropy, what he’s doing is giving tiny bits of money to very vital institutions. But with those bits of money, they attract government money, which was running those institutions. Now, because of his clout, he is taking control of the agenda of these institutions. In the meantime, he’s pushing patenting, be it on drugs, vaccines or on seeds.”

UN Food Summit Bowing Down to Corporate Technology

Gates is also tied to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which hundreds of farmers and human rights groups are boycotting due to its domination by corporate interests. The Summit claims it is convening to “launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food,”¹⁸ but critics say it favors agribusiness interests, elite foundations and the exploitation of African food systems.¹⁹

Agnes Kalibata, the former Rwandan agriculture minister who is now the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,²⁰ was appointed as the event’s head.

AGRA is essentially a Gates Foundation subsidiary, and while some of its projects appear to be beneficial, most of its goals are centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers. AGRA was launched in 2006 with funding from the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After more than a decade, AGRA’s influence has significantly worsened the situation in the 18 African nations targeted by this “philanthropic” endeavor. Hunger under AGRA’s direction increased by 30% and rural poverty rose dramatically.²¹

Shiva has also traveled the globe to warn other countries, including those in Africa, about plans to displace rural farmers so investors can turn the land into industrial farms to export the commodities. She said:²²

“A handful of multinational corporations … is driving species extinction. The poisons they have deployed are pushing the disappearance of bees, the disappearance of pollinators, the disappearance of insects, the disappearance of biodiversity.

Industrial agriculture is not only destroying biodiversity, it is destroying the soil and releasing large amounts of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere … This is not a food system. It is not an ecological system. It is a recipe for destruction of the planet’s health and the destruction of our health.”

Living With the Land Is Key

Regenerative agriculture and animal husbandry are the next and higher stages of organic food and farming — free from toxic pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and CAFOs, and regenerative in terms of the health of the soil, the environment, the animals and rural farmers.

As Shiva put it, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”²³ Cullen is also hopeful that positive change is at hand even in Iowa:²⁴

“[W]e have an opportunity to return to an ethos that can sustain us. The conversation is changing to how we can live with the land. Corn yields and pork production have increased fantastically over the past half-century. Yet we have demeaned ourselves in the process.

… Leopold’s Land Ethic has a chance, and it could bring back so much that has died from an anti-life system built for the profit of a few, taken from the many … Farmers all over Iowa are finding that path again by adapting sustainable practices as they can.”

On a small scale, you can help by supporting your local organic and regenerative farmers by purchasing their goods at local farmers markets or purchasing your meat and dairy products directly from your local farm. A growing number of homeowners are also converting their yards into edible landscaping using organic and regenerative methods.

By acting on an individual level to be agents of change, we can all make waves that push agriculture away from industrial militarization and toward regenerative practices that have true potential to feed the world and heal the planet.

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Notes

^1, 2 EWG January 21, 2020

^{3, 8, 13, 15, 24} The Storm Lake Times March 26, 2021

⁴ University of Delaware October 13, 2019

^5, 6 Yale Environment 360 September 25, 2018

⁷ U.S. EPA, Estimated Animal Agriculture Nitrogen and Phosphorus From Manure

^9, 11, 12 The Storm Lake Times March 25, 2021

¹⁰ Des Moines Register December 17, 2020

¹⁴ The Aldo Leopold Foundation, The Land Ethic

¹⁶ Independent Science News November 16, 2020

¹⁷ Navdanya International, Gates to a Global Empire

¹⁸ U.N. 2021 Food Systems Summit

¹⁹ U.S. Right to Know March 9, 2021

²⁰ Archive Today, The Guardian March 4, 2021

²¹ The Defender February 4, 2021

²² VandanaShivaMovie.com

²³ Organic Consumers Association May 22, 2019

Featured image is from Mercola

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Conflict with Russia may be inevitable. Kiev’s strident threats to resolve the crisis in Eastern Ukraine with force of arms, combined with Washington’s refusal to acknowledge that Moscow actually has legitimate national security interests in Eastern Ukraine, makes it so. Equally troubling, the president sees no particular reason why he should explain to the American people why Washington’s readiness to support Kiev’s use of force against Russia makes strategic sense for America. 

In 1937, when the Imperial Japanese government expressed sincere regret for attacking and sinking the U.S.S. Panay, an American gunboat that had been patrolling China’s Yangtze River, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew was not satisfied. He warned the Japanese Foreign Ministry that “Facts mean more than Statements.”

Grew was right. A Biden-Harris guarantee of support for the Ukrainian government’s plan to reconquer its lost territories, including Luhansk, Donetsk, or Crimea, is about as meaningless as the British government’s 1939 guarantee of assistance to the Poles in the event of a German attack on Poland. 

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to retaliate against the Japanese. FDR knew there was no public support in the United States for a war with Japan or any other great power. FDR also resisted pressure from the U.S. Navy’s admirals to retaliate because he knew America’s armed forces were not ready for a full-scale war. As for our British friends, they were not ready to weaken their fleet in the Atlantic to join a fight against Japan when the threat of war with Germany was growing. 

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In memory of Ramsey Clark, we re-post this article which was first published in January 2012.

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This article by Ramsey Clark recounts the US-Israel terror war against Iran back in 2012. And now the World is witnessing under the Biden administration a new wave of terror against Iran.

The legacy of Ramsey Clark will live forever.

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Stop the campaign of terror against Iran and its scientists!

Another Iranian Scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, has been assassinated in Iran by a car bomb.  This is the fifth Iranian scientist targeted by assassins working in Iran in two years. Four attacks succeeded. This is a deadly escalation of the covert criminal activities conducted by the U.S., Israel and their terrorists and domestic spies in Iran against the government and people of Iran.

While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has denied any U.S. involvement, the important and undeniable truth is that the governments of the U.S. and Israel have openly declared Iran as an enemy and have publicly stated that they will use all means necessary, not excluding military attack, to change the Iranian government using Iran’s efforts to produce nuclear energy as an excuse.

The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists is an effort to create fear in the Iranian people, opposition to their own government and monopolize nuclear research and development of nuclear power. The aim is to stop Iran’s drive for industrial and technological independence on which the independence of Iran and the freedom of its people depends.

Those who forget the past are condemned to its repetition. Do we remember the Shah, who ruled Iran for 25 years on behalf of the U.S., had a huge nuclear energy program intended to replace depleted fossil fuels? Do we realize his billions of dollars of arms purchased from the U.S. with wealth of the Iranian people helped fund U.S arms research, development and production that now threaten Iran?

In the decades since the Shah fled, sanctions, sabotage and threats have escalated into dangerous new decisions to send a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier, destroyers and nuclear submarines into the Persian Gulf and impose harsher sanctions on trade, and an oil embargo. All of these threats are threats against peace and violations of international law.

A just society can have no interest in stopping the peaceful progress of other nations and peoples.

No to another war for oil, no to foreign government domination and foreign corporate exploitation of Iran, or any other country.

-Ramsey Clark

We urge all who oppose another war of ever greater massive destruction and death to speak out and act in this hour of maximum peril.

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Why NATO Destroyed Libya Ten Years Ago

By Manlio Dinucci, April 12 2021

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***

A new organization with ties to Iranian monarchists is cultivating relationships with the Republican Party, holding a series of online events with newer GOP House members, strongly advocating against diplomacy with Iran, and pushing for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate so-called “Islamic Republic agents and lobbyists” in the United States.

Iranian Americans for Liberty was established last year alongside two related entities: a political action committee called Iranian Americans for the Constitution, and a super PAC called Iranian Americans for Peace. The group’s public-facing activities –– which include tweets, press releases, and a series of webinars hosted with Republican House candidates and incumbents –– take aim at both the Iranian government and Iranian Americans who favor engaging with the country, while echoing traditional hawkish talking points.

Most significantly, the organization is closely aligned with Iranian monarchists, who advocate for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the return of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to the country as the leader of a constitutional monarchy. In particular, the group has ties to the Farashgard movement –– known as “Iran Revival” in English –– as well as the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, an organization based in the Iranian diaspora community in Southern California.

Members of the Farashgard, including Amir Etemadi and Saeed Ghassminejad, previously participated in the Iran Disinformation Project, a State Department-funded project founded in 2018 that worked closely with the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies purportedly to counter Iranian propaganda. But the State Department later suspended funding for the project after complaints that the group spent an inordinate amount of time attacking domestic critics of former President Trump’s Iran policies.

Iranian Americans for Liberty –– which also has ties to pro-Israel advocacy organizations and has apparently sought to obscure the source of its funding –– often launches attacks against other Iranian American organizations and citizens that it claims, without evidence, to be agents of the Iranian regime.

“These groups are part of this Iranian American Q-Anon phenomenon that we have seen really explode over the past few years during the Trump administration,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian-American Council,[1] which has been the target of much of the group’s rhetoric. “They engage in these character attacks and try to paint these wacky conspiracies to try to delegitimize us rather than engage in a real debate.”

As the Biden administration seeks to re-engage with Iran and potentially return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal, IAL is putting pressure on Republicans to resist a more diplomatic approach. While stopping short of calling for a U.S.-backed overthrow of the regime, IAL argues aggressively against lifting any sanctions on Iran.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran, they’re constantly chanting things like ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’ why do you think the current administration is so eager to loosen economic sanctions on the Iranian regime when they clearly do not like the U.S. and our allies?” asked Adelle Nazarian, a frequent moderator of the group’s events, in a “meet and greet” with Rep. Mike Garcia.

More significantly, the group’s activities appear to be an effort to delegitimize proponents of diplomacy with Iran –– particularly members of the Iranian American community –– by branding them as “apologists” or mouthpieces for the Iranian government.

Targeting of other Iranian Americans

During a series of virtual events held with Republican candidates and members of Congress, IAL has often brought up NIAC –– an Iranian-American organization that advocates for diplomacy with Iran and has been a proponent of the JCPOA –– by asking members how they plan to “stand up and fight against the Islamic Republic’s lobbyists.” IAL has also produced videos that baselessly accuse NIAC of acting as a lobbying organization for the Iranian government and promulgating “anti-American propaganda.”

In addition to NIAC, Iranian Americans for Liberty has also attacked other Iranian Americans who publicly support the JCPOA and diplomacy with Iran –– including journalist Negar Mortazavi and State Department official Ariane Tabatabai –– by accusing them, again without evidence, of being apologists for the regime.

Barbara Slavin, Director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said that some of the animosity likely stems from ideological divisions within the Iranian diaspora — which were exacerbated by Trump’s foreign policy.

“They benefited from Trump. They were encouraged, they got money from the State Department until it was revealed that they were spending most of their time on Twitter attacking other Iranian Americans and people who supported diplomacy with Iran,” said Slavin, referring to the Iran Disinformation Project. “It doesn’t help their cause, because they expend all their energy going after other Iranian Americans instead of trying to come together on the goal of making Iran a more democratic and less repressive place. And the tactics they use are so awful, who in their right mind would trust these people?”

NIAC, she said, has become a target due to its apparent success in advocating for diplomacy. “None of these other groups, these monarchist groups, come close.”

“We’d like to see the DOJ ramp up their efforts to root out the regime’s operatives here in America. What do you think about this?” asked Nazarian during a February 15 “meet and greet” with New Mexico Representative Yvette Herrell.

“I think what I see is maybe another letter coming from Congress to really hold the DOJ’s feet to the fire,” replied Herrell. “There are people here that are lobbying members of Congress for the Iranian government, which turns out to be very detrimental.” One month later, Herrell sent a letter — co-signed by eight other GOP House members — to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate Iranian nationals who they claim may be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

While the letter referenced the January arrest of Lotfolah Kaveh Afrasiabi, who has been charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Iranian government, it did not provide further evidence for any of its claims.

“This is another situation where I believe we will need to be working collectively –– our office, Iranian Americans for Liberty –– so that we can ensure that we can be holding the DOJ’s feet to the fire as things progress,” said Herrell during the event.

“I will gladly follow your lead on that so that we can make good, productive policy decisions in Washington,” she also said.

Jordan Haverly, a spokesperson for Rep. Herrell, acknowledged that IAL was “interested” in the letter but said he was unaware of its origin, and Herrell’s office did not respond to additional requests for comment. IAL has been amplifying the letter since it was published, with executive director Bryan Leib stating that they were “thrilled” to learn about it.

In a recent appearance on the website Foreign News Desk, Leib doubled-down on his baseless accusations against NIAC, insinuating that they were “driving the agenda” of the Biden administration to return to the JCPOA.

The growing influence of monarchists

Last year, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that Republican members of Congress had met with members of Farashgard after Ali Saadat-Meli, a prominent member of Farashgard and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican Party campaigns and committees.

That investment appears to be continuing. Along with Rep. Herrell, 11 other Republican members of Congress, most of whom have been elected since 2018, have participated or are scheduled to participate in virtual events sponsored by IAL or IAC. Four of those members –– Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Nicole Malliotakis, Young Kim, and Maria Elvira Salazar –– sit on the House Foreign Affairs committee, while Reps. Andrew Garbarino and Jeff Van Drew sit on the Homeland Security committee. Reps. Jim Hagedorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene have also met with the organization, while Reps. Ashley Hinson and Michelle Fischbach are scheduled to speak with the group in April.

All have received at least $2800 –– the maximum individual donation amount permitted by the Federal Election Commission –– from Ali Saadat-Meli, who did not respond to a request for comment.

IAL’s affiliation with Iranian monarchists is not immediately apparent, but can be discerned through closer examination of the group’s activities. The group’s two primary board members –– Shervan Fashandi and Daniel Jafari –– are members of Farashgard, while the group issued a joint press release in August with the Constitutionalist Party of Iran. Additionally, IAL’s logo uses the “Lion and Sun” symbol, which appeared on the Iranian flag prior to the 1979 revolution and is associated with monarchists who oppose the regime.

For many Iranian Americans in particular, the era of Pahlavi rule in Iran is viewed fondly. “There is a kind of nostalgic desire for a return to it,” said Abbas Milani, the Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and one of the co-founders of the Iran Democracy Project. Polling conducted in 2020 by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans and Zogby Research Services found that 53 percent of Iranian Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the U.S. government backing Reza Pahlavi as a legitimate opposition force against the Islamic Republic of Iran, while 32 percent were opposed.

Milani also said that Farashgard represented an attempt by monarchists to appeal to younger generations of Iranians, and that the older Constitutionalist Party of Iran was “arguably the most thoughtful, the most experienced argument about what kind of a monarchy Iran might be” –– a kind of historical recollection, versus a formal institution.

While Iranians did enjoy greater social freedoms under Pahlavi, the later years of his rule were characterized by brutal repression and lack of political freedoms, with many Iranians tortured at the hands of the SAVAK intelligence service established by the Shah.

Abdi, NIAC’s president, said that monarchism has waned over the decades, but has found new ascendancy due to the influence of television networks such as Iran International –– a Saudi-owned satellite TV network based in London –– as well as Manoto, which broadcasts cultural programming into Iran that some view as intentionally promoting the crown prince. “There’s been this effort to try to revive the notion of the monarchy, and it has been somewhat successful,” he said.

One other manifestation of the IAL’s affinity for Pahlavi-era Iran is its questioning of prevailing narratives about the 1953 U.S.-backed overthrow of Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. While the CIA has acknowledged its role in orchestrating the coup, IAL — along with other hawks in Washington who support regime change — has sought to distort that narrative, arguing that Mossadegh had carried out a coup of his own.

A spokesperson for IAL declined to acknowledge the group’s ties with Farashgard and the Constitutionalist Party of Iran when asked, merely stating that the group believed in “peace with their neighbors, universal human rights, and freedom of speech, expression, and religion.”

IAL operates as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, allowing it to hide its sources of funding. Both related political action committees –– which are required to report expenses and contributions under federal law –– appear to be funded entirely by a Delaware-based shell company called “Expelliarmus Partners, LLC,” which has no online footprint and was incorporated in late June 2020.

“That’s long been a concern, that foreign money, either from governments or corporations or individuals may be hidden in these shell companies,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which has reported on the potential for shell companies to be used as conduits for foreign entities to spend money influencing politics. “It’s super concerning for anybody who cares about preventing corruption.”

Asked who was funding the organization, the spokesperson for IAL said “we cannot confirm any individual’s involvement with Iranian Americans for Liberty. Allegations of involvement can have, and have had, real implications for the safety of family members currently living in the region.”

Iranian Americans for Liberty also maintains ties with the pro-Israel advocacy community in the United States. Along with Farashgard, the group participated in 2020 gala for the Zionist Organization of America, a far-right pro-Israel group. Leib, IAL’s executive director, formerly worked for the Israeli-American Council and HaShevet, a group whose stated mission is “to ensure that pro-Israel Jewish values are instilled in the next generation of Jewish leaders in America.” Both the Israeli-American Council and the Zionist Organization of America have been heavily funded by the late Sheldon Adelson, a GOP megadonor and casino magnate who has pushed for a more aggressive approach towards Iran and once suggested that the United States should drop a nuclear weapon on the country.

To be sure, Iranian American citizens have a first amendment right to participate in political advocacy. However, the lack of transparency around who is funding Iranian Americans for Liberty, the group’s ongoing attempts to delegitimize proponents of diplomacy with Iran and promote a hawkish agenda, and its barely-concealed ties to Iranian monarchists raises questions about its ascent into the Iran policy debate and its apparent growing influence within the halls of Congress.

*

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Notes

[1] Disclosure: Quincy Institute Vice President and co-founder Trita Parsi is the former president of NIAC. He played no role in the publication of this article. 

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***

I would like to dedicate this book to my friend and colleague, Ramsey Clark, whom I have followed (for the most part) during the past two decades on our mutual quest for peace, justice, human rights, and democracy around the world, and especially here in the United States of America.

Defending the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. Unfortunately, I do not believe that I can personally measure up to the task of trying to honor Ramsey. Therefore, I believe it would be better for someone else besides me to say a few words in his honor. And I have just the right person—the late Sean MacBride, Irish Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former Chief-of-Staff of the Irish Republican Army.

Image on the right: Ramsey Clark speaks at the March 20, 2010 anti-war protest in Washington, DC (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I think both Ramsey and I would agree that perhaps the greatest man we have ever known was Sean MacBride, whose profound impact upon me has been duly recorded elsewhere. Sean was one of the great historical figures of the twentieth century. And I am sure that Ramsey would also be the first to agree that Sean was the most principled and courageous person it has ever been our pleasure to know. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me that when I travel around the world, oppressed peoples everywhere still possess an enormous degree of respect, admiration, gratitude, and genuine personal affection for Sean MacBride despite the fact that he has been dead now for over fifteen years. They feel the same way about Ramsey.

In August of 1987, Sean and I were attending an international conference of lawyers against nuclear weapons for the purpose of founding an international organization to achieve the objective of eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. At the time, one of Sean’s great fears was that the organization would be dominated by the lawyers from the United States and the Soviet Union to the effective exclusion of meaningful input from lawyers all around the world, and especially from Third World countries. Sean believed that it would be unprincipled, imprudent, and counterproductive to have lawyers living in the world’s two nuclear superpowers placed in charge of eliminating nuclear weapons. As he saw it, that would be akin to putting the foxes in charge of the chicken coup. In order to prevent this from happening, Sean strongly believed that Ramsey Clark should be invited to play a prominent role in the founding of this organization. Without even bothering to discuss the issue with him, Sean instinctively knew that Ramsey would agree with him on this important matter of principle and politics, which he later did.

A special executive meeting of this proposed organization convened to discuss these and many other issues as well. There Sean put forth Ramsey’s name. Sean’s proposal immediately provoked sharp objections from most of the American lawyers sitting around the table. They argued that Ramsey Clark was generally perceived to be too radical, without credibility, marginalized, and without much of a following. These ad hominem attacks upon Ramsey precipitated a fairly sharp response from Sean and me. After about 30 minutes of fairly vigorous debate on this subject, we all agreed to take a break from the discussions in order to allow tempers to cool.

Image below: Sean MacBride (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

As we strolled down the hallway from the meeting room, I turned to Sean and said:

“You know, all their objections to Ramsey Clark are total nonsense. Ramsey is a hero to tens of thousands of people in the peace movement here in the United States as well as around the world, myself included.”

At that point, Sean turned to me and said:

“You’re right, Francis. And Ramsey Clark is one of my heroes too!”

Sean then proceeded to tell me the story of when they were both in Hanoi together on a fact-finding mission to oppose the U.S. aggression and genocide against Vietnam while American B-52 bombers were mercilessly pounding that city with their “ordnance.” They had to take cover in bomb shelters on more than one occasion. Many years later, Ramsey would repeat this heroic performance during February of 1991 when he travelled to Iraq on a fact-finding mission while those same U.S. B-52 bombers were mercilessly obliterating the cities and people of that poor country.

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.

Sean concluded his story by giving the following instruction to me:

“Now you go back into that room and tell those American lawyers that Ramsey Clark is one of my heroes!”

He then walked off to his hotel room, obviously fatigued by these needless mental exertions. He had less than five months to live. He died just before he was to meet with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar for the purpose of establishing his truly international organization of lawyers from around the world in order to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. In any event, pursuant to Sean’s instructions, I returned to that room by myself in order to argue the case for Ramsey’s inclusion. Of course, Sean’s ringing endorsement of Ramsey did not make any difference to the American lawyers sitting around that room—for they also believed that Sean MacBride himself was too radical, marginalized, and without a following. Be that as it may, both at the time and in retrospect, I was and am still struck by the fervor of Sean MacBride when he emphatically told me that Ramsey Clark was one of his “heroes.” I think that even Ramsey would agree that no greater tribute could ever be paid to him by anyone. Someday I shall be most honored and pleased to learn that those in power consider me to be as radical and marginalized as Ramsey Clark and Sean MacBride. My heroes.

Ramsey

Just His Name
Brings Hope to People
All over the world
Ramsey coming to help!

For Poor, Oppressed, Downtrodden
Against rich, powerful, famous
Against states, governments, empires
Especially American Empire
Ramsey in town!

As young man thought Ramsey
Typical LBJ Imperial Goon
Persecuting Ben Spock et al  for Vietnam
Got on that plane to North Vietnam
Mirabile dictu!
I Was wrong!

Four Decades
Working with Ramsey
Solid as Rock
Principles Unbending
Will of Steel

Gone to hell
And back with him
Then again
No end
Still today

How many times
Risked his life
For Poor, Oppressed, Downtrodden
Against rich, powerful, famous
Against states, governments, empires
Especially American Empire
Lost count

93
Retired
Honorably
From Field of Battle
Hope can say
Same someday

Miss My Buddy
My Friend
My Comrade-in-Arms

Calls me Pal
No greater honor
Ramsey’s Pal!

Will carry on
Best I can
Poor substitute I am

His Sterling Example
Always on Mind
Be like Ramsey?
No way!
Never can!
North Star

With Sean MacBride
Our Friend
And Comrade-in-Arms
Our North Star
R.I.P.

Three Musketeers
Three Amigos
Up the Rebels!
Forevermore!

*

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Francis Boyle is professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is the author of many books on International Law and an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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***

The line between clearly defined political prisoners and prisoners targeted to make points for the political power structure is hidden. Criminalization is a standard tool of racial supremacists. George Floyd’s death is familiar a thousand times over because it restates the predominant ethic of law enforcement’s historical treatment of a minority population as revealed in the examples of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton.

But consider the less well known and large number of former Black Panther and other community activists serving intolerable prison terms which have taken away their normal lives in trials that can’t match objective standards of justice or international law. Guilty verdicts thrived on the targeting mechanisms of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, withheld testimony, ‘bought’ witnesses, rights violations, and obvious misidentifications suggesting that U.S. law enforcement has a difficulty telling black people apart. At particular risk of injustice were those who converted to Islam and were targeted for destruction.

Two troubling examples: Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (aka Hubert Gerold Brown) was a target of CONTELPRO. It’s hard to explore the facts and conviction in his case without understanding that another has confessed to the crime he was convicted of and the crime’s perpetrator as described by witnesses bore little resemblance to Al-Amin. The likelihood of his innocence becomes law enforcement’s shame. Serving a sentence of life without parole, afflicted after confinement with a rare form of bone cancer, an imam deprived of his community, Al Amin’s most recent appeal to the Supreme Court was denied in April 2020.

Consider Jeff Fort (aka Abdul Malik Ka’bah) of Chicago, whose case and 168 year sentence have become so buried in history the reader may not have heard of him. Fort, a founder of Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the Black P. Stones, and El Rukn, is considered the first American convicted on charges of terrorism. His life is the story of a community leader and gang leader, surviving under the knee of supremacist law enforcement which made its final judgement with the intentionally unbearable sentences he currently serves.

Wikipedia notes that currently he’s confined at the Florence Colorado supermax since 2006 under a “no-human contact order since his arrival.” An alternative judgement to law enforcement’s was his mother’s, quoted here from an ancient piece (“The Making of Jeff Fort,” 1988) by Tom Brune and James Ylisela, who wrote – “Fort’s mother recited parables. “We lived on 63rd Street, and there was an alley you could go through. In those days, it wasn’t dope fiends, it was old men being wineheads. I would cook [for her ten children] and when I would go into the parlor and sit down and come back, all my food is gone. I’m thinking somebody’s coming in getting my food. I didn’t have no dream that it was Jeff taking the food out there and feeding those people.

“He was out there, giving all of them a plate. He just couldn’t stand seeing people hungry. I just sat there and tears ran down. I said, ‘This child is an unusual child.’”

Former Los Angeles Black Panther Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald died March 28, 2021, shackled in hospital following his second stroke. He served over fifty years of two life sentences and was eligible for parole. There was and remains more than reasonable doubt of his guilt in the crimes he was charged with.

Sentenced to fifty years for knocking the gun out of a police officer’s hand in Texas, Xinachtli (aka Alvaro Luna Hernandez ) is eligible for parole July 18, 2021.

Finally released from 49 years in prison after eleven denials of parole, Jalil Muntaqim, tried to register to vote but technically before he was eligible to vote again. Arrested on charges connected to voter fraud, the charges were pressed by the District Attorney which would have returned Muntaqim to prison for the rest of his life but the country grand jury refused to indict him.

A veteran of military service in Germany and Vietnam and a former Black Panther leader in Omaha, Edward Poindexter, is serving the fiftieth year of a life sentence in Nebraska’s State Penitentiary for alleged involvement in bombing a policeman. There is a strong possibility that Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, (AKA David Rice) his co-convicted, were and are entirely innocent. Mondo we Langa has already died in prison. Poindexter, a diabetic with triple-bypass heart surgery and a eye cataract, uses a wheelchair. Petitions continue to urge the Nebraska Pardons Board to commute Poindexter’s sentence to time already served [access this].

Imprisoned since 1973, under a life sentence, a model prisoner without betraying his beliefs Sundiata Acoli (Clark Edward Squire) is still held in prison and denied the parole he was first eligible for in 1992. The mechanism of his incarceration could be one of vengeance and extra-judicial punishment to extract information. The legal system apparently considers him to have information about the escape from prison to Cuba of Assata Shakur. Marilyn Buck, considered an accomplice to Ms. Shakur’s escape was released from prison to die from a cancer which was too slow to be treated at federal Prison in California. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, considered the escape’s mastermind has been fighting cancer after repeated unjust denials of parole and release. Acoli at 84 has had COVID and suffers from dementia among other illnesses. A petition to New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy asks to commute the sentence and bring Sundiata Acoli home [access this]. It is hard enough to be an elder outside of prison.

With a judicial ruling allowing a review of previously filed appeals in his case, Mumia Abu Jamal’s current attorneys have filed actions supporting his claims. Recently he was shackled during his hospitalization for COVID and congestive heart failure. He has also reported an excruciating skin condition. In a letter published in The Jamal Journal urging protest of medical neglect in the treatment of Mumia Abu Jamal, Ramona Africa cites medical neglect as contributing factors in the deaths of Delbert Africa, Phil Africa, and Merle Africa. (see the Move 9).

North Americans rarely speak of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, born in Pakistan, a Muslim mother and neuroscientist who studied at the University of Houston Texas, then transferred to take her BA from M.I.T., and PhD from Brandeis. Her field of expertise included areas of biological warfare and viruses and all information about her could be ‘constructed’. She was a terrorist suspect wanted by the FBI for questioning when she was disappeared in Pakistan, March 2003. She was subsequently identified as prisoner 650 held at Bagram Air Force Base..

Prisoner 650 was reportedly continuously raped by the prison officers at Bagram. There is strong evidence she was tortured. She has claimed she was kidnapped by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan. Shortly after being reported as in American custody for four years, in 2008 she reappeared with her son at age 12 to be arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of terrorism.

In 2010 she was tried and sentenced in New York City to eighty-six years in prison for allegedly attempting to shoot at the entourage of U.S. military and law enforcement personnel which held her prisoner under detention in 2008. U.S. personnel were untouched by bullets. Dr. Siddiqui was shot in the torso. With no powder marks from firing a weapon on her clothes or self, evidence against her is non-existent, far-fetched, and unlikely. Her family fears she has been tortured within the U.S. prison system.

She is said to have been in solitary confinement for twelve years. Incarcerated at Carswell Medical prison she has refused to see lawyers and communicate with her family. Two of her children survived her initial arrest in 2003 and were held in criminal circumstances. Her son Muhammad, age seven at arrest in 2003, was reportedly kept in F.B.I. custody from 2003 to 2009. Her daughter Mariam, age five at arrest was reportedly kept in a “cold dark room” at Bagram Air Force base before return to the Siddiqui family in 2010. A third child, Suleman was only six months old when taken from his mother and was never returned and is feared dead. The facts of Dr. Siddiqui’s case are so publicly outrageous that either she was pre-empted for covert uses by U.S. and allied intelligence operations or elements of the war on terror are run by Nazis.

There’s an absence of mercy in unbearable sentences.

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***

An exceedingly well-qualified physician, who was censored by YouTube last year, addressed the Texas State Senate Health and Human Service Committee last month providing thorough information on successful treatments of COVID-19, the present high-level of herd immunity from the disease, the very limited potential of “vaccines,” and the data that shows early treatment could have saved up to 85 percent of the “over 500,000 deaths in the United States.”

Dr. Peter McCullough, MD is an internist and cardiologist, along with being a professor of medicine at Texas A&M University Health Sciences Center. He is distinguished as the most published person in history in his field and an editor of two major medical journals.

McCullough explained that from the beginning of the pandemic, he refused to let his patients “languish at home with no treatment and then be hospitalized when it was too late,” which was the typical treatment protocol being discussed, promoted and offered across the west.

Click here to watch the video.

He thus “put together a team of doctors” to study “appropriately prescribed off-label use of conventional medicine” to treat the illness and they published their findings in the American Journal of Medicine.

“The interesting thing was, (that while) there were 50,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature on COVID, not a single one told the doctor how to treat it,” he said. “When does that happen? I was absolutely stunned! And when this paper was published … it became … the most cited paper in basically all of medicine at that time the world.”

With the help of his daughter, Dr. McCullough recorded a YouTube video incorporating four slides from the “peer-reviewed paper published in one of the best medical journals in the world” discussing early treatments for COVID-19. The video quickly “went absolutely viral. And within about a week YouTube said ‘you violated the terms of the community’” and they pulled it down.

Due to the “near total block on any information of treatment to patients,” Sen. Bob Johnson hosted a November hearing on this important topic where McCullough was the lead witness.

With such an aggressive suppression of information on early treatments, and the default policy in COVID-19 testing centers to not offer any such resources to those who test positive for the infection, McCullough said, “No wonder we have had 45,000 deaths in Texas. The average person in Texas thinks there’s no treatment!”

And the blackout of such vital information goes well beyond the blatant censorship of big tech companies. McCullough said,

“What has gone on has been beyond belief! How many of you have turned on a local news station, or a national cable news station, and ever gotten an update on treatment at home? How many of you have ever gotten a single word about what to do when you get handed the diagnosis of COVID-19? That is a complete and total failure at every level!”

“Let’s take the White House: How come we didn’t have a panel of doctors assigned to put all their efforts to stop these hospitalizations? Why don’t we have doctors who actually treated patients get together in a group and every week give us an update? … Why don’t we have any reports about how many patients were treated, and spared hospitalizations? … This is a complete and total travesty to have a fatal disease, and not treat it,” he said.

“So what can be done right here, right now?” McCullough proposed to the legislators. “How about tomorrow, let’s have a law that says there’s not a single (test) result given out without a treatment guide, and without a hotline of how to get into research. Let’s put a staffer on this and find out all the research available in Texas, and let’s not have a single person go home with a test result with their fatal diagnosis, sitting at home going into two weeks of despair before they succumb to hospitalization and death. It is unimaginable in America that we can have such a complete and total blind spot.”

In reference to early treatments that have been widely used outside the west with great success (with around 1 percent to 10 percent of the death rates of the first world), McCullough turned his attention to broad media suppression of information once again asking, “When was the last time you turned on the news and ever got a window to the outside world? When did you ever get an update about how the rest of the world is handling COVID? Never. What’s happened in this pandemic is the world has closed in on us.

“There’s only one doctor whose face is on TV now. One. Not a panel. (As) doctors, we always work in groups, we always have different opinions. There’s not a single media doctor on TV who’s ever treated a COVID patient. Not a single one. There’s not a single person in the White House Task Force who has ever treated a patient,” he said.

“Why don’t we do something bold. Why don’t we put together a panel of doctors that have actually treated outpatients of COVID-19, and get them together for a meeting. And why don’t we exchange ideas, and why don’t we say how we can finish the pandemic strongly.”

“Isn’t it amazing?! Think about this. Think about the complete and total blind spot (regarding home treatments),” he said.

Herd immunity and vaccination

“The calculations in Texas on herd immunity … right now with no vaccine effect (is) 80 percent,” McCullough said. “And more people are developing COVID today. They’re going to become immune (as well).”

“People who develop COVID have complete and durable immunity. And (that’s) a very important principle: complete and durable. You can’t beat natural immunity. You can’t vaccinate on top of it and make it better. There’s no scientific, clinical or safety rationale for ever vaccinating a COVID-recovered patient. There’s no rationale for ever testing a COVID-recovered patient,” he continued.

“My wife and I are COVID-recovered. Why do we go through the testing outside? There’s absolutely no rationale (for such testing).”

Given the high levels of herd immunity, McCullough said any impact from broad vaccination in preventing COVID-19 can only be minimal at best.

“There’s plenty of COVID-recovered patients. Let them forgo the vaccine and let people who are clamoring for it get it. But at 80 percent herd immunity, in the vaccine trials fewer than one percent … in the placebo actually get COVID. Fewer than one percent. The vaccine is going to have a one percent public health impact. That’s what the data says. It’s not going to save us, we’re already 80 percent herd immune,” he said.

“If we’re strategically targeted we can actually close out the pandemic very well with the vaccine,” the cardiologist stated. “But strategically targeted. (For) people under 50 who fundamentally have no health risks, there’s no scientific rationale for them to ever become vaccinated.”

Addressing the broad “misinformation” of asymptomatic transfer of COVID-19, which has supported the need for lockdowns due to the notion that the virus can be unintentionally spread by infectious, asymptomatic people, the medical professor said, “One of the mistakes I heard today as a rationale for vaccination is asymptomatic spread. And I want to be very clear about this: My opinion is there is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread. Sick person gives it to sick person. The Chinese have published a study … [of] 11 million people. They tried to find [evidence of] asymptomatic spread. You can’t find it. And that’s been, you know, one of important pieces of misinformation.”

Finally, McCullough highlighted the impact of suppressing information on effective and safe early treatments during this last year. Citing two “very large” studies, he said “when doctors treat patients early who are over age 50 with medical problems, with a sequence multi-drug approach … there’s an 85 percent reduction in hospitalizations and death.”

“We have over 500,000 deaths in the United States. The preventable fraction could have been as high as 85 percent (425,000) if our pandemic response would have been laser-focused on the problem: the sick patient right in front of us,” he concluded.

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Featured image: Dr. Peter McCullough, MD addresses the Texas State Senate Health and Human Service Committee. (Youtube Screenshot)

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Children’s Health Defense has made significant progress in the case against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg since the last court filing, and looks forward to its next court date, May 5.

In August 2020, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and two of Facebook’s “fact checkers.” The lawsuit asserts claims of illegal censorship in violation of the First Amendment, illegal “taking” in violation of the Fifth Amendment and corporate fraud in violation of federal law — Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) and Lanham Acts.

On Nov.13, 2020, CHD filed a 150-page first amended complaint in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, detailing factual allegations regarding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CDC Foundation and World Health Organization’s (WHO) extensive relationships and collaborations with Facebook and Zuckerberg.

CHD has made significant progress in the case against Facebook and Zuckerberg since the last court filing — including filing a second amended complaint on Dec.15, 2020, which contained considerable factual amplification of the allegations set forth in our initial filings.

As set forth in the second amended complaint, CHD believes children are being exposed to health and life-threatening injuries by the multi-billion-dollar vaccine industry and that 5G technology, promoted by behemoth internet interests, poses similarly severe risks.

To alert the public to these serious potential dangers, CHD posts links to articles in reputable scientific journals, and publishes opinions expressed by doctors, scientists and others, including CHD Chairman, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This material is constitutionally protected speech on matters of serious public concern.

As alleged in our second amended complaint, since early 2019, Facebook and Zuckerberg have engaged in a deliberate, systematic effort to degrade and destroy CHD by fraudulently branding our Facebook content as false, directing users to competitors’ sites and preventing Facebook users from donating to CHD.

The complaint specifically identifies 15 instances of defendants falsely labeling CHD content as inaccurate.

The complaint also sets out in detail the reason behind the defendants’ animus against CHD: CHD is a nonprofit organization dedicated to warning the public about the potential risks of certain vaccines and technologies in which the defendants have immense financial interests and investments.

The complaint also outlines how federal actors and agencies encouraged and pressured defendants to engage in their censorship scheme against CHD and jointly participated in that scheme.

The resulting threat to free speech is especially serious because government agents have in essence “deputized” Facebook to do what the government itself is constitutionally forbidden to do.

As the latest complaint details, the defendants were pressured by a prominent Congressman to suppress so-called vaccine “misinformation” — incredibly defined to include content that “casts doubt on the safety or efficacy of vaccines.”

The complaint also alleges that in censoring CHD, the defendants acted with the joint participation of the CDC — a federal agency — and its proxy, the World Health Organization, with which Facebook partnered to create its “fact-checking” protocol.

As a consequence, and as CHD has consistently argued, Facebook and Zuckerberg were not acting merely as private parties, but were functioning as government actors — and thus are subject to the First Amendment’s strictures against government censorship.

As anticipated in this hard-fought litigation, on Dec. 21, 2020, defendants moved to dismiss the second amended complaint. Facebook apparently seeks special dispensation, not available to other parties, to dismiss CHD’s allegations of government joint action and of Facebook’s responsibility for its “fact-checks” because Facebook claims that it isn’t working with the government or with these same “fact-checkers.”

Facebook also claims that its “fact-checks” aren’t statements of fact at all, but merely protected “opinions,” and that Facebook is merely labelling CHD’s content as “potentially” misleading.

CHD is confident the district court will see through these arguments and that ultimately CHD’s rights will be vindicated. Toward this end, CHD vigorously opposed defendants’ motions to dismiss, filing detailed opposition briefs on Feb. 5. These briefs carefully and thoroughly elaborate the legal basis for CHD’s claims and explain why we should be permitted to proceed through the discovery process and on to trial, rather than be dismissed.

On March 8, CHD filed a motion to supplement the second amended complaint, asserting new and additional allegations based on very recent efforts by Facebook to injure and retaliate against CHD.

In CHD’s motion to supplement, CHD asserts that since the filing of the second amended complaint, Facebook and Zuckerberg have engaged in further acts of censorship and retaliation against CHD, and in further acts of joint participation with the federal government to suppress CHD’s constitutionally protected speech.

Among the specific acts that CHD has moved to include as supplemental allegations in the action are:

(1) On Feb. 10, Facebook terminated the Instagram account of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD’s founder and chairman, which at that time had more than 800,000 followers.

(2) In late February, federal actors and Facebook itself publicized significant encouragement to censor vaccine-related information. These statements represent a clear acknowledgement by companies such as Facebook and government sources that federal officials are directly engaged with Silicon Valley in censoring social media users.

(3) On March 5, Facebook published a “warning label” on a third-party user’s Facebook account, which included the message: “Unfollow Children’s Health Defense.” The warning label also implies that CHD is promulgating false and harmful information on its Facebook page; encourages users to visit the WHO’s COVID page for accurate information; and allows users to stop seeing posts from CHD by clicking on an accompanying icon. CHD’s briefs in support of its motion to supplement were filed on March 8 and March 29.

Oral arguments on defendants’ motion to dismiss and CHD’s motion to supplement the second amended complaint are scheduled to be heard by the Court (the Honorable Susan Illston) on May 5.

In what may be an encouraging sign, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in a recent concurrence to the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in another case, indicated a receptivity to the kind of First Amendment argument that CHD is making in the action against Facebook, alleging that when private companies censor based on government pressure, they may be considered state actors.

Referring to digital platforms such as Facebook and others, Justice Thomas remarked on the “unprecedented … concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties.” As a result, he noted, “[w]e will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated privately owned infrastructure such as private platforms.”

After analyzing the possibility that legislative or regulatory action might be taken to limit the platforms’ ability to exclude speakers or engage in viewpoint censorship, Justice Thomas noted that, even in the absence of such legislation, the First Amendment is relevant and “some speech doctrines might still apply in limited circumstances, as this Court has recognized in the past.”

In words that appear to be germane to our First Amendment arguments opposing Facebook’s motion to dismiss, Justice Thomas remarked that “although a private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment, it is if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint.”

Examples of the kind of government conduct that could render a private entity subject to the First Amendment could include threats made by the government. As Justice Thomas explains:

“The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. Under this doctrine, plaintiffs might have colorable claims against a digital platform if it took adverse action against them in response to government threats.”

Justice Thomas acknowledged in his concurrence, however, that “[w]hat threats would cause a private choice by a digital platform to be ‘deemed … that of the state’ remains unclear,” and the question was not directly presented in the case in which he issued his concurrence.

To what extent Judge Illston may prove receptive to these ideas reflected in CHD’s pleadings and briefs remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

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Ten years ago, on March 19, 2011, US/NATO forces began their bombardment of Libya by air and by sea. The war was initiated directly by the United States, first through Africa Command (AFRICOM), and then through NATO under US command. Over the course of seven months, US/NATO airplanes carried out 30,000 missions, including 10,000 strikes involving over 40,000 bombs and missiles. Italy – with the consensus of its multi-party Parliament (with the Democratic Party-Pd in the front row) – played a part in the war, providing seven air bases (Trapani, Gioia del Colle, Sigonella, Decimomannu, Aviano, Amendola and Pantelleria), fighter-bombers Tornado, Eurofighter and other warplanes, and the Garibaldi aircraft carrier and other warships. Even before the air-naval offensive, tribal and Islamist groups hostile to the government had already been financed and armed, and special forces were infiltrated, especially by Qatar, in order to spread armed conflict within the country.

And that’s how an African country which, as documented by the World Bank in 2010, maintained “high levels of economic growth”, where GDP rose 7.5% a year, which demonstrated “high human development indicators” such as universal access to primary and secondary education and a 40% university attendance rate, came to be destroyed.

Taking disparities into account, the average standard of living in Libya was higher than in other African countries. About two million immigrants, mostly African, found work there. The Libyan state, which possessed the largest oil reserves in Africa, in addition to natural gas, ceded limited profit margins to foreign companies. Thanks to energy exports, the Libyan balance of trade was in the black to the tune of $27 billion USD per year.

Those resources enabled Libya to make about $150 million USD in foreign investments. Libyan investments in Africa were decisive in the African Union’s creation of three financial organizations: the African Monetary Fund, headquartered in Yaoundé, Cameroon; the African Central Bank, based in Abuja, Nigeria; and the African Investment Bank, headquartered in Tripoli. The mission of these organizations was to create a common market and common currency in Africa.

It’s no coincidence that the NATO war to destroy the Libyan state was initiated barely two months after the rise of the African Union, which, on January 31, 2011, led to the creation that year of the African Monetary Fund. This is proven by emails written by the Obama Administration’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, later released by WikiLeaks, showing how the United States and France wanted to eliminate Qaddafi before he used Libya’s gold reserves to create a pan-African currency as a an alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc, the currency France imposed on 14 former colonies.

It’s also proven by the fact that the banks were released even before the bombers in 2011, seizing $150 million USD of Libya’s foreign investments, most of which have disappeared. Goldman Sachs, the most powerful investment bank in the United States, whose vice president was Mario Draghi, played a leading role in the looting.

In Libya today, energy export revenues are hoarded by power groups and multinationals amidst the chaos of armed conflicts. The standard of living for most of the population has been decimated. African immigrants, accused of being “Qaddafi’s mercenaries,” have been imprisoned in zoo cages, tortured and killed. Libya has become the main transit route for human traffickers in a chaotic wave of migration towards Europe that has taken the lives of more victims than the 2011 war. In Tawergha, the NATO-supported Islamist militias of Misurata, who assassinated Qaddafi in October 2011, have truly carried out an ethnic cleansing, forcing around 50,000 Libyan citizens to flee with no hope of returning.

Also responsible for all of this is the Italian parliament, which on March 18, 2011 committed the Italian government to “adopt any and all initiatives (including the entrance of Italy into the war against Libya) to ensure the protection of the region’s populations.”

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto. Translated by Danica Jorden.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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The Weimar District Court has ruled that the obligation to wear a mask, to maintain minimum distances and to perform rapid tests in schools pose a threat to the mental, physical or emotional well-being of the child. So serious that, without any intervention, significant harm to children can be foreseen with a high degree of certainty. The judge stated in his decision:

“There is such a risk here. Because the children are not only endangered in their mental, physical and spiritual well-being, but are also currently damaged by the obligation to wear face masks during school time and to keep their distance from one another and from other people. This violates numerous rights of children and their parents under the law, the constitution and international conventions. This applies in particular to the right to free development of personality and to physical integrity from Article 2 of the Basic Law as well as to the right from Article 6 of the Basic Law to education and care by parents (also with regard to health care measures and ‘objects’ to be carried by children ).”

The entire judgment (Weimar District Court, decision of April 8th, 2021, Az .: 9 F 148/21) comprises 178 pages and is a general statement with the Corona regulations in schools. You can find it under this post.

It is astonishing that initially nothing about the judgment could be found in the big media, at least about Google. Only smaller sites like 2020 News report. It was only after the report here that major media outlets such as Focus Online followed suit. Even in the headline, they are scolding judges and framing in the interests of the government (dubious expert reports as the basis – questionable judgment: Weimar District Court prohibits the use of masks and tests in schools). This silence or this scolding of the judges is extremely remarkable for a democratic media landscape. Even if it is only a judgment from the first instance that is very likely to be overturned by a higher instance: it is an important document in contemporary history. It remains to be seen with excitement whether a discrediting campaign against the judge will be started soon, as was the case in January against a judge at the Weimar District Court, who passed a judgment critical of the Corona measures (see here). According to the lawyers, the present judgment was not passed by the same judge. This is a family judge.

In the judgment it says:

“I. The directors and teachers of the schools for children A, born on … and B, born on …, namely the state regular school X, Weimar, and the state primary school Y, Weimar, as well as the superiors of the school management are prohibited for them and all to order or prescribe the following to other children and pupils taught at these schools:

• to wear face masks of all kinds in class and on the school premises, in particular mouth and nose covers, so-called qualified masks (surgical mask or FFP2 mask) or others,
• Maintain minimum distances between each other or to other people that go beyond what was known before 2020,
• to take part in rapid tests to determine the SARS-CoV-2 virus

II. The directors and teachers of the schools for children A, born on … and B, born on …, namely the state regular school X, Weimar, and the state primary school Y, Weimar, as well as the superiors of the school management are offered for these and all other children and pupils taught at these schools to maintain face-to-face teaching at the school.

As a justification, the judge stated: “The children are harmed physically, psychologically and educationally and their rights are violated, without this being of benefit to the children themselves or to third parties.” The judge came to the conclusion that the school administrators and teachers could not rely on the state regulations on which the measures are based. This is because these regulations are unconstitutional and therefore void. The judge justified this with the fact that they violated the principle of proportionality and thus the rule of law.

The judgment states:

“According to this principle, also known as the prohibition of excess, the measures envisaged to achieve a legitimate purpose must be suitable, necessary and proportionate in the narrower sense – that is, when weighing the advantages and disadvantages achieved with them. The measures that are not evidence-based, contrary to Section 1 (2) IfSG, are already unsuitable for achieving the fundamentally legitimate purpose they pursue, namely avoiding overloading the health system or reducing the rate of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In any case, however, they are disproportionate in the narrower sense, because the considerable disadvantages / collateral damage they cause are not offset by any discernible benefit for the children themselves or for third parties, ”the judge explained.

He also noted a “lack of benefit from wearing a mask and observing distance regulations for the children themselves and third parties”:

“To the court’s conviction, she summarized that the effectiveness of masks for healthy people in public has not been proven by scientific evidence . Likewise, ‘third-party protection’ and the ‘unnoticed transmission’, with which the RKI justified its ‘reassessment’, are not supported by scientific facts. Plausibility, mathematical estimates and subjective assessments in opinion contributions cannot replace population-based clinical-epidemiological studies. Experimental studies on the filter performance of masks and mathematical estimates are not suitable for proving effectiveness in real life. The international health authorities are in favor of wearing masks in public spaces, but also say that there is no evidence from scientific studies for this. Rather, all currently available scientific results suggest that masks have no effect on the infection process. All publications that are cited as evidence for the effectiveness of masks in public spaces do not allow this conclusion. This also applies to the so-called Jena study, as the expert explains in detail in the report. “

The ruling on the Jena study also states:

“Because in the Jena study – like the vast majority of other studies, a purely mathematical estimation or modeling study based on theoretical assumptions without real contact follow-up with authors from the field of macroeconomics without epidemiological knowledge – As explained in detail by the expert, the decisive epidemiological circumstance is not taken into account that the infection values already fell significantly before the introduction of the mask requirement in Jena on April 6, 2020 (about three weeks later in the whole of Germany) and there was no relevant at the end of March 2020 There was more infection in Jena. “

In the judgment of the judge, the dangers of wearing a mask are pointed out:

“Every mask must be worn correctly, as the appraiser explains, in order to be effective in principle. Masks can become a contamination risk if touched. However, on the one hand they are not worn properly by the population and on the other hand they are very often touched with their hands. This can also be seen in politicians who can be seen on television. The population was not taught how to use masks correctly, there was no explanation of how to wash your hands while on the move or how to effectively disinfect your hands. It also failed to explain why hand hygiene is important and how to be careful not to touch your eyes, nose and mouth with your hands. The population was virtually left alone with the masks. The risk of infection is not only not reduced by wearing the mask, but is increased by incorrect handling of the mask. In her report, the expert explains this in detail as well as the fact that and for what reasons it is “unrealistic” to achieve the appropriate use of masks by the population. “

The transmission of the corona virus through “aerosols” is not medically plausible and scientifically unproven, the judge continued:

“According to the most recent presentation of the transmission routes by the WHO (from 01.12.2020), the new coronavirus (like all other respiratory viruses ) transmitted through (large) pots of respiratory secretions and through direct and indirect contact with the respiratory secretions of infected people. Aerosol transmission outside of medical care (where aerosol-producing measures may be used, such as open endotracheal suctioning of intubated patients) cannot be ruled out, but a detailed examination of all published clusters, for which the respective authors postulated aerosol transmission or at least considered it likely, suggested, according to the WHO, that transmission via so-called large droplets and / or contaminated objects (i.e. contact) could also explain the pathogen transmission within these clusters. The other international health authorities (ECDC, CDC) also agree that the pathogen causing COVID-19 – like other viral respiratory pathogens – is mainly transmitted via large droplets and contact [117, 118]. The RKI does not commit itself and considers aerosol transmission to be possible in principle, but does not emphasize this transmission route [119]. The role of airborne transmission in SARS-CoV-2 is scientifically at least unclear. “

The transmission by aerosols is a hypothesis that goes back mainly to aerosol physicists, who, according to the expert, cannot understandably assess medical contexts from their area of ​​expertise, according to the court’s statements: The * aerosol theory is extremely harmful for the coexistence of the People as a whole and has a destructive effect on contacts between people of all ages. Therefore, in appropriately planned epidemiological investigations, direct and indirect contacts – via (large) droplets and / or contact (especially hand contact) – must be reliably excluded in order to be able to consider airborne transmission. “

The explanations of the policy on masks, first fabric masks in 2020, then since the beginning of 2021 either surgical masks or FFP2 masks, lacked any clear line, according to the judge’s ruling. Surgical masks and FFP masks are medical masks, but have different functions and are therefore not interchangeable:

“Either the politicians who made these decisions themselves did not understand what type of mask is basically suitable for, or it does not matter to them only on the symbolic value of the mask. From the expert’s point of view, the mask decisions made by politics are incomprehensible and, to put it mildly, can be described as implausible. “

With reference to the expert Prof. Dr. Kuhbandner writes the court that “so far there is no high-quality scientific evidence that wearing face masks can significantly reduce the risk of infection. According to the expert’s findings, the recommendations of the RKI and the S3 guideline of the professional associations are based on observational studies, laboratory tests on the filter effect and modeling studies, which only provide low and very low levels of evidence, because no really valid conclusions on the effect from such studies due to the underlying methodology can be removed from masks in everyday life and at schools. In addition, the results of the individual studies are heterogeneous and more recent observational studies also provide contradicting results. ”

In addition, according to the judge,

“the extent to which the risk of infection can be reduced by wearing a mask in schools is very low, because infections very rarely occur in schools even without masks. Accordingly, the absolute risk reduction is so low that a pandemic cannot be fought in a relevant way with it … According to the expert, the currently allegedly increasing number of infections in children is in reality due to the fact that the number of tests in the children was in the previous one Weeks has increased sharply. Since the risk of infection in schools is very small, even with a possible increase in the infection rate with the new virus variant B.1.1.7 in the range assumed in studies, the virus spread in schools is not expected to increase significantly. This little benefit is offset by numerous potential side effects related to the physical, psychological and social well-being of children that many children would have to suffer to prevent a single infection. The expert presents these in detail, among other things, using the register of side effects published in the journal Pediatric Journal. “

Under the heading “The unsuitability of PCR tests and rapid tests for measuring the infection rate” it says in the judgment:

“Already the expert Prof. Dr. med. In her report, Kappstein points out that only genetic material can be detected with the PCR test used, but not whether the RNA comes from viruses that are capable of infection and therefore capable of replication (= capable of reproduction). The reviewer Prof. Dr. rer. biol. hum. In her molecular biology expert report, Kämmerer confirms that a PCR test – even if carried out correctly – cannot make any statement as to whether a person is infected with an active pathogen or not. Because the test cannot differentiate between “dead” matter *, e.g. a completely harmless genome fragment as a remnant of the fight of the body’s own immune system against a cold or flu (such genome fragments can still be found many months after the immune system “takes care of” the problem hat) and “living” matter, ie a “fresh”, reproductive virus. For example, PCR is also used in forensics to reproduce residual DNA from hair residues or other trace materials by means of PCR in such a way that the genetic origin of the perpetrator (s) can be identified (“genetic fingerprint”). “

The judge continues:

“Even if everything is done“ correctly ”when performing the PCR including all preparatory steps (PCR design and establishment, sampling, preparation and PCR execution) and the test is positive, ie: one If the genome sequence recognizes which may also exist in one or even the specific “Corona” virus (SARS-CoV-2), this does not mean under any circumstances that the person who tested positive has a replicating SARS-CoV -2 infected and therefore contagious = dangerous for other people.

Rather, to determine an active infection with SARS-CoV-2, additional, specifically diagnostic methods such as the isolation of viruses that are capable of replicating must be used.

Regardless of the fundamental impossibility of determining an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the PCR test, the results of a PCR test also depend on the statements of the expert Prof. Dr. Treasurer from a number of parameters, which on the one hand cause considerable uncertainties and on the other hand can be manipulated in such a way that many or a few (apparently) positive results are achieved. “

The “result” at the end of the 178 page long judgment says:

“The compulsion imposed on school children to wear masks and to keep their distance from one another and from third parties harms the children physically, psychologically, educationally and in their psychosocial development, without any more than marginal benefit for the children themselves or third parties.

Schools do not play a major role in the “pandemic” event.

The PCR tests and rapid tests used on their own are in principle not suitable for determining an “infection” with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

According to the explanations in the expert report, this already results from the own calculations of the Robert Koch Institute. According to RKI calculations, such as expert Prof. Dr. Kuhbandner explains, in mass tests with rapid tests, regardless of symptoms, the probability of actually being infected if a positive result is obtained is only two percent with an incidence of 50 (test specificity 80%, test sensitivity 98%). That would mean: For every two genuinely positive quick test results there would be 98 false positive quick test results, all of which would then have to be retested with a PCR test.

A (regular) compulsion for mass testing without cause on asymptomatic, i.e. healthy people, for whom the medical indication is already lacking, cannot be imposed because it is disproportionate to the effect that can be achieved with it. At the same time, the regular compulsion to take a test puts the children under psychological pressure, because their ability to go to school is constantly put to the test.

Based on surveys in Austria, where masks are not worn in primary schools, but rapid tests are carried out three times a week nationwide, according to the explanations of the expert Prof. Dr. Cow bandner:

100,000 primary school students would have to put up with all the side effects of wearing a mask for a week in order to prevent just one infection per week.

To describe this result as disproportionate would be a completely inadequate description. Rather, it shows that the state legislature regulating this area has gotten far removed from the facts and has assumed dimensions that appear to be historical.

By ordering such measures, the well-being of the children is endangered, as shown, § 1666 BGB. The teachers are therefore not allowed to order them. They cannot invoke the relevant state ordinances and the cited general decree, since they, because of their unsuitability to achieve the desired goals, in any case violate the principle of proportionality because of their disproportionate nature and are therefore unconstitutional and null and void.

In addition, the children have a legal right to accessible school lessons.

According to the current state of the investigation, it appears very likely that this result will be confirmed in the main proceedings. Further details are left to a decision there.

In the context of an assessment of the consequences, when issuing an interim order, the disadvantages that arise if the regulation sought by the parents of the children are not initially made by the family court in the interim order, but then later in the main proceedings, and the effects that arise if the family court already meets the regulation sought by the parents of the children in the preliminary injunction procedure, but later does not confirm it in the main proceedings.

The disadvantages for the children if the intended regulation is delayed by the family court predominate considerably.

In any case, the parents are not able to avert the danger, § 1666 BGB. With the Easter holidays coming to an end, there is also an urgent need to act immediately.

After all that, the decision evident from the tenor was necessary. Since the classmates of the children named in the tenor are affected in the same way, the court made its decision in favor of them.

Here is the verdict:

Click here to read the document.

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Translated from German.

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In the face of constant attacks by US officials over alleged human rights abuses, China released a report on Friday that blasts the US for its many military interventions that have created humanitarian disasters.

The report, titled “Severe Humanitarian Disasters Caused by US Aggressive Wars against Foreign Countries,” was released by the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS), which falls under China’s State Council Information Office.

“The majority of the aggressive wars were launched by the US unilaterally. They resulted in mass casualties and destruction of property and led to appalling humanitarian catastrophes. Such foreign interventions lay bare America’s selfishness and hypocrisy,” the report reads.

The report said that from the end of World War II to 2001, the US was responsible for 81 percent of the world’s armed conflicts. “According to incomplete statistics, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 2001, among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions of the world, 201 were initiated by the United States, accounting for 81 percent of the total number,” the study reads.

The report examined statistics of seven armed conflicts the US was involved in, from the Korean War to recent intervention in Syria. CSHRS said that besides direct military involvement, the US has also “intervened directly or indirectly in other countries’ affairs by supporting proxy wars, inciting anti-government insurgencies, carrying out assassinations, providing weapons and ammunition, and training anti-government armed forces.”

In recent years, US officials have turned up the rhetoric against China, and the Biden administration has been especially hostile. Beijing has maintained a more diplomatic tone, but since in-person talks between the two countries’ top diplomats in Alaska turned hostile last month, China seems more willing to call out Washington’s hypocrisy.

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

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Turkey has confirmed an earlier CNN report that the U.S. will send warships to the Black Sea in what a Pentagon official cited by CNN said was a demonstration of support to the government of Ukraine in response to claims of increased Russian military presence on Ukraine’s eastern border. The Black Sea is nowhere near the current conflict zone in the Donbass, further east of which the alleged Russian build-up is occurring.

Under terms of the 1936 Montreux Convention naval vessels from non-littoral nations have to notify Turkey, whose territory the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean are, of a planned visit to the Black Sea nine days in advance. The ships, which will enter the sea on April 14 and 15 and stay until May 4 and 5, are the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Donald Cook and USS Roosevelt. The Convention regulates by tonnage individual ships and groups of ships entering the sea. More than two U.S. destroyers might surpass the limit of the latter maximum.

What advanced warships like the Tomahawk- and Standard Missile-3-equipped American destroyers are doing in a sea half a world away from the U.S. seems to be a question no one ever asks.

Russian news reports of the past twenty-four hours have quoted from the CNN feature the words of the unnamed Defense Department official that the deployment would “sent a significant signal” to Moscow. Delivering a message sounds innocuous enough. The traditional term for such an action is brinkmanship.

The CNN feature mentioned that U.S. Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea, crisis or no crisis, but that dispatching additional warships to the sea would “send a specific message to Moscow that the US is closely watching.” The equivalent of what’s being considered would be Russia sending several guided-missile cruisers through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes to “send a message” to the U.S. over Washington moving troops in the direction of the Canadian border.

The same Defense Department official informed CNN that U.S. Navy was flying reconnaissance flights over the Black Sea where Russia maintains its naval fleet of that name at Sevastopol in Crimea.

To increase U.S. and allied NATO military presence in the Black Sea region would mean a substantial forward presence indeed, as the U.S. had three guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser in the Black Sea in the last three months, frequently two at a time: USS Thomas Hudner, USS Porter, USS Donald Cook and USS Monterey. The first three are destroyers, the last a cruiser. The destroyers can carry 56 Tomahawk missiles apiece, and both the destroyers and cruisers are part of the Navy’s Aegis Combat System and can also be equipped with Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles that could shoot down Russian missiles.

CNN also reported that on April 7 two American B-1 supersonic bombers (previously nuclear-capable) flew over the Aegean Sea, which gives access to the Black Sea.

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier with its attached carrier strike group is currently in the Eastern Mediterranean. Four guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser are assigned to the group. The warships could have as many as 280 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Dwight D. Eisenhower has 90 fixed-wing planes and helicopters in addition to Sea Sparrow anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles and Rolling Airframe Missile surface-to-air missiles. All within immediate striking range of the Black Sea.

The above comes against the backdrop of mounting anti-Russian rhetoric from Washington, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stating on April 8:

“The United States is increasingly concerned by recently escalating Russian aggressions [sic] in eastern Ukraine, including Russia’s movements on Ukraine’s border. Russia now has more troops on the border of Ukraine than any time since 2014. Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs.”

In recent days President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have all had conversations with Ukrainian counterparts on the intensified fighting in the Donbass and in regard to reported Russian “aggressions.”

Also on April 8 Interfax reported the Russian Defense Ministry announced it was relocating ten navy vessels, described as landing craft and artillery warships, from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea for exercises. (As the Caspian is landlocked, the vessels can’t be of great size as they would be required to be moved overland.)

Without doubt we are witnessing the most serious escalation of tensions between the world’s two major nuclear powers since the first Soviet troops crossed the Oxus River to enter Afghanistan in late 1979. In fact maybe since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been detained at the high-security Belmarsh prison in London for two years.

During that time, Assange became the first publisher to be indicted under the United States Espionage Act and prevailed after a district judge denied the U.S. government’s extradition request. He completed a sentence for “jumping bail” when he sought asylum from Ecuador. He also survived multiple COVID-19 outbreaks in prison.

“It’s long past time for this injustice to end, and we continue to appeal to the United States and the Department of Justice to drop the appeal and all the charges against Julian. This gross injustice must come to an end,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson declared.

Stella Moris, Assange’s partner, acknowledged the protests and solidarity actions that are planned throughout the world.

Mobilizations were planned for April 11 in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., Denver, Chicago, Raleigh, San Jose, Seattle, Tulsa, Toronto, London, Glasgow, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Mexico City, Melbourne, Perth, Auckland, and Wellington.

Several actions will take place over the course of the week in cities like Boston, Berlin, Brussels, Dresden, Vienna, and Hamburg.

“Anniversaries are a platform to educate, nurture compassion and solidarity, and bring like-minded people onboard,” Moris stated.

The U.S. Justice Department dramatically escalated the political prosecution against Assange on April 11, 2019, when it unsealed a single charge indictment against the WikiLeaks founder. Ecuador allowed British police to enter their London embassy and drag him to a van.

While video posted showed a vulnerable person in distress, begging the United Kingdom and everyone around the world to resist this prosecution, many focused on his unkempt appearance—his long hair and shaggy beard—and mocked him.

Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, shared,

“During my visit, he explained to us that his shaving kit had been deliberately taken away three months earlier.”

This was all part of Ecuador President Lenin Moreno‘s U.S.-backed pressure campaign to force Assange to leave the embassy.

In 2012, Assange was granted political asylum, when Rafael Correa was president of Ecuador. Correa’s administration considered “legal evidence” that Assange would not receive a fair trial if extradited to the U.S. and endorsed Assange’s fears of due process violations and cruel and inhuman treatment if he was handed over to Sweden.

At Assange’s extradition trial in September, his defense team presented evidence of an espionage operation backed by U.S. intelligence that was carried out against him at the London embassy.

Undercover Global S.L., a Spanish security company, bugged the embassy and had a “real obsession” with spying on Assange’s legal team. Beyond that, U.C. Global Director David Morales talked about plots to kidnap Assange or even poison him, and the company ordered employees to steal diapers so they could figure out if he fathered a child.

In October 2019, a Spanish high court charged Morales with offenses “related to violating the privacy of the WikiLeaks founder and passing the information on to the United States’ intelligence services,” according to El Pais.

That case is still unfolding in Spain, however, the Justice Department has sought to obstruct proceedings by refusing cooperation unless whistleblowers from the company reveal their identities.

The unsealed indictment against Assange was initially limited to a “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a general statute against any conspiracies to “defraud” the U.S. government, which prompted a number of Western pundits to erroneously insist prosecutors avoided a case that would implicate the First Amendment.

However, the indictment declared,

“The WikiLeaks website publicly solicited submissions of classified, censored, and other restricted information. Assange, who did not possess a security clearance or need to know, was not authorized to receive classified information of the United States.”

The indictment relied upon language straight from the Espionage Act. Prosecutors explicitly singled out Assange as an “aider” and “abettor” of “espionage” for publishing unauthorized disclosures of classified information, even though reporters and editors at media organizations throughout the world routinely produce stories based upon sensitive documents without a U.S. security clearance.

A little over a month later, in May 2019, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment with 17 charges under the Espionage Act. It dispelled any illusions journalists throughout the world may have had.

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President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Attorney General Merrick Garland now have the obligation, if they are serious about press freedom, to drop the charges that were issued under Trump by a Justice Department deeply politicized by Attorney General Bill Barr.

The Biden administration should recognize how much time has passed, including how long ago it was that Attorney General Eric Holder‘s Justice Department examined the evidence against Assange and chose not to indict a publisher. (Biden was President Barack Obama’s vice president.)

Whether the Biden administration returns to a norm that existed under Obama, Stella Moris suggests that those opposed to the prosecution “remind people that the judge threw out the U.S. extradition request in January.”

“Remind them that Julian published information because he defends people’s right to know what the government does in their name. Remind them that he has done nothing wrong and to put him in prison is to criminalize journalism. Remind them that he has a family and that he is suffering,” Moris concluded.

Those who support freedom of the press may also recall the U.S. war crimes in Iraq that Assange helped to expose by publishing disclosures from Pfc. Chelsea Manning. They may recall diplomatic cables that revealed how the British government sought to limit an inquiry into the U.K.’s involvement in the Iraq War. They may recall the pressure European countries faced to not investigate CIA torture, and the extrajudicial assassinations by CIA and U.S. military forces in Pakistan, which became widely known. And they may recall how documents showed the CIA enlisted U.S. officials to spy on UN officials and foreign diplomats at the UN in New York.

Though the above represents only a sliver of the information published, it is some of the most compelling evidence that Assange was targeted for enabling scrutiny of a global superpower.

The U.S. government has appealed the January ruling by the British judge against extradition. Assange’s team has also appealed because his attorneys believe the judge issued a decision that was far too dangerous for the future of press freedom in the world.

The High Court of Justice will decide in the coming months whether to hear the appeal.

Meanwhile, in Ecuador, President Moreno’s right-wing, neoliberal, and U.S.-backed agenda has been entirely rejected. A runoff is taking place on the same day as the anniversary of Moreno’s flagrant violation of Assange’s human rights.

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***

A few lessons to be learnt from the wall-to-wall coverage of Prince Philip’s death in the British media:

1. There is absolutely no commercial reason for the media to have dedicated so much time and space to the Prince’s death. The main commercial channel ITV, which needs eyeballs on its programmes to generate income from advertising, saw a 60 per cent drop in viewing figures after it decided to broadcast endless forelock-tugging. Audiences presumably deserted to Netflix and Youtube, where the mood of “national mourning” was not being enforced. Many viewers, particularly younger ones, have no interest in the fact that a very old man just died, even if he did have lots of titles. 

The UK is one of the world's most propagandised nations on the planet.

Just look at the top of the @BBCNews website or the major 'newspapers' today. pic.twitter.com/mv9si3863X

— Media Lens (@medialens) April 10, 2021

The BBC, the state broadcaster, similarly ignored the wishes of its audiences, commandeering all of its many channels to manufacture and enforce the supposedly national mood of grief. That even went so far as placing banners on the CBBC channel for children encouraging them to forgo their cartoons and switch to the BBC’s main channel paying endless, contrived tributes to Philip. The resulting outpouring of anger was so great the BBC was forced to open a dedicated complaints form on its website. It then had to hurriedly remove it when the establishment threw a wobbly about viewers being given a chance to object to the BBC’s coverage.

BBC inundated with complaints over ‘too much’ Prince Philip coverage https://t.co/1t7YfTyQCr

— The Independent (@Independent) April 10, 2021

2. The BBC is reported to have heavily invested in coverage of Philip’s death for fear that otherwise it would face a barrage of criticism from Britain’s rightwing press for showing insufficient patriotism and revealing a supposed “leftwing bias”. That was what apparemtly happened when the BBC failed to grovel sufficiently to the royal family over the Queen Mother’s death in 2002. But if that is the case, doesn’t it simply underscore how vulnerable the supposedly “neutral” state broadcaster is to pressure from the rightwing billionaire owners of the establishment media?

If Rupert Murdoch and company can force the BBC into alienating and antagonising many of its own viewers with endless homilies to a royal little loved by large sections of the population, how else is the BBC’s coverage being skewed for fear of the potential backlash from corporate media tycoons? Is the fear of such repercussions also responsible for the BBC’s complicity in the recent, evidence-free smearing of a socialist Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, or the BBC’s consistent failures in reporting honestly on countries like Syria, Libya, Iraq and Venezuela – all of them in the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and Latin America that the United States and the west demand control over?

If the BBC makes its editorial decisions based on what rightwing and far-right newspaper tycoons think is good both for the country and for the world, then how is the BBC not equally rightwing?

3. The BBC is also reportedly afraid that, if it is not seen to be deferential enough to the royal family, it risks being punished by the ruling Conservative party, which regards the institution of the monarchy as sacrosanct. The BBC’s licence fee and wider funding – which need government approval – might be in jeopardy as a result.

But that is no less troubling than that the BBC is kowtowing to billionaire media magnates. Because if the ruling Conservative party can wield a stick sufficiently big to dictate to the BBC how and to what extent it covers Philip’s death, why can the government not also bully the BBC into giving it an easy ride on its failures to deal with Covid and its cronyism in awarding Covid-related contracts?

At what point does the UK officially become a banana republic? At the point when its health secretary awards a massive contract for medical supplies to his former neighbour and pub landlord? https://t.co/9DPlVXj5DB

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 27, 2020

Similarly, if the BBC is quite so craven, why can the ruling party not also intimidate it into ignoring the biggest current assault on journalism: Washington’s relentless efforts to imprison for life Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after he exposed US war crimes?

And what would there be to stop Tory leader Boris Johnson from arm-twisting the BBC into ignoring the rampant racism documented in his own party and pressuring the state broadcaster instead into presenting the Labour party as riddled with antisemitism, even though figures show that Labour has less of a problem with racism than wider British society and the Tories?

And there is the rub. Because that is exactly what the BBC has been doing, serving as little more than a propaganda channel for the right.

That same fear of the ruling Conservative party might explain why the BBC keeps filling its top posts, and its most influential editorial jobs, with stalwarts of the right. Most egregiously that includes the BBC’s new chairman, Richard Sharp, who is not only one of the Tory party’s biggest donors but helped to fund a firm accused of “human warehousing” – stuffing benefit recipients into “rabbit hutch” flats – to profit from a Conservative government scheme.

New BBC chair Richard Sharp is not only a major donor to the Conservative party but he helped to fund a firm accused of 'human warehousing', stuffing benefit recipients into 'rabbit hutch' flats to profit from a Conservative government scheme https://t.co/nR4wOeZozv

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 26, 2021

It would also explain the appointment in 2013 as head of BBC news of James Harding, a Murdoch loyalist and former Times editor who vowed that he and his newspaper were unabashedly “pro-Israel”. It would explain too why Sarah Sands, editor of the unapologetically rightwing Evening Standard, was seen as suitable to serve as editor of the Radio 4’s morning news programme, Today.

4. The truth is that these factors and more have played a part in ensuring there have been only wall-to-wall tributes to Prince Philip. Corporate media is not there simply to make quick profits. Sometimes, it is seen by its billionaire owners as a loss-leader. It is there to generate a favourable political and social climate to help corporations accrete ever greater power and profits.

Manufacturing the pretence of patriotic solidarity in a time of supposed national loss or calamity; cultivating a reverence for tradition; promoting unquestioning respect for socially constructed authority figures; reinforcing social hierarchies that normalise grossly offensive wealth disparities is exactly what establishment media is there to do.

Is the worst our corporate media has to say about Prince Philip that he could have a 'gruff exterior'? Why is the supposedly 'liberal-left' Guardian offering page after page of homily? Could his death not have been wrapped up in one story, leaving it to the redtops to grovel? pic.twitter.com/IUAyf8XzqM

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 10, 2021

The corporate media, from the rightwing Daily Mail to the supposedly liberal BBC and Guardian, is there to make the patently insane – mourning an entitled man most of us knew little about and what little we did know made us care even less for him – seem not only natural but obligatory. To refuse to submit to compulsory grieving, to state that Philip’s death from old age is less important than the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the UK who lost their lives early from the pandemic, is not rudeness, or heartlessness, or a lack of patriotism. It is to cling to our humanity, to prize our ability to think and feel for ourselves, and to refuse to be swept up in a carnival of hollow emotion. 

And most important of all, it is to sense – however briefly – that the wall-to-wall propaganda we are being subjected to on the death of a royal may look exceptional but is in fact entirely routine. It is simply that in normal times the propaganda is better masked, wrapped in the illusion of choice and variety.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog. 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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

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Introduction by Dr. Gary G. Kohls

If Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca or any of the host of for-profit, Vaccine Pushing, corporate-connected entities that inhabit the CDC, the NIAID, the NIH, the Departments of Health, Dr Fauci, Dr Osterholm, Dr Offit, Dr Hotez, “Dr” Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, the WHO, your personal physician, your nurse practitioner, your neighbors or friends, your hospital or clinic CEOs or your talking heads on TV urge you to get the Covid shot after already having had the disease (or perhaps even simply having had a “positive” PCR test along with some influenza-like symptoms), you will know that you are being given irresponsible, dangerous, potentially lethal advice from a relatively vaccinology-illiterate source that probably has financial conflicts of interest, and you should search elsewhere for unbiased, ethical advice.

Shamefully, all of the truly science-based, vaccinology-literate sources of accurate information have had their “dangerous” books figuratively burned or black-listed/banned from YouTube, Google, FaceBook, etc,. – a reality that should make everybody eager to know exactly what is so threatening to the industries of Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Medicine and assorted for-profit governmental agencies, all of which that have been turning once-honorable vaccinologists into crass pseudo-scientists who do what their corporate paymasters demand of them.)

Getting a Covid “vaccine” after having had the infection should be regarded as a relative contradiction until comprehensive clinical studies are done that have established both short and long-term safety and efficacy. So far there are no such research studies being done. Vaccine Pushers are not interested in getting to those truths and the propaganda has been so intense, that the narrative has been established, so that admitting that there are problems is not an option.

However there is already plenty of evidence exposing the dangers of blindly inoculating everybody on the planet (Bill Gates wants all 7+billion people – including infants – to be inoculated and then given regular booster shots with any one or more of the experimental Covid “vaccines”!). The following article summarized important information that is accumulating in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) – recognizing that only about 1% of actual adverse events ever get reported to the site.

The author of this important piece – Luke Yamaguchi – had to do a lot of pain-staking research to collate the information on the patients (as of April 1, 2021) that died after receiving the Covid-19 shot. Because the full article came to well over 5000 words, I have abbreviated for this Duty to Warn article it by deleting the clinical data for each of the patients. That information can be easily obtained by clicking on the link provided.

Dr. Gary G. Kohls, April 11, 2021

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On January 26, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm sent an open letter to the FDA and Pfizer warning of the potential dangers of giving Covid vaccines to people who have already had (or currently have) COVID-19. As a physician-scientist with an MD and PhD in cellular immunology, Dr. Noorchashm based his warning on an “immunological prognostication” outlined below:

• People who have recently had (or currently have) COVID-19 can have viral antigens present in the endothelial lining of blood vessels, among other tissues.
• If these viral antigens are present, the immune response triggered by Covid vaccination will target these tissues causing inflammation and damage.
• In blood vessels, this can result in blood clot formation with the potential for major complications.

In other words, people who have previously had COVID-19 will be at greater risk of adverse events if they receive Covid vaccinations. To be clear, this is a theory based on an understanding of immunology. But is there any evidence to support this hypothesis?

According to an article in The Telegraph, recent data shows that Covid vaccine side effects are seen up to three times more often in people who have previously had COVID-19. The data comes from the King’s College ZOE app which has logged details from more than 700,000 vaccinations. The ZOE data shows that 12.2% of people reported side effects after their first dose of Pfizer vaccine, but that jumped to 35.7% in people who had previously had COVID-19. For the AstraZeneca vaccine, 31.9% of people reported symptoms following their shot, rising to 52.7% for people who had previously been infected with COVID-19.

In addition to this data, anecdotal stories in the news suggest that some people who previously had COVID-19 and recovered, died after receiving a Covid vaccination.

Dr. J Barton Williams, a 36-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Tennessee, is one such case. According to a local news report, Dr. Williams died of a “COVID-related illness” known as multi-system inflammatory syndrome that causes inflammation in the blood vessels and other tissues. He also tested positive for COVID antibodies, meaning he previously had COVID-19 but never knew it. Dr. Williams died just weeks after receiving his second Covid vaccination.

It is ironic that he survived COVID-19 without even knowing it, only to die after receiving a Covid vaccine intended to save his life.

In another news report, a California resident who had tested positive for COVID-19 in December, died just hours after receiving his Covid vaccine on January 21, 2021.

Turning our attention to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), we see many such cases of people who got COVID-19 and survived, only to die soon after receiving their Covid vaccine.

What follows in Annex is a compilation of such cases.

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ANNEX

Deaths Same Day as Vaccination

VAERS ID: 940955

VAERS ID: 967830

VAERS ID: 915682

VAERS ID: 914961

VAERS ID: 915920

VAERS ID: 924456

Deaths One Day After Vaccination

VAERS ID: 1082717

VAERS ID: 1106667

VAERS ID: 1092651

VAERS ID: 949474

VAERS ID: 946225

VAERS ID: 1046915

VAERS ID: 1000280

VAERS ID: 937773

VAERS ID: 1095238

VAERS ID: 944732

VAERS ID: 970976

VAERS ID: 974172

VAERS ID: 1074955

VAERS ID: 946959

VAERS ID: 1075097

VAERS ID: 1125079

Deaths Two Days After Vaccination

VAERS ID: 1003382

VAERS ID: 934507

VAERS ID: 961705

VAERS ID: 991997

VAERS ID: 934059

VAERS ID: 1020227

VAERS ID: 1032873

VAERS ID: 1105193

VAERS ID: 1038635

VAERS ID: 1038442

Deaths Three Days After Vaccination

VAERS ID: 1112164

VAERS ID: 965561

VAERS ID: 982541

VAERS ID: 935343

VAERS ID: 1030712

VAERS ID: 992599

VAERS ID: 1022397

VAERS ID: 1075657

Deaths Four or More Days After Vaccination

VAERS ID: 1006303

VAERS ID: 998138

VAERS ID: 1069118

VAERS ID: 979926

VAERS ID: 1000228

VAERS ID: 1006316

VAERS ID: 952881

VAERS ID: 1012047

VAERS ID: 1010114

VAERS ID: 1033448

VAERS ID: 1055149

VAERS ID: 953754

VAERS ID: 1017675

VAERS ID: 975744

VAERS ID: 975206

VAERS ID: 964795

VAERS ID: 998419

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***

“I am not going to be talking about numbers today,” Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly told Australia’s Radio National on April 12.  This echoed suggestions from the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who had adopted the position that Australia best forget meeting any clear vaccination targets.  Having left battling the pandemic to State governments, the Federal government has found itself unable to execute its program, if one dare call it that.

Part of the monumental failings of the government can be put down to its stubbornness in prioritising the use of one vaccine.  AstraZeneca was meant to be the vaccine wonder, the Godhead, the miraculous deliverer.  CSL, Australia’s only vaccine manufacturer, was given the task of producing the majority of 54 million ordered doses at its Broadmeadows factory in Melbourne.  Many of those now risk being essentially useless.

AstraZeneca’s product has been plagued by a profile that has become a ballooning public relations nightmare.  While various medical authorities in Europe delayed the application of jabs fearing a possible link between the vaccine and a rare blood-clotting syndrome, Australia looked on with goggle-eyed wonder, insisting that no pause was necessary.  Administrative objectives took priority over medical ones.

Last week, Morrison’s medical advisers made things even more trying by suggesting that the AstraZeneca vaccine be ruled out for those under 50.  In a media release on April 8 by the Department of Health Secretary Brendan Murphy and Chief Medical Officer Kelly, it was revealed that they had “received very important advice” from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI).  ATAGI had been considering European and US findings regarding any possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and any possible cause of “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia” characterised by “blood clots with low platelet counts.”

In Europe, one in every 250,000 people who had received AstraZeneca had been diagnosed with the rare blood clot condition.  But Australia had not been spared, with one patient suffering thrombosis  and a low platelet count after being vaccinated on March 22.

ATAGI had recommended that those under 50 years of age should take the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine instead.  “This recommendation is based on the increasing risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 in older adults – and hence a higher benefit from vaccination – and a potentially increased risk of ‘thrombosis with thrombocytopenia’ following AstraZeneca vaccination among those aged under 50.”

The advisory group also recommended, obliquely, that the AstraZeneca vaccine might still be used for adults aged under 50 in cases “where the benefits clearly outweigh the risk for that individual” and the individual in question had made “an informed decision based on an understanding of the risks and benefits.”  Patients, it would seem, beware.

Ominously, the health officers had to accept that the decision to accept the ATAGI advice would have “implications for the vaccine rollout program.”  One of them was already in evidence by the end of last week.  Victoria’s Department of Health was taking few chances.  “Until updated consent forms and consumer information are available from the Commonwealth Department of Health, and immunisation teams have been familiarised with these materials, it is advised that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 is not administered to eligible persons aged under 50 years.”

Those who had made vaccination appointments for April 9 at the Royal Exhibition building in Melbourne were denied the jab.  “They just turned me away,” St. John Ambulance employee Athena Stathoulas explained to the ABC.  “I had no idea it was for 50s and over. I had no notification.”

The Morrison government has been scrambling.  The Prime Minister announced on Friday that Australia had secured a further 20 million Pfizer vaccine doses, in addition to current orders for 20 million.  He tried to distract critics by noting that 170 million doses of vaccines in total, spanning deals with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Novavax and COVAX, had been secured.  (Delivery has been quite another matter.)

None of this could conceal the fact that vaccination timetables had been shredded.  An October deadline had been proposed for all Australians wishing to be vaccinated to receive at least one dose.  Prior to that, the government had dreamily suggested a target of 4 million vaccinated Australian adults, with all remaining adults being finished by October.  On April 8, Morrison emphasised “uncertainties” and “many, many variables” that doomed any coherent planning.  “This is not a certain world and we’re not on our own.  The whole world is dealing with the same uncertainty.”

Government incompetence has also taken on a patriotic dimension. Stupidity can be forgivable, if it is shown to be defending the national interest.  Agriculture Minister David Littleproud is a startling example of this, refusing to consider how ordering other vaccines might ameliorate the problem.  Having not consulted the entire Australian population on the matter, he could confidently tell Channel Nine that he did not “think any Australian would want the Chinese vaccine or the Sputnik vaccine.”  He spoke of an approach “calm and methodical about making sure that we give the best vaccine with confidence, and however long it takes”.

The National COVID-19 Commission, through member Jane Halton, is also of the same view.  “The trick now is for people to calm down a little bit and get back to basics.”  Prizer would be the stand-in hero here.  Think, warbles Halton, that “there will be 40 million doses in total” of it.

The current state of calm, understanding of basics, and methodical application means that a further two years will be required for Australians to be fully vaccinated.  Daily tallies such as 27,209 are a far cry from the suggested number put forth by epidemiologist Mary-Louise McClaws, who opines that a total between 100,000 and 120,000 would be eminently more suitable.

AstraZeneca’s future is not promising in other respects.  The European Medicine Agency is currently reviewing reports on a possible cause of capillary leak syndrome.  Other drug titans are also not being spared scrutiny, with Johnson & Johnson’s own Janssen vaccine potentially being tarnished by the same blood clot problem.  “At present, no clear casual relationship has been established between these rare events and the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine,” stated the company in an email.

The damage, certainly in terms of public relations and the vaccination program, deepens.  But in Australia, the issue cuts deeper.  Bureaucratic incompetence has become the Siamese twin of unoriginal selections and poor supply lines.  With the State governments having performed the lion’s share of the work protecting populations from COVID-19, the Federal government has shown various, fabulous ways of soiling the stable.  A near future of closed borders, snap lockdowns and an increasingly enfeebled economy, seems likely.

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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]

Featured image: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison Photo: Xinhua

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The Académie nationale de médecine, an independent but official learned society in France, published a statement on Thursday warning that nasopharyngeal swabs used for PCR tests to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus “are not without risks.” The alert came days before nasal auto-testing kits will become available in French pharmacies.

According to the statement published online by the Academy, a growing amount of data show that “complications” can and do occur, some of them “serious.”

Most are “benign,” and include “discomfort, pain or bleeding.” But the statement notes that over the last weeks, scientific articles have been appearing in medical journals describing undesirable events “including breaches of the anterior skull base associated with a risk of meningitis.”

Several studies were quoted by the Academy, including one documenting “meningitis due to cerebrospinal fluid leak after nasal swab testing for COVID-19.”

The nasopharyngeal swab is done with a long, thin cotton swab introduced high up into the nasal cavity, often successively via both nostrils, and rotated quickly each time in order to collect a sample of cells and mucus to analyze for the Wuhan virus using the highly controversial PCR test, or to be used in view of an antigenic test.

The Academy noted that these tests have now become extremely common. The learned society is concerned because swabs are being increasingly used, and that more and more individuals are getting repeat tests, “sometimes in inadequate conditions.”

“It is important to recall that precautions need to be taken and that risks do exist,” it said.

The Academy advises that medical personnel should be making the swabs, and then exclusively those who received training to be able to observe the necessary “technical conditions.”

These include asking patients whether they had a medical history of accidents or surgery in the ORL field that may have modified the anatomy of the nasal and sinus cavities, and not placing their heads in hyperextension during sample taking: they should remain in a natural position, with the chin “parallel” to the floor. Swabs should be introduced “horizontally following the base of the nasal cavity and they should under no circumstance be deviated upwards, in the direction of the base of the skull.”

The Académie de médecine appears to be particularly worried about children, strongly suggesting that they should be tested using saliva samples “because of both their safety and their acceptability.”

Regarding the upcoming auto-tests that also rely on nasal swabs, the statement said that their users should be warned about their use. “Auto-sampling can lead to false negatives when the swab is too shy and too superficial, but it can also become dangerous when the swab goes too deep and is orientated in the wrong direction,” it said.

Auto-tests are not exactly like the nasal swabs used by health professionals in France since the beginning of the COVID crisis: the swab is shorter, wider, and less disagreeable and only requires entering three to four centimeters into the nasal cavity – some of these swabs, but not all, include a little “collar” showing how far to go. Instead of being processed in special lab instruments, the auto-test will give a positive or negative result within minutes. If negative, people are advised to continue “social distancing” and wearing masks; if positive, the result needs to be confirmed by an RT-PCR test in order to mark the “variant” and allow contact-tracing.

French health authorities are hoping that the tests will be used by private individuals who want to know their status before a visit to a vulnerable person, for instance, but they also expect to use them for large-scale testing in apartment buildings or high schools for people aged over 15.

In Germany, similar tests are being marketed and will include a flash code allowing the identification and tracking of “positive cases.”

At the beginning of the crisis in March 2020, very little testing was done even on symptomatic patients, to the detriment of isolation procedures that would have stopped the spread of the virus much more efficiently. If early treatment of positive patients had been allowed and recommended, many would not have seen their condition worsen: according to Professor Christian Perronne, 24,500 deaths out of 30,000 during the spring epidemic last year could have been avoided.

Now testing in France is beyond imagination. Since March 1, 2020 and April 4 of this year, some 70 million tests were done: 57.7 million PCR tests, the rest antigenic, according to a public health statistics institution, DREES. And the numbers are going up and up: from March 29 to April 4, 3.8 million test results were validated in one week. They were obviously not limited to people with flu-like symptoms.

PCR tests remain the so-called gold standard of COVID-19 testing, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that they should mostly be considered as an “aid for diagnosis” and that their results should be carefully interpreted according to manufacturers’ guidance and accompanied by clinical observations, among others. The WHO also said that “the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases.”

Present curves representing the evolution of positives, hospitalizations, and deaths in France show a slow increase of the latter and a fast increase of the former as thousands of people test each day and “positives” keep climbing, while hospitalizations and deaths remain quite stable.

With the introduction of more and more kinds of tests and auto-tests, the “epidemic of cases” is not set to end.

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Below is the summary of Forbes analysis on how the Corona Crisis has contributed to a massive increase in billionaire wealth.

The report points to the enrichment of CEO’s connected to Big Pharma and the covid vaccine, as well as Chinese business interests in the areas of covid health products. 

While the focus of the Forbes report is on billionaire wealth, it should also be understood that global enrichment has been marked by an accompanied by process of impoverishment of large sectors of the World population in the course of the last 14 months. According to the FAO, famines have erupted in at least 25 developing countries according to UN sources. 

This concentration of global wealth has been accompanied by a wave of bankruptcies affecting both Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) as well as large Corporations. The evidence suggests that small and medium sized enterprises are literally being wiped out. According to a survey by the International Trade Centre, quoted by the OECD, pertaining to SMEs in 132 countries:

“Based on several surveys in a variety of countries, McKinsey (2020) indicates that between 25% and 36% of small businesses could close down permanently from the disruption in the first four months of the pandemic. (OECD Report, emphasis added)

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Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 12, 2021

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Shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, markets collapsed and economies around the world plunged into recession. At the same time, hundreds of billionaires fell from the ranks of Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list, capturing a snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people.

One year later, things couldn’t be more different: a record 493 new billionaires joined the list this year, propelled by a red-hot stock market and unprecedented economic stimulus. Among those newcomers are at least 40 new entrants who draw their fortunes from companies involved in fighting Covid-19. Some, such as Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and BioNTech cofounder Uğur Şahin, have become household names thanks to the vaccines they helped develop. Others got rich making everything from personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests to antibody treatments and software that helps authorities schedule vaccination campaigns, which will be essential in reopening economies and returning to normal life.

The richest of these new billionaires is Li Jianquan, the president of Chinese medical products manufacturer Winner Medical, which ramped up production of masks and medical overalls to supply frontline workers across the globe. Winner Medical’s IPO on the Shenzhen stock exchange in September 2020 instantly made Jianquan, 64, a billionaire several times over thanks to his 68% stake in the company, worth $6.8 billion.

Some vaccine companies have been so successful that their rise over the last year has minted several new billionaires from the same company, including four apiece from Moderna and Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics, which saw its one-shot vaccine approved by Chinese regulators in February. And it’s not just the vaccine discoverers: companies that mass produce the vaccines and contract research firms that help firms run clinical trials have both reaped the rewards, creating new fortunes for people like Juan López-Belmonte López of Spanish pharma outfit Rovi and Karin Sartorius-Herbst and Ulrike Baro of German biopharma firm Sartorius AG.

Read complete report

Click here to read the 40 newcomers with ties to companies battling the Covid-19 pandemic; net worths are as of March 5, 2021.

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One year ago, following the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterrres appealed to G-20 leaders to lift all of their economic sanctions against the poorest countries of the world for the duration of the pandemic. Guterres noted, “Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world.”

Not a single G-20 leader complied. Some, like Trump, actually increased their coercive economic measures against countries such as Venezuela and Iran, hoping that the combination of economic sanctions and pandemic would lead to regime change in those countries.

Here in Canada, two peace organizations, one each from the two main language groups in the country, united to amplify the Secretary-General’s appeal to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by organizing an open letter from 100 prominent Canadians on April 13, 2020, asking Trudeau to lift Canada’s economic sanctions against 20 countries of the world, 9 of which are in Africa. Regrettably, the PM did not even bother to reply to the substance of the open letter.

In response, the two organizations organized both a Change.org petition to the PM with the same demands. When that too failed to elicit a response, they also initiated parliamentary petition e-2630, sponsored by NDP MP Scott Duvall. The parliamentary petition did finally get a response from MP Rob Oliphant, Parliamentary-Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, that response found little favour with the two peace groups.

Below is a rebuttal of the government’s position, as stated by Parliamentary-Secretary Rob Oliphant:

1) The government of Canada must respect the rule of international law. The UN Charter recognizes that economic sanctions are an act of war that often kill more people than bullets and bombs and therefore reserves the right to level these coercive economic measures solely for the Security Council. Canada’s economic sanctions against 19 countries of the world are unilateral, i.e., they don’t have the approval of the UNSC. Therefore, they are illegal. Moreover, they constitute meddling in the internal affairs of other sovereign countries, which is also illegal under the UN Charter and many centuries of international law. Canada needs to stop applying unilateral coercive economic measures.

2) Human rights have been weaponized by many western governments, including Canada’s. Alleged human rights violations, which are cherry-picked unilaterally by these governments, have been used respectively to invoke the doctrines of humanitarian interventionism and the responsibility to protect (R2P) against countries, such as the former Yugoslavia and Libya, to destroy entire states and turn large populations into refugees. Human rights violations are never used as excuses to intervene or level sanctions in major human-rights-violating countries such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the apartheid State of Israel, because these states are within the sphere of influence of the main imperial power, the USA.

3) We take exception to the Parliament-Secretary’s characterization of Canada’s sanctions as “appl(ying) a targeted approach and rigorous analysis to minimize adverse consequences for the civilian population, including vulnerable groups… such as women and children.” In fact, Canada’s sanctions on Syria and Venezuela, for example, have caused widespread unemployment, devaluation of currencies, loss of life-savings, fuel and food shortages, lack of medications, homelessness, increases in crime, and death. Furthermore, these adverse consequences of economic sanctions disproportionately affect marginal groups, such as women and children. In Venezuela, for example, 40,000 people are estimated to have perished due to sanctions organized by the Lima Group, of which the Trudeau government of Canada is a founding member. In Syria, combined with the incursions of proxy armies of mercenaries sponsored by the US Coalition, of which the Harper government of Canada was a founding member, coercive economic measures contributed to turning nearly 5.5 million Syrians into refugees. The well-to-do in both countries have the resources to ride out the economic sanctions. It is the poor and marginalized who suffer most or flee. In the context of hybrid war and widespread poverty, human trafficking has risen in both countries, affecting especially women and girls, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of Trudeau’s allegedly feminist foreign policy.

4) It is fallacious for Mr. Oliphant to state his government “ensure(s) sanctions regimes do not present an unintended barrier that would hinder the humanitarian response to the pandemic.” In fact, the US government has forced other countries to obey its sanctions regime (in which the Government of Canada is a partner) against targeted states through the use of extraterritoriality, that is, by penalizing foreign corporations which dare to trade with countries which the USA has sanctioned. This extraterritoriality is deterrent enough in practice for virtually every financial institution in the world NOT to provide the necessary funding and paperwork to facilitate the transfer of food and medical supplies to sanctioned countries. For example, Iran was unable to receive doses of Covid-19 vaccines from COVAX although the vaccines were offered to that country.

5) Finally, the Trudeau Government of Canada would do well to look into the mirror. Rather than looking abroad for the “gross human rights violations, significant corruption, or behaviour that flouts the rule of law and threatens global peace and security”, which Parliamentary-Secretary Oliphant notes are the raison d’être of Canada’s coercive economic measures, the federal government ought to focus on eliminating systemic discrimination that results in dozens of native communities still lacking potable water as well as adequate medical and educational facilities. It also resulted in RCMP killings of alarming numbers of native persons last year as well as thousands of murdered and missing native women. These “gross human rights violations”, a term used by Oliphant in his response, are on top of the residential schools, the forced sterilization of native and Metis women, the Chinese Head Tax, the wartime internment of Japanese-Canadians, the refusal to allow Jewish refugees of Nazism to land in Canada, the deportation of would-be Sikh immigrants, and many other national disgraces. Canada also suffers from corruption of which the SNC Lavelin affair and the We Charity were recent examples. As for upholding the international rule of law, the parliamentary-secretary should blush at his government’s kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou, its growing sales of arms to Saudi Arabia for its illegal war on Yemen, and its continued support for the juntas in Haiti and Ukraine, which were put into power respectively by Canadian-backed coups in 2004 and 2014.

People in glass houses should not throw stones.

Conclusion

On this first-year anniversary of Secretary-General Guterres’ call for G-20 countries to lift all their economic sanctions for the duration of the pandemic, Prime Minister Trudeau ought immediately to drop all of Canada’s sanctions against twenty countries of the world – permanently.

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Ramsey Clark’s Legacy Will Live Forever

First published by GR in September 2013.

Abby Martin speaks with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, discussing Iraq before the first Gulf War, his opinions on Syria, why he legally represented Saddam Hussein, and how US sanctions have a far greater negative effect on people than on the regimes of the countries these sanctions target.

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Our thoughts are with Ramsey Clark. His legacy will live forever. This article was first published nine years ago in March 2012.

What happens in the international community is not by chance, and what happened In Libya is not by chance, what is happening in Syria and Iran is not by chance. And what is happening in Syria and Iran?

Who is behind the acts of terrorism? What is behind the assassinations and murder of intellectuals and high-ranking officials in both countries? We are building up to what, exactly? And where is the truth in the international press?

As usual, the obedient press, along with the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has managed to come up with the same goods time and time again and so long as a gullible public, obediently swayed to where it is supposed to be by swallowing the tidy controlled media package daily, it is going to work: public opinion will acquiesce to the schemes of the arms and energy and banking lobbies which control Washington, and by proxy, NATO and the USA’s allies.

What you also do not know is that the squeaky-clean media package placed before you daily in your nice crisp newspaper or your TV News is the result of a process of sinister manipulation — brainwashing. How many people were informed of Colonel Gaddafi’s positive humanitarian record – for which he was to receive an award from the UN in March 2011?

Interview with Ramsey Clark

How many people knew he was spending his time trying to reduce casualties among the terrorists attacking his country to the minimum, negotiating with them before an attack took place? Who informed the readers that NATO broke the rules, broke international law, supported terrorists on their own proscribed lists and committed acts of murder and war crimes? Now let us move on to Syria and Iran.

Where are the stories about the mass acts of murder inside both countries, taking out Generals, strategists and high-ranking politicians and scientists? Who is perpetrating these evil deeds, who are these terrorists? Why are these acts being committed? The answer is perfectly simple. Syria is the last frontier between sanity and a balanced international community, a world ruled by the forces of right and reason and good, and the Satanic desires of the evil and invisible lobbies which are currently in power in Washington, and which in turn control the foreign policy of its allies.

We are speaking here of those responsible for torture, for maintaining concentration camps such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, those who urinate on dead, commit acts of sodomy on prisoners, those responsible for torture, for maintaining concentration camps such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, who detain persons without due process, without the right to a lawyer, to an accusation or a trial, who commit rape and murder, who break international law, who breach the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions and commit war crimes. And this same evil clique is now swinging into action in the Middle East.

First objective: Lebanon and Syria; second objective: The Islamic republic of Iran; third objective: the resources of Central Asia, leading to direct confrontation with Russia and the People’s Republic of China, which passes by installing Washington-friendly regimes in all these countries so that guess who can siphon off the resources? This is why Syria is the final frontier, this is why Syria must resist the intrusion of enslaved by NATO Arab League and this is why Syria must destroy the demonic elements running amok inside the country committing acts of arson, butchery, terrorism, vandalism, murder and torture.

It is not difficult to stir up trouble, take advantage of internal divisions, divide and rule and reap the consequences from the chaos that is sown. That is exactly what the West has been doing for hundreds of years and continues to do today. It has to do not with freedom and democracy – why did NATO not allow the Libyan Jamahiriya government to hold an election? It has to do with control of resources and guaranteeing that the US dollar is used as the international currency in major deals, and that includes oil. Why is it that when a country threatens to swap the USD for another currency in its dealings, it is invaded?

As for what we can do, the bottom line is keep informed and hold the politicians responsible for their actions. Democracy does have a fatal fault for those who try to manipulate it, and that is the fact that the power lies ultimately in the hands of the people. Bring international policy onto the political agenda and don’t let them lie to you and fool you about what is really going on. If you really feel your vote makes a difference, then create the conditions for this to be the case. Let us use citizen power to avoid World War Three. After all those who push for it, will their sons be on the front line? Would anyone survive?

Comments by Stop NATO Crimes

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) on Friday said they will allow the Dakota Access oil pipeline to continue to flow without a federal permit. The decision was revealed in a court filing in federal District Court the District of Columbia.

The Corps officially refrained from taking a position by saying they need more time, which will allow the pipeline to continue operating illegally, without a valid permit.

The decision comes despite strong pressure by Native Americans and environmental groups that had their hopes up the Biden administration would order the pipeline will be shut down. Last week a group of Native Americans youth marched throw the streets of Washington to outside the White House to send a strong message to President Biden to shut down the pipeline.

“We are gravely concerned about the continued operation of this pipeline, which poses an unacceptable risk to our sovereign nation,” Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Mike Faith said. “In a meeting with members of Biden’s staff earlier this year, we were told that this new administration wanted to ‘get this right.’ Unfortunately, this reported update from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows it has chosen to ignore our pleas and stick to the wrong path.”

Native Americans have opposed Dakota Access pipeline because long the pipeline’s route underneath the Missouri River and the Lake Oahe reservoir constituted a major threat to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation and the region’s drinking water.

Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who has represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe since 2016, feels the Corps missed an opportunity for the Biden administration to make good on their promised they have been making about improved tribal consultation and doing some to stop climate change.

“This was their chance. There have been so many things, the new administration has said about tribal sovereignty and about environmental justice,” Hasselman said during a press conference on Friday afternoon. “The importance of addressing the climate crisis, that are so important and so meaningful but today was the day to see whether this this rhetoric was going to be met with actions, and they fell short.”

Last July, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a victory when U.S. District Judge James Boasberg vacated a federal permit allowing the line to run under Lake Oahe and ordered a new environmental review.

The Corps could have shut down the pipeline as it conducts its environmental review, but instead on Friday threw the matter to the court to decide.

Judge Boasberg allowed the pipeline’s owner until April 19 to makes its case keeping the oil flowing. Hassleman said he expects the Boasberg to make his ruling in early May.

In 2016, the opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline was the impetus of the largest gathering of American Indians in over a century when tens of thousands tribal citizens from over 350 tribal nations converged on Standing Rock.

The Dakota Access pipeline ships up to 575,000 barrels of crude oil daily.

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Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Last week, Native American youth were in Washington, D.C. to tell President Biden to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. Photo courtesy of the Indigenous Environmental Network

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In response to the Covid-19 pandemic governments across the world implemented an unprecedented and untested strategy to slow the spread of the disease. Colloquially known as lockdowns, these public health interventions effectively shut down most normal societal functions through the use of stay-at-home orders, school closures, business closures, bans on large gatherings, and travel restrictions. This policy apparatus effectively relegated the vast majority of people to a form of self-quarantine and completely upended the standard social functioning of society. Although these measures were advertised in the United States as a short-term measure, the now infamous two weeks to flatten the curve policy to shut down societal functions to control the spread of Covid-19 dragged on for over a year. 

The damage to society was certainly extensive, with a 3.5 percent annualized economic retraction record in 2020 and a 32.9 percent decline in Q2 of 2020, making this one of the sharpest economic declines in modern history. However, the level of suffering and trauma caused by these policies cannot be appropriately expressed by economic data alone.

Lockdown policies may have caused a substantial amount of financial damage but the social damage is just as concerning, if not more so. Across the board, there have been increased reports of mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, that are linked to social isolation, substantial life disruptions, and existential dread over the state of the world. Unlike lost dollars, mental health problems leave real and lasting damage which could lead to complications later in life, if not self-harm or suicide. For young people, a drastic increase in suicides has claimed more lives than Covid-19. That is because they are far less vulnerable to Covid than older segments of the population but far more negatively impacted by lockdowns.

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When the Pentagon began gearing up for a future war with China in 2018, Defense Department officials quickly realized that they needed access to Vietnamese territory for troops armed with missiles to hit Chinese ships in a US-China conflict. So they initiated an aggressive campaign to lobby the Vietnamese government, and even Communist Party officials, in the hope that they would eventually support an agreement to provide them the permission.  

But a Grayzone investigation of the Pentagon’s lobbying push in Vietnam shows what a delusional exercise it was from its inception. In a fit of self-deception that highlighted the desperation behind the bid, the US military ignored abundant evidence that Vietnam had no intention of giving up its longstanding, firmly grounded policy of equidistance between the United States and China.

Vietnam as a key base in US war strategy

Between 2010 and 2017, China developed intermediate-range missiles capable of hitting American bases in Japan and South Korea. To counter that threat, the Pentagon and military services began working on a new strategy in which US Marines, accompanied by an array of missiles, would spread out over a network of small, rudimentary bases and move continuously from one base to another.

Vietnam was the logical choice for such sites. Australia and the Philippines publicly ruled out hosting US missiles capable of hitting China, and South Korea was considered unlikely to agree. Indonesia and Singapore were too economically dependent on China to be interested.

But as Chris Dougherty, the former senior advisor to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, who had written large parts of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, told the Military Times last September, “Vietnam has some wonderful geography. You can have good external lines against the Chinese.” Pentagon strategists also knew that Vietnam had soundly defeated a poorly conceived Chinese invasion in 1979 designed to punish the Vietnamese for their ties with the Soviet Union.

The Pentagon’s focus on Vietnam began when then-Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Vietnam in both 2017 and 2018, meeting several times with Defense Minister General Ngo Xuan Lich, who had previously visited him in Washington. During his January 2018 visit, Mattis waxed enthusiastically about the future of US-Vietnam cooperation, calling the two countries “like-minded partners.”

In April 2019, the commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip S. Davidson, visited Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during a four-day trip. Mattis’s successor, Mark Esper, went even further in a November 2019 trip, meeting not only with the defense minister, Lich, but with executive secretary of the Communist Party, Tran Quoc Vuong, as well.

Officials were pleased with what they believed was a breakthrough for the Pentagon, despite the Vietnamese Defense Ministry’s abrupt cancellation of 15 previously planned “defense engagements” with the United States without public explanation the previous month.

In the Defense Department’s pursuit of Vietnam’s active involvement in its new war strategy, however, US military brass were ignoring the fundamental fact that the Communist Party of Vietnam and military leadership were not going to budge from the strategic policy to which it had been publicly committed for two decades.

The policy was summed up in three fundamental principles: no military alliances, no aligning with one country against another, and no foreign military bases on Vietnamese soil. The Vietnamese commitment to those “three noes”, first made public in a national defense white paper published in 1998, was repeated in successive white papers in 2004 and 2009.

Those principles clearly ruled out the kind of military cooperation that the Pentagon sought from Vietnam. But there was apparently too much at stake for top Pentagon officials to let that reality stand in the way of their enthusiasm.

The Defense Department’s main corporate research arm, the RAND Corporation, which was heavily invested in the idea of a viable new military strategy for war with China, was equally unwilling to acknowledge the truth. In January 2019, Derek Grossman, RAND’s specialist on Vietnamese defense policy, publicly reassured the policymakers that Hanoi was not really bound by any of those three “three noes.”

On the principle of “no military alliances,” Grossman claimed that Vietnam had “essentially created a major loophole in its own rule” by defining alliance as a military agreement requiring another country to defend Vietnam if it were attacked. He came up with equally creative explanations for why the other “noes” were also loosely defined in practice.

When Vietnam’s long-awaited new National Defense White Paper was published in late November 2019, Grossman discovered new reasons for pressing ahead with the Pentagon’s bid for Vietnam’s cooperation with the US military against China.

Grossman suggested that the Vietnamese had planted “subtle messages of opportunity for Washington” in the document, including its readiness to participate in “security and defense mechanisms in the Indo-Pacific region.” And he pointed to a new supplement to what had now become Vietnam’s “four noes.”

“[D]epending on the circumstances and specific conditions,” the principle said, “Vietnam will consider developing necessary, appropriate defense and military relations with other countries.” In practice, that merely meant that if Vietnam were seriously threatened by a Chinese attack, it could abandon its commitment to those “four noes.”

But the addendum was hardly a signal of Vietnamese readiness to participate in a US “Indo-Pacific Strategy”. Rather, the “four noes and one depend” in the defense white paper were part of a larger strategy of maintaining equidistance between China and the United States, as first adopted by the Party Central Committee in 2003 as “Resolution 8”.

The Pentagon’s Vietnam bubble bursts

Washington’s optimism about a new era of US-Vietnam defense cooperation against China was based on little more than wishful thinking.

By late 2020, it was apparent that the bubble of Pentagon hopes for a breakthrough with Vietnam had burst: there would be no Vietnamese involvement in a US anti-China military strategy in the region. Nor would there be high-level Pentagon or military visits during the year. More importantly, no further US-Vietnam military activities were announced.

The RAND Corporation’s Derek Grossman finally acknowledged in August 2020 that Vietnam had not been poised to begin deeper military collaboration against China after all. He now admitted the reality that Hanoi was taking a “conservative approach” to the “four noes and one depend” that he had marketed only months before as an open door to more US cooperation.

Grossman conceded that Vietnam had carried out a “delicate balancing act,” avoiding any move likely to antagonize China. The country’s careful approach, he wrote, is “disappointing for Washington and should temper American assessments of the extent to which Hanoi might be willing to play a role in the US Indo-Pacific strategy,” clearly implying that the Trump administration’s “high hopes” for a “like-minded partner” strategy in Vietnam were misplaced.

Nguyen The Phuong, a research associate at the Centre for International Studies at Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, confirmed in an interview with The Grayzone that the basic Vietnamese policy of maintaining equidistance between China and the United States is not questioned by anyone within the Vietnamese government.

Nguyen observed that both civilian and military officials believe the US Navy had no effective strategy for curbing Chinese operations in the maritime zone that Vietnam claims.

The only difference of opinion which had arisen within that consensus, he said, was that many Vietnamese diplomats with whom he has talked believe that the US Coast Guard, which is not under the control of Defense Department — but which the US nevertheless considers a military service — would be more effective tool in countering China’s tactics in the contested maritime zone in the South China Sea than the US Navy has been.

They also believed that giving the Coast Guard access to Vietnam’s deep-water port at Cam Ranh Bay would not be provocative to China. The military leadership, however, has rejected that idea, according to Nguyen.

But what the Pentagon desired from Vietnam primarily was access to bases for American ground troops with missiles.

In September 2020, after the Defense Department reached an agreement with Palau on bases in the Pacific island, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that what the Defense Department truly sought was “access to places instead of permanent bases.”

As the article explained, “US security policy in Asia calls for a heavier presence of American forces, but on a rotational basis, whereby troops switch in and out for training and exercises.”

The Marines that the Pentagon would like to have positioned in Vietnam would otherwise have been sitting ducks for Chinese missiles. But Nguyen The Phuong does not believe that any Vietnamese official, whether civilian or military, would even consider allowing such access. “If the US tried that approach on Vietnam, it would certainly fail,” he said.

The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that US power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Featured image is from US Indo-Pacific Command/Flickr

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According to a report in the London Telegraph, anyone wishing to drink in a pub garden in Britain from Monday (only the outside areas will open) will be forced to hand over their phone to venue staff who must check the individual is registered on the government’s tracking app.

Venues will face fines of £1000 if they are found to be admitting people who have not registered on the NHS Test and Trace app with all their personal details and then scanned a QR code on entry to the outdoor portion of the venue.

The official government guidance notes “should someone choose to check in with the official NHS QR code poster, a venue should check their phone screen to ensure they have successfully checked in”.

The word ‘choose’ is odd because the guidance makes clear that it is mandatory for everyone to individually register on the app, or fill in a paper form.

There is no ‘choice’ in the matter.

Pubs have also been told to refuse entry to anyone they believe has given false details.

LOL – not fucking happening. Jog on. https://t.co/bXSjC5eyKq

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 8, 2021

The only type of person who asks to check your phone are abusive and controlling partners.
So this does fit the government's pattern of behaviour and mode of thought perfectly.

— Martin Farnell (@timpers7) April 9, 2021

As we have previously highlighted, the much maligned ‘test and trace’ app is completely voluntary and authorities have no grounds to enforce its adoption legally. This is yet another example of how bureaucratic control freaks are simply inventing laws and justifying intimidation by means of coronavirus hysteria.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson ‘rewarded’ Brits recently by announcing that coming vaccine passports would not be required to enter pubs, however this policy directly undermines that and is essentially a small step away from being the exact same thing.

As we have previously noted, the vaccine passports are set to be integrated with the test and trace app via a QR code system. That has been the plan all along. Further dystopian systems, including biometric face scanning, are also being touted.

Responding to the latest developments, Madeleine Stone of privacy advocacy group Big Brother Watch, told The Telegraph: “Requiring every single person who enters a cafe or pub to show their phone screen and hand over their personal details poses a serious risk to privacy and data rights and is based on exclusion, criminal sanctions and police enforcement.”

“Businesses won’t be able to comply with this draconian new diktat as well as data protection law, which is why we’ve sent legal letters to the Department of Health and Information Commissioner’s Office as to whether these intrusive requirements are safe and lawful,” Stone added.

🛂 THREAD 🛂

5 reasons why Covid passes 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐓 be stopped 🛑

Read our full report 'Access Denied – The Case Against a Two-Tier Britain Under Covid Certification' ⬇️https://t.co/PVWIyjDPro pic.twitter.com/3zM5map8X9

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) April 8, 2021

Venue owners have also expressed dismay at the guidance, expressing concern that it is unenforceable and will leave already stretched staff vulnerable to abuse from angry punters who don’t want to be tracked by the government just to have a pint of beer.

So long as being "at pub" is like being "at airport," I won't be "at pub". Sorry.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 8, 2021

Surely handing someone a phone which is covered in germs to someone who’s handled presumably many phones that day is irresponsible due to the risk of the virus spreading?

— Ted (@IBoyd1966) April 8, 2021

Also from the same article: Drinkers will still have the option of registering manually by filling out a form with their name and telephone number.

Wider question is, why is T&T needed when everyone will be outside, where the risk is minuscule? Vallance himself said this.

— Pierceck (@Pierceck2) April 8, 2021

And at the same time, i can’t even get it to work on my phone!

— Railway, London & Maritime Bloke (@RailLondonSeaYT) April 8, 2021

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