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Excerpts from an article by Bill Sardi on Lew Rockwell

Click link to access complete article

The World Economic Forum, which was a co-sponsor to EVENT 201 at Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security along with Bill Gates in October of 2019, just prior to the onset of COVID-19 in January of 2020 and announcement of a mutated coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020, is now announcing CYBER POLYGON, a war cyber warfare game that will be blamed on overseas “enemies.”  CYBER POLYGON is a drill scheduled for July of 2021.

Should such an event occur, it would paralyze every business, church, hospital, even security and police forces.  It appears prudent to make plans for a major online cyber business disruption given public authorities appear to be clueless or even complicit in this event as they have been in COVID-19.  Consumer-related businesses would be wise to advise their customers to stock up on necessities, particularly food, toiletries, vitamins, medicines and alternate sources of power if possible.  Doctors should schedule patients accordingly.

 

Click through to the links below to validate this warning.  This is not a sensationalist report.

Cyber Polygon is a war game being held by the World Economic Forum (WEF) this July/2021 which is meant to simulate a major cyber attack on the global supply chain and the economic system. There has been endless discussion int the media the past year building up fears of cyber attacks by Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea.

See this.

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From April 2 (Good Friday) to April 10, there were nonstop violent demonstrations in Northern Ireland, everyday with Irish Catholic nationalists (who want to reunify with the Republic of Ireland) and British-Irish loyalists  or unionists (who want to remain part of the UK) confronting the police – molotov cocktails and barricades were everywhere. Tensions still remain. Most of the violence is taking place in Belfast, but it has spread to other towns as well, especially in mostly Protestant loyalist places, such as Carrickfergus and Newtonabbey.

Part of it started over the funeral of former Irish Republic Army (IRA) leader Bobby Storey last year. 24 (mostly catholic) Sinn Fein politicians attended the republican funeral in a huge event in defiance of pandemic-related lockdown measures – Sinn Fein is historically associated with the provisional Irish Republican Army. Many loyalists called for an investigation. Two weeks ago, prosecutors announced no action would be taken against them. Loyalists then interpreted this as evidence that the state gives a kind of preferential treatment to republicans.

This event was a catalyst that brought to surface many grievances and complaints against the police forces in the country. Organized crime gangs such as the South East Antrim UDA and paramilitary groups (that control many working class loyalist neighborhoods) took advantage of the situation to retaliate against police raids and operations targeting their criminal activities.

A lot of it has to do with the post-Brexit situation of Northern Ireland as well (most people there voted against it). The island of Ireland is of course divided into two countries: the – since 1921 – independent Republic of Ireland (a European Union member) that comprises most of the island, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Although Northern Ireland is part of the UK, the Brexit deal actually left it inside the European Union (EU) customs unions and single market. This, in a way, “pushes” Northern Ireland away from Britain and pushes the Irish island towards reunification, a scenario feared by loyalists who feel their Britishness is thereby diminished – one has to keep in mind that Northern Ireland was pretty much created to be a kind of “haven” for UK unionists within the island of Ireland otherwise they would become a minority in the Republic of Ireland. To this day, Northern Ireland remains a very polarised society – about 90 per cent of its youth grew up attending religious segregated schools.

The problem is the UK government had promised Brexit would not create barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Britain. However, since Brexit, there are checks on food, agricultural and other goods that are moving between Britain and Northern Ireland (to comply with EU requirements) – and that has been causing many inconveniences. It slows the movement of goods and as a result of that the population has been facing product shortages amid the pandemic. This is being caused by the arrangement made with the European Union, called the Northern Ireland Protocol. Such new regulatory “border” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK has in fact created a kind of border in the Irish Sea, thereby eroding the very place of Northern Ireland in the UK, loyalists claim.

This complicated situation arose out of the so-called Brexit Trilemma involving the goals of 1) no hard border on the Irish island; 2) no customs border in the Irish Sea; and 3) no British participation in either the European Union Customs Union or the European Single Market. It is impossible to have all three at the same time. The third item was the whole point of Brexit and returning a hard border within the Irish island would bring back the memories of those years of conflict when the UK-Republic of Ireland border were militarized. So Britain sacrificed the second item. Thus, while the rest of the UK (that is, Great Britain) left the EU Single Market, Northern Ireland still adopts its regulations on electricity and goods.

When, in 1998, the Good Friday Belfast Agreement brought an end to the conflict, the border issue did not arise because both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were EU members within a Common Travel Area. And so was Britain. The Brexit referendum changed it.

The general feeling amongst loyalists is one of betrayal and abandonment. Northern Ireland Justice Minister, Naomi Long, explicitly accused Boris Johnson of “dishonesty” over this border issue. Brussels has sued Britain over this, claiming it constitutes a breach of the Brexit agreement.

This is happening at a time when the cause of Irish union is gaining more support throughout the island of Ireland – Sinn Fein has been calling for it – and so the loyalists are reacting. The violence is worrying many leaders in Europe, who have condemned it – including Boris Johnson. On Thursday, the Biden administration also voiced its concern regarding the escalation of tensions.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was supported by former Democrat President Bill Clinton and so Biden would be following Clinton in taking a conciliatory role. After Brexit, UK is seeking new free trade deals and the special relationship with the US will tend to grow stronger. An example of it is Johnson’s keenness on having the UK join the QUAD. Apparently, Britain compromised too much for Brexit, and Northern Ireland unionists now feel abandoned.

The so-called “Irish question” dominated the political life of Britain for two centuries at least and had become a thing of the past – or so many thought. It has come back, apparently.

While much is talked about the rise of nationalism and “tribal” and ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe, the violence in Ireland is a reminder that nationalist, ethnic and religious conflicts and separatism are a reality in Western Europe too – be it Catalan and Basque separatism in Spain, France’s recent “anti-separatism” bill (widely seen as an Islamophobic measure) or the violence in the UK, the West has no higher moral ground.

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

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Xinjiang Must Unite, Not Divide, China and Turkey

April 19th, 2021 by Andrew Korybko

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A controversy occurred earlier this month after two Turkish opposition politicians expressed support for separatism in Xinjiang. The Chinese Foreign Ministry condemned their counterproductive remarks, which in turn prompted Ankara to summon the Chinese Ambassador. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian then said that “We hope that people in Turkey from all walks of life can correctly, rationally and objectively view the firm position of China to protect its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Because of how sensitive the issue is both in general and for bilateral relations, it deserves to be discussed more thoroughly.

Turkey is presently rising as a regional power in accordance with its rich civilizational and historical influence. This has recently seen the country promote a hybrid model of secular and religious influence in order to broaden its appeal to traditional and prospective partners alike in North Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia. The last-mentioned region is comprised of former Soviet republics, many of whom are populated by Turkic people who feel a close kinship with their Turkish brethren. This ethnic outreach to what Ankara regards as the Turkic world is natural and should be encouraged by all so long as it doesn’t take any threatening form.

The problem is that there are some in Turkey who flirt with radical interpretations of their country’s newfound soft power strategy. Instead of respecting every country’s sovereign interests to govern themselves however their legitimate leaders believe is best, they arrogantly think that they know better those states or their own people do. Therein lies the issue with the latest Xinjiang controversy whereby two opposition politicians made counterproductive remarks in favor of separatist forces there. Considering the growing closeness of Chinese-Turkish relations, these statements were unwelcome and could have caused trouble between those two.

Thankfully, bilateral ties have matured enough to the point where such comments won’t affect those countries’ expanding partnership, but they still deserved to be condemned in order to remind everyone of how unacceptable they were. The individuals that made them were clearly misled by the US-led global information warfare campaign against the People’s Republic alleging that China is carrying out a so-called “genocide” against the Uyghurs, who are mostly fellow Muslims related to the Turkish people. In fact, one can argue that Turkey is one of the prime target audiences of this American Hybrid War narrative.

The US hopes to mislead the world, and especially Muslim countries, about the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The intended result is to pressure those states into distancing themselves from cooperating more closely with China, which could in turn provide a comparative competitive advantage to the US. In the Turkish context, American strategists want to manipulate influential Turkish figures into provoking more international controversies between their country and China over this manufactured fake news-driven issue. In reality, however, Xinjiang must unite, not divide, China and Turkey.

Upon learning more about the socio-economic renaissance of the Uyghur people and other minorities in the XUAR, more Turks will realize how badly they were misled by the US’ information warfare campaign. China isn’t “oppressing” the Uyghurs, not to mention committing “genocide” against them, but has unprecedentedly improved their living standards to the point where its efforts can objectively be described as the most successful minority empowerment campaignanywhere in the planet’s history. Life expectancy and overall population numbers have soared, household income is at its highest-ever levels, and security is guaranteed.

In fact, Turkey could even learn from China’s experiences with the Uyghurs to similarly improve the situation for its own minorities. This could in turn reduce separatist and terrorist threats in the same way as has recently happened in the XUAR. With this vision in mind, Turks should resist the US’ external pressure to exploit this situation for the purpose of dividing their country from China. If anything, they should learn more about the reality of what’s happening there in order to motivate them to take ties with China to the next level, including through more people-to-people interactions such as touring the XUAR once the pandemic finally ends.

It’s sad that some Turkish individuals were misled by American propaganda about Xinjiang, but their own government nowadays knows that these narratives aren’t true. That’s why ties remain strong between China and Turkey despite the latest controversy. Both countries are in a mutually beneficial partnership with potential strategic implications, which no single issue – let alone an artificially manufactured one – can sabotage. As time goes on, it’s hoped that more Turks will learn the truth about the XUAR, appreciate China’s historic efforts in improving the Uyghurs’ lives, and see Xinjiang as a natural bridge between their two countries.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

The $2.3 Quadrillion Global Timebomb

April 19th, 2021 by Egon von Greyerz

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Credit Suisse is hours from collapse and the consequences could be a systemic failure of the financial system.

Disappointingly, my dream last night stopped there. So unfortunately I didn’t experience what actually happened.

As I warned in last week’s article on Archegos and Credit Suisse, investment banks have created a timebomb with the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives monster.

A few years ago, the BIS (Bank of International Settlement) in Basel reduced the $1.5 quadrillion to $600 trillion with a pen stroke. But the real gross figure was still $1.5q at the time. According to my sources, the real figure today is probably over $2 quadrillion.

A major part of the outstanding derivatives are OTC (over the counter) and hidden in off balance sheet special purpose vehicles.

Leveraged Assets Just Go Up in Smoke

The $30 billion in Archegos derivatives that went up in smoke over a weekend is just the tip of the iceberg. The hedge fund Archegos lost everything and the normal uber-leveraged players Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Nomura etc lost at least $30 billion.

These investment banks are making casino bets that they can’t afford to lose. What their boards and top management don’t realise or understand is that the traders, supported by easily manipulated risk managers, are betting the bank on a daily basis.

Most of these ludicrously high bets are in the derivatives market. The management doesn’t understand how they work or what the risks are and the account managers and traders can bet billions on a daily basis with no skin in the game but massive potential upside if nothing goes wrong.

Deutsche Bank — Derivates 600x Equity

But we are now entering an era when things will go wrong. The leverage is just too high and the bets totally out of proportion to the equity.

Just take the notorious Deutsche Bank (DB) that has outstanding derivatives of €37 trillion against total equity of €62 billion. Thus the derivatives position is 600X the equity.

Or to put it in a different way, the equity is 0.17% of the outstanding derivatives. So a loss of 0.2% on the derivatives will wipe the share capital and the bank out!

Now the DB risk managers will argue that the net derivatives position is just a fraction of the €37 trillion at €20 billion. That is of course nonsense as we saw with Archegos when a few banks let $30 billion over a weekend.

Derivatives can only be netted down on the basis that counterparties pay up. But in a real systemic crisis, counterparties will disappear and gross exposure will remain gross.

So all that netting doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny. But it is typical for today’s casino banking world when depositors, shareholders and governments take all the downside risk and the management all the upside.

So let us look at the global risk picture in the financial system:

The $2.3 quadrillion above is what the world is exposed to when this timebomb explodes.

That is the total sum of global debt, derivatives and unfunded liabilities. When all the dominos start falling, and no one can meet their obligations, this is what governments are left to finance.

Yes, they will print this money and much more as deficits mount exponentially due to collapsing currencies. But the MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) clowns will then find out that printed money rightfully has ZERO value.

If these clowns studied history they would learn that MMT has never worked. Just check the Roman Empire 180-280 AD, France in the early 18th century, or the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela in the 19th and 20th centuries.

So when Fiat money dies, how much gold is required to repair the damage?

If we look at the cube below with all the gold ever produced in history, we see that it is 198,000 tonnes valued at $11 trillion.

Below the cube the total central bank and investment gold is shown. This amounts to 77,000 tonnes or $4.3 trillion. That sum represents 0.2% of the total debt and liabilities of $2.3 quadrillion as shown in the Timebomb.

The $4.3 trillion gold value is at a gold price of $1,750 per ounce. This minuscule 0.2% of liabilities obviously is far too small to support global debt. A 20% gold backing of total liabilities would be a minimum.

That would be 100X the current 0.2% or a gold price of $175,000.

I am not forecasting this level or saying that it is likely to happen. All I am doing is looking at the total risk that the world is facing and relating it to the only money that will survive.

Also, measuring the gold price in dollars serves no purpose because when/if this scenario happens, the dollar will be worthless and the gold price measured in worthless dollars at infinity.

Focus on Wealth Preservation

Rather than focusing on a potential gold price measured in dollars, investors should worry about preserving their wealth in real assets held outside a bankrupt financial system.

Regardless of what price gold and silver reach, history proves that it is the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

It will not be different this time. Therefore, in the coming crisis, precious metals will be the best insurance to hold as protection against unprecedented global risk.

Gold’s rise since 2000 in no way reflects the massive money printing we have seen in this century.

Still as the graph below shows, gold is at the beginning of a very strong uptrend that has very far to go in both time and price.

Investors have the following choice:

Either they follow the coming crash in bubble assets like stocks, property and bonds all the way to the bottom which is likely to be 75-95% lower in real terms (measured in gold).

Or they protect their wealth in physical precious metals, stored outside a fractured financial system.

As always, history gives the answer as to which path to take.

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AK-47. Kalashnikov: The Amateur Inventor Who Shot to Global Fame

April 19th, 2021 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin

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AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle. This Russian film, released in February of last year, follows the young Kalashnikov as he is bombarded by Germans during WWII and interspersed with flashbacks of his childhood. Disturbed by the failure of a newly designed gun that nearly gets a comrade killed when it jams, he examines the parts and lists out various problems with the new design. An amatuer inventor who had been playing around various types of primitive gun designs since he was child, Kalashnikov goes back to work in a steam engine workshop after being injured in battle. There he is assigned a desk and tools, and struggles to assemble a new design he had been drawing up. Help is at hand when the other workers in the workshop offer their after-hours services to help him tool the parts necessary for his new design. After this, his life takes many twists and turns as he struggles to perfect his design and gain acceptance through inventor competitions, testing ranges and the military hierarchy.

The story focuses on his drive and sincerity in producing a safer gun that would help the Soviets win the war. Although the gun he is famous for was not produced until 1947 (“Avtomát Kaláshnikova” (Russian: Автома́т Кала́шникова, lit. ‘Kalashnikov’s Automatic Gun’), its reliability and design ensured its wide use in many armies around the world in subsequent decades. The film also strives to show Kalashnikov as a role model for how someone with a basic education (Kalashnikov left school after seventh grade) can achieve so much in the way of plaudits and global fame.

Image on the right: Kalashnikov’s first submachine gun

In AK-47: Kalashnikov, the testing processes of the gun were not complete successes but Kalashnikov is given more promotions and more help in developing his ideas. With the development of new technologies, a simplified, lighter version of the automatic rifle was developed which soon became the most ubiquitous variant of the AK-47. In the real world, the popularity of the design meant that “approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles had been produced by 2009, and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year. Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, did not patent the weapon until 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world’s production.”

The film is beautifully shot with realistic battle scenes and panoramic landscape settings. The relations between the soldiers, and between the soldiers and their superiors are developed without the stereotyped or charicatured portrayals seen in films like Enemy at the Gates (2001), as Kalashnikov gets help and encouragement all around him, even at his lowest points when he feels like giving up. Moreover, in these days of instant-everything and easy consumption access to any product, it is refreshing to see male and female workers with so many skills (including his drafting technician who becomes his wife) bringing an idea from drawings through precision tooling to the finished gleaming weapon.

Kalashnikov himself did suffer “spiritual pain” about whether he was responsible for the deaths caused by his weapons, but also believed that their use was defensive rather than offensive. The AK-47 has been used in many anti-colonial wars and received the ultimate praise when appearing on some national flags and coats of arms. Of course like any weapon his guns have been used in terrorist organisations but one could argue that overall its reliability and simplicity evened up the stakes in many an asymmetrical war.

Watch the trailer below.

Kalashnikov was hospitalized on 17 November 2013, in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia and where he lived and died on 23 December 2013, at age 94 from gastric hemorrhage. A statue dedicated to Kalashnikov was commissioned by the Russian Military Historical Society and unveiled in Moscow in 2017. It is a 7.5m (25ft) monument, which shows Kalashnikov holding an AK-47 in his arms. However, it was soon spotted that the technical drawing of the gun etched onto a metallic plate at the base of the monument was actually of an StG 44 rifle used by the Nazis during WWII.

The symbolism of this mistake was not lost on the public, a country that lost millions of its people at the hands of the Nazi invasion which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941. The section of the metallic plate with the gun design was soon removed with an angle grinder.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Featured image: Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013)  Kalashnikov at the Kremlin, December 2009

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Will Vaccinated People be More Vulnerable to Variants?

April 19th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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As soon as vaccine companies announced they were developing a COVID-19 vaccine, doctors, scientists, researchers and other experts raised warnings1,2 about the problematic history of coronavirus vaccines and their propensity to produce antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which could make vaccinated individuals more susceptible to infection by SARS-CoV-2 or its variants.

It is also called paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE), which I believe is a more accurate description of what is happening.

Among those issuing early warnings were Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in my interview with him — featured in “Well-Known Hazards of Coronavirus Vaccines” — recounted previous failed coronavirus vaccine trials in which he said the vaccinated animals died when exposed to the wild virus.

Considering all previous coronavirus vaccine efforts have failed for this reason, it seemed reasonable to suspect that a COVID-19 vaccine might have similar problems, and that such effects might remain hidden for some time since animal testing was bypassed. Recent research suggests such fears might still be warranted, although conclusive evidence that ADE is in fact occurring has not been produced.

Trial Subjects Have Not Been Informed of ADE Risk

The October 28, 2020, paper,3 “Informed Consent Disclosure to Vaccine Trial Subjects of Risk of COVID-19 Vaccine Worsening Clinical Disease,” stressed that “COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralizing antibodies may sensitize vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated,” and criticized vaccine makers for not clearly informing participants in current vaccine trials of this risk.

“Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern:

That vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralizing antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE),” the paper stated.4

“This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.”

What Is ADE?

What exactly is ADE, and what does it mean? In a nutshell, it means that rather than enhance your immunity against the infection, the vaccine actually enhances the virus’ ability to enter and infect your cells, resulting in more severe disease than had you not been vaccinated.5

Needless to say, this is the exact opposite of what a vaccine is supposed to do. The 2003 review paper “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of Virus Infection and Disease” explains it this way:6

“In general, virus-specific antibodies are considered antiviral and play an important role in the control of virus infections in a number of ways. However, in some instances, the presence of specific antibodies can be beneficial to the virus. This activity is known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of virus infection.

The ADE of virus infection is a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies enhance the entry of virus, and in some cases the replication of virus, into monocytes/macrophages and granulocytic cells through interaction with Fc and/or complement receptors.

This phenomenon has been reported in vitro and in vivo for viruses representing numerous families and genera of public health and veterinary importance … For some viruses, ADE of infection has become a great concern to disease control by vaccination.”

Vaccinated People More Susceptible to South African Variant

As feared from the beginning, vaccinated individuals do appear to be more susceptible to infection by certain variants of SARS-CoV-2, although it remains to be seen whether they are more prone to serious illness.

A study by researchers at Tel Aviv University and Clalit Health Services in Israel found the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, dubbed B.1. 351 — which presently accounts for about 1% of COVID-19 cases in Israel — affects people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine to a greater extent than unvaccinated people.7,8,9,10

The researchers compared 400 individuals who had tested positive for the B.1.351 variant two weeks or more after receiving at least one dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine against 400 unvaccinated individuals who had been infected.

Among the 150 people who were fully vaccinated, having received both shots of the vaccine, the variant was eight times more prevalent than in unvaccinated individuals (5.4% compared to 0.7%).

An estimated 53% of Israel’s 9.3 million inhabitants have received the Pfizer vaccine.11 While Moderna’s vaccine is also available in Israel, it was not included in this investigation. According to professor Adi Stern, Ph.D.,12 at Tel Aviv University, who said the findings took her by surprise:13

“We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection.”

For clarity, while the risk of infection appears significantly greater, it is still unknown whether the variant might generate more serious illness in vaccinated individuals. The study did not report disease outcomes, stating it would be “statistically meaningless” to do so since the number of vaccinees infected was too low.

That said, professor Ran Balicer, director of research at Clalit Health Services, which provided assistance for the study, noted this is the first study “to be based on real-world data, showing that the vaccine is less effective against the South Africa variant, compared to both the original virus and the British variant.”14

Other Research Suggests B.1.351 May Evade First-Gen Vaccines

Another recent study,15 reported by Times of Israel,16 was done by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Here, they analyzed blood samples to assess vaccine response to the South African variant. As reported by Times of Israel:17

“The researchers collected blood samples from 10 people who recovered from COVID-19, five people who received the first dose of the vaccine, and 10 people who also received the second. Samples were drawn from participants 21 days after the first dose, or 10 days after the second. They then measured the antibodies’ ability to protect against infection.”

The study18 found that while the Pfizer vaccine produced high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the generic strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the British variant, it fared worse against the South African variant.

Overall, the neutralization potency of the Pfizer vaccine was 6.8 times lower for the B.1.351 variant compared to the generic strains. It was also less effective against strains that have attributes of both the British and the South African variants. According to the authors:19

“Our study validates the importance of the Pfizer vaccine, but raises concerns regarding its efficacy against specific SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants … Our data also indicate that the Pfizer vaccine is moderately compromised against SA-N501Y/K417N/E484K pseudo-variants.

Average decrease in mean neutralization potential of the vaccinated sera against this pseudovirus was 6.8-fold, relative to wild-type SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus. This result is only partly aligned with recent conclusions from Pfizer,20 reporting that its vaccine is almost similarly efficient against the SA [South African] variant as wild-type SARS-CoV-2.

A Moderna report21 also documented that its vaccine is 6.4-fold less efficient in neutralizing SA-B.1.351 variant, relative to neutralization of the wild-type SARS-CoV-2. However, their conclusion indicated that such a reduction is not clinically significant.

In our mind, the clinical significance of a 6.8-fold-reduced neutralization potency of convalescent or post-vaccination sera against the SA strain remains to be determined and raises concerns about vaccine efficiency against current or future SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Overall, these results call for close attention to variant spread. Moreover, development of new vaccines with improved neutralizing potency against specific SARS-CoV-2 variants may be required.”

As you’d expect, vaccine makers are already hard at work tweaking their formulas to target various mutations of the virus, so don’t be surprised if all of a sudden vaccinated individuals start getting called back for additional shots. As reported by STAT News:22

“Vaccine makers are working on booster shots specifically targeting B.1.351 or that could defend against multiple strains of the coronavirus, and regulators are considering how the updated shots could be authorized without needing to go through the full gamut of clinical trials.”

Pfizer Study Reports Drop in Effectiveness Against B.1.351

Last but not least, Pfizer’s own investigation, published in The New England Journal of Medicine23March 8, 2021, found its vaccine was about two-thirds less effective, in terms of neutralizing potency, against the South African variant, B.1.351, compared to other forms of the virus.

“It can be difficult to extrapolate what such lab experiments mean for what happens if someone who received the vaccine is exposed to the variant. For one, these experiments only look at how one arm of the immune system, called neutralizing antibodies, responds to the modified virus,” STAT News reports.24

“The vaccines generate a range of immune fighters, including other types of antibodies and T cells, so it’s possible that overall people retain more of their defenses in fending off the virus. It’s also possible that even though neutralizing antibodies don’t work as well against the variant, they can still mount enough activity to have an impact.”

What STAT News does not mention is that the vaccines may also generate nonneutralizing (aka binding) antibodies25 which, instead of preventing infection, can trigger ADE, a paradoxical immune enhancement that increases your susceptibility to infection and more severe illness.

Aside from the studies already mentioned at the beginning of this article, many others have raised concerns about coronavirus vaccines and ADE in particular. Among them is the May 2020 mini review26 “Impact of Immune Enhancement on COVID-19 Polyclonal Hyperimmune Globulin Therapy and Vaccine Development.” As in many other papers, the authors point out that:27

“While development of both hyperimmune globulin therapy and vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 are promising, they both pose a common theoretical safety concern. Experimental studies have suggested the possibility of immune-enhanced disease of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV infections, which may thus similarly occur with SARS-CoV-2 infection …

Immune enhancement of disease can theoretically occur in two ways. Firstly, non-neutralizing or sub-neutralizing levels of antibodies can enhance SARS-CoV-2 infection into target cells. Secondly, antibodies could enhance inflammation and hence severity of pulmonary disease …

Animal studies … have shown that the spike (S) protein-based vaccines (specifically the receptor binding domain, RBD) are highly immunogenic and protective against wild-type CoV challenge … However, immunization with some S protein based CoV vaccines have also displayed signs of enhanced lung pathology following challenge.

Hence, besides the choice of antigen target, vaccine efficacy and risk of immunopathology may be dependent on other ancillary factors, including adjuvant formulation, age at vaccination … and route of immunization.”

Th2 Immunopathology Is Another Potential Risk

Another potential risk is that of Th2 immunopathology, especially among the elderly. As reported in a PNAS news feature:28

“Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: Some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated.

The vaccine-primed immune system, in certain cases, seemed to launch a shoddy response to the natural infection …

This immune backfiring, or so-called immune enhancement, may manifest in different ways such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a process in which a virus leverages antibodies to aid infection; or cell-based enhancement, a category that includes allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology. In some cases, the enhancement processes might overlap …

Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body.

‘There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,’ says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses … at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology … in which a faulty T cell response triggers allergic inflammation, and poorly functional antibodies that form immune complexes, activating the complement system and potentially damaging the airways.”

Full Extent of Risks Remain To Be Seen

Whether or not COVID-19 vaccines can trigger ADE or Th2 immunopathology remains to be seen. As or right now, studies suggest vaccinated individuals are at increased risk of contracting lab-confirmed infection with variants such as the South African B.1.351 strain, but there’s no telling whether they actually get sicker than unvaccinated individuals.

Similarly, while there are now hundreds of cases of fully vaccinated individuals having being diagnosed with COVID-19, some of whom have died as a result,29 it’s too early to tell whether ADE is at play. We’re currently moving into summer in the Western hemisphere, a time when respiratory viruses tend to be less prevalent in general, so I suspect the real test will come this fall and winter.

So, while some argue that ADE is a “non-issue” with COVID-19 vaccines simply because we haven’t seen any signs of it yet,30 even with new variants, I have my doubts. I suspect we might still see it once flu season sets in. Besides, ADE is far from the only potential problem. There are many other potential side effects, some of which may take months or years to develop, while others may be lethal within days or even hours.

The vaccines may also be problematic for already immunosuppressed patients. The reason for this is because they don’t develop a robust neutralizing antibody response from the vaccines, and there’s research31 warning that developing a poor neutralizing antibody response after an initial exposure to certain coronaviruses might result in more severe illness upon re-exposure. Might the same apply if you fail to develop robust neutralizing antibodies in response to mRNA gene therapy?

A recent JAMA study32,33 found only 17% of organ transplant recipients mounted detectable antibodies after their first dose of Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine. Among patients taking antimetabolites, only 8.75% had detectable antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 following vaccination. As noted by the authors:

“Given this observation, the CDC should update their new guidelines for vaccinated individuals to warn immunosuppressed people that they still may be susceptible to COVID-19 after vaccination. As the CDC guidelines are currently written, they assume that vaccination means immunity.

Our study shows that this is unlikely for most transplant recipients, and one could guess that our findings (especially those concerning anti-metabolites) could also apply to other immunosuppressed patients, such as those with autoimmune conditions.”

In my view, there are still so many potential avenues of harm and so many uncertainties, I would encourage everyone to do your homework, keep reading and learning, weigh the potential pros and cons, and take your time when deciding whether to get any of these COVID-19 gene therapies.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.

In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.

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Notes

1 Nature Microbiology September 9, 2020; 5: 1185-1191

2 Hum Vaccin Immunother. December 1, 2020; 16(12): 3055-3060

3, 4 International Journal of Clinical Practice, October 28, 2020 DOI: 10.111/ijcp.13795

5 PNAS.org April 14, 2020 117 (15) 8218-8221

6 Viral Immunology 2003;16(1):69-86

7, 14 Epoch Times April 11, 2021

8, 13 Reuters April 10, 2021

9, 11 Washington Examiner April 11, 2021

10 Medical Xpress April 11, 2021

12 Tel Aviv University Adi Stern

15, 18, 19 Cell Host & Microbe March 20, 2021

16, 17 The Times of Israel March 22, 2021

20 Nature Medicine February 8, 2021

21 BioRxiv January 25, 2021 DOI: 10.1101/2021.01.25.427948

22, 24 STAT News February 17, 2021

23 New England Journal of Medicine March 8, 2021: DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2102017

25 Science Direct Binding Antibody

26, 27 EBioMedicine 2020 May; 55: 102768

28 PNAS April 14, 2020 117 (15) 8218-8221

29 The Defender April 6, 2021

30 Medpage Today March 16, 2021

31 PLOS Pathogens 2017 Aug; 13(8): e1006565

32 JAMA March 15, 2021 (Epub ahead of print)

33 Medpage Today March 15, 2021 (Archived)

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***

“Afghanistan is the source of more than 90% of world’s opium supply and more than 95% of the European opium supply since 2001.” (Rubenstein 2019, Pg. 235). Why?

The planned events of September 11, 2001 set in motion a series of United States military occupation of Muslim countries that had nothing to do with exacting justice.

Invading other nations is a planned event. By December 2001, 2,500 United States Armed Forces had invaded Afghanistan, climbing to +100,000 soldiers by 2011. By March 2003, 43 NATO countries (51 countries by 2006) had joined in the occupation of Afghanistan. In March 2003, United States Armed Forces invading Iraq totaled 177,194.

Two separate countries, two different military missions. In Iraq, the United States goal was to immediately collapse the Iraqi government and replace it with one more easily managed. In Afghanistan, the long-term United States goal was to seize the countries areas of opium production and prevent Taliban forces from destroying opium crops.

In 2007, the Pentagon changed the designation  “War on Terror” for occupation of Middle East countries identified as hostile, to the “Long War” designation, signaling a restart for a global Cold War.

NATO Occupation and Opium Production

Since United States military occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, followed by NATO occupation in 2003, opium production has increased exponentially. Areas under Taliban control had zero production in 2001 (Global Research, October 17, 2018).

Source: Afghanistan Opium Survey 2017 report

Afghanistan is divided into six regions comprised of administrative provinces: North-eastern (Kundaz, Takhar, Badakhshan), Eastern (Nuristan, Kunar, Kapisa, Laghman, Nangarhar), Central (Panjshin, Parwan, Wardak, Ghazni, Paktika, Khost, Paktya, Logar, Kabul), Northern (Balkh, Jawzjan, Faryab, Samangan, Sari Pul, Bamyan, Baghlan), Western (Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, Badghis), and Southern (Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, Day Kundi). The capital-city, Kabul, is located in the province of Kabul in the Eastern region.

The highest percentage of opium poppy cultivation harvested are located in the Western provinces of Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, and Badghis. Also, high opium poppy cultivation occurred in the Southern provinces of Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, and Day Kundi. The increase in production is mainly a result of an increase in area under opium poppy cultivation. These areas under opium poppy cultivation are controlled by United States and NATO military forces.

Afghani provinces with zero production between 2016-2017: North-eastern provinces of Kundaz, Takhar. The Central provinces of Panjshin, Parwan, Wardak, Logar, Paktika, Paktya, and Khost. And the Northern province of Bamyan.

Geographically, Afghanistan is divided between climates, with the best climate for opium poppy production found in the Western and Southern provinces. The Western provinces (Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, and Badghis) has Warm Mediterranean climate (Csa), Warm semi-arid climate (BSh), and Warm desert climate (BWh), and the Southern provinces climate (Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, and Day Kundi) is separated between Warm desert climate (BWh), Warm Mediterranean climate (Csa), and Cold desert climate (BWk).

The increase in production is mainly a result of an increase in area under opium poppy cultivation. “In 2002, farmers took advantage of the power vacuum following the U.S. invasion and returned to planting poppy as a cash crop. According to the U.N.’s opium production report from 2002, poppy cultivation was down to approximately 8,000 hectares in 2001, then surged to roughly 74,000 hectares after the fall of the Taliban” (Rawlings, 2013).

The difference between increased production of opium poppy and zero production of opium poppy between provinces has to do with the presence of NATO forces verses the presence of Taliban forces. Islam prohibits drug use and the Taliban are strict prohibitionists of poppy production, destroying crops where Taliban are located, resulting in zero opium production. NATO forces work to keep the Taliban from destroying opium crops, resulting in high opium crop production:

“The United States invaded Afghanistan largely to restore the heroin industry and it is now making about $1.5 trillion every year from this business” (Press TV,  2017).

“The heroin business is not “filling the coffers of the Taliban” as claimed by US government and the international community: quite the opposite! The proceeds of this illegal trade are the source of wealth formation, largely reaped by powerful business/criminal interests within the Western countries. …Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade” (Chossudovsky, 2005).

NATO Base map. Source: NATO

NATO forces located in areas of zero opium production do not engage with Taliban forces (Global Research, 2018). Italy, for example, is known to pay Taliban forces to not attack Italian NATO patrols (Ingram, 2009). Also, several NATO countries rotate between provinces, so one year a province may have some opium production under the flag of one NATO country, then the next year opium production falls to zero under the flag of the next NATO nation that rotates in (Press TV, 2017). The process is called “Push down pop up”; as one NATO nation along with provincial government forces attempt to suppress opium poppy production in one area, weak border security in other provinces create opportunity for opium poppy production to increase in areas with less NATO oversight (Redmond, November 2011).

Decrease and zero production of opium poppy also appear in areas where Afghanistan government has confidence of the local population, where government provides incentives to farmers to eradicate their opium crop or not produce one at all (Asia Foundation, 2017).

To rebuild Afghanistan, sixty percent of aid for “projects” is funded through private Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). These organizations consist of private contractors working towards the donors agenda.  (Source: The USAID/Afghanistan Plan for Transition, 2015-2018).  The economy of Afghanistan is based on several key industries: NGOs, Drugs, and Agriculture (FAO, 2012-2015). Also, “Since 2001, the US has spent about $8.6 billion on counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan” (The Guardian, 2018).

Source: UNODC, 2016

Areas of increased opium poppy production appear to be in the Northern, Western, and Southern provinces of Afghanistan where the climate is Warm Mediterranean (Csa), Warm semi-arid (BSh), and Warm desert (BWh). The Eastern region has seen a slight increase in opium production do to the Taliban having turned away from opium poppy eradication toward mineral smuggling of Talc, Chromite, and Marble across the border into Pakistan to fund their operations. Border security surrounding Afghanistan is porous, providing opportunity to smuggle stuff in and out of the country (Ghosh, 2018).

Who Profits from Opium Drug Trade?

Answer: Everyone who invests in Afghanistan Opium trade.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report (2017) lists street value in USofA for heroin at $200 per gram: 189,000 grams X $200 = $37,800,000 per 50 gallon drum.

Value of Opium production in 2017 was worth between US$ 4.1 to 6.6 billion, or 20 and 32 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and provided up to 354,000 full time jobs to rural areas for opium poppy weeding and harvesting. Other countries benefit from the drug trade as well (UNODC, 2017).

Afghanistan Opium Cultivation, 2011. Source United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011

Areas of decreased opium poppy production appear in the Central (Central Highlands) and North-eastern (Hindu-Kush) regions of Afghanistan where elevation exceeds 10,000 feet above sea-level. The North-eastern and Northern regions appear to have the worst agricultural land due to high mountain regions while the rest of the country appears to be suitable for agriculture:

“Winter can get very harsh, particularly in the mountain regions. Some areas are isolated from autumn’s first snow fall until the spring thaw has melted the snow again. In the most severe cases, this can mean up to and beyond six months a year” (Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, 2018).

The UNODC reports several reasons why Islamic farmers in Afghanistan produce opium poppies. One reason is lack of “Governor-led eradication” (UNODC, 2017, pg. 27). Other reasons are Islamic politics and economic opportunity:

“Opium is permissible because it is consumed by kafirs (infidels) in the West and not by Afghans.” Exhibiting the Taliban leaders’ understanding of the politics of the drug economy, Rashid added, “We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan” (Redmond, 2011).

Where does the Opium go?

Border security surrounding Afghanistan is porous, providing opportunity to smuggle opium out of the country.

The Taliban allow the sale of Afghanistan opium poppy to Pakistan, collecting a 20 percent tax where:

“The value of Opium production in 2017 was worth between US$ 4.1 to 6.6 billion, or 20 and 32 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and provided up to 354,000 full time jobs to rural areas for opium poppy weeding and harvesting” (UNODC, 2017). Add to that the $8.6 billion the United States spends on counter-narcotic efforts in Afghanistan (The Guardian, 2018).

Opium flow out of Afghanistan. Source UNODC, 2008

Opium and heroin are ingested and transported inside paid refugees (men, women, and children) called Packers. The Balkan route is the main trafficking route for world opiate trafficking.

Balkans Opium route. Source: UNODC, 2008

Another route is the Oppistan route.

“Oppistan” route. Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2016

While another is Diplomatic flights. These flights, into and out of war zones, have Diplomatic immunity and can not be searched for contraband: drugs, weapons, or people.

The United States government occupies Afghanistan because it believes opium poppy production there “significantly threatens the United States” (Thomas, 2009).

Results of the Long War

Increase in drug overdose deaths in USA.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics 

With heroin and synthetic opioids impacting states…

Source: The Kaiser Foundation, 2016

and communities closer to home.

Source: CDC, University of Chicago (NORC), USDA, 2017. The Staggering Numbers Behind America’s Opioid Epidemic, ZeroHedge.com, 10/17/2018.

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Protestors once again gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto to speak out against the ongoing lockdowns, the latest amendment of which gives police increased authority to enforce the provincial stay-at-home order.

In sharp contrast to previous weeks where protestors were arrested and ticketed in accordance with the order, the police were far more relaxed during Saturday’s events.

Officers stood in groups around the event itself, while others walked among the protestors in conversation.

“I understand you have an opinion that you’d like to express,” one officer said to some protestors, adding that “free expression is everything in this country.”

Another officer said

“There are at least two sides to everything,” one said, “and we’re always in the middle. We’re just trying to make it a safe place for everybody.”

Since Doug Ford’s announcement that police would now be stopping vehicles in order, several police districts have said they do not intend to enforce the orders.

Protestors then embarked on their “Essential Exercise March,” referencing the fact that exercise is deemed an acceptable reason to be outside.

Travis Dhanraj, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief for Global News, reported that as a result of the police’s refusal to enforce Ford’s harsh measures, Ontario is currently “reconsidering” the playground closures and police stops.

Protestors passed through Trinity Bellwoods Park where they declared “cherry blossoms are essential” and called to “free the cherry blossoms” after the city blocked off access to the trees.

As the group made its way through the city, several passerby expressed their disapproval with the protestors. One threw at least two bottles of water from off a roof.

The march wrapped at Queen’s Park, with one participant shouting “Two weeks to flatten the curve became over 1 year!” at the Ontario Legislative Building.

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1976 Swine Flu vaccine program

This program, in hindsight, was mounted to gain support for the Presidential election of Gerald Ford, who was running against Jimmy Carter.  The program was conceived after a soldier died at Fort Dix (after an exhausting march) and then he and several other soldiers were found to harbor swine influenza virus. 

The specter of the 1918 swine flu pandemic was invoked, and the public health machinery went into overdrive to create a national vaccine program. Several Pharma companies were enlisted to produce vaccines.

As several months wore on, there were no more swine flu cases.  The risk of another 1918 flu had vanished. But the vaccination program had taken on a life of its own.

The vaccine companies demanded relief from liability. After all, it is hard to get everything right the first time. They declined to continue the vaccine program, complaining that their insurers refused to take on the liability burden.  This became the first time the federal government agreed to serve as Pharma’s insurer.  This event became the model for the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

You know the rest of the story.  One quarter of the US got vaccinated, before it was acknowledged that the vaccine caused paralysis. Guillain-Barre syndrome, at a rate 6 times normal, was occurring in vaccinees.  There were about 400 cases and 40 deaths.  Vaccinations ended.  The virus was gone long before the vaccinations had even started, and has never returned. The federal government paid damages. Pharma and their insurers had been a lot more savvy than the U.S. public health enterprise.

2003 Smallpox vaccination program

This was a program rooted in fear of bioterrorism engendered by the 2001 anthrax letters and the hype provided by the media.  Everyone knew the nasty little phrase, “It’s not a question of if, but when” and preparedness was on everyone’s mind.  There was no intelligence supporting an imminent threat of smallpox. But the vaccine program was a central part of the campaign of fear that was used to justify the invasion and takeover of Iraq. The idea fed to Americans was that we had to stop Saddam before he sprayed us with smallpox, even though he had nothing to do with either the anthrax letters, or the 9/11 attacks. The fact that the United States’ American Type Culture Collection had provided Iraq’s atomic energy agency with Vollum strain anthrax was kept as quiet as possible.

Smallpox vaccine had been stockpiled by the Clinton administration, and more had been purchased by the Bush administration.  Smallpox vaccinations had been halted in the US decades earlier, and the disease smallpox had been wiped out in 1977.  Smallpox vaccine was  known to be highly reactogenic, and the old medical literature claimed it killed one in a million babies who received it.

Smallpox vaccine was also known to cause myocarditis, with EKG changes occurring in 3% of Finnish soldiers who had received the vaccine, in a 1978 publication.  In the US, 1 in 13,000 smallpox vaccine-naive airmen developed a clinical case of myopericarditis after receiving their first dose.

When the vaccine was given to healthcare workers and first responders in 2003, episodes of heart failure, heart attacks, myocarditis and death quickly mounted. Doctors and nurses noticed that they could not sue for damages if injured, and at first there was no federal compensation either.  They began refusing to be vaccinated.  Congress quickly allotted money for a compensation program, but the maximum award was only $250,000 for a permanent disability or death.

Well-paid professionals were not impressed.  After about 50,000 inoculations, and a series of 6 negative “Letter Reports” by the Institute of Medicine, the program quickly petered out, at least for civilians.  The military continued vaccinating soldiers.  Yet no smallpox cases have occurred since 1977.

2009 Swine Flu vaccination program

In the early spring of 2009, another swine flu was discovered in Mexico, and quickly spread to the U.S. People were said to be dying from the illness in droves.  Not only the United States, but the entire ‘developed’ world clamored for vaccines. Again, the initial hype was that this was a tremendously dangerous flu bug, probably 1918 all over again.

Not only were multiple new vaccines to be created, but this was also an opportunity to trial new vaccine adjuvants, which by supercharging the immune response, could cut down the amount of antigen needed by an estimated 80%, thus providing much faster production of the large volumes of vaccine needed.

The 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a dud in terms of virulence–it turned out to be considerably less deadly than a normal flu season virus.  It did, however, serve to expose the fact that pre-existing pandemic flu vaccine deals had already been negotiated and signed by the World Health Organization, Big Pharma, and individual countries.

Here is how the deals worked:  once a pandemic was declared by the WHO Director-General, the contracts were activated, and countries were committed to buying large stocks of pandemic vaccine, sight unseen.  Other agreements and memoranda of understanding guaranteed that the flu vaccines (the original concern was a deadly bird flu or swine flu pandemic) would be grandfathered in, dodging the unpredictable testing and licensure process in which many more vaccine candidates fail than finally cross the finish line.

Also exposed by the 2009 pandemic was the fact that the WHO had, only a month earlier, changed its official description-definition of a pandemic’s “Phase 6”.

The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed from the W.H.O. webpage listing the phases of a pandemic, and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.”  Surprisingly, a novel virus that only caused a cold would have met the definition.

A declaration of pandemic Phase 6 was the requirement that would trigger the pre-existing vaccine contracts, committing many nations to spend billions of dollars on vaccines yet to be designed.

Why had WHO changed the definition? What was the process that led WHO’s then-Director General  Margaret Chan to invoke it? We still don’t know.

The 2009 pandemic was an opportunity that opened the door to powerful vaccine adjuvants.  The US bought large quantities of adjuvants from GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis (which has since sold its vaccine businesses) as well as large quantities of rapidly tested vaccines.  But in response to widespread fears about these novel adjuvants, and their potential to cause autoimmune illnesses, they were not added to the new swine flu vaccines in the US.

In Europe things were different. The adjuvants were used.  The GSK vaccine with adjuvant, Pandemrix, led to over 1300 cases of severe narcolepsy, primarily in adolescents.  Whether this was caused by the vaccine antigens or the adjuvant has not been resolved.  Glaxo unsurprisingly has denied its vaccine caused the problem.

However, studies of the frequency of new narcolepsy cases in many European countries revealed that adolescents who had received the Pandemrix vaccine were 10-16 times more likely to develop narcolepsy as those who had not.

The 2009 pandemic revealed something else.  The vaccine contracts that had been mediated by the WHO between the vaccine manufacturers and individual nations contained a clause absolving the manufacturers of all liability for injuries.  In order to access vaccines, countries had to agree that their citizens could not sue the manufacturers for damages if deaths or injuries occurred.  Litigation of some of the narcolepsy cases continues, as the UK government has flip-flopped over its responsibility to compensate those injured by the Pandemrix vaccine.

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Those are the prior examples of “warp speed” vaccine development for perceived pandemics.  In no case were the vaccine manufacturers willing to take on liability for their products.  In each case, governments took on the liability, but grudgingly.  Any benefits awarded were considerably less than would be expected from successful litigation with pharmaceutical companies.

Why won’t the manufacturers stand by their products? Because there is no possible way to determine the products’ safety or effectiveness in the short time allotted. The two swine flu programs went from conception to vaccinating citizens in approximately six months, similar to what was achieved with the Covid-19 vaccines. (Claims that the warp speed vaccines were the fastest ever developed is simply wrong.) The smallpox program was a little different, as vaccine had been stockpiled, but not clinically tested, over several years.

How long is the usual process of vaccine development?  According to the American College of Physicians,

Vaccine development is a long, complex process, often lasting 10-15 years and involving a combination of public and private involvement…Vaccines are developed, tested, and regulated in a very similar manner to other drugs. In general, vaccines are even more thoroughly tested than non-vaccine drugs…

CDC says, Vaccine licensing is a lengthy process that can take 10 years or longer. 

The Vaccine Life Cycle: Safety at Every Phase

Vaccine safety in the United States includes safety measures at every phase of vaccine development and approval, and ongoing safety monitoring once vaccines are in use.

The bottom line is that given current technology, it is impossible to make a safe and effective vaccine in months.  Everyone wishes it wasn’t so, and Presidents may think they have the funds and clout to compel the system to produce a great vaccine, or six, at warp speed. They may think they can make it happen, but they can’t.

When you hand billions of dollars to inveterate government bureaucrats with MDs after their names, tragedies are certain to follow.  They always have.

Repurposed drugs could have won against this pandemic, and most likely the next, since we know a lot more about how to combat viruses using drugs in 2021 than ever before.  Can someone tell the President he can be an even bigger hero using drugs instead of vaccines, since they are more readily available, cheaper and safer? I’m very concerned about the next time, given all these future vaccine contracts.  What does the government know that I don’t about the next time?

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Then again, when the public health bureaucracy is working so hard to get us all vaccinated, especially those who are already immune (i.e., at greater risk of serious adverse reaction, with no benefit at all from a vaccine) you just have to ask, what are they really trying to do?

If you want us to have immunity passports, then check our immunity. Why can’t I get an acceptable immunity test?

Why do we need to get vaccine passports instead of immunity passports?

Why has the US government and the EU committed to buying many vaccine doses per person for several years?

What are they putting, or planning to put, into those injections?

Or could the purpose be to put our life onto an app? Is the vaccine passport going to be the social credit score/finances/travel/privileges/ control app?  The Financial Times suggests,

“There is an opportunity here to use the Covid-19 pass as a building block for a digital infrastructure that could service public needs well beyond the pandemic — for example in banking, education or public health more generally…”

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The US War in Afghanistan: A Historic Crime

April 19th, 2021 by Patrick Martin

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US President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the American military intervention in Afghanistan will be brought to an end by September 11, 2021, and the last American soldier will leave that country several weeks before the 20th anniversary of the American invasion and conquest of the Central Asian country on October 7, 2001.

Biden is the third American president to promise to end the war in Afghanistan. Even if the last 3,500 or so American soldiers leave the country, there will still remain thousands of CIA operatives, mercenaries and paratroopers propping up the puppet government of President Ashraf Ghani. And the Pentagon will continue to drop bombs and fire missiles more or less at will at whatever the US claims are “terrorist” targets. A renewed deployment of combat troops, as in Iraq, is entirely possible.

But Biden’s announcement provides an occasion for drawing a balance sheet of the longest war in the history of the United States, one which has produced incalculable suffering for the people of Afghanistan, squandered vast resources and brutalized American society.

By official figures, more than 100,000 Afghans have been killed in the war, no doubt a vast underestimation. The US waged this war through the methods of “counterinsurgency,” that is, through terror: bombing wedding parties and hospitals, drone assassination, abductions and torture. In one of the crowning atrocities of the war, in 2015, US aircraft carried out a half-hour long attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 42 people.

Biden’s brief remarks announcing the military withdrawal made no reference to the dire conditions in the country, for which American imperialism bears the principal responsibility.

The war, based on the deliberate misrepresentation of the US’s real aims, was sold to the American population as a response to the events of September 11, 2001, which have never been the subject of a serious investigation. It was, in reality, an illegal war of aggression, aimed at dominating and subjugating a historically oppressed population in pursuit of the predatory interests of US imperialism.

No one has been held accountable for the crimes perpetrated by the US military in Afghanistan, including the officials in the Bush administration, who launched it, and the Obama administration, who perpetuated it. George W. Bush is (lately) praised as a statesman because he is less openly crude and dictatorial than Donald Trump.

Barack Obama is treated by the media as a celebrity although he is the only American president to have waged war every day he was in office. Top aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Hillary Clinton, enjoy millionaire retirements. Obama’s vice president now occupies the White House. This criminal war was supported by every section of the US political establishment, Republican and Democrat, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who voted for it.

The World Socialist Web Site has an unparalleled record of opposition to the American imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, going back to the initial invasion in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In its first statement on the US invasion, published on October 9, 2001, the WSWS editorial board explained “Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan.” We wrote:

The nature of this or any war, its progressive or reactionary character, is determined not by the immediate events that preceded it, but rather by the class structures, economic foundations and international roles of the states that are involved. From this decisive standpoint, the present action by the United States is an imperialist war.

The US government initiated the war in pursuit of far-reaching international interests of the American ruling elite. What is the main purpose of the war? The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago created a political vacuum in Central Asia, which is home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.

The Caspian Sea region, to which Afghanistan provides strategic access, harbors approximately 270 billion barrels of oil, some 20 percent of the world’s proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet’s gas reserves.

The American intervention in Afghanistan began, not in 2001, but in July 1979, when the Carter administration decided to aid forces fighting the Soviet-backed government, with the goal, as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, of “giving the USSR its Vietnam War.” Following the Soviet invasion of December 1979, the CIA worked with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to recruit Islamic fundamentalists to go to Afghanistan and engage in guerrilla warfare, an operation that brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and created Al Qaeda.

The Taliban was likewise the product of Pakistani weaponry and training, Saudi financing and American political backing. Although the fundamentalist group emerged out of the refugee camps in Pakistan as a kind of “clerical fascism,” the byproduct of decades of war and oppression, the Clinton administration endorsed its takeover in 1995-96 as the best prospect for restoring “stability.”

From 1996 to 2001, US relations with Afghanistan revolved around proposed pipelines to bring oil and gas from the Caspian basin on a route that would bypass Russia, Iran and China. Both Zalmay Khalilzad, the perpetual US envoy to the region, and Hamid Karzai, the first US-backed president of Afghanistan, worked for the oil giant Unocal.

The Bush administration threatened military action against the Taliban at several points in 2001. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, far from being events that “changed everything,” set into motion a long-planned attack. And there is considerable evidence that US intelligence agencies permitted the 9/11 attacks to go forward to supply the necessary pretext.

The WSWS analyzed the rapid conquest of Afghanistan and the collapse of the Taliban regime as an event that revealed the criminal ferocity of American imperialism, as thousands were killed in US bombing raids, and thousands more were slaughtered by US-backed militia forces. The regime established in Kabul was an unstable alliance of former Taliban officials like Hamid Karzai, head of a Pashtun tribe, and the Northern Alliance, based in the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities.

The US invasion had a no less destabilizing effect on geopolitics, as all the neighboring states, including Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan, regarded the huge American expeditionary force, which grew to 100,000 troops at various times under the Bush and Obama administrations, as a permanent threat just across their borders. The Bush administration would go on to carry out an even bloodier act of imperialist barbarism, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which created the conditions for the wider destabilization of the whole Middle East, now consumed by civil wars and imperialist interventions in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

The Bush and Obama administrations combined record military budgets with police-state measures at home, the buildup of the surveillance state and economic austerity—budget cuts, wage cuts and worsening living standards for the majority of working people.

The WSWS explained that the war in Afghanistan was part of an eruption of US imperialism, beginning with the Gulf War of 1991, aimed at offsetting the economic decline of the United States through military means. As David North wrote in the preface to A Quarter Century of War in 2016: “The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.”

This prognosis has been confirmed. A principal consideration behind Biden’s plans for withdrawing US military forces from Afghanistan is to concentrate the resources of the US military on the escalating conflict with Russia and, above all, China. In recent weeks, Biden has overseen a series of increasingly provocative actions in the East Asia, and the US military has inscribed in its official doctrine the necessity for preparing for “great power conflict.”

A real accounting for two decades of bloody crimes in Afghanistan, and the development of a movement against imperialist barbarism, requires the building of an international socialist movement in the working class. This is the task which the WSWS and the International Committee have taken up.

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waronterrorism.jpgby Michel Chossudovsky
ISBN Number: 9780973714715
List Price: $24.95
click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

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

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

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

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

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

***

The new report on 2020 by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that the world’s renewable energy generation capacity increased by an astonishing 10.3% in 2020 despite the global economic slowdown during the coronavirus pandemic. It beats the previous record for an annual increase in this sector by a healthy 50%.

The bad news for Americans is that most of this increase took place in Asia, especially China. In this strategic set of technologies, China is eating America’s lunch.

Given that China beat the pandemic even before the vaccine with masks and social distancing, while the odious Trump left counties on their own and refused to mobilize the federal government, it is no surprise that the Chinese economy saw a growth spurt last fall and grew for the year. In the first quarter of 2021, China’s economy grew an eye-popping 18.3 percent! Along with its rapid march to renewables, China is becoming more and more formidable. Unlike the Biden administration, I don’t see this as a threat, but as a healthy challenge. If we want to compete, we have to swing into action.

In 2020, the global net increase in renewables was 261 gigawatts (GW). That is the nameplate capacity of some 300 nuclear power plants! There are actually only 440 nuclear power plants in the whole world, with a generation capacity of 390 gigwatts.

So let’s just underline this point. The world put in 2/3s as much renewable energy in one year as is produced by all the existing nuclear plants!

Those who argue we absolutely must construct more nuclear plants to beat the climate emergency are clearly just wrong. Renewables can do it all, and they can be installed much more inexpensively and way faster than nuclear plants. Nuclear is a distraction and a diversion of resources at a time when we are racing to get the earth down to producing no net carbon dioxide.

Asia was responsible for the lion’s share of the new renewables capacity, at 61 percent.

In other words, the United States was lying down on the job. President Biden wants to turn this lackluster performance around and put the US back into the vanguard of this crucial emerging technology.

Almost all (91 percent) of the new renewables capacity consisted in wind and solar farms.

h/t International Renewable Energy Agency

Asia has 1,286 gigawatts of renewables, and they put in 167.6 GWs just in 2020! North America, despite being industrially and technologically advanced, only has 422 gigawatts. For shame, America. Even Europe has 609 gigawatts.

Since I cover the Middle East a lot at this site, it is worth noting that this region only has a minor renewables capacity, of about 24 gigawatts, only 1 percent of the global production. It only put in 1.2 gigawatts last year. This result is because the region has so much natural gas. But note that renewables are nevertheless cheaper and more reliable in their pricing. In the region, only Morocco has made real strides toward renewables, though there are some big projects planned in Egypt.

The rate of new wind energy installation almost doubled in 2020 year on year, with an increase of of 111 gigawatts in 2020 against only 58 new gigawatts in 2019.

China was the world leader here, putting in 72.4 gigawatts of new wind all by itself. The US only put in 14.2 gigawatts of wind.

This kind of statistic has made President Biden worried about American competitiveness in the new world that is taking shape. China is leaving us in the dust.

Offshore wind reached 5% of total wind capacity in 2020. It is still a small part of the sector but it is growing rapidly and has enormous potential.

In what is perhaps a sign of the future, solar energy, which was a poor cousin to wind a few years ago, has now caught up with it and its responsible for just about as much electricity production.

Asia was the leader here too, putting in 78 gigawatts of new solar in 2020 (up from 55 GW in 2019). China alone put in nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar. Vietnam put in 11.6 GW of new solar. Japan, despite being an advanced industrial country, only put in 5 GW of new solar.

India only put in 4 GW of solar in 2020, despite its big ambitions, about the same as South Korea.

The United States was down around the Vietnam level, with only 14.9 gigawatts of new solar.

I’ve been in places like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Arizona in the summer, and I cannot understand why every single house doesn’t have solar panels. In some Republican-ruled such states, the legislature has even put in fees to discourage solar and promote dirty fossil fuels, which are wrecking the planet with global heating.

As a result, China is making the breakthroughs in solar panel technology and is a major exporter of panels. The US? Desperately breaking up underground rocks and polluting the environment chasing the last wisps of natural gas under there so as to add to the climate emergency.

I grew up in the age of the moon shot and I am not used to America being so backward.

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US Expects Russia to Submit. Will It?

April 19th, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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In his landmark foreign policy speech delivered from the US state department on February 4, President Joe Biden had proclaimed that “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the centre of our foreign policy.” That maxim was put to test last week. And it failed to make the grade.  

A confusing picture emerges as the US diplomacy toward Russia in recent weeks, especially in the past week since April 13, runs a zigzag course. To recap, Washington has been quietly encouraging Kiev to be belligerent along the contact line with Ukraine’s breakaway region of Donbas. 

Repeatedly affirming the US’ “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and concerns over “the sudden Russian military build-up in occupied Crimea and on Ukraine’s borders,” the Biden Administration has been steadily boosting Ukraine’s military capability to provoke Russia. 

Moscow estimated that a precipitate situation might be engineered as in 2008 when Washington encouraged the regime in Georgia to pick up a fight with its breakaway regions that inevitably led to a conflict with Russia. Thus, on April 7, the Kremlin warned that Russia would keep military forces near the border with Ukraine and could take “measures” if a precipitate situation arose threatening Donbas or Crimea. 

In a reversal of the policy of President Obama not to provoke Russia, Biden Administration has begun supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine, which has fired up revanchist neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists. Indeed, the US is fully aware that the Ukraine issue concerns Russia’s core interests, and Moscow will never give in. Simply put, if Ukraine joins NATO, the reach of the alliance gets extended to Russia’s doorsteps. 

Thus, the announcement in Kiev in early April of large-scale military exercises planned between Ukraine and NATO armies disregarded the Kremlin’s repeated warnings that any deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine would threaten stability near Russia’s borders. On top of it, Turkey informed Russia on April 9 that two US warships were due to cross the Bosphorus and enter the Black Sea to remain there until May 4. 

Amidst these rising tensions — with Washington drawing the EU and NATO into its containment strategy against Russia — President Joe Biden telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 13. According to the Kremlin readout, Biden expressed interest in interaction with Russia on pressing matters such as “ensuring strategic stability and arms control, Iran’s nuclear programme, the situation in Afghanistan, and global climate change.” The White House readout said Biden proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the “full range of issues” facing the US and Russia. 

Biden’s motivation remained a mystery, since only two days later, on April 15, the State Department disclosed that he had also signed an Executive Order imposing more sanctions against Russia and that the US Treasury had already issued a directive that prohibits American financial institutions from participation in the primary market for ruble or non-ruble denominated Russian bonds, the intention being to weaken and destroy the Russian currency. Besides, the US also expelled 10 Russian diplomats.  

Either Biden had a memory lapse and forgot he was to sign the Executive Order when he called Putin and played nice, or he was plain insincere. (Curiously, the Executive Order also delegated the executive power to the state dept to use the discretion to impose even more sanctions if needed in future!) This strange behaviour has triggered speculation. Some say Biden may not be in control of the Russia policies that are being driven by the “Deep State”. 

But Moscow reacted strongly. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned that Washington’s “hostile moves are dangerously raising the level of confrontation” and that the only plausible explanation for such strange behaviour is that the US “is not ready to accept the objective reality of a multipolar world in which American hegemony is not possible. It is placing its bets on sanctions pressure and interference in our domestic affairs.”  

But then came yet another surprise when within hours, on April 15 itself, Biden appeared personally before the media to make what appeared to be a conciliatory statement about Putin and Russia. He insisted, 

“The United States is not looking to kick off a cycle of ecs- — of escalation and conflict with Russia.  We want a stable, predictable relationship… When I spoke to President Putin, I expressed my belief that communication between the two of us, personally and directly, was to be essential in moving forward to a more effective relationship…

“Now is the time to de-escalate.  The way forward is through thoughtful dialogue and diplomatic process. The U.S. is prepared to continue constructively to move forward that process. My bottom line is this: Where it is in the interest of the United States to work with Russia, we should and we will. Where Russia seeks to violate the interests of the United States, we will respond.”

However, as it turned out, these sugar-coated words hid a bitter pill to swallow — that Russia should gracefully accept the sanctions and simply reconcile with the idea of a selective engagement with Washington whenever it suited US interests. 

Amidst such contradictions, a thaw the US-Russia tensions cannot be a realistic possibility. Moscow is unlikely to compromise on core interests. On the other hand, Biden also knows that Russia’s participation is vital for solving many major global issues and to that extent, Biden may want to ease tensions. Indeed, a pragmatic working relationship also cannot be ruled out, as the US is well aware that Russia is interested in easing tensions with the West, given the challenges it is facing over its domestic economy, production lines and stability in the Middle East. 

Simply put, the current tensions would have unpredictable consequences. There is room for the two sides to interact over issues such as strategic stability and arms control, the Iran nuclear issue, Afghanistan or climate change. Above all, Russia is also keen to be a participant on the global stage. But a summit cannot produce substantive results unless it is backed up with adequate preparations and in-depth exchanges regarding each side’s interests and concerns. Whereas, the current state of play does not allow space for constructive diplomacy. 

Russia has since blacklisted eight current and former American officials and sent ten diplomats packing in retaliation for US sanctions. Evidently, as the Russian statement put it, these were “just a fraction of the capabilities at our disposal.” Nonetheless, the State Department has promptly lamented this “escalatory” response and warned that it might respond. In effect, the US insists on its prerogative to impose sanctions, but Russia should not retaliate.

How far this pantomime will continue under the  rubric of “diplomacy” remains to be seen. Expectations must be kept low.  Evidently, the Biden administration has no interest to use diplomacy to wean Russia away from an alliance with China, as Kissinger once advised, so as to isolate and encircle China, the US’ main archetypal rival on the world stage. Biden instead expects Russia to submit to American writ and thereby deny strategic depth to China. 

But will Russia submit to the US hegemony — a nation that held its ground against Napoleon and Hitler? No, it will never. The Ukraine issue will, therefore, remain a tinder box, which can blow up anytime and become a laceration wound on Russia’s body polity and contaminate and weaken it — which, of course, is also the ultimate logic of the regime change in Kiev in the 2014 colour revolution masterminded by the US state department officials including Victoria Nuland, who has resurfaced as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden Administration currently.  

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Featured image: US President Joe Biden departs after delivering remarks on Russia in the East Room at White House, Washington, DC, April 15, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)

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A woman’s exposure to the pesticide DDT during pregnancy can increase her granddaughter’s risk for breast cancer decades later, according to a new study.

Published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the study found a significant association between DDT in grandmothers’ blood during pregnancy, and obesity and early first menstrual periods in their granddaughters—factors known to increase the risk for breast cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.

“This is the first three-generation study that [shows] it’s plausible that an environmental chemical in a grandparent can impact obesity and timing of menarche in the grandchild,” Barbara Cohn, a study author and director and senior research scientist at the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS), told EHN.

Transgenerational impacts of DDT 

Researchers have established health effects from transgenerational exposure to chemicals in laboratory animals, but never before in humans. Grandchildren’s exposure can occur when their mothers are in utero and their mother’s egg cells are in development.

DDT compounds are known endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can alter and interfere with natural hormones that are essential for development. DDT exposure has been linked to breast cancer, birth defects, reduced fertility, and an increased risk of diabetes. It was banned in the United States in 1972 but is still used in other countries to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.

Conducted by researchers at CHDS and the University of California at Davis, the study relied on blood samples collected from pregnant women between 1959 and 1967 as part of the CHDS study that has followed 20,000 pregnant women in California’s Bay Area, and their families, for more than 60 years. CHDS investigates how health and disease are passed on between generations. The original cohort of women, the grandmothers, gave blood samples at each trimester during pregnancy and one sample shortly after they gave birth.

The current study is based on a subset of 365 adult granddaughters. The risk of obesity (Body Mass Index greater than 30 kg/m2) in young adult granddaughters was found to be 2 to 3 times greater when their grandmothers had higher levels of o,p’-DDT, a minor compound of DDT, in their blood during or just after pregnancy. Similarly, granddaughters were twice as likely to have earlier first menstrual periods (before age 11) when their grandmothers had higher o,p’-DDT blood levels.

Previous CHDS studies have shown that mothers’ DDT exposure during pregnancy or immediately after birth correlates with increased risk of breast cancer and the prevalence of breast cancer risk factors, including obesity, in their adult daughters. While the granddaughters were too young (median age of 26) to measure breast cancer risk, the researchers state that “the impact can’t be ruled out.”

Timing of toxic exposures

DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972 but is still used in other countries to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.(Credit: Tim Lang/flickr)

The study breaks other important ground, according to Julia Brody, executive director at the Silent Spring Institute, who was not involved in the study. First, it shows consistency that o,p’-DDT is the best marker for recent exposure. Most previous studies, conducted after DDT was banned in the U.S., have measured DDT’s main breakdown compound (DDE) in women’s blood and they largely failed to find a connection to breast cancer.

CHDS researchers focused on o,p’-DDT, a contaminant comprising roughly 15 percent of commercial grade DDT, as a marker for active exposure—that is, exposure during pregnancy many decades ago—because it is more quickly metabolized than DDT’s main ingredient (p,p’-DDT) which breaks down to DDE.

Second, Brody told EHN, the study shows, “You can’t assume that exposure later in life is the same as exposure early in life.” Exposures to DDT at pregnancy appear more impactful than at mid-life, the age that other researchers have focused their investigations into DDT and breast cancer risk.

Cohn agrees. Her research shows that DDT exposure during pregnancy and at puberty is particularly harmful. “The issue of the vulnerability of a pregnant woman should be a major part of the story,” she said.

Policies aimed at endocrine disruptors 

Researchers further conclude that their results suggest that ancestral DDT exposures may be a contributing factor to the global trend in today’s rising obesity rates, and the falling age at first menstrual period.

Though they were not able to account for diet or exposure to other so-called obesogens (chemicals associated with obesity), Cohn pointed to the strong association they found between grandmothers’ DDT levels and granddaughters’ obesity and said that for other factors to explain granddaughters’ obesity, “only the daughters whose grandmothers were exposed to DDT would have to be exposed to current obesogens today,” and that’s unlikely.

Kelle Moley, deputy director at Reproductive Health Technologies, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, thinks the theory has “biological plausibility.” She’s studied factors in transgenerational obesity in laboratory animals and finds it interesting to see a similar effect in humans. “The study, of course doesn’t explain all of it, but it could be some contributing factor to the rise in obesity,” she said.

Moving forward, both Cohn and Brody would like policymakers to view the study as proof of concept that exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals can impact generations, and to begin looking to animal studies that have documented the impact of endocrine disruptors on future generations to devise policies that reduce human exposure.

“We don’t want to wait the next three generations to find out the chemicals that are in use now cause breast cancer,” said Brody.

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Featured image: “We’re all kind of connected…what you do today has an effect on generations going forward,” says Akilah Shahid, pictured here with her mother Dr. Terri Jett and grandmother Beatrice Jett. All three generations participated in the Child Health and Development Studies research program. (Credit: Akilah Shahid)

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The Supreme Court Is Also to Blame for Daunte Wright’s Death

April 19th, 2021 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

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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When veteran Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter, who is white, stopped Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, for an expired registration tag, she committed an act of racial profiling. As a result, Wright’s blood is on the hands not only of Potter but also of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has legally sanctioned this type of racial profiling.

Like Derek Chauvin, who is on trial for killing George Floyd, Potter is not an exception to the rule. Both are typical representatives of a system of racist, violent law enforcement against Black people. When Potter shot and killed Wright, her act — whether intentional or accidental — was also grounded in the same sort of racism manifested by officers throughout the United States.

Potter killed Wright quickly, unlike Chauvin, who tortured Floyd to death over a period of nine minutes and 29 seconds. After she stopped Wright, Potter found he had a warrant out for his arrest for a misdemeanor. When the officers tried to arrest him, Wright pulled away to get back in the car. Potter pointed her gun at Wright, threatened to taser him and then shot him. The overreaction of both Potter and Chauvin to relatively minor offenses led to the murders of two unarmed Black men. “Why, when you stop people of color, [do] you automatically draw a weapon?” asked Pastor Ezra Fagge’Tt, an eyewitness to Wright’s death.

Pretext Traffic Stops Enable Racial Profiling

Although Potter may have had probable cause to believe that Wright committed a minor traffic infraction, her decision to stop him was also the result of racial profiling.

In 1996, Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court that legalized racial profiling during traffic stops. The Court authorized pretext stops in Whren v. United States. That means officers can stop cars and temporarily detain motorists on the pretext of enforcing traffic laws, even if a reasonable officer would not have stopped the driver absent some additional law enforcement objective.

Even if they are subjectively motivated by racism, officers can stop a car as long as they have probable cause to believe the driver committed a traffic infraction. Whren permits “reasonable”law enforcement objectives to serve as a pretextual justification for subjective suspicion on the basis of race. Pretext stops foster racial profiling, and ultimately, the use of violence against Black people.

Living in a society steeped in white supremacy, non-Black people in the U.S. often associate Blackness with criminality and violence. The participants in a 2017 study conducted by the American Psychological Association “believed that the black men were more capable of causing harm in a hypothetical altercation and, troublingly, that police would be more justified in using force to subdue them, even if the men were unarmed,” lead author John Paul Wilson said. Non-Black participants were more likely to view the Black men as more harmful.

More than a quarter of police killings in 2018 occurred during traffic stops, according to a study conducted by National Public Radio. Officers’ use of force is not proportionate to the level of risk they’re faced with during these traffic stops.

Legal scholar Jordan Blair Woods found that “the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6.5 million stops.” Likewise, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was just 1 in every 361,111 stops. Yet Black men were killed at a rate of 31.17 per every 1 million stops, a report by ProPublica concluded.

Tasers Can Also Kill People

Potter is claiming that she intended to reach for her Taser but accidentally grabbed her gun instead. Before shooting Wright, Potter screamed, “Taser!” Even if Potter did intend to taser Wright, that still would have amounted to the use of excessive force.

Tasers are electrical weapons that “deliver pulses of electrical charge that cause the subject’s muscles to contract in an uncoordinated way, thereby preventing purposeful movement. This effect has been termed ‘neuromuscular incapacitation,’” according to the 2020 UN Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement. “The charge is delivered through metal probes that are fired towards the subject but which remain electrically connected to the device by fine wires.”

Officers regularly use Tasers despite their lethal nature. While police ostensibly seek compliance from victims by utilizing Tasers, they render victims unable to respond to commands due to neuromuscular incapacitation. There is a pattern of disproportionate use of deadly force by tasering Black people. A Reuters survey on Taser-related deaths through 2018 concluded that of the 1,081 people who have died in the U.S. from the use of Tasers, at least 32 percent were Black, even though Black people comprise only 14 percent of the population. But although 29 percent of people killed by Tasers were white, 60 percent of the U.S. population is white.

Officers Are Rarely Convicted of Killing Black People

Officers are rarely held accountable for killing Black people. Mapping Police Violence reported in 2020, “Officers were charged with a crime in only one percent of all killings by police.” Most officers who are charged are not convicted. And in the few cases they are convicted, it is frequently for lesser charges, not murder.

The timing of her killing of Wright made Potter’s prosecution more likely. Tensions in Minneapolis and indeed, throughout the nation, are high as video clips of Chauvin crushing the life out of Floyd are broadcast repeatedly throughout Chauvin’s trial. The justifiable public outrage at Potter’s shooting of Wright led to quick resignations of Potter and the Brooklyn Center police chief. Prosecutors charged Potter with second-degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.

In Minnesota, second-degree manslaughter is defined as causing the death of another by “culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

But Ben Crump, attorney for the Wright family, stated “This was no accident. This was an intentional, deliberate and unlawful use of force.” He said, “You would think that you know what side your gun is on and what side your Taser is on. There was no need to even Tase him.”

Crump cited “implicit bias” that “goes beyond policy.”

Wright’s aunt, Nyesha Wright, wants Potter charged with murder. “Prosecute them, like they would prosecute us,” she said at a news conference. “We want the highest justice.”

Prosecutors are likely doubtful they could get a jury to convict Potter of murder. Second-degree murder, which can result in a 40-year prison sentence, is defined as causing the death of another, without intent to kill, but while committing a felony. Third-degree murder carries a maximum sentence of 25 years. In order to be convicted, the perpetrator must have caused the death of another by “an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”

Potter is a former president of her police union. These unions often assist members in covering up their misconduct. Police union representatives frequently provide officers with false narratives to conceal their culpability. Officers routinely meet with union representatives and lawyers before they officially submit a statement.

On April 27, the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, for which I am serving as a rapporteur, will release its report with findings of fact and recommendations addressed to national and international policy makers. The commission is examining whether police violence against Black people in the U.S. constitutes a gross violation of international human rights and fundamental freedoms. Testimony was presented to the commission by family members and attorneys about police killings of 43 Black people and the paralyzing of another, all of whom were unarmed or were not threatening the officers or others.

Racism drove each of the steps that led to Wright’s murder — from Potter’s stop of Wright, to her pulling out her gun, to her threatening to fire a Taser at him, to finally shooting Wright dead. Systemic racism is the fuel that drives police violence against Black people, and we must cast aside any talk of “accidents” when it comes to matters of racially motivated violence.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Daunte Wright Protest at GAP (By Andrew Ratto/Wikimedia Commons)

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Popular herbicide products widely available at hardware and garden stores contain undisclosed “inert” ingredients that can kill bumblebees, according to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

The study compared several products, most of which contained the herbicide glyphosate, which is best known as the active ingredient in Roundup products. They found highly variable toxicity to bumblebees, including one formulation that killed 96% of the bees within 24 hours. Yet another herbicide formulation was found to cause no harm to bumblebees.

Unlike the active ingredients in pesticide products, such as glyphosate, these so-called inert ingredients are not subjected to a mandatory set of tests by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the study shows these inert substances can be toxic and harmful in their own right, including some that appear to block the bees’ breathing holes and gas-exchange systems, essentially drowning them.

“This important new study exposes a fatal flaw in how pesticide products are regulated here in the U.S.,” said Jess Tyler, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Now the question is, will the Biden administration fix this problem, or will it allow the EPA to continue its past practice of ignoring the real-world harms of pesticides?”

Pesticides are manufactured and sold as formulations that contain a mixture of compounds, including one or more active ingredients and, potentially, many inert ingredients. The inert ingredients are added to pesticides to aid in mixing and to enhance the products’ ability to stick to plant leaves, among other purposes.

The researchers’ finding that the various inert ingredients added to each formulation played a significant role in mortality rates suggests that the EPA’s current practice of just looking at the impacts of active ingredients fails to provide adequate protections.

Currently the agency requires hardly any toxicity data on a pesticide formulation. In 2017 the Center for Food Safety filed a legal petition calling for the agency to require pesticide companies to provide safety data on the whole pesticide formulations that farmers and homeowners actually use, including inert ingredients. The EPA held a comment period on the petition but has not yet acted to grant or deny it.

“EPA must begin requiring tests of every pesticide formulation for bee toxicity, divulge the identity of ‘secret’ formulation additives so scientists can study them, and prohibit application of Roundup herbicides to flowering plants when bees might be present and killed,” said Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety. “Our legal petition gave the EPA a blueprint for acting on this issue of whole formulations. Now they need to take that blueprint and turn it in to action, before it’s too late for pollinators.”

There are currently 1,102 registered formulations that contain the active ingredient glyphosate, each with a proprietary mixture of inert ingredients. The secrecy of these undisclosed, inert ingredients leaves researchers and the general public in the dark about the exact chemical makeup and actual toxicity of pesticide products.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States and worldwide, with about 280 million pounds a year used across 285 million acres in U.S. agriculture alone. Its total volume of application increased by a factor of 12 from 1995 to 2014. This is largely driven by the adoption of genetically engineered crops like corn and soy that are engineered to withstand what would normally be a fatal dousing of glyphosate.

The EPA recently determined that glyphosate’s labeled uses are likely to “adversely affect” 93% of all threatened and endangered species and 96% of critical habitats that sustain them.

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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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VAERS data released today showed 795 reports related to blood clotting disorders with 400 attributed to Pfizer, 337 to Moderna and 56 to Johnson & Johnson between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 8, 2021.

Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines revealed reports of blood clots and other related blood disorders associated with all three vaccines approved for Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (J&J). So far, only the J&J vaccine has been paused because of blood clot concerns.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received through a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 8, a total of 68,347 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 2,602 deaths — an increase of 260 over the previous week — and 8,285 serious injuries, up 314 since last week.

Form the 4/8/21 release of VAERS Data

Of the 2,602 deaths reported as of April 8, 27% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 19% occurred within 24 hours and 41% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 174.9 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 8. This includes79.6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 90.3 million doses of Pfizer and 4.9 million doses of the J&J COVID vaccine.

This week’s VAERS data show:

Reports of blood clotting disorders in VAERS

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 795 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 8.

Of the 795 cases reported, there were 400 reports attributed to Pfizer, 337 reports with Moderna and 56 reports with J&J — far more than the eight J&J cases under investigation, including the two additional cases added Wednesday.

As The Defender reported today, although the J&J and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines have been under the microscope for their potential to cause blood clots, mounting evidence suggests the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also cause clots and related blood disorders. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to the problem as far back as December 2020.

CDC ignores The Defender, no response after 39 days 

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

On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. We requested information about how the CDC conducts investigations into reported deaths, the status of ongoing investigations reported in the media, if autopsies are being done, the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine, and education initiatives to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

After many attempts to get a response from the CDC, 22 days after our initial outreach a representative from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force responded, saying the agency had never received our questions — even though the employees we talked to several times said their press officers were working through the questions we sent.

We provided the questions again and set a new deadline of April 7. We’ve reached out multiple times since, but the representative has not answered our emails or returned our calls.

On April 15 we called the CDC’s general media line again and were told they had our list of questions and were unsure why the representative told us she never received them. We were told the COVID response team would be informed and that we should follow up in a few days.

It has been 39 days since we first reached out and have yet to receive answers to our questions.

Johnson & Johnson paused over reports of blood clot

On April 15, The Defender reported that a healthy 43-year old man in Mississippi suffered a stroke hours after being vaccinated with J&J’s COVID vaccine. Brad Malagarie, father of seven, had received the vaccine a little after Noon and was found unresponsive by co-workers at his desk.

Also on April 15, the  Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the Ohio Department of Health is monitoring the investigation into what may have caused a 21-year-old University of Cincinnati student to die suddenly last Sunday, about a day after he received the J&J vaccine.

Alicia Shoults, a spokeswoman for the state health department, said the agency is waiting for the completion of a Hamilton County coroner’s report, and “if necessary,” further guidance from the CDC.

The two news stories came just days after federal health officials paused the J&J vaccine.

As The Defender reported April 13, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for a temporary but immediate halt to the use of J&J’s COVID vaccine while the agencies investigated the vaccine’s possible link to potentially dangerous blood clots.

In a joint statement, the agencies said the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was reviewing clinical data gathered on six women, one who died, between the ages of 18 and 48 years who developed blood clots after receiving the single-dose J&J vaccine.

On April 14, the ACIP held an emergency meeting to vote on whether to lift the pause on J&J’s vaccine or change recommendations for its use. As The Defender reported, the ACIP postponed the vote, extending the pause pending further analysis of data relating to blood clots. The ACIP said it would reconvene for a vote in one week to 10 days.

That same day, J&J revealed two more cases of blood clots — one that occurred in a 25-year-old man who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during a clinical trial and another case of deep-vein-thrombosis in a 59-year-old woman.

In its review of J&J’s submission for Emergency Use Authorization in February, the FDA initially urged further surveillance of a slight “numerical imbalance” in blood clotting events after receiving the shot. At the time, it was concluded there was “insufficient” data to determine “a causal relationship” with the vaccine and the drugmaker resumed the trial.

As The Defender reported April 12, the rollout of J&J’s COVID vaccine has not been smooth. 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 in Baltimore.

The vaccine maker also has been plagued with shutdowns of its vaccine sites prior to the vaccine being paused, multiple reports of COVID breakthrough cases and criticism over its CEO’s $30 million pay package while the company pays out billions for its role in the opioid epidemic.

CDC, multiple states report ‘breakthrough’ COVID cases among fully vaccinated

Cases of fully vaccinated people getting COVID, referred to as “breakthrough” cases, continue to make news.

Calling it a “really good scenario,” the CDC yesterday reported 5,800 cases of COVID in fully vaccinated people. Of the 5,800 cases, 396 required hospitalization and 74 people died, the CDC said.

The CDC said it was “keeping a close eye” on the cases, but that breakthrough cases are to be expected. Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health in Ohio, told NBC News:

“This is a really good scenario, even with almost 6,000 breakthrough infections. Most of those have been mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic. That’s exactly what we were hoping for.”

On April 12, the Houston Health Department reported 142 breakthrough cases of COVID that occurred in fully vaccinated people since January, according to ABC 13 News. Vaccine recipients received either two doses of Moderna or Pfizer, or one dose of J&J. The report ruled out those who were said to have contracted the virus 45 days before their second scheduled shot date.

Houston Health Department said there were 2.46 positive cases out of every 10,000 fully-vaccinated people and it was unclear if those who tested positive contracted the original strand of COVID or a newer variant.

Last month, The Defender reported on breakthrough cases in Washington, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, New York, California and Minnesota. On April 6, The Defender reported on 246 breakthrough cases in Michigan, which included three people who died.

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

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

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When the United States government’s Food and Drug Administration earlier this week called for temporarily halting the giving of Johnson & Johnson’s experimental coronavirus vaccine shots because of the developing of blood clots in people who have received the shots, I asked if we were seeing an example of regulatory favoritism for the new mRNA technology shots over more traditional vaccine shots such as the Johnson & Johnson shots. The question arises because the US government is still encouraging everyone to take experimental mRNA “vaccines” from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech regarding which there are also many reports of injury and death.

While a variety or injuries and deaths have been reported after people have taken experimental coronavirus vaccine shots developed respectively by the three companies, if you focus in on just blood clot problems, those problems appear to arise after Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech experimental coronavirus shots as well as after Johnson & Johnson shots.

Megan Redshaw wrote Friday at the Children’s Health Defense website regarding adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) related to the blood clots in people who had taken any one of the three companies’ experimental vaccines:

Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 795 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 8.Of the 795 cases reported, there were 400 reports attributed to Pfizer, 337 reports with Moderna and 56 reports with J&J — far more than the eight J&J cases under investigation, including the two additional cases added Wednesday.

As The Defender reported today, although the J&J and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines have been under the microscope for their potential to cause blood clots, mounting evidence suggests the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also cause clots and related blood disorders. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to the problem as far back as December 2020.

So why the different treatment for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots?

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Is Canada breaking international law when it applies unilateral coercive economic measures that are commonly referred to as sanctions?

Most countries and international law experts believe sanctions are only legitimate when approved by the World Trade Organization or United Nations Security Council. Economic sanctions outside the framework of the UN charter are generally considered “unilateral” and unlawful. According to the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization report “Unilateral and Secondary Sanctions: An International Law Perspective”, “the imposition of unilateral and secondary sanctions on countries through application of national legislation is not-permissible under international law.”

So US sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere clearly violate the UN charter. Rather than a nonviolent measure, they are akin to a medieval siege designed to starve a city or fortress into submission.

Unilateral sanctions run afoul of the principle of self-determination and people’s right to development. In The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights a trio of authors note: “Unilateral economic sanctions (as opposed to multilateral UN measures under Chapter VII of the Charter) imposed by one State or group of States on another, to compel the latter to change a particular political or economic policy, could amount to a prohibited intervention and a denial of self-determination.” Similarly, the UN Human Rights Council recently reaffirmed that “unilateral coercive measures are major obstacles to the implementation of the Declaration on the Right to Development.” Last month the Human Rights Council approved a resolution 30 to 15 (with two abstentions) urging all states to stop adopting unilateral sanctions as they impede “the right of individuals and peoples to development.”

In recent years the Canadian government has adopted unilateral sanctions against a host of countries including Venezuela, China, Russia, Nicaragua and others. In a sign of Ottawa’s growing employment of sanctions as a tool of coercive statecraft, Canada adopted legislation modeled after the US Magnitsky Act and Global Affairs created a Sanctions Policy and Operations Coordination Division in 2018. At the time they put up $22 million over five years to enforce their sanctions regime.

Alongside the US, UK and EU, Canada sanctioned a Chinese state agency and four officials recently. Individuals assets in Canada were frozen and they are prohibited from travelling here or doing business with Canadian firms.

Two years ago Canada sanctioned nine Nicaraguan government officials, including ministers and the president of the National Assembly, in coordination with Washington. A June 2019 media note released by the US State Department declared “Canada’s sanctions actions today illustrate the international commitment to Nicaraguans’ cause, signaling clearly that President Ortega’s insufficient and self-serving measures are not nearly enough to address Nicaraguans’ demands for democracy, basic rights, and freedom from repression.”

Canada has adopted four rounds of sanctions against Venezuela since 2017. These moves reinforced and legitimated US sanctions that have contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. According to the preliminary report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, “the [Venezuelan] government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99%, with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income,” which has impeded “the ability of Venezuela to respond to the Covid-19 emergency.”

Not only a possible violation of international law, Canada’s first round of sanctions on Venezuela may have actually contravened domestic law. According to lawyer Andrew Dekany the August 2017 sanctions weren’t in accordance with Canadian legislation stating that international sanctions be adopted only as part of international alliances. As such, the Trump administration aided the Trudeau government by creating the US-Canada “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” to conform to the existing sanctions legislation. In a Venezuela Analysis article titled “Do Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela Violate Canadian Law?”, Dekany wrote, “there is no reason for Canada to ‘create’ this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out [by sanctioning Venezuela], having failed to persuade the one obvious organization (Organization of American States) which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way.”

Partly to sidestep the requirement to sanction in accordance with international institutions the federal government adopted the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (or Magnitsky law), empowering it to freeze individuals’ assets/visas and prohibit Canadian companies from dealing with sanctioned individuals. These sanctions are presented as simply targeting corrupt officials, but they have broader impacts. They dissuade broader commercial relations with a country and often legitimate harsher US measures. Whether they are in compliance with the UN charter is unclear. In her September report “Negative impact of unilateral coercive measures: priorities and road map: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights”, Douhan questions “the legality of sanctions imposed on individuals and non-State entities, especially due to the proliferation of Magnitsky-like acts.”

Trudeau and his ministers regularly claim to promote an “international rules based order” with the No. 1 priority on Global Affairs’ website “revitalizing the rules-based international order.” As such, it’s remarkable how little discussion there is of whether unilateral Canadian sanctions violate international law.

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In a remote corner of Brazil’s Roraima state, a makeshift mining raft, made of empty gasoline barrels bound together with rope, floats in the Cotinga River. Under the surface of the murky water, its pump noisily scrapes up gravel and gold from the riverbed. On the horizon, chalk-colored pools of water polluted with heavy metals dot the savanna landscape of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous territory.

Gold miners are technically barred from the vast territory, which is protected under federal law and reserved for the exclusive use of the 26,705 Indigenous people who call it home. Yet scenes like these — captured on video by Indigenous leaders last year — are becoming increasingly common in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve as illegal wildcat miners, known as garimpeiros, descend on the territory in search of gold.

Illicit mining in the territory — which sprawls for 1.75 million hectares (4.32 million acres) along Brazil’s border with Venezuela and Guyana — has exploded over the last two years. Indigenous leaders in the territory now estimate there are between 2,000 and 5,000 garimpeiros in the area. The Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) says the number has doubled in the last year.

The Indigenous community has put up a barrier to stop outsiders — including illegal gold miners — from entering Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory and infecting those who live there with Covid-19. But residents say the garimpeiros are still pouring in. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.

“The invasions are intensifying,” said Edinho Batista, CIR coordinator and part of the Macuxi ethnic group. “We have a huge challenge on our hands in Raposa Serra do Sol. And it’s thanks to the discourse of the government.”

Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly supported miners and agribusiness over Indigenous groups — before and since becoming Brazil’s president — often using incendiary language. In 2016, while still in Congress, he declared: “We’re going to reverse Raposa Serra do Sol’s demarcation. We’re going to give rifles and weapons to all the ranchers!” As president, he has said of the reserve that “it is the richest area in the world. There are ways to exploit it rationally. And for the Indians, to give them royalties and integrate them into society.”

Possibly emboldened by such language, miners invading the territory have done far-reaching environmental and social damage. Swaths of the territory are burning, as garimpeiros set ablaze vegetation to clear the riverbanks, where most gold deposits can be found. In the last four months, satellites from U.S. space agency NASA have recorded 1,303 fire alerts in Raposa Serra do Sol, 80% of which lies in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna biome.

Environmentalists also warn that toxins like mercury — frequently used in mining to separate gold from grit — are seeping into the soil and flowing into water supplies. And with Covid-19 still ravaging Brazil, many fear illegal miners will infect Indigenous people, whose relative isolation makes them especially vulnerable to disease.

“The social and environmental impact is enormous,” said Alisson Marugal, federal public prosecutor for Roraima. “It’s devastating for the Indigenous community that lives there.”

An IBAMA agent investigates an illegal gold mine inside the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve during a past raid. Illicit invasions have increased in the territory since Jair Bolsonaro took office, but with IBAMA’s sharply reduced budget and personnel, law enforcement has been lax. Image courtesy of IBAMA.

Emboldened to invade

In Raposa Serra do Sol, the battle against invaders can be traced back more than half a century. The push to demarcate the territory began in the 1970s, but was stymied by local politicians and powerful agricultural interests, who argued that preservation would deal an economic blow to Roraima.

While Reposa Serra do Sol was formally demarcated in 2005, its protected status has been disputed for years. Rice producers, soy farmers and cattle ranchers illegally occupying the land refused to abandon it. Finally, Brazil’s Supreme Court recognized the demarcation in 2009 and ordered the removal of non-Indigenous occupants.

“We’re talking about Indigenous land that is iconic,” said Martha Fellows, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). “There was a battle to demarcate it, which was very complex. And now it finds itself under attack again.”

Observers blame the fresh incursions into the territory on Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, a populist who took office in January 2019. Since taking office, he has greatly weakened environmental enforcement, opposed the demarcation of Indigenous lands and supported a bill that would allow wildcat miners to freely explore them. He has also repeatedly criticized Raposa Serra do Sol’s protected status and vowed to review it.

“The Bolsonaro government is giving a green light with these plans to legalize economic activities inside Indigenous territories,” said Carol Marçal, a campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil. “And clearly this has an automatic impact on the ground, in the form of more invasions of Indigenous lands.”

The president’s rhetoric has been echoed by Roraima’s state government, which earlier this year passed a law legalizing wildcat mining. While the law did not permit mining on Indigenous lands or environmentally protected areas, it allowed garimpeiros to explore public lands without prior environmental studies.

And even though the law was revoked by the Supreme Court after just two weeks, it left a profound mark on the state, according to Marugal.

“This law, above all, had a symbolic impact for the wildcat miners,” Marugal said in an interview with Mongabay. “They understood this to be a signal that their activities within Indigenous lands could also be legalized in the future.”

Indigenous community members in the Raposa Serra do Sol Reserve being vaccinated against Covid-19 in March 2021. The community worries that illegal gold miners, who are invading their territory, may be bringing Covid-19 with them. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.

From conflict to Covid

The invasions into Raposa Serra do Sol have posed a series of fresh threats to the Macuxi, Wapichana, Taurepang, Sapará and Ingaricó Indigenous peoples who live within the territory. Batista says these communities are seeing their health impacted, which he blames on the toxins miners often use to extract gold — especially mercury.

“We are suffering from the environmental impact: the water contamination, the air pollution, the destruction of the soil,” Batista said.

Scientific studies have found mercury to be dangerous to human health and have linked  exposure to skin diseases, infertility and birth defects. In Brazil, some 221 metric tons of mercury seep into the environment each year as a result of illegal mining, preliminary studies showed in 2018.

In Roraima, a 2016 government-backed study discovered alarming levels of mercury in hair samples collected in Indigenous villages. One community was found to have mercury levels that were more than double what is considered a serious health risk.

Indigenous groups say miners are also bringing with them a host of social problems, including alcohol abuse and prostitution. Violence is on the rise too: in 2019, authorities registered 26 murders of Indigenous people in Roraima, the second highest rate in Brazil.

The advance of illegal mining is also spurring internal conflicts within Indigenous communities, according to Batista. “It ends up pitting people within the community against each other,” he said, noting that some reject the mines while others welcome the economic prospects they promise to Indigenous residents. “It’s fragmenting our communities.”

Many also fear that, as Covid-19 continues to batter Brazil, illegal miners may be bringing the virus into the territory and infecting Indigenous people, who have a history of being decimated by disease brought in from the outside. Batista says communities in Raposa Serra do Sol have put restrictions in place to keep Covid-19 out, but the surge in illegal miners is undermining their efforts.

“We created various sanitary barriers for containing the virus,” Batista said. “But the reality is that the garimpo continues operating, beyond these barriers.”

This week, Indigenous leaders in the neighboring Yanomami Indigenous Territory accused Ministry of Health workers of immunizing garimpos in exchange for gold, using vaccines meant for Indigenous people. Indigenous communities in Brazil have registered 46,509 known cases of Covid-19, with the eastern Roraima region accounting for 3,890 of these.

Members of the Indigenous community in Raposa Serra do Sol keep watch for outsiders invading their territory. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.

Déjà vu

Authorities have struggled to contain the surge in invasions into Raposa Serra do Sol. Under Bolsonaro’s leadership, environmental agencies like IBAMA and ICMBio have seen their budgets and staff slashed repeatedly, leaving them with fewer enforcement resources.

Last year, three high-ranking IBAMA officials were also fired, after their teams burned equipment confiscated during a mass crackdown on illegal miners in an Indigenous territory — a practice long used legally by IBAMA, but condemned by the president.

“There is a whole series of measures that were taken [by the Bolsonaro administration] with the intention of weakening the structures that are in place to protect Indigenous territories,” Fellows said. “And that makes it difficult to enforce the rules.”

Federal police forces carried out two operations in Raposa Serra do Sol in early 2020 with the aim of investigating the criminal structure behind the mining operations, according to Marugal. He said authorities are now planning another operation in hopes of expelling the outsiders, amid worries about the surge in invasions this year.

But broader enforcement efforts in the region may have also backfired. With a renewed crackdown on miners in the Yanomami Reserve located in the Amazon rainforest biome, Batista says that mining pressure seems to have shifted to Raposa Serra do Sol, most of which lies in the Cerrado savanna biome.

“The operations are expelling some of the miners from Yanomami,” he said. “And so they’re just migrating here.” For many in Raposa Serra do Sor, this harks back to the 1990s, when the Yanomami reserve’s demarcation set off a similar wave of expelled garimpeiros who poured into the territory.

Indigenous children in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve. Indigenous land rights have been under assault in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, leaving the future uncertain. Image © 1996 Fiona Watson / Survival.

Across Brazil today, illegal miners are opening up new areas for mineral exploration as existing ones become oversaturated or mineral deposits dwindle. About 90% of new mining sites in 2020 were in Indigenous territories or protected parks, data from Brazilian space agency INPE shows. It is known that this surge in wildcat mining is well supported by criminal networks and elites, who pump money into gold mining, paying the miners, providing heavy equipment and supplies, as well as planes and airstrips to fly out gold.

As a new frontier of illicit gold mining emerges in Raposa Serra do Sol, authorities worry the territory may be on the same path as the Yanomami reserve, where illegal mining has become so entrenched that garimpeiros have built whole towns to back their efforts. Indigenous groups say about 20,000 wildcat miners have invaded Yanomami so far — a figure the federal government disputes.

“Today, normal police actions are not enough in Yanomami,” Marugal said. “We need a huge operation to expel the miners from there. It’s almost like fighting a war.

“And in Raposa Serra do Sol, the biggest concern right now is that the mining activity could spiral out of control in the same way that it has in Yanomami. This is our greatest fear.”

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It’s now universally acknowledged that public support for the Iraq war was based on an ignominious lie, a fallacy deliberately constructed within the public imagination by the imperial command system that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. The mythos was the consequence of a multi deep-state ops supposed to swindle the masses into believing Saddam Hussein represented an immediate existential threat to the West that could only be contained by military action, military action conspicuously consisting in the presence of more corporate contractors than actual fighting soldiers for the first time in the history of war.

Today we are seeing the same strategies of disinformation being deployed to isolate and destroy an ascendant socialist China and leftists in the imperial core are once again being influenced by propaganda, uncritically, unthinkingly regurgitating Orientalist tropes about the barbarity of the Chinese regime. To defend the life of the mind against its debasement at the hands of imperialist propaganda those on the left must put in the hard work of methodically, sceptically examining the articles of faith the establishment manipulates us into swallowing about China.

The lynchpin of the Western propaganda effort against China is the myth of the Uyghur genocide, a lie serving as justification for a long planned war against China, which, as the biggest threat to US geostrategic hegemony, is a target for neutralization, and the propaganda is deeply, darkly manipulative, weaponising people’s innate sense of humanism against them.

A dispassionate study of the data, statistics and eye witness testimonies from Western dissidents who have studied the Uyghur culture suggest there is no genocide to speak of. Nevertheless, a moral panic has taken over Western politicians and media following a high profile Washington funded propaganda campaign. Claims of “millions detained” came from a Washington backed NGO, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, who interviewed only eight people before jumping to rash conclusions about what was happening to a population of twenty million. CHRD boasts significant donations from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington regime change outfit which has its claws deep in the far-right discourse on the “need” to turn China into a Westernized client state.

Claims of “millions detained” were given more oxygen by Adrian Zenz, a far-right evangelist who serves as a China specialist at an anti-communist institute established by the US government, a religious zealot who once claimed that God had ordered him to fight against China.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the abhorrent standards of western media, he is being treated as a serious authority on Chinese politics rather than the deluded, apoplectic liar he is, testifying to congress and becoming the go to pundit on Xianjing. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that Zenz works for is a descendent of the National Captive Nations Committee, a far-right nationalist organisation in the Ukraine which sought to stop detente with the Soviet Union. Yaroslav Stetsko, its co-chairman, boasted rank in a fascist militia that collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of the Ukraine and went on to set up the World Anti-Communist League, a festering void of anti-semitism and neo-nazi sympathies that is attempting to whitewash history by rewriting it to put the legacy of Communism on a par with Hitler.

In the run up to Iraq, Blair, suzerain of the UK Parliament, relied on a “dodgy dossier” concocted by his principal spin doctor Alistair Cambpell which plagiarised parts of a PhD thesis and selectively presented the facts to suit the narrative that Saddam harbored weapons of mass destruction posing an immediate existential threat to the West.

Zenz has his own “dodgy dossier”: Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang, in which he argues that the CCP are systematically suppressing Uyghur birthrates. Far from being isolated and attacked by a CCP policy steeped deep in repressive biopolitics the Uyghurs benefit from access to a wealth of family planning clinics and family planning resources supplied by the Chinese state for all citizens.

That the Western politico-media establishment gives an indomitable platform to such ethically dubious figures as Zenz shows that the verities of “liberalism” today, of which the myth of the Uyghur genocide is one, lack academic integrity. Zenz is merely an avatar of a fascistic US empire, a 2-dimensional cardboard cutout villain who makes an industry out of lying. One of the main aims of the massive psyops against China is to repress knowledge that the regime is making historic progress in bringing millions of people in and beyond China out of absolute poverty, therein distracting people from the fact neoliberal capitalism isn’t working. Another aim is to inculcate a revisionist history that wrongfully attributes genocidal intent to communist regimes.

Beyond the fact that the “millions detained” lie stems from agencies of the empire state, it’s also true that the “concentration camps” emotively referred to by western politicians are really educational institutes aiming to rehabilitate extremists so they can learn the skills to peacefully coexist within Chinese society. Uyghur separatists have joined forces with violent, murderous terrorist groups in the middle east and pose a severe threat to the safety, coherence and stability of Chinese society. The “concentration camps” are really a humane attempt to re-educate those mis-led by extremist philosophies.

If we were looking for examples of repression of Muslims, we might want to start with France, where illiberal policies are impinging on religious freedoms the West once prided itself on. If we were looking for examples of colonialism in Africa we might focus on the French military executing 12 innocent civilians. If we were looking for examples of colonialism as a danger worldwide, we might want to start looking at the transatlantic capitalist monolith.

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***

Hopes and expectations for a partial normalization between Moscow, Washington and Kiev stepping off the warpath were brief and flickered only for a moment before being entirely extinguished.

On April 13, U.S. President Joe Biden held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The White House statement on the matter was positive, optimistic even, saying that the two discussed a number of regional and global issues.

They agreed to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.

They spoke about Ukraine, and how Russia needs to put forward effort to de-escalate the situation.

In response, Putin outlined approaches to a political settlement based on the Minsk Package of Measures.

The counterparts agreed to meet for talks a month after the diplomatic crisis sparked by Biden’s claims that Putin was a “killer.”

The situation seemed to be largely defused, proven by the fact that the United States decided not to deploy two of its warships to the Black Sea and, in fact, recalled them.

Immediately after that, the Biden Administration turned around, with the US President signing an executive order sanctioning Russia, and recalling 10 ambassadors.

He declared a national emergency over Russia’s alleged threat and all aspirations of normalization quickly evaporated.

The US Secretary of State immediately said that he was “pleasantly surprised” by the position of all 30 NATO states against Russia’s presumed aggression against Ukraine.

In addition, Russian ambassadors were summoned to the Foreign Ministers of the UK and Poland.

It was a united front, two complete shifts in rhetoric within a single day.

The same day, Biden had a short speech, expressing hope of establishing a rapport with Russia.

It was a very cliché text, and he quickly bolted afterwards.

He answered two questions, including one regarding Nord Stream 2.

He simply ran out of text and left, solidifying any “conspiracies” regarding whether he’s actually in control of his own ship.

As a result of the instability in US politics, Russia said that it was considering to ditch the US dollar.

No other Biden Putin meetings are likely to take place, mostly due to the incredible hypocrisy shown within a single day.

Meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine appears to be heading towards deterioration.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the “Army is ready” and that the situation was under control, albeit there were “certain issues.”

While Moscow’s attention was focused on Washington, Turkey reportedly sent its troops to Ukraine.

According to Turkish media, Ankara’s specialists arrived to train Ukrainian soldiers in operating the Bayraktar TB2 drones.

April 15th may come down in modern history as the day a new war began, be it hot or cold.

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***

The recently intensified “sanctions war” between the US and Russia has made many observers wonder whether this escalation is symbolic, substantive, or strategic.

The US’ imposition last week of its most intense sanctions against Russia in several years prompted Moscow to respond in kind. Reuters published a handy factbox about the US’ initial moves while Sputnik released one about Russia’s, both of which should be reviewed by readers who aren’t fully familiar with what just happened.

The US reacted real negatively to Russia’s response by viewing it as a so-called “escalation” despite it mostly being tit-for-tat. Moscow also hinted that it has a few more sanctions tricks up its sleeve if Washington decides to take matters further. It therefore remains to be seen what might come next, but now’s the perfect moment to reflect on last week’s events in order to determine whether they’re symbolic, substantive, or strategic.

In a nutshell, the US sanctioned Russian currency and debt, tech companies, information outlets, and officials alongside expelling ten Russian diplomats. Russia responded by expelling an equal number of American diplomats, publishing a list of several American officials who are banned from the country, imposing restrictions on the hiring practices of US diplomatic missions and the movement of its diplomats, and promising to thwart all US-backed meddling efforts inside of Russia. The American moves were made on the unsubstantiated pretext of Russian hacking and meddling accusations while Russia’s were promulgated purely in self-defense. The US aims to create a stigma around Russian companies, its economy, and friendly media outlets while Russia intends to expose actual American meddling within the country.

It can be argued that both sets of moves are symbolic, substantive, and strategic. The American ones were in reaction to a weaponized information warfare narrative (symbolic), target elements of the Russian economy (substantive), and increase the campaign of so-called “maximum pressure” against Moscow (strategic). Russia’s, meanwhile, responded in kind by expelling US diplomats and publishing the list of officials who’ve been banned (symbolic), restricting US diplomatic activities (substantive), and thereby making it more difficult for America to meddle in Russia’s internal affairs (strategic). Basically, the US’ actions are offensive while Russia’s are defensive, and both endeavor to gain strategic advantages over the other in terms of the respective dynamics of their competition (the US pushing against Russia to destabilize it while Russia pushes back to protect itself).

Unlike the US-Chinese trade war, neither side can really inflict all that much damage on the other since their countries never “coupled” in the first place to “decouple” in the present in a way that might be mutually detrimental. This observation has pros and cons for each side. The “positive” side of things is that each party’s moves carry very little chance of provoking the other to significantly damage their interests, while the “negative” one is that this means that each party can at least in theory continue with their moves unabated depending on their political will to do so since it’s unlikely that their counterpart’s response will adversely affect them all that much. Obviously, the “positive” and “negative” determinations are relative and in the eyes of the bolder, dependent also on their intentions, ideologies, and other such factors that differ between them.

With that in mind, it’s appropriate to assess the chances of each respective strategy succeeding. The US’ will only be consequential if Washington has the political will to impose so-called “secondary sanctions” against those who purchase Russian currency and debt, which remains to be seen. Even in that scenario, however, the Russian response might predictably be to move much closer to China on those fronts, thus accelerating their grand strategic convergence and strengthening the newly formed “Justice League” between those two multipolar Great Powers. As for the odds of Russia’s defensive strategy succeeding, it has much brighter prospects since Moscow’s moves will greatly restrict Washington’s ability to meddle in its domestic affairs. For this reason, it’s predicted that US will lose its “sanctions war” with Russia even if it spins its failure as a success.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

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Denying the Demonic

April 18th, 2021 by Edward Curtin

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***

In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. 

My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in dreams of “shit-filled overflowing toilets” and “people pissing in their pants”.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

Since “excremental visions” and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines.

People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are “evil” and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.

Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book:

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”   It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after. 

Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.

I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

I do think we are today in the grip of “radical evil”, “demonic forces”. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.

As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

So let me begin with a few reminders.

The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt.

Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.

Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of “conspirators” have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.


Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.

As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

Resist.

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 


Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies

Author: Edward Curtin

ISBN: 9781949762266

Published: 2020

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***

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.

Failed Green Revolution

Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.

Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

In her latest report, ‘Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:

“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”

Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:

“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”

It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.

Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’ (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’ (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).

These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.

GMO value capture

As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.

The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.

Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper ‘The Myth of a Food Crisis’.

However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.

It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.

Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.

It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.

And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.

The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.

The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.

The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.

In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.

The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.

None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.

This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.

Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.

Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – ‘Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India‘) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning,  the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).

When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:

“able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits”.

What can be done?

Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.

Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.

The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.

But is all of this inevitable?

Not according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, which has just released a report in collaboration with the ETC Group: ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045‘.

The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.

The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.

The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.

Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.

He says:

“In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.”

Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.

As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.

The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Featured image is from American Institute for Economic Research

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***

The US will soon review its nuclear weapons programme.

Should it spend $1.2 Trillion extending & updating it?

“The world’s largest nuclear weapon would vaporize everything within 5km and kill nearly everyone within 9km. At 20km, most buildings would collapse and many would catch fire. Everyone would be injured and many would die.”

Watch the video below by Double Down News.

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Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

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).

***

Early on the morning of November 16, 2010 in front of the U.S. Federal District Courthouse in Tacoma, Washington, a large throng had gathered to vigil before the motions hearing for five Plowshares activists known as the Disarm Now Plowshares. Up the sidewalk I saw one of the defendants, Sr. Anne Montgomery walking toward us with Former US Attorney General William Ramsey Clark.

Clark had come to testify on behalf of the defendants who had been charged with a variety of offenses, while their only intention was to prevent the most ghastly crime possible – a full scale nuclear war.

The former attorney general appeared on behalf of Bill “Bix” Bichsel, SJ, Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald, Steve Kelly, SJ, and Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, who all faced charges of Conspiracy, Trespass, Destruction of Property on a Naval Installation and Depredation of Government Property for their November 2, 2009 Plowshares action. They had entered the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapons storage depot at Bangor, Washington to symbolically disarm the nuclear weapons stored there, and expose the illegality of the government’s continuing preparations for nuclear war.

Later, in the courtroom, Judge Benjamin Settle allowed testimony from Clark, who responded to questions from Disarm Now Plowshares co-defendants. When asked by Anne Montgomery if the plowshares activists were justified to enter the restricted area of the U.S. Naval Base, Clark said that they “had a duty to prevent harm, they were justified, and even required to prevent harm.” Clark was speaking in the context of the Plowshares activists entering the base, in which nuclear weapons are stored, to expose the illegality of the government’s actions in preparing for nuclear war.

When asked by Susan Crane if Trident nuclear warheads are legal, Clark said “No,” and explained that the Supreme Court has ruled that international law is binding under the U.S. Constitution. Nuclear weapons are unlawful under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) because of the agreement of the nuclear powers to eliminate them. Clark was in the Justice Department when the NPT was drafted. “Had we abided by the NPT, we would be a nuclear free world. It’s hard to believe we’ve come to this stage,” Clark said. The U.S. has ignored its obligations under the NPT, and now has enough warheads to destroy the planet.

Clark quoted Hugo Grotius, who wrote in his book “Of The Law of War And Peace” in the 17th century that, “The care to preserve society that is the source of all law.” Essentially, the law is designed to preserve society, and this theme continued to grow over centuries through international treaties (such as the NPT).

“Possession of the bomb is a crime. Just like it’s illegal to have a switchblade or concealed weapon, the nuclear weapons are illegal,” Clark said. He explained that 99 percent of the deaths in the Hiroshima bombing were non-military, and therefore extraordinarily disproportional. Possessing thousands of nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, and which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians, is definitely a crime.

Clark concluded that Plowshares activists are opposed to all violence, and particularly nuclear weapons, which are “the ultimate human degradation.”

Among the documents considered by the Judge in the Disarm Now Plowshares case was a motion for dismissal in which the co-defendants concluded that, “Because this case involves unjust and illegal weapons of mass destruction, the use of which is a war crime under US and international law, and defendants actions were taken to protect a greater good and much higher law than the laws they are accused of violating, this case should be dismissed immediately.” Clark spoke to the heart of this issue and elucidated the duty of citizens to act when their government fails to follow the rule of law. The five Disarm Now co-defendants firmly believed that there was sufficient legal doctrine substantiating their invocation of the necessity defense, and that the “Defendants’ actions are just and not at all illegal,” and therefore the case should be immediately dismissed.

As with most other Federal Plowshares trials, the judge dismissed both motions by the defendants to dismiss charges, and the trial went forward. Ultimately, the jury found the defendants “guilty” of trespass, felony damage to federal property, felony injury to property, and felony conspiracy to damage property after a trial in which the defendants were not allowed to mount anything resembling a reasonable defense.

Clark testified on behalf of the Transform Now Plowshares in 2013, and led the defense team for Fr. Philip Berrigan and the Harrisburg Seven in 1971.

As for Clark’s participation in the Disarm Now Plowshares trial, it was a fine example of speaking one’s truth to power, and representing those with little or no voice or power. Clark’s life is an example of an individual who evolved over a full lifetime; an imperfect human being who strived to follow the rule and intent of the law, and to criticize his country when necessary, saying that a citizen’s “highest obligation” was to speak up when his government had violated its own principles and “not point the finger at someone else.”

The New York Times has published a detailed obituary that chronicles Clark’s many legal exploits on behalf of the victims of abuse of power by the US government. Wikipedia also lists a large number of people Clark defended in the years after he left government service.

Thank you, Ramsey, for representing those our nation has abused, neglected and usurped in its quest for power and hegemony.

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Featured image: Ramsey Clark and Sr. Anne Montgomery in front of the Tacoma Federal Courthouse on November 16, 2010 (by Leonard Eiger)

The Hawks Who Want War with Iran Are Working Overtime

April 17th, 2021 by Medea Benjamin

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***

Last week’s cyberattack on an Iranian nuclear facility, reportedly by Israeli intelligence, is the latest gambit from the coalition of Israeli leaders, Christian fundamentalists, and hawkish Washington neocons who want to block a US return to the Iran nuclear agreement. If they’re successful, millions of ordinary Iranians suffering under draconian sanctions will pay the price.

Just as talks between the United States and Iran were taking place last week in Vienna, a cyberattack was carried out on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Reports are that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was behind the attack that blacked out the facility just one day after Tehran launched new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, and as US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Israel speaking about the United States’ “enduring and ironclad” commitment to the Jewish state.

This is the latest in a series of Israeli attacks on Iran designed to scuttle negotiations. Last summer, a number of explosions attributed to Israel broke out across Iran, including a fire at the Natanz site. These took place while US elections were in full swing and Biden was promising that if elected, he would return the United States to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) that Trump withdrew from in 2018. In November 2020, Israeli operatives assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist in the city of Absard outside Tehran. Had Iran responded, the United States might have been dragged into an all-out war.

Israeli officials have also directly lobbied the US Congress to quash the deal. In 2015, Netanyahu traveled to Washington, DC in 2015 to address a joint session of Congress in an attempt to uncut Obama’s original negotiations. This time, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen will be traveling to Washington to meet with top White House and US intelligence officials, and he hopes with Biden directly, to convince the administration that Iran has been concealing details about its nuclear program and therefore can’t be trusted. This is indeed ironic coming from a country that, unlike Iran, actually has nuclear weapons and refuses to disclose any information about its program.

Like Israel, the powerful US lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is trying to convince Biden not to go back into the JCPOA. Last month, they organized bipartisan letters in the House and Senate, urging the Biden administration to insist on an expanded deal that included missiles, human rights, and Iran’s activities in the region. Since Tehran has been clear that an expanded or amended deal is a nonstarter, such “advice” was an attempt to quash talks.

The neoconservative think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which worked inside the Trump administration during and after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, has been relentlessly pushing for war with Iran. After the United States recklessly assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz gloated, tweeting that the death of Soleimani was “more consequential than the killing of [Osama] #BinLaden”; and on April 11, the same day as the Natanz blackout, former CIA officer and FDD fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, speaking on CNN, voiced disappointment that Trump hadn’t taken the United States and Iran into an all-out war.

Another group against a deal with Iran is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), one of the most powerful pro-Israel voices in the United States. In March 2021, CUFI urged the Senate not to confirm Colin Kahl for a top policy position at the Pentagon, claiming, “Kahl is a serial Iran appeaser” who “helped advance the disastrous Iran nuclear accord.” In response to the blackout at Natanz, they cheered Netanyahu, tweeting “‘Battling Iran is a colossal mission,’ Netanyahu says following blackout at Iranian nuclear plant.”

The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, which the United States had previously designated as a terrorist organization and is known for assassinations and bombings it has carried out, is virulently opposed to US-Iran diplomacy. In March 2021, a number of US Senators attended a virtual event organized by the MEK-aligned Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) calling for continued US sanctions and “bringing down the regime.” Senator Bob Menendez, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was among several Democrats in attendance.

The opponents of the Iran deal are trying to keep in place the draconian wall of sanctions that the Trump administration imposed precisely to make it more difficult for a future US administration to rejoin the JCPOA. But these sanctions are causing immense suffering for ordinary Iranians, including runaway inflation and skyrocketing food and medicine prices. According to the UN, they contributed to the government’s “inadequate and opaque” response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit Iran particularly hard.

While “successful” in inflicting harm on the Iranian people, the sanctions have failed to broaden the terms of the talks, led the nation to increase its uranium enrichment, negatively impacted the human rights situation, and put the United States and Iran on the brink of an all-out war on multiple occasions.

That’s why so many people in Iran, and those who care about them, have been encouraged by this new round of diplomatic engagement. But Israel, AIPAC, CUFI, FDD, MEK, Menendez, and the like are probably instead hoping that Iran carries out the revenge that Iranian officials have called for in response to the Natanz blackout. But as the saboteurs of diplomacy hope for a violent escalation, let’s keep in mind — and hope Iran agrees — that the best revenge would be a revived JCPOA.

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This article was originally published on Jacobin.

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

Ariel Gold is the national co-director and Senior Middle East Policy Analyst with CODEPINK for Peace.


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Media Allegations of Genocide in Xinjiang

April 17th, 2021 by Kim Petersen

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***

In February, I asked, “Does the West Repeating Claims of China Committing Genocide in Xinjiang Reify It?” China is continually being raked over the coals by western governments and state/corporate media on whatever charge or pretext can be thrown in the hopes that something sticks to incriminate China. China’s economic ascendancy, socialism with Chinese characteristics, has thrown the capitalists of the world into a tizzy. However, to allege something so heinous as a genocide is beyond the bounds of bizarre.

If an identifiable group were being destroyed, especially a group that in 2018 constituted 12.7184 million people, that would surely be impossible to hide — even in a region as large as the autonomous province of Xinjiang. Furthermore, if one is going to allege such a horrific crime, one should not do so without irrefutable evidence.

One French journalist based in China, writing under the byline of Laurene Beaumond, criticized western media for alleging genocide1 against Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.2

She asks,

So what is this parody of a process against China from a distance, without any concrete proof, without any valid testimony, by individuals who have never set foot in this region of the world?3

Concrete evidence should be demanded of all accusers.

This genocide is alleged to have occurred although the population of Uyghurs is vastly increasing in Xinjiang. Global Times, an English-language Chinese newspaper under the People’s Daily, cites statistical data from 2010 to 2018 that show:

the Uygur population increased from 10.1715 million to 12.7184 million, an increase of 2.5469 million, or 25.04%; the population of Han ethnic group increased from 8.8299 million to 9.0068 million, an increase of 176,900 people, or 2.0%.

If factually accurate (and I have seen no refutation of the statistics), then this is an utter refutation of a genocide taking place! The only other conclusion is that the modern Chinese are absolutely incompetent genocidaires.

Western media accusations are relying, for the greatest part, on a thoroughly discredited German “academic”: Adrian Zenz.

Le Monde does not seek to buttress the allegations of genocide in Xinjiang. Instead it questions the bona fides of Laurene Beaumond. Le Monde says this person does not exist.

Global Times says she exists, but the name is a pseudonym.

This is problematic. It can be taken for granted that if one wants to work in western media then previous writings highly critical of the western Establishment and its media would shut the door quite tightly for any writing gigs in the West. But writing under a pseudonym poses ethical considerations. The monopoly media is often criticized by independent media and free thinking readers for trotting out anonymous sources. When a source is anonymous, when substantiation is lacking for what is said or written, then that source and its claims deserve to be met with skepticism.

In my mind, CGTN or any scrupulous media, should only allow persons to write under a pseudonym under stringent conditions, for example, if the writer’s life would be endangered. Also, the media would have to vouch, up front, for the bona fides of the writer or story source. This is especially so given the seriousness of a genocide allegation.

There is a solution, and it will require a bold step by “Laurene Beaumond.” She must come forward, declare her genuine identity, and present her credentials to clear all this up. CGTN needs to develop a transparent policy on the use of pseudonyms, and I’d suggest an apology might be in order for publishing this under a pseudonym.4

The heinous allegation of genocide demands a forthrightness to dispel it as disinformation. The insidiousness of disinformation is such that it has been held to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. Professor Anthony J. Hall made this clear:

Disinformation originates in the deliberate and systemic effort to break down social cohesion and to deprive humanity of perceptive consciousness of our conditions. Disinformation seeks to isolate and divide human beings; to alienate us from our ability to use our senses, our intellect, and our communicative powers in order to identity truth and act on this knowledge. Disinformation is deeply implicated in the history of imperialism, Eurocentric racism, American Manifest Destiny, Nazi propaganda, the psychological warfare of the Cold War, and capitalist globalization. Disinformation seeks to erode and destroy the basis of individual and collective memory, the basis of those inheritances from history which give humanity our richness of diverse languages, cultures, nationalities, peoplehoods, and means of self-determination. The reach and intensity of disinformation tends to increase with the concentration of ownership and control of the media of mass communications.

Practice open-minded skepticism; demand evidence; demand to know who the people involved are; scrutinize the history and backgrounds of the people, media, and places. In other words don’t allow yourself to easily be lied to.

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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. Twitter: @kimpetersen.

Notes

  1. Several media speak of “allegations” or “accusations” of genocide in Xinjiang. E.g., CNN, BBC, Frankfurter Allegemeine, Al Jazeera, Berlinske, CTV, CBC, Forbes, etc. Japan is more cautious. It is highly recommended for those seeking insight to read the report compiled by the Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation.
  2. The linked article carries an editor’s note: “Freelance journalist based in France, with a double degree in art history and archeology at the University of Sorbonne-IV and holder of a master’s degree in journalism, Laurène Beaumond has worked in various editorial offices Parisians before settling down in Beijing where she lived for almost 7 years.
    The article reflects the views of the author, and not necessarily those of CGTN Français.”
  3. “Qu’est-ce donc cette parodie de procès que l’on fait à la Chine à distance, sans aucune preuve concrète, sans aucun témoignage valable, par des individus qui n’ont jamais mis le pied dans cette région du monde…?”
  4. After all, Global Times demanded an apology from Le Monde for doubting the existence of “Laurene Beaumond.” No writer genuinely exists under this birth name, so, in fact, Le Monde was accurate on this account.

Exiting Afghanistan: Biden Sets the Date

April 17th, 2021 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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).

***

It had to be symbolic, and was represented as such.  Forces of the United States will be leaving Afghanistan on September 11 after two decades of violent occupation, though for a good deal of this stretch, US forces were, at best, failed democracy builders, at worst, violent tenants.

In his April 14 speech, President Joe Biden made the point that should have long been evident: that Washington could not “continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result.”  As if to concede to the broader failure of the exercise, “the terror threat” had flourished, being now present “in many places”.  To keep “thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders.”

For such a long stay, the objectives have been far from convincing.  The US presence in Afghanistan should focus “on the reason we went there in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.  We did that.  We accomplished that objective.” A debacle is dressed up in the robes of necessity, the original purpose being to “root out al Qaeda” in 2001 and “to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.” 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is marshalling European leaders to aid in the withdrawal effort.  “I am here,” he stated at NATO’s Belgium headquarters, “to work closely with our allies, with the secretary general, on the principle that we have established from the start, ‘In together, adapt together and out together’.”  There have been few times in history, perhaps with the exception of the Vietnam War, where defeat has been given such an unremarkable cover.

Little improvement on this impression was made at a meeting between Blinken and Abdullah Abdullah, chair of the Afghanistan High Commission for National Reconciliation.  According to State Department spokesperson Ned Price, the secretary “reiterated the US commitment to the peace process and that we will use our full diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian toolkit to support the future the Afghan people want, including the gains made by Afghan women.” 

At the US embassy in Kabul, Blinken made an assortment of weak assurances about “America’s commitment to an enduring partnership with Afghanistan and the Afghan people.”  Despite the troops leaving the country, the “security partnership will endure.”  There was “strong bipartisan support for that commitment to the Afghan Security Forces.”  There would be oodles of diplomacy, economic investment and development assistance.  And, as for the Taliban, joyfully lurking in the wings to assume power, Blinken had this assessment: “It’s very important that the Taliban recognize that it will never be legitimate and it will never be durable if it rejects a political process and tries to take the country by force.” 

A better, and more accurate sense of attitudes to Kabul could be gathered in the remarks of a senior Biden official, as reported in the Washington Post.  “The reality is that the United States has big strategic interests in the world…. Afghanistan just does not rise to the level of those other threats at this point.”  Afghanistan, in time, will be discarded like strategic refuse.

Critics invariably assume various aspects of the imperial pose: to leave the country is to surrender a policing function, to encourage enemies, to reverse any gains (shallow as they are), to lay the grounds for the need for potential re-engagement.  An erroneous link is thereby encouraged linking US national security interests with the desperate ruination that has afflicted a State that has not seen peace in decades. For its part, the US contribution to that ruination has been, along with its coalition allies, far from negligible. 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell preached that the withdrawal was “a grave mistake,” a reminder that such foolish decisions had been made before.  “Ten years ago, when President Obama let politics dictate the terms of our involvement in Iraq, those failed decisions invited the rise of ISIS.”  For McConnell, battling terrorism remained a central purpose for keeping boots on the much trodden ground of Afghanistan.  “A reckless pullback like this would abandon our Afghan, regional, and NATO partners in a shared fight against terrorists we have not yet won.”

In March, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told a National Security Council Principal Committee meeting that withdrawing would see women’s rights return “to the Stone Age”.  Leaving was also not advisable, given “all the blood and treasure spent”.  (Others at the meeting felt that Milley’s arguments had the soft stuffing of emotion rather than firm logic.)

The Washington Post, in a vein similar to that of McConnell and Milley, resorted to the conventional betrayal thesis: leaving was “an abandonment of those Afghans who believed in building a democracy that guaranteed basic human rights”.  It would also mean nullifying “the sacrifices of the American servicemen who were killed or wounded in that mission.”  Little thought is given to the shallow, corruption saturated regime in Kabul that can barely claim any semblance of legitimacy beyond the sponsorship of external powers.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, takes a more prosaic, utilitarian line.  Leaving Afghanistan will, he explained at a hearing of a Senate Intelligence Committee on global threats, drain the intelligence pool.  “When the time comes for the US military to withdraw, the US government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish.  That’s simply a fact.”

The pessimists from the National Review are also full of warning.  Jim Geraghty is almost shrill in worrying what the media headline, “Taliban Rule Afghanistan Again” will do in spurring on “global Islamist jihadism,” claiming that, “[a] bad withdrawal only sets up the need for more combat in the future.”  Kevin Williamson is at least accurate on one point: Afghanistan, for the US, is a clear picture of “what failure looks like.  What success is going to look like, we still don’t know.”  Nor, it would seem, ever will.

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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 is from New Eastern Outlook

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***

That the United States likes to use expressions like “shock and awe” or “maximum pressure” would rather suggest that there is a psychopath working in the White House basement whose full-time job is to come up with pithy one-liners to somehow euphemize government bad behavior. The expressions hardly mean anything in and of themselves apart from “tough talk” but they do serve as an alternative to having to admit in plain language to the killing of millions of people since the Global War on Terror began in 2001. “Millions?” one might skeptically ask. Yes, millions if one includes all those killed directly or indirectly as a result of the wars. Direct victims of the violence number at least 157,000 in Afghanistan, 182,000 in Iraq, 400,000 in Syria and 25,000 in Libya. And if you want to go back a few years three million Vietnamese died in 1964-1975 while 2.5 million civilians were killed in Korea. And even in the “Good War” World War 2 there were unnecessary incidents to include the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 105,000, the firebombing of Tokyo adding another 97,000, and the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden that together killed 45,000.

An estimated ten million more civilians have been displaced from their homes since 2001, creating refugee crises in both Europe and the Americas, while trillions of dollars have also been wasted or “misplaced” by the geniuses at the Pentagon and in Congress. And some might reasonably argue that the violence taking place all around the world has also been internalized in the U.S., with mass murders surfacing in the news media every few days. Some argue that the United States has nearly always been at war since its founding, which would be true, but it is also correct to note that the nature of America’s lethal engagement with the rest of the world has changed in the past twenty years. Old wars were fought to expand territory and trade or to acquire colonies for the same purpose, meaning they were intended to increase one’s power and wealth. Since 9/11, however, the wars are being fought seemingly without any real identifiable objective while also inflicting significant losses in relative wealth and power on the United States.

The fundamental problem is that the United States is being led by a political and financial elite that has completely bought into a radical view that Americans have a “manifest destiny” to create an international order that is both plausibly democratic and rules-based that would as the theory goes benefit everyone. This is, of course, nonsense as the United States itself is becoming increasingly totalitarian while it also nurtures in its bosom anti-democratic states like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The elite that might be blamed for many of the missteps of the past twenty years includes both liberals and conservatives, all of whom for one reason or another embrace America’s mission. There is, for example, little to differentiate the world views of Donald Trump appointees Mike Pompeo and John Bolton from those of the current foreign policy incumbent Tony Blinken, as all three men believe that the use of force is the completely acceptable ultimate response to recalcitrant nations and leaders.

Blinken shares the very same trait visible in Pompeo and Bolton, that they actually radiate a sense of moral superiority while implementing policies that result in the pointless deaths of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and even millions of innocents. They occupy the bully pulpit as they sanctimoniously call for action regarding their “noble cause” of making the rest of the world both look like America while also deferring to Washington for direction and guidance.

Tony Blinken is not surprisingly a protégé of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who famously cackled that “it was worth it” when asked about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. enforced sanctions on food and medicine. Somehow it seems that whenever one turns over a rock in the Democratic Party up pops someone connected with the Clintons. Blinken recently produced and tweeted out a bizarre video that attempts to explain the real “humanity” behind the current Syrian policy, which he helped to define and initiate working closely with Joe Biden while serving under President Barack Obama. It is a sanctions-plus military intervention construct that has, inevitably, resulted in the deaths and the displacements into Europe and the Middle East. The policy was from the beginning clearly intended to bring about “regime change” in Damascus even though the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad in no way threatened the United States.

Blinken tweeted: “When I think of the suffering of the Syrian people, including Syrian children, I think of my own two children. How could we not take action to help them? Our common humanity demands it. Shame on us if we don’t. We have to find a way to do something to take action to help people.” Blinken fails to mention that the blood of the Syrian children is largely on his hands, particularly as the U.S. and Israel effectively turned loose and otherwise supported the terrorist and separatist groups that killed so many Syrian civilians while also destroying entire towns, religious centers and many irreplaceable relics of the country’s history.

So Blinken is really a good guy, thinking about his own kids while mourning the deaths of so many Syrian boys and girls? No. If he really wanted to help those children, he would have announced that U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Syria immediately. He would have lifted sanctions on the country so that it can begin serious reconstruction, together with restoring access to food and needed medicines. He did nothing of the sort and clearly is fully on board with the agenda set over the past ten years by the neocons and their Israeli masters plus the “democracy promotion” at all costs wing in his own party.

And the real problem is that Syria is not alone. Blinken and his cohorts are also encouraging Ukraine’s irredentism which is close to bringing on a war with Russia while also poking China over Taiwan. And then there is also Venezuela which appears to need a regime change and the perennial problem with Iran. And Afghanistan? Blinken should realize that all the deaths of the children that so concern him could be avoided if he and those pulling his strings would adopt a more modest agenda and stay at home. We have enough problems in the United States, but then again, the hubris which has created a pointless foreign policy would likely be channeled to drive still more of the destructive impulses that are turning the country into a collective of hostile enclaves.

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Ireland: Study of COVID-19 Deaths

April 17th, 2021 by Kieran Morrissey

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Objectives

The goal of this study is not to impress academics with complex statistics or seek favourable peer reviews, but to demonstrate to the ordinary decent citizen of Ireland, in the simplest possible terms, how the 2020 COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET every night on RTE1 and published on the data.gov.ie website cannot possibly be true. To that end I will present basic arithmetic and graphs as it is my belief that every Irish citizen should be fully informed of the fraud which has been carried out by the Irish Government, its agents and the media for the benefit of vested interests to terrorise the population into submitting to their draconian COVID measures by grossly overstating the deaths due to COVID-19 in 2020.

This study will conclude that Ireland had the lowest death rate in 2020 since 2012

Introduction

It is a legal requirement in Ireland that every death that takes place in the State must be recorded and registered. Records of deaths in Ireland are held in the General Register Office (GRO), which is the central civil repository for records relating to Births, Marriages and Deaths in Ireland. Deaths must be registered as soon as possible after the death and no later than 3 months.

The GRO estimate that approximately 80% of deaths are registered in this timeframe, however many deaths take longer than 3 months especially if a death is referred to the Coroner’s Service, such deaths include suicides, violent deaths and more recently all COVID-19 deaths, these deaths may not be registered for months or years after the occurrence. The GRO provide regular updates on the total deaths registered by the month they occurred in, but because of the lag in registrations they do not come close to being accurate until approximately six months after the month of occurrence. Generally, this lag would not cause a major problem as the death data is mainly used for medical research, however in natural disasters and health emergency situations such as the ongoing alleged COVID-19 pandemic, accurate and up-to-date death data is critical for planning and implementing measured responses to emerging situations. Without this current data on deaths, vested interests can use misinformation to understate or exaggerate deaths to pacify or terrorise the general population into certain actions or inactions, i.e., mass manipulation or hysteria.

Methodology

During the early stages of the alleged COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 a number of publicly funded Irish academics began fearmongering through the media, including state sponsored media, that they estimated thousands of additional deaths would occur due to COVID-19. These deaths are called “excess” as they are above the normally expected deaths based on the previous 5-year average. These academics were estimating deaths compared to deaths notices published on the RIP.ie website.

Antidotally the evidence I was receiving from family, friends, work colleagues and my own observations in the major Dublin hospital where I work made me sceptical that the large numbers of COVID-19 deaths being reported were not actually excess deaths and were not above normal for previous flu seasons. In fact, January 2020 had a very low occurrence of flu cases. I began to look at the RIP.ie death notices and could not see how the academics could predict such high numbers of deaths. I contacted the academics and debated with them by email but they claimed the RIP.ie database they were using was privileged and would not share it with me, I was led to believe that they had obtained a proprietary database of the death notices from RIP.ie.

Later in November 2020 I became aware of an experiment being carried out by John Flanagan of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) also using RIP.ie death notices to estimate the total number of deaths occurring in recent months. The last CSO press statement on 2nd November 2020 regarding John’s experiment which ended in the September encouraged me to look closer at the possibility of obtaining more up-to-date figures on deaths using the RIP.ie death notices. I developed an automated system to obtain the data required from the death notices published on the RIP.ie website, plus, a method to remove or “clean” notices for deaths which occurred outside of Ireland and duplicate notices. I benchmarked my estimates against previous monthly GRO/CSO death data back to 2014 and found that it was as accurate as John Flanagan found during his experiment.

Results

The comparison in tabular format between the death notes that I obtained from the RIP.ie website and cleaned to remove deaths which had occurred outside Ireland and duplicate notices, and the published GRO/CSO data from 2014 to 2021 is shown in Table 1 & 2 below.

Table 1

Table 2

While it can be seen that there are variations between the monthly and yearly data, the totals for the years 2014 to 2019 is 185,741 for RIP.ie and 185,500 for GRO/CSO, a difference of only 0.13%.

I then calculated the previous 5-year average for each month 2018-2012 from the data in Table 1 & Table 2, the excess deaths were calculated as the difference between the previous 5-year average for each month and the total for that month as shown in Table 3 below. The COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET and sourced from data.gove.ie is also included in Table 2 for each month from March 2020 to March 2020, there are no COVID-19 deaths provided for Jan and Feb 2020 and are assumed to be zero.

Table 3

Discussion

As can be seen from the Table 3, the excess deaths based on RIP.ie data for a full year from Jan to Dec 2020 (in red) total up to -103 whereas the total deaths claimed by NPHET / data.gov.ie from Mar to Dec 2020 (in blue) total up to 2,167, an alarming difference of 2,270 deaths. It must be noted that NPHET / data.gov.ie do not provide data on COVID-19 deaths in Jan and Feb 2020 and therefore assumed to be zero. If COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie were caused by a novel virus, and there were no other factors causing excess deaths (such as another novel disease, war, famine, natural disaster, etc.), then the NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line) should closely match the RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) in Graph 1.

In order to analyse the results further I prepared Graph 1 from the 5-year average and excess deaths calculated in Table 3.

The expected influenza season can be easily identified from the 5-year average shown in the data in Table 3 and the peak in Graph 1 in Jan 2020 –

  • 3,223 deaths GRO/CSO (solid blue line)
  • 3,224 deaths RIP.ie (dashed purple line)

The drop in excess deaths for Jan 2020 in the data in Table 3 and the dip in Graph 1 –

  • 266 deaths GRO/CSO (solid black line) and
  • 339 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line)

indicate that the deaths which would historically occur in Jan, often referred to “flu season”, will occur later in the as they have occurred occasionally in previous years. These deaths which always occur at some time during the year are delayed due to some undetermined factors in 2020.

As can be seen by the total deaths in the data in Table 3 and the spike in Graph 1 –

  • 3,216 deaths GRO/CSO (solid orange line)
  • 3,235 deaths RIP.ie (dashed yellow line)

The “flu season” moved from Jan to Apr in 2020.

The number of excess deaths in April 2020 is highlighted in yellow in the data in Table 3 and as shown as the spike in Graph 3 indicates where the influenza or COVID-19 season moved –

  • 992 deaths GRO/CSO (solid black line)
  • 923 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line)
  • 981 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line).

Oddly, this is the only point at which the claimed COVID-19 deaths match the GRO/CSO and RIP.ie excess deaths.

Graph 1

The next expected influenza season is again indicated in the 5-year average data in Table 3 and the peak in Graph 1 Jan 2021 –

  • 3,216 deaths GRO/CSO (solid blue line)
  • 3,224 deaths RIP.ie (dashed purple line)

However, the total deaths in the data in Table 3 and the spike in Graph 1 in Jan 2021 is –

3,722 deaths RIP.ie (dashed yellow line), also higher than the April 2020 spike indicating that a serious unexplained event took place and increased the excess deaths by –

487 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line) in Jan 2021, which is the same month that the COVID-19 vaccination was rolled out in the Irish nursing homes. Death data from RIP.ie also indicates the deaths which occurred in nursing homes directly after the rollout of vaccinations are approximately 500 higher than normal for this time.

The number of claimed COVID-19 deaths shown in the data in Table 3 and as the two high points in Graph 3 in Jan and Feb 2021 indicates a very large exaggeration of COVID deaths –

  • 1, 082 and 1,045 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie (solid red line)

In comparison to the to –

  • 487 and 301 RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) in Jan and Feb 2021

I obtained 50 records for deaths which occurred in the nursing homes after the scheduled date of COVID-19 vaccinations and when I examined them, I found that the majority of the deaths were recorded as COVID-19 even though they occurred very shortly after the scheduled vaccination dates. If those patients who died were ill with COVID-19 then they should not have been vaccinated, otherwise if they did not have a positive COVID-19 PCR test then it is very likely that they died from an adverse reaction to the experimental COVID-19 vaccination and not COVID-19 disease.

The total GRO/CSO deaths (solid orange line) and excess deaths (solid black line) are ignored from Oct to Mar because they are falling away indicating the lag / delay in the registration of deaths is greatest closer to the present time causing a deficit in the GRO/CSO death data.

The claimed COVID-19 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie (solid red line) also look suspiciously higher compared to the excess deaths indicated in Graph 1 by RIP.ie (dashed green line) and GRO/CSO (solid black line) between June and Dec 2020. For this reason, I produced a more detailed Graph 2 for Dec 2020 to Mar 2021 using the same RIP.ie data, but plotted the figures weekly to analysis this more closely.

If the large number of COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie were caused by a novel virus, and there were no other factors causing excess deaths (such as another novel disease, war, famine, natural disaster, etc.), then the COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie deaths (solid red line) should closely match the RIP.ie excess deaths (solid green line) in Graph 2, however as can be seen the COVID-19 deaths are consistently higher than the RIP.ie excess deaths. It can also be seen at this level of detail that the peak of the claimed COVID-19 deaths in mid Apr 2020 were approximately 200 deaths higher and 2 weeks later that the actual peak excess deaths indicated by the RIP.ie death notices.

The NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line) in Graph 2 is also a very smooth line compares to the fluctuating RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) which would be expected for weekly data, this makes the red line appear to be unnatural and false or fabricated.

Graph 2

An argument which has been raised by various vested interests is the possibility that healthcare deprivation during the alleged pandemic may have increased other causes of deaths in in 2020. While there is a possibility of this occurring later in 2020, I feel that it would be very doubtful that it had any effect in the early part of 2020, and if that were the case, then it would further prove that the COVID-19 death figures were exaggerated as they would have been concealing healthcare deprivation deaths in order for the excess deaths to remain low.

Other vested interests claim that the lockdowns have reduced influenzas deaths and accidental deaths which compensate for the extra COVID-19 deaths and that this explains why the total or excess deaths are not higher in 2020. I find this a difficult proposition to accept as the CSO 2019 Vital Statistics Yearly Summary states that accidents accounted for only 909 deaths and even if there were no accidental deaths in 2020, it would not make up the 2,270 difference between claimed COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths. Influenza deaths were not identified in previous CSO reports, as tests such as PCR, were not used to confirm diagnosis of influenza and those deaths were recorded as respiratory deaths. Suicides accounted for 421 deaths in 2019 and it is expected that there may be a substantial increase in those deaths due to the socioeconomic impact of the lockdowns plus healthcare deprivation will also most likely increase deaths in related causes. To give an overview of the relative numbers of deaths in the main IDC-10 causes, and to demonstrate how little they vary from year to year, thus having little effect on the 5-year average and on excess deaths, I have complied Graph 3 below from the CSO’s 2014-2019 Vital Statistics Annual Reports.

Graph 3

Conclusion

By now the, mis-match that I have outlined between the NEPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths and the official GRO registered deaths up to Jun 2020 together with the RIP.ie cleaned death notices from then up to Mar 2021 can only bring you to the same conclusion that I have arrived at. That is, that the NEPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths are deaths of older people and people with underlying conditions who died as per normal but were fraudulently classified as COVID-19 by vested interests using PCR tests which have found to produce a high percentage of false positive results.

Furthermore, I conclude that the approximately 500 excess deaths in Jan-Feb 2021 must be related to the rollout of the vaccinations in those nursing homes during that period, and that the excessively high COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie in Jan-Feb 2021 are contrived for the sole purpose of allowing those deaths to be explained as COVID-19 as per the death records rather than adverse reactions to the vaccines.

And finally, the health of a nation can be quickly assessed by looking at its trend death rates as quoted in deaths per 1,000 of population. I have prepared Table 4 below from CSO annual reports, recent GRO updated data and RIP.ie death notices for 2020.The table shows that the 2020 death rate will be the lowest since 2012, a clear indication that there was no need for the mass hysteria created by vested interests which could not be challenged due to the lack of up-to-date date and transparent death data from the Central Statistics Office.

Table 4

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Kieran Morrissey is a US born Engineer who has worked in healthcare for most of his career and has been educated and spent most of his life in Ireland. He is married with 4 adult children.

Featured image is from Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

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).

***

President and Co-Founder of Your Ontario Doctors and frontline physician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur recently sat down with Dr. Richard Schabas, MD, Former Chief Medical Officer of Health for Ontario, Canada, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, Epidemiologist, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, PhD Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff were the initiators behind The Great Barrington Declaration.

In the video below they discuss the harms of lockdown and the dangerous of censorship, as well as a path forward. Throughout this pandemic, numerous studies have found that lockdowns have been quite ineffective at stopping the spread of covid. You can access some of those studies and read more about it here for more examples and an in depth discussion. I also recently published an article about two renowned Swedish scientists/epidemiologists who have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and came to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight covid as have died of covid. You can read more about that here.

Obviously, as you probably already know, there is information on both sides of the coin when it comes to all things covid. What doesn’t bode well, however, is the fact that one side is being completely unacknowledged, ignored, and censored within the mainstream.

Some experts have not been given a voice, and discussion has been completely shut down. When certain information, data/evidence or opinion goes “against the grain” and gains some sort of “virality” it then seems to be heavily ridiculed within the mainstream and labelled a “conspiracy theory.” It seems mainstream media along with government health authorities don’t even want to entertain the idea of having a discussion with experts who oppose their narrative. They simply continue to push forth their viewpoints and perspective as the ultimate truth.

This type of censorship, and the entire pandemic has truly served as a catalyst for ‘ordinary’ citizens, doctors and scientists to really question what type of world we are currently living in as well as the intentions of government and ‘big health.’ This is a very encouraging thing to see, but what’s more important is that everyday people who disagree with each other really need to start empathizing with each other.

I decided to share the video below because, whether you agree or disagree is not important.

What’s important is that everybody in the field gets to share their perspective, openly and freely without being subjected to censorship. What’s happening during this pandemic is quite unfair, immoral, unethical and harmful, which is why it’s so important to share discussions like this.

The Takeaway

Society must have controversial conversations in a meaningful way. We are not getting anywhere by taking authoritarian actions that harm the well being of general society and our ability to stay connected as communities. Mainstream culture is expecting everyone to side with the idea that fringe ‘conspiracy theories’ are undermining truth in society, yet mainstream culture does not want to take responsibility for its role in this phenomenon via censorship and corporate favoritism.

At the end of the day, it’s quite clear that things with regards to the pandemic are not as clear as mainstream media is making them out to be. Lockdowns and other “authoritarian” measures taken by governments, although supported by many people are also heavily opposed by many people. When this is the case and things aren’t as black and white has they are being made out to be, should the government simply not make recommendations and let the people decide for themselves? Should we really give them the authority to put into place such mandates that they have when there are such enormous consequences as a result and when it’s not even clear if they (the mandates) are effective?

People want to thrive, they are tired of being constantly handed the short end of the stick as the rich get richer. It does not take long to look with open eyes and see that government is not working to serve people as much as we’d like to think.

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First published by Global Research on November 22, 2020

Author’s Note and Update

On 13 April 2021, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany amended or tightened the Infection Protection Act (§ 28b IfSG). It is the draft of a Fourth Law for the Protection of the Population in the Event of an Epidemic Situation of National Significance.

In reality, this so-called “Federal Emergency Brake” slows down the legally guaranteed basic rights of citizens.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) confirms: “Emergency Brakes” Act abrogates fundamental right of inviolability of home and body (1).

The renowned legal scholar Volker Boehme-Neßler adds: The planned coercive measures such as de curfews are “unconstitutional, dictatorial and against human nature” (2).

The German Bundestag will decide next week on this legislative path to open dictatorship.

Rudolf Hänsel,  April 17, 2021

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Auf Deutsch:  

Das Lied der Deutschen gilt für das gemeine Volk nicht mehr

The German national anthem, as a state symbol, was protected from denigration in a special way. But for months it has been dragged deeper and deeper into the mud by a corrupt clique of politicians on behalf of a billionaire and power “elite” and is now only valid for them, no longer for the common people.

A minority of people, who exploit, enslave, sow discord, injustice and lack of freedom, has taken over the scepter worldwide. And whoever believes that he can speak and negotiate with this other side, these ruling beneficiaries, who have the whole thing in their hands, is mistaken.

No! They are so sick that no negotiation is possible with them. It was still like that in the story: When the working people went on strike for their right to freedom, justice, security, peace and a life worthy of a human being and took to the streets for their children, the governments first used the police and then the military – and finally let them shoot.

The text of the German national anthem is the third verse of the poem “Das Lied der Deutschen” and was written by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1841 on Helgoland and set to music by Joseph Haydn:

“Unity and Justice and Freedom / for the German Fatherland!

Let us all strive for this / Brotherly with Heart and Hand!

Unity and Justice and Freedom / are the Promise of Happiness:

Flourish in this Blessing’s Glory, / Florish, German Fatherland!”

What has remained of all this in Germany?

The passing of the new so-called infection protection law last week is only one example of many for the omnipotence fantasies of politicians and the increasing compulsion, the permanent rule changes and threats, the sickening isolation detention of adults and their children, the restricted freedom of movement, the psychological programming and finally the systematic destruction of the human psyche (David Icke). The formerly “silent” dictatorship of democracy was secretly transformed into an open dictatorship.

Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian lawyer, moral teacher and pacifist, showed the world in the last century what strength a person with an unbending will can develop and what he can achieve through it. His motto was:

“Strength does not come from physical abilities. It comes from an unbending will.”

The Indian independence movement, of which he was the intellectual and political leader, took up his idea of non-violent action and “Civil Disobedience” and in August 1947 reached the end of British colonial rule over India. Why should we not develop this unbending will?

“When I think of Germany at night, / Then I am deprived of sleep,

I can no longer close my eyes, / And my hot tears flow.”

(Heinrich Heine, Night Thoughts)

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Auf Deutsch

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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Biden Declares National Emergency: U.S. and NATO Brand Russia an International Pariah

By Rick Rozoff, April 16 2021

The thirty-member North Atlantic Council, the political decision-making body of NATO consisting of the ambassadors of all member states, posted a statement supporting the Joe Biden administration’s declaration of a national emergency attributed to Russian actions, real or fancied.

Beware of Covid PCR Testing and the Relentless “Vaccinate Vaccinate Vaccinate” Campaign

By Peter Koenig, April 16 2021

The validity of the PCR test has been questioned for months, if not from the very beginning of the declared covid-19 plandemic, including lately also by WHO. However, this test is still and ever more so being forced upon us.

CDC Admits 5,800 Fully Vaccinated People Became Infected with COVID-19 and 74 Died

By Brian Shilhavy, April 16 2021

The CDC today apparently sent out emails to the major corporate media outlets allegedly explaining that about 5,800 fully vaccinated people have still come down with COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, and 74 people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have allegedly died from COVID-19.

US to Withdraw from Afghanistan after Two Decades of War Leaving Behind a Tortured Wasteland and Having Accomplished… Nothing.

By Scott Ritter, April 16 2021

The US decision to leave Afghanistan without any conditions represents a political victory for those in the US government who sought an end to the nearly two-decade conflict in that nation.

White House Won’t Say If Special Forces Will Leave Afghanistan Under Biden’s Withdrawal Plan

By Dave DeCamp, April 16 2021

After President Biden formally announced his plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11th, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if special operations soldiers would remain in the country under the plan, which she declined to answer.

Labour Disclosure ‘Shows Antisemitism Was Weaponised Against Corbyn’, Activists Say

By Jonathan Cook, April 16 2021

A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.

India’s Impending War on Crypto

By Peter C. Earl, April 16 2021

A senior official in the Indian government recently revealed to Reuters that the government would soon propose a law banning the trade and possession of cryptocurrencies.
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Genocide Drowned out by Media Silence: The Yemen War Six Years Later

By Michael WelchSteven SahiounieYousra Abdulmalik, and Azza Rojbi, April 16 2021

The country of Yemen, once renowned for its architectural gems and theatre shaping the minds and memory of its population, is now scraping itself out from under the wreckage of homes, schools, mosques and hospitals downed by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes.

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U.S. Joins Past Empires in Afghan Graveyard

April 16th, 2021 by Medea Benjamin

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).

***

An Afghan taxi-driver in Vancouver told one of us a decade ago that this day would come. “We defeated the Persian Empire in the eighteenth century, the British in the nineteenth, the Soviets in the twentieth. Now, with NATO, we’re fighting twenty-eight countries, but we’ll defeat them, too,” said the taxi-driver, surely not a member of the Taliban, but quietly proud of his country’s empire-killing credentials. 

Now, after nearly twenty years of a war that has been as bloody and futile as all those previous invasions and occupations, the last 3,500 U.S. troops and their NATO brothers-in-arms will be coming home from Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden tried to spin this as the United States leaving because it has achieved its objectives, bringing the terrorists responsible for 9/11 to justice and ensuring that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for a future attack on the United States. “We achieved those objectives,” Biden said. “Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is degraded. It’s time to end the forever war.”

What Biden did not admit is that the United States and its allies, with all their money and firepower, were unable to vanquish the Taliban, who currently control about half of Afghanistan and are positioned to control even more in the coming months without a ceasefire. Nor did Biden admit that, in two decades, the United States and its allies have been unable to build up a stable, democratic, popular government or a competent military in the country.

Like the U.S.S.R., the U.S. is leaving in defeat, having squandered the lives of countless Afghans, 2,488 U.S. troops and personnel, and trillions of dollars.

A U.S. withdrawal—especially one not based on conditions on the ground—is, nevertheless, a bold move for Biden. He is going against the advice of the U.S. intelligence community and top Pentagon officials, including the head of the U.S.-Afghan Forces and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Biden is also coming under attack from Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Senator Mitch McConnell artfully slammed Biden’s decision, accusing him of helping U.S. enemies “ring in the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them.” Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the withdrawal “undermines our commitment to the Afghan people, particularly Afghan women.”

But while Biden is being pilloried by some for pulling out too soon, the truth is that he is violating a May 1 deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal that was painstakingly negotiated under the Trump Administration.

Ironically, Biden acknowledged in his speech on Wednesday that the withdrawal agreement the United States signed with the Taliban in February 2020 was a solemn commitment, but then he said U.S. forces would begin their withdrawal on May 1 and complete it by September 11, which is not what was agreed to.

After it was clear that the United States was going to break the May 1 withdrawal agreement, Mohammad Naeem, the Taliban spokesperson in Qatar, issued a statement that the Taliban would now not take part in the ten days of U.N.-led peace talks scheduled to begin in Istanbul on April 24, nor would it take part in any further peace negotiations until the last foreign soldiers leave Afghanistan.

This is a reversion to the Taliban’s long-standing position that it would not negotiate with a government backed by foreign occupation forces.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad spent years of his life negotiating with the Taliban to arrive at the 2020 withdrawal agreement. Secretary Blinken took a potentially historic step back from U.S. unilateralism when he invited the United Nations to lead a new Afghan peace process. And Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov set the stage for a ceasefire and a peaceful transition of power by bringing the two Afghan warring parties together in Moscow in March, where they agreed to keep talking.

By reneging on the May 1 deadline, President Biden has squandered much of the hard-won goodwill and trust that was painstakingly built up through these diplomatic efforts. It was not impossible to meet the May 1 deadline. The Trump Administration was steadily withdrawing troops, Biden’s transition began in November, and he’s been President since late January.

It is also unclear whether the United States will continue the war by providing airpower for the Afghan military and carrying out covert operations. Throughout these two decades, the United States has dropped more than 80,000 bombs on Afghanistan and waged a secret war with special forces, CIA operatives, mercenaries, and paramilitary units. Ending U.S. airstrikes and covert operations is as vital to peace as withdrawing U.S. troops.

It’s true that a U.S. withdrawal may lead to setbacks in the gains made by Afghan women and girls. But those gains have been mainly in the capital city of Kabul. Two thirds of girls in Afghanistan still receive no primary education, and Afghan women will never achieve significant advances while their country remains at war.

The United States and NATO military presence has made an end to violence impossible for twenty years, as the Taliban have long made clear that they will keep fighting as long as their country is under foreign occupation. And as long as the U.S. continues to prop up a weak, corrupt government in Kabul, instability and political fragmentation is inevitable.

Ending the fighting and investing a small fraction of U.S. war spending in education and health care would do far more to improve the lives of Afghan women and girls.

The United Nations, even with the full support and cooperation of the United States, will have its work cut out to convince the Taliban to rejoin talks. If the U.N. fails to negotiate a lasting ceasefire before the occupation forces withdraw, the U.S. and its NATO allies will be leaving a country still at war with the Taliban, the Afghan government, and various warlords vying for power.

We must hope that, in the coming months, the U.N. will find a way to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together and craft a ceasefire and a workable peace process based on power sharing. After so many decades of war and intense suffering, much of it perpetrated by the United States and its allies, the Afghan people desperately need—and deserve—an end to this war.

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This article was originally published on The Progressive.

Medea Benjamin is co-director of the peace group CODEPINK. Her latest book is Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of “Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.” He is a researcher for CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and a freelance writer.

India’s Impending War on Crypto

April 16th, 2021 by Peter C. Earl

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***

In a clear example showing how the CDC and Big Pharma control the corporate media, the CDC today apparently sent out emails to the major corporate media outlets allegedly explaining that about 5,800 fully vaccinated people have still come down with COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, and 74 people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have allegedly died from COVID-19.

In typical fashion of how the CDC operates, they attempted to spin these numbers as something positive, by stating how many people have now been “vaccinated” against COVID, and that one’s chance of getting COVID is significantly reduced if you receive the injection.

As I saw this statement start appearing everywhere in social media, I tried to find the source for this alleged CDC information, but all I could find were various corporate media outlets stating that the CDC had told them this directly. Apparently this is not on the CDC website anywhere.

Some examples:

CNN:
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 5,800 people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have become infected anyway.

Out of those people, 74 died and 396 [7%] required hospitalization. Many were seriously ill, the CDC reported.

It’s the first indication from CDC of how effective the vaccine is in real life — and the first indication the vaccines do not protect completely against severe disease and death.

“So far, about 5,800 breakthrough cases have been reported to CDC. To date, no unexpected patterns have been identified in case demographics or vaccine characteristics,” the CDC told CNN via email.

The HILL:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency has documented about 5,800 “breakthrough” COVID-19 cases among the millions of Americans who are fully vaccinated, totaling far less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people.

“Vaccine breakthrough infections make up a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated,” the CDC told The Hill in a statement. “CDC recommends that all eligible people get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one is available to them.”

Yahoo:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found about 5,800 cases of COVID-19 infections among people who have been fully vaccinated in the U.S., according to a new report.

CDC officials tell Yahoo Life that as of April 13, about 5,800 breakthrough COVID-19 infections — meaning someone who was fully vaccinated against the virus still contracts COVID-19 — have been reported to the CDC among the more than 66 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated. Of those, 396 (or 7 percent) required hospitalization and 74 people (0.0001 percent) died.

And as is usual with the Pharma-funded corporate media, there was no investigative reporting done to challenge or even question the data that the CDC was providing.

So let me do that. (The CDC did not send me a copy of the letter for some reason.)

For example, how do we know that there are only “5,800 breakthrough COVID-19 infections” among 66 million fully vaccinated Americans? How did the CDC arrive at that figure, and where are they getting their data?

These experimental COVID injections have only been out in the public for about 4 months now, and the vast majority of the injections have occurred within the past few weeks.

These are experimental pharmaceutical products with very little testing done, and the CDC has changed the amount of time they claim it takes for full immunity to start after “vaccination” several times already. They originally said two weeks after the first injection, and full immunity after the second one. Then it was changed to 4 weeks. Now, they are saying it can take up to 6 weeks.

So there really is no way the CDC can make any definitive statements at this point as to just what the percentage of fully vaccinated people will be who still get COVID and still die from it.

Earlier this week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky actually stated that the COVID “vaccines” are “too slow” to stop an alleged surge of COVID cases in Michigan, because it takes “weeks” for them to start working.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said Michigan should put coronavirus restrictions back in place to stop the spread of COVID-19.

“Really what we need to do in those situations is shut things down,” Walensky said during a press briefing on Monday. “I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we will be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work – to actually have the impact.” (Source.)

“We know that if vaccines go in arms today, we will not see an effect of those vaccines, depending on the vaccine, for somewhere between two to six weeks,” Walensky said. (Source.)

Anybody with any kind of critical thinking skills can clearly see that this is pure PR the CDC is spinning to their corporate media lap dogs.

They want to try and convince the U.S. public that even though people are still getting sick and dying from COVID after being fully vaccinated, that they still should get vaccinated anyway, and then agree to new lockdowns as cases start going up again because the vaccines “work too slowly.”

Of course they want you to ignore the fact that in states that have opened back up and stopped mandating face masks, that cases and deaths, even by their own corrupted statistics, are now going down.

How long is the American public going to put up with this insanity?

People are DYING from these COVID “vaccines” and the CDC is now forced to admit that these vaccines don’t even work in many people.

And whatever small businesses that are still left and have survived the first round of lockdowns last year will surely die if lockdowns are required again, unless enough people wake up finally and say “enough is enough – we will NOT comply!”

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***

U.S. President Joe Biden officially announced the withdrawal of American troops and NATO allies from Afghanistan in a televised speech on Wednesday. Accordingly, the withdrawal of these forces will begin on May 1 and symbolically end on September 11.

American troops and their allies invaded Taliban-held Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The guise used to invade Afghanistan was to prevent the country from ever becoming a launch pad to attack the U.S. again. In his speech, Biden stressed that this goal has already been achieved and that the U.S. “cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for withdrawal and expecting a different result.”

“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan,” he said, adding “Two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”

The withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces has alarmed Afghanis who are terrified of what is about to happen. Although the Afghan government said the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country would not affect the security situation, officials and experts have repeatedly expressed concern about the withdrawal.

This is an unsurprising expectation considering that the Taliban are already boasting about their victory over the U.S. following Biden’s announcement. In speaking with the BBC, Haji Hekmat, the Taliban’s shadow mayor in Balkh district, said “we have won the war and America has lost.” He also confirms that “the Taliban before and the Taliban now are the same” and they do not “fight for power but for Allah and His Law” and “whoever stands against us, we will fight against them.”

There is clear concern in Kabul as the Afghan Army has very little control over the rural areas of the country and are mostly reduced to controlling the main cities and towns.

Rahman Rahmani, Speaker of the House of Representatives of Afghanistan, said:

“The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan is a long-standing demand of the Afghan people, but given the security situation in the country, the conditions for the withdrawal of these forces have not yet been provided. The withdrawal of foreign troops in the current situation could lead to a worsening of the situation and a civil war.”

Contrary to the belief of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Fawad Aman, Deputy Spokesman of the Ministry of National Defense of Afghanistan, said:

“Our security and defense forces, which come from different ethnic groups in the country, are a legitimate force that works to defend the lands and protect the lives and property of the people, and after the withdrawal of NATO forces, they will not allow any terrorist group to disrupt the country’s security. Since our defense forces are made up of all the compassionate tribes of this land, we believe we are not heading for a civil war.”

Although Aman expresses confidence that the Afghan Army will be able to establish a peace and defeat the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, regional player India does not share this sentiment. Indian Chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, said on Thursday that a “space for other disruptors” who are “looking at the opportunity to exploit the vacuum […] is being created. Afghanistan is a nation which is rich in resources.”

Despite the confidence that many in the Afghan government are portraying, the reality is that the U.S.-NATO withdrawal will lead to a rapid escalation in Taliban insurgency that the national army will struggle against. This will inevitably lead to a proxy struggle as China, India, Pakistan, Russia and Iran will all vie for influence in a post-U.S. Afghanistan in the hope of being able to exploit the $3 trillion worth of mineral wealth in the country.

It is likely that India and Iran will vehemently back the Afghan government’s preservation to prevent a radical Sunni Islamic Emirate from being established as it can pose a major security threat. In turn, to weaken Indian influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan will likely continue its ardent support for the Taliban.

As U.S. Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed, said on the Senate floor on Thursday, the “crucial factor contributing to the Taliban’s success” has been the U.S.’ inability to “eliminate the sanctuary the Taliban was granted in Pakistan.”

By using the Taliban, Pakistan hopes to eliminate any Indian economic and diplomatic influence in Afghanistan. In this way, Afghanistan will undoubtedly become a field for competing rivalries.

Russia and China will also try and assert their influence over Afghanistan, but will likely deal with any government that emerges in a post-U.S. Afghanistan. But they will certainly not want the country to become a proxy battleground between India (and perhaps Iran too) and Pakistan. Sun Qi, an international relations specialist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, believes that Beijing will not station troops in Afghanistan, but might instead work with other countries in the region to promote political stability and reduce the security risk to China that a post-U.S. Afghanistan will pose.

It took the U.S. 20 years to finally withdraw from Afghanistan, having achieved nothing but the utter destruction of the country and leaving behind it a vacuum that will undoubtedly not only lead to a civil war between the Taliban, other terrorist organizations and the national army, but a proxy battle between key regional states.

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A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.

The group, who call themselves Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J), say the new disclosure confirms their claim that leading Jewish organisations intentionally politicised the meaning of antisemitism to entrap left-wing critics of Israel and undermine Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

As a result, the number of cases of antisemitism in Labour was inflated, falsely feeding the public impression that the political party under Corbyn had attracted Jew haters, say the Labour activists.

The suggestion that groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement “weaponised” antisemitism against Corbyn is currently seen as grounds by Labour to suspend or expel members.

But according to LA4J, evidence revealed in their legal case has now vindicated that claim.

The activists note that Jewish groups that waged a campaign of attacks on Corbyn over an antisemitism code of conduct drafted by the party in 2018 are now “deafeningly silent” on discovering that Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, has been secretly using exactly the same code.

When it was first published, the Board of Deputies and other Jewish organisations erupted in outrage, alleging that the 16-point code was proof of “institutional antisemitism” in the Labour party – and even that Corbyn posed a threat to Jewish life in Britain.

But the admission by Starmer’s officials that they are using the same code of conduct to investigate members has gone entirely unremarked three years later.

That is despite a submission to the courts from Labour’s own lawyers that the code had been kept secret because its publication might prove “politically incendiary”.

LA4J point out that back in 2018 the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement and other groups insisted that Corbyn replace the code with an alternative, controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

According to the activists, the current silence of these Jewish groups, after Starmer’s officials have conceded that they are using Corbyn’s code rather than the IHRA definition, further indicates bad faith.

Despite public statements to the contrary, the organisations knew that the IHRA definition was unworkable for Labour’s disciplinary procedures back in 2018, LA4J say.

“If Labour believes that the code issued by Corbyn was ‘incendiary’, the question is where is the bushfire now, when Starmer’s team admit they are using the very same code,” Chris Wallis, a spokesman for LA4J, told Middle East Eye.

“One of the things this case suggests is that groups like the Board of Deputies hoped to weaponise antisemitism as a way to attack Corbyn.”

Disciplinary process ‘back to front’

The group’s legal action is due to reach the High Court in June. It will be the first wide-ranging legal examination of Labour’s disciplinary procedures relating to antisemitism. In October 2019, the High Court ruled that the suspension of then-Labour MP Chris Williamson for “bringing the party into disrepute” over antisemitism allegations was illegal, though the judge did not overturn a second suspension that ousted him from the party.

Eight party members, including three Jews, are pursuing the case after they were investigated for alleged antisemitism. LA4J estimates that at least 30 Jewish members of the party have been accused of antisemitism, some repeatedly.

Late last year the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equalities watchdog, issued a report critical of Labour’s handling of antisemitism cases, especially over what it termed “political interference” by Corbyn’s office, which it said had resulted in “a lack of transparency and consistency in the complaints process”.

However, the EHRC found that in practice such interference chiefly harmed the interests of those accused of antisemitism rather than their accusers. Corbyn’s officials often tried to speed up investigations in the hope of ending the barrage of criticism from Jewish organisations.

LA4J argue that hundreds of members have been drummed out of the party in a process that has lacked the transparency and fairness demanded by the EHRC. The procedure, they say, has failed to provide those under investigation with an opportunity to challenge the allegations.

Most members receive a “notice of investigation” that typically cites social media posts as evidence of antisemitism. In some cases, members have been accused of sharing articles from prominent websites, such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, known to be harshly critical of Israel for its repeated violations of Palestinian rights.

No explanation is made in the notice of why party officials believe the posts to be antisemitic. Instead, it is required of those under investigation to demonstrate why their posts should not be considered antisemitic.

The notices also demand that members under investigation not publicise their case or the information that is being used against them. It is unclear whether they are even allowed to seek legal advice. Instead, they are encouraged to get help from a GP or the Samaritans to aid their “wellbeing”.

Wallis, a former BBC radio drama producer who has been under investigation since last year, is one of the eight members taking the party to court.

“The disciplinary process has been entirely back to front,” he said. “We were never told about the secret code being used to judge our cases and it was never explained how what we did was antisemitic. The assumption was that we were guilty unless we could prove otherwise, and we were expected to incriminate ourselves.”

‘Sickness’ in Labour

At a preliminary hearing in February, the Labour Party argued that the courts had no place adjudicating on its handling of antisemitism cases. However, the judge approved the High Court hearing for June and awarded costs against Labour.

In what appears to be an attempt to avoid a second adverse ruling, Labour officials made the disciplinary process more transparent last month by divulging how it assessed antisemitism cases.

Starmer’s officials published on the party’s website the same antisemitism code of conduct that had been drafted during Corbyn’s time as leader. They did so despite a submission from one of Labour’s senior lawyers during February’s court hearing that such an admission could prove “politically incendiary”.

That was because a wide range of Jewish leadership groups rounded on Corbyn and Labour over the code when it was first published in July 2018.

Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, set up to protect Jewish communities from antisemitic attacks, lambasted Corbyn in an article in the Guardian headlined “Labour’s antisemitism code exposes a sickness in Jeremy Corbyn’s party”.

A blog on the Trust’s website added that the code “brazenly contravenes basic anti-racist principles”.

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, both claiming to represent Britain’s Jewish community, stated that the adoption by Corbyn’s officials of the code would “further erode the existing lack of confidence that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement”.

The Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour party affiliate connected to the Israeli Labor party, argued that the code was “a get out of jail free card” for antisemites, and claimed it breached equalities legislation.

Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, called the code “a watershed moment” for Labour and warned that it sent “an unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community”.

Dozens of rabbis backed him, accusing the Labour leadership of having “chosen to ignore the Jewish community”.

And the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a pro-Israel lobby group, argued that “the code seems to be designed to give free rein to certain forms of antisemitic discourse”.

‘It was about who was in charge’

But despite the outpouring of concern back in 2018, note LA4J, Jewish organisations have remained silent since Labour revealed that the same antisemitism code of conduct introduced under Corbyn is being used by Starmer’s officials in disciplinary cases.

“This was never about what was going on inside Labour, as was claimed,” said Wallis. “It was about who was in charge. The aim was to remove Corbyn at all costs.”

Labour’s stated goal in drafting the code in 2018 was to assist with ironing out problems in the IHRA definition, which was being aggressively lobbied for by leading Jewish groups.

In particular, Corbyn’s code provided additional context to help judge aspects of the IHRA’s 11 potential examples of antisemitism, seven of which relate to Israel.

The code warns that the IHRA text “is not a legal definition, and on its own does not provide clear guidance about the circumstances in which particular conduct should or should not be regarded as antisemitic”.

The Labour antisemitism code also emphasises a need for “respectful debate” between party members when talking about contentious political matters around Israel and warns that the party “will not tolerate name-calling and abuse”.

The concern among Corbyn’s team was that the definition would shift the focus of antisemitism away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel, and expose activists supportive of Palestinian rights to investigation.

The imprecision of the IHRA definition, and its politicisation of antisemitism, had already been widely criticised, including by a former Court of Appeal judge and the British parliament’s home affairs select committee.

Kenneth Stern, the chief architect of the IHRA definition, had also weighed in to note that it was unsuitable for use in disciplinary procedures and was being “weaponised” by elements of the Jewish community to stifle criticism of Israel.

Jewish organisations, on the other hand, argued that Corbyn was using the Labour code to avoid adopting the IHRA definition in full with all its examples, and implied that his motivation was to make Labour hostile to British Jews.

Facing the backlash, and concerted criticism in the media, Corbyn’s officials appeared to discard the code and instead adopted the IHRA definition in full a few weeks later, in September 2018.

Definition ‘not fit for purpose’

It is unclear whether Corbyn’s officials ever used the 2018 code to adjudicate in disciplinary cases. But LA4J say its adoption by Starmer’s officials – and their efforts to hide the fact that they were using the code – confirm that the IHRA’s definition was indeed unworkable.

Jenny Manson, a co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, which was set up in 2017 to show support for Corbyn among Jewish party members and is now supporting LA4J, said that the weaknesses of the IHRA definition must have been clear to organisations like the Jewish Labour Movement and Board of Deputies.

“Their current silence shows that they must have known the IHRA definition wasn’t fit for purpose as it was,” she said. “The additional code of conduct was needed. They opposed it in 2018, it seems clear, only because they were looking to damage Jeremy [Corbyn].”

Although LA4J argue that the code is fairer than the IHRA definition, they also say it has been widely misused against members as officials have sought to placate Jewish groups accusing Labour of being institutionally antisemitic.

Diana Neslen, an 82-year-old Orthodox Jew who has been investigated for antisemitism and sanctioned by the party, said:

“Even a quick look at [the code] suggests that all of us have been wrongfully accused. Indeed, we should never have been investigated in the first place.”

LA4J hopes that, with the code no longer secret, Labour members will have a better chance to challenge current and future investigations conducted against them by party officials.

Neslen warned, however, that existing injustices needed to be addressed too: “What are they going to do about the hundreds of people already judged under the secret code, including me?”

She and LA4J have called for those suspended or expelled to have their cases reopened and the evidence reassessed in a transparent manner.

The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council were all approached by Middle East Eye for comment. None had responded by the time of publication.

According to LA4J, their court case highlights how little evidence there was for the claim that antisemitism within the Labour party had been an especial problem under Corbyn’s leadership.

Levels of antisemitism in Labour appear to be lower than in the wider British public, within which about five percent of people could “justifiably be described as antisemites”, according to research published by the Community Security Trust in 2017.

Corbyn’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, issued figures in April 2019 that showed disciplinary action had been taken against just 0.08 percent of Labour’s 540,000 members, even after the strict application of the antisemitism code and “political interference” by Corbyn’s officials in speeding up disciplinary proceedings.

During the latest legal proceedings, Labour has revealed equivalent figures for Starmer, relating to the period between May last year and last month. Although details about the investigations are not precise, in the worst-case scenario an even smaller percentage of Labour members were found to be antisemitic.

These figures, the LA4J argue, suggest that Labour has not had an “antisemitism problem” under either Corbyn or Starmer.

That impression is shared by most Labour members. According to a YouGov poll commissioned last month by the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, a significant majority – 70 percent – believe that Labour does not have a serious problem with antisemitism.

Most appear to agree with Corbyn’s reaction to the Equalities Commission report that the claims against Labour were “dramatically overstated for political reasons”. That statement led to Starmer expelling Corbyn from the Labour parliamentary party.

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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.

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***

The US decision to leave Afghanistan without any conditions represents a political victory for those in the US government who sought an end to the nearly two-decade conflict in that nation.

President Joe Biden, in a departure from a policy embraced by four successive US presidential administrations which placed stringent conditions on determining the conditions under which the US might leave Afghanistan, has announced that he is ordering all US military forces out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021 – the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks which propelled the US Afghan intervention to begin with. This decision, which is not linked to any preconditions or other policy contingencies, means the US will finally extricate itself from the two-decade long nightmare in Afghanistan that had become known as “the forever war.”

By rejecting the established model of a “conditions-based approach” when it came to withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, President Biden liberated himself from the reality that the situation in Afghanistan would never stabilize to the point that the risk-averse generals who populate the US military (and for whom the war in Afghanistan has been an integral part of their respective careers) would feel comfortable leaving. In making this decision, Biden mirrored the conclusion reached by his predecessor, Donald Trump, that left to their own devices, the US military would never depart from Afghanistan.

Biden had made the rejection of the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan an integral part of his national security strategy, but had been held hostage by conditions that had been put in place regarding the capabilities of the Afghan military and security forces to operate independently, assurances about women’s rights, assurances on the part of the Taliban regarding their relationship with Al-Qaeda, and a desire on the part of many officials – Biden included – that a residual force of US special operations forces based in Afghanistan was required for any lasting peace to be had.

In carrying out a “whole of government” analysis of US objectives in Afghanistan, it became apparent to Biden and his inner circle that by placing conditions on the withdrawal of US troops, the US would never leave Afghanistan. This decision flew in the face of the advice Biden was receiving from the military, which argued that any condition-free withdrawal would doom the Afghan government and military to a Vietnam-like collapse.

Biden had also to overcome similar objections on the part of NATO and non-NATO allies of the US who had collectively deployed a 7,000-strong contingent to Afghanistan dedicated to the very training and advisory capacity the US military claimed was essential to the continued survival of the Afghan government.

Unlike Trump, who ignored NATO when making his decision to withdraw, Biden dispatched his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to the alliance’s headquarters, where he announced that the US would work with its allies to ensure a “safe, deliberate and coordinated withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan.”

Biden’s decision was likewise aided by the recent appointment of William Burns, a veteran diplomat, to run the CIA. The CIA has built a virtual empire in Afghanistan, underpinned by a private army of contracted Afghan special forces who operate independently of the Afghan military, reporting instead to the CIA-controlled Afghan intelligence service. This private army represented the logical extension of the intimate and visceral involvement of the CIA in Afghanistan dating back to the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Like the US military, the current CIA leadership was forged in the fires of the Afghan conflict.

Trump’s last CIA director, Gina Haspel, was the personification of this reality, having played a key role in the implementation of both the CIA torture program and the ongoing use of armed drones to kill so-called “high value targets” in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Haspel strongly opposed Trump’s withdrawal plan and worked with the Pentagon to prevent its full implementation. With Haspel gone, and Burns in as director, the CIA’s objections, like those of the US military, have been pushed aside in favor of the domestic political imperative recognized by Biden that whatever national security gains that might be accrued by remaining in Afghanistan could not offset the reality that the American public was tired of a war that never ended, and apparently could not be brought to a successful conclusion.

A wild card in this decision is the reality that by extending the deadline from May 1 to September 11 for the total withdrawal from Afghanistan of US and allied forces, Biden is violating the peace agreement signed by the US with the Taliban back in February 2020. The Taliban have rejected a US plan which would formally extend the deadline for withdrawal, instead insisting that the US comply with the original agreement. Likewise, the Taliban have refused to engage in any negotiations with the US if the May 1 deadline is missed.

There are concerns that the Taliban might engage in attacks against any American and NATO forces which remain in Afghanistan once the deadline passes, leading to an escalation in violence which could lead to US retaliation, and even the dispatch of additional troops to the region. However, by endorsing a “conditions-free” withdrawal, Biden is sending a clear signal that US and NATO troops will be out of Afghanistan by September 11, regardless of what happens inside that nation in the interim.

The political nature of Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is underscored by his linking of it to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. There is a certain irony in this decision. While Biden and his advisors clearly mean to convey the message of “mission accomplished” (even if they avoid that specific phrase), the fact is that the US is leaving Afghanistan roughly as it found it two decades ago, with the Taliban intact and largely in charge, and Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups such as the Islamic State intact and continuing to operate from Afghan soil.

In short, the 20-year conflict in Afghanistan accomplished nothing other than killing more than 2,000 Americans, wasting trillions of dollars of American treasure, and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Afghans while leaving their country little more than a tortured wasteland.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

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***

The thirty-member North Atlantic Council, the political decision-making body of NATO consisting of the ambassadors of all member states, posted a statement supporting the Joe Biden administration’s declaration of a national emergency attributed to Russian actions, real or fancied.

Biden began a letter accompanying an executive order sent to the U.S. Congress today with this announcement:

“Pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), I hereby report that I have issued an Executive Order declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States posed by specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation.”

In a writ of indictment that includes no fewer than seven grave – in some instances the gravest of – accusations, the letter continued:

“I have determined that specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation – in particular, efforts to undermine the conduct of free and fair democratic elections and democratic institutions in the United States and its allies and partners; to engage in and facilitate malicious cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies and partners; to foster and use transnational corruption to influence foreign governments; to pursue extraterritorial activities targeting dissidents or journalists; to undermine security in countries and regions important to United States national security; and to violate well-established principles of international law, including respect for the territorial integrity of states – constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

The last time such near-apocalyptic language was used in relation to Russia was after Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December of 1979. In his State of the Union address in January 1980 President Jimmy Carter spoke these words (giving rise to the eponymous Carter Doctrine), written by his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and modeled after the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which signaled the beginning of the Cold War:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Truman’s concerns were over communist activities in Greece and Turkey. Carter’s were over potential Russia influence in the Persian Gulf. Biden’s are global in their nature: everything from meddling in other nations’ elections (something his nation, of course, has never been known to do) to using bribes to influence government officials (this article was written in Chicago); to targeting dissidents and journalists with “extraterritorial activities” (Julian Assange’s opinion on this matter would be valuable) to showing lack of respect for the territorial integrity of states (it was the U.S. and not Russia that supported the secession of Kosovo, South Sudan and Eritrea in the post-Cold War era).

Even the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t present such a life-and-death threat to the U.S. and its “allies and partners” in every part of the world as Biden would have us believe Russia does in “constituting an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” Washington hastily declared war against Japan eighty years ago. What Biden has done today may well be the equivalent of that action.

Today NATO released a statement on, in fact a line-item condemnation of, Russia’s threat to most every aspect of life, repeating, amplifying and fleshing out Biden’s sweeping accusations:

“Russia continues to demonstrate a sustained pattern of destabilising behaviour, including its violations of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and continued violation, non-implementation, and circumvention of numerous international obligations and commitments, including the Budapest Memorandum. Examples include attempted interference in Allied elections, including the U.S. presidential election; widespread disinformation campaigns; and malicious cyber activities. The United States and other Allies assess that all available evidence points to the responsibility of the Russian Federation for the SolarWinds hack. We stand in solidarity with the United States. We condemn the attack on Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition figure, with the use of a nerve agent from the banned Novichok group. Any use of chemical weapons, under any circumstances, is a clear breach of international law and contrary to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Reports that Russia encouraged attacks against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are also of concern.”

The NATO statement followed its litany of charges with the resolve for member states to consult regularly to “address Russia’s actions, which constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” It demands Russia cease what NATO characterizes as its destabilizing behavior. It also calls on Russia – and only Russia – to discontinue alleged provocations near and to deescalate tensions on the border of the Donbass and “in illegally-annexed Crimea.”

The observation that war is the continuation of politics by other means has been ascribed to Carl von Clausewitz. It is equally true that the type of political denunciation and diktat detailed above can constitute conducting war by other means. Perhaps only until the real thing arrives.

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After President Biden formally announced his plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11th, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if special operations soldiers would remain in the country under the plan, which she declined to answer.

“I’m obviously not going to get into operational specifics from the podium,” Psaki said when asked if the removal of combat troops by September 11th will include withdrawing Special Forces.

“I will say that we may — we will have what is needed to secure a diplomatic presence,” Psaki added. “And those assessments will be made over the coming months and obviously led by the Defense Department and State Department in coordination.”

The US officially has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan currently, although reports have said the number is closer to 3,500. Besides soldiers, the US also has thousands of contractors working for the US military in the country. According to numbers released in January, there are over 18,000 Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan.

When Biden’s plan was first reported on Tuesday, current and former US officials told The New York Times that some sort of US presence will continue in Afghanistan.

The Times report reads:

“Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”

When announcing his withdrawal plan, President Biden said the US needed to reshuffle its resources to better confront China, which is now a priority of the Pentagon. Considering Afghanistan’s Central Asian location and the fact that it shares a small border with China’s Xinjiang province, the US will undoubtedly at least maintain a CIA presence in the country.

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

This Week’s Most Popular Articles

April 16th, 2021 by Global Research News

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A Damned Murder Inc: Kennedy’s Battle Against the Leviathan

By Cynthia Chung, April 15 2021

The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

False Perception Fabrication Inc.

By Mark Taliano, April 15 2021

Mainstream Everything can create a pandemic out of anything, even out of a Low Infection Fatality Rate virus that arguably has not been properly isolated, purified, or replicated. And that is exactly what they did.

The WHO’s Vaccine Experts Inadvertently Communicate to the World that “Vaccine Hesitancy” Makes Scientific Sense

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, April 15 2021This was first published in March 2020.

The FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations. And the CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company.

European Union Plans to Buy 4 mRNA Shots for Every Human in the EU in 2022. Why?

By Dr. Meryl Nass, April 15 2021

There are 448 million humans in the EU. Why in heaven’s name would each one of them, regardless of age, need 4 shots in 2022 after they are fully vaccinated this year?

Florida, Texas, Idaho, Montana and Tennessee Have Banned So-called Vaccine Passports

By Dr. Meryl Nass, April 15 2021

The Indiana legislature debated the issue, but Democrats blocked a vote on it. South Carolina’s Senate unanimously voted to ban employers from mandating Covid vaccinations for employees.

Denis Halliday: A Voice of Reason in an Insane World

By Denis Halliday and Nicolas J. S. Davies, April 15 2021

Denis Halliday is an exceptional figure in the world of diplomacy. In 1998, after a 34-year career with the United Nations—including as an Assistant Secretary-General and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq—he resigned when the UN Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq.

Woke Virus: COVID Is Sustainable, Equitable, Inclusive, Racially Unbiased and Climate Aware

By Makia Freeman, April 15 2021

Did you know that SARS-CoV-2 is a woke virus? Did you ever notice how smoothly the COVID rhetoric has morphed with climate change rhetoric, Agenda 2030 rhetoric, Great Reset rhetoric and New World (NWO) rhetoric in general?

Does Biden Want to Provoke Russia into A Rash Military Action, “Leading” the World to the Brink of Nuclear War?

By Mark H. Gaffney, April 15 2021

Scarcely three months into his presidency, Joe Biden is “leading” the world to the brink of nuclear war over Ukraine. In February, Biden insisted that the US would never accept the Russian annexation of Crimea.

British Columbia: One Dead, Three Neurologically Disabled, ‘Numerous’ Reactions from Vaccine in Tiny Indigenous Village

By Celeste McGovern, April 15 2021

One patient died, two suffered anaphylactic reactions, three have ongoing disabling dizziness, muscle weakness, and chronic pain, and “numerous” patients developed allergic reactions after they received a first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine given to 900 mostly Indigenous people, according to a local doctor.

Seven Reasons Why a Vaccine Passport (Pass, Certificate or Whatever They Want to Call It) Should Give Us Pause for Thought

By Nick Corbishley, April 15 2021

Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status.

The “Secret Agenda” of the So-called Elite and the Covid mRNA Vaccine

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, April 15 2021

The pathogenic or even deadly composition of this vaccine, which will also contain Nano-chips to control humanity, has certainly already been mixed in the world’s secret laboratories.

Personal Tribute to Ramsey Clark: Iraq and Rwanda

By John Philpot, April 15 2021

Our friend in struggle, Attorney Ramsey Clark, passed away on April 9, 2021. Ramsey affected many of our lives. We followed closely his opposition to the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983. We got to know him best from his Commission of Inquiry into the US war on Iraq in beginning 17 January 1991.

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Hassan Diab’s French Lawyers Appeal to the Court of Cassation

April 15th, 2021 by Hassan Diab Support Committee

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Thank you for your support following the shockingly unjust decision on 27 January 2021 by a French Court of Appeal to refer Dr. Hassan Diab to trial. This comes three years after French investigating judges found consistent evidence of Hassan’s innocence and dismissed the case in 2018.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, the Court of Appeal’s decision is exceptional, because never before, in terrorism cases, had a Court of Appeal opposed the investigating judges. The decision flies in the face of overwhelming evidence of Hassan’s innocence and offers Hassan as an innocent scapegoat. Hassan’s French lawyers point to the immense political pressure being applied to keep the case alive.

Hassan’s French lawyers have appealed to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, which will hear the case next month.

Statements by Organisations Supporting Hassan Diab

The list of civil society and human rights organisations standing in solidarity with Hassan Diab continues to grow. Organisations are urging the Canadian government to intervene, end Hassan’s Kafkaesque nightmare of injustice, and refuse a potential second extradition request from France.

Statements from organisations can be found here.

Please Write to PM Trudeau and Major Newspapers

We urge you to add your voice by writing to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, urging the Canadian government to refuse a potential second extradition request from France, and to put an immediate end to this continuing miscarriage of justice.

Your letter can be brief and from the heart. Please address your letter to:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, [email protected]

and copy the following politicians:

Please share your correspondence with us at [email protected]

Also please consider submitting op-eds or letters to the editors of major newspapers voicing your concerns.

Many thanks to those who have already written. We greatly appreciate your support and invite you to keep urging the Canadian government to protect Hassan Diab. 

Donate to Hassan Diab’s Legal Defence in France

Please consider making a donation to help cover the cost of Hassan’s ongoing legal defence in France. Your support is vital to protect Hassan’s rights and prevent his wrongful conviction. A donation of any amount is much appreciated and can make a difference.

So far, we have raised CAD $28,251 out of CAD $37,000 (or 25,000 Euros) to cover legal fees. 100% of all donations go towards paying for Hassan’s legal defence in France.

To donate, please visit: https://www.justiceforhassandiab.org/donate

Many thanks if you have already contributed. We greatly appreciate your generous support!

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Did you know that SARS-CoV-2 is a woke virus?

Did you ever notice how smoothly the COVID rhetoric has morphed with climate change rhetoric, Agenda 2030 rhetoric, Great Reset rhetoric and New World (NWO) rhetoric in general? Every technocrat and his dog are going around pushing their favorite elite agenda, mixing it with Agenda 2030 and politically correct woke buzzwords and projecting it all onto COVID. If I didn’t know any better, it’s almost like COVID has become the pretext to hide and promote just about every single NWO (New World Order) agenda under the sun. COVID has now become the most sustainable, equitable, inclusive, racially tolerant and climate aware disease and pandemic in the history of humanity. This is a good thing, since if the imaginary SARS-CoV-2 can’t be a particular deadly virus (COVID survival rates are 99.5+% for most age groups up to 69 years old) then at least it can be a woke virus.

Sustainable COVID

Our philanthropic masters over at the Rockefeller Foundation, who only have humanity’s best interest at heart, have released a new report entitled Financing Global Vaccination and Sustainable Growth” which is an interesting mixture of COVID fear, mandatory vaccination and sustainability. After all, what’s the point in injuring and killing millions of people with dangerous and experimental RNA technology, or just plain old blood-clotting technology, if it’s not done sustainably? Everything must be sustainable and the depopulation agenda is no exception. The report states:

“Just as the entire world shared in the spread and pain of the pandemic, we must now share in orchestrating its end, and a transition to a just, equitable, and sustainable recovery … For this reason, we must act swiftly to achieve a global vaccination rate of up to 70 percent by the end of 2022. This Action Plan, the first in a series, highlights three mutually reinforcing goals leveraging the power of existing multilateral financial architecture:

Goal 1: The issuance, reallocation, and leveraging of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) by the International Monetary Fund to ensure equitable global access to vaccines

Goal 2: Unleashing the full lending power of the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) for a climate-friendly and equitable recovery

Goal 3: Leveraging private capital at scale through new, innovative investment vehicles.”

Note how they are pitching equitable and sustainable as part of their vision of the end of the pandemic. Also note how they want to continue the same decades-old predatory lending practices that made them rich and powerful (as detailed by whistleblowers like economic hitman John Perkins). Translation: we want more nations to go into debt to buy our toxic vaccines and drugs using their own resources as collateral. That way, it’s a four-for-one: we infect people, we injure and kill people, we introduce microchips or nanotech or into their bodies and we gain control of their infrastructure and minerals when they default.

Equitable COVID

The WEF (World Economic Forum) seems like one of those B-grade or C-grade Hollywood actors that, since the advent of Operation Coronavirus, is trying to pretend it’s in the top tier of NWO think tanks. The WEF is pushing the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Bodies, or in other words, an inescapable Smart Grid to lay the foundation for transhumanism. It recently held a Global Technology Governance Summit which features – you guessed it – more buzzwords galore. This one focused on equity, equality and resilience. They say the summit was to foster the “equitable use of technology” but it seems like another stepping stone to Global Governance by creating a framework of rules (to fill in “governance gaps”) that they hope will eventually be brought into a One World Government. Here’s the article from their site:

“New and emerging technologies can help humanity become more resilient and adaptable in a post-pandemic world … as we harness powerful new technologies brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to “build back better”, we have to make sure that we adopt them in such a way that they do not exacerbate inequality … Our aim will be to develop a common set of guidelines on how to implement both existing and future technologies – guidelines that address a series of current “governance gaps” of which we are aware.”

Inclusive and Racially Unbiased COVID

Going back to our friends at the Rockefeller Foundation, did you know that COVID is paving the way for a more inclusive future? Their article Forget the New Normal: Let’s Head to an Inclusive Future contains the full gamut of soppy buzzwords designed to please:

“Covid laid bare, once again, deep systemic inequities that create barriers to healthy diets and dignified work, education and even internet access. In a post-Covid world, a sustainable recovery must have justice and parity at its heart, both in the U.S. and globally. In this Matter of Impact, our team and grantees share how we are reimagining a more inclusive future. From ground breaking worker-owned companies, to using food as medicine, to creating inclusive technology incubators, to developing racially unbiased A.I. algorithms, this issue introduces the pioneering people who are partnering with The Rockefeller Foundation to change lives, empower communities, and work toward an innovative and inclusive recovery. Read on and join us.”

Climate Aware COVID

SARS-CoV-2 must be a woke virus indeed, because apparently it’s also saving the Earth by sparing us from dreaded manmade climate change. We were repeatedly told at the start of this scamdemic that the one good thing about the lockdowns was the reduction in pollution. Thousands of mainstream articles along these lines were written, such as this one as an example (Can Covid-19 Help Ease the Climate Crisis? The Global Pandemic Offers Chance to Embrace Clean Energy). I pointed out back in April 2020 that there were already many eerie similarities between the coronavirus and climate change hoaxes. Since then, the pandemic has become further drenched in wokeology. It’s not surprising, because the NWO is one giant conspiracy with many facets, and the propaganda used to push it is evenly applied to these many facets – propaganda which is boring and predictable once you have decoded it.

Woke Virus: Beware the Explosion of Feelgood Buzzwords to Push the Same Old Tired Agenda

The idea of a woke virus is a deliberate piece of satire to draw attention to the way the NWO manipulators are dramatically ramping up the use of this languaging to obfuscate the real agenda. I highlighted this in a recent article that pointed out this very same phenomenon at work in the WHO letter calling for a new international pandemic treaty. There are buzzwords galore – sustainable, equitable, inclusive, racially unbiased, climate aware, diverse, fair, resilient – but it’s just fluff. None of it means anything substantial. It’s just window-dressing to make the agenda of control more appealing and palatable. Glenn Greenwald summed it up with his article title: Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology the Way Intelligence Agencies Do: As a Disguise. It’s all empty virtue-signaling. It’s the military deployment of wokeology. It’s sickening and it’s shallow. Yet, how many people are falling for this new woke virus-style of propaganda?

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and LBRY.

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The American and Russian Presidents have a slew of issues to discuss in the event that they meet in person sometime in the coming future like Biden proposed doing during their last phone conversation, but the most important topics on the itinerary would arguably be strategic security and peacefully resolving the conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Biden-Putin Summit Plans

Russian-American tensions are at an historic high for the post-1991 period so it’s sensible that President Biden proposed to hold an in-person meeting with his Russian counterpart during their last phone conversation in order “to discuss the full range of issues” facing their countries. The most important topics on the itinerary would arguably be strategic security and peacefully resolving the long-running conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine, but other issues would of course also be brought up. What follows is a list of the most pressing problems between these two Great Powers in the order of their significance. Each point includes a summary of their respective positions and what a compromise might look like if one’s realistically possible:

Strategic Security

The White House’s readout of their call noted “the intent of the United States and Russia to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues, building on the extension of the New START Treaty”, which was reflected by the Kremlin also referencing “strategic stability and arms control”. Both countries therefore share the common desire to build upon the New START Treaty’s last-minute extension in February, though it’s unclear in what direction this might go. The prior US administration demanded that China join all such forthcoming talks while Russia respects Beijing’s right not to do so. The ideal scenario would be if all relevant powers made proportionate cuts to their pertinent arsenals, but that might not be realistic.

Ukraine

This hot button issue concerns more than just politically resolving the Eastern European country’s civil war in line with the Minsk Accords that US-backed Kiev has thus far refused to implement despite previously agreeing to them. It also involves NATO’s aggressive forward posturing in the region and its support for Ukraine’s anti-Russian activities, including against Crimea. The situation is so tense at the moment that a war might even break out before the Russian and American leaders meet, with the subsequently feared brinksmanship potentially serving as the reason to expedite their summit plans. The best-case scenario would be if the US assesses the seriousness of the situation and finally pressures Kiev to implement the Minsk Accords.

Afghanistan

The Kremlin’s readout reported “the situation in Afghanistan”, which was missing from the White House’s, but this issue will likely be at the fore of their discussions considering that the US plans to fully withdraw from that country by 9/11 this year. Both Great Powers have recently seen their positions converge insofar as supporting an inclusive transitional government in which the officially terrorist-designated Taliban participates as the only pragmatic political outcome of the conflict. The challenge is that the Taliban reacted negatively to the US’ announcement that it’ll miss its originally scheduled deadline for withdrawing by 1 May, so it remains to be seen whether the fragile ceasefire between those two holds long enough for the meeting to occur.

Syria

Syria didn’t warrant a mention on either government’s readout so it’s unclear whether it was brought up during their last discussion, but it’s nevertheless a major issue between them that can’t be ignored. The US retains occupation forces in the northeast beyond the de facto “internal partition” line of the Euphrates River, and its widely reported support of terrorist forces in the country is a major impediment to the conflict’s resolution. Moreover, the US’ political proxies have hitherto obstructed the parallel peace processes, so something must be done in order to make progress on these tracks. The only realistic compromise would be “decentralization” and Damascus requesting Iran’s dignified but phased withdrawal from the country, but the latter still seems unlikely.

China

The US is slowly realizing that it made a major mistake by triggering Russia’s historical siege mentality, pushing it closer to China in response, and provoking Moscow to actively seek Washington’s containment all across the world. Even a simple thought exercise embracing the US’ infamous zero-sum outlook on International Relations suggests that this works out to America’s grand strategic disadvantage while being one of the best-ever scenarios for China. Accordingly, Biden’s team might attempt to court Russia into reversing its recent American-provoked foreign policy pivot so as to restore Moscow’s traditional “balancing” act between East and West, but this outcome is only possible in the event credible progress is made on a “New Detente”.

Iran

The Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is another major issue of disagreement between the US and Russia, but one which also attracts their interest more than ever after Iran recently clinched a 25-year strategic partnership deal with China. That agreement stands the chance to revolutionize the greater region’s geostrategic situation through the expansion of Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) to West Asia via W-CPEC+, which was an unexpected game-changing development that seemingly caught both the US and Russia off guard. Not only will they seek to address the immediate nuclear-related issue, but they might also discuss ways to manage this new regional geostrategic reality, perhaps in an indirectly joint way if they make progress on a “New Detente”.

Palestine

The so-called “Mideast Peace Process” (MEPP) is also an area of mutual concern for Russia and the US. Both Great Powers are also allied with “Israel” to different extents, with Russia’s largely under-discussed relationship being the result of skillful policymaking at the presidential level through Putin’s personal diplomacy with his close friend Prime Minister Netanyahu (background context here, here, here, here, and here). Since Biden is attempting to balance the US’ regional relationships a bit more than Trump did, it’s possible that he’ll walk back his predecessor’s so-called “Deal of the Century” and thus help pave the way for his country and Russia to jointly herald at least the symbolic creation of a Palestinian state, though it’ll still take a while for this to occur.

Russiagate/Navalny/Climate

Biden will almost certainly bring up the discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory due to domestic pressure from his base. This speculative aspect of their discussion would be entirely symbolic since it’s what many have rightly called a “nothingburger”. It’ll only be talked about for appearance’s sake, the same as Navalny‘s imprisonment might too if that’s even brought up that is. As for climate change, this is a “neutral” means through which the two could at least superficially cooperate more closely and result in a semi-tangibly positive outcome to their planned summit. Both of their leaders agree on the need to thwart this threat, but there really isn’t much that they can do together. Still, it could make for some good headlines if they release a joint statement about it.

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

Featured image: Russian President Vladimir Putin (ID1974/Shutterstock) and President Joe Biden (Stratos Brilakis/shutterstock)

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Scarcely three months into his presidency, Joe Biden is “leading” the world to the brink of nuclear war over Ukraine. In February, Biden insisted that the US would never accept the Russian annexation of Crimea. Even though 95% of Crimeans voted in 2014 to return to Russia, Biden continues to describe the annexation as “aggression” and an “invasion.” Democratic referendums apparently are irrelevant if Washington disapproves of the outcome. 

Nor did the Russians invade. At the time, Russian troops were already present in Crimea by an earlier agreement with the previous elected Ukrainian government. This kind of distorted history has become standard in what passes for journalism in the West on any issue involving Russia. 

Recently, president Biden had the impertinence to describe Vladimir Putin as a “killer.” I say impertinence because in 2002 Senator Biden himself was the most vocal promoter in the US Senate of the 2003 Iraq War that killed at least a million Iraqis. As Putin put it, “it takes one to know one.”

And when Putin responded to Biden’s “killer” comment by wishing the US president good health and offering to meet with him to discuss world events, Biden brusquely dismissed the offer, saying he was “quite busy.” Well informed people probably gagged at the remark, given Biden’s scaled back work schedule and his visibly worsening mental impairment.

Ukrainian president Zelensky withdrew from the Minsk peace process. And then days later, Zelensky essentially declared war on Russia by issuing a decree stating that, if necessary, Crimea will be liberated from Russian control through military action.

Zelensky also called on the West to expedite Ukraine’s entry into NATO. Should this occur, it would obligate a NATO military response in the event of war. Following his plea, there were a series of emergency meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Since 2014, at least 14,000 Russians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Over seven years, the Ukrainian army has been shelling and terrorizing the Russian towns and communities that lie east of the line of control. The western press has hardly covered any of this violence. When it does, Russia is typically blamed.

As I write, a military buildup is underway in the region. Russian and Ukrainian forces are massing on both sides of the border. The other day, Kremlin officials described the situation along the front line as “unstable” and “terrifying.” Yet, Biden and his advisers appear determined to throw gas on the fire. Days ago, Biden ordered two US destroyers into the Black Sea where a Russian naval buildup is also underway. The US ships were to pass through the Bosporus on April 14-15. 

It is certainly true that the Black Sea is an international waterway. The US Navy has the right to sail there. But given all that has transpired, is it really wise to risk a nuclear showdown with Russia over a regional dispute that surely cannot be vital to US national interests. US officials have never explained why liberating Crimea and eastern Ukraine should be important to Americans.

So, why is Biden engaging in brinksmanship? 

The reason is simple, though it is never mentioned in the western press. Biden and his advisers hope to provoke Russia into a rash military action. They intend to score a propaganda coup by branding Putin as the aggressor. This will enable them to ratchet up enormous political pressure on Germany to cancel the Nordstream II gas pipeline, which is 95% complete. The pipeline starts in northern Russia near St. Petersburg and runs beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany. When finished, the capacious pipeline will provide Germany (and Europe) with abundant cheap natural gas. But Biden’s team views the pipeline as an existential threat to US hegemony in Europe. And it seems they are prepared to take the world to the nuclear brink to prevail on the issue.

Over the years, the US has already expended enormous political capital to force a halt to the Nordstream project. Western intelligence agencies have gone to elaborate lengths, cooking up one scam after another, to increase pressure on the German government.

Some examples are the alleged 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, allegedly by Russia, and the more recent case of dissident Alexei Navalny who was also allegedly targeted with the same Russian-made nerve agent used on the Skripals, known as Novichok.

Despite the sensational charges, media storm, and hyped expulsion of Russian diplomats, both stories have since unraveled. Western intelligence agencies failed to explain how the Skripals and Navalny managed to survive Novichok’s extreme toxicity. The substance is so lethal that even the first responders and doctors who came in contact with the alleged victims should also have died. Does anyone believe that the Russians are so incompetent they failed repeatedly to assassinate their alleged victims using their own nerve agent? 

The smear campaigns may have worked on Americans, but they failed where it matters most, in Germany. 

The US wants to supply Germany with liquified natural gas from North America delivered by tankers at a much higher price. This would make Germany permanently dependent on more expensive US natural gas, while Nordstream II would liberate Germany from US political controls and influence. 

The problem for Washington is that the German government has not budged. A recent poll shows why. Despite all of the attempts to discredit Putin, 67% of Germans still support completion of the Nordstream II project. Typically well informed, the German people understand that the pipeline is vital to their country and to Europe. It’s a safe bet they also see through the CIA’s transparent propaganda.

It is noteworthy that the US-backed 2014 coup that toppled the previous government in Kiev occurred immediately after then-Ukrainian president Yanukovitch had rejected an economic package offered by the European Union (also backed by the US), and instead signed onto a deal with Russia that was much more favorable to Ukraine.

The timing was significant. It was at this point that Washington gave the green light for the coup. After which, the US moved into Ukraine with its own economic “reforms.” Monsanto, for example, ever eager to increase its market share, began buying up large tracts of fertile Ukrainian farmland for the purpose of exporting its GMO poisons into the region.

After failing to block the pipeline using every covert scheme in the CIA and State Department playbook, the Biden team has now upped the stakes. Evidently they are prepared to risk World War III to maintain Germany’s current status as a US vassal. Controlling Germany is one of the keys to controlling Europe.

With regard to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, entry into the NATO alliance is a lengthy process. A number of conditions must first be met and, given that Ukraine is an economic basket case, it is unlikely any of this has occurred. For this reason, Zelensky’s plea for expedited membership may not be feasible. Furthermore, Ukraine’s gloomy economic situation is about to worsen because one of its main sources of revenue is about to disappear.

Because the Nordstream II pipeline passes far to the north and bypasses Ukraine, the country stands to lose $billions in royalty fees it presently collects for Russian gas delivered to Europe across its territory. This is surely why Ukrainian officials have joined with Americans in calling for cancellation of the project.

At the time of his election in 2019, Ukraine president Zelensky promised to end the civil war and make peace with Russia. But the issues have turned out to be so intractable that positions on both sides have since hardened. Russia has no intention of ever surrendering its only warm water port in Crimea, nor will the eastern provinces ever submit to control by Kiev. Putin has begun passing out Russian passports to residents in Luhansk and Donets, and this suggests Moscow could be contemplating the next step, namely, political absorption of both provinces back into Russia.

Given that Biden’s team is doing everything in their power to make a bad situation worse, Putin faces the biggest challenge of his political career. For many years, Putin has been such a model of restraint vis a vis the West, that many Russians feel he has been too accommodating, especially in the face of continued US hostility and warmongering. Not that Russians are spoiling for a fight. My research indicates otherwise. The Russian people have no appetite for war. They understand the horrors of war far more acutely than do Americans. After all, thirty million of their countrymen perished in the debacle with Nazi Germany. Although I believe Putin long since ceased caring what Americans think of him, he knows if he oversteps he risks antagonizing the Germans who could still decide to cancel Nordstream II. So, Putin must tread carefully. But if Ukraine forces the issue, the Russian military is prepared to act.

Assuming the pipeline is completed, I predict it will permanently change Germany’s relationship with the US and with Russia. In that case, the European balance of power will shift eastward. Russia and Germany are natural trading partners. Increased commerce between the two countries will insure the peace in Europe well into the future. Continuing US attempts to block the emergence of this important trade relationship is a testament to failed US leadership dating back many years.

*

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Mark’s latest book is Deep History and the Ages of Man (2020) which is available at Amazon.com. Mark can be reached for comment at markhgaffney@earthlink.net

Featured image is from Asia Times

The Economic and Social Development of the African Continent. A Russian Perspective

April 15th, 2021 by Prof. Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova

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).

***

After the Soviet collapse, Russia has maintained strong and time-tested relations with African countries, and of course, the Soviet Union had played an important role during the decolonization of Africa. The African continent comprises a diverse collection of countries, each with its own set of development setbacks and challenges. The political culture and investment climate are, in fact, diverse but are also important forces in the economy.

According to several development reports, Africa is one of the fastest growing regions in the world: the average annual GDP growth rate estimated at 3.5% to 5% on the continent. The reports have strongly encouraged African leaders to initiate development-oriented policies, prioritize sustainable development as a practical step towards raising the living standards of millions of impoverished population and further guide against the revival of neo-colonialism, the destructive attitude towards the resources in Africa.

In this interview, Associate Professor Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova, Ural Federal University, Department of International Relations and Assistant Professor Alexei Antoshin share their views and opinions about Africa today, the current economic cooperation between Africa and Russia. As widely known, Russia plans to hold the Second Russia-Africa summit in 2022.

Here are the interview excerpts:

Kester Kenn Klomegah: How do researchers (during academic discussions) of the Department of International Relations at Urals State University generally look at Africa today? What are the popular perceptions and so forth about Africa?

Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova: Unfortunately, this region is not actively studied directly by teachers and students of the Department of International Relations at the Urals State University. It is most often explored when examining issues such as human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Alexei Antoshin: For many years, I have been a member of the RAS Scientific Council on African problems, interacting with the RAS Institute for African Studies and the Center for African Studies of the RAS Institute of General History, publishing in scientific journals and collective monographs on this topic. For 20 years now, at the Faculty (Department) of International Relations, I have been teaching the course “Russia and Africa”, dedicated to various spheres of interaction between our country and African states. In addition, for the last five years I have been teaching the course “Culture of Modern Africa” which is also of great interest to the students of the Department of Oriental Studies.

The problem of the influence of African culture on contemporary global art (music, street art, etc.) is of particular interest to students. In addition, annually under my leadership, term papers and graduate qualifications are written on various aspects of China’s policy in Africa, the expansion of Chinese capital, and the activities of Confucius Institutes on the Black Continent.

KKK: What comes to mind when we talk about sustainable development, and its interpretation, in Africa?

Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova: When writing an article on the Red Cross and the SDGs, I came to the conclusion that the main problems are related to the environment (lack of drinking water), the complexity of health care, the problems of realizing the rights of vulnerable groups of the population.

Alexei Antoshin: Unfortunately, Africa firmly holds the first place among continents in terms of poverty, the number of hungry and refugees, and the spread of AIDS. A colossal problem is the conflict potential of the region, political instability, and the failure of democratic transition. True, in comparison with the 1990s, which were extremely unfortunate for the continent, the situation has improved somehow, but many experts attribute this to fluctuations in world oil prices.

KKK: What, in your opinion, are the main challenges hindering the realization of expected development there?

Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova: In my opinion, this is due to historical and geographical factors: the colonial past – there was no desire to develop “economic independence” of the region; consumer attitude to territories and resources; isolation of the region from world production chains. During the Cold War, the USSR and the USA, competing for influence on the continent, were forced to develop industry and infrastructure. After the end of the Cold War, this was no longer necessary. Many states have lost their statehood, centralized power and territorial integrity (Somalia, Libya).

Alexei Antoshin: Yes, unfortunately, paradoxically, Africa is “lost” from the end of the Cold War. Now both the United States and Russia are losing the “battle for Africa” ​​to China: its investments in Africa are several times greater than those of Russia and the United States. The problem is that the Chinese expansion is already causing an ambiguous reaction from the local population: the PRC’s consumer attitude towards the richest resources of the region, underestimation of environmental problems lead to public discontent. An additional factor is activation.

Islamist extremist groups in many countries of the region. The fall of apartheid in South Africa also led to a surge in extremism, the problem of “black racism”, a drop in the level of education in South African universities, which traditionally occupy high places in world rankings.

KKK: Do you think much depends on African leaders and its people (African solutions to African problems) to work toward long-term sustainable development?

Alexei Antoshin: Most experts were skeptical and still refer to the economic programs developed by African leaders and Africans themselves. This applies to integration within the framework of the African Union (copying the European Union is unproductive), and to its economic program NEPAD – New Partnership for Africa’s Development. In the world rankings of bureaucratic corruption, African countries are in the first place.

KKK: How do you interpret current engagement of foreign players (countries) in Africa? Do you also think there is geopolitical competition and rivalry among them there?

Alexei Antoshin: As I have already noted, this competition is underway, since Africa’s resources are colossal. The potential winner is likely to be China.

KKK: Is it appropriate when we use the term “neo-colonialism” referring to activities of foreign players in Africa? What countries are the neo-colonizers in your view?

Alexei Antoshin: Difficult question. Colonialism was a controversial phenomenon: it was the colonialists who created the infrastructure that modern Africa uses. A number of experts call the current policy of the PRC “neo-colonial”, but it is also ambiguous.

KKK: Do you think, with the adoption of African Continental Free Trade (AfCFTA), it offers a window of hope for attaining economic independence for Africa? What role Russia can play in this or of what significance is it for potential Russian investors?

Ksenia Tabarintseva-Romanova: The free trade zone is the most important modern tool for the economic development of regions, but it is not a panacea. Successful implementation requires a sufficiently high level of economic development of the participating countries, logistical accessibility, developed industry with the prospect of introducing new technologies. This means that in order for AfCFTA to effectively fulfill its tasks, it is necessary to enlist the provision of sustainable investment flows from outside. These investments should be directed towards the construction of industrial plants and transport corridors.

President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has stated for several years that Africa is a strategic region for Russia, which has a large number of long-standing economic partners. For example, the construction of a new naval base in Sudan (the creation of service industries, the supply of new equipment, the renewal of the army is envisaged); cancellation of debts to Angola, preparation for the Russia-Africa summit 2022. Russia already has vast experience with the African continent, which now makes it possible to make investments as efficiently as possible, both for the Russian Federation and for African countries.

If we talk about the interaction of the Sverdlovsk Region and Africa, then according to the Ministry of International and Foreign Economic Relations, at the end of 2018, among the trading partner countries of the Sverdlovsk Region, Algeria ranked 22nd among the 159 trading partners of the region. The trade turnover amounted to almost US$ 138 million.

On February 6, 2020, during the visit of the delegation of the Sverdlovsk region to the province of Mpumalanga of South Africa, an Action Plan was signed to implement the Agreement between the Government of the Sverdlovsk Region and the Government of the Mpumalanga Province on the implementation of international and foreign economic relations in trade, economic, scientific, technical, cultural and humanitarian spheres for 2020 – 2022. The following enterprises of the Sverdlovsk Region cooperate with South Africa – OJSC Uralasbest, LLC Viz Steel, PJSC Uralmashzavod.

Alexei Antoshin: Russian state corporations are participating in the “Battle for Africa” and the main significant problem is the high risks associated with investing in Africa. In addition, unfortunately, in Russia there is a shortage of qualified personnel who know African markets, the specifics of the business culture of Africans and so forth. Although there is also an underestimation of the continent’s potential associated with the image of Africa as a “black hole” which is also due to the fact that the bulk of the Soviet debts of African countries had to be written off. These are the realities of the situation with Africa.

*

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The Fukushima-Daiichi Disaster, Ten Years ago, March 11, 2011. 

While commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima tragedy, the evidence amply confirms that this disaster has by no means been resolved. 

“Unimaginable” levels of radiation still prevail. In the words of Dr. Helen Caldicott, “one millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled can cause cancer”.  

The Fukushima disaster in March 2011 resulted in 16,000 deaths, causing some 165,000 people to flee their homes in the Fukushima area.

Both the Japanese and Western media tend to downplay the impacts of nuclear radiation which has spread to vast areas in Northern Japan, not to mention the contamination of the food chain.

The continued dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination.

Amply documented the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was involved in a coverup. And so was the Japanese government. 

The Abe government casually pointed to “harmful rumors”. The present government’s stance remains ambiguous. 

TEPCO has acknowledged that the decommissioning of the Fukushima facility could last until 2051.

In recent developments, the Japan government of Prime Minster Yoshihide has confirmed that

“it will release treated radioactive water [tritium] from Fukushima nuclear plant into sea”. The PM met with is Cabinet to formalise this decision on April 13, 2021.” (SCMP).

The Worldwide public health impacts which includes the contamination of the Pacific Ocean extending to the Western Hemisphere are incalculable.

***

Originally published in  January 2012, this study by Michel Chossudovsky confirms what is now unfolding: a Worldwide process of nuclear radiation.

Note to Readers: Remember to bookmark this page for future reference.

Please Forward the GR I-Book far and wide. Post it on Facebook.

[scroll down for I-BOOK Table of Contents]

Originally published in January 2012. The introduction of the I-Book is contained as a chapter in Michel Chossudovsky’s 2015 bestseller:  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity, Global Research, Montreal 2015

*       *       *

GLOBAL RESEARCH ONLINE INTERACTIVE READER SERIES

Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War

The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation

Michel Chossudovsky (Editor)

I-Book No. 3, January 25  2012

Global Research’s Online Interactive I-Book Reader brings together, in the form of chapters, a collection of Global Research feature articles and videos, including debate and analysis, on a broad theme or subject matter. 

In this Interactive Online I-Book we bring to the attention of our readers an important collection of articles, reports and video material on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and its impacts (scroll down for the Table of Contents).

To consult our Online Interactive I-Book Reader Series, click here.

INTRODUCTION

The World is at a critical crossroads. The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation.

The crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war”. In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami:

“This time no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.”

Nuclear radiation –which threatens life on planet earth– is not front page news in comparison to the most insignificant issues of public concern, including the local level crime scene or the tabloid gossip reports on Hollywood celebrities.

While the long-term repercussions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are yet to be fully assessed, they are far more serious than those pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, which resulted in almost one million deaths (New Book Concludes – Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer Global Research, September 10, 2010, See also Matthew Penney and Mark Selden  The Severity of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster: Comparing Chernobyl and Fukushima, Global Research, May 25, 2011)

Moreover, while all eyes were riveted on the Fukushima Daiichi plant, news coverage both in Japan and internationally failed to fully acknowledge the impacts of a second catastrophe at TEPCO’s (Tokyo Electric Power Co  Inc) Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant.

The shaky political consensus both in Japan, the U.S. and Western Europe is that the crisis at Fukushima has been contained.

The realties, however, are otherwise. Fukushima 3 was leaking unconfirmed amounts of plutonium. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott, “one millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled can cause cancer”.  

An opinion poll in May 2011 confirmed that more than 80 per cent of the Japanese population do not believe the government’s information regarding the nuclear crisis. (quoted in Sherwood Ross, Fukushima: Japan’s Second Nuclear Disaster, Global Research, November 10, 2011)

The Impacts in Japan

The Japanese government has been obliged to acknowledge that “the severity rating of its nuclear crisis … matches that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster”. In a bitter irony, however, this tacit admission by the Japanese authorities has proven to been part of  the cover-up of a significantly larger catastrophe, resulting in a process of global nuclear radiation and contamination:

“While Chernobyl was an enormous unprecedented disaster, it only occurred at one reactor and rapidly melted down. Once cooled, it was able to be covered with a concrete sarcophagus that was constructed with 100,000 workers. There are a staggering 4400 tons of nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima, which greatly dwarfs the total size of radiation sources at Chernobyl.” ( Extremely High Radiation Levels in Japan: University Researchers Challenge Official Data, Global Research, April 11, 2011)

Fukushima in the wake of the Tsunami, March 2011

Worldwide Contamination

The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination. Radioactive elements have not only been detected in the food chain in Japan, radioactive rain water has been recorded in California:

“Hazardous radioactive elements being released in the sea and air around Fukushima accumulate at each step of various food chains (for example, into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow’s meat and milk, then humans). Entering the body, these elements – called internal emitters – migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, continuously irradiating small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years often induce cancer”. (Helen Caldicott, Fukushima: Nuclear Apologists Play Shoot the Messenger on Radiation, The Age,  April 26, 2011)

While the spread of radiation to the West Coast of North America was casually acknowledged, the early press reports (AP and Reuters) “quoting diplomatic sources” stated that only “tiny amounts of radioactive particles have arrived in California but do not pose a threat to human health.”

“According to the news agencies, the unnamed sources have access to data from a network of measuring stations run by the United Nations’ Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. …

… Greg Jaczko, chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told White House reporters on Thursday (March 17) that his experts “don’t see any concern from radiation levels that could be harmful here in the United States or any of the U.S. territories”.

 

 

The spread of radiation. March 2011

Public Health Disaster. Economic Impacts

What prevails is a well organized camouflage. The public health disaster in Japan, the contamination of water, agricultural land and the food chain, not to mention the broader economic and social implications, have neither been fully acknowledged nor addressed in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion by the Japanese authorities.

Japan as a nation state has been destroyed. Its landmass and territorial waters are contaminated. Part of the country is uninhabitable. High levels of radiation have been recorded in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of  39 million (2010) (more than the population of Canada, circa 34 million (2010)) There are indications that the food chain is contaminated throughout Japan:

Radioactive cesium exceeding the legal limit was detected in tea made in a factory in Shizuoka City, more than 300 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Shizuoka Prefecture is one of the most famous tea producing areas in Japan.

A tea distributor in Tokyo reported to the prefecture that it detected high levels of radioactivity in the tea shipped from the city. The prefecture ordered the factory to refrain from shipping out the product. After the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, radioactive contamination of tea leaves and processed tea has been found over a wide area around Tokyo. (See 5 More Companies Detect Radiation In Their Tea Above Legal Limits Over 300 KM From Fukushima, June 15, 2011)

Japan’s industrial and manufacturing base is prostrate. Japan is no longer a leading industrial power. The country’s exports have plummeted. The Tokyo government has announced its first trade deficit since 1980.

While the business media has narrowly centered on the impacts of power outages and energy shortages on the pace of productive activity, the broader issue pertaining to the outright radioactive contamination of the country’s infrastructure and industrial base is a “scientific taboo” (i.e the radiation of industrial plants, machinery and equipment, buildings, roads, etc). A report released in January 2012 points to the nuclear contamination of building materials used in the construction industry, in cluding roads and residential buildings throughout Japan.(See  FUKUSHIMA: Radioactive Houses and Roads in Japan. Radioactive Building Materials Sold to over 200 Construction Companies, January 2012)

A “coverup report” by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (May 2011), entitled Economic Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Current Status of Recovery  presents “Economic Recovery” as a fait accompli. It also brushes aside the issue of radiation. The impacts of nuclear radiation on the work force and the country’s industrial base are not mentioned. The report states that the distance between Tokyo -Fukushima Dai-ichi  is of the order of 230 km (about 144 miles) and that the levels of radiation in Tokyo are lower than in Hong Kong and New York City.(Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Current Status of Recovery, p.15). This statement is made without corroborating evidence and in overt contradiction with independent radiation readings in Tokyo (se map below). In recent developments, Sohgo Security Services Co. is launching a lucrative “radiation measurement service targeting households in Tokyo and four surrounding prefectures”.

A map of citizens’ measured radiation levels shows radioactivity is distributed in a complex pattern reflecting the mountainous terrain and the shifting winds across a broad area of Japan north of Tokyo which is in the center of the of bottom of the map.”

SOURCE: Science Magazine

“Radiation limits begin to be exceeded at just above 0.1 microsieverts/ hour blue. Red is about fifty times the civilian radiation limit at 5.0 microsieverts/hour. Because children are much more sensitive than adults, these results are a great concern for parents of young children in potentially affected areas.”

The fundamental question is whether the vast array of industrial goods and components “Made in Japan” — including hi tech components, machinery, electronics, motor vehicles, etc — and exported Worldwide are contaminated? Were this to be the case, the entire East and Southeast Asian industrial base –which depends heavily on Japanese components and industrial technology– would be affected. The potential impacts on international trade would be farreaching. In this regard, in January, Russian officials confiscated irradiated Japanese automobiles and autoparts in the port of Vladivostok for sale in the Russian Federation. Needless to say, incidents of this nature in a global competitive environment, could lead to the demise of the Japanese automobile industry which is already in crisis.

While most of the automotive industry is in central Japan, Nissan’s engine factory in Iwaki city is 42 km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Is the Nissan work force affected? Is the engine plant contaminated? The plant is within about 10 to 20 km of the government’s “evacuation zone” from which some 200,000 people were evacuated (see map below).

Nuclear Energy and Nuclear War

The crisis in Japan has also brought into the open the unspoken relationship between nuclear energy and nuclear war.

Nuclear energy is not a civilian economic activity. It is an appendage of the nuclear weapons industry which is controlled by the so-called defense contractors. The powerful corporate interests behind nuclear energy and nuclear weapons overlap.

In Japan at the height of the disaster, “the nuclear industry and government agencies [were] scrambling to prevent the discovery of atomic-bomb research facilities hidden inside Japan’s civilian nuclear power plants”.1  (See Yoichi Shimatsu, Secret Weapons Program Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant? Global Research,  April 12, 2011)

It should be noted that the complacency of both the media and the governments to the hazards of nuclear radiation pertains to the nuclear energy industry as well as to to use of nuclear weapons. In both cases, the devastating health impacts of nuclear radiation are casually denied. Tactical nuclear weapons with an explosive capacity of up to six times a Hiroshima bomb are labelled by the Pentagon as “safe for the surrounding civilian population”.

No concern has been expressed at the political level as to the likely consequences of a US-NATO-Israel attack on Iran, using “safe for civilians” tactical nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.

Such an action would result in “the unthinkable”: a nuclear holocaust over a large part of the Middle East and Central Asia. A nuclear nightmare, however, would occur even if nuclear weapons were not used. The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities using conventional weapons would contribute to unleashing another Fukushima type disaster with extensive radioactive fallout. (For further details See Michel Chossudovsky, Towards a World War III Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War, Global Research, Montreal, 2011)

The Online Interactive I-Book Reader on Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War

In view of the official cover-up and media disinformation campaign, the contents of the articles and video reports in this Online Interactive Reader have not trickled down to to the broader public. (See Table of contents below)

This Online Interactive Reader on Fukushima contains a combination of analytical and scientific articles, video reports as well as shorter news reports and corroborating data.

Part I focusses on The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: How it Happened? Part II  pertains to The Devastating Health and Social Impacts in Japan. Part III  centers on the “Hidden Nuclear Catastrophe”, namely the cover-up by the Japanese government and the corporate media. Part IV focusses on the issue of  Worlwide Nuclear Radiation and Part V reviews the Implications of the Fukushima disaster for the Global Nuclear Energy Industry.

In the face of ceaseless media disinformation, this Global Research Online I-Book on the dangers of global nuclear radiation is intended to break the media vacuum and raise public awareness, while also pointing to the complicity of  the governments, the media and the nuclear industry.

We call upon our readers to spread the word.

We invite university, college and high school teachers to make this Interactive Reader on Fukushima available to their students.

Michel Chossudovsky, January 25, 2012


Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War

Michel Chossudovsky

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” –Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“.  

Click here to order directly from Global Research.

List Price: $15.95

Special Price: $10.25

Click here to order.

This title is also available for purchase through the Amazon Kindle program


TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: How it Happened

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: What Happened on “Day One”?
– by Yoichi Shimatsu – 2011-04-16
Fukushima is the greatest nuclear and environmental disaster in human history
– by Steven C. Jones – 2011-06-20

Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan
Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and cover-up
– by Keith Harmon Snow – 2011-03-18

Humanity now faces a deadly serious challenge coming out of Japan — the epicenter of radiation.

VIDEO: Full Meltdown? Japan Maximum Nuclear Alert
Watch now on GRTV
-by Christopher Busby- 2011-03-30

Fukushima: Japan’s Second Nuclear Disaster

– by Sherwood Ross – 2011-11-10

Secret Weapons Program Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant?
U.S.-Japan security treaty fatally delayed nuclear workers’ fight against meltdown
– by Yoichi Shimatsu – 2011-04-12

The specter of self-destruction can be ended only with the abrogation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, the root cause of the secrecy that fatally delayed the nuclear workers’ fight against meltdown.

Fukushima: “China Syndrome Is Inevitable” … “Huge Steam Explosions”
“Massive Hydrovolcanic Explosion” or a “Nuclear Bomb-Type Explosion” May Occur
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-11-22

Accident at Second Japanese Nuclear Complex: The Nuclear Accident You Never Heard About

– by Washington’s Blog – 2012-01-12

VIDEO: New TEPCO Photographs Substantiate Significant Damage to Fukushima Unit 3
Latest report now on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-10-20

PART II

The Devastating Health and Social Impacts in Japan

VIDEO: Surviving Japan: A Critical Look at the Nuclear Crisis
Learn more about this important new documentary on GRTV
– by Chris Noland – 2012-01-23

Fukushima and the Battle for Truth
Large sectors of the Japanese population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination
– by Paul Zimmerman – 2011-09-27

FUKUSHIMA: Public health Fallout from Japanese Quake
“Culture of cover-up” and inadequate cleanup. Japanese people exposed to “unconscionable” health risks
– by Canadian Medical Association Journal – 2011-12-30

FUKUSHIMA: Radioactive Houses and Roads in Japan. Radioactive Building Materials Sold to over 200 Construction Companies

– 2012-01-16

VIDEO: Cancer Risk To Young Children Near Fukushima Daiichi Underestimated
Watch this important new report on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2012-01-19

VIDEO: The Results Are In: Japan Received Enormous Exposures of Radiation from Fukushima
Important new video now on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen, Marco Kaltofen – 2011-11-07

The Tears of Sanriku (三陸の涙). The Death Toll for the Great East Japan Earthquake Nuclear Disaster

– by Jim Bartel – 2011-10-31

The Severity of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster: Comparing Chernobyl and Fukushima

– by Prof. Matthew Penney, Prof. Mark Selden – 2011-05-24

Uncertainty about the long-term health effects of radiation

Radioactivity in Food: “There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources. Period,” – by Physicians For Social Responsibility – 2011-03-23

71,000 people in the city next to the Fukushima nuclear plant “We’ve Been Left to Die” – 2011-03-19

Tokyo Water Unsafe For Babies, Food Bans Imposed – by Karyn Poupee – 2011-03-23

 

PART III

Hidden Nuclear Catastrophe: Cover-up by the Japanese Government and the Corporate Media

VIDEO: Japanese Government Insiders Reveal Fukushima Secrets
GRTV Behind the Headlines now online
– by James Corbett – 2011-10-06

Fukushima and the Mass Media Meltdown
The Repercussions of a Pro-Nuclear Corporate Press
– by Keith Harmon Snow – 2011-06-20

Scandal: Japan Forces Top Official To Retract Prime Minister’s Revelation Fukushima Permanently Uninhabitable

– by Alexander Higgins – 2011-04-18

Emergency Special Report: Japan’s Earthquake, Hidden Nuclear Catastrophe
– by Yoichi Shimatsu – 2011-03-13

The tendency to deny systemic errors – “in order to avoid public panic” – is rooted in the determination of an entrenched Japanese bureaucracy to protect itself…

VIDEO: Fukushima: TEPCO Believes Mission Accomplished & Regulators Allow Radioactive Dumping in Tokyo Bay
Learn more on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2012-01-11

The Dangers of Radiation: Deconstructing Nuclear Experts
– by Chris Busby – 2011-03-31

“The nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity.” This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of the human race.

Engineers Knew Fukushima Might Be Unsafe, But Covered It Up …
And Now the Extreme Vulnerabilty of NEW U.S. Plants Is Being Covered Up
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-11-12

COVERUP: Are Fukushima Reactors 5 and 6 In Trouble Also?
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-11-14

Fukushima’s Owner Adds Insult to Injury – Claims Radioactive Fallout Isn’t Theirs

– by John LaForge – 2012-01-17

PART IV

The Process of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation

VIDEO: Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: The Dangers of Worldwide Radiation

– by Dr. Helen Caldicott – 2012-01-25

An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the US Follows Arrival of Radioactive Plume from Fukushima, Is there a Correlation?
– by Dr. Joseph J. Mangano, Dr. Janette Sherman – 2011-12-20

In the US, Following the Fukushima fallout, samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal…

Radioactive Dust From Japan Hit North America 3 Days After Meltdown
But Governments “Lied” About Meltdowns and Radiation
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-06-24

VIDEO: Fukushima Will Be Radiating Everyone for Centuries
New report now on GRTV
– by Michio Kaku, Liz Hayes – 2011-08-23

Fukushima: Diseased Seals in Alaska tested for Radiation

– 2011-12-29

Radiation Spreads to France

– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-11-15

Radioactive rain causes 130 schools in Korea to close — Yet rain in California had 10 TIMES more radioactivity

PART V

Implications for the Global Nuclear Energy Industry

 

Science with a Skew: The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima
– by Gayle Greene – 2012-01-26

After Fukushima: Enough Is Enough

– by Helen Caldicott – 2011-12-05

VIDEO: Radiation Coverups Confirmed: Los Alamos, Fort Calhoun, Fukushima, TSA
New Sunday Report now on GRTV
– by James Corbett – 2011-07-04

VIDEO: Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Don’t Want You to Know
Watch now on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen, David Lochbaum – 2011-07-12

VIDEO: Safety Problems in all Reactors Designed Like Fukushima
Learn more on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-09-26

VIDEO: Proper Regulation of Nuclear Power has been Coopted Worldwide
Explore the issues on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-10-05

VIDEO: New Nuclear Reactors Do Not Consider Fukushima Design Flaws
Find out more on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-11-24

Nuclear Energy: Profit Driven Industry
“Nuclear Can Be Safe Or It Can Be Cheap … But It Can’t Be Both”
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-12-23

VIDEO: Fukushima and the Fall of the Nuclear Priesthood
Watch the new GRTV Feature Interview
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-10-22

Why is there a Media Blackout on Nuclear Incident at Fort Calhoun in Nebraska?

– by Patrick Henningsen – 2011-06-23

Startling Revelations about Three Mile Island Disaster Raise Doubts Over Nuke Safety

– by Sue Sturgis – 2011-07-24

Radioactive Leak at Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Station

– by Rady Ananda – 2011-07-01

VIDEO: US vs Japan: The Threat of Radiation Speculation
Dangerous double standards examined on GRTV
– by Arnie Gundersen – 2011-06-25

Additional articles and videos on Fukushima and Nuclear Radiation are available at Global Research’s Dossier on The Environment


TEXT BOX

 Nuclear Radiation: Categorization

At Fukushima, reports confirm that alpha, beta, gamma particles and neutrons have been released:

“While non-ionizing radiation and x-rays are a result of electron transitions in atoms or molecules, there are three forms of ionizing radiation that are a result of activity within the nucleus of an atom.  These forms of nuclear radiation are alpha particles (α-particles), beta particles (β-particles) and gamma rays (γ-rays).

Alpha particles are heavy positively charged particles made up of two protons and two neutrons.  They are essentially a helium nucleus and are thus represented in a nuclear equation by either α or .  See the Alpha Decay page for more information on alpha particles.

Beta particles come in two forms:  and  particles are just electrons that have been ejected from the nucleus.  This is a result of sub-nuclear reactions that result in a neutron decaying to a proton.  The electron is needed to conserve charge and comes from the nucleus.  It is not an orbital electron.  particles are positrons ejected from the nucleus when a proton decays to a neutron.  A positron is an anti-particle that is similar in nearly all respects to an electron, but has a positive charge.  See the Beta Decay page for more information on beta particles.

Gamma rays are photons of high energy electromagnetic radiation (light).  Gamma rays generally have the highest frequency and shortest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.  There is some overlap in the frequencies of gamma rays and x-rays; however, x-rays are formed from electron transitions while gamma rays are formed from nuclear transitions. See the Gamma Rays  for more” (SOURCE: Canadian Nuclear Association)

A neutron is a particle that is found in the nucleus, or center, of atoms. It has a mass very close to protons, which also reside in the nucleus of atoms. Together, they make up almost all of the mass of individual atoms. Each has a mass of about 1 amu, which is roughly 1.6×10-27kg. Protons have a positive charge and neutrons have no charge, which is why they were more difficult to discover.” (SOURCE: Neutron Radiation)


“Many different radioactive isotopes are used in or are produced by nuclear reactors. The most important of these are described below:

1. Uranium 235 (U-235) is the active component of most nuclear reactor fuel.

2. Plutonium (Pu-239) is a key nuclear material used in modern nuclear weapons and is also present as a by-product in certain reprocessed fuels used in some nuclear reactors. Pu-239 is also produced in uranium reactors as a byproduct of fission of U-235.

3. Cesium (Cs-137 ) is a fission product of U-235. It emits beta and gamma radiation and can cause radiation sickness and death if exposures are high enough. …

4. Iodine 131 (I-131), also a fission product of U-235, emits beta and gamma radiation. After inhalation or ingestion, it is absorbed by and concentrated in the thyroid gland, where its beta radiation damages nearby thyroid tissue  (SOURCE: Amesh A. Adalja, MD, Eric S. Toner, MD, Anita Cicero, JD, Joseph Fitzgerald, MS, MPH, and Thomas V. Inglesby MD, Radiation at Fukushima: Basic Issues and Concepts, March 31, 2011)


Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He has taught as Visiting Professor at universities in Western Europe, South East Asia, Latin America and The Pacific, acted as adviser to governments of developing countries and as a consultant to several international organizations.

Prof. Chossudovsky is a signatory of the Kuala Lumpur declaration to criminalize war and recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, Germany. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.

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The Indiana legislature debated the issue, but Democrats blocked a vote on it.

South Carolina’s Senate unanimously voted to ban employers from mandating Covid vaccinations for employees.

And from the airlines organization, IATA, comes a hopeful sign:  “These are measures that may be necessary as temporary arrangements while we go through this crisis, but once we’re through it, we want to see these restrictions permanently removed so people can get back to traveling as they experienced back in 2019,” Willie Walsh, former CEO of British Airways’ parent International Consolidated Airlines Group, said in his first press briefing as IATA’s director general.

The WHO came out against the passports in February, issuing a note of caution–since most humans have no current access to vaccines, many lack smartphones, and the privacy issues are huge.  Many say the systems now being used can be easily hacked.

WHO position

At the present time, it is WHO’s position that national authorities and conveyance operators should not introduce requirements of proof of COVID-19 vaccination for international travel as a condition for departure or entry, given that there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission. In addition, considering that there is limited availability of vaccines, preferential vaccination of travellers could result in inadequate supplies of vaccines for priority populations considered at high risk of severe COVID-19 disease. WHO also recommends that people who are vaccinated should not be exempt from complying with other travel risk-reduction measures.

This is a great issue to work on with your own governors and legislatures–it is a great opportunity to throw a “spanner in the works” of the Great Reset.

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Australia’s Self-Inflicted Economic Woes Continue

April 15th, 2021 by Joseph Thomas

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This was first published in March 2020.

In this expose, the WHO vaccine experts admit that:

  • Vaccines can be fatal.
  • The design of safety studies makes it difficult to spot problems.
  • Safety monitoring is inadequate.
  • Vaccine adjuvants increase risk.

“The FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from the pharmaceutical industry.

The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations.

And the CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company; it owns 56 vaccine patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children program, which is over 40% of its total budget.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr 

1) An admission that adjuvants can multiply the toxicity of vaccines:

“Adjuvants multiply the immunogenicity of the antigens that they are added to, and that is their intention.  It seems to me they multiply the reactogenicity in many instances, and therefore it seems to me that it is not unexpected if they multiply the incidence of adverse reactions that are associated with the antigen, but may not have been detected through lack of statistical power in the original studies.”Stephen Evans, BA, MSc, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) 

2) Warnings about long-term systemic toxicity from vaccine adjuvants:

“You are correct. As we add adjuvants, especially some of the more recent adjuvants, such as the ASO1, saponin-derived adjuvants, we do see increased local reactogenicity. The primary concern, though, usually is systemic adverse events rather than local adverse events. And we tend to get in the Phase II and the Phase III studies quite good data on the local reactogenicity. Those of us in this room that are beyond the age of 50 who have had the pleasure of having the recent shingles vaccine, will know that this does have quite significant local reactogenicity. If you got the vaccine, you know that you got the vaccine. But this is not the major health concern. The major health concern which we are seeing are accusations of long term, long term effects. So, to come back to this, I’m going to once again point to the regulators. It comes down to ensuring that we conduct Phase II and the Phase III studies with adequate size and with the appropriate measurement.”Martin Howell Friede, PhD (Biochemistry) – WHO coordinator for the Initiative for Vaccine Research

3) An admission that the WHO and Big Pharma are panicking because some doctors and cover-up of vaccine injuries:

“There’s a lot of safety science that’s needed, and without the good science, we can’t have good communication. Although I’m talking about all these other contextual issues and communication issues it absolutely needs the science as the backbone. You can’t repurpose the same old science to make it sound better if you don’t have the science that’s relevant to the new problem. So, we need much more investment in safety science…The other thing that’s a trend and an issue is not just confidence in patients but confidence of health care providers. We have a very wobbly health professional front line that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. When the front-line professionals are starting to question (the safety of vaccines) or they don’t feel like they have enough confidence about the safety to stand up to it to the person asking them the questions.  I mean, most medical school curriculums, even nursing curriculums, I mean in medical school you’re lucky if you have a half-day on vaccines. Never mind keeping up to date with all this.”Heidi Larson, PhD (in Anthropology – and therefore likely to be vaccinology-illiterate!) and Director of the Big Pharma-funded Vaccine Confidence Project

4) An admission that vaccine clinical safety trials are flawed and that vaccines damage children far more than they damage adults:

“One of the additional issues that complicates safety evaluation is that if you look at, and you struggle with the length of follow-up that should be adequate in a, let’s say a pre-licensure or even post-marketing study if that’s even possible. And again, as you mentioned pre-licensure clinical trials may not be powered enough. It’s also the subject population that you administer the adjuvant to because we’ve seen data presented to us where an adjuvant, a particular adjuvant added to a vaccine antigen did really nothing when administered to a certain population and usually the elderly, you know, compared to administering the same formulation to younger age strata.  So, these are things which need to be considered as well and further complicate safety and effectiveness evaluation of adjuvants combined with vaccine antigens.”  Marion Gruber, PhD – Director, FDA Office of Vaccines Research and Review (OVRR) and the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER)

5) A warning about the lack of vaccine safety monitoring systems:

“I think we cannot over-emphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries, and this adds to the miscommunication and the misapprehensions because we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine, and this always gets blown up in the media. One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly has happened and what the causes of the deaths are, but in most cases there is some obfuscation at that level and therefore, there’s less and less trust then in the system.” Soumya Swaminathan, MD, WHO Chief Scientist and non-practicing Pediatrician (involved in academics and research ever since her medical training)

6) An admission that viral fragments don’t work and that adjuvants are responsible for the toxic inflammatory responses to vaccines.

“Every time that there is an association, be it temporal or not temporal, the first accusation is it is the adjuvant. And yet, without adjuvants, we are not going to have the next generation of vaccines.  And many of the vaccines that we do have, ranging from tetanus through to HPV require adjuvants in order for them to work.  So, the challenge that we have in front of us is:  How do we build confidence in this? And the confidence first of all comes from the regulatory agencies (I look to Marion). When we add an adjuvant it’s because it is essential.  We do not add adjuvants to vaccines because we want to do so.  But when we add them, it adds to the complexity. I give courses every year on “How do you develop vaccines?”, “How do you make vaccines?” And the first lesson is, while you’re making your vaccine, if you can avoid using an adjuvant, please do so.  Lesson two is, if you’re going to use an adjuvant, use one that has a history of safety. And lesson three is, if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully.” Martin Howell Friede, WHO Coordinator for the Initiative for Vaccine Research and member of the Strategic Advisory Committee for Hilleman Labs – a vaccine research company co-owned by US drug maker Merck  and Britain’s Wellcome Trust.

7) An admission that vaccine safety tracking systems don’t exist.

“Now the only way to tease that out is if you have a large population database like the vaccine safety datalink as well as some of the other national databases that are coming to being worthy. Actual vaccine exposure is trapped down to that level of specificity of who is the manufacturer? What is the lot number? Etc, etc. And there’s an initiative to try to make the vaccine label information bar-coded so that it includes that level of information. So that in the future when we do these type of studies, we are able to tease that out. And in order to be – each time you subdivide them, the sample size gets becoming more and more challenging and that’s what I said earlier today about that we’re really only in the beginning of the era of large data sets where hopefully you could start to kind of harmonize the databases for multiple studies. And there’s actually an initiative underway… Marion (Gruber) may want to comment on it to try to get more national vaccine safety database linked together so we could start to answer these types of questions that you just raised.”Robert Chen, MD – Scientific Director, Brighton Collaboration The motto of the Brighton  Collaboration was “We build trust in the safety of vaccines through rigorous science”

8) An admission that the WHO doesn’t understand the mechanisms of vaccine toxicity.

“So in our clinical trials, we are actually using relatively small sample sizes, and when we do that we’re at risk of tyranny of small numbers, which is, you just need a single case of Wegener’s Granulomatosis, and your vaccine has to, solve Walt’s, How do you prove a Null Hypothesis? …And it takes years and years to try to figure that out. It’s a real conundrum, right? Getting the right size, dealing with the tyranny of small numbers, making sure that you can really do it. And so I think one of the things that we really need to invest in are kind of better biomarkers, better mechanistic understanding of how these things work so we can better understand adverse events as they come up.” David Kaslow, MD, VP of Essential Medicines, Drug Development program PATH Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access (CVIA) Dr Kaslow has been a non-clinical researcher for decades with past relationships with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Merck.

9) A naïve question directed to WHO experts (and not answered by them) that points out the reality that Big Vaccine corporations have NEVER done studies on the synergistic damage vaccine toxicities that happen when more than two vaccines are injected at the same office visit.

“I cast back my mind to our situation in Nigeria where at six weeks, ten weeks, fourteen weeks, a child is being given different antigens from different companies, and these vaccines have different adjuvants and different preservatives and so on. Something crosses my mind… is there possibility of these adjuvants, preservatives, cross-reacting amongst themselves? Have there ever been a study on the possibility of cross-reactions on from the past that you can share the experience with us?”Bassey Okposen – Program Manager, National Emergency Routine Immunization Coordination Centre (NERICC). Abuja, Nigeria

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Dr Kohls practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth for the last decade of his family practice career prior to his retirement in 2008, primarily helping patients who had become addicted to cocktails of psychiatric drugs to safely go through the complex withdrawal process. His column often deals with various unappreciated health issues, including those caused by Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas and Big Food’s malnourishing food industry. Those four sociopathic entities can combine to even more adversely affect the physical, mental, spiritual and economic health of the recipients of the vaccines, drugs, medical treatments and the eaters of the tasty and ubiquitous “Franken Foods” – particularly when they are consumed in combinations, doses and potencies that have never been tested for safety or long-term effectiveness.

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national; https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/; and 

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

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According to the Business Standard:

Later on Wednesday the President of the European Commission said the EU was in talks with Pfizer and BionTech for a new contract for 1.8 billion doses, confirming a Reuters report from last week. “We need to focus on technologies that have proven their worth. mRNA vaccines are a clear case in point,” she added.

There are 448 million humans in the EU.  Why in heaven’s name would each one of them, regardless of age, need 4 shots in 2022 after they are fully vaccinated this year?

Here in the US, as we approach herd immunity, it looks like approximately half the population does not want these experimental shots, at least not at this time.  If the same holds true in Europe, are they planning for 8 shots per person?  Or forced vaccinations?

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One patient died, two suffered anaphylactic reactions, three have ongoing disabling dizziness, muscle weakness, and chronic pain, and “numerous” patients developed allergic reactions after they received a first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine given to 900 mostly Indigenous people, according to a local doctor who works in the tiny Fraser Valley village of Lytton, British Columbia.

“I have been quite alarmed at the high rate of serious side effects from this novel treatment,” family doctor Charles Hoffe wrote in an April 5 letter to British Columbia Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry.

A 72-year-old patient with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) but no underlying cardiovascular disease complained of being continually more short of breath after receiving a first dose of Moderna’s experimental COVID vaccine, and 24 days after the injection, died “very suddenly and unexpectedly,” the letter said.

Three of Hoffe’s patients have “ongoing and disabling neurological deficits,” including continuing “disabling dizziness,” “neuromuscular weakness, with or without sensory loss” and “chronic pain,” with or without headaches. These ailments persisted for 10 weeks after their shots of the  Moderna’s vaccine.

“It must be emphasized, that these people were not sick people, being treated for some devastating disease,” Hoffe wrote. “These were previously healthy people, who were offered an experimental therapy, with unknown long-term side effects, to protect them against an illness that has the same mortality rate as the flu. Sadly, their lives have now been ruined.”

Hoffe said two patients had anaphylactic reactions – life-threatening allergic reactions that can cause swelling of the throat, hives internally and externally, and dangerously low blood pressure – to the Moderna vaccine and “numerous” others have had milder allergic reactions.

Lytton is a village municipality with a population of 249 at last count in 2016, with another 1,700 living in the vicinity and on reserves of the neighboring six Nlaka’pamux communities. Hoffe is one of three doctors who works at the Lytton Medical Clinic and at St. Bartholomew’s Emergency Department.

“Are these considered normal and acceptable long-term side effects for gene modification therapy?” Hoffe asked the provincial health officer.

“Do you have any idea what disease processes may have been initiated, to be producing these ongoing neurological symptoms,” the doctor asked in his letter to the government health officer.

To date, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2,342 deaths, including 1,170 linked to Moderna’s vaccine. There are 304 reported anaphylactic shock events with Moderna’s vaccine.

A total of 941 permanent disabilities after COVID vaccination have been reported to VAERS, including 450 after Moderna shots.
Reports from VAERS include a 35-year-old Oklahoma man who developed nerve pain in both legs four hours after an injection of the first dose of Moderna vaccine and became progressively paralyzed and was diagnosed with Guillain Barre Syndrome five days after the shot.

A 33-year-old woman from Nevada’s report said her breathing became difficult within three hours of receiving a shot of Moderna’s vaccine in January and she experienced paralysis, was hospitalized for five days, and is still unable to use her left arm three months later.

While public health officials have stated that only “one or two in a million” people are expected to have anaphylactic reactions to vaccines, a study published in March in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported an overall allergic reaction rate of 2 percent in the vaccinated health care workers it sampled. Anaphylactic allergic reactions to mRNA-based COVID vaccines occurred at a rate of 2.47 per 10,000, which is 247 in a million. The JAMA study found that the allergic reactions were more frequent among those who received Moderna’s COVID vaccine compared with Pfizer’s.

Hoffe’s letter to the provincial health officer said that he had noticed that “vaccine-induced side effects are going almost entirely unreported” and that the provincial vaccine injury reporting form “does not even have any place to report vaccine injuries of the nature and severity that we are seeing from this new mRNA therapy.”

“I am aware that this is often a problem, with vaccines in general, and that delayed side effects after vaccines are sometimes labeled as being ‘coincidences,’ as causality is often hard to prove. However, in view of the fact that this is an experimental treatment, with no long-term safety data, I think that perhaps this issue should be addressed too,” Hoffe wrote.

During the public health pandemic, the Lytton doctors have not treated any patients with COVID-19, Hoffe said. “So in our limited experience, this vaccine is quite clearly more dangerous than COVID-19.”

Given that the recovery rate from COVID-19 is similar to that of seasonal flu for every age category, and given that this was only the first dose and Moderna’s second-dose of the vaccine is known to have worse side effects, Hoffe asked the provincial health officer: “Is it medically ethical to continue this vaccine rollout, in view of the severity of these life altering side effects, after just the first shot?”

LifeSiteNews contacted B.C Provincial Health Officer Henry’s office to ask what her responses had been to Dr. Hoffe’s questions in his public letter. Her media relations officer asked for the request to be sent by e-mail but did not reply to it on Wednesday.

Dr. Hoffe’s office said he was out of the clinic until next week.

Moderna’s vaccine has been granted Emergency Use Authorization only. Clinical trials are not expected to be completed until at least October 2022.

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Denmark has become the first country to permanently halt the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine following its possible link to very rare cases of blood clots.

The Danish health authority said on Wednesday that, following its own review, the country’s vaccine rollout would continue without the AstraZeneca shot, as it warned of a “real risk of severe side effects.”

“Based on the scientific findings, our overall assessment is there is a real risk of severe side effects associated with using the COVID-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca,” said DHA director general Søren Brostrøm. “We have, therefore, decided to remove the vaccine from our vaccination program,” he added.

The health agency said it agreed with the European Union drug regulator’s assessment that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, but noted that the watchdog urged individual countries to consider their own situations and vaccine availability when making a judgment.

Brostrøm said the epidemic was currently under control in Denmark, with a large proportion of the older population vaccinated and those yet to be inoculated at less of a risk.

“We must weigh this against the fact that we now have a known risk of severe adverse effects from vaccination with AstraZeneca, even if the risk in absolute terms is slight,” he added.

Those who have already received the first dose of AstraZeneca AZN, 2.73% AZN, 1.95% will be invited to have a different vaccine second time around, the health authority said.

It added that Denmark could reintroduce use of the U.K.-Swedish drug company’s vaccine at a later date if the country’s situation changes.

Last week, the U.K. government’s vaccination advisory committee said people under the age of 30 would be offered an alternative vaccine. It came after the U.K.’s drug regulator — the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) — said the benefits outweighed the risks for most people, but MHRA Chief Executive Dr. June Raine said for young people it was more “finely balanced.”

Denmark’s move is another set back to the EU’s already sluggish vaccination campaign, which was exacerbated on Tuesday after U.S. pharmaceutical Johnson & Johnson JNJ, 0.77% said it would delay the planned rollout of its COVID-19 shot across the 27-member bloc due to reports of blood clotting.

J&J made the decision after U.S. health agencies called for an immediate pause of the vaccine’s use while they examine six severe cases of rare blood clots that have been reported in people who have received the shot. J&J was due to supply 55 million doses of its single-shot vaccine to the EU in the second quarter.

The J&J vaccine has currently only been delayed, but analytics company Airfinity warned the EU’s vaccination rollout would take two months longer than expected if the bloc was unable to use the shot at all.

However, there was some good news for Europe as the EU reached an agreement to speed up delivery of 50 million more doses of the vaccine developed jointly by German biotech BioNTech BNTX, 1.63% and U.S. drug company Pfizer PFE, 0.78% to boost the rollout program.

Denmark’s decision could delay the country’s vaccine rollout by up to four weeks, based on previous statements by health bodies, a report by Reuters noted.

The country was the first to initially suspend use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March, over safety concerns. Last week, the EU drug regulator said that “unusual blood clots” should be listed as a “very rare” side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but insisted the benefits of the shot still outweighed the risks.

The majority of EU countries have since restarted using the AstraZeneca vaccine, but some countries, including Spain and Italy, have limited the use of the shot to people aged over 60. Last month, French and German health officials restricted the use of the AstraZeneca shot for the over-55s and over-60s, respectively, following concerns over unusual blood clotting in some recipients.

Shares in AstraZeneca were trading 1.31% higher in London on Wednesday.

AstraZeneca has acknowledged the findings from the EMA, as well as a separate review from the U.K.’s MHRA, noting that they “reaffirmed the vaccine offers a high-level of protection against all severities of COVID-19 and that these benefits continue to far outweigh the risks.”

The drug company said it was working with global regulators to better understand the individual cases, epidemiology and possible mechanisms that could explain these extremely rare events.

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Lina Saigol is the London-based head of corporate news in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions for MarketWatch and Barron’s Group.

Callum Keown is a Barron’s Group reporter for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. He writes for MarketWatch, Barron’s, Penta and Financial News. Follow him on Twitter: @CallumKeown1.

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The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to “prepare the ground”.

Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary (terrorist) activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.

This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam, but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

Any country that was observed to hold views that were not aligned with U.S. foreign policy could not simply be invaded in most scenarios, but rather, the ground would need to be prepared to create the justification for a direct military invasion.

This is one of the roles of the CIA which abides by the motto “fake it till you make it.

Don’t have an actual ‘enemy’ to fight and justify your meddling into another country’s affairs? Not a problem. Just split your paramilitary team into “good guys” and “bad guys” and have them pretend fight. Go village to village repeating this action-drama and you will see how quickly the word will spread that there are “dangerous extremists” in the area that exist in “great numbers.”

Prouty described this paramilitary activity, which is called “Fun and Games,” and how this tactic was also used in the Philippines, resulting in the election of Ramon Magsaysay who was declared a hero against a non-existing enemy. In fact, the Filipino elite units that were trained by the CIA during this period were then brought into Vietnam to enact the very same tactic.

Prouty writes:

I have been to such training programs at U.S. military bases where identical tactics are taught to Americans as well as foreigners. It is all the same…these are the same tactics that were exploited by CIA superagent Edward G. Lansdale [the man in charge of the CIA Saigon Military Mission] and his men in the Philippines and Indochina.

This is an example of the intelligence service’s ‘Fun and Games.’ Actually, it is as old as history; but lately it has been refined, out of necessity, into a major tool of clandestine warfare.

Lest anyone think that this is an isolated case, be assured that it was not. Such ‘mock battles’ and ‘mock attacks on native villages’ were staged countless times in Indochina for the benefit of, or the operation of, visiting dignitaries, such as John McCone when he first visited Vietnam as the Kennedy appointed director of central intelligence [after Kennedy fired Allen Dulles].

What Prouty is stating here, is that the mock battles that occurred for these dignitaries were CIA trained agents “play-acting” as the Vietcong… to make it appear that the Vietcong were not only numerous but extremely hostile.

If even dignitaries can be fooled by such things unfolding before their own eyes, is it really a wonder that a western audience watching or reading about these affairs going on in the world through its mainstream media interpreter could possibly differentiate between “reality” vs a “staged reality”?

Not only were the lines between military and paramilitary operations becoming blurred, but as Prouty states in his book, the highest ranking officers who were operating and overseeing the Vietnam situation were all CIA operatives, not only within the U.S. military but including the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Prouty writes:

US Ambassador Lodge – had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency.”

Prouty goes further to state in his book that Lodge was brought into the role as Ambassador on August 26th, 1963 specifically to remove Ngo Dinh Diem President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), who was seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict at that point.

Ngo Dinh Diem was killed two months after Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam, on November 1st, 1963. Twenty-one days later John F. Kennedy who was in the process of pulling out American troops from Vietnam, was assassinated. The Vietnam War continued for 12 years more, with the Americans having nothing to show for it. And in 1976, the city of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh city.

A “legacy of ashes”

The militarization of government began to return power to the corporate elite, as captains of industry and finance moved into key government posts. The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

Eisenhower wished to establish U.S. supremacy while avoiding another large-scale shooting war as well as the imperial burdens that had bankrupted Great Britain (to which the U.S. now did its bidding under NSC-75). By leveraging the U.S. military’s near monopoly on nuclear firepower, the president hoped to make war an unthinkable proposition for all American adversaries.

The problem with Eisenhower’s strategy was that by keeping Washington in a constant state of high alert, he empowered the most militant voices in his administration. Eisenhower had made the grave error of choosing Foster Dulles as one of his close if not closest advisers, and thus whether he liked it or not, Allen Dulles – I doubt Eisenhower ever had a free moment from the poisoned honey that was constantly being dripped into his ear.

The line between CIA and military became increasingly blurred, as military officers were assigned to intelligence agency missions, and then sent back to their military posts as “ardent disciples of Allen Dulles,” in the words of Prouty, who served as a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA between 1955 and 1963.

Approaching the end of his presidency, in May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate a “Crusade for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. It was Eisenhower’s clear attempt to finally push forward an initiative that was his own and which did not receive its “blessing” by Foster. If Eisenhower were to succeed in this, it would move to dissolve the Cold War Grand Strategy and remove the justification for a military-industrial complex.

In preparation for the summit, the White House had directed all overflight activity over communist territory to cease until further notice. Yet on May 1st, 1960, a high flying U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers left Pakistan on a straight-line overflight of the Soviet Union en route to Bodo, Norway, contrary to the Eisenhower orders.

The U-2 crash-landed in Sverdlovsk, Russia. Amongst the possessions found in the plane, were of all things, identification of Powers being a CIA agent, something highly suspect for an intelligence officer to be carrying during a supposed covert mission.

The incident was enough to cancel the peace summit, and the “Crusade for Peace” was bludgeoned in its cradle.

Rumours abounded quickly thereafter that it was the Soviets who shot down the plane, however, it was Allen Dulles himself, who gave testimony before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U-2 spy plane had not been shot down but had descended because of “engine trouble.”[1] This important statement by Dulles was largely ignored by the press.

Later, Eisenhower confirmed in his memoirs that the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine power and crash-landed in Russia.

Prouty suspected that the “engine failure” may have been induced by a pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel and that Powers’ identification items were likely planted in his parachute pack. With only a certain amount of fuel and a straight line trajectory, it would have been easy to calculate exactly where Powers would be forced to make a landing.

Prouty suspected that the CIA had intentionally provoked the incident in order to ruin the peace conference and ensure the continued reign of Dulles dogmatism.

Interestingly, the man who was in charge of the Cuban exile program, Richard Bissell (deputy director of plans for the CIA), was the same man who ran the U-2 program and who, according to Prouty ostensibly sent the Powers flight over the Soviet Union on May 1st, 1960.

Richard Bissell, who was most certainly acting upon the orders of Dulles, was among the three (Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA and Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA) who were fired by Kennedy as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or more aptly put for their act of treason.

On Jan. 5th, 1961, during a meeting of the National Security Council, a frustrated and worn down President Eisenhower, put on public record just weeks before Kennedy was to assume office, that the CIA under Dulles, had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left nothing but “a legacy of ashes for his successor.”

All Eisenhower had left of his own was his farewell address, which he made on Jan. 17th, 1961, where he famously warned the American people of what had been festering during his eight-year presidential term:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.“

A phoenix rising

Eisenhower may have left a legacy of ashes for his predecessor, but out of those ashes would emerge a force that would come to directly challenge the rule of the “power elite”.[2]

In April 1954, Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower administration’s support for the doomed French imperial war in Vietnam, foreseeing that this would not be a short-lived war.[3]

In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s own Independence Day, Kennedy declared:

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.

The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism – and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.

Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free.

On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.

If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.” [4]

In September 1960, the annual United Nations General Assembly was being held in New York. Castro and a fifty member delegation were among the attendees and had made a splash in the headlines when he decided to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the midtown Shelburne Hotel demanded a $20,000 security deposit. He made an even bigger splash in the headlines when he made a speech at this hotel, discussing the issue of equality in the United States while in Harlem, one of the poorest boroughs in the country.

Kennedy would visit this very same hotel a short while later, and also made a speech:

Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, [and] Khrushchev…there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil…We should be glad [that Castro and Khrushchev] came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”[5]

What did Kennedy mean by this? The American Revolution was fought for freedom, freedom from the rule of monarchy and imperialism in favour of national sovereignty. What Kennedy was stating, was that this was the very oppression that the rest of the world wished to shake the yoke off, and that the United States had an opportunity to be a leader in the cause for the independence of all nations.

On June 30th, 1960, marking the independence of the Republic of Congo from the colonial rule of Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese Prime Minister gave a speech that has become famous for its outspoken criticism of colonialism.

Lumumba spoke of his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage that was forced upon us… [years that were] filled with tears, fire and blood,” and concluded vowing “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.”

Shortly after, Lumumba also made clear:

We want no part of the Cold War[…]We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.”[6]

As a result, Lumumba was labeled a communist for his refusal to be a Cold War satellite for the western sphere. Rather, Lumumba was part of the Pan-African movement that was led by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah (who later Kennedy would also work with), which sought national sovereignty and an end to colonialism in Africa.

Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles said at an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” [7] Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station:

We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.”[8]

Lumumba was assassinated on Jan. 17th, 1961, just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, during the fog of the transition period between presidents, when the CIA is most free to tie its loose ends, confident that they will not be reprimanded by a new administration that wants to avoid scandal on its first days in office.

Kennedy, who clearly meant to put a stop to the Murder Inc. that Dulles had created and was running, would declare to the world in his inaugural address on Jan. 20th, 1961, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

And so Kennedy’s battle with the Leviathan had begun.

La resistance

Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, Kennedy was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

The Bay of Pigs set-up would occur three months later. Prouty compares the Bay of Pigs incident to that of the Crusade for Peace, both events were orchestrated by the CIA to ruin the U.S. president’s ability to form a peaceful dialogue with Khrushchev and decrease Cold War tensions. Both presidents’ took onus for the events respectively, despite the responsibility resting with the CIA. However, Eisenhower and Kennedy understood, if they did not take onus, it would be a public declaration that they did not have any control over their government agencies and military.

Further, the Bay of Pigs operation was in fact meant to fail. It was meant to stir up a public outcry for a direct military invasion of Cuba. On public record is a meeting (or more aptly described as an intervention) with CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and Navy Chief Admiral Burke basically trying to strong-arm President Kennedy into approving a direct military attack on Cuba.

Admiral Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.”[9] (This incident is what inspired the Frankenheimer movie “Seven Days in May.”)

Kennedy stood his ground.

“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later told Special Assistant to the President Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.”[10]

Incredibly, not only did the young president stand his ground against the Washington war hawks just three months into his presidential term, but he also launched the Cuba Study Group which found the CIA to be responsible for the fiasco, leading to the humiliating forced resignation of Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. (For more on this refer to my report.)

Unfortunately, it would not be that easy to dethrone Dulles, who continued to act as head of the CIA, and key members of the intelligence community such as Helms and Angleton regularly bypassed McCone and briefed Dulles directly.[11] But Kennedy was also serious about seeing it all the way through, and vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

There is another rather significant incident that had occurred just days after the Bay of Pigs, and which has largely been overshadowed by the Cuban fiasco.

From April 21-26th, 1961, the Algiers putsch or Generals’ putsch, was a failed coup d’état intended to force President de Gaulle (1959-1969) not to abandon the colonial French Algeria. The organisers of the putsch were opposed to the secret negotiations that French Prime Minister Michel Debré had started with the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN).

On January 26th, 1961, just three months before the attempted coup d’état, Dulles sent a report to Kennedy on the French situation that seemed to be hinting that de Gaulle would no longer be around:

A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France…The Army and the Air Force are staunchly opposed to de Gaulle…At least 80 percent of the officers are violently against him. They haven’t forgotten that in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on his promise, and they hate him for that. de Gaulle surely won’t last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year — he will be either deposed or assassinated.”[12]

The attempted coup was led by Maurice Challe, whom de Gaulle had reason to conclude was working with the support of US intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press, which reported the CIA as a “reactionary state-within-a-state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control.[13]

Shortly before Challe’s resignation from the French military, he had served as NATO commander in chief and had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking US officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters.[14]

In August 1962 the OAS (Secret Army Organization) made an assassination attempt against de Gaulle, believing he had betrayed France by giving up Algeria to Algerian nationalists. This would be the most notorious assassination attempt on de Gaulle (who would remarkably survive over thirty assassination attempts while President of France) when a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the president’s car, which managed to escape the ambush despite all four tires being shot out.

After the failed coup d’état, de Gaulle launched a purge of his security forces and ousted General Paul Grossin, the chief of SDECE (the French secret service). Grossin was closely aligned with the CIA, and had told Frank Wisner over lunch that the return of de Gaulle to power was equivalent to the Communists taking over in Paris.[15]

In 1967, after a five-year enquête by the French Intelligence Bureau, it released its findings concerning the 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. The report found that the 1962 assassination plot could be traced back to the NATO Brussels headquarters, and the remnants of the old Nazi intelligence apparatus. The report also found that Permindex had transferred $200,000 into an OAS bank account to finance the project.

As a result of the de Gaulle exposé, Permindex was forced to shut down its public operations in Western Europe and relocated its headquarters from Bern, Switzerland to Johannesburg, South Africa, it also had/has a base in Montreal, Canada where its founder Maj. Gen. Louis M. Bloomfield (former OSS) proudly had his name amongst its board members until the damning de Gaulle report. The relevance of this to Kennedy will be discussed shortly.

As a result of the SDECE’s ongoing investigation, de Gaulle made a vehement denunciation of the Anglo-American violation of the Atlantic Charter, followed by France’s withdrawal from the NATO military command in 1966. France would not return to NATO until April 2009 at the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit.

In addition to all of this, on Jan. 14th, 1963, de Gaulle declared at a press conference that he had vetoed British entry into the Common Market. This would be the first move towards France and West Germany’s formation of the European Monetary System, which excluded Great Britain, likely due to its imperialist tendencies and its infamous sin City of London.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson telegrammed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer directly, appealing to him to try to persuade de Gaulle to backtrack on the veto, stating “if anyone can affect Gen. de Gaulle’s decision, you are surely that person.”

Little did Acheson know that Adenauer was just days away from singing the Franco-German Treaty of Jan 22nd, 1963 (also known as the ÉlyséeTreaty), which had enormous implications. Franco-German relations, which had long been dominated by centuries of rivalry, had now agreed that their fates were aligned.

(This close relationship was continued to a climactic point in the late 1970s, with the formation of the EMS, and France and West Germany’s willingness in 1977 to work with OPEC countries trading oil for nuclear technology, which was sabotaged by the US-Britain alliance. For more on this refer to my paper.)

The Élysée Treaty was a clear denunciation of the Anglo-American forceful overseeing that had overtaken Western Europe since the end of WWII.

On June 28th, 1961, Kennedy wrote NSAM #55. This document changed the responsibility of defense during the Cold War from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and would have (if seen through) drastically changed the course of the war in Vietnam. It would also have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the coordination of intelligence.

By Oct 11th, 1963, NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy[16], was released and outlined a policy decision “to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963” and further stated that “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965.” The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.

With the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, likely ordained by the CIA, on Nov. 2nd, 1963 and Kennedy just a few weeks later on Nov. 22nd, 1963, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 on Nov. 26th, 1963 to begin the reversal of Kennedy’s policy under #263. And on March 17th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy’s death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans, and 30 years if you count American covert action in Vietnam.

The last days of Kennedy

By Germany supporting de Gaulle’s exposure of the international assassination ring, his adamant opposition to western imperialism and the role of NATO, and with a young Kennedy building his own resistance against the Federal Reserve and the imperialist war of Vietnam, it was clear that the power elite were in big trouble.

There is a lot of spurious effort to try to ridicule anyone who challenges the Warren Commission’s official report as nothing but fringe conspiracy theory. And that we should not find it highly suspect that Allen Dulles, of all people, was a member of this commission. The reader should keep in mind that much of this frothing opposition stems from the very agency that perpetrated crime after crime on the American people, as well as abroad. When has the CIA ever admitted guilt, unless caught red-handed? Even after the Church committee hearings, when the CIA was found guilty of planning out foreign assassinations, they claimed that they had failed in every single plot or that someone had beaten them to the punch.

The American people need to realise that the CIA is not a respectable agency; we are not dealing with honorable men. It is a rogue force that believes that the ends justify the means, that they are the hands of the king so to speak, above government and above law. Those at the top such as Allen Dulles were just as adamant as Churchill about protecting the interests of the power elite, or as Churchill termed it, the “High Cabal.”

Interestingly, on Dec. 22nd, 1963, just one month after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman published a scathing critique of the CIA in The Washington Post, even going so far as to state “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society, and I feel that we need to correct it.”[17]

The timing of this is everything.

As Prouty has stated, anyone with a little bit of free time during an afternoon could discover for themselves that the Warren Commission was an embarrassingly incompetent hodge-podge, that conducted itself as if it were a done deal that Oswald killed Kennedy and was disinterested in hearing anything contrary to that narrative.

Not only did the record of Oswald’s interrogation at the Dallas Police Department go up in smoke, likely because he was making the inconvenient claim that he was a “patsy,” but his nitrate test which proved that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov. 22nd, 1963, was kept secret for 10 months and was only revealed in the final report,[18] which inexplicably did not change the report’s conclusion that Oswald shot Kennedy.

During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine (whose founder Henry Luce was known to work closely with the CIA[19]). This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from behind.

When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman.

This was not the only piece of evidence to be tampered with, and includes Kennedy’s autopsy reports.

There is also the matter of the original autopsy papers being destroyed by the chief autopsy physician, James Humes, to which he even testified to during the Warren Commission, apparently nobody bothered to ask why…

In addition, Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney at the time who was charging Clay Shaw as a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, besides uncovering his ties to David Ferrie who was found dead in his apartment days before he was scheduled to testify, also made a case that the New Orleans International Trade Mart (to which Clay Shaw was director), the U.S. subsidiary of Permindex, was linked to Kennedy’s murder.

Garrison did a remarkable job with the odds he was up against, and for the number of witnesses that turned up dead before the trial…

This Permindex link would not look so damning if we did not have the French intelligence SDECE report, but we do. And recall, in that report Permindex was caught transferring $200,000 directly to the bankroll of the OAS which attempted the 1962 assassination on de Gaulle.

Thus, Permindex’s implication in an international assassination ring is not up for debate. In addition, the CIA was found heavily involved in these assassination attempts against de Gaulle, thus we should not simply dismiss the possibility that Permindex was indeed a CIA front for an international hit crew.

In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in Nov. 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico.[20]

Col. Clay Shaw was an OSS officer during WWII, which provides a direct link to his knowing Allen Dulles, and thus we come around full circle.

After returning from Kennedy’s Nov. 24th funeral in Washington, de Gaulle and his information minister Alain Peyrefitte had a candid discussion that was recorded in Peyrefitte’s memoire “C’était de Gaulle,” the great General was quoted saying:

What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.

…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.

America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.

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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada). The author can be reached at [email protected]

Notes

(1) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The Cia, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, ” pg 147

(2) C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite”

(3) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 304

(4) Ibid, pg 305

(5) Ibid, pg 295

(6) Ibid, pg 319

(7) Ibid, pg 319

(8) Ibid, pg 319

(9) Ibid, pg 337

(10) Ibid, pg 337

(11) Ibid, pg 359

(12) Ibid, pg 350

(13) Ibid, pg 353

(14) Ibid, pg 347

(15) Ibid, pg 354

(16) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” pg xxxiv

(17) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 201

(18) Jim Garrison, “On the Trail of the Assassins,” pg 116-117

(19) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 72, 128

(20) Ibid, pg 422

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With tensions simmering in eastern Ukraine, US media outlets are happy to push the narrative that Russia is the aggressor and is preparing to invade its neighbor. These reports ignore the fact that the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the eastern Donbas region declared independence from Ukraine back in 2014 in response to a US-backed coup.

Since 2014, the US has provided Ukraine with about $2 billion in military equipment and supported its fight against the Donetsk and Lugansk separatists. Supporting a war on Russia’s border is an incredible provocation, but these facts are lost on the Western press, and some outlets seem eager to see the situation escalate. On Monday, Politico published a report that asked if it was time for Ukraine to deploy weapons provided by the US to face Moscow.

The Politico report reads:

“As Russia amasses the highest number of troops on Ukraine’s border since 2014, the question for Kyiv now becomes: Is it time to start putting US-made weapons in the field?”

The report explains how President Trump took a step his predecessor was unwilling to take and sold hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. President Obama chose not to give Kyiv offensive weapons for fear of provoking Moscow. This fact contradicts the conspiracy theory that Trump was beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was pushed hard by Politico. One of the co-authors of the Ukraine report, Natasha Bertrand, built her career on pushing the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.

The Javelin missiles were sold under the condition that they would be stored in western Ukraine, far from the front lines of the Donbas war. But the weapons can be deployed anywhere in the country and can be used as long as Kyiv can frame their use as “defensive” in nature.

Two unnamed former US military officials told Politico that the current situation with Russia is “exactly the kind of scenario the Javelin sale was designed to counter.”

The Biden administration has already approved a $125 million military aid package for Ukraine that includes armed patrol boats, and another $150 million is expected to be provided sometime this year. Over the past few weeks, the US has delivered multiple military shipments to Ukraine as it hypes the movement of Russian troops inside Russia.

On top of the military support from the US, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing for a NATO membership. Even though Ukraine being a NATO member could lead to the US and Russia going to war, which should be an unthinkable scenario, Zelensky’s request is receiving favorable coverage in the Western media.

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Personal Tribute to Ramsey Clark: Iraq and Rwanda

April 15th, 2021 by John Philpot

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Our friend in struggle, Attorney Ramsey Clark, passed away on April 9, 2021. Ramsey affected many of our lives. We followed closely his opposition to the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983. We got to know him best from his Commission of Inquiry into the US war on Iraq in beginning 17 January 1991.

The Crime of aggression highlighted in the Nuremberg judgment was the underlying theme in the War Crimes Tribunal which held hearings on 28, 29 January 1992 in New York. This Tribunal which I sat on condemned the USA for the crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. He published a book, The Fire This Time, U.S War Crimes in the Gulf. This book available on Amazon.com is an anti-war textbook in international law comprehensible to all and can inspire us to join in the peace movement which is more important than ever.

Ramsey’s wisdom helped inspire many of us to join the fight against the Rwandan Patriotic Front/USA war on Rwanda.

Ramsey understood that the war of aggression on Rwanda by the RPF proxy was the cause of the so-called “genocide”. He joined the defence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and defended Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana who was living in Laredo, Texas. He succeeded in blocking his extradition to Arusha in local courts on the first attempt by his hard work and legal genius.

Ramsey Clark combined principle, justice, and legal genius in his defence of the Pastor after he was unfairly sent to Arusha for trial.

The wrongly accused ICTR accused and our defence bar were honoured to have his contribution to the ICTR defence. He inspired all of us. We had some success in avoiding convictions and ICTR lies about the war on Rwanda. The truth is coming out about the illegitimacy of the biased ICTR prosecutions, and we will not rest until the world understands.

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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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