Global Research

If anyone murders a federal official, you can be assured of one thing: the feds will do everything they can to ensure that everyone involved in the crime is brought to justice. It’s like when someone kills a cop. The entire police force mobilizes to capture, arrest, and prosecute everyone involved in killing the cop. The phenomenon is even more pronounced at the federal level, especially given the overwhelming power of the federal government.

Yet, the exact opposite occurred in the Kennedy assassination. The entire effort immediately became to pin the crime solely on a communist ex-U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald and to shut down any aggressive investigation into whether others were involved in the crime.

What’s up with that? That’s not the way we would expect federal officials to handle the assassination of any federal official, especially the president of the United States. We would expect them to do everything — even torture a suspect — in order to capture and arrest everyone who may have participated in the crime.

For example, just three days after the assassination and after Oswald himself had been murdered, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent out a memo stating,

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”

How in the world could he be so certain that Oswald was the assassin and that he had no confederates? Why would he want to shut down the investigation so soon? Does that sound like a normal federal official who is confronted with the assassination of a president?

The answer to this riddle lies in the brilliantly cunning scheme of the U.S. national-security establishment to ensure that the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination would be shut down immediately and, therefore, not lead to the U.S. national-security establishment.

The assassination itself had all the earmarks of a classic military ambush, one in which shooters were firing from both the front and back of the president. It is a virtual certainty that responsibility for the ambush lay with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been waging a vicious war against Kennedy practically since the time he assumed office. (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.)

While the JCS were experts at preparing military-style ambushes, they lacked the intellectual capability of devising the overall plot and cover-up, given its high level of cunning and sophistication. That responsibility undoubtedly lay with the CIA, whose top officials were brilliant graduates of Ivy League Schools. Moreover, practically from its inception the CIA was specializing in the art of state-sponsored assassinations and in how to conceal the CIA’s role in them.

To ensure that the role of the Pentagon and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination would be kept secret, they had to figure out a way to shut down the investigation from the start. Their plan worked brilliantly. While the normal thing would have been all out investigations into the murder, in this particular murder the state of Texas and U.S. officials did the exact opposite. They settled for simply pinning the crime on Oswald, the purported lone nut communist ex-U.S. Marine.

Here is how they pulled it off.

As the years have passed, it has become increasingly clear that Oswald was a government operative, most likely for military intelligence or maybe the CIA and the FBI as well. His job was to portray himself as a communist, which would enable him to infiltrate not only domestic communist and socialist organizations but also communist countries, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union.

After all, how many communist Marines have you ever heard of? The Marines would be a good place to recruit people for intelligence roles. Oswald learned fluent Russian while in the military. How does an enlisted man do that, without the assistance of the military’s language schools? When he returned from the Soviet Union after supposedly trying to defect and after promising that he was going to give up secret information he had acquired in the military, no federal grand jury or congressional investigation was launched into his conduct, even though this was the height of the Cold War.

Thus, Oswald would make the perfect patsy. He could be stationed wherever his superiors instructed. And he would have all the earmarks of a communist, which would immediately prejudice Americans at the height of the Cold War.

But simply framing Oswald wouldn’t have been enough to shut down the investigation. An aggressive investigation would undoubtedly be able to pierce through the pat nature of the frame-up. They needed something more.

If you’re going to frame someone who is supposedly firing from the rear, then doesn’t it make sense that you would have shots being fired only from the rear? Why would they frame a guy who is supposedly firing from the rear by having shots fired from the front?

That’s where the sheer brilliance of this particular regime-change operation came into play. The plan was much more cunning than even the successful regime-change operations and assassinations that took place prior to the one against Kennedy — i.e., Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Cuba from 1959-1963, and the Congo in 1961.

There is now virtually no doubt that Kennedy was hit by two shots fired from the front. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital described the neck wound as a wound of entry. They also said that Kennedy had a massive, orange-sized wound in the back of his head. Nurses at Parkland said the same things. Two FBI agents said they saw the big exit-sized wound. Secret Service agent Clint Hill saw it. Navy photography expert Saundra Spencer told the ARRB in the 1990s that she developed the JFK autopsy photos on a top-secret basis on the weekend of the assassination and that they depicted a big exit-sized wound in the back of JFK’s head. A bone fragment from the back of the president’s head was found in Dealey Plaza after the assassination. That is just part of the overwhelming evidence that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the shot that hit Kennedy in the head came from the front.

Okay, if you’ve got a shooter firing from the back and he’s a communist, and if you have other shooters firing from the front, then they have to be working together. So, who would the shooters be who were firing from the front? The logical inference is that they had to be communist cohorts of Oswald.

That’s what Oswald’s supposed visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico just before the assassination were all about —making it look like Oswald was acting in concert with the Soviet and Cuban communists to kill Kennedy.

If the assassination was part of the Soviet Union’s supposed quest to conquer the world, retaliation would mean World War III, which almost surely would have meant nuclear war, which was the biggest fear among the American people in 1963.

But why not retaliate in some way? Would U.S. officials at the height of the Cold War hesitate to retaliate for the communist killing of a U.S. president, simply because they were scared of nuclear war? Not a chance! In fact, throughout Kennedy’s term in office the Pentagon and the CIA were champing at the bit to attack Cuba and go to war with the Soviet Union.

But here’s the catch: How do you take action that is going to destroy the world when it was your side that started the assassination game in the first place? Remember: It was the CIA that started the assassination game by partnering with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Thus, Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the JCS had the perfect excuse to shut down the investigation and pin the crime only on Oswald: If they instead retaliated, it would be all-out nuclear war based on an assassination game that the U.S. had started.

In fact, when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade alleged from the start that Oswald was part of a communist conspiracy, Johnson told him to shut it down for fear that Wade might inadvertently start World War III.

Moreover, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren initially declined Johnson’s invitation to serve on what ultimately became the Warren Commission, Johnson appealed to his sense of patriotism by alluding to the importance of avoiding a nuclear war. Johnson used the same argument on Senator Richard Russell Jr.

From the start, the Warren Commission proceedings were shrouded in “national-security” state secrecy, including a top-secret meeting of the commissioners to discuss information they had received that Oswald was an intelligence agent. When Warren was asked if the American people would be able to see all the evidence, Warren responded yes, but not in your lifetime.

Does that make any sense? If the assassination was, in fact, committed by some lone nut, then what would “national security” and state secrecy have to do with it?

That’s undoubtedly how they induced the three military pathologists to conduct a fraudulent autopsy — by telling them that they had to hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front in order to ensure that there was no all-out nuclear war. That’s how we ended up with a fraudulent autopsy. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)

Thus, the plan entailed operating at two levels: One level involved what some call the World War III cover story. It entailed shutting down the investigation, as well as a fraudulent autopsy, to prevent nuclear war. The other level involved showing the American people that their president had been killed by only one person, a supposed lone nut communist former Marine.

Obviously, secrecy and obedience to orders were essential for the plan to succeed. That was why the autopsy was taken out of the hands of civilian officials and given to the military. With the military, people could be ordered to participate in the fraudulent autopsy and could be forced to keep everything they did and witnessed secret.

That’s why Navy photography expert Saundra Spencer kept her secret for some 30 years. She had been told that her development of the JFK autopsy photos was a classified operation. Military people follow orders and keep classified information secret. Imagine if Spencer had told her story suggesting a fraudulent autopsy in the week following the assassination.

Gradually, as the years have passed, the incriminating puzzle has come together. The big avalanche of secret information came out in the 1990s as part of the work done by the Assassination Records Review Board.

Of course, there are still missing pieces to the puzzle, many of which are undoubtedly among the records that the CIA and national-security establishment are still keeping secret. But enough circumstantial evidence has come to light to enable people to see the contours of one of the most cunning and successful assassination plots in history.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

Throughout the history of mankind, the citizens of a people have had to courageously oppose tyrants of all stripes in order to fight for the freedom they deserve and not to be subjugated. Friedrich Schiller showed us this struggle for freedom against tyranny with the right to individual and collective resistance in his plays “Die Räuber” and “Wilhelm Tell”, eloquent and inspiring. The opening quotation is his wise words.

Today, our generation is called upon to take up the fight against the despotic rule of a corrupt clique of politicians and their sinister backers in order not to gamble away our own future and that of our children. Parents and educators are particularly called upon to do so, as many small children and schoolchildren are already severely traumatised. But most citizens cannot decipher the “flaming writing on the wall” (Heine) and remain inactive. A sense of authority, irrational fears and a reflex of obedience prevent them from doing so. With real knowledge of the diabolical plans of the ruling billionaire and power “elite”, they would try with unbending will to overcome the partly unconscious mechanisms of their inner resistance.

The vicious circle of obedience

Many adults react to the confused instructions of politicians like children or how primitive primitive people reacted: in the form of a “magical belief in authority”: uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And that has consequences: The belief in authority inevitably leads to a sense of belonging to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind. Full-minded adults are then no longer able to think independently and judge sensibly and hand over the power of decision to immoral politicians. We are currently experiencing where this leads.

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote an illuminating text in the middle of the 16th century, to which the German word “Kadavergehorsam” can be traced back. In the version translated from Spanish into Latin and published by the Congregation of the Order in 1558, it read

“We should be aware that each one of those who live in obedience must be guided and directed by Divine Providence through the Superior, as if he were a dead body that can be taken anywhere and treated in any way, or like an old man’s staff that serves wherever and for whatever purpose he wishes to use it”.

Long before Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi (1181/82-1226) compared the perfect and highest form of obedience (perfecta et summa obedientia) to the superior with a dead, lifeless body (corpus mortuum, corpus exanime) that can be taken wherever one wants without reluctance and without grumbling. (1)

The vicious circle of violence

According to the results of a study published on 19 November by the University Hospital Ulm on behalf of UNICEF and the German Child Protection Association, one in two people in Germany considers physical violence to be an adequate method of education. Every sixth person slaps her children. Physical and emotional violence would thus continue across generations – and trigger a “vicious circle of violence”. (2)

All those involved in the education of children and young people – whether parents, educators or teachers – should never try to make the adolescent generation obedient and compliant on its way to adulthood by means of beatings and other authoritarian educational methods. Nor should they burden them with the mind-numbing ballast of religion. They are gambling with the future of their children and of all of us.

Deep psychological insight has shown us the immense importance of education. Pedagogy at home and at school must therefore renounce the authoritarian principle – which for centuries was regarded as the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour – and the use of violence of any kind. Educators must adapt to the child’s spiritual life with true understanding, respect the child’s personality and turn to him or her in a friendly manner. Such an upbringing will produce a type of person who does not possess a “subject mentality” and will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in our world. (3)

Beatings and other forms of violence, such as emotional rejection of the child, cause the child to be afraid of the other person and to believe that it is not good to eat cherries with people. These sometimes unconscious emotions do not make him or her happy. In later life, in marriage, at work and in the community, the adult then finds it difficult to find his way around and cannot show solidarity with the other person. Only then will he find his way to himself if he does not resent his parents and reconcile with them, because they were unable to deal with the child properly due to a lack of knowledge about the problem of upbringing.

State law enforcement officers as willing executors

Government enforcement officers, such as police officers, medical officers or other representatives of the public health administration (health authorities) and the statutory health and pension insurance funds, should also be aware of whose mandate they are acting on. When police officers use violence against peacefully demonstrating citizens or when health officers invade private households of families to check compliance with dubious government measures for the so-called protection of children, they act on very dubious legal bases. There are already hair-raising and fear-inducing testimonies of both peaceful citizens and concerned parents in circulation. Why these parents do not go to the barricades is another question.

All civil servants have learned in the course of their training – at least in Germany – that according to the provisions of civil service law, a civil servant must check the legality of his or her official actions. Yes, it is a must! (Remonstration duty under German civil service law according to § 63 BBG and § 36 BeamtStG). If he has doubts about the legality of an instruction, he must remonstrate with his immediate superior, i.e. raise objections to the execution of the instruction. (4)

The extent to which civil servant teachers are state law enforcement officers is beyond my knowledge. In any case, these colleagues must also be asked how they view the hair-raising instructions of their educational authorities and what they value the health, welfare and education of the pupils entrusted to them.

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.

Notes

(1) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27120

https://www.globalresearch.ca/dispel-the-magical-belief-in-author…-power-and-violence-strengthen-community-feelings/5729560?

(2) https://deutsch.rt.com/inland/109449-unicef-jeder-zweite-in-deutschland/

(3) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27120

https://www.globalresearch.ca/dispel-the-magical-belief-in-author…-power-and-violence-strengthen-community-feelings/5729560?

(4) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remonstration

Featured image is from PopularResistance.Org

The Yemeni Houthis have fired their new cruise missile, the Quds-2, at a Saudi Aramco oil company distribution station in the kingdom’s city of Jeddah, the group’s media news wing announced early on November 23. A spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Houthi-led government, Yahya Sarea, said foreign companies and residents in Saudi Arabia should stay away from the military and oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia as “operations will continue”. He emphasized that the missile precisely hit its target causing notable damage.

The Houthis claim that the Quds-2 is a new generation “winged missile” produced by their Missile Forces. As always, the missile was likely assembled thanks to technical assistance from Iran or Iranian-supplied components.  That facility is located southeast of Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport. Over the past years, the Houthis have repeatedly pounded the military section of the airport with missiles and drones. Therefore, it was just the question of time, when the nearby oil infrastructure would be hit.

At the same time, the Saudi side remains silent regarding the impact of the Houthi missile strike. This is an ordinary posture of Saudi Arabia towards Houthi missile and drone strikes. The Kingdom censors social media, denies any damage and claims that all targets were intercepted, if it appears possible and that no visual evidence of destruction are leaked immediately. Also, the main oil production and export facilities of Aramco are mostly in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, more than 1000km across the country from Jeddah. Therefore, Riyadh likely believes that it can silence another setback in the ongoing war with the Yemeni movement.

In September 2019, when the Houthis, with probable help from Iran, put out of service almost a half of Saudi oil infrastructure by hitting targets in Abqaiq and Khurais, the Kingdom was vowing a powerful response and the full destruction of Houthi missile and drone capabilities. However, a year later, the situation on the ground in Yemen for Saudi-backed forces became even worse and the widely-promoted ‘great Saudi victory’ over the Houthis turned into ashes.

In recent month, Saudi-led forces lost the battle for the Yemeni province of Bayda, and now they seem to be losing the battle for Marib. Recently they retreated from the key Maas Base and the route for the potential Houthi advance on the provincial capital is almost open. The denial of the facts on the ground and the air dominance of the Kingdom did not help it to achieve a victory in the war. In turn, it’s the Houthis who have put themselves in the position that allowed them to turn the tide of the conflict. With the current trend in the Yemeni conflict, Saudi Arabia will apparently have to pay an even bigger price for its intervention in the Arab country.

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is under fire for attempting to undermine the incoming Biden administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic on his way out the door after his department confirmed Tuesday that it intends to place $455 billion in unspent coronavirus relief funds into an account that requires congressional authorization to access.

Bloomberg reported that the funds, which Congress allocated to the Federal Reserve in March for emergency lending programs to assist local governments and struggling businesses, will be put in the Treasury Department’s General Fund following Mnuchin’s widely condemned decision last week to cut off the relief programs at the end of the year.

Mnuchin requested that the funds be reallocated by the currently divided Congress, and the Fed has agreed to cooperate with the outgoing treasury secretary’s move.

According to Bloomberg, “Mnuchin’ clawback would make it impossible” for Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Treasury Department, to utilize the funds “without lawmakers’ blessing.”

“The move leaves just under $80 billion available in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a pot of money that can be used with some discretion by the Treasury chief,” Bloomberg noted. “By contrast, the CARES Act funds had specific uses, and weren’t available for general government spending purposes.”

While Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, insisted he is attempting to ensure the funds are put to better use, Democratic members of Congress and other observers immediately accused the treasury secretary of a potentially unlawful ploy to hamstring the Biden administration’s coronavirus response before the president-elect takes office. According to one analyst, Mnuchin’s actions are an “explicit” violation of the CARES Act.

“This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden administration. The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year,” tweeted Bharat Ramamurti, a member of the congressional commission established to oversee the use of coronavirus relief money. “For its part, the Fed should not go along with this attempted sabotage and should retain the CARES Act funds it already has.”

Burning it down on the way out the door.

There is no reasonable justification for this. https://t.co/Nn4w1lZy7D

— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) November 24, 2020

This is flat out sabotage https://t.co/Dbj2MDhkyW

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 24, 2020

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, denounced as “shameful” Mnuchin’s effort to pull back the congressional relief funds and place them out of the Biden administration’s reach.

“As the economy backslides amid skyrocketing Covid-19 cases, Secretary Mnuchin is engaged in economic sabotage, and trying to tie the Biden administration’s hands,” Wyden said in a statement to Reuters on Tuesday.

Echoing Wyden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted late Tuesday that “Secretary Mnuchin’s Covid-19 response has been a corrupt and incompetent failure.”

“He needs to stop sabotaging the Biden administration from cleaning up his mess and helping states, cities, and small businesses,” said Warren.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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If Israeli security journalist Yossi Melman is correct, Pres. Trump’s Department of Justice is expected this week to remove all parole restrictions on ex-Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. Pollard served 30 years in prison and was freed conditionally in 2015.  The Justice Department restricted him to living in New York City and not leaving the U.S.  This prohibited him from his goal of moving to Israel, where the far-right Likud government could be expected to lionize him for his betrayal (of U.S. interests).

On Friday, those restrictions expire.  Melman posted a series of tweets explaining that he queried DOJ about whether they might be extended and the response he received was that there was no expectation they would be.

Melman also noted that Pollard’s lawyer, accused pedophile Alan Dershowitz, told the reporter that he was cautiously optimistic that Pollard would be free on Friday and leave for Israel soon.

This will end a decades-long saga which found Pollard to be one of the most damaging Spies in U.S. history.  He sold U.S. Navy top secret plans to the Israelis who, in turn, exchanged them with the Soviets to barter for the release of Soviet Jewish dissidents.

Pollard was “run” by another infamous Israeli spy Master, Rafi Eitan, who kidnapped Eichmann and also ran State Department analyst, Larry Franklin, who offered secret government documents to Aipac lobbyist, Steve Rosen.

Officials in the Reagan administration felt so betrayed by Israeli promises that they would not spy on their chief ally, that they insisted on prosecuting Pollard under charges that brought a conviction and life sentence.  He spent three decades in prison during which both Bill Clinton and George Bush refused to commute his sentence despite enormous pressure applied by the Israeli government and its domestic agents, the Israel Lobby. The U.S. Intelligence apparatus was adamant that Pollard’s crimes never be mitigated.  CIA director George Tenet even threatened to resign if Clinton commuted Pollard’s sentence.  After his release, the former spy spent several years living under parole restrictions.

If Trump and his attorney General, Bill Barr, free Pollard, it will mark yet another favor the U.S. has done for Israel’s right-wing Likud government.  Those include moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the city, legitimating Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, and recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan.

It will also offer Israel a green light to continue and intensify its ongoing intelligence operations against this country, realizing that no matter what happens Israel can manipulate the U.S. and mitigate whatever punishments are involved.  These operations, as Melman notes began in 1948 and continue to this day.  They included the theft of enriched uranium from a U.S. storage facility in a plot devised by then Israeli-spy (now Hollywood producer), Arnon Milchan.

The freeing of Pollard would mark yet another betrayal by this administration of its intelligence services. Trump has spent the past four years braying at the FBI, CIA and NSA, complaining that they refuse to be pliant to his demands. He has run through multiple directors of each of these agencies who’ve fallen afoul of him.  This is yet another way in which he can humiliate them and their interests.

Finally, the Pollard case buttresses arguments of anti-Semites who claim that American Jews harbor a dual loyalty conflict between the interests of Israel and the U.S.  In fact, in cases like this some Jews like Pollard choose the interests of Israel above those of America.  They may somehow justify to themselves that those interests are the same, but they’re not.  And a life sentence for betraying U.S. intelligence secrets should bring that home.  But what Israel did in running Pollard seriously endangered American Jews.  There is absolutely no evidence that Israel understands this or even cares.  And that is offensive and a schandeh.

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A British Supreme Court judge has slammed the UK government as ‘control freaks’ for attempting to control people’s lives under the guise of COVID, and labeled it “morally and constitutionally indefensible” to define what freedoms the public should and shouldn’t have.

In an op-ed published Sunday, Lord Sumption noted that the “debate about whether to let us have a family Christmas perfectly sums up what is wrong with this Government’s handling” of the crisis.

Sumption wrote that there are “many different answers to the dilemmas of a Covid Christmas”, yet the crux of the matter is “whether we should be allowed to make the choice for ourselves, instead of having it imposed on us by law.”

“But for the Jacobins of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the control freaks in the Department of Health, theirs is the only answer,” Sumption urged.

The British government has posited allowing people to spend 5 days in the company of their relatives over Christmas, but with the caveat that in January they will have to pay back the privilege with more lockdown time, specifically another 25 days.

The technocrats may allow us to escape lockdown for a few days over Christmas.

How gracious of them! pic.twitter.com/g0tSKjohOV

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 22, 2020

Lord Sumption, who served as a senior judge on the Supreme Court of the UK between between 2012 and 2018, slammed the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, suggesting he is engaging in “public relations management” rather than leadership.

“Boris Johnson knows that restrictions over Christmas would be deeply unpopular, widely ignored and catastrophic for the retail and hospitality industries,” Sumption asserted.

“So he will soon announce their temporary suspension, behaving as if our lives belonged to the state and Christmas was an act of indulgence on his part,” the judge added.

I love to see the local pubs fighting back against lockdown lunacy. Bravo. pic.twitter.com/ZI1GJ23Cwp

— Benjamin Loughnane (@Loknayn) November 21, 2020

Sumption further wrote that “control freaks and the rest of the sackcloth and ashes brigade will demand a payback” afterwards, claiming that some “are already pressing for two, three or even five days of extra lockdown for every day of release over Christmas. ”

Sumption proclaimed that the state is exercising an “insistence on coercing the entire population,” saying it is “morally and constitutionally indefensible in a country which is not yet a totalitarian state, like China.”

“The Government has not earned our trust. Sooner or later, people will take back control of their own lives and do the right thing, whatever Ministers say,” he predicted.

Sumption’s comments come in the wake of reports that the UK government is planning to issue ‘freedom passes’ for people who agree to vaccination or twice testing negative for the virus in one week.

Oi, mate – have you got a license for that "freedom"? https://t.co/FN1FV7Efst

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 22, 2020

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A few nostalgic types still believe that the Union Jack continues to flutter to sighs and reverence over outposts of the world, from the tropics to the desert.  They would be right, if only to a point.  Britain, it turns out, has a rather expansive global reach when it comes to bases, military installations and testing sites.  While not having the obese heft and lumbering brawn of the United States, it makes a good go of it.  Globally, the UK military has a presence in 145 sites in 42 countries.  Such figures tally with Ian Cobain’s prickly observation in The History Thieves: that the British were the only people “perpetually at war.”

Phil Miller’s rich overview of Britain’s military footprint for Declassified UK shows it to be heavy.  “The size of the global military presence is far larger than previously thought and is likely to mean that the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.”  The UK military, for instance, has a presence in five countries in the Asia-Pacific: naval facilities in Singapore; garrisons in Brunei, drone testing facilities in Australia; three facilities in Nepal; a quick reaction force in Afghanistan.  Cyprus remains a favourite with 17 military installations.  In Africa, British personnel can be found in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Mali.  Then come the ever dubious ties to Arab monarchies.  

The nature of having such bases is to be kind to your host, despite him being theocratic, barking mad, or an old fashioned despot with fetishes. Despite the often silly pronouncements by British policy makers that they take issue with authoritarians, exceptions numerous in number abound.  The UK has never had a problem with authoritarians it can work with or despots it can coddle.  A closer look at such relations usually reveal the same ingredients: capital, commerce, perceptions of military necessity.  The approach to Oman, a state marked by absolute rule, is a case in point.  

Since 1798, Britain has had a hand in ensuring the success, and the survivability, of the House of Al Said.  On September 12, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that a further £23.8 million would go to enhancing the British Joint Logistics Support Base at Duqm port, thereby tripling “the size of the existing UK base and help facilitate Royal Navy deployments to the Indian Ocean”.  The Ministry of Defence also went so far as to describe a “renewal” of a “hugely valuable relationship,” despite the signing of a new Joint Defence Agreement in February 2019.    

The agreement had been one of the swan song acts of the ailing Sultan Qaboos bin Said, whose passing this year was genuinely mourned in British political circles.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson called him “an exceptionally wise and respected leader who will be missed enormously.”  Papers of record wrote in praise of a reformer and a developer.  “The longest serving Arab ruler,” observed a sycophantic column in The Guardian, “Qaboos was an absolute monarch, albeit a relatively benevolent and popular one.”    

The same Sultan, it should be said, had little fondness for freedom of expression, assembly and association, encouraged the arrests and harassment of government critics and condoned sex discrimination. But he was of the “one of us” labels: trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, an unwavering Anglophile, installed on the throne by Britain in the 1970 palace coup during the all but forgotten Dhofar Rebellion.  “Strategically,” Cobain reminds us, “the Dhofar war was one of the most important conflicts of the 20^th century, as the victors could expect to control the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil.”  The British made sure their man won.

Public mention of greater British military involvement in foreign theatres can be found, though they rarely make front page acts.  The business of projecting such power, especially in the Britannic model, should be careful, considered, even gnomic.  Britain, for instance, is rallying to the US-led call to contain the Yellow Peril in the Asia Pacific, a nice reminder to Beijing that old imperial misdeeds should never be a bar to repetition.  The head of the British Army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, spoke in September about there being “a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia).  It’s an area that saw a much more consistent Army presence in the Eighties, but with 9/11 we naturally receded from it.”  The time had come “to redress that imbalance”.

The UK Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, prefers to be more enigmatic about the “future of Global Britain.”  To deal with an “ever more complex and dynamic strategic context,” he suggests the “Integrated Operating Concept”.  Britain had to “compete below the threshold of war in order to deter war, and to prevent one’s adversaries from achieving their objectives in fait accompli strategies.” 

Gone are the old thuggeries of imperial snatch and grab; evident are matters of flexibility in terms of competition. “Competing involves a campaign posture that includes continuous operating on our terms and in places of our choosing.”  This entails a thought process involving “several dimensions to escalate and deescalate up and down multiple ladders – as if it were a spider’s web.”  The general attempts to illustrate this gibberish with the following example:  “One might actively constrain in the cyber domain to protect critical national infrastructure in the maritime Domain.”

In 2017, there were already more than just murmurings from Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, that a greater British presence in the Asia-Pacific was warranted.  Fallon was keen to stress the reasons for deeper involvement, listing them to a group of Australian journalists. “The tensions have been rising in the region, not just from the tests by North Korea but also escalating tension in the South China Sea with the building program that’s gone there on the islands and the need to keep those routes open.”

With such chatter about the China threat you could be forgiven for believing that British presence in the Asia-Pacific was minimal.  But that would ignore, for instance, the naval logistics base at Singapore’s Sembawang Wharf, permanently staffed by eight British military personnel with an eye on the busy Malacca Strait.  A more substantial presence can also be found in the Sultanate of Brunei, comprising an infantry battalion of Gurkhas and an Army Air Corps Flight of Bell 212 helicopters.  The MOD is particularly keen on the surroundings, as they offer “tropical climate and terrain … well suited to jungle training”. 

Over the next four years, the UK military can expect to get an extra £16.5 billion – a 10% increase in funding and a fond salute to militarists.  “I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and ends now,” declared Johnson.  “Our plans will safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs in the defence industry, protecting livelihoods across the UK and keeping the British people safe.” 

The prime minister was hoping to make that announcement accompanied by the “Integrated Defence and Security Review” long championed by his now departed chief special adviser, Dominic Cummings.  Cummings might have been ejected from the gladiatorial arena of Downing Street politics, but the ideas in the Review are unlikely to buck old imperial trends.  At the very least, there will be a promise of more military bases to reflect a posture General Carter describes rather obscurely as “engaged and forward deployed”.

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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 TruePublica

‘Private medicine grants privileges to those who have money to the detriment of those who do not have it and nothing could be more inhumane than that. It is unbelievable that rich societies that apply this and many other similar policies speak of human rights and humanity when their own system is the most inhumane, the most egotistic, the most individualistic and the most alienating’ (Fidel Castro, Havana, 1999).

‘Man can’t be a piece of merchandise nor can human health be a piece of merchandise, because selling, trading, profiting from health is like selling, trading and profiting from slaves, trading and profiting from human life…’ (Fidel Castro, Havana 1998).

The success of Cuba’s healthcare system is widely acknowledged, even among the country’s adversaries, critics and enemies. However, little credit is given to Fidel Castro’s role and vision in bringing it to fruition. Before the triumph of the Socialist Revolution, Cuba faced persistent shortages of medical workers and had few hospitals. In fact, Cuba’s many poor people often had no access to healthcare services whatsoever, particularly those residing in rural and remote areas of the island. Meanwhile, it was not uncommon for people to sleep on the floor at the few hospitals that the country did have. This is because doctors mainly served ‘the owners of the sugar mills, [and] the millionaires,’ mostly in Havana (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002). Fidel Castro (Havana, 2002) described the state of health care in Cuba prior to the Socialist Revolution as ‘a crime against the people, against the sick, against the unfortunate, against those who suffer.’

Accordingly, one of the main goals of the Cuban revolutionaries was to establish a good health care system that would be available to everyone. In fact, they believed that it was the duty of the Revolution to provide the people of Cuba with excellent universal health care services. Shortly after the Revolution prevailed, the government essentially launched an ‘attack against diseases,’ and implemented measures so that the nation could effectively ‘save thousands of lives from tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough, diseases that kill thousands of children every year, and can be caught by any child in any family’ (Fidel Castro 1962). On October 17, 1962, Fidel Castro stated that this would be accomplished by:

preventing these diseases through vaccination. And in this way we will continue to combat disease after disease, and will go on decreasing the number of epidemics, the number of deaths, the number of victims. In this way we will work at fulfilling this worthy goal: to move from therapeutic medicine to preventive medicine.[i]

Since the early days of the Revolution, Fidel Castro was determined to have more students enter into medical school each year so that Cuba could, one day, boast more doctors per capita than any other country in Latin America. However, he was well aware that a good health care system and improvements in ‘medicine or the medical power of a country are not only measured by the number of doctors,’ but also by ‘the way these doctors are trained,’ their knowledge, as well as their spirit (Fidel Castro Havana, 1999).[ii] Ultimately, he wanted the country to have an abundance of well-trained doctors, who were also good human beings.

Fidel Castro advanced the socialist government’s efforts to improve Cuba’s health care system by establishing new medical schools throughout the country, introducing new services and ideas, sending family doctors to remote areas, building and expanding hospitals and polyclinics, and investing in scientific research. Now, ‘good doctors and the best specialists are at the service of all the citizens in whatever part of the country’ they reside, and regardless of the income they earn (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998).[iii] The island has transformed itself into ‘a genuine medical power’ that provides extraordinary services in Cuba and abroad.

To fully appreciate the extraordinary achievements of Cuba’s socialist regime in the area of health care, it is sufficient to examine some current health statistics. In 1962, there were only 3,960 doctors in all of Cuba. Today the country boasts one of the highest doctors per capita in the world. In 2019, it was reported that ‘Cuba has more than 100,000 doctors, the highest number in the history of the country with a proportion of nine doctors per 1,000 citizens.’[iv] That same year, ‘there were 91,375 physicians in Canada, representing 241 physicians per 100,000 population,’[v] or 2.4 doctors per 1,000 citizens. Moreover, Cuba currently produces enough medicines to meet about 90% of the island’s total needs. In October, Doctor Eduardo Martínez Díaz, president of the BioCubaFarma[vi] enterprise group, explained that Cuba has domestically developed and produced vaccines to treat a variety of ailments, including meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B and haemophilus influenzae type B.[vii] He emphasized that Cuban ‘vaccines have international prestige, made evident by the fact that hundreds of millions of doses manufactured on the island have been supplied to more than 40 nations.’[viii] In fact, Cuba was the first nation in Latin America and the Caribbean to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to clinical trials, having developed two potential candidates, SOBERANA 1 and SOBERANA 2. If either of these vaccines are determined to be safe and effective, then Cuba could become a major supplier for many of its neighbours. In discussing Cuba’s efforts to rapidly develop its own vaccine by mobilizing its best scientists and lab technicians, Doctor Eduardo Martínez Díaz stated: ‘We have worked hard, in unity, with intelligence, and we are going to do our duty, which means fulfilling our duty to the people, to Fidel and Raul.’[ix]

The Cuban health care system has faced considerable hardship, largely due to persistent material shortages on account of the American trade embargo, which has been described as ‘an attempt to kill’ Cubans through ‘hunger and disease, in order to destroy’ the Socialist Revolution. The United States has made numerous attempts to undermine Cuba’s Socialist revolution, beginning almost immediately after it succeeded in toppling the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. In addition to economic and political sanctions, the US has employed anti-Cuban propaganda, sabotage, and terrorism, including chemical and biological warfare. Nonetheless, the vision of Fidel Castro and the determined efforts of the Cuban people have made the dream of achieving excellence in health care for the benefit and well-being of all citizens of the country into a reality. Ultimately, the destructive American economic embargo has forced Cubans to learn how ‘to do a lot with very little,’ as evidenced by their successes in terms of raising life expectancy and lowering child mortality (Fidel Castro Caracas, 1999).

The destructive impacts of the blockade were intensified in an unprecedented manner with the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act in 2019. More precisely, ‘between 2019 and 2020 alone more than 130 measures’ were imposed against Cuba, ‘with the deliberate purpose of stifling the economy, creating discontent and despair in the population.’[x] These measures resulted in the cancellation of significant commercial operations and foreign investment projects in Cuba. In particular, concerns about being subjected to fines, sanctions, and legal proceedings has led many banks and financial institutions to limit their activities and services in Cuba, while a number of shipping and delivery companies have suspended many of their shipments to the island.

Recently, Cuba was even prevented from receiving a donation of medical supplies from the Chinese company Alibaba that included mechanical ventilators, COVID-19 testing kits, face masks and various other items. The considerable challenges imposed on the lives of the Cuban people by the US blockade over last six decades, including the recent intensification by the Trump administration, makes the effectiveness and achievements of its healthcare system even more impressive. This is particularly true when considering its success in terms of managing its COVID-19 outbreak and comparing it to the outcomes observed in some of its free-market oriented counterparts.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, Cuba has reported 7,879 cases and 132 deaths with a population of 11.34 million. That translates into about 1.16 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, much lower than Canada’s 30.47 deaths per 100,000, and the US with 80.29 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In fact, New York City alone reported around 301,000 cases and 24,218 deaths with a population of 8.399 million, which amounts to a staggering 288.34 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, Brazil fared slightly worse than the US as a whole, with 80.89 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, which might be fitting given the spectacle that Jair Bolsonaro made by publicly demanding changes to The More Doctors program (Programa Mais Médicos), a Brazilian government initiative designed to provide doctors to underserved areas of the country. Since the program was established by the government of Dilma Rousseff in 2013, approximately 20,000 Cuban health professionals have served in Brazil, including in 700 municipal districts that never had a resident doctor before.[xi]

Recently, President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel underscored Cuba’s success in its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak by pointing out that ‘across the planet, 75% of the sick have recovered, in the Americas 65%, and in Cuba 91%.’[xii] He also stated that ‘the percentage of active cases as compared to the population in Cuba is seven, while in the world it stands at 21.8% and in Latin America, over 31.4%.’[xiii] Furthermore, ‘there have been no deaths of children, pregnant women or health personnel’[xiv] attributed to COVID-19 on the island. President Díaz-Canel also highlighted the fact that Cuban ‘intensive care units never collapsed’ even though ‘100% of confirmed cases and their contacts have been treated in hospitals.’[xv] Subsequently, they were allowed to go home after they tested negative.

A key factor in the successful handling of the COVID-19 outbreak on the island was the quick and decisive action of Cuba’s socialist government. Like many countries, Cuba closed its borders, businesses and schools shortly after the World Health Organization declared that the global COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The government also made face masks mandatory almost immediately. Another important action taken by the government, which is beyond the scope of many other countries, was to deploy doctors, nurses and medical students to all streets and homes throughout the country to check for symptoms.

On a recent visit to Cuba, I had the opportunity to personally observe and experience some of the new measures and rules implemented by the socialist government aimed at protecting the lives of visitors to the island by minimizing the risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus. At the Cuban airport, passengers were put into a line outside of the main entrance as soon as they disembarked the airplane, with Cuban officials ensuring that the 2-metre distancing rule was being respected. Inside, a team of workers disinfected all carry-on baggage and purses, while passengers were made to sanitize their hands. Subsequently, a team of medical professionals checked each passenger’s temperature before collecting samples that were labelled and sent to a lab for testing. Meanwhile, a large contingent of workers were busy continuously cleaning every single area of the airport, as well as any objects that that passengers might have touched or otherwise come in contact with. This was a stark contrast with the airport experience when I returned to Canada, as social distancing was not enforced while waiting in lines, carry-on baggage was not disinfected, no medical personnel were visible, and no mandatory COVID-19 tests were administered.[xvi] Compared to the experience in Cuba, the Canadian airport appeared to be very poorly organized and lacking in resources when it comes to encouraging rigorous and effective hygiene practices, and enforcing social distancing rules.

At the Cuban resorts, employees are regularly tested. There are also nurses and doctors on staff to monitor the health of all their clients, which includes taking everyone’s temperate each morning. Furthermore, all public areas have been organized in a manner that ensures public distancing, while washrooms, tables, chairs, and other items are sanitized immediately after being used by tourists.

Broadly speaking, Cuba’s success in terms of containing its COVID-19 outbreak is due in large part to the centrally planned system’s adherence to the principle that free and universal health care is a fundamental human right. Consequently, its leaders have consistently made extensive investments in health care services since the early days of the Revolution. In addition to providing medical care to all inhabitants of the island, Cuban doctors are renowned for venturing well beyond their borders en masse in order to assist other nations in need, particularly in their most remote areas that are underserved and often have no doctors at all. None of this is particularly surprising, as the Cuban government has committed itself to building ‘awareness,’ and instilling ‘feelings of solidarity and a generous internationalist spirit’ at its medical schools since triumph of the Revolution (Fidel Castro Caracas, 1999).

For Cuban medical workers, their ‘mission is to create a doctrine about human health, to set an example of what can be done in this field’ (Fidel Castrol Havana, 1999).[xvii] Since the Revolution, over 400,000 Cuban health professionals have been sent to 164 countries around the world to help them meet their health care needs, and to provide assistance in times of crisis and in the aftermath of natural disasters.[xviii] Moreover, Cuban medical workers will often remain in foreign countries in order to assist them in the development of their own health care systems and services. Recently, Cuba sent about 4,000 health workers to around 40 countries to help them with their COVID-19 outbreaks.[xix]

Additionally, Cuba helps combat doctor shortages in developing countries by providing free medical school to students from those regions. In fact, Havana’s Latin American Medical School (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM)) is ‘the largest medical school in the world.’[xx] ‘The University of Toronto has 850 medical students and Harvard University has 735. ELAM has twelve times more students than those two schools combined: 19,550.’ In 2002, Fidel Castro delivered a speech to students of the Latin American Medical School in the presence of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and stated:

what good would it do if you all went back to your countries to become part of institutions where, sadly, financial concerns, commercialism and selfishness prevail? What good would it do if no one was willing to go work in the mountains, the plains, the remote corners of the countryside or marginal neighborhoods of the cities to practice the noble profession of medicine? More than a medical school, our most fervent hope is that this will be a school of solidarity, brotherhood and justice.[xxi]

During a 2003 visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fidel Castro underscored Cuba’s commitment to preserving human life when he said:

Our country does not drop bombs on other countries, or send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country has neither nuclear weapons, nor chemical weapons, nor biological weapons. The tens of thousands of scientists and doctors in our country have been educated in the philosophy of saving lives. It would be totally contradictory to their formation to ask a scientist or a doctor to work producing substances, bacteria or viruses capable of causing the death of other human beings…Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors have offered their services on internationalist missions in the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. I once said that our country could not and would not ever launch preemptive attacks against any dark corner of the world. On the other hand, our country has sent badly needed doctors to the darkest corners of the world. Doctors and not bombs, doctors and not intelligent weapons…[xxii]

Fidel Castro (Havana 1998) believed that, instead of investing massively in the development of weapons to kill in the most efficient and destructive ways imaginable, countries with ‘the resources for it should promote medical research and put the fruits of science at the service of humanity, creating instruments of health and life and not of death.’ He was very proud of the Cuban health care system’s accomplishments, both domestically and internationally, and trusted that Cuban doctors had the integrity and skills necessary in order to save lives anywhere in the world.

Fidel Castro would likely have not been surprised by the failure of health care systems to adequately respond to and manage COVID-19 outbreaks in many of the countries that subscribe to capitalism. He was highly critical of the practice of treating health care services as though they were business transactions in a free-market place. Instead, he often reiterated the point that the commercialization of health care was ‘repugnant,’ and everybody should have free access to adequate health care services. Accordingly, the privatisation of health care would not be permitted on the socialist island nation of Cuba. In addition to denouncing all forms of private health care, Fidel also strongly condemned profit-oriented pharmaceutical companies. He specifically expressed his frustration with large and powerful pharmaceutical companies that dedicate themselves to maximizing their profits instead of demonstrating a genuine commitment to human life when he addressed ‘the special session commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the World health Organization,’ in Geneva, Switzerland on May 14, 1998, when he stated:

medicines, that should be made to save lives, are sold at increasingly higher prices. In 1995, the market of pharmaceuticals involved 280 billion dollars. The developed countries with 824 million people, 14.6 percent of the world population, consume 82 percent of the medicines while consumption in the rest of the world with a 4,815 million population is only 18 percent. The prices are actually prohibitive for the Third World where consumption is limited to the privileged sectors. The control of patents and markets by the big transnational companies allows them to raise prices over ten times above production costs. The market price of some advanced antibiotics is 50 times higher than their cost.[xxiii]

Fidel Castro was not only critical of the profit maximizing behaviour of large pharmaceutical companies, he also frequently spoke of the failure of governments to provide adequate public health care services for their citizens. In a 1998 speech in Havana, he claimed that public hospitals in many countries failed ‘because they didn’t have resources, because they didn’t have a budget.’ He recalled that public health care was in a similar state in Cuba prior to the Revolution as, ‘in addition to scarce and diminishing budgets, a part of these budgets was misappropriated’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998). He was always a strong advocate of publicly funded and managed healthcare systems, as he stated that ‘If the state is sick, let’s cure the state, let’s give the state health. It’s necessary for the state to function healthily. But let’s not hand the solution of problems of human health over to the market’[xxiv] (Fidel Castro Havana, 1998). Fidel Castro believed that if a state was truly committed to the achievement of the collective good, it would find a way to provide its citizens with universal health care services even in the face of economic difficulties and other problems. This is evidenced by Cuba, as Castro stated:

We have lived the experience and we’ve had the opportunity, with very few resources, to see how public medicine can work and, even today, with a double blockade, it could be said, it works, not with all the resources that we would like, but, for many years, the country invested in hospitals. It first used those that existed and it later built many new hospitals and it built clinics, modest hospitals, including in the mountains, in the countryside, with a network of hospitals and polyclinics being established throughout the country, even managing to create, in addition, that outstanding network for primary care that is now made up of our family doctors, with a new sense.[xxv]

In a 1998 speech in Havana, Fidel Castro underscored the critical importance of family doctors in Cuba, as he explained that:

every doctor that graduates, except in a very few specialties, in order to become a specialist in the varied branches of medicine, first has to be a family doctor, a professional with great knowledge of man, experience, human behavior, who has looked after patients in a community, to know well how they live, in what social conditions. Then, later, if they want, they can acquire a second specialty…But they’re people who already have very wide knowledge. They’ve studied for six years at university and they’ve studied for three years from their office. They’ve had nine years studying and, later, they’ll have to study for another three or four years if they’re going to acquire a second specialty.[xxvi]

According to Fidel Castro, the success of the family doctors system in Cuba could not have been achieved under the auspices of the private sector. While he acknowledged that a number of other nations around the world also utilized family doctors, he pointed out that they often live far away from their patients. To the contrary, family doctors on the socialist island live close to their patients, sometimes right next door. ‘They can be 100 meters from the resident, from the citizen. Others have the doctor 50 meters away if they live nearer the doctor’s office. In the cities, the residents…live with a doctor next door.’[xxvii] Family doctors can essentially be found everywhere in Cuba, including in the nurseries, schools, factories, hotels and resorts, and many other workplaces. Fidel Castro (1999 Havana) made it clear that there could never be enough doctors, stating that Cubans are not ‘afraid of the number of doctors. There will never be too many doctors anywhere, be it a passenger’s plane, a train or a boat.’ [xxviii] In a 1999 speech to students graduating from the Havana Higher Institute of Medical Sciences, Fidel Castro explained that when it was suggested to him that Cuba would not need any more doctors after the island achieved the milestone of 20,000, he responded by saying:

You think that there will be too many doctors? That is not possible…because doctors have to defend people’s health like the CDRs [Comités de Defensa de la Revolución] defend the Revolution; there should be one on every block.[xxix]

Before Socialist Cuba established its health care system, people were often forced to wait for days, or even weeks, in order to have simple health procedures performed at hospitals. Now that family doctors with adequate knowledge and training to diagnose and treat many diseases, illnesses and other health problems are available all over the country, people have the option of avoiding hospitals for relatively minor health issues. However, they can also see a specialist at a polyclinic or hospital if that is their preference. Fidel Castro believed that providing people with such a wide range of choices when it comes to health care is an effective approach for the ‘saving of beds and facilities.’[xxx] It appears that he was correct, as Cuban emergency rooms and hospitals never have to contend with overcrowding. This was particularly evident during the current pandemic, as Cuban emergency rooms were at no point at risk of being overwhelmed, unlike those of a number of capitalist countries.

Cuba’s successful handling of the COVID-19 outbreak relative to many capitalist countries is not overly surprising, given that Cubans have considered health to be a fundamental human right since the Socialist Revolution. This has led the country to make significant investments and expend a massive collective effort in establishing free health care services for all Cubans. However, other features of the socialist regime were also instrumental in successfully combatting the spread of COVID-19 in addition to Cuba’s commitment to universal healthcare. For instance, President Díaz-Canel explained that Cuba’s centrally planned system, one of the fundamental and most criticized aspects of its socialist regime, played an important role by ensuring the availability of basic food items, cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene products since the outbreak began. History has shown that Cuba’s socialist government has always been very capable of swiftly and effectively mobilising its economic, natural and human resources in order to secure the well-being and safety of its citizens when faced with a catastrophic event. In fact, president Díaz-Canel went so far as to describe Cuba’s successful handing of its COVID-19 outbreak as ‘almost a miracle,’ which is an outcome of ‘people, experiences, principles and the thinking of Fidel and Army General Raul Castro Ruz.’[xxxi] He further elaborated that ‘those of us who are members of the band of non-conformists and optimists, like Fidel and Raúl, learned with them and their comrades in struggle that all challenges can be overcome. Cubans are proving, once again, that it can be done.’[xxxii] He also highlighted the key roles of solidarity, collective efforts, dedication and sacrifices on the part of Cubans since the outbreak began.[xxxiii] On October 28, 2020, president Díaz-Canel delivered a speech in ‘closing the Fifth Ordinary Period of Sessions of the National Assembly of People’s Power,’ in which he stated:

There is a component in Cuban DNA, in the magnificent mix of ethnicities and history of continuous resilience, from which emerges from “that sweet word: Cuban.” But there is another factor that is no less important, which is the conscious construction, over more than 60 years, of a work that is larger and stronger than we are, with an authentic leadership, respected and admired in the world, more respected and admired the more it has resisted the blows of the adversary without giving up. I speak, of course, of Fidel, of Raúl, of the Centennial Generation, whom we are honored to follow, with proud dedication to the cause to which they devoted their lives.[xxxiv]

Socialist Cuba has always strived to achieve a more humane and just world order, characterized by solidarity and social cooperation among human beings. Accordingly, its leaders and supporters of the Revolution were acutely aware of the many defects and destructive outcomes of free-market capitalism. In fact, some of the key factors that contributed to COVID-19 being so disastrous on a global level include the poverty of neo-liberal governmental policies, the inflexibility of neo-liberal economists, and the myopic visions of politicians who never cared about the collective good. However, the panic that ensued during the pandemic led many Western governments to suddenly transition to central deliberate planning, after being devoted to free-market capitalism, while also being adamantly opposed government interventions at achieving the collective good, for decades. By essentially transitioning away from the laissez-faire approach and towards central planning, traditionally free-market oriented governments have temporarily abandoned the principles, policies and behaviours that they have adhered to and promoted for the last four decades. In fact, the extent to which these governments have recently involved themselves in the economy, as well as in people’s lives, represents unchartered waters for many of them. Ultimately, the failures of Western countries in dealing with their respective COVID-19 outbreak supports Fidel Castro’s contention that free market capitalism is ill-equipped when it comes to responding to catastrophic events. In this regard, he stated that ‘the state is sick’ and needs to be cured. However, curing the state from the ills of capitalism is not something that can be achieved swiftly or easily.

According to Fidel Castro (Havana 1998), only revolutionary people could dedicate themselves to ensuring that the interests of the masses are ‘aligned with the best causes of humanity,’ which is necessary in order to achieve a more humane and just world order. Furthermore, he believed that ‘the Revolution is not just about putting forward ideas, it is about carrying out ideas. The Revolution is not theory; it is action, above all’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002). Cuba has shown that ‘whatever the Revolution has proposed to do, it has achieved. Whatever the Revolution has begun, it has carried on with. And this is the result of ideas turned into reality, of tasks undertaken and carried out’ (Fidel Castro Havana, 2002).

‘Long live free Cuba! Long live the victorious Revolution!’ (Fidel Castro)

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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa. 

Notes

[i] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-ceremony-commemorating-40th-anniversary-victoria-de-giron-institute-basic-medical

[ii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-students-graduating-havana-higher-institute-medical-sciences-karl-marx-theater

[iii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[iv] https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/cuba-cuban-doctors-highest-number-in-history-20190723-0009.html

[v] https://www.cihi.ca/en/physicians-in-canada

[vi] ‘BioCubaFarma, the Cuban organization of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries, manages the country’s efforts toward manufacturing medicines, diagnostics and medical equipment and providing high quality life science services to improve people’s health. BioCubaFarma serves as a gateway for potential partners and investors interested in accessing the extensive biopharma resources Cuba has to offer.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/d43747-020-00522-5

[vii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-21/the-emergence-of-soberana-1-is-not-a-chance-event

[viii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-21/the-emergence-of-soberana-1-is-not-a-chance-event

[ix] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-21/the-emergence-of-soberana-1-is-not-a-chance-event

[x] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-30/it-will-always-be-an-honor-to-serve-you-beloved-homeland

[xi] In the first four years of The More Doctors program, the percentage of Brazilians receiving primary health care rose from 59.6% to 70%. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro stated that the 11,420 Cuban doctors working in poor and remote parts of Brazil could only stay if they received 100% of their pay and their families were permitted join them. He also questioned the qualifications of the Cuban doctors and suggested that they might have to renew their licenses in Brazil. In response, Cuba’s health ministry announced its withdrawal from the program, stating that ‘these conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the program.’ The abrupt withdrawal of Cuban doctors has not only adversely affected Brazil’s healthcare system, with Bolsonaro failing to deliver on promises to quickly find domestic substitutes, it has also hurt Cuba’s economy.

[xii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/diaz-canel-in-cuba-life-is-our-principal-treasure

[xiii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/diaz-canel-in-cuba-life-is-our-principal-treasure

[xiv] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/diaz-canel-in-cuba-life-is-our-principal-treasure

[xv] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/diaz-canel-in-cuba-life-is-our-principal-treasure

[xvi] Additionally, the kiosk display screens that each passenger has to use to fill out their Canada Border Services Agency Declaration (CBSAD) forms were not disinfected after each use. There is also a new COVID-19 form to fill out, which is done at those same kiosks using a couple of pens that have been left there for passengers to share without being disinfected. After getting through customs, the Canadian airport did not demonstrate the same level of commitment to sanitizing the washrooms and other public areas as the one in Cuba, where personnel were observed engaging in frequent cleaning.

[xvii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-students-graduating-havana-higher-institute-medical-sciences-karl-marx-theater

[xviii] http://www.granma.cu/mundo/2020-03-23/cubasalva-practica-humanista-de-la-revolucion-23-03-2020-01-03-38

[xix] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cuba-sends-white-coat-army-doctors-fight-coronavirus-different-countries-n1240028

[xx] https://www.ted.com/talks/gail_reed_where_to_train_the_world_s_doctors_cuba/transcript?language=en

[xxi] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-given-during-former-us-president-jimmy-carters-visit-latin-american-medical-school

[xxii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-given-law-school-university-buenos-aires-argentina

[xxiii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-special-session-commemorating-50th-anniversary-world-health-organization

[xxiv] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[xxv] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[xxvi] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[xxvii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[xxviii] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-students-graduating-havana-higher-institute-medical-sciences-karl-marx-theater

[xxix] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-students-graduating-havana-higher-institute-medical-sciences-karl-marx-theater

[xxx] http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-closing-ceremony-health-ministers-meeting-non-aligned-countries

[xxxi] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/diaz-canel-in-cuba-life-is-our-principal-treasure

[xxxii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-30/it-will-always-be-an-honor-to-serve-you-beloved-homeland

[xxxiii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-09/cuba-saves-heals-and-sows-the-seeds-of-our-future

[xxxiv] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-10-30/it-will-always-be-an-honor-to-serve-you-beloved-homeland

Featured image is from The Council of Canadians

The recent Issue Brief by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission entitled The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Testbed for Chinese Power Projection takes a close look at the Chinese security footprint in Central Asia and its political dimensions. A perception has grown over the most recent years amongst great game watchers generally, especially the US analysts, that China is gobbling up Central Asia. On the contrary, this report takes a contrarian view. 

By the way, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, headquartered in Washington, DC, is a congressional commission of the United States government, which was created in October 2000 with the legislative mandate to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the US and China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action. 

This Issue Brief appeared in the second week of November at a time when the US-China relations have hit an all-time low level in all its history since the normalisation in the early 1970s. Yet, interestingly, it eschews hyperbole or propaganda. The report estimates that Beijing almost single-mindedly uses the grouping to safeguard its national security interests and is not pursuing any geopolitical agenda.

The Issue Brief’s conclusions can be summarised as follows: 

i) In recent years, Beijing has increased security cooperation with Central Asian countries under the auspices of the SCO to insulate itself from perceived threats in the region. Beijing is using the SCO to enhance its ability to project power beyond its borders. 

ii) The SCO military exercises offer a unique opportunity for the Chinese armed forces to practice air-ground combat operations in foreign countries, undertaking a range of operations including long-distance mobilisation, counterterrorism missions, stability maintenance operations, and conventional warfare. 

iii) Beijing has used the SCO to extend its defensive perimeter into Central Asia. 

iv) Russia and China have used the SCO to leverage the eviction of US military bases in Central Asia. 

v) Following the induction of India and Pakistan as SCO members, the grouping’s potential to challenge US interests in a coordinated way may have diminished; and,    

vi) Beijing’s fears of instability and terrorism have grown, which prompted it to step up cooperation with SCO in relation to the Afghan situation.

Since 2016, the People’s Armed Police, part of China’s armed forces, has operated an outpost “in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan province bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor for joint counterterrorism border patrolling with Afghan and Tajik forces. However, this stems from the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism on border security comprising Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China.  

Clearly, the above findings do not add up to anything earthshaking. It is well-known that the SCO was created primarily as a security organisation with the stated objectives of combatting terrorism and instability. Its original aim was to strengthen political ties between the member states, promote border security, share intelligence and counter terrorist threats. In later years, SCO also began turning attention to expansion of economic cooperation, but without any big success stories to mention so far.

What emerges is that the common narrative that China is overshadowing the Russian security presence in Central Asia lacks any empirical evidence. Russia is still the only extra-regional power that maintains a military base in Central Asia (in Tajikistan) and also heads a CSTO base (in Kyrgyzstan). 

Russia’s sensitivities are historical. The Russian and Chinese shadows in the region historically overlapped. The Russian incursions into Central Asia date back to the 17th century. The first Russia-China treaty over Central Asia was concluded in 1689 allowing the Russians to enter China for trading in commodities (eg., tea, silk, porcelain, etc.) that had tremendous market in Europe, while in return, China got additional territory in Central and Inner Asia. 

The Czarist Russia’s incremental takeover of Central Asia continued through the 18th century, and by 19th century, the region had come under Russian control. In 1868 Czarist Russia made Tashkent its ‘capital’ in the Central Asian region. China was ahead of Russia by moving into Xinjiang roughly a century earlier. 

Indeed, riots and revolts and opposition to foreign powers continued in the Central Asian region through the 19th century and right into the 20th century. Meanwhile, Great Britain also appeared on the horizon in the 19th century, trying to build a buffer zone to protect India, particularly from Russia, by expanding into areas of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, apart from trying to expand into Tibet and Afghanistan. 

These activities were later referred to as the Great Game. The Great Game receded in the 20th century with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the emergence of Soviet Central Asia. An Iron Curtain descended over Central Asia so much so that in 1988, hardly three years before the Soviet Union itself disappeared, Moscow made a great exception for its close friend India by allowing it to open a consulate in Tashkent! Needless to say, Central Asia was out of bounds for China through the Soviet era. 

The above recap is in order to bear in mind that Russia and China’s present-day co-habitation in Central Asia has a profound historical backdrop. China was quick on its feet to accord diplomatic recognition to the newly independent Central Asian republics in 1991 and establish its embassies in the five ‘Stans’. 

It took only a few years for Beijing to create the necessary legal underpinnings of state-to-state relations — despite the fact that the institutions of governance in the new ‘Stans’ were far from formed. On a parallel track, discussions also commenced on the boundary disputes with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. 

The Chinese diplomats assigned to the region accomplished a lot in a short period of time. Looking back, the colourful Central Asia tour by President Jiang Zemin in 1996, the first by a Chinese president to the region, was a sort of victory lap during which, in his inimitable way, the Chinese leader spread petals of goodwill all across the steppes.       

Right from the outset, Beijing attributed high importance to the Central Asian region from the perspective of China’s national security and development. It began by building the sinews of a tight partnership with the ‘Stans’ in battling the three ‘evils’ of terrorism, separatism (or ‘splittism’) and religious extremism. 

Unsurprisingly, through the 1990s, China’s economic influence and geo-political interest in Central Asia also kept steadily increasing. However, Beijing proceeded very cautiously, wary of treading on Russian sensitivities in a region which Moscow saw as its traditional sphere of influence. 

The good part was that there was no major conflict of interests insofar as China and Russia had common concerns in regard of the security and stability of Central Asia. Much of Beijing’s diplomacy with the Central Asian republics (including later in the ‘Shanghai Five’ forum comprising China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) was conducted in the full view of the Russian neighbour, which gave a transparency to the Chinese intentions as Beijing enthusiastically co-operated in the joint statements on common resistance to radical Islamist groups. 

China co-ordinated with each of its Central Asian republic neighbours as well in intelligence sharing and anti-terrorism activities targeting anti-Chinese Uighur and Kazakh elements in Central Asia. From the Central Asian perspective, China appeared as a model of successful transition from a centrally controlled to a market economy, which was broadly the trajectory chosen by the former Soviet republics too. 

Possibly, the Central Asian political elites also regarded as a useful counterweight to Russia and the West, and a potential investor as well as customer for Caspian energy resources. Above all, their comfort level Beijing was high, given China’s scrupulous adherence to non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries — and, in the central Asian context, its non-prescriptive approach to issues of human rights, authoritarianism and so on. 

By the end of the 1990s, much before the Belt and Road was rolled out in 2013, China had already outbid Western companies and invested nearly $1 billion dollars in two Kazakh oil fields; this outlay eventually rise to manifold as the fields were developed. Beijing’s China National Petroleum Corporation signed an agreement to consider building a 2,500-mile pipeline to carry Kazakh Caspian oil across Kazakhstan to China’s north-east. 

China publicly supported the revival of the East-West Silk Road. All in all, China was systematically staking its own economic and political claims in Central Asia. Already by 2000, three of the five Central Asian republics had more trade with China than Russia.

On the other hand, China was careful to balance its accumulating presence in Central Asia with its improving relations with Russia through the 1990s, while also retaining its strategic relationship with Pakistan. China never stopped leveraging its close and friendly relations with Pakistan as a hedge against the radical Islamist groups based on Pakistani soil, including militant elements from Central Asia and Xinjiang. 

In later years, it came as no surprise that Russia also began copying the Chinese experience to seek Pakistan’s help to neutralise security threats from the extremist groups operating in the region. China’s eagerness to induct Pakistan into the SCO — and Russia’s support for it — can be put in such a perspective, and inevitably, it eventually brought China, Russia and Pakistan onto the same page as regards their common stance on the imperative need of reconciliation with the Taliban as a key template of settlement in Afghanistan. 

(A second part will follow.) 

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Featured image: Modern day traders on the ancient Silk Road track in Central Asia. Photo: Facebook

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) and the Coalition of Canadian Palestinian Organizations (CCPO) are urging the Canadian government to take action in response to the crisis facing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency responsible for 5.7 million Palestinian refugees. CJPME and the CCPO are calling on Canada to renew and increase its annual support for UNRWA, provide the agency with emergency financial assistance, and to vote in support of Palestinian refugees at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Since 2016, Canada has provided about $20 million annually in funding to UNRWA, which is currently due for renewal. Earlier this month, UNRWA announced that it has run out of money and faces its “worst financial crisis” ever, partly due to a shortfall following Trump’s withdrawal of US funding in 2018. If UNRWA doesn’t receive an additional $70 million USD in emergency financial assistance by the end of November, the agency warns that it will not be able to pay its 28,000 staff or continue to provide essential services.

“Palestinian refugees are counting on the international community to step up in this time of crisis,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “In addition to a renewal of its annual funding to UNRWA, Canada needs to take leadership by providing emergency assistance. There’s no more time to wait.”

CJPME notes that despite Canada’s financial support to UNRWA, it refuses to support UNRWA at the UNGA. Since 2010 under Stephen Harper, Canada has annually voted against resolutions supporting the agency, and has abstained on whether to renew UNRWA’s mandate. So far in 2020 Canada has continued this approach at the UN committee level, but has yet to make a final vote on these resolutions at the UNGA plenary.

“Canada’s failure to support UNRWA at the UN is perplexing, given Canada’s own contributions to the agency,” said Mousa Zaidan, National Coordinator for the CCPO. “Canada should stand up and be proud and vocal about its investment in the health, education and livelihoods of Palestinian refugees – one of the world’s most vulnerable populations.”

Earlier this month, CJPME and the CCPO successfully campaigned to urge Canada to vote in support of Palestinian self-determination at the UNGA. Despite that vote, Canada has otherwise maintained its radical anti-Palestine habit of voting “No” on related motions on Palestinian human rights, even when those motions are consistent with official Canadian policy. Several weeks ago, CJPME published its “UN Dashboard,” an on-line tool to monitor Canada’s voting on annual UN resolutions on Palestinian human rights.

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Featured image is from UNRWA

Conforme exposto na primeira parte desta reportagem, o governo Lukashenko em época de crise mundial foi balançado, com a investida da oposição bielorrussa após as eleições; e em especial porque estava estremecido com o forte parceiro Putin, sem poder nele se apoiar. Mas diante do perigo, essa distância entre Moscou e Minsque logo voltaria a ser uma boa amizade.

De volta aos protestos bielorrussos, vejamos como se deu este roteiro clássico de golpe neoliberal, segundo o modelo da “primavera dos povos”, cuja sequência passa por uma atuação determinada do Ocidente, que abraça rápida e estrategicamente a causa da caloura da política Svetlana Tsikhanouskaia, ao mesmo tempo que esculacha Lukashenko diante da opinião pública. Note-se que este líder é o mesmo que, há cinco anos, fora reconhecido pelo Ocidente como presidente “legitimamente eleito” – em um pleito cujas porcentagens foram muito similares às atuais.

Protestos da oposição e apoio do Ocidente

O caso bielorrusso se deu de modo mais veloz que noutros golpes. Em pouco tempo após o início das manifestações de rua, alguns estrategas mais audaciosos já aventavam erguer Svetlana ao pódio, enquanto presidenta “de direito”. Neste caso, desde o exílio, para onde fugiu logo nos primeiros dias de protesto, ela seria a destinatária responsável pelos amplos “fundos de auxílio” (ou mais precisamente de “desestabilização nacional”) – tal qual fizeram com o fantoche autoproclamado, Juan Guaidó. 

Não chegaram (ainda) a tanto; talvez por erros políticos da própria líder opositora, que alteou demais a voz, quando não tinha ainda suficiente audiência para fazê-lo: ao ameaçar Lukashenko [1], caso não renunciasse, com uma manifestação de proporções nunca antes vistas, ao lado de uma greve geral que pararia completamente o país.

Nem uma coisa, nem outra: nem a manifestação pós-ultimato (cujo prazo foi este 25 de outubro) foi tão grande assim, nem as greves pararam mais do que pequenas parcelas de algumas fábricas menores. Segundo entrevista exclusiva obtida por esta reportagem, o engenheiro da Petrobrás e pesquisador de energia e geopolítica, Paulo Henrique Tavares, que vive entre a Bielorrússia e a Rússia (onde trabalha em seu doutorado), afirma que na manifestação do “ultimato”, em Minsque não tinham mais que 10 mil pessoas nas ruas. Ou seja, um décimo do que foi estimado na primeira manifestação (que se deu logo após as eleições). 

Diante das evidências, inclusive um dos pilares da mídia conservadora brasileira, a Folha de São Paulo [2], foi obrigada a admitir, no dia seguinte, o “fracasso” da convocatória opositora.

Mas se Svetlana se equivocou no gesto político um tanto soberbo, não se deve por isso negligenciar sua astúcia e força. Observada mais de perto, a professora, agora líder opositora, não parece nem tão idealista, nem tão desprotegida como a mídia ocidental tem querido construí-la; e sua posição atual de liderança tampouco parece ser uma casualidade, ocorrida no calor do “clamor democrático”. 

Sigamos a trilha opositora e vejamos o outro lado da questão: quem é esta oposição a Lukashenko; onde deseja chegar com seu discurso liberal e clamores às potências ocidentais; e quais suas propostas (tão distantes da sonhada “oposição à esquerda” que alguns sinceros analistas críticos acreditam ver se alçando contra o atual líder cambaleante).

A oposição bielorrussa: comprando neoliberalismo

A atual líder dos protestos bielorrussos, Svetlana Tsikhanouskaia, vêm inflamando as ruas do país (ao menos nas maiores cidades). Anteriormente, ela não tinha nenhuma passagem pela política, até que – segundo ela – resolveu assumir a dianteira, motivada pela prisão do marido, um famoso blogueiro político que pouco antes tinha se lançado à presidência. 

Depois de não reconhecer a vitória de Lukashenko no pleito de agosto, Tsikhanouskaia insuflou seus partidários a ocuparem as ruas de Minsque. A polícia bielorrussa, que não é nenhuma PM brasileira, usou balas de borracha e interveio com firmeza, ainda que não se possa comparar com o sangue que escorre das crônicas policiais cotidianas da periferia de São Paulo ou Rio.

A “violência” de borracha e gás foi o suficiente para o Ocidente – e os mercados – clamarem pela renúncia do “ditador” reeleito, ameaçando reconhecer como presidenta a opositora Svetlana, e bloqueando recursos econômicos e pessoais do estado e dos líderes bielorrussos (tal como fizeram na Venezuela).

Vendo o país desestabilizado, Tsikhanouskaia partiu para a vizinha Lituânia, que em nome da UE, acolheu como “exilada” a líder supostamente ameaçada. Instalada na capital Vilnius, ela afirmou que deixou o país “por seus filhos”, em uma “decisão difícil”.

Mas antes de discorrer sobre Svetlana e seu projeto, vejamos quem são alguns importantes atores da oposição bielorrussa. 

Outros líderes opositores 

O influenciador digital, Sergei Tsikhanouski, seu esposo, foi detido em maio, por acusações de distúrbio violento da ordem, incluindo agressão a um policial por parte de seu grupo. Pouco depois, uma busca policial em sua casa de campo apreende centenas de milhares de dólares [3]. Questionada pelo caso, Svetlana se limitou a mostrar-se surpreendida, afirmando enigmaticamente que: “não temos riqueza, se tivéssemos iríamos levar uma vida melhor”.

Tsikhanouski é natural de Gomel, segunda cidade do país. Tendo estudado humanidades, logo abandonou a área, investindo na carreira de empreendedor de sucesso, conforme conta em entrevista [4]: abriu e passou a gerenciar algumas boates, atividade que o levou a trabalhos como o de produção de espetáculos musicais, eventos e vídeos. A partir daí, passa a fazer filmes publicitários, tendo aberto escritórios na Ucrânia e Rússia. 

Sua ascensão pública se daria justamente neste percurso de produtor de videoclipes, quando tem a bem-humorada ideia de ganhar nome zombando de Lukashenko, convidando oponentes do governo para vídeo-debates, e chegando a realizar um documentário sobre os protestos opositores de 2010, ocorridos em Minsque. Seu canal de vídeo no Youtube, “Um país para a vida” [5] – que explora histórias de bielorrussos “comuns” e casos “reais” de empresários “que ajudarão a construir um país para a vida” – foi lançado em 2019 e conseguiu atrair 140 mil assinantes. 

Outro possível candidato, até então voz ativa da oposição liberal – o banqueiro Viktor Babariko – estava impedido de candidatar-se, pois responde a processo por peculato e lavagem de dinheiro. Em suas propostas de pré-campanha, o milionário opositor defendia “reformas e privatizações”, visando o enxugamento do estado (de bem-estar social) – ressaltando ou mesmo admitindo, contudo, que para tanto o estado deveria arcar também com o ônus de previamente “criar empregos para aquelas pessoas que podem ficar desempregadas”.

Foi assim que a “responsabilidade” por liderar os opositores liberais recairia sobre Svetlana. Mas não de modo assim tão casual, como ela sugeriu em declaração à mídia. 

Svetlana Tsikhanouskaia: desde jovem nos braços do Ocidente 

A atual líder Svetlana foi uma das afetadas pelo acidente nuclear de Chernobyl (1986), episódio trágico que seria amplamente usado pelo Ocidente como arma retórica anti-soviética, nos anos finais da Guerra Fria. 

De acordo com artigo do portal russo pró-ocidental, The Moscow Times [6], ela, na época uma adolescente, foi convidada por uma ONG a viajar com tudo pago para a Irlanda – estado-membro da UE que, embora declaradamente “neutro” na Guerra Fria, apoiava habitualmente seus vizinhos da OTAN. Um membro da família irlandesa que a recebeu, David, filho de Henry Dean (um dos mentores deste projeto “filantrópico”, de apoio às vítimas da tragédia), afirma em entrevista que as crianças convidadas “ficaram muito impressionadas com o padrão de vida muito mais elevado do que o da Bielorrússia”, apesar de que a Irlanda de então era um país socialmente “mediano”, se comparado aos demais do Ocidente. Segundo David, foi neste processo que Svetlana – assim como as outras crianças – aprenderam a se questionar sobre os porquês de na Bielorrússia elas não poderem “ter tudo o que eles têm na Irlanda”. 

A maioria das crianças do projeto viajaram somente em uma ou duas oportunidades ao país insular, mas Svetlana retornaria lá “por oito anos e, assim, ela se tornou mais próxima da comunidade local”, tendo trabalhado em uma fábrica irlandesa, e também como tradutora. A matéria afirma ainda que foi assim que a líder da oposição passou a frequentar a Europa Ocidental, onde cultivou a “independência”, o “talento de liderança” que a caracteriza. E possivelmente, a visão elitista ocidentalizada que vem demonstrando em suas propostas para o país, ora expostas no programa de sua candidatura. 

É esta, brevemente, a trajetória de Svetlana, bem formada no caldo cultural europeu-ocidental.

Exportando “democracia”: Washington no coração dos golpes

Em se falando de financiamento externo de ONGs voltadas à “formação de lideranças” e promoção da “democracia” (em países rivais da OTAN), abre-se aqui um parêntesis para mencionar que, na mesma linha de seduzir jovens promissores e formá-los conforme a visão neoliberal de mundo, trabalha o National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – “Fundo Nacional para a Democracia”. Financiado pelo governo dos EUA e atualmente bastante focado na Bielorrússia, onde desenvolve vários de seus projetos de “exportação da democracia”, o NED é um grande incentivador das forças da oposição. 

Olga Kovalkova, por exemplo, uma das protagonistas da campanha de Svetlana Tsikhanouskaia, é graduada pela Eastern European School of Political Studies, instituição patrocinada pelo NED – e que dispõe também de recursos da USAID (Agência para o Desenvolvimento Internacional dos EUA), Fundação Rockefeller, União Europeia e fundos de programas da própria OTAN.

Em 2019, o NED listou em sua página cerca de 34 doações para seus projetos na Bielorrússia – de acordo com reportagem do portal canadense Mondialisation [7]. Os objetivos, menos ou mais explícitos, desses projetos é o de apoiar a formação técnica, jurídica e política de grupos de oposição ao governo Lukashenko, fomentando a criação de ONGs pró-ocidentais no país. São projetos que envolvem setores importantes para a desestabilização de um país, como o desenvolvimento “de estratégias de advocacia”, ou de um “repositório em rede de publicações que não são facilmente acessíveis” (obras políticas, históricas, ou de direitos humanos, segundo a visão ocidental), ou ainda incentivos para a defesa de “jornalistas e da mídia independente”, além de doações concedidas à “formação de partidos e movimentos democráticos para campanhas eficazes de conscientização”. 

Por trás dos projetos do NED, que se pintam sob aura de inocência, uma análise um pouco mais atenta pode vislumbrar um modelo de formação continuada de opositores pró-Ocidente, com vistas a difundir as chamadas “revoluções coloridas”. Segundo o próprio portal do NED [8], foram doados, em 2019, centenas de milhares de dólares a projetos como: “Liberdade de informação”; “Ideias e valores democrático”; “Apoio à sociedade civil”; “Apoio a um jornal independente”; “Fortalecimento de ONGs”; “Promoção do engajamento do cidadão”; “Instituto Democrático Nacional para Assuntos Internacionais”;  “Promoção do discurso público independente e valores democráticos”… e por aí vai.

De volta a Svetlana, destinatária, como seu marido, de muita atenção e apoio ocidental (como se tem podido observar em seus encontros fraternais com líderes de potências europeias), atentemos então a seu programa de governo [9] (recentemente retirado do ar), cujas propostas são vagas e até primárias. Esquivando-se de temas fundamentais (educação, saúde, política econômica), o programa, quando aborda tais questões, o faz de uma maneira superficial e populista, tratando problemas concretos de um modo genérico, como por exemplo: promover o “combate à corrupção” e ao “autoritarismo”; ou ainda “democratizar e modernizar” a Bielorrússia, prometendo como plataforma de governo [10] “a celebração de eleições democráticas seis meses após eleita” (!), e a “libertação de presos políticos”, “principalmente [sic] jornalistas ativistas e [!!] blogueiros”.

De propositivo mesmo, seu programa tem poucas linhas, ainda que nelas um bom entendedor possa compreender um pouco a que veio e onde quer chegar esta opositora formada na Europa rica: planos de incentivos para a iniciativa privada, privatizações de empresas “deficitárias” (ou que seu governo torne deficitárias?) e – claro – aproximação à União Europeia e afastamento da Rússia. 

Especificamente sobre o tema econômico [11], o programa afirma: “Vamos remover as barreiras para o desenvolvimento de pequenas e médias empresas”; “Deixe as pessoas criarem empregos elas mesmas”. Prevê ainda a realização de uma série de “reformas destinadas a reduzir os impostos das empresas, privatizar e apoiar os pequenos empreendimentos”. O discurso em louvor da suposta meritocracia liberal fica ainda mais evidente na seguinte passagem: “existem muitas pessoas inteligentes, talentosas e corajosas” no país, que devem ter “permissão para empreender”, de modo “eficaz”, o que “aumentará os salários”… Provável referência à pequena parcela de “empreendedores de sucesso” que escaparão, “por mérito”, do desemprego, após as privatizações.

Defende também a valorização da cultura bielorrussa [12], ainda que em seus discursos e declarações costume falar o russo (quando não o inglês); segundo dados de 2009, somente um terço dos cidadãos falam o bielorrusso, sobretudo no interior. Já quanto a sua política externa, ela acena ao Ocidente, embora afirme: “queremos ser independentes; encontrar amigos, não inimigos” – como que demonstrando inocência a respeito dos conflitos sociais que movem a história, incluindo a de seu país. 

Atualmente, desde seu exílio na UE, Svetlana se encontrou com líderes europeus, como Macron e Merkel, a quem clama por que sejam estabelecidas sanções econômicas contra seu país [13]: “As sanções são muito importantes em nossa luta, porque são parte da pressão que pode forçar as autoridades a iniciar um diálogo conosco”, afirmou a opositora. De fato, as sanções piorariam a situação social de seu povo, já insatisfeito com a crise – mas ela já está longe. E enquanto isso, o estratega Lukashenko viaja a Sochi, para fazer as pazes com Putin.

Finalmente, para apoiar as conjecturas do leitor ainda com dúvidas quanto aos objetivos da oposição, veja-se ainda que, apesar de ter concorrido como “independente”, Svetlana tem o apoio de todo o espectro conservador bielorrusso, notadamente os tradicionais Partido Socialdemocrata  e o Partido Cívico Unido (ambos de tendência neoliberal e pró-Ocidente!). 

Cenas dos próximos capítulos do golpe colorido bielorrusso devem passar pelas eleições estadunidenses. Como se tem visto nos últimos tempos, os “republicanos”, como Trump, têm reagido ao declínio da hegemonia de seu país de modo mais defensivo (apesar da retórica), enquanto os ditos “democratas”, como Obama, foram dos que mais intervieram militarmente mundo afora. Neste caminho, o potencial presidente “democrata” Biden já começa a erguer sua voz belicosa [14], afirmando que a “comunidade internacional deve aumentar significativamente suas sanções” ao governo Lukashenko e seus aliados, inclusive “congelando” seus recursos no exterior – tática de sufocamento econômico semelhante a que vem sendo usada contra governos como o venezuelano, iraniano e sírio.

Yuri Martins-Fontes

Primeira parte :

Golpe colorido na Bielorrússia : a planificação social de Lukashenko

Referências-Notas

[1] https://observador.pt/2020/10/25/bielorrussia-ultimato-para-alexander-lukashenko-se-demitir-termina-hoje

[2]https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2020/10/greve-geral-fracassa-na-belarus-e-ditadura-mantem-repressao.shtml

[3]https://borisovnews.by/2020/06/08/tihanovskaya-o-900-tysyachah-najdennyh-posle-treh-obyskov

[4]https://www.svaboda.org/a/30635211.html

[5]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFPC7r3tWWXWzUIROLx46mg

[6]https://www.themoscowtimes.com/ru/2020/08/26/irlandskii-sled-v-zhizni-svetlani-tihanovskoi-a428

[7]https://www.mondialisation.ca/lencerclement-malveillant-de-la-russie/5650212

[8]https://www.ned.org/region/central-and-eastern-europe/belarus-2019

[9]https://tsikhanouskaya2020.by

[10]https://www.publico.es/internacional/elecciones-bielorrusia-tres-mujeres-dictador-europa.html

[11]https://belaruspartisan.by/politic/

[12]https://www.publico.es/internacional/elecciones-bielorrusia-tres-mujeres-dictador-europa.html

[13]https://euobserver.com/foreign/149493

[14]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belarus-election-usa-biden-idUSKBN27C346

The scheme was cooked up by Obama/Biden regime Russophobes John Brennan, Hillary and the DNC — to smear Russia and discredit Trump at the same time.

It aimed to maintain and escalate US hostility toward the Russian Federation – for its sovereign independence, advocacy for world peace, opposition to Washington’s imperial agenda, and having foiled its aim to transform Syria into another US vassal state.

It also relates to Sino/Russian unity – representing the only obstacle to Washington’s aim for unchallenged global dominance.

Probes by special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as House and Senate committees found no evidence of Russian US meddling.

Nor did the US intelligence community. Claims otherwise without corroborating evidence were and remain baseless.

In US criminal judicial proceedings, evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is required for convictions.

Without it, fairly and impartially adjudicated cases would be dismissed.

Time and again, Russia was falsely accused of US election meddling, notably in the run-up to Trump v. Hillary in 2016.

To this day, no credible evidence ever proved accusations because none exists.

The Russiagate hoax remains one of the most shameful political chapters in US history, exceeding the worst of McCarthyism because despite its exposed Big Lies, it’s still around.

Yet in 2018 testimony before House Intelligence Committee members, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (2010 – 2017) said the following:

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting (or) conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

“I do not recall any instance when I had direct evidence of the content of” alleged Trump team-Russia collusion.

Remarks like the above, along with failure of probes by Mueller, House and Senate members to present evidence of Russian US election meddling should have ended the Russiagate witch-hunt once and for all.

While largely dormant in the run-up to and aftermath of US Election 2020, it could resurface any time in old or new form.

In following NYT reports on other issues, most recently with regard to Trump v. Biden/Harris, I haven’t seen a Russiagate report in its online editions for some time.

Belatedly I discovered an August 2020 mini-book-length article in the NYT Magazine (online), a publication I don’t follow.

It discusses a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of various geopolitical issues, this one prepared in July 2019.

The Times: “According to multiple officials who saw it, the document discussed Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence US elections: the 2020 presidential contest and 2024’s as well (sic).”

Its so-called “interest” is much the same as in other nations.

“Interest” has nothing to do with meddling. No credible evidence ever surfaced to show US election interference by any nations.

It’s in sharp contrast to credible evidence of US meddling in scores of elections abroad throughout the post-WW II period and earlier.

According to “key judgments” of US intelligence officials, “Russia favored the current president: Donald Trump,” adding:

Ahead of the summer 2020 party national conventions, “Russia worked in support of the (Dem) presidential candidate Bernie Sanders,” said the Times, based on the NIE report.

It wasn’t “genuine” support for Sanders, just an effort “to weaken that party and ultimately help the current US president (sic).”

The Times: “Just as this article was going to press,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) claimed the following:

Moscow “is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former (Joe) Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment (sic).’ ”

The ODNI accused Moscow of “sophisticated election-disrupting capabilities (sic).”

An unnamed intelligence community source familiar with the NIE was quoted, saying it’s “100 percent reliable (sic).”

Left unexplained by the Times was that from inception to the present day, Russiagate was and remains a colossal hoax.

No evidence ever surfaced to suggest Kremlin US election meddling, nor by any other foreign country.

What the NIE allegedly called “100 percent reliable” defied reality. It’s part of longstanding Russia bashing.

In January 2017, a US intelligence community report titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution” — claiming Trump v. Hillary election meddling — included no evidence proving it.

None existed then or now to present day.

When Vladimir Putin was asked if he wanted Trump to win in 2016 — at a joint Helsinki, Finland news conference with DJT in July 2018 — he replied: “Yes, I did.”

His preference for Trump over Hillary was unrelated to election meddling.

If other foreign leaders expressed a preference for one US presidential candidate over another, the same logic holds.

One thing has nothing to do with the other. Implying otherwise is an act of deception, a longstanding US intelligence community and Times specialty.

Trump was justifiably skeptical about accusations of Russian US election meddling that favored him over Hillary in 2016 or over Biden/Harris this month.

According to the Times, Trump’s objections to claims about alleged Russia US election meddling “alarm(ed) the intelligence community.”

Former acting CIA director/Hillary campaign advisor Michael Morell was quoted calling Trump “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

He’s a political novice, geopolitical know-nothing, first ever US reality TV president.

He’s no witting or unwitting Russian agent.

Separately, Morell defied reality, claiming:

Election 2016 was “the only time in American history when we’ve been attacked by a foreign country and not come together as a nation,” adding:

“In fact, it split us further apart.”

“It was an inexpensive, relatively easy to carry out covert mission.” It deepened our divisions.”

“I’m absolutely convinced that those Russian intelligence officers who put together and managed the attack on our democracy (sic) in 2016 all received medals personally from Vladimir Putin (sic).”

The above claims and others about a DJT/Russia connection et al are pure rubbish.

The lengthy Times magazine piece was all about smearing Russia, falsely claiming Kremlin US election meddling, and demeaning Trump for defeating media darling Hillary.

No evidence was included to back any of the above claims. None exists.

In the run-up to and aftermath of US election 2020, Russiagate simmers largely below the surface.

If Trump’s legal action against brazen election fraud to deny him a second term succeeds — what’s highly unlikely but possible — will a phony DJT/Russia connection again make headline news?

Will there be claims of Kremlin involvement in backing litigation to discredit Biden/Harris?

No matter how often the Russiagate Big Lie was debunked before, it may never die.

It may be around as long as the Russian Federation and China remain Washington’s favorite national security threats.

Real ones don’t exist so they’re invented as pretexts to advance US imperial interests.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Shutterstock/cunaplus

Secretive Cabinet Office ‘Clearing House’ for Freedom of Information requests also accused of “blacklisting” journalists; openDemocracy launching a legal bid for transparency

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The British government has been accused of running an ‘Orwellian’ unit in Michael Gove’s office that instructs Whitehall departments on how to respond to Freedom of Information requests and shares personal information about journalists, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Experts warn that the practice could be breaking the law – and openDemocracy is now working with the law firm Leigh Day on a legal bid to force Gove’s Cabinet Office to reveal full details of how its secretive ‘Clearing House’ unit operates.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are supposed to be ‘applicant-blind’: meaning who makes the request should not matter. But it now emerges that government departments and non-departmental public bodies have been referring ‘sensitive’ FOI requests from journalists and researchers to the Clearing House in Gove’s department in a move described by a shadow cabinet minister as “blacklisting”.

This secretive FOI unit gives advice to other departments “to protect sensitive information”, and collates lists of journalists with details about their work. These lists have included journalists from openDemocracy, The Guardian, The Times, the BBC, and many more, as well as researchers from Privacy International and Big Brother Watch and elsewhere.

The unit has also signed off on FOI responses from other Whitehall departments – effectively centralising control within Gove’s office over what information is released to the public.

Conservative MP David Davis called on government ministers to “explain to the House of Commons precisely why they continue” with a Clearing House operation that is “certainly against the spirit of that Act – and probably the letter, too.”

Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Helen Hayes said:

“This is extremely troubling. If the cabinet office is interfering in FOI requests and seeking to work around the requirements of the Act by blacklisting journalists, it is a grave threat to our values and transparency in our democracy.”

Details of the Clearing House are revealed in a new report on Freedom of Information published today by openDemocracy.

‘Art of Darkness’ finds that the UK government has granted fewer and rejected more FOI requests than ever before – with standards falling particularly sharply in the most important Whitehall departments.

The Clearing House circulates a daily list of FOI requests to up to 70 departments and public bodies that contains details of all requests that it is advising on. This list covers FOI requests about “sensitive subjects” as well as ‘round robin’ requests made to multiple government departments.

Press freedom campaigners have sharply criticised the Clearing House operation and have called for full transparency.

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said:

“The existence of this clearing house in the Cabinet Office is positively Orwellian. It poses serious questions about the government’s approach to access to information, its attitude to the public’s right to know and the collation of journalists’ personal information.”

Jon Baines, a data protection expert at the law firm Mischon de Reya and chair of the National Association of Data Protection Officers, said that he was “far from assured that the operation of the Clearing House complies with data protection law.”

“Data protection law requires, as a basic principle, that personal data be processed fairly and in a transparent manner – on the evidence that I have seen, I do not feel that the Clearing House meets these requirements,” Baines added.

‘Art of Darkness’: the worst offenders

The new report published by openDemocracy paints a disturbing picture of the state of Freedom of Information in Britain.

In 2019, central UK government departments granted fewer and rejected more FOI requests than ever before. In the last five years, the Cabinet Office – as well as the Treasury, Foreign Office and Home Office – have all withheld more requests than they granted, according to the report.

The Cabinet Office – which is the government department responsible for Freedom of Information policy – has one of the worst records on access to information. Last year, Michael Gove’s department was the branch of Whitehall most likely to have its decisions referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates information rights in the UK.

New analysis by openDemocracy also shows that some public bodies are cynically undermining requests for information by failing to respond to requests in any way – a tactic described in openDemocracy’s report as ‘stonewalling’. Decision Notices, which are issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about stonewalling, have increased by 70 per cent in the last five years. Again, the Cabinet Office is a repeat offender.

The study reveals that the ICO fully or partially upheld complaints about mishandled requests in 48 per cent of its Decision Notices last year: the highest proportion in five years.

Yet the ICO’s capacity to investigate complaints and enforce the Act is diminishing. The regulator has seen its budget cut by 41 per cent over the last decade, while its complaint caseload has increased by 46 per cent in the same period.

The ICO’s enforcement may also be hampered by its governance structure – under which it is accountable on FOI to the Cabinet Office. Michael Gove’s department also is involved in setting the ICO’s annual budget.

Responding to openDemocracy’s questions about the Clearing House, a government spokesperson said:

“The Cabinet Office plays an important role through the FOI Clearing House of ensuring there is a standard approach across government in the way we consider and respond to requests.

“With increasing transparency, we receive increasingly more complex requests under Freedom of Information. We must balance the public need to make information available with our duty to protect sensitive information and ensure national security.”

‘Jenna Corderoy is a journalist’

openDemocracy has had first hand experience of how the Clearing House slows down or obstructs FOI requests, and profiles journalists, on a number of different occasions.

In February 2020, openDemocracy journalist Jenna Corderoy sent an FOI request to the Ministry of Defence about meetings with short-lived special advisor Andrew Sabisky. The MoD subsequently complained internally that “due to the time spent in getting an approval from Clearing House, the FOI requestor has put in a complaint to [the FOI regulator] the ICO”.

The MoD refused the Sabisky request after 196 days, which is more than six times the normal limit for responding to an FOI request.

Separately, when Corderoy sent a Freedom of Information request to the Attorney General’s Office, staff at the office wrote in internal emails:

“Just flagging that Jenna Corderoy is a journalist” and “once the response is confirmed, I’ll just need [redacted] to sign off on this before it goes out, since Jenna Corderoy is a reporter for openDemocracy”.

Today’s findings on the operation of the Clearing House add to mounting questions about the British government’s approach to transparency and press freedom.

Earlier this year, Number 10 was heavily criticised after it barred openDemocracy from COVID press briefings. The Ministry of Defence was also subsequently accused of ‘blacklisting’ DeclassifiedUK after the department refused to provide comment to the investigative website.

Edin Omanovic, advocacy director at Privacy International said that

“the point of Freedom of Information is to access information from individual authorities themselves, not from a centralised body within the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office should not be interfering.”

Silke Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch said,

“We’re appalled that such important information rights have been so disrespected by the government. The centralisation of difficult FOIs, the secrecy of this list and the fact that our names have been circulated around Whitehall is seriously chilling. This is a shameful reflection on the government’s attitude towards transparency.”

Long legal battle for transparency 

openDemocracy first asked for copies of the Clearing House lists back in 2018. The Cabinet Office refused this Freedom of Information request but, 23 months later, in July 2020 the ICO finally decided that the lists – including the advice that the Cabinet Office provides on dealing with FOI requests – should be disclosed to the public.

While the Cabinet Office eventually disclosed some material from the Clearing House list, it is keeping its advice to departments secret and is appealing against the ICO’s decision.

openDemocracy, represented by the law firm Leigh Day, will now be submitting evidence to an information tribunal hearing to determine whether this information about the Clearing House should be made public.

According to ICO guidance, a public authority can only look up a requester’s identity if the request is repeated – potentially a vexatious request – or whether the cost of two or more requests made by the requester can be aggregated under FOI.

The ICO has been aware of the Clearing House’s existence for some time. In 2005, the Clearing House’s annual budget was reported to be £700,000.

The Clearing House was initially housed within the then Department for Constitutional Affairs then later moved to the Ministry of Justice. In 2015, when the Cabinet Office took responsibility for freedom of information policy, the department also took over the Clearing House, despite concerns about its operation.

The Cabinet Office has previously advertised roles to work in the Cabinet Office’s Clearing House. Specific responsibilities listed for the positions included “creating a weekly FOI tracker of new cases and releases”, and “forwarding drafts for clearance, reverting to departments with advice and negotiating redrafted responses”.

But openDemocracy’s findings – and the upcoming tribunal case – have highlighted fresh and pressing concerns, including among rights advocates who campaigned for the initial, groundbreaking Freedom of Information legislation more than 15 years ago. The Campaign for Freedom of Information’s Katherine Gundersen has said: “It’s time the clearing house was subjected to proper scrutiny.”

Meanwhile Gavin Freeguard, head of data and transparency at the Institute for Government, said that, 15 years after the Freedom of Information act came into effect, it was not right that the public was still having to fight to access information.

“With delayed responses, more requests being rejected than ever before and these reports of a Clearing House it feels like we’re having to fight for the right to information all over again,” said Freeguard.

“And all this at a time when it’s vital for politicians, the press and the public to be able to scrutinise government.”

The Cabinet Office organises quarterly engagement meetings and biannual information rights forums with other government departments. openDemocracy sent an FOI requesting materials from these meetings and forums, but the request was denied.

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On Sunday, a joint statement by Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said the following:

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own.”

“She is not a member of the Trump legal team.” 

“She is also not a lawyer for (Trump) in his personal capacity.”

During a press conference last Thursday with Giuliani and Ellis, Powell discussed Election 2020 fraud and actions being pursued to counter it legally.

At the time, Ellis said she’s part of the Trump campaign’s “elite strike force team.”

She’s been part of Trump’s legal team all along. At last Thursday’s press conference, she concluded her remarks as follows, saying:

“There’s no doubt (that Election 2020 results were) alter(ed)” to benefit Biden over Trump.

“We are going to take this country back. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down.”

“We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide.”

“We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”

Was she removed from Trump’s legal team over the weekend for reasons unknown or is something else going on?

On Sunday, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s initial national security advisor — represented by Powell to reverse injustice against him — said the following:

“Sidney Powell has been suspended from Twitter for twelve hours.”

“She understands the WH press release and agrees with it today.”

“She is staying the course to prove the massive deliberate election fraud that robbed #WeThePeople of our votes for President Trump and many other Republican candidates.”

She released a statement, saying:

“I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips will fall where they may.”

“We will not allow the foundations of (the) republic to be destroyed by abject fraud or our votes for President Trump and other Republicans to be stolen by foreign interests or anyone else.”

In mid-November, Trump tweeted the following:

“I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend our right to free and fair elections”

“Rudy Giuliani, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!”

Whether part of Trump’s legal team or operating separately, she remains involved to continue legal actions against Election 2020 fraud.

On Friday, Federal Election Commission chairman Trey Trainor said the following:

“(M)assive amounts of affidavits that we see in (contested Election 2020 states) show that there was in fact fraud that took place.”

Mathematics Professor Steven Miller — an analytic number theory and sabermetrics expert — flagged nearly 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots for suspected fraud.

After analyzing election data, he said up to 98,801 state ballots of registered GOP voters were either not counted or switched to someone else.

Trainor said Miller’s credentials qualify him as an expert in court proceedings on the issue of election fraud.

According to federal law, anyone making a false statement in a sworn affidavit can be fined or face up to five years in prison on  charges of perjury.

On Friday, Powell said she’s “focusing more on the technology and the fraud.”

Giuliani “is working (on) the individual witnesses, on that side of things.”

On Sunday, GOP Senator Kevin Cramer said the following:

Trump campaign’s litigation is legal according to the “Constitution…our (statute) laws.”

It’s “not just appropriate, but…an obligation…to the millions of Americans” who voted for Trump.

They “want to see him fight to the end.” Cramer supports letting things “play out the legal way.”

So do many others. Election 2020 was tainted by brazen fraud.

If allowed to stand — losers Biden/Harris replacing winner Trump in January — open, free and fair federal elections no longer will exist.

*

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

A Terceira Comissão das Nações Unidas – responsável pelas questões sociais, humanitárias e culturais – aprovou, em 18 de Novembro, a Resolução “Combate à glorificação do nazismo, do neonazismo e de outras práticas que contribuem para alimentar formas contemporâneas de racismo, discriminação racial, xenofobia e da intolerância relacionada”.

A Resolução, ao recordar que “a vitória sobre o nazismo na Segunda Guerra Mundial contribuiu para a criação das Nações Unidas, a fim de salvar as gerações futuras do flagelo da guerra”, lança o alarme para a disseminação de movimentos neonazis, racistas e xenófobos em muitos partes do mundo. Exprime “profunda preocupação pela glorificação, sob qualquer forma, do nazismo, do neonazismo e dos antigos membros da Waffen-SS”. Sublinha, a seguir,  que “o neonazismo é algo mais do que a glorificação de um movimento do passado: é um fenómeno contemporâneo”. Os neonazis e outros movimentos semelhantes “alimentam as formas actuais do racismo, da discriminação racial, do anti-semitismo, da islamofobia, da cristianofobia e da intolerância relacionada”.

Portanto, a resolução exorta os Estados das Nações Unidas a tomarem uma série de medidas para combater esse fenómeno. A Resolução, já adoptada pela Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas, em 18 de Dezembro de 2019, foi aprovada pela Terceira Comissão com 122 votos a favor, incluindo os dos dois membros permanentes do Conselho de Segurança – a Rússia e a China.

Só dois membros das Nações Unidas é que votaram contra: os Estados Unidos (membro permanente do Conselho de Segurança) e a Ucrânia.

Efectivamente, devido a uma directiva interna, os outros 29 membros da NATO, incluindo a Itália, abstiveram-se. Os 27 membros da União Europeia fizeram o mesmo, 21 dos quais pertencem à NATO. Entre as 53 abstenções, estão também a Austrália, o Japão e outros parceiros da NATO.

O significado político desta votação é claro: os membros e os parceiros da NATO boicotaram a Resolução que, sem a nomear, antes de mais nada põe em causa a Ucrânia, cujos movimentos neonazis foram e continuam a ser usados ​​pela NATO para fins estratégicos. Existem inúmeras provas de que as equipas neonazis foram treinadas e empregadas, sob a direcção USA/NATO, no putsch da Praça Maidan, em 2014, e no ataque aos russos da Ucrânia para provocar, com o afastamento da Crimeia e o seu regresso à Rússia, um novo confronto na Europa semelhante ao da Guerra Fria.

É emblemático o papel do Batalhão Azov, fundado em 2014 por Andriy Biletsky, o “Führer branco” defensor da “pureza racial da nação ucraniana, que não se deve misturar com raças inferiores”. Depois de se destacar pela ferocidade, o Azov foi transformado num regimento da Guarda Nacional Ucraniana, equipado com tanques e artilharia. O que ele conservou, foi o emblema, decalcado no das divisões SS Das Reich, e a formação ideológica dos recrutas modelada na dos nazis. O regimento Azov é treinado por instrutores norte-americanos, transferidos de Vicenza para a Ucrânia, acompanhados por outros da NATO.

O Batalhão Azov não é apenas uma unidade militar, mas um movimento ideológico e político. Biletsky continua a ser o chefe carismático especialmente para a organização juvenil, educada no ódio contra os russos e treinada militarmente. Ao mesmo tempo, são recrutados em Kiev neonazis de toda a Europa, incluindo da Itália. Assim, a Ucrânia tornou-se o “viveiro” do ressurgimento do nazismo no coração da Europa. Faz parte desse quadro, a abstenção da Itália, inclusive na votação da Resolução na Assembleia Geral.

O Parlamento concorda, como aconteceu quando, em 2017, assinou um memorando de entendimento com o Presidente do Parlamento ucraniano, Andriy Parubiy, fundador do Partido Social Nacional Ucraniano, segundo o modelo nacional-socialista hitleriano, chefe das equipas neonazis responsáveis ​​pelos assassinatos e espancamentos ferozes dos opositores políticos. Será ele que irá congratular-se com o governo italiano pela não votação da Resolução das Nações Unidas sobre o Nazismo, em sintonia com o que disse na televisão: “O maior homem que praticou a democracia directa, foi Adolf Hitler”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

All’Onu l’Italia si astiene sul nazismo

ilmanifesto.it, 24 de Novembro de 2020

Il Terzo Comitato delle Nazioni Unite – incaricato delle questioni sociali, umanitarie e culturali – ha approvato il 18 novembre la Risoluzione «Combattere la glorificazione del nazismo, neonazismo e altre pratiche che contribuiscono ad alimentare le contemporanee forme di razzismo, discriminazione razziale, xenofobia e relativa intolleranza». La Risoluzione, ricordando che «la vittoria sul nazismo nella Seconda guerra mondiale contribuì alla creazione delle Nazioni Unite, al fine di salvare le future generazioni dal flagello della guerra», lancia l’allarme per la diffusione di movimenti neonazisti, razzisti e xenofobi in molte parti del mondo. Esprime «profonda preoccupazione per la glorificazione, in qualsiasi forma, del nazismo, del neonazismo e degli ex membri delle Waffen-SS».

Sottolinea quindi che «il neonazismo è qualcosa di più della glorificazione di un movimento del passato: è un fenomeno contemporaneo». I movimenti neonazisti e altri analoghi «alimentano le attuali forme di razzismo, discriminazione razziale, antisemitismo, islamofobia, cristianofobia e relativa intolleranza». La Risoluzione chiama quindi gli Stati delle Nazioni Unite a intraprendere una serie di misure per contrastare tale fenomeno. La Risoluzione, già adottata dall’Assemblea Generale delle Nazioni Unite il 18 dicembre 2019, è stata approvata dal Terzo Comitato con 122 voti a favore, tra cui quelli di due membri permanenti del Consiglio di Sicurezza, Russia e Cina. Due soli membri delle Nazioni Unite hanno votato contro: Stati uniti (membro permanente del Consiglio di Sicurezza) e Ucraina.

Sicuramente per una direttiva interna, gli altri 29 membri della Nato, tra cui l’Italia, si sono astenuti. Lo stesso hanno fatto i 27 membri dell’Unione europea, 21 dei quali appartengono alla Nato. Tra i 53 astenuti vi sono anche Australia, Giappone e altri partner della Nato. Il significato politico di tale votazione è chiaro: i membri e partner della Nato hanno boicottato la Risoluzione che, pur senza nominarla, chiama in causa anzitutto l’Ucraina, i cui movimenti neonazisti sono stati e sono usati dalla Nato a fini strategici. Vi sono ampie prove che squadre neonaziste sono state addestrate e impiegate, sotto regia Usa/Nato, nel putsch di piazza Maidan nel 2014 e nell’attacco ai russi di Ucraina per provocare, con il distacco della Crimea e il suo ritorno alla Russia, un nuovo confronto in Europa analogo a quello della guerra fredda. Emblematico il ruolo del battaglione Azov, fondato nel 2014 da Andriy Biletsky, il «Führer bianco» sostenitore della «purezza razziale della nazione ucraina, che non deve mischiarsi a razze inferiori».

Dopo essersi distinto per la sua ferocia, l’Azov è stato trasformato in reggimento della Guardia nazionale ucraina, dotato di carri rmati e artiglieria. Ciò che ha conservato è l’emblema, ricalcato da quello delle SS Das Reich, e la formazione ideologica delle reclute modellata su quella nazista. Il reggimento Azov è addestrato da istruttori Usa, trasferiti da Vicenza in Ucraina, affiancati da altri della Nato.. L’Azov è non solo una unità militare, ma un movimento ideologico e politico. Biletsky resta il capo carismatico in particolare per l’organizzazione giovanile, educata all’odio contro i russi e addestrata militarmente. Contemporaneamente, vengono reclutati a Kiev neonazisti da tutta Europa, Italia compresa. L’Ucraina è così divenuta il «vivaio» del rinascente nazismo nel cuore dell’Europa. In tale quadro si inserisce l’astensione dell’Italia, anche nella votazione della Risoluzione all’Assemblea Generale.

Il Parlamento acconsente, come quando nel 2017 ha firmato un memorandum d’intesa col presidente del parlamento ucraino Andriy Parubiy, fondatore del Partito nazionalsociale ucraino, sul modello nazionalsocialista hitleriano, capo delle squadre neonaziste responsabili di assassini e feroci pestaggi di oppositori politici. Sarà lui a complimentarsi col governo italiano sul non-voto della Risoluzione Onu sul nazismo, in linea con quanto ha dichiarato in televisione: «Il più grande uomo che ha praiicato la democrazia diretta è stato Adolf Hitler».

Manlio Dinucci

The most intense phase of Ethiopia’s several-week-long civil conflict appears to be drawing to a close after the country’s national defense forces gave an ultimatum to Tigrayan rebels in the restive region’s capital to surrender or face utter destruction, but the consequences of this conflict will likely linger for long after the war formally concludes considering just how significant of an event this has been for the country.

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Throughout most of the post-WW II period, permanent war on invented enemies has been official US policy.

Since Woodrow Wilson involved the US in WW I, Dems have been notoriously more belligerent than Republicans — Bush I, II, and Dick Cheney major exceptions. 

Unlike most other Dems, Jack Kennedy transformed himself from a warrior to peacemaker.

He opposed Pax Americana, supported nuclear disarmament, normalization with Soviet Russia, and respect for Palestinian rights.

For these and other reasons, the CIA eliminated him on November 22, 1963.

Pro-war Lyndon Johnson replaced him. A decade of Southeast Asia quagmire followed.

Throughout his time as US senator and vice president, Biden was notoriously pro-war.

He’s expected to surround himself with a cadre of right-wing hawks.

Former third-ranking US war department official, its highest-ever-ranking woman, co-founder of the neocon Center for a New American Security (CNAS), war OF terror backer Michelle Flournoy is expected to be named Biden/Harris regime war secretary.

According to Bloomberg News on Sunday, Tony Blinken — longtime Biden foreign policy advisor — is expected to be named the likely incoming regime’s secretary of state.

He, Flournoy, and Joe Biden backed all US new millennium preemptive wars on nonbelligerent nations threatening no one.

Perpetual war on the phony pretext of supporting world peace and stability appears to be taking shape as one of the centerpieces of the presumptive Biden/Harris regime’s geopolitical agenda.

Wars by other means against China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and other nations unwilling to subordinate their sovereign rights to US interests are also likely to continue endlessly.

Blinken and Flournoy co-founded political strategy firm WestExec.

He was Vice President Biden’s national security advisor from 2009 to 2013.

He was Obama/Biden regime’s deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015.

From 2015 – 2017, he was deputy  secretary of state.

Time and again he argued for “tough diplomacy.” If unable to achieve compliance with US demands, he said “military action is possible.”

An advocate of American exceptionalism (sic), the indispensable nation (sic), he said the following weeks earlier:

“On leadership, whether we like it or not, the world just doesn’t organize itself.”

The US always “played a lead role in doing a lot of that organizing, helping to write the rules, to shape the norms and animate the institutions that govern relations among nations.”

“When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one or two things is likely to happen.”

“Either some other country tries to take our place – but probably not in a way that advances our interests or values – or no one does.”

“And then you get chaos or a vacuum filled by bad things before it’s filled by good things. Either way, that’s bad for us.”

Pre-election he said if Biden is elected, “(t)he first thing is we have to dig out from a strategic deficit that (Trump) has put us in,” adding:

The incumbent “helped China advance its own key strategic goals.”

A Dem regime will “step up…Taiwan’s” defensive capabilities.

“We need to focus on readiness for whatever may come.”

On US relations with Israel, he said the Biden/Harris regime “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes, period, full stop.”

Support for its apartheid rule, occupation and theft of Palestinian land, along with cross-border hostilities will continue unchanged.

Last summer, Blinken said Biden (if elected) will use the JCPOA “as a platform to try to build a stronger and longer deal working with (US) partners,” adding:

E3 countries and Brussels are “likely to join us in trying to curb other actions by Iran that we find objectionable.”

Biden advisor Jake Sullivan called it “impractical to think that the United States will provide significant sanctions relief without assurances that Iran will immediately begin negotiations on a follow-on (JCPOA) agreement that at least extends the timelines of the deal and addresses issues of verification and intercontinental ballistic missiles (sic).”

According to Bloomberg, he’s expected to be named presumptive Biden/Harris national security advisor.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield reportedly will be named UN envoy.

He and Blinken were involved in earlier JCPOA negotiations that produced the landmark agreement.

Now it appears they want it hardened, notably to include restrictions on Iran’s legitimate missile program.

Under the UN Charter and other international law, the right of self-defense is inviolable.

Iran’s military, its missiles and other weapons development are solely for defense, not offense.

The country is the region’s leading proponent of peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other nations.

Its anti-war geopolitical agenda stands in sharp contrast to US, NATO, Israeli belligerence.

Hardline US policies toward Iran are expected to continue at least largely unchanged if Biden/Harris succeed Trump.

In public remarks and op-eds, Blinken supports the Russiagate hoax, earlier saying:

Trump’s “collusion with Russia’s plans is really striking (sic).”

Putin “managed to sow doubt about our electoral system (sic).”

“He managed to help defeat the candidate that he despised, Hillary Clinton (sic).”

“He managed to get the first national security adviser adviser (John Bolton) fired (sic).”

“Every step along the way, either knowingly or not, wittingly or not (Trump) has aided and abetted this effort at delegitimizing our institutions and our leaders (sic).”

Whenever hostile claims are made about Russia and other independent nations on the US target list for regime change, supportive evidence is absent — rendering them baseless.

Note: Bloomberg reported that Biden chief of staff Ron Klain said initial cabinet announcements will likely be made on Tuesday.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 16, 2016 (Source: Public Domain)

There seems to be no shortage of invasive technology being invented, deployed, and worn in an effort to detect COVID-19 symptoms and/or track people’s whereabouts and personal encounters. Devices are being worn by American military personnel, American employees (see 1, 2), school children and staff, NFL players and staff, and perhaps others.

Expensive and controversial temperature-scanning technology has also been installed at schools, universities, and likely other locations. Experts continue to warn about the privacy risks and violations associated with this. Nevertheless, more wearables are being introduced and promoted as necessary.

Sunday 22^nd November 2020 marked 12 months since doctors from around the world wrote to the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, calling for an immediate end to the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.

Since that time, Doctors for Assange has repeatedly cautioned that the documented abuse of Mr Assange’s human rights, including his detention in London’s Belmarsh prison, is deleterious to his health and survival. Our warnings have taken the form of letters to governments; widespread media coverage; public statements and interviews; and two appeals in the premier medical journal, The Lancet. They have been widely referenced in the media, by advocates and by politicians of conscience.

Now, one year on, the torture and medical neglect of Mr Assange not only continues unabated but has intensified. He remains arbitrarily deprived of his liberty in Belmarsh prison, as determined by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, imprisoned for journalistic activity that was legal when and where it occurred and remains so. He has been found to be at risk of dying and a victim of psychological torture by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Priti Patel’s Home Office did not respond to our letter directly, but instead issued a statement to the media, reported on 25^th November 2019:

“The allegations Mr. Assange was subjected to torture are unfounded and wholly false. The UK is committed to upholding the rule of law and ensuring that no one is ever above it.”

To be clear, when Doctors for Assange wrote to the Home Secretary, Mr Assange had been assessed as being a victim of past and continuing psychological torture. It was not simply the case that he had been subjected to torture; he was being subjected to ongoing torture, which continues to this day.

Mr Assange is being detained in Belmarsh high security prison by the UK government in deference to a US government extradition request based on controversial and unprecedented political charges in retaliation for prize-winning, public interest journalism. Plainly, Julian Assange is a political prisoner of the UK-US ‘special relationship’.

And yet, none of the medical and psychological conditions itemised in our first letter to the UK government have been adequately treated or addressed. Nor has the Australian government intervened on behalf of its citizen despite our and others’ appeals for it to do so.

Mr Assange not only remains in solitary confinement, recently increased from 23 to 24 hours a day, he is at high medical risk from Covid-19 given a chronic lung condition and likely immunosuppression due to prolonged psychological torture. He meets internationally agreed criteria for release of vulnerable prisoners in light of Covid-19. Nevertheless, emergency bail has been denied, and Covid-19 positive inmates are being housed in Julian Assange’s prison wing as of November 2020. His mother and fiancée are understandably expressing their fears for his life.

Doctors for Assange shares those fears, on multiple medical grounds, and we mark one year since our first letter by renewing our call for Julian Assange to be released from prison, immediately.

Foreseeable medical and psychological harm

Given his ongoing torture and medical neglect, it is no surprise that the court at Julian Assange’s extradition hearing at the Old Bailey in September 2020 heard evidence of severe psychological and medical suffering, with a high risk of suicide. Indeed, medical experts testified that Mr Assange suffers from many of the medical, psychological and cognitive symptoms that Doctors for Assange has warned of for the last 12 months.

In light of the continued abuses of Mr Assange’s human right to health despite our warnings, it was foreseeable that the court would hear in September 2020 that Julian Assange suffers from severe depression, trauma, suicide risk and cognitive impairments affecting concentration, memory and verbal functioning.

In a widely publicised open letter to the Australian government in December 2019, Doctors for Assange wrote that Julian Assange’s treatment by governments, judiciaries and prison authorities (arbitrariness, constant fear, threat and trauma, and prolonged isolation):

• could be expected to cause “extreme helplessness, hopelessness, destabilisation and despair, all correlates of suicide.”
• was such that “the will to live itself can be fatally undermined.”
• “can cause severe cognitive impairment, including memory, attention and concentration deficits”, affecting a “person’s ability to reason, think and speak.”

Vulnerability to harm

The court also heard that Mr Assange suffers from psychosis in the form of hallucinations. This is a cause for serious concern. It should equally concern any individuals who, or authorities that, owe Mr Assange a duty of care, as the conditions of his detention are known precipitants of psychosis. Members of Doctors for Assange have warned in public statements and interviews that prolonged isolation, such as that imposed on Mr Assange, can cause hallucinations and psychosis in vulnerable individuals.

The court further heard that Mr Assange is vulnerable not only to hallucinations and Covid-19, but depression and suicide. Experts testified that: Julian Assange suffers from a history of depression and hallucinations, there is a family history of suicide, and he has a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), specifically Asperger Syndrome. Experts explained to the court that Mr Assange’s ASD diagnosis statistically places him at a ninefold elevated risk of suicidal ideation.

Vulnerable to suicide

Based on the medical evidence, Doctors for Assange agrees with expert witnesses that Julian Assange is likely to succumb to suicidal impulses should extradition to the United States become imminent. That is not to say, however, that the current conditions of Mr Assange’s detention, constituting “arbitrary deprivation of liberty” according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, do not already pose a substantial risk.

Doctors for Assange would like to add that Julian Assange’s vulnerability to suicide is further exacerbated by the medical neglect that we have repeatedly documented and denounced. Physical illness is known to increase suicide risk, particularly where multiple physical ailments co-occur. Prolonging Julian Assange’s medical neglect by continuing to hold him in Belmarsh prison, rather than releasing him for appropriate medical care, constitutes an additional risk to his psychological and mental health, with potentially fatal consequences.

Vulnerable to physical harm

Doctors for Assange issued a statement in March 2020 detailing Mr Assange’s medical vulnerabilities to Covid-19.

The Old Bailey heard, moreover, that Julian Assange broke a rib while tying a shoelace, and that he suffers from osteoporosis. Doctors for Assange has previously warned that Julian Assange would likely be suffering from bone problems as a result of being forced to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy and living for many years without sunlight, adequate exercise or proper medical care.

Duty of care

Given these multiple vulnerabilities, authorities and governments responsible for Julian Assange’s welfare have a duty and responsibility to prevent actions that would cause further harm to his physical and psychological health. Doctors for Assange notes that a prosecution witness argued that as hospital treatment was not recommended by treating practitioners, Julian Assange’s symptoms could not be severe. To be clear, publicly available evidence indicates that precisely such recommendations were made, for example, in September 2015, January 2018, and June 2018. Indeed, this was documented in our letter to the UK government in November 2019 and is among the reasons our letters in The Lancet referred to Julian Assange’s torture and medical neglect, the instruments of Mr Assange’s abuse and suffering and in which officials are complicit.

Our medical recommendations

In light of the medical evidence and growing public record of Julian Assange’s psychological torture and medical neglect, it is incumbent upon UK government authorities, including those directly responsible for Mr Assange’s medical care, to refrain from placing him at further medical risk in a maximum security prison, as a non-violent person on remand, charged with nothing under UK law, and detained solely for controversial political offences under archaic and draconian US law, the Espionage Act of 1917.

Accordingly, Doctors for Assange joins the world’s leading human rights and press freedom authorities in calling for Julian Assange’s freedom from imprisonment and extradition over publishing activity. At a minimum, Julian Assange must be urgently released to home detention for medical reasons, consistent with his human right to life and health, and in line with the inviolable medical obligation to do no harm.

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Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

The Trump administration unveiled its final analysis today to justify its 2019 land-management plans that slashed protections for the imperiled greater sage grouse across 51 million acres of the western United States.

Today’s final “supplemental environmental impact statements” covering Bureau of Land Management lands across California, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Colorado are intended to prop up earlier plans blocked by a federal judge in Idaho in October 2019.

“Trump’s Bureau of Land Management doesn’t seem to get that they can’t just paper over their mistakes in failing to protect sage-grouse habitat,” said Erik Molvar, executive director with Western Watersheds Project. “Instead of strengthening sage-grouse protections as scientific principles and sage grouse population declines would dictate, this administration continues to make excuses for slashing protections, with additional excuses and denials of the impacts of its decisions on sage-grouse habitat.”

“These guys are hellbent on turning over the last refuges of the vanishing greater sage grouse to drilling, mining and grazing,” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s disgusting, transparent and illegal. The Trump administration isn’t even trying to repair the scientific and legal failings of its 2019 cuts to sage-grouse habitat protections. Instead it’s doubling down on pandering to extractive industries and steamrolling over conservation science.”

The new environmental analysis is the latest chapter in the greater sage-grouse conservation saga. To prevent Endangered Species Act listing for the sage grouse in 2015, the Obama administration issued land-use plan amendments to improve protection for the bird across much of the West, including parts of California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas and Utah. The Obama-era amendments relied heavily on loophole-ridden, optional conservation measures, which the Trump administration has tried to further weaken.

“If the BLM were serious about improving its plans, it would have done so last year when we provided extensive comments and scientific support telling them what they could do better,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director with WildEarth Guardians. “It’s unfortunate but likely that the agency only intends to do the bare minimum to get its pro-industrial extraction plan back in effect.”

In 2019 the Bureau issued new plan amendments that further weakened protections and benefited the fossil-fuel industry — even as the bird’s remaining populations dwindled. Months later a federal judge blocked the plan, citing the Bureau’s numerous violations of the National Environmental Protection Act. Rather than redo its analysis, the Bureau simply created today’s supplemental environmental impact statements to “clarify” its analysis and support its earlier conclusions.

“The administration’s last-minute attempt to save BLM’s plan amendments will fail in court,” said Sarah Stellberg, an attorney with Advocates for the West, which is representing the conservation groups. “Rather than remedy its NEPA violations, the Bureau just doubled down on its prior unlawful analysis.”

Greater sage grouse once occupied hundreds of millions of acres across the West, but their populations have plummeted as oil and gas extraction, livestock grazing, roads and power lines have destroyed and fragmented their native habitats.

The grouse is under threat because it’s intensely loyal to particular areas, reliant on large expanses of intact sagebrush and especially sensitive to disturbance and habitat fragmentation. It also needs enough vegetation cover and nutrition to raise chicks, unaltered mating grounds called “leks” for reproduction, and sufficiently healthy winter habitat to survive the cold season.

Protecting the grouse and its habitat benefits hundreds of other species that depend on the Sagebrush Sea ecosystem. That includes pronghorns, elk, mule deer, golden eagles, native trout and migratory and resident birds. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing about half of the nation’s remaining sage-grouse habitat.

Even as the Trump administration rolled out its latest effort to weaken sage-grouse protections, Congress is debating whether to extend a six-year moratorium on listing the greater sage grouse.

“Now, more than ever, it is obvious that sage grouse need the safety net of the Endangered Species Act,” said Molvar.

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Featured image: Greater sage grouse. Photo credit: Bob Wick, BLM Image is available for media use.

President-elect Biden has reportedly chosen his longtime foreign policy adviser Antony Blinken as his nominee for Secretary of State. Blinken had previously served as Biden’s national security advisor when Biden was vice president, and he was also deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration. It was always a given that Blinken would be receiving one of the top jobs on Biden’s national security team, and the president-elect is expected to announce his choice for repairing the State Department on Tuesday.

Blinken is a respected, credentialed member of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment, and his record is accordingly mixed. While advocates of restraint will find a few cautiously hopeful notes in his appointment, there are other things that should give us pause.

Like Biden, Blinken has been and remains a strong supporter of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nonproliferation agreement that restricted Iran’s nuclear program that was by most accounts successful until President Trump withdrew from the pact two years ago. Blinken has said that a Biden administration would reenter the deal as the basis for pursuing a follow-on agreement with Iran. He also supports extending the New START treaty with Russia that would cap and reduce our respective nuclear stockpiles, so his appointment is a positive signal that the Biden administration will keep the remaining arms control treaty alive for the next five years.

Blinken is respected internationally, and he will be in a good position to repair many of the relationships that were fractured by Mike Pompeo’s reckless swaggering. It will be refreshing to have a secretary of state who values the work of the department he will be leading instead of working overtime to wreck it and demoralize its diplomats as Pompeo has done. Insofar as repairing and rejuvenating the State Department will be one of the main tasks for the next secretary, Blinken is eminently qualified to do it.

When it comes to questions of military intervention, Blinken’s record is much less reassuring. According to journalists Robert Wright and Connor Echols, who have created a system for grading Biden’s possible appointees against a standard of progressive realism, Blinken’s support for military restraint has been quite poor.

Blinken maintains that the failure of U.S. policy in Syria was that our government did not employ enough force. He stands by the false argument that Biden’s vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq was a “vote for tough diplomacy.” He was reportedly in favo of the Libyan intervention, which Biden opposed, and he was initially a defender and advocate for U.S. support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen. In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them.

The war on Yemen is an important example of how Blinken started off with a terrible position, but seems to have learned from that mistake. In 2015, Blinken was defending the Obama administration’s disastrous decision to back the intervention in Yemen. Like many other former Obama officials, Blinken has changed his view of the policy that Obama started. More recently, he was one of many leading former Obama administration officials to sign a letter in 2018 in support of the effort to end U.S. involvement in the war. Biden has pledged to end U.S. support for the Saudi coalition, and together with Blinken’s changed position, it suggests that there is good reason to expect that this will happen early in the new year. Yemen will be the most important early test to determine whether Biden and Blinken can make a clean break with the errors of both the Obama and Trump administrations.

While there are encouraging signs that a Biden administration will undo some of the outgoing administration’s more harmful policies, Biden and Blinken remain wedded to an overly ambitious and costly strategy of primacy, however. When Blinken co-wrote an article with Robert Kagan in early 2019, he dismissed alternative foreign policy visions that called for the United States to scale back its role in the world. They blow off arguments for restraint on the grounds that it would repeat the errors of the 1930s.

On the issue of Syria, Blinken and Kagan asserted that the United States “made the opposite error of doing too little.” That is a disturbingly hard-line interventionist view to hold so many years after the war in Syria began. They called for the “judicious use of force,” but it seems impossible to square that with a belief that Washington should have intervened more forcefully in the Syrian nightmare. If a similar crisis occurs in the coming years, it seems likely that Blinken will be among those urging Biden to use force.

There is no question that having Blinken as secretary of state will be a huge improvement over the current occupant of that office. After four years of demoralization and terrible leadership, the department can begin to recover from the damage that has been done to it. It’s also clear that Blinken was a better choice than some of the others that Biden could have picked. Advocates of restraint may find Blinken to be receptive to some of our arguments on certain issues, but we should also be prepared to hold him accountable if he endorses more misguided interventions in conflicts where the U.S. has no vital interests.

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Featured image: Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 16, 2016 (Source: Public Domain)

Covid is a real virus.  It is a threat to a small minority of the population—primarily people with poor immune systems and comorbidities.  

There are inexpensive ways of boosting immune systems with supplements, such as zinc, vitimans C and D3, Beta Glucan, and NAC.  But public health officials have not educated the public about the value of supplements in the Covid battle.  The reason is that so-called public health officials are shills for Big Pharma’s profits, and Big Pharma regards good immune systems as a hindrence to profits.

There are also two effective, safe, and inexpensive cures for Covid.  One is the combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin, and zinc.  The other is the combination of ivermectin, azithromycin, and zinc.  See this. 

The use of these known cures has been blocked by public health officials, such as Tony Fauci of the National Institute of Health.  Again, the reason is Big Pharma’s profits.  The use of these effective cures negates the profit opportunity of a new vaccine.  

So many have died by denying treatment while we wait for a vaccine that some experts worry will be more dangerous than Covid— see this.

Keeping Covid alive as a threat serves other harmful purposes.  As I wrote on November 13, the main threat from Covid is not the disease— see this.  When Covid subsides as a threat, the increased powers of government over citizens will remain. 

In Europe and in parts of the US, it is clear that the people understand that the lockdowns and mask rules are a bigger threat to them than Covid.  In Germany there have been mass protests, which are spreading elsewhere in Europe— see this.  

Klaus Madersbacher says Germans have memories of where the use of arbitrary power leads. Unlike the American “anti-fascist” Antifa and BLM movements which conduct kristallnachts against white businesses, a real anti-fascist movement in Germany fights against the lockdown: see this.

In Huntington Beach, California, there were protests early Sunday morning against the Democrat governor’s curfew— see this.

Sheriffs in five California counties with a population of 17,250,000 people refuse to enforce the nutty governor’s curfew— see this.

Even the police, who welcome any excuse to exercise power, are backing away from enforcing ineffective but intrusive Covid rules. Just as the California sheriffs are declining, the police chief in Leipzig, Germany, said that there is no point in using the police to fight a pandemic.

The only reason that the “pandemic” continues is that Western public health officials are financially tied in one way or another with Big Pharma, and public health officials are using their positions in the interest of these financial connections. 

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

Featured image is by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

In these past couple of weeks, two important studies have been published that could dramatically increase our understanding of the Covid-19 disease. Adding to the science of how we understand and treat this disease is something that should be welcomed, because properly understood it can save lives.

The only problem is that because the results from these two studies challenge what the media has established as conventional wisdom about the disease, the reports are at best being ignored and at worst being openly distorted by the mainstream media.

This is in my view a dangerous and foolish subjugation of science to politics and it may well end up causing many more unnecessary deaths.

First is the Danish mask study, which was completed several months ago but was only recently published in a peer-reviewed journal. The study took two groups and gave the first group masks to wear with instruction on how they should be used. The other group was the mask-free control group.

The study found that coronavirus spread within the statistical margin of error in each group. In other words, wearing the mask did little if anything to control the spread of the virus.

As the wearing of masks is still being mandated across the country and the globe, this study should be reported as an important piece of counter-evidence. At the very least it might be expected to invite a rush of similar studies to refute or confirm the results.

However, while mostly ignored by the media, when it was covered the spin on the study was so strange that the conclusion presented was opposite to the findings. For example, the Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline, “Face mask trial didn’t stop coronavirus spread, but it shows why more mask-wearing is needed.”

Similarly, a massive new study conducted in Wuhan, China, and published in the respected scientific journal Nature, reports that asymptomatic persons who have tested positive for Covid-19 do not pass on the infection to others. Considering that mask mandates and lockdowns are all based on the theory that asymptomatic “positive cases” can still pass on the sickness, this is potentially an important piece of information to help plan a more effective response to the virus.

At the least, again, it should stimulate additional, far-reaching studies to either confirm or deny the Wuhan study.

We do know, based on information from widely-accepted sources as the CDC and World Health Organization, that lockdowns can have a very serious negative effect on society. On July 14th, CDC Director Robert Redfield told a seminar that lockdowns are causing more deaths than Covid.

So if there is a way to continue fighting Covid and protecting those most at risk while drastically reducing deaths related to lockdowns, isn’t this worth some consideration? Isn’t this worth at least some further research?

Well, not  according to the mainstream media. They have established their narrative and they are not about to budge. The two studies are fatally flawed, they report. Of course that might be the case, but isn’t that an argument to attempt to replicate the studies to prove it?

That would be the scientific approach. Sadly, “trust the science” has come to mean “trust the narrative I support.” That is a very dangerous way of thinking and can prove to be deadly.

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As of November 23, the Russian peacekeeping force has finished its deployment in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, that included the sending 1960 personnel and 552 units of equipment. The total number of observation posts currently kept by Russian forces in the region is 23. At the same time, planes of the Russian Aerospace Forces have not halted their flights to Armenia. They are currently involved in the deployment of additional equipment and civil defense and disaster response specialists that will participate in the humanitarian aid campaign in Karabakh.

While the Azerbaijani side insists that it would demine and restore all territories that it is gaining under the peace deal, the area to which the Azerbaijani military will have no access to will remain within the zone of the responsibility of the Russian peacekeepers and the authorities of the self-proclaimed Armenian Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Another factor is the return of displaced persons. Since November 14, over 9,000 civilians have returned to their homes under the protection of the Russian military. Most of the activities needed to avoid an acute humanitarian crisis are now being conducted with direct involvement or under the supervision of the peacekeepers.

Meanwhile, the Armenian government, led by Nikol ‘The Basement’ Pashinyan that is openly cracking down on opposition to its rule with force and threats of jail terms, continues demonstrating its brilliant skills in undermining the Armenian regional position and destroying the already weakened partnership with the only guarantor of its statehood and security.

On November 21, a high-ranking Russian delegation, including Prime Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, visited Armenia and Azerbaijan holding a series of meetings with the leadership of both countries on the current situation in the region and the settlement of the Karabakh question. Accepting the high-ranking Russian delegation, the Armenian side ‘accidentally’ forgot to put out the Russian flag.

Such a position of Armenia towards its only real ally in the region that has just rescued Armenian forces from total annihilation in the war with Azerbaijan for Nagorno-Karabakh is at least surprising. In the worst case scenario, it just demonstrates that the government led by the Western puppet is rock solid in its anti-Armenian policy could easily lead to the full destruction of the country’s statehood.

It is interesting to note that the Armenian Foreign Ministry claimed that the absence of the Russian flags is completely fine and this is an ordinary practice for Yerevan. However, the fact that the Russian flag appeared on photos after media drew attention to the incident and that demonstrates that the original situation was not so okay because it revealed the real aim of the current Armenian government.

The Russian visit to Baku expectedly led to no diplomatic scandals of such kind and Azerbaijan is now preparing to take control of another district that Armenian forces should hand over to it under the reached deal. On November 25, Azerbaijani troops are set to enter Kalbajar District. The Armenian leaders are reaping the benefits of its destructive policies of the previous years.

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President-elect Joe Biden faces monumental challenges, left to him by an exceptionally dysfunctional administration now heading for the exits—despite temper tantrums en route. Among those challenges, one hardly mentioned during the campaign is stemming the runaway appetite in the Pentagon, the defense industry, and Congress for never-ending increases in the military budget.

The president-elect’s apparent pick for secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, would not squelch that appetite. Her stated prescriptions for defense are to bring in people ill-suited to curb Pentagon spending, kill off badly needed oversight, and worsen long-standing pathologies that make our armed forces smaller, older, and weaker.

Keep in mind Flournoy‘s extensive defense industry ties. In 2002 she went from positions in the Pentagon and the National Defense University to the mainstream but hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is largely funded by industry and Pentagon contributions. Five years later, she co-founded the second-most heavily contractor-funded think tank in Washington, the highly influential Center for a New American Security (CNAS). That became a stepping stone to her role as under secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration. From there she rotated­­ to the Boston Consulting Group, after which the firm’s military contracts expanded from $1.6 million to $32 million in three years. She also joined the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm laden with defense contracts. In 2017 she co-founded WestExec Advisors, helping defense corporations market their products to the Pentagon and other agencies.

Though WestExec Advisors does not reveal its clients, Flournoy has stated, “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important,” even a “labor of love.” WestExec is also careful not to designate Flournoy as a lobbyist, which could run afoul of Biden’s likely prohibitions against appointing “lobbyists” to senior positions. But a WestExec source did tell an interviewer, “We’ll tell you who to go talk to” and what to tell them. This simply circumvents the legalities; it is lobbying by remote control.

In a CNAS article this July, Flournoy laid out a plan embraced by candidate Biden and other Democrats, “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration.” The piece reveals Flournoy’s corporate outlook and outlines how the next secretary of defense should manage the Pentagon.

The nature of any Pentagon administration stems from the quality of the people selected to run it. Addressing this central question, Flournoy states:

It will be imperative for the next secretary to appoint a team of senior officials who meet the following criteria: deep expertise and competence in their areas of responsibility; proven leadership in empowering teams, listening to diverse views, making tough decisions, and delivering results; mission-driven and able to work well in a team of strong peers … and diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that will ultimately contribute to better decision making and organizational performance.

Nowhere does she list ethics, character, objectivity, or independence from contractor, service, or political biases, all qualities stunningly missing from Trump’s Pentagon as well as earlier ones.

Significantly, Flournoy expands: “DoD leaders need to find ways to deepen their dialogues with current and potential partners in industry, both companies that are part of the traditional defense industrial base and non-traditional partners, for instance commercial technology companies in places such as Silicon Valley, Austin, and Boston.” Stated plainly, her Pentagon would have an open-door policy for contractor influence, especially for the sector she called her “labor of love.”

Further on, she elaborates:

In order to attract the best of Silicon Valley and other tech hubs across the country, however, the department must also generate a clear demand signal and create more substantial recurring revenue opportunities for these companies. One approach is to announce the department’s big bets and put substantial funding behind each one, teeing up a series of opportunities for companies to compete for development, prototype, and ultimately production contracts.

Translating this into plain English, she favors getting the best out of the defense tech industry by increasing the money flow.

But would there be any checks and balances and meaningful oversight in Flournoy’s Pentagon? How will we know whether the products of her “more substantial recurring revenue opportunities” would help or hurt our soldiers, sailors, and pilots in combat?

After some remarks about “robust analysis, wargaming, and particularly field experimentation” and “more analysis, anchored by experimentation at scale, [that] is desperately needed so that novel operational concepts can be analyzed and tested in realistic scenarios,” she adds a devastating caveat regarding weapons oversight: “the department and Congress may want to consider a new type of funding authority that supports both the development and testing of new digital technologies. For many emerging software-defined technologies, the distinction between research and development, operations and maintenance, and testing and evaluation (T&E) is artificial.”

To understand how this opaque language sabotages any serious acquisition oversight on behalf of our military, a little history will help.

Perhaps Congress’s most successful Pentagon reform of the past half-century was the creation of the independent Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), controlling combat-realistic testing and reporting directly to the secretary of defense and Congress. The Pentagon had long subordinated testing and test reporting under the senior development and acquisition executives in the military services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In other words, committed weapons program advocates could, and did, alter the tests and censor the reports for any and all weapons.

As literally millions of people take to the streets all across Europe to protest new COVID orders as many face a second “lockdown” this year in the name of COVID, there is growing evidence that as states in the U.S. try to order more people to obey their edicts as the U.S. also heads towards a second lockdown, that law enforcement simply is going to refuse to enforce these orders this time around.

Why? Because they are too busy enforcing real laws and chasing down real criminals, rather than worrying about who is in your home for Thanksgiving, or if you are walking around outside without a face mask, etc.

The vast majority of the U.S. public seems to still get their information from the corporate media controlled by the Globalists, so will enough of the public wake up to the fact that all of these COVID orders are NOT laws, and are legally unenforceable?

The American public appears to be sufficiently uneducated enough today to not even understand what a “law” is anymore. A new law is made when someone in the legislature proposes a “bill” which then must pass both houses of the legislature, which is the government body tasked with making “laws,” and then signed into law by the executive branch, either the Governor at the state level, or the President at the national level.

The executive branch can issue “orders,” but the issuance of an “order” does not automatically make it either “legal,” or “enforceable.” Not even during a “pandemic.”

Since these COVID “orders” by Governors are supposedly in the name of “emergency health orders” related to COVID, it appears that most of the country’s law enforcement agencies are waking up to the fact that these Governors just mostly want more control, especially when they themselves do not even follow their own orders, and these orders actually have little or nothing to do with “health,” and are therefore refusing to enforce them.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo got upset this week because many of the State’s Sheriffs have come out and assured the public that they are not going to enforce his order that no more than 10 people can attend a Thanksgiving dinner.

New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo has warned law enforcement they have to implement his Covid restrictions over Thanksgiving.

Mr Cuomo had faced a revolt from a string of upstate sheriffs who said they would not have officers implement the rules that bans more than 10 people at family gatherings.

“I don’t believe as a law enforcement officer you get to pick and choose which laws you enforce,” said Mr Cuomo said in response to the criticism. (Source.)

Sorry Mr. Cuomo, but your “order” is not a law! And law enforcement is correct in not using their time in chasing down REAL criminals to be raiding peoples’ Thanksgiving dinner plans.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has made a similar order for her state, came out in public and even admitted that her order, or anybody else’s order limiting people attending Thanksgiving dinners, is not enforceable.

During an interview aired on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said that “You can’t enforce” the state’s five-person family gathering limitation and no place in the nation can enforce such a rule.

“NewsHour” Senior National Correspondent Amna Nawaz asked, “You’re asking people in New Mexico to limit their gatherings to five. How do you begin to enforce that?”

Grisham responded, “So, you ask one of the most important questions. You can’t enforce that. There is no way, anywhere in the country, we’re going to be able to say, look, you brought another household together. There [were] ten of you having Thanksgiving dinner.” (Source.)

How sad that so many in the U.S. will obey these “unenforceable” orders and willingly allow their Thanksgiving plans to be ruined.

In West Virginia, Governor Jim Justice issued an “amended” order for face masks making them required even inside buildings. He threatened to close down any businesses that refuse to comply.

To the business owners, he told them to call law enforcement if their patrons did not comply with his order.

Sorry Governor! Your order is not a law, and is unenforceable.

Lawyers and the West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey opposed the governor, and so the governor backed down.

Beckley attorney Robert Dunlap stated:

“Governors have the ability to take you out of jail, it’s called a pardon. They don’t have the ability to put you in jail.” (Source.)

In Oregon, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office has also publicly stated that they will not enforce Governor Kate Brown’s orders after she publicly told citizens to call the police on people who were not adhering to her COVID decrees. (Source. See also: Clackamas County’s Tootie Smith doubles down on defiance of Oregon COVID-19 restrictions.)

Then there is Governor Newsom, who presides over what some people refer to as the Communist Republic of California.

Newsom has gone farther than any U.S. governor to date, imposing a state-wide curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

And this is following days of media coverage attacking him for failing to obey his own COVID orders by wining and dining with other officials, unmasked with no social distancing, at a fancy restaurant where someone took pictures that made its way to the press. (Source.)

Just after Newsom ordered the curfew, Breitbart News reported that every single Sheriff in Southern California has publicly stated that they will NOT enforce Newsom’s curfew.

Fox News interviewed Sacramento County’s (California State Capital) Sheriff Scott Jones who stated that he also was not going to enforce the Governor’s curfew order, nor any other COVID order.

On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said that he won’t enforce the state’s coronavirus curfew or any current or future coronavirus orders.

Jones explained that his department still has “the same types and amounts of calls for service as we always have” to deal with and he doesn’t want his sheriffs “to be instruments of…oppression. I want folks to call us when they need help, knowing that we are going to show up and make their lives better and make the situation better, and this is the opposite of that.”

Jones said, “Well, we won’t be enforcing that, or any of the other orders that are in existence now or might be coming. A couple of reasons for that: Really one is practical. We still have the same types and amounts of calls for service as we always have, from the mundane to the exciting.

But there’s also kind of a theoretical aspect of it. I mean, my kids, my family, my extended family are all suffering during this, like everybody’s family. And it really has had an oppressive effect on everybody’s family, and I really don’t want our women and men of the sheriff’s office to be instruments of that oppression.

I want folks to call us when they need help, knowing that we are going to show up and make their lives better and make the situation better, and this is the opposite of that.” (Source.)

This is not to say that there are no law enforcement groups, particularly city police departments who in some neighborhoods will use any means they can to control the public, especially in high crime areas, who will try to enforce these orders, like the curfews in California.

But even then, they do not have the law on their side, and these kinds of orders with no basis in the law are increasingly being defeated in court.

So what are you going to do America? The emperor has no clothes.

If you are not going to resist the wholesale destruction of America and what few freedoms we still have left, when law enforcement is overwhelmingly on your side, what are you going to do when the vaccine comes out and they try to vaccinate everyone in the nation?

Because then you will probably be dealing with the military, who are trained to fight and kill, rather than your neighborhood law enforcement officers, many of whom also have families living in your community.

There is no political solution to this problem. These orders will only get worse, and they are happening in both Blue and Red states, and it matters not who sits in the Oval Office.

Only massive resistance by the public, such as we are starting to see now in Europe, will put a stop to this madness.

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Featured image: Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones appeared on Fox News and stated his department would not enforce the Governor’s new curfew, nor any other COVID orders from him or unelected Health Department bureaucrats. (Source.)

Background

China has reacted strongly to a senior US official’s unannounced visit to Taiwan, warning that it will take legitimate and necessary action according to circumstances.

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman reiterated Beijing’s firm opposition to any official ties between Taiwan and the US. The reaction came after the media cited sources, including a Taiwanese official, as saying that US Navy’s Rear-Admiral Michael Studeman was on a trip to the self-ruled island. He’s the director of an agency which oversees intelligence at the US military’s Indo-Pacific Command. The administration of US President Donald Trump has recently ramped up support for Taiwan, including with the approval of new arms sales and high-level visits. Beijing has long warned against such moves. China considers Taiwan a breakaway province and maintains its sovereignty over the region under the One-China policy.

Interview of Peter Koenig with Press TV

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PressTV: What is your overall take on this latest US aggression against China?

Peter Koenig: China has of course every right to protest against any visit and any US intervention in Taiwan, be it weapons sales, or provoking conflict over Taiwan self-declared “sovereignty” which it clearly has not, as it is but a breakaway part of Mainland China.

By and large this looks to me like one of Trump’s last Lame Duck movements to do whatever he can to ruin relations between the US and China.

In reality, it will have no impact or significance.

In fact, China’s approach to Taiwan over the past 70 years, has been one of non-aggression. With various attempts of rapprochement – which most of the times were actually disrupted by US interference – as Taiwan is used by the US, not because Washington has an interest in Taiwan’s “democracy’ – not at all – but Taiwan is a tool for Washington to seek destabilizing China – not dissimilar to what is going on in Hong Kong, or Xinjiang, the Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Tibet.

But China’s objectives are long-term and with patience – and not with force.

Just look at China’s recently signed Trade Agreement with 14 countries – the so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. This agreement alone is the largest in significance and volume of its kind ever signed in recent history. It covers countries with some 2.2. billion people and controlling about one third of world GDP.

And the US is not part of it.

Worse, the US dollar is not even a trading currency.

This must upset the US particularly – especially since the 2-year trade war Trump was waging against China resulted in absolutely zilch – nothing – for the US. To the contrary, it pushed China towards more independence and away from the US.

The same applied to Chinese partners, happy to have honest trading partners, not of the western, especially the Washington-type, that dish out sanctions when they please and when they don’t like sovereign countries’ behavior.

So – no worries for China, but geopolitically, of course, they must react to such acts against international rules of diplomacy.

PressTV: What will change under President Biden?

PK: Most likely nothing. To the contrary, Biden’s likely Secretary of Defense, Michèle Flournoy, played an important behind the scene role in the Obama Administration. She has not changed the aggressive position of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” which essentially consisted in surrounding China with weapons systems and in particular stationing about 60% of the US navy fleet in the South China Sea.

Though at this point, it looks like China is but the target of an off-scale aggression by President Trump, in reality, China is part of a long-term policy of the US, not only to contain China, but to dominate China.

As we see, though, to no avail.

Interestingly, China does not respond with counter-aggression, instead she moves steadily forward with new creations, towards an objective that does not seek domination, but a multi-polar, multi-connected world, via, for example, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – not the type of globalization that especially the Biden camp – along with the corporatocracy behind the World Economic Forum (WEF) is seeking.

The US empire is on the decline and China, of course, is aware of it. Washington may be lashing around in its deteriorating times, to create as much damage as possible and to bring down as many nations as they can. Case in point is the constant aggression, sanctions and punishment against Iran and Venezuela – but here too, these two countries are moving gradually away from the west and into the peaceful orbit of China – pursuing after all a shared bright future for mankind.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. 

Peter is also co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry was always going to make for a gruesome read – and that was only the redacted version.  The findings of the four-year investigation, led by New South Wales Court of Appeal Justice and Army Reserve Major-General Paul Brereton, point to “credible evidence” that 39 Afghan non-combatants and prisoners were allegedly killed by Australian special forces personnel.  Two others were also treated with cruelty.  The Report recommends referring 36 cases for criminal investigation to the Australian Federal Police. These involve 23 incidents and 19 individuals who have been referred to the newly created Office of the Special Prosecutor.

The Report goes into some detail about various practices adopted by Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan.  The initiation rites for junior soldiers tasked with “blooding” – the first kill initiated by means of shooting a prisoner – come in for mention.  “This would happen after the target compound had been secured, and local nationals had been secured as ‘persons under control’.”  “Throwdowns” – equipment such as radios or weapons – would then be placed upon the body.  A “cover story” would thereby be scripted “for purposes of operational reporting to deflect scrutiny.” 

A “warrior culture” also comes in for some withering treatment, which is slightly odd given the kill and capture tasks these men have been given with mind numbing regularity.  “Special Force operators should pride themselves on being model professional soldiers, not on being ‘warrior heroes.’”  When one is in the business of killing, be model about it. 

As with any revelation of war crimes, the accused parties often express bemusement, bewilderment and even horror.  The rule at play here is to always assume the enemy is terrible and capable of the worst, whereas somehow, your own soldiers are capable of something infinitely better.  “I would never have conceived an Australian would be doing this in the modern era,” claimed Australian Defence Force Chief General Angus Campbell.

History has precedent for such self-delusions of innocence abroad.  The atrocity is either unbelievable, or, if it does take place, aberrant and capable of isolation.  The killing of some 500 unarmed women, children and elderly men in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968 by soldiers of the US Americal Division was not, at least initially, seen as believable.  When it came to light it was conceived as a horror both exceptional and cinematic.  A veteran of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division went so far as to regard My Lai as “bizarre, an unusual aberration.  Things like that were strictly for the movies.” 

The investigating subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee responded to My Lai in much the same way, suggesting a lack of sanity on the part of the perpetrators.  The massacre “was so wrong and so foreign to the normal character and actions of our military forces as to immediately raise a question as to the legal sanity at the time of those men involved.”

The Brereton Report also has a good deal of hand washing in so far as it confines responsibility to the institution of the army itself.  “The events discovered by this Inquiry occurred within the Australian Defence Force, by members of the Australian Defence Force, under the command of the Australian Defence Force.” 

Even here, troop and squadron commanders, along with headquartered senior officers, are spared the rod of responsibility.  The Report “found no evidence that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to, the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Group Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels such as Commander of Joint Task Force 633, Joint Operations Command, or Australian Defence Headquarters.” 

Such a finding seems adventurously confident.  If accurate, it suggests a degree of profound ignorance within the ADF command structure.  For his part, Campbell acknowledged those “many, many people at all sorts of levels across the defence force involved in operations in Afghanistan or in support of those operations who do wonder what didn’t they see, what did they walk past, what did they not appreciate they could have done to prevent this.”

The Report also sports a glaring absence.  The political context in terms of decisions made by Australian governments to use such forces drawn from a small pool is totally lacking.  Such omissions lend a stilted quality to the findings, which, on that score, prove misleading and patently inaccurate.  Armies, unless they constitute the government of a state, are merely the instruments of political wish and folly.  Nonetheless, the Report insists that, “It was not a risk [the unlawful killings] to which any government, of any persuasion, was ever alerted. Ministers were briefed that the task was manageable. The responsibility lies in the Australian Defence Force, not with the government of the day.”

Prime ministerial and executive exemption of responsibility is thereby granted, much aided by the persistent fiction, reiterated by General Campbell, that Australian soldiers found themselves in Afghanistan because the Afghans had “asked for our help.” 

History may not be the ADF chief’s forte, given that the government at the time was the Taliban, accused of providing sanctuary to al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Needless to say, there was no invitation to special forces troops of any stripes to come to the country.  The mission to Afghanistan became a conceit of power, with Australia’s role being justified, in the words of the Defence Department’s website, to “help contain the threat from international terrorism”. 

It is also accurate to claim that Australian government officials were unaware of the enthusiastic, and sometimes incompetently murderous activities of the SAS in the country.  On May 17, 2002, Australian special troops were responsible for the deaths of at least 11 Afghan civilians. They had been misidentified as al-Qaeda members.  The defence minister at the time, Robert Hill, told journalist Brian Toohey via fax that the special forces had “well-defined personnel identification matrices” including “tactical behaviour”, weapons and equipment.  These suggested the slain were not “local Afghan people.”  This turned out to be nonsense: the dead were from Afghan tribes opposed to the Taliban.

John Howard, the prime minister responsible for deploying special operations troops to Afghanistan in 2001, is understandably keen to adopt the line of aberrance in responding to the Report’s findings.  The ADF was characterised by “bravery and professionalism”, and the disease of atrocity and poor behaviour could be confined to “a small group of special forces personnel who, it is claimed, amongst other things, were responsible for the unlawful killing of 39 Afghan citizens.” 

This is much wilful thinking, though it will prove persuasive to most Australian politicians.  In Canberra, there are few voices arguing for a spread of responsibility.  One of them is the West Australian Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John.  “The politicians who sent [the special forces] to #Afghanistan & kept them there for over a decade,” tweeted the sensible senator, “must be held to account, as must the chain of command who either didn’t know when they should’ve or knew & failed to act”.    

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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]

Credits to the owner of the featured image

Joe Biden’s first national security hires have been consulting for defense contractors or working for industry-funded think tanks. The picks are of a piece with Biden’s entire career of backing US imperialism rather than bucking it.

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Terrorism is advancing strongly in Africa, while international society remains silent. Jihadist penetration in Mozambique is absolutely out of control and threatens to spread across southern Africa. The barbarism of Islamist extremism brutally confronts the power of the national government, which remains fearful and powerless to the growing threat.

Terrorism in the country is led by the radical group ah-Shabab, an African branch of the well-known Al Qaeda, one of the largest terrorist organizations of all times. Recently, in early November, members of al-Shabab murdered more than twenty people, mostly children and adolescents, who were participating in a tribal ceremony in the district of Mocímboa da Praia, in the province of Cabo Delgado. Most of the victims were beheaded – a form of execution quite common among such terrorist groups. Previously, in April, more than forty young Mozambicans were also beheaded in the same region after refusing to join the terrorist guerrillas. Since 2017, when al-Shabab arrived in the region, more than 600 terrorist attacks have been reported in Cabo Delgado, with the deaths of more than 2,300 people. In addition to the murders, there is another major problem arising in Mozambique due to the attacks, which is a migratory crisis. Afraid of being the next victims of Islamic extremists, Mozambicans are moving more and more, both inside and outside the country, with the security crisis having already resulted in the migration of more than 400,000 people since 2017, according to data from the International Organization for Migration.

According to Mirko Manzoni, UN official representative for Mozambique, the main fear today is that foreign fighters will continue to arrive in the country and increase the ranks of the terrorist group that has been perpetrating the massacres. According to reports, every day, new combatants arrive in Mozambique, making the situation completely out of control for the local government and its security forces – which is why Manzoni defends the sending of international military aid to the African country.

However, the government remains silent about the situation. The Mozambican president, Filipe Nyusi, did not request any commitment to military cooperation with his international partners in the Southern Africa Development Community, SADC – an organization that also provides for collaboration on security matters. This does not mean necessarily a negligence by the Mozambican government, but a total failure to cooperate between African states. The threat appears to be far beyond the institutional strengths of the Mozambican state, but the situation in other African countries is not secure enough to provide adequate assistance – mainly because other countries on the continent fear that their populations will be the next victims of such acts of barbarism. For example, in South Africa, the government received an alert issued by the Islamic State that no aid would be provided to Mozambique. Under such circumstances, cooperation between African nations will not be possible. Meanwhile, fear spreads in the region and nothing seems to be able to stop it.

To worsen the situation in Mozambique, the domestic political scenario is chaotic. Nyusi was elected president last year in an electoral process considered fraudulent by most observers, which created a major legitimacy crisis in national politics amid a context of armed tensions. Nyusi’s party, “Fremlino”, and its opposition party, “Renamo”, have faced each other with arms before and still maintain armed militias, which raises concerns about a possible return to the civil war. However, even though such parties maintain peace with each other, the mere fact that the crisis prevents the development of a unified national plan for security and combating terrorism already makes the national situation hopeless.

It is important to remember that Mozambique has certain specific conditions that make the country attractive to the activities of international criminal organizations. Despite being one of the poorest countries on the planet, Mozambique has unexploited natural resources in abundance, including one of the largest natural gas reserve in the world, in the north of the country. European and Chinese companies have been investing in the region for a long time. It is speculated that in four years Mozambique will become the largest exporter of natural gas in the world. But for this to happen, the security crisis must be resolved.

Obviously, the interests of terrorists in Mozambique include such economic factors. By making the situation in the country chaotic and unstable, such groups can control the region’s natural resources and trade them illegally, as is already the case in several terrorist-controlled regions in countries like Syria and Libya. This would guarantee income for criminal organizations and perpetuate underdevelopment and poverty in Africa. To avoid this, cooperation efforts must be intensified. The activity of private security companies in Mozambique is already high. Companies interested in gas exploration send their “private armies” to protect their facilities from al-Shabab, but the results have not been satisfactory. In the region rich in natural gas, seven terrorist camps have already been identified. The objective is clear: to form an Islamic caliphate in a zone rich in natural resources. This could possibly lead to the formation of a new state in Africa – without international recognition – after a bloody civil conflict with Mozambican security forces.

Only a joint effort by the world powers interested in the peace and security of the African people can prevent this catastrophic scenario in Mozambique. The security of the local population and natural resources cannot be limited to the work of a weak army and private security companies, and a new international cooperation mechanism must be created to occupy the country with security forces genuinely interested in peace – and not just exploring natural resources. Recently, faced with similar problems, the nations of the African Sahel asked logistical support from Russia to combat terrorism. Historically, France is the nation that cooperates with such countries in matters of security, but the total European inefficiency in handling the African crisis has led these states to seek other partnerships. Perhaps this is the right way for Mozambique.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

President Donald Trump’s gifts to Israel in the last few weeks of his administration are, quite frankly, incomprehensible based on any consideration that U.S. foreign policy should be reflective of American national and international interests. On the contrary, the nearly worldwide assessment of the United States as a completely rogue nation headed by someone who is quite plausibly insane and led by the nose by Israel has done considerable damage to America’s ability to lead on important issues like nuclear proliferation and climate change.

Much of the bad decision making by Trump is derived from his having bought into the Israeli view of Iran, which, in reality, does not threaten Americans or U.S. interests. On his recent visit to Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added new sanctions against Iran while also releasing a State Department statement defending Trump’s “maximum pressure” against the Islamic Republic. He boasted about the damage being done to the Iranian economy:

“The Maximum Pressure campaign against the Iranian regime continues to be extraordinarily effective. Today, Iran’s economy faces a currency crisis, mounting public debt, and rising inflation. Prior to the Maximum Pressure campaign, Iran was exporting nearly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. Now it struggles to export even a quarter of that volume.”

Hostility towards Iran also means continuing a military presence in Syria, an Iranian ally, as well as in Iraq, which has a largely Shi’a government that is friendly to Iran. Whatever troop withdrawals Trump is envisioning between now and the time he leaves office will certainly not include Syria and he will surely be leaving a considerable presence in Iraq, deferring to Israeli interests.

Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have doubled down on pleasing Israel even though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick off the mark in acknowledging that Joe Biden had indeed won the presidential election. Netanyahu was able to do so because he knows that his influence over the White House is matched by his ability to get favors from both major parties in the U.S. Congress. And if all else were to fail, unlikely as that is, the Israeli leadership is confident that it can make the American media dance to its tune. In other words, no matter what Netanyahu does vis-a-vis the U.S. election, Israel would find itself well positioned to manipulate America’s foreign policy to favor its own interests.

Pompeo’s latest and just concluded trip to the Middle East involved the usual stops in Israel to be given his marching orders but he also was bearing gifts. His visit was clearly intended to deliver the message that as far as the Trump Administration is concerned Israel can do whatever it wants relating to the Palestinian West Bank, which is now home to 700,000 illegal settlers. Pompeo accomplished that part of his mission in two ways. First, he visited both the annexed Golan Heights as well as an illegal Israeli settlement at Qasr el Yahud on the Jordan River. He also stopped at a winery located on land blatantly stolen from Palestinians, whose Florida based Jewish “owners” had previously named a wine in his honor. It was the first time that an American Secretary of State had visited a settlement, and it was a signal that Washington no longer regards the exclusively Jewish enclaves as an obstacle to peace and no longer considers them illegal.

Second, Pompeo, while in Israel last Thursday, made two significant statements regarding U.S. policies on Israel and the Palestinian territories, revealing stronger support for Israel’s presence in the West Bank. He said that as a result of the State Department taking a “reality-based foreign policy approach,” products exported to the U.S. from the illegally occupied territory shall be marked as Israeli.

He elaborated “In accordance with this announcement, all producers within areas where Israel exercises the relevant authorities – most notably Area C under the Oslo Accords - will be required to mark goods as ‘Israel’, ’Product of Israel’, or ‘Made in Israel’ when exporting to the United States.” In other words, the United States is now endorsing the reality that much of the formerly Palestinian West Bank – Area C comprises 60% of it – is now both de facto and de jure part of Israel.

The move was immediately denounced by former Palestinian Chief Negotiator Hanan Ashrawi as “…an attempt to legitimize the theft of Palestinian land and plunder of Palestinian resources that runs counter fundamental principles of international law and the global consensus.” And so it is, but it was followed by a second statement which no doubt pleased the Israelis but which should concern all Americans who are troubled about the dramatic erosion of free speech in the United States.

Pompeo, standing next to Netahyahu, said the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was “a cancer” and anti-Semitic, adding the U.S. would work to stop its funding. Netanyahu called the move “wonderful.” Formed in 2005, BDS is non-violent. It is active in many countries around the world and calls for a total boycott of Israel, including cultural, economic and academic activities, over the brutal Israeli repression of the Palestinian people.

Pompeo personally pledged the U.S. government decision to “…immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw U.S. government support for such groups. We want to stand with all other nations that recognize the BDS movement for the cancer that it is.”

An accompanying State Department press statement issued by Pompeo elaborated that

“It is the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism everywhere in the world and in whatever form it appears, including all forms of discrimination and hatred rooted in anti-Semitism. The United States strongly opposes the global discriminatory boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign (Global BDS Campaign) and practices that facilitate it, such as discriminatory labeling and the publication of databases of companies that operate in Israel or Israeli-controlled areas. As we have made clear, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The United States is, therefore, committed to countering the Global BDS Campaign as a manifestation of anti-Semitism. To advance this policy, I have directed the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism to identify organizations that engage in, or otherwise support, the Global BDS Campaign. In identifying such organizations, the Office of the Special Envoy will consider whether an organization is engaged in actions that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize, or otherwise limit, commercial relations specifically with Israel or persons doing business in Israel or in any territory controlled by Israel.”

The Pompeo statement is a declaration of war against a non-violent group that seeks to bring about change through peaceful means. Many U.S. states have already taken steps to punish BDS and its supporters and there is legislation in Congress that will make it guilty of hate speech as well as anti-Semitism due to its criticism of the Jewish state. The legislation includes substantial fines and prison time. In France, for example, it is already illegal to advocate a boycott of Israel.

While Pompeo was in Israel, lest there be any doubt about the Trump Administration’s love for the Jewish state, the president himself, speaking from Washington, announced that Sudan would be establishing diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. He added that many more countries would be doing likewise in the next two months. That Sudan made its decision under intense American pressure and due to suffocating sanctions imposed by Washington was not mentioned by President Trump.

Trump also responded favorably to another request from Netanyahu. Last Friday his Justice Department blocked any extension of the travel limitations imposed by the terms of the parole of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. The move came over the objections of many in intelligence and national security communities, but was intended to please Israel. Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst, is now free from any travel restrictions and will move to Israel, where he is regarded as a hero and has been granted citizenship in absentia. He was the most damaging spy in U.S. history, having revealed top secret information on U.S. intelligence sources and communications, some of which was passed on to the Soviet Union by Israel in exchange for allowing the emigration of Russian Jews.

It is being argued that both Trump and Pompeo have ulterior motives for expressing their warm feelings towards Israel and all its works. Pompeo would like to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024 and Trump would like to retain his control over the party. Either would benefit from the powerful support of the Israel Lobby in the United States and through solidifying their positions as being among the greatest friends of the Jewish state. The tragedy is that what benefits two more politicians on the make has absolutely nothing in it for the American people. And from Joe “I’m a Zionist” Biden we certainly can expect more of the same, both because the outgoing Trumpsters are creating a web of complications around what is taking place both with Iran and Israel that will be difficult to unravel and because the new president would fear taking any steps not approved by Netanyahu.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is 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.

Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence participate in an expanded bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Jan. 27, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

First published by GR in June 2018

“To ignore evil is to become an accomplice” (Martin Luther King)

Humans are of the Earth, physically adapted to its range of climates, gravity, radiation, electro-magnetic field and composition of the atmosphere. Had there ever been a single critical issue science has conveyed, it is that altering the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere can only bear fatal consequences for nature and humanity. 

This scientific projection is holding true: it is estimated that, to date, some 150,000 to 400,000 people world-wide have perished each year due to direct and indirect effects of global warming¹. This includes, for example, 1833 people in New Orleans, possibly up to 5000 in Puerto Rico, 6329 by typhoon Haiyan in the Philippine―the list goes on. Although these events have been documented in detail, the silence in most of the mainstream media regarding the connection between global warming on the one hand and the rising spate of hurricanes, storms and fires on the other, is deafening. 

Figure 1. Average CO2 and Methane: 1800 – 2017. NASA.² 

Figure 2. Mean global temperature: 1880-2017. NASA.³

Atmospheric CO2 levels is rising at a rate of 2 to 3 parts per million per year (Figure 1) while mean global temperature has accelerated between 1998 and 2016, rising by about 0.4 degrees Celsius (Figure 2). The projected trend, inducing large-scale melting of the Greenland, west and east Antarctic ice sheets, many meters-scale sea level rise and a rising spate of hurricanes, storms, heat waves, fires and droughts, commenced in the 20^th century, threatens  to render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.

Which is what climate science has been projecting over the last 40 years or so⁴. The message, refused by vested interests and ignored or only paid lip service to by the political and economic powers, has also been overlooked by millions of people due to part cover-up by much of the media. Business as usual and a bread and circuses culture continue unabated. Many understand the climate message but feel powerless, voting for parties that, under false promises, end up taking little or no effective measures at reduction of carbon emissions. 

In so far as there is hope a majority of people will understand global warming is transcending the very life support systems of the planet, it is when they face the rise in extreme weather events. That this to date is not the case is the responsibility of the mainstream media, since, although climate science clearly indicates the rise in carbon emissions is responsible for the rise in extreme weather events⁵, rarely does the media include the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in reporting these events only. By contrast, expressions such as “one in 100 or 1000 year event” are common⁶. 

Climate science and scientists are rarely represented on media panels, by contrast to science infotainment programs where attractive celebrities promote space travel to the planets and beyond. The promotion by the media of outer space travel and the conquest of planets constitute one of the biggest distractions from the global climate emergency⁷.

Through the media vested interests and their political and journalistic mouthpieces have been proliferating untruths regarding the causes and consequences of global warming. With few exceptions the mainstream media continues to propagate half-truths, or remain silent, or deal mainly with related economic issues, as if anything like the present economy could survive under +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial conditions. Whenever the term “future” is expressed in the media and in Parliaments, it is rare that a caveat is made regarding the effects of global warming, given the currently 2 to 3-fold rise in extreme weather events⁸. 

With exceptions, little or no information is given in the mainstream media regarding what the future holds under +2 or +4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, projected by the IPCC to take place within this century, which would render large parts of the planet uninhabitable. Likewise, with exceptions, rarely does most of the mainstream media report the global consequences of a nuclear exchange. In the lack of detailed information and warning by the Forth Estate, the world is being led blindly toward collapse⁹.

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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, ANU School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Climate Change Institute, ANU Planetary Science Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. Dr. Andrew Glikson is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/121032/map-climate-change-kills-more-people-worldwide-terrorism ; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-and-health/ 

2. https://sealevel.info/co2_and_ch4.html 

3. http://ozewex.org/2017-is-set-to-be-among-the-three-hottest-years-on-record/ 

4. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html 

5. https://johnmenadue.com/andrew-glickson-hurricanes-and-megafires-abound-but-dont-mention-the-words-climate-change/

6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/31/harvey-is-a-1000-year-flood-event-unprecedented-in-scale/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad8fb23e0d43 

7. https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Earth-One-Way-Makes-Sense/dp/1495358976 

8. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Munich+re+extreme+weather+events&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6j6j_78rbAhXHVrwKHT0WBMAQsAQISA&biw=1217&bih=938#imgrc=_RH4-ZdwKL27JM: 

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed 

We bring to the consideration of our readers this important article by Dr. Mercola.

This is controversial analysis which requires carefully debate.  

The video by the World Economic Forum (WEF) focusses on the “New Normal” Global Reset. It is presented to us a private-public partnership project.

This is what they propose as a “Solution”.  

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STORY AT-A-GLANCE

Two of the last pieces of the totalitarian takeover will be the transition to an all-digital currency linked to digital IDs. With that, enforcement of social rules will be more or less ensured, as your finances, indeed your entire identity, can easily be held hostage if you fail to comply.

Just think how easy it would be to automate it such that if you fail to get your mandated vaccine, or post something undesirable on the internet, your bank account becomes unavailable or your biometric ID won’t allow you entry into your office building.

An August 13, 2020, article³ on the Federal Reserve website discusses the supposed benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). There’s general agreement among experts that most major countries will implement CBDC within the next two to four years.

An all-digital currency system also plays into social engineering, as it can be used to incentivize desired behaviors, very similar to what China is doing with their social credit system. For example, you might get a certain amount of digital currency but you have to buy a certain item or perform a particular task within a certain timeframe.

Many uninformed people will believe that these new CBDCs will be very similar to existing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they would be seriously mistaken. Bitcoin is decentralized and a rational strategy to opt out of the existing central bank controlled system, while these CBDCs will be centralized and completely controlled by the central banks.

If you have been intrigued about investing in Bitcoin as a safer alternative to the stock market, but just didn’t know how or understand the process, the video below is an excellent introduction on how to do this safely without losing your funds. My favorite crypto exchange is Kraken, which has far lower fees than Coinbase.

The Globalists

While I mention Gates a lot, he’s not acting alone, of course. It just so happens that as you trace the connections between the decision-makers of the world, you’ll find him in an astonishing number of places.

For example, In October 2019, Gates co-hosted a pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, along with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum.

The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered⁴ with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.

Gates is also the largest funder of the World Health Organization — the medical branch of the U.N., while the World Economic Forum is the social and economic branch of the U.N. Other key partners that play important roles in the implementation of the globalists agenda include:⁵

• Foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the UN Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation
• Avanti Communications, a British provider of satellite technology with global connectivity
• 2030 Vision, a partnership of technology giants to provide the infrastructure and technology solutions needed to realize the U.N.’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. 2030 Vision is also partnered with Frontier 2030, which is a partnership of organizations under the helm of the World Economic Forum
• Google, the No. 1 Big Data collector in the world and a leader in AI services
• Mastercard, which is leading the globalist charge to develop digital IDs and banking services
• Salesforce, a global leader in cloud computing, the “internet of things” and artificial intelligence. Incidentally, Salesforce is led by Marc Benioff, who is also on the World Economic Forum’s board of directors

The Fourth Industrial Revolution Is the Technocratic Agenda

In decades past, the technocrats, the global, mostly unelected, elite that steer the management of nations worldwide, called for a “new world order.” Today, the NWO has been largely replaced with terms like “the Great Reset,”⁶ “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,”⁷ and the slogan “Build Back Better.”⁸

All of these terms and slogans refer to the same long-term globalist agenda to dismantle democracy and national borders in favor of a global governance by unelected leaders, and the reliance on technological surveillance rather than the rule of law to maintain public order.

As expressed by Matt Hancock, the British Minister for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, during a speech before the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 2017:⁹

“One of the roles of Parliament is to cast ahead, to look to the horizon, and tackle the great challenges of our time. So, I applaud the creation of the APPG on the fourth industrial revolution, which surely is one of the greatest challenges we face, as a nation, and as a world.

The nature of the technologies is materially different to what has come before. In the past, we’ve thought of consumption as a one-off, and capital investment as additive. Yet put resources into the networks that now connect half the world, or into AI, and the effects are exponential …

I’m delighted to speak alongside so many impressive colleagues who really understand this, and alongside Professor Klaus Schwab who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the 4th Industrial Revolution. Your work, bringing together as you do all the best minds on the planet, has informed what we are doing …

Our Digital Strategy, embedded within the wider Industrial Strategy, sets out the seven pillars on which we can build our success. And inside that fits our 5G strategy, like a set of Russian Dolls.

Our Strategy covers infrastructure, skills, rules and ethics of big data use, cyber security, supporting the tech sector, the digitization of industry, and digitization of government.”

The Great Reset — A Techno-Fascist Recipe

If you listened to my interview with Wood, you will recognize the technocratic elements of Hancock’s speech: the focus on technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry (which includes banking) and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).

Then there’s the direct reference to professor Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum. Schwab is also highlighted in the June 29, 2020, Technocracy.news article,¹⁰ “The Elite Technocrats Behind the Global ‘Great Reset,” which reads, in part:¹¹

“The UN Agenda 2030 with its Sustainable Development Goals is claimed to ‘ensure peace and prosperity for people and the planet.’ The actions are said to tackle poverty and hunger, bring better health and education, reduce inequalities, and save the oceans, forests and the climate.

Who can argue against such benevolent goals? But the promised Utopia comes with a price — it sets shackles on our personal freedom …

The leading partners of the United Nations Global Goals project reveal the real technocratic agenda that lies behind the polished feel-good façade — it involves a plan to fully integrate mankind into a technological surveillance apparatus overseen by a powerful AI.

The current pandemic scare has been a perfect trigger to kickstart this nefarious agenda … The current COVID-19 crisis is seen by the World Economic Forum and its chairman Klaus Schwab as the perfect trigger to implement their grandiose technocratic plan. Big Tech will come to ‘rescue’ the world.

In June 2020, Schwab declared … the need of a Great Reset to restore order in a world steeped in panic, conflict and economic turmoil:

‘The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century. It has laid bare the fundamental lack of social cohesion, fairness, inclusion and equality. Now is the historical moment in time, not only to fight the real virus but to shape the system for the needs of the Post-Corona era.

We have a choice to remain passive, which would lead to the amplification of many of the trends we see today. Polarization, nationalism, racism, and ultimately increasing social unrest and conflicts.

But we have another choice, we can build a new social contract, particularly integrating the next generation, we can change our behavior to be in harmony with nature again, and we can make sure the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are best utilized to provide us with better lives.’

This techno-fascist recipe will then, in an utmost non-democratic fashion without any public debate or skeptic inquiry, soon be integrated into the agenda of G20 and the European Union — relabeled as the Great Green Deal …

Unsurprisingly, Klaus Schwab fails to mention his own and his cronies’ role in creating this global economic mess in the first place — as it was ‘foreseen’ with stunning accuracy in World Economic Forum’s and Bill Gate’s Event 201 (October 2019) and in the Rockefeller Foundation report¹² Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development(2010).”

UN Calls for Nations to ‘Build Back Better’

The U.N.’s central role in the technocratic agenda is hard to miss once you start looking. As reported by the U.N.’s Department of Global Communications April 22, 2020, in an article about climate change and COVID-19:¹³

“As the world begins planning for a post-pandemic recovery, the United Nations is calling on Governments to seize the opportunity to ‘build back better’ by creating more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies …

‘With this restart, a window of hope and opportunity opens… an opportunity for nations to green their recovery packages and shape the 21st century economy in ways that are clean, green, healthy, safe and more resilient,’ said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa in her International Mother Earth Day message … It is therefore important that post-COVID-19 stimulus packages help the economy ‘grow back greener’ …

As Governments approve stimulus packages to support job creation, poverty reduction and economic growth, UNEP will help Member States ‘build back better,’ and capture opportunities for leap-frogging to green investments in renewable energy, smart housing, green public procurement and public transport — all guided by the principles and standards of sustainable production and consumption. These actions will be critical to fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Here too, we see the technocratic agenda shining through. As described by Wood (see interview hyperlinked above), technocracy is an economic system based on the allocation of energy resources, which necessitates social engineering to control the population and the technological infrastructure to automate this control.

Rather than being driven by supply and demand and free enterprise, this system is one in which companies are told what resources they’re allowed to use, when, and for what, and consumers are told what they are allowed to buy — or rather, rent, judging by the World Economic Forum video above.

If you need something, you’ll be allowed to rent it. You probably won’t even own the clothes on your back. Everything will be “fair” and “equitable.” There will be no need for hard work, ingenuity or higher-than-average intelligence. Everyone will be the same — with the exception of the technocrats themselves, of course. And in true social engineering fashion, they tell us we will be “happy” in our 24/7 enslavement to boot.

The Encroaching Dystopia

It’s important to realize that one way by which this globalist plan is being pushed forward is through the creation of new global laws. Gates already wields powerful influence over global food and agriculture policy, in addition to his influence over global health and technology (including banking and digital IDs).

The Great Reset, or the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations as part of the post-COVID recovery effort. It sounds like a worthwhile endeavor — after all, who doesn’t want to protect the environment?

But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else.

To get an idea of just how dystopian a future we might be looking at, consider Microsoft’s international patent¹⁴ WO/2020/060606 for a “cryptocurrency system using body activity data.” The international patent was filed June 20, 2019. The U.S. patent office application,¹⁵ 16128518, was filed September 21, 2018. As explained in the abstract:¹⁶

“Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user.

Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.”

The U.S. patent application includes the following flow chart summary of the process:¹⁷

This patent, if implemented, would essentially turn human beings into robots. If you’ve ever wondered how the average person will make a living in the AI tech-driven world of the future, this may be part of your answer.

People will be brought down to the level of mindless drones, spending their days carrying out tasks automatically handed out by, say a cellphone app, in return for a cryptocurrency “award.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of better, more enjoyable ways to spend my time here on Earth.

The World Economic Forum — A Trojan Horse

I’ve mentioned the World Economic Forum multiple times already in this article, and it, along with the U.N., is at the heart of the global takeover agenda. As noted in the Canadian Truth blog post,¹⁸“World Economic Forum Wheel of Evil”:

“ … this is about two things, the implementation of the UN SDG’s [Sustainable Development Goals] and the WEF [World Economic Forum] Fourth Industrial Revolution. End game: total Technocratic lock-down where they control every aspect of our lives and all resources on the planet.”

The blog post includes the following illustration, created and released by the World Economic Forum, showing the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it. If you go to the original site for the illustration,¹⁹ you’ll also find listings of publications, videos and data relating to all of these facets.

In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries.

As mentioned earlier, the price for this salvation is your liberty. The World Economic Forum will, through its financial bailouts, be able to effectively control most countries in the world. And, again, one of the aspects of the technocratic plan is to eliminate nation borders and nationalism in general.

COVID — Symptoms of Power

There’s a lot more that could be said on this, but I’ve already covered many of the different aspects of the globalists agenda in other articles, including “COVID Symptoms of Power: Tech Billionaires Harvest Humanity,” “Tech Billionaires Aiming at a Global Currency,” “Harvard Professor Exposes Surveillance Capitalism,” “How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Possible” and “US Surveillance Bill 6666: The Devil in the Details.”

None of it is pleasant reading, but it’s important to understand where we’re headed. We no longer have the luxury of sticking our heads in the sand and waiting for the bad news to pass.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically widened the economic gap between average people and the wealthy elite, with billionaires raking in trillions of dollars in mere months.^20,21 Without the competition from small businesses, large multinational companies have been allowed to gobble up business, expanding both their wealth and their influence, while extreme poverty has risen for the first time in two decades.²²

If you think the Great Reset and the Green New Deal are going to even out this financial disparity and turn the world into an equitable Utopia, you’re bound to be disappointed. The globalist plan isn’t about creating a better world for the average person. Microsoft’s patent illustrates what the plan heralds for us.

Medical Tyranny Will Get Worse if We Let It

Click here to watch the video.

The medical tyranny and censorship of anti-groupthink that has emerged full-force during this pandemic are also part and parcel of the Great Reset. After all, if they won’t allow you to own anything, and they want to put biosensors into your body to turn you into a cryptocurrency mining minion, do you really think they’re going to let you make medical decisions for yourself?

Over the past several months, Gates has made the media rounds discussing the need to silence dissenting views and information about the virus, it’s treatment and the vaccines being made.

According to a survey cited by RT,²³ less than half of all Americans now say they would not take the COVID-19 vaccine even if they were paid $100 to do it. There are good reasons for this hesitancy, as trials are starting to reveal serious side effects.

For Gates, who is funding no fewer than six different COVID-19 vaccines, this is no small problem. In an October 2020 interview, Gates urged American health officials to start “thinking about which voices will help reduce the hesitancy, so we can get a level of vaccination that really has a chance of stopping” the pandemic.²⁴

Despite the risks associated with these novel mRNA vaccines, which have never before been approved for human use, and despite the fact that children and adolescents have a minuscule risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19, vaccine proponents like Dr. Paul Offit are now calling for children to be added to the COVID-19 trials.²⁵ Hopefully, the number of parents willing to offer up their children as guinea pigs will be few.

In closing, keep in mind that technocracy is inherently a technological society run through social engineering. This is why there’s such a strong focus on “science.” Anytime someone dissents, they’re therefore accused of being “anti-science,” and any science that conflicts with the status quo is declared “debunked science.”

The only science that matters is whatever the technocrats deem true. Logic, however, will tell you that this cannot be so. Science is never settled. Science is never one-sided. Science can be wrong. Getting to the truth demands that an issue be looked at from many different angles.

Over the past year in particular, scientific inquiry and inquisitiveness has been censored and stifled to an astonishing degree. If we allow it to continue, the end result will be devastating.

We must keep pushing for transparency and truth. We must insist on medical freedom and personal liberty. Do not allow yourself to be bullied into silence by those who counter your objections with “anti-science” or “conspiracy-theory” slurs. The future of mankind is at stake. Be brave. Resist tyranny.

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First published by GR on May 26, 2020

“By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.” — Russell Blaylock, MD

Researchers found that about a third of the workers developed headaches with use of the mask, most had preexisting headaches that were worsened by the mask wearing, and 60% required pain medications for relief. As to the cause of the headaches, while straps and pressure from the mask could be causative, the bulk of the evidence points toward hypoxia and/or hypercapnia as the cause. That is, a reduction in blood oxygenation (hypoxia) or an elevation in blood C02 (hypercapnia).

It is known that the N95 mask, if worn for hours, can reduce blood oxygenation as much as 20%, which can lead to a loss of consciousness, as happened to the hapless fellow driving around alone in his car wearing an N95 mask, causing him to pass out, and to crash his car and sustain injuries. I am sure that we have several cases of elderly individuals or any person with poor lung function passing out, hitting their head. This, of course, can lead to death.

A more recent study involving 159 healthcare workers aged 21 to 35 years of age found that 81% developed headaches from wearing a face mask.   Some had pre-existing headaches that were precipitated by the masks. All felt like the headaches affected their work performance.

Unfortunately, no one is telling the frail elderly and those with lung diseases, such as COPD, emphysema or pulmonary fibrosis, of these dangers when wearing a facial mask of any kind—which can cause a severe worsening of lung function. This also includes lung cancer patients and people having had lung surgery, especially with partial resection or even the removal of a whole lung.

The importance of these findings is that a drop in oxygen levels (hypoxia) is associated with an impairment in immunity. Studies have shown that hypoxia can inhibit the type of main immune cells used to fight viral infections called the CD4+ T-lymphocyte. This occurs because the hypoxia increases the level of a compound called hypoxia inducible factor-1 (HIF-1), which inhibits T-lymphocytes and stimulates a powerful immune inhibitor cell called the Tregs. This sets the stage for contracting any infection, including COVID-19 and making the consequences of that infection much graver. In essence, your mask may very well put you at an increased risk of infections and if so, having a much worse outcome.

People with cancer, especially if the cancer has spread, will be at a further risk from prolonged hypoxia as the cancer grows best in a microenvironment that is low in oxygen. Low oxygen also promotes inflammation which can promote the growth, invasion and spread of cancers.  Repeated episodes of hypoxia have been proposed as a significant factor in atherosclerosis and hence increases all cardiovascular (heart attacks) and cerebrovascular (strokes) diseases.

There is another danger to wearing these masks on a daily basis, especially if worn for several hours. When a person is infected with a respiratory virus, they will expel some of the virus with each breath. If they are wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask or other tightly fitting mask, they will be constantly rebreathing the viruses, raising the concentration of the virus in the lungs and the nasal passages. We know that people who have the worst reactions to the coronavirus have the highest concentrations of the virus early on. And this leads to the deadly cytokine storm in a selected number.

It gets even more frightening. Newer evidence suggests that in some cases the virus can enter the brain. In most instances it enters the brain by way of the olfactory nerves (smell nerves), which connect directly with the area of the brain dealing with recent memory and memory consolidation. By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.”

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Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of The Blaylock Wellness Report newsletter, is a nationally recognized board-certified neurosurgeon, health practitioner, author, and lecturer. He attended the Louisiana State University School of Medicine and completed his internship and neurological residency at the Medical University of South Carolina. For 26 years, practiced neurosurgery in addition to having a nutritional practice. He recently retired from his neurosurgical duties to devote his full attention to nutritional research. Dr. Blaylock has authored four books, Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills, Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life, Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients, and his most recent work, Cellular and Molecular Biology of Autism Spectrum Disorders.

We are, indeed, in unprecedented times, and we face unprecedented challenges.

To say that the public has become disillusioned and wary of constant doomsday media reports and news coverage that adhere to corporate agendas is a gross understatement — people see their world changing and they want to understand what is happening, and why.

However, curbing the tide of disinformation being pumped out by powerful and well-funded mainstream media is a considerable challenge. At this juncture in our history, freedom of expression as an instrument of social change is threatened.

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Unspeakable Memories: The Day John Kennedy Died

By Edward Curtin, November 22 2020

Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the CIA that carried out JFK’s murder. Confirmation of this fact keeps arriving in easily accessible forms for anyone interested in the truth.

Conspiracy and Class Power: A Talk by Michael Parenti

By Michael Welch and Michael Parenti, November 21 2020

The term is also a ‘thought-stopper.’ As soon as you are labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ even before you have a chance to muster an argument, the public by and large will immediately develop a distrustful attitude toward you. But conspiracies not only exist in our society, it actually is a concept in law!

The Yemen “Civil War” Arms Bonanza. Mammoth Weapons Sales to UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, November 22 2020

Biden’s top foreign policy advisor, Tony Blinken, seems less concerned about who will be the target of the weapons in the UAE sale than any upset caused to that most unimpeachable of allies, Israel.  Sales of the F-35, for instance, were intended as a US-Israeli preserve.

The China Moment

By Peter Koenig, November 23 2020

China has achieved the almost impossible – a free trade agreement with 14 countries – the ten ASEAN, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether 15 countries, including China.

A Comic Display of Geopolitical Subservience: Mike Pompeo’s Visit to Israel

By Richard Falk and Correio Braziliense, November 23 2020

For me the entire event was a grotesque occasion of national embarrassment from start to finish. Even the most dimwitted imperialist would know better than to declare Pompeo’s subservience to Israel in these scary words: “Israel is everything we want the entire Middle East to look like going forward.”

Report: Government Spies Are Tracking Brits Movements to Check if They’re Complying with Lockdown

By Steve Watson, November 23 2020

GCHQ spooks are monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions, according to reports.

Lockdown Politics — The Great Travesty

By Carl Boggs, November 23 2020

Nearly one year into the COVID pandemic, even a modicum of critical thinking should tell us that lockdown politics as practiced in the United States is an unmitigated disaster, and with no end in sight. 

Biometric Police State? DHS Plans to Start Collecting Eye Scans and DNA — With the Help of Defense Contractors

By Felipe De La Hoz, November 23 2020

Through a little-discussed potential bureaucratic rule change, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to collect unprecedented levels of biometric information from immigration applicants and their sponsors — including U.S. citizens.

It’s Time for the US to Face Its War Crimes

By Joe Lauria, November 23 2020

Australia had to reveal heinous crimes its troops committed in Afghanistan, even after it prosecuted a whistleblower and raided a TV station. It’s time for the U.S. to launch serious investigations of its own conduct in war.

“Coup 1953” Documentary Opens Up Wounds Over Britain’s Criminal Role in Iran’s History

By Hamid Dabashi, November 23 2020

“Angry TV film-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary,” ran the headline of a recent Guardian news story. What documentary exactly is this? We learn: “Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of a 1985 show, who say it sullies their names.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo broke a long-standing taboo and became the first American secretary of state to visit an Israeli settlement. Then, Pompeo announced that the United States would recognize products made in West Bank settlements as “made in Israel,” thus erasing a key distinction between Israel within its internationally recognized borders and its settlements, which are illegal under international law.

But even that wasn’t enough for Pompeo. Unprompted, the Secretary declared that the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, or BDS, is “antisemitic” and a “cancer.”

In a press statement, Pompeo stated that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The United States is, therefore, committed to countering the Global BDS Campaign as a manifestation of anti-Semitism.” He ordered a State Department funding review to ensure it doesn’t go to any groups that support BDS.

The mere designation of BDS as antisemitic is bound to have a chilling effect, making supporters of Palestinian rights wary of engaging in public debate. It will also make an already tense debate even more fraught, with defenders of Israeli policy emboldened to declare opponents who advocate any material pressure on Israel antisemitic.

Will Biden change course?

With only two months left in the Donald Trump administration, the obvious question about this and any other actions the administration carries out is whether a Joe Biden administration will quickly reverse them.

Biden hasn’t responded to Pompeo’s visit to Israel, and it seems unlikely that he will. Given Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election, his blocking the president-elect’s access to information and funding needed for a smooth transition in January, and the many fires, foreign and domestic, Trump is setting, Biden has to weigh the fights he picks with the outgoing administration carefully.

Still, it’s unlikely that Biden will reverse Pompeo’s stigmatization of BDS upon assuming office. He is more likely to focus on Pompeo’s erasure of the distinction between Israel inside its recognized borders and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That has a direct impact on Biden’s ambitions to restart talks between Israelis and Palestinians and resuscitate hopes for a two-state solution.

Biden has made it clear that resuming something resembling the peace process that finally stopped breathing under his and Barack Obama’s watch is his priority. That is also an ambition pro-Israel groups can support. The fight over BDS, however, is more ambiguous.

AIPAC was quick to applaud Pompeo’s attack on BDS, tweeting,

“We welcome @SecPompeo’s announcement that the @StateDept will not fund organizations that support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions campaign. U.S. government efforts are critical to thwarting the anti-Israel, anti-peace, discriminatory BDS campaign.”

Democratic Majority for Israel has thus far been silent on the matter.

The American Civil Liberties Union also responded quickly and critically to Pompeo’s declaration, tweeting,

“Criticism of Israel, or any government, is fully protected by the First Amendment. Threatening to block government funds to groups that criticize Israel is blatantly unconstitutional.”

While groups like J Street oppose BDS, they defend the right to engage in it on First Amendment grounds. J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami issued a statement focused largely on the settlement issue, but added a call on Biden to, “reverse the harmful and reductive new decision to designate all forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel or the occupied (territories) as inherently ‘antisemitic’ — a move that appears intended in part to attack respected NGOs that seek to document human rights violations and to maintain the distinction between Israel and the occupied territory.”

Similarly, Rabbi Jill Jacobs of the rabbinical human rights group, T’Ruah, issued a statement condemning Pompeo’s designation of BDS as antisemitic based on the concern that it is a thinly-veiled attempt to criminalize criticism of Israel and to target human rights organizations that document Israeli crimes. “The way to fight distasteful speech is with more speech, not by shutting down the other side,” Rabbi Jacobs added.

An unhealthy tightrope

J Street’s statement implies that the issue is not that BDS is a legitimate, if debatable, response to Israel’s policies, but that Pompeo’s stigmatization of it threatens human rights groups’ activity. That’s a legitimate and pressing concern, but the statement implies that if the attack on BDS is more narrowly focused, it would be acceptable.

Rabbi Jacobs’ labeling of BDS as “distasteful” speech also reflects the difficult balancing act liberal BDS opponents have chosen to walk. It is important to note that this is, indeed, a choice.

T’Ruah, J Street, and others have decided on a stance that does not merely disagree with BDS but calls it, in one way or another, illegitimate, while still defending the right of BDS activists to this illegitimate expression on free speech grounds. The result of that decision is a boost to more cynical efforts to characterize criticism of Israel and efforts to create consequences — which are otherwise minimal or even non-existent — for its treatment of the Palestinians as antisemitism.

The alternative is to disagree with BDS, to debate it as a legitimate position as we do other policy issues. This is not the path that BDS opponents have chosen and that decision leaves them with a weak political argument that ultimately cannot protect the freedom of speech Israel’s critics are entitled to.

There are rational arguments for and against BDS, as with any other tactic. But unless one believes that the mountain of reports from the State Department for many years, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, al-Haq, Gisha, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and many other groups are all part of a global conspiracy to sully Israel’s reputation, there is nothing “distasteful,” “Illegitimate,” or antisemitic about a call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions in response to these crimes.

One can argue that Israel does not merit such action, or that it is only going to harm the oppressed group. One can argue that it’s an ineffective tactic. But to argue that demanding or creating consequences for human rights violations or to create material pressure for changes in a policy that has caused so much bloodshed and misery for so long is in any way distasteful or illegitimate is to stifle that debate.

Pompeo is engaged in an assault on basic constitutional rights. That can’t be fought while using even the mildest version of their tactics, such as stigmatizing views you disagree with.

Antisemitism can be found among supporters of BDS, and it can be found among supporters of Israel too. It characterizes neither. Smearing BDS as antisemitic because some of its supporters hold antisemitic views is as absurd as labeling American Jews xenophobic based on the actions and words of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner.

Those who feel that Israel should not be targeted with economic repercussions for its policies should defend that proposition on its merits. But any argument that boycotts against Israel — given the decades of occupation and dispossession of Palestinians — are pre-emptively out of bounds is neither ethical nor credible. If Israeli policies were justified, that argument should not be difficult to make without resorting to trying to pre-empt the opposing viewpoint. The only remedy to Pompeo’s assault on the rights of American supporters of Palestinians is to fully open the debate, free of stigma on either side.

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Featured image: Graffiti on the Israeli separation wall dividing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis (Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler via shutterstock.com)

18.11.2020 – Tag der demokratischen Schande – Die etwas andere Perspektive.

Police repression is being routinely carried out in response to Germany’s Infection Protection Law which denies fundamental rights to oppose the Merkel government’s lockdown policies, which have triggered unemployment and poverty throughout the country.  

“Anti-lockdown protesters have compared the Infection Protection Law, proposed by Angela Merkel’s government, to the law that paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933”.

In Germany, people are being arrested for challenging the Lockdown political consensus.  

The Government claims that the new legislation is there to “protect the population in the event of an epidemic situation of national importance’. Nonsense. It is there to sustain the interests of the financial establishment. 

What is this “Great Reset” we’re now hearing about? In a nutshell, the Great Reset refers to a global agenda to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance.

As explained by journalist James Corbett in his October 16, 2020, Corbett Report below,¹ the Great Reset is a new “social contract” that ties every person to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

It’s about “getting rid of capitalism” and free enterprise, and replacing them with so-called “sustainable development” and “stakeholder capitalism” — terms that belie their nefarious, anti-humanity intents. As noted in the book, “Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order”:²

“… Sustainable Development is Technocracy … The Sustainable Development movement has taken careful steps to conceal its true identity, strategy and purpose, but once the veil is lifted, you will never see it any other way. Once its strategy is unmasked, everything else will start to make sense.”

The Grand Plan

In her blog post “The Great Reset for Dummies,” Tessa Lena summarizes the purpose behind the call for a global “reset”:³

“The mathematical reason for the Great Reset is that thanks to technology, the planet has gotten small, and the infinite expansion economic model is bust — but obviously, the super wealthy want to continue staying super wealthy, and so they need a miracle, another bubble, plus a surgically precise system for managing what they perceive as ‘their limited resources.’

Thus, they desperately want a bubble providing new growth out of thin air — literally — while simultaneously they seek to tighten the peasants’ belts, an effort that starts with ‘behavioral modification,’ a.k.a. resetting the western peasants’ sense of entitlement to high life standards and liberties (see awful ‘privilege’).

The psychological reason for the Great Reset is the fear of losing control of property, the planet. I suppose, if you own billions and move trillions, your perception of reality gets funky, and everything down below looks like an ant hill that exists for you. Just ants and numbers, your assets. Thus, the practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions:

One, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology).

And two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’

The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital … precision — all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability.”

These new global “assets” can also be turned into brand new financial instruments that can then be traded. An example of this was given by Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., in my interview with her.

In it, she explained how India is headed toward Zero-Budget Natural Farming — a brand-new concept of farming in which farmers must trade the carbon rate in their soil on the global market if they want to make a living. They’ll get no money at all for the crops they actually grow.

There’s not a single area of life that is left out of this Great Reset plan. The planned reform will affect everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing and even how we interact with our fellow human beings in general.

Privacy protections, of course, are a major hurdle in this plan, which is why every effort is made to get people to loosen their views on the right for privacy. In the U.S., we also have the Constitution that stands in the way, which is why efforts to undermine, circumvent, ignore or nullify it are increasing.

“To sum it up, the desired end result is a giant, joyless, highly controlled global conveyor of everything and everybody where privacy is tremendously expensive, dissent is unthinkable, and spiritual submission is mandatory.

It’s like a 24/7 medicated reality, except the medications are both chemical and digital, and they are reporting you back to the mothership, which can then punish you for bad behavior by, say, blocking your access to certain places or by putting a hold on your digital bank account — perhaps without any human intervention at all,” Lena writes.⁴

Stakeholder Capitalism

An October 5, 2020, Winter Oak article⁵ addressed the “technocratic fascist vision” of professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum who wrote the book on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab announced the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative in June 2020, which includes stripping all people of their privately owned assets.

In addition to being a staunch technocrat, Schwab also has a strong transhumanist bend, and he has spoken of a near future in which humans merge with machines and in which law enforcement will be able to read our mind.⁶

Winter Oak — a British nonprofit social justice organization — points out that Schwab and his globalist accomplices are using the COVID-19 pandemic “to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will.”

This is no conspiracy theory. The plan is out in the open. As noted by Time magazine,⁷ “The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to think about the kind of future we want.” The same statement has been delivered by a number of politicians and organizations around the world in recent months.

Schwab’s book,^8,9 “COVID-19: The Great Reset” also urges industry leaders and decision makers to “make good use of the pandemic” and “not letting the crisis go to waste.” Incidentally, the owner of Time magazine and founder of Salesforce, Mark Benioff, is also a board member of the World Economic Forum,¹⁰ so he’s clearly familiar with the reset plan.

The problem is that while the plan is being sold as a way to, finally, make life fair and equitable for all people, the required sacrifices do not apply to the technocrats running the system. Ultimately, the Great Reset will result in two tiers or people: the technocratic elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets, and the rest of humanity, who have no power, no assets and no say-so in anything.

While technocracy is not a political system but an economic one, in practical terms it does resemble fascism. None of it is being sold under the banner of fascism, of course. Instead, they use financial terms like “stakeholder capitalism,” described by Forbes magazine¹¹ as “the notion that a firm focuses on meeting the needs of all its stakeholders: customers, employees, partners, the community and society as a whole.”

In that same article, Forbes points out that this strategy has already been tried and failed. It failed because balancing conflicting stakeholder claims was near-impossible and only led to mass confusion and poor returns. The failure of this strategy is what led big businesses to focus on maximizing shareholder value instead.

Now, at a time when big business finds itself under attack for “single-mindedly shoveling money to its shareholders and its executives at the expense of customers, employees, the environment and society as a whole,” the answer, they say, is to return to stakeholder capitalism. But if it didn’t work before, what makes us think it will work now?

Great Reset Plan for Big Food

A November 9, 2020, article¹² in The Defender, a new media platform by the Children’s Health Defense, also points out the problems with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset plan for the food industry:

“The architects of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change. But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions.”

Aside from the food industry, partners¹³ include data mining giants, telecommunications, weapons manufacturers, finance, drug companies and the biotechnology industry.

Looking at that list, it should come as no surprise that the World Economic Forum insists the future of food and public health hinges on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), laboratory-grown protein, drugs and industrial chemicals.

The EAT Forum and the Rise of Food Imperialism

To further the fake food takeover, the World Economic Forum has partnered with the EAT Forum, which will set the political agenda for global food production. The EAT Forum was cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, which in turn was established with the financial help of GlaxoSmithKline.

EAT currently collaborates with nearly 40 city governments across Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia, and maintains close relationships with imitation meat companies such as Impossible Foods, which was co-funded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.¹⁴

As noted by The Defender, the ultimate aim is to “replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations.” To this end, EAT is working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to establish global dietary guidelines and sustainable development initiatives.

The “Planetary Health Diet”¹⁵ developed by EAT is a diet that is supposed to replace all others. Federic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels told The Defender:¹⁶

“The diet aims to cut the meat and dairy intake of the global population by as much as 90% in some cases and replaces it with lab-made foods, cereals and oil.”

Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., has raised harsh critique against the proposed diet saying it “is not about nutrition at all. It’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”¹⁷ The Defender adds:¹⁸

“According to EAT’s own reports, the big adjustments the organization and its corporate partners want to make to the food system are ‘unlikely to be successful if left up to the individual,’ and the changes they wish to impose on societal eating habits and food ‘require reframing at the systemic level with hard policy interventions that include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration and other economic and structural measures.’

But Shiva said this is the wrong approach, because ‘all of the science’ shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity. She explained that ‘EAT’s uniform global diet will be produced with western technology and agricultural chemicals. Forcing this onto sovereign nations by multinational lobbying is what I refer to as food imperialism.’”

The Future of Food and Health Care

You can get a feel for where the future of food is headed by analyzing the World Economic Forum’s strategic intelligence map.¹⁹ As you can see, this top-down approach ties food production to a wide range of sectors, including biotech, the chemical industry, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and the digital economy.

For more details on Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s strategic intelligence plan, see Covert Geopolitic’s article,²⁰ “Breaking Down the Global Elite’s Great Reset Master Plan.”

If any of this raises your concern, you’re probably not going to like what the World Health Economic Forum has in store for health care reform either. As detailed on their website:²¹

“Our current capital intensive, hospital-centric model is unsustainable and ineffective. The Platform for Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare leverages a data-enabled delivery system and virtual care, integrated across the continuum of care from precision prevention to personalized care delivery …”

Aiding the World Economic Forum in this health care transformation are the biggest corporate criminals in the history of the modern world, including Bill Gates, AstraZeneca,²² Bayer,²³ Johnson & Johnson,²⁴ Merck,²⁵ Pfizer,²⁶ Novartis²⁷ and a host of others.²⁸

These companies have at various times been found guilty of all sorts of crimes that they have paid tens of billions of dollars in fines for. They are also loaded with conflicts of interest in nearly every venture they are involved with. Yet we’re now supposed to believe these companies are going to put aside their profit incentives and fix the whole system?

Build Back Better

As noted in a July 21, 2020, World Economic Forum article,²⁹ the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns “has the potential to hobble global prosperity for generations to come.” The answer is to come up with stimulus measures, such as infrastructure development, that can allow countries to move forward.

But while at it, countries are urged to make sure the economic system is “built back better.” Make no mistake, this catchy slogan is part and parcel of the Great Reset plan and cannot be separated from it, no matter how altruistic it may sound. As reported by Fox News:³⁰

“A radical movement called the Great Reset embraced by some Democrats poses a grave threat to liberty and free markets in the United States and around the world … The Great Reset is perhaps the biggest danger to capitalism and individual rights since the collapse of the Soviet Union …

It would destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with progressive and modern socialist systems, with a special emphasis placed on eco-socialist policies … Policy ideas offered by ‘Great Reset’ advocates include government-provided basic income programs, universal health care, massive tax increases and the Green New Deal …

For example, at a campaign event on July 9, Biden said we need to end the ‘era of shareholder capitalism,’ a major part of the Great Reset proposal that would alter how companies are evaluated, elevating social justice causes and climate change concerns over property rights …

The Build Back Better plan comes straight from the Great Reset’s playbook … As recently as July 13, the World Economic Forum promoted ‘building back better’ through ‘green’ infrastructure programs as part of the Great Reset …”

Part of the “building back better” is to shift the financial system over to an all-digital currency system, which in turn is part of the system of social control, as it can easily be used to incentivize desired behaviors and discourage undesired ones.

An August 13, 2020, article³¹ on the Federal Reserve website discusses the supposed benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). There’s general agreement among experts that most major countries will implement CBDC within the next two to four years.

Many uninformed people believe that these new CBDCs will be very similar to existing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they would be mistaken. Bitcoin is decentralized and a rational strategy to opt out of the existing central bank controlled system, while these CBDCs will be centralized and completely controlled by the central banks and will have smart contracts that allow the banks to surveil and control your life.

The Great Reset Psyops Guide

It goes without saying that to achieve the kind of radical transformation of every part of society has its challenges. No person in their right mind would agree to it if aware of the details of the whole plan. So, to roll this out, they had to use psychological manipulation, and fear is the most effective tool there is.

As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, there’s an entire school of public health research that focuses on identifying the most effective ways to frighten people into accepting desired public health measures.

By adding confusion and uncertainty to the mix, you can bring an individual from fear to anxiety — a state of confusion in which you can no longer think logically — and in this state, you are more easily manipulated. The following graphic illustrates the central role of fearmongering for the successful rollout of the Great Reset.

Social Engineering Is Central to Technocratic Rule

In closing, keep in mind that technocracy is inherently a technological society run through social engineering. Fear is but one manipulation tool. The focus on “science” is another. Anytime someone dissents, they’re simply accused of being “anti-science,” and any science that conflicts with the status quo is declared “debunked science.”

The only science that matters is whatever the technocrats deem to be true, no matter how much evidence there is against it. We’ve seen this first hand during this pandemic, as Big Tech has censored and banned anything going against the opinions of the World Health Organization, which is just another cog in the technocratic machine.

If we allow this censorship to continue, the end result will be nothing short of devastating. We simply must keep pushing for transparency and truth. We must insist on medical freedom, personal liberty and the right to privacy.

One fight in particular that I don’t see us being able to evade is the fight against mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. If we don’t take a firm stand against that and fight for the right to make our own choice, there will be no end to the medical tyranny that will follow. As noted in the Covert Geopolitics article:³²

“As you might have guessed, ‘the most important anchor of recovery’ is for a COVID-19 vaccination … The implication is that without a vaccine the world will be unable to return to any sense of normality, particularly in terms of open interaction with your fellow man …

You can actually participate in the global efforts to cripple the Deep State organized criminal cabal’s ability for genocide, while enjoying healthcare freedom at the same time, by boycotting Big Pharma for good.”

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Notes

¹ Corbett Report October 16, 2020

^2, 20, 32 Geopolitics August 29, 2020

^3, 4 Tessa.substack.com October 28, 2020

^5, 6 Winter Oak October 5, 2020

⁷ Time Magazine The Great Reset

⁸ COVID-19: The Great Reset

⁹ Steven Guiness September 3, 2020

^{10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18} The Defender November 9, 2020

¹¹ Forbes January 5, 2020

^13, 28 Weforum.org Partners

¹⁵ Eatforum.com The Planetary Health Diet

¹⁹ World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence Map, Future of Food

²¹ Weforum.org Shaping the Future and Health of Healthcare

²² Nordic Life Sciences October 14, 2014

²³ Newspunch March 20, 2019

²⁴ CBS News August 27, 2019

²⁵ ABC.net.au August 20, 2005

²⁶ Lawyers and Settlements Pfizer found guilty of Medicaid fraud

²⁷ Medical Xpress July 2, 2020

²⁹ World Economic Forum July 21, 2020

³⁰ Fox News July 23, 2020

³¹ Federal Reserve August 13, 2020

Featured image: Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) swiss-image.ch/Photo by Remy Steinegger/CC BY-SA 2.0

“Angry TV film-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary,” ran the headline of a recent Guardian news story. What documentary exactly is this? We learn: “Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of a 1985 show, who say it sullies their names.” 

The makers of that show, the British TV series End of Empire, deny that the UK government put any pressure on them to remove an interview with an MI6 officer from their series (they say it was an off the record interview). For this reason they are preventing the release of a film that documents Britain’s treachery back in the 1950s, when a vicious act of state-sponsored terrorism was perpetrated against an entire nation.

The whole world knows how in 1953, the British MI6 and the American CIA staged a military coup to topple the government of Iranian Prime Minster Mohammad Mosaddegh, and brought back to power a runaway monarch subservient to their oil companies and other economic and strategic interests. Winston Churchill, that mass murderer beloved by British elites, was prime minister of the UK at the time, while Dwight Eisenhower was the US president.

Source

In case you think this pernicious act was an isolated incident, three years later, in 1956, Anthony Eden’s British government, together with Israel and France, invaded Egypt to prevent Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US did the same as they did in Iran, staging yet another coup in 1954 in Guatemala.

The UK and US – at this time, and before and after – thought the world was theirs to divide and rule as they pleased. As such, the coup in Iran was not an isolated incident, but rather an act that was definitive and integral to US and UK colonial and imperial violence around the globe. This begs the question: why block the release of a documentary detailing this despicable act of political chicanery?

The facts of the 1953 coup are well-known around the world. CIA documents have been released. Two decades ago, the New York Times reported in detail on the secret history of the coup. Numerous scholarly books and articles in Persian and English have detailed the horrors of what happened.

Former US President Barack Obama and the CIA itself have confessed to America’s deeds. Two eminent historians, Ervand Abrahamian and Stephen Kinzer, are among the leading scholars who have written books on the subject. So why are British filmmakers blocking a major documentary on the subject?

‘New mysteries’

In the new documentary, Coup 53, made by Taghi Amirani and edited by Walter Murch, more details of the British government’s involvement are unearthed.

“Angry complaints from some of the biggest names in British television, including the veteran documentary-maker Brian Lapping, have blocked the general release of Coup 53,” the Guardian article notes.

“They allege the film undermines their reputations by suggesting they kept government secrets when they first told the story on television in 1985 in the landmark Channel 4 series End of Empire, made by Granada TV.”

Filmmaking is a matter of perspective, priority and editorial choices – but the filmmakers’ reaction to Coup 53 today raises far more serious questions.

According to the Guardian, Lapping said that the new documentary implies his earlier series was compromised by government pressure – an allegation he denies. “We are consulting solicitors. We would much prefer not to go to the law,” he said. “We will only do so if we do not get a positive response to our requests.”

David Puttnam, a member of the House of Lords and a revered figure in the British film industry who mentored Amirani, said of the dispute. “I find it heartbreaking that a generation of film-makers that I revere should feel it necessary to block a wholly admirable new documentary made by a world class team.”

Traumatic event

In this context, it is important to reflect upon the significance of this coup in the history of an entire nation. For Iranians, the criminal CIA-MI6 operation against the Mosaddegh government in 1953 is arguably the most traumatic event of the 20th century in their homeland.

Some of the masterpieces of modern Persian film, fiction and poetry revolve around the terrorising treachery perpetrated by the British and Americans. Shirin Neshat’s acclaimed film Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same title upon which it was based, and the iconic poem Winter by Mehdi Akhavan Sales are just a few examples.

At least two widely popular television series in recent years, Shahrzad and The Enigma of the Shah, have brought the coup to a much wider audience. They have been dubbed and aired in Urdu, Arabic, Russian and other languages. The world is not waiting for British filmmakers to deign to help reveal the truth of their despicable government and what terror their empire has perpetrated upon the globe.

Iran is the home of the master Abbas Kiarostami and has a glorious cinematic history. Iranians themselves, the primary victims of this Anglo-American deception, do not need filmmakers outside their homeland to bring it to a much larger global viewership.

It is significant that an Iranian filmmaker who lives in the UK spent almost a decade putting together a documentary on the coup of 1953. The time that the British could rule the world and control the story of their treacheries is long over. To paraphrase the immortal words of Edward Said, we no longer need permission to narrate our own stories.

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Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York. His latest books include Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (Zed, 2020). His forthcoming book, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past, is scheduled to be released by Haymarket Books later this year.

Australia had to reveal heinous crimes its troops committed in Afghanistan, even after it prosecuted a whistleblower and raided a TV station. It’s time for the U.S. to launch serious investigations of its own conduct in war, writes Joe Lauria.

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The report of a four-year Australian government investigation into alleged war crimes by the country’s special forces in Afghanistan was published on Thursday, revealing unspeakable atrocities against civilians.

The report details how at least 25 members of Australia’s Special Air Services (SAS) were involved in 39 murders of civilians.  The report’s description on page 120 of just one incident suffices to describe the nature of these crimes:

“Special Forces would then cordon off a whole village, taking men and boys to guesthouses, which are typically on the edge of a village. There they would be tied up and tortured by Special Forces, sometimes for days. When the Special Forces left, the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit.

Cover-ups. A specific incident described to Dr Crompvoets involved an incident where members from the ‘SASR’ were driving along a road and saw two 14-year-old boys whom they decided might be Taliban sympathisers. They stopped, searched the boys and slit their throats. The rest of the Troop then had to ‘clean up the mess’, which involved bagging the bodies and throwing them into a nearby river…”

Learning to Kill

The report on page 29 describes a practice known as “blooding”:

“…the Inquiry has found that there is credible information that junior soldiers were required by their patrol commanders to shoot a prisoner, in order to achieve the soldier’s first kill, in a practice that was known as ‘blooding’. This would happen after the target compound had been secured, and local nationals had been secured as ‘persons under control’. Typically, the patrol commander would take a person under control and the junior member, who would then be directed to kill the person under control. ‘Throwdowns’ would be placed with the body, and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny. This was reinforced with a code of silence.”

“Two 14-year-old boys were stopped by SAS who decided they might be Taliban sympathisers. Their throats were slit.
The rest of the troop then had to ‘clean up the mess’… bodies bagged & thrown in a river.”

Don’t ask why we are the target of#terrorists. https://t.co/AdZdphs3Z3

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) November 19, 2020

Nineteen of the 25 soldiers involved face criminal prosecution. Their unit has been disbanded. As many as 3,000 soldiers will have their medals stripped and special forces in future will wear body cameras.

These are the kinds of crimes that show an unbroken link to colonial barbarity dating back to the 19th Century, when Western soldiers, jacked up to kill their “inferiors” then as now, are unleashed on innocent populations in developing countries.

Revelations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan speak of a continuation of 19th Century colonial barbarism. pic.twitter.com/2dTCA1XlNx

— Joe Lauria (@unjoe) November 19, 2020

Prosecution and a Raid

The Australian government was aware of such allegations when an Army lawyer in Afghanistan named Maj. David McBride came forward as a whistleblower. He recounted what he had witnessed up the chain of command and was ignored. He then gave his story and documents to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. ABC reported the “Afghan Files” in July 2017.

“The documents also provide fresh details of some notorious incidents, including the severing of the hands of dead Taliban fighters by Australian troops,” the ABC reported, much like the photo in the tweet above from the Belgian Congo.

For his efforts, McBride was arrested and is being prosecuted for divulging classified documents (marked Australian Eyes Only). He faces life in prison. For its efforts, the ABC’s offices in Sydney were raided by Australian Federal Police (AFP) and copies of files were taken from newsroom computers.

The raid took place less than two months after the April 2019 London arrest of the Australian Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publisher, who had himself revealed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.  An ABC journalist, Dan Oakes, who was facing prosecution for publishing classified information (just like Assange), had his charges dropped on Oct. 15, just a month before the government report confirmed McBride’s story and Oakes’ reporting.

I wrote at the time of the ABC raid:

“While there is no direct connection between Assange’s arrest and indictment for possessing and disseminating classified material and these subsequent police actions, a Western taboo on arresting or prosecuting the press for its work has clearly been weakened. One must ask why Australian police acted on a broadcast produced in 2017 and an article published in April only after Assange’s arrest and prosecution.”

The prosecution of McBride so far continues. It would be an even bigger scandal than his arrest, if his charges aren’t dropped too.

"A Defence spokeswoman noted that General Campbell referred rumours and allegations of war crimes by special forces soldiers to the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force"

10 years after they first heard them.

— David McBride (@MurdochCadell) November 17, 2020

It’s Your Turn U.S.

This could be a watershed moment for Australia, which has been shaken by the government’s report. It might rethink its military policy and perhaps its knee-jerk obedience to an order from the United States to join its wars.

Image on the right: Howard getting 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom. (GW Bush White House Archives)

Australia was only in Afghanistan because of the U.S.  For his devotion to Washington in sending Australian troops far away to Afghanistan in 2005, former Prime Minister John Howard was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, who started the Afghan War in 2001.

What Australia has now finally done should be a lesson for its Five Eyes senior partner.  As it is, the United States has a very sparse record of prosecuting its own war crimes.

While there were at least 10 known war crimes during the U.S. Civil War, (especially Sherman’s scorched earth drive to the sea) only four men, all confederates, were prosecuted after the war ended.  During the war against Native Americans, the U.S. government authorized raids, which often led to massacres. Rather than prosecuting, the government rewarded Americans for killing indigenous people.

In the U.S. colonial war in the Philippines after the 1898 war against Spain, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith was court-martialed and forced to retire after he told the commanding officer at Samar:

“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”

A widespread massacre of civilians followed. Filipino historians say up to 50,000 people were slaughtered.  Mark Twain, who opposed the U.S. war in the Philippines, wrote:

“In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people.”

It was not the only U.S. massacre in that war.

The  Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 followed the Geneva Convention of 1864 as the first international war crimes laws.  All sides in the First World War, including the U.S., used poison gas, which was a violation of the Hague Conventions, but no one was prosecuted for it.

According to History.com,

“Future president Harry S. Truman was the captain of a U.S. field artillery unit that fired poison gas against the Germans in 1918.”

It would not be the last time Truman was involved with unconventional weapons.

His dropping of two atomic bombs on civilians in Japan, opposed by top U.S. generals, is likely the biggest war crime in history. It was celebrated and not punished. There is a long list of documentedU.S. and allied war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Second World War but the trials were reserved for defeated German and Japanese war criminals.

A U.S. war crime during the Korean conflict was covered up for nearly 50 years, before the Associated Press revealed it in 1999.  U.S. soldiers massacred refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950. No one was ever charged.

In the Vietnam War, massacres of civilians were routine, according to Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves.  But there were few prosecutions of U.S. soldiers. Only 203 U.S. military personnel were charged, 57 were court-martialed and 23 were convicted, not including the most well known case of My Lai.

US soldiers pose with Filipino Moro dead after the First Battle of Bud Dajo, March 7, 1906, Jolo, Philippines. (Wikimedia Commons/Unknown Author)

The My Lai incident was revealed to the public in Nov. 1969 through the reporting of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. An army veteran whistleblower, Ronald Ridenhour, had first written in early 1969 to the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and members of Congress revealing credible details about the massacre. It lead to a military investigation.

The probe found that U.S. Army soldiers had killed 504 unarmed people on March 16, 1968  in the village of My Lai, including men, women and children. Some women were gang-raped by the soldiers.  The military investigation led to charges against 26 soldiers.  Just one, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a C Company platoon leader, was convicted. He was found guilty of the premeditated murder of 109 villagers. (Given a life sentence, he ultimately served only three and a half years under house arrest.).

But Calley’s conviction was largely covered up by the military until Hersh broke the story.  It was Hersh again, more than 30 years later, who would break the story of torture at the U.S.-run prison in Abu Ghraib. When the news media makes a splash with evidence of a U.S. war crime, the government is sometimes forced to act. Such was the case with the prison torture as the public was outraged, especially by the photographs.

U.S. soldiers were acting in a post 9/11 environment in which U.S. leaders openly supported torture and White House lawyers and the then U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that detainees were “unlawful combatants” and not protected as prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions, a series of war crimes conventions from 1864 to 1949.

U.S. war crimes were becoming normalized legally, and, except for old school reporters like Hersh, not investigated by the news media. It has amounted to a sense of impunity for U.S. leaders to commit whatever crimes they need to commit during war.  Few people learn about them. As Harold Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“My contention here is that the US crimes in the same period [the Cold War] have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. … the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked….It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The American people did learn about Abu Ghraib, however, and an investigation had to be launched. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was hauled before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and said:

“These events occurred on my watch…as Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility…..there are other photos — many other photos — that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.”

George W. Bush didn’t apologized, but expressed remorse “for the humiliation suffered” by Iraqi prisoners. But the investigation only convicted seven low level soldiers in the prison. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw the prison, was merely demoted to colonel. When President Barack Obama came into office, he refused to investigate U.S. officials for torture, preferring to not “look back.”  In that way he added to American impunity.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. convicted one soldier for murder, put another on trial and demoted a third who was acquitted of murder.  But President Donald Trump pardoned the first two and restored the rank of the third, perhaps making him an accessory to a crime after the fact.  When the International Criminal Court announced in March that it would launch an investigation into alleged U.S. crimes in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reacted by threatening ICC officials with sanctions if they came to the United States.

Unlike the reaction to Abu Ghraib, another revelation of prima facia evidence of a U.S. war crime in Iraq has been virtually ignored: WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video.

Still of opening scene of Collateral Murder.

Despite initial interest when it was released, nothing happened, as Pinter would say. Instead of prosecuting the soldiers involved in the Collateral Murder massacre, the U.S. government has arrested and put on trial Assange, the journalist who exposed it and imprisoned his source, Chelsea Manning.

Having come clean on its own war crimes, Australia should at long last assert its sovereignty and tell the United States to send its citizen home.  To not do so would be to make a mockery of its report revealing its own war crimes.

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Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional career as a stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at [email protected]and followed on Twitter @unjoe . 

Featured image: Collateral Murder video released by WikiLeaks.

China has achieved the almost impossible – a free trade agreement with 14 countries – the ten ASEAN, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether 15 countries, including China. The so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, was in negotiations during eight years – and achieved to pull together a group of countries for free trade, i.e. some 2.2 billion people, commanding some 30% of the world’s GDP. This is a never before reached agreement in size, value and tenor. The RCEP was signed during the 37^th ASEAN Summit on 11 November in Vietnam.

On top of being the largest such trade agreement in human history, it also associates with and binds to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), or also called the New Silk Road, which in itself comprises already more than 130 countries and more than 30 international organizations. In addition, China and Russia have a longstanding strategic partnership, containing bilateral agreements that also enter into this new trade fold – plus the countries of the Central Asia Economic Union (CAEU), consisting mostly of former Soviet Republics, are also integrated into this eastern trade block.

The conglomerate of agreements and sub-agreements between Asian-Pacific countries that will cooperate with RCEP, is bound together by for the west a little-understood Asian Pact, called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), founded on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai as an intergovernmental organization composed of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO’s purpose is to ensure security and maintain stability across the vast Eurasian region, join forces to counteract emerging challenges and threats, and enhance trade, as well as cultural and humanitarian cooperation.

Much of the funding for RCEP and BRI projects will be in the form of low-cost loans from China’s Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and other Chinese and participating countries’ national funding sources. In the hard times emerging from the covid crisis, many countries may need grant assistance to be able to recover as quickly as possible their huge socioeconomic losses created by the pandemic. In this sense, it is likely that the new Silk Road may enhance a special “Health Road” across the Asian Continent.

The real beauty of this RCEP agreement is that it pursues a steady course forward, despite all the adversities imposed by the west, foremost the US of A. In fact, the RCEP may, as “byproduct”, integrate the huge Continent of Eurasia that spans all the way from western Europe to what is called Asia and covering the Middle East as well as North Africa, of some 55 million square kilometers (km2). See map (Wikipedia).

The crux of the RCEP agreement’s trade deals is that they will be carried out in local currencies and in yuan – no US dollars. The RCEP is a massive instrument for dedollarizing, primarily the Asia-Pacific Region, and gradually the rest of the world.

Much of the BRI infrastructure investments, or New Silk Road, may be funded by other currencies than the US dollar. China’s new digital Renminbi (RMB) or yuan soon being rolled out internationally as legal tender for international payments and transfers, will drastically reduce the use of the dollar. The new digital RMB will become attractive for many countries which are fed up with being subjected to US sanctions, because using the US-dollar, they automatically become vulnerable to being punished with dollar blockages, confiscations of resources, whenever their international “behavior” doesn’t conform with the mandates of Washington’s.

Even country reserves can be stolen, a crime perpetrated by Washington with impunity and with the help of the UK, in full sight of the world, stealing 1.2 billion dollars’ worth of Venezuelan gold deposited with the Bank of England. Only a cumbersome lengthy legal process in UK courts initiated by Venezuela could eventually free the funds to be returned to the jurisdiction of Caracas. This is a warning for many countries, who want to jump the fiat-dollar-ship and join an honest trading and reserve currency, offered by China’s solid and stable economy-backed RMB / yuan.

The dollar is already today in decline. When some 20-25 years ago about 90% of all worldwide held reserve-assets were denominated in US dollars, this proportion has shrunk by today to below 60% – and keeps declining. The emerging international RMB / yuan, together with a RCEP- and BRI-strengthened Chinese economy, may further contribute to a dedollarization, as well as dehegemonization of the United States in the world. Simultaneously and progressively the international digital RMB / yuan may also be replacing the US-dollar / euro reserves in countries’ coffers around the globe.

The US-dollar may eventually return to be just a local US-currency, as it should be. Under China’s philosophy, the unilateral world will transform into a multi-polar world. The RCEP and New Silk Road combination are rapidly pursuing this noble objective, a goal that will bring much more equilibrium into the world.

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For the west adapting to this new reality may not be easy. Cooperation instead of competition has never been a western concept or philosophy. For hundreds if not thousands of years the western dominance has left a sad legacy of exploitation of the poor by the rich colonial masters and of bloody wars.

Cooperation instead of competition and warring for power, is a concept not easily adhered to by the west. It is clearly visible by US-instigated trade wars, and possibly a currency war between the US and China may already be in the making. The FED has vaguely expressed its plans to also launch a digital, possibly cryptic, blockchain-based currency to counter the new RMB / yuan – not yet even launched internationally. Details of the FED’s plans are at the time of this writing not clear.

Having to adapt to the new RCEP, conforming to an agreement among equals, will not come easy for the west. The west will not let go and may use to the utmost possible, its creation and western biased World Trade Organization (WTO), to sabotage as much as possible the RCEP’s trade deals and BRI-infrastructure, as well as cross-border industrial development advances.

The west, led by the US – and always backed by the Pentagon and NATO, may not shy from threatening countries participating in China’s projects, but to no avail. Under Tao philosophy, China will move forward with her partners, like steadily flowing water, constantly creating, avoiding obstacles, in pursuit of her noble goal – a world in Peace with a bright common future.

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In conclusion, the RCEP is a Chinese Masterpiece with Chinese characteristics and is paving the way for further progressing towards a world community with a shared future for mankind. The underlying principle is a community of sovereign nations, living, working, building, inventing, creating and culturally enriching each other in peace.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. 

Peter is also co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

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

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has – albeit inadvertently – single-handedly done his utmost to encourage the Scottish independence movement since he took office, even last week causing more offence north of the border with his ‘devolution was a disaster’ comments. But while the PM himself may be somewhat oblivious to cracks that are emerging in the Union, others are less indifferent. Indeed, the British military and security establishment is getting increasingly flustered about the fact that, with every day that passes, Scotland is edging closer to independence.

An article in The Economist this month aptly summed up this newfound worry. It’s an extraordinary piece, containing rhetoric and ideas which plunge us right back into the depths of the Cold War. To summarise, it asserts that England needs Scotland to defend itself from Russia.  The scenarios presented wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond plot.  Allegedly, the ‘threat from Russia has grown’ and because of Scotland’s northerly position it’s in an ideal position to ‘intercept Russian bombers from Murmansk’.  Not just that, but the west coast of Scotland provides ‘the simplest and safest way’ for British submarines to take ‘nuclear missiles…over the Arctic to Russia’.  (I kid you not, it talks about nuclear missiles.)

It also describes how the Scottish Highlands and Islands have been used for generations for the testing of various weaponry.  Apparently the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) uses 115,000 square kilometres of airspace over the Hebrides archipelago for testing missile defence systems.  And the UK’s only naval firing range is in Cape Wrath.  So it’s clear that Scotland provides the ideal, remote, playground for the British army. Conveniently, the article fails to mention the negative side of the MOD’s experimentation, such as the anthrax testing on Gruinard island in the 1940s which led to its contamination for decades; or the presence of nuclear weapons at Faslane, which the majority of Scots oppose.

There are so many things to take issue with in this piece it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all there’s the implication that Russia poses a real military threat to Britain. As if the Russian Federation is the least bit interested in combat with our island. What would it have to gain? More territory? Hardly likely for the largest country in the world.  There is of course the widely held view in the west that Putin is about to invade the Baltic states at any minute. But this view is devoid of any logical basis.  As eminent scholar Professor Stephen Cohen (now sadly deceased) noted in his book ‘War with Russia’ in 2019, Vladimir Putin tends to react to events rather than initiate them. Instances of so-called ‘Russian aggression’ are in fact more acts of self-defence.  The ‘invasion of Ukraine’ is cited in The Economist article as being the starting point for the growth of the ‘Russian threat’.  Yet this really is a twisted version of events as it ignores the role played by western regime change efforts in initiating what is an ongoing civil war in Ukraine.  As Cohen wrote:

‘The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the longstanding effort to bring that country, despite these large regions’ shared civilization with Russia, into NATO.’

Cohen also cites the Russian conflict with Georgia in 2008 as another example of western meddling, as Saakashvili, the Georgian leader who mounted his attack on South Ossetia, was backed by the US. In both these conflicts, frequently cited as examples of Russian aggression, the only intervention Russia has made has been to defend the rights of ethnic Russians living in these former Soviet regions.

The reality is, that if any real war was to break out between ourselves and Russia, and as is suggested, nuclear missiles were used, our whole island would be swiftly decimated. In 2019  Russia unveiled its new Avangard supersonic nuclear missile, the first of its kind in the world. You don’t want to play games with a country that has this kind of technology.  Not only that, but why on earth would Russia want to engage in military conflict of this kind? To suggest as much is to completely misunderstand Russia’s geopolitical strategy. One cannot help but think that once again Russia has become a useful scapegoat in other peoples’ political agendas.

There is no doubt of course that an independent Scotland would have a completely different approach to diplomacy and defence from the United Kingdom, which reflects the nation’s age-old internationalist outlook.  In a proposal drawn up by think-tank Commonweal back in 2014, it is suggested that an independent ‘Scotland would be an international actor of a completely different character to the UK’. The paper proposes that Scotland would aim to reduce defence spending and abandon its nuclear weapons, promoting instead a “distinctive, Scottish ‘international brand’ which emphasizes cooperation, dialogue, and peace”.  The country could aim to be a ‘middle-power’ peacekeeper like Canada, Norway or Ireland. The role, it is said, would contrast greatly with Great Britain’s traditional one of ‘projecting power’ abroad which has (it is politely expressed) ‘invited international criticism due to the damage that has sometimes been visited on the ‘recipients’ of this projected power.’ In other words, Scotland would not be looking to follow the same interventionist and expansionist path which has been tread by the United Kingdom in times past.

Such a divergence between Scotland and England over defence will of course concern London. Currently there is no indication that Scotland shares English fears of an imminent Russian invasion, and any reduction on defense in the northern part of the British isles will likely be opposed by the English military. However, there is also another objective to the UK government raising concerns in this area. As the desire for independence increases in Scotland, so will the amount of propaganda produced by the UK government as to why it should remain in the union. By exaggerating the threat from Russia, the English can persuade Scots of the need to retain the Union. What seems obvious in any case, is that even in this one area of defence, England needs Scotland more than the other way around.

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Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Boris Johnson’s government has for the first time confirmed the existence of a prime ministerial task force which is reportedly planning a “radical shake-up of the NHS”.

Freedom of Information disclosures to openDemocracy show the new “No.10 Health and Social Care Taskforce” reports to a Steering Group chaired by Munira Mirza, the influential head of Boris Johnson’s policy unit, and that it “met weekly” from July to September with a further meeting in October.

Mirza, a political appointee who previously worked for Johnson when he was London mayor, has no background or policy experience in health.

The disclosures also reveal that whilst some Department of Health officials do attend the task force, it is led by four senior civil servants based at the Treasury, and none of whom are from the Department of Health.

The government has not published any information about the task force’s existence, work, terms of reference or membership – and has refused to answer questions about the nature of its work.

However in July, The Guardian reported that Boris Johnson was planning a “radical and politically risky reorganisation of the NHS” – in response to “frustration” with the NHS’s performance during the COVID crisis.

And in September, the Financial Times reported that inside sources had revealed an interdepartmental health task force with a wide remit, “determining what the health service’s goals should be”.

The government has previously claimed that rumours regarding the work of the task force are “pure speculation,” and did not even formally confirm its existence, insisting that instead: “As has been the case throughout the pandemic, our focus is on protecting the public, controlling the spread of the virus, and saving lives.”

Not only is the group now confirmed to exist, but Mirza’s leading role and the lack of leaders from the Department of Health suggest that its work is politically focused.

Jackie Applebee, Chair of Doctors in Unite, told openDemocracy,

“It is shocking that people with no background in health are meeting regularly to determine the future of health and social care. COVID-19 has surely shown us that putting people with no health experience in charge of the NHS is a disaster.”

Meanwhile Tamasin Cave, a lobbying expert, has called Mirza “a political hire who is unqualified to mess around with the NHS”. She also questioned the timing: “Why are they doing this now, given how much the NHS – and the country – has on its plate already?”

The revelations come as concerns are mounting about post-COVID pressures on the NHS.

Kailash Chand, former deputy chair of the British Medical Association, told openDemocracy.

“The waiting lists have built up to an awful level, and they’ll use that as an excuse to bring the private sector in, as they did under the previous Labour government.”

He described Boris Johnson as “dangerous” and having “no faith in public services.”

Secrecy ‘the worst possible way’ to do NHS reform

In their Freedom of Information responses, the Department of Health, the Treasury and Number 10 have all denied having a full record of who has been attending the task force and steering group meetings.

Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has criticised the government’s secretive approach as “the worst possible way to design a major reform.”

“Secrecy encourages groupthink. The government rightly stresses the importance of public and patient involvement and co-production with users when designing new models of care. It is bizarre to reject these ideas for the really big decisions.”

What today’s disclosures do show is that the task force’s civil service policy lead is Adrian Masters. An alumnus of the management consultancy McKinsey, Masters played a key role in shaping the last major piece of NHS legislation, the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

McKinsey was reported to have drafted large parts of that bill, which was criticised as enabling increased fragmentation and private sector outsourcing of large parts of the NHS.

The task force also includes William Warr: Johnson’s health advisor and a former lobbyist at the firm of Lynton Crosby, who masterminded numerous Conservative Party election campaigns and Johnson’s successful 2008 London mayoral bid.

Warr described the NHS as “outdated” in a Telegraph article penned shortly before he and Johnson entered Downing Street last year, suggesting that the incoming prime minister should ask himself: “If I created the NHS today from scratch, what would it look like?” Warr answered: “Nothing like the monolith we have today.”

Boris Johnson’s first Queen’s Speech in December last year promised to “bring forward detailed proposals” and “draft legislation” to “accelerate the Long Term Plan for the NHS, transforming patient care and future-proofing our NHS.”

The British Medical Association (BMA) has characterised this Long Term Plan as a “plan for a market-driven healthcare system”.

Kailash Chand, the former BMA deputy chair, told openDemocracy he believed the purpose of the task force was part of a wider effort to drive forward more NHS privatisation:

“These people are really clever at bringing these things in disguise. This is essentially about getting us towards… big pickings for private companies. It’s not going to happen overnight but this is the road map.”

Referring to McKinsey’s regular NHS recommendations that were implemented under the Cameron government, he said:

“McKinsey were brought in previously to recommend financial savings. The easiest way for hospitals to achieve those targets was to cut beds, cut nurses and the salary bill. And we’re still suffering today.”

Political appointments

Boris Johnson has faced criticism for appointing political allies with no health experience to key roles in the COVID-19 response. Test and Trace head Dido Harding, another former McKinsey employee and Tory peer, is in the process of taking over a large portion of the soon-to-be-abolished Public Health England’s remit, the government announced in August. She has also been tipped as favourite to take over as chief executive of the English NHS from the current incumbent, Simon Stevens, next year.

Stevens’ own proposals for major NHS reform last year attempted to allay fears about further privatisation, though campaigners raised concerns that they could make outsourcing less transparent.

Both the Department of Health and the NHS now appear to be taking a back seat in policymaking. Stevens is not on the task force, and none of the four top senior servants in charge comes from the department.

openDemocracy approached Munira Mirza, Adrian Masters, Number 10 and the Treasury for comment, but all have declined to respond by the time of publication.

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Through a little-discussed potential bureaucratic rule change, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to collect unprecedented levels of biometric information from immigration applicants and their sponsors — including U.S. citizens. While some types of applicants have long been required to submit photographs and fingerprints, a rule currently under consideration would require practically everyone applying for any kind of status, or detained by immigration enforcement agents, to provide iris scans, voiceprints and palmprints, and, in some cases, DNA samples. A tangled web of defense and surveillance contractors, which operate with little public oversight, have already begun to build the infrastructure that would be needed to store these records.

After proposing the rule in September, DHS is currently reviewing, and must respond to, thousands of comments it received during the 30-day period in which the public could weigh in. The agency had signaled that the proposal would be coming when it announced last year that it would be retiring its legacy Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT, and replacing it with the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology framework — stating explicitly that one of its objectives was to collect more types of biometric data and make searching and matching easier. Where HART was the vessel, the new proposed rule is the means of collecting all the new data types to populate it.

Any potential contractors tasked with rolling out the new data collection infrastructure and management won’t be decided until after the rule is finalized, but a look at the companies currently working on building out DHS’s already vast biometrics capabilities is instructive.

The contract for the current biometrics management system used by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, for case processing, background checks, and identity verification was awarded in 2015 to the relatively large but low-profile federal contractor Pyramid Systems, which is based in Fairfax, Virginia. Run by a Taiwanese immigrant couple who are Democratic donors, Pyramid has been contracted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Census Bureau, and other agencies. In a 2016 release about the contract, which is potentially worth up to $87.5 million, the company wrote that it would “provide Agile services for enhancement and operations and maintenance (O&M) of current biometrics applications used for U.S. immigration-related efforts,” using jargon for a software development methodology focused on constantly evolving to changing circumstances and a client’s needs.

Defense giant BAE Systems has a $47 million contract for USCIS biometrics support and collection, which appears to involve the mechanics of actually taking fingerprints and photographs. The technical infrastructure for the processing, searching, matching, and maintenance of the first couple of components of HART are being built by Northrop Grumman through a contract potentially worth $143 million.

These international defense conglomerates have, over the years, amassed tens of thousands of U.S. government contracts worth tens of billions of dollars, including hundreds with DHS alone, for everything from software to weapons. These partnerships between defense contractors and DHS — a sprawling agency created after 9/11 — form the backbone of a decadeslong melding of the war on terror with the war on drugs, and the expansion of an all-encompassing national security state whose reach extends inside and outside the country. BAE Systems and Pyramid Systems did not respond to requests for comment; Northrop Grumman referred questions to DHS, which responded to detailed questions by pointing back to its press release.

DHS’s data collection operations are also aided by its contracts with the surveillance state. HART, like much of the federal government’s data infrastructure, is hosted on Amazon Web Services; Amazon has made itself indispensable as its lobbying machine simultaneously pushes anti-labor, pro-surveillance, and pro-monopolization policy. The controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI — which built its software by trawling social media and the web for billions of images to scrape — already has an active contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which, as a component of DHS, could easily match those images against the HART database. Palantir, the data-mining firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel whose software uses data from various databases to form detailed relationship maps and establish connections between individuals, also has a contract with ICE.

That nongovernmental entities with commercial incentives and fewer limits on data use would have access to so much personal data is alarming to privacy watchdogs.

“It has a private prison feel. When you start contracting out that stuff to the private sector, the private sector will never care about rights,” said Paromita Shah, executive director of Just Futures Law.

In October, several Democratic senators called on the Trump administration to reverse course on its expansion of biometric data collection.

“This proposed rule by the Department of Homeland Security should send chills down the spines of every American who doesn’t want to live under big brother-style government surveillance,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, one of the letter’s signatories, said in a statement to The Intercept. “It’s disturbing that the Trump administration is trying to inch us closer to that slippery slope and further intimidate our immigrant communities. We have to keep fighting tooth and nail to bolster biometric data privacy rights and oppose dangerous and misguided data collection policies like this one.”

The Trump administration has not issued a timeline for when it will finish reviewing public comments. If that should happen before Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, the new administration would have to go through a regulatory process to roll it back. If not, Biden’s DHS could decide not to move forward with implementing the rule. But it’s far from certain that it would. While the president-elect has promised to roll back some unpopular Trump-era immigration policies, like the travel ban, the expansion of the surveillance state has long been a point of bipartisan consensus. The Biden transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

The proposed rule represents a significant departure from current practices, where only certain applicants for visas, residency, and naturalization must submit photographs and fingerprints. Under the new regime, practically everyone presenting an application with USCIS, and their U.S. resident or citizen sponsors, will be expected to provide iris scans, voiceprints — which can be used to identify an individual by the sound and tenor of their voice alone — palmprints, and DNA in cases where they are attempting to prove a genetic relationship. As written, it leaves the door open for adding an unlimited amount of other characteristics without further public discussion, including “behavioral characteristics” such as gait recognition.

While DHS and its component agencies have long had congressional authority to collect DNA from immigrants in their custody, it was not until this year that ICE and Customs and Border Protection began to do so. The proposed rule goes a step further, mandating additional types of detainee data collection for the first time, as well as for the first time DNA from nondetained applicants.

USCIS would be able to collect biometrics from all visitors to the U.S., as well as from all immigrants at any point up until they become a naturalized citizen, for which the shortest, widely available path — marrying a U.S. citizen — can take four or five years when factoring in processing times. Some people on work visas can reside in the country legally for decades without the option to obtain residency and subsequent citizenship. Even U.S. citizens could be forced to provide biometric data if, for example, they sponsor the application of a family member or if their prior naturalization application is reopened.

While other government entities, like the Department of Justice, also collect biometrics, DHS is known as a uniquely opaque and privacy-adverse domestic law enforcement and surveillance apparatus. Its culture disdains privacy, perhaps best exemplified by reports that former DHS Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan, whose job included overseeing the department’s compliance with widely accepted standards known as Fair Information Practice Principles, or FIPPs, was called a “terrorist” by others within the department.

The Justice Department’s biometrics database, for example, is strictly controlled by a number of internal privacy guidelines, including a limited number of purposes for which it can be accessed. HART has far fewer protections. DHS wants its database to be as big as the Justice Department’s, said Shah, “but no one cares about who has access to it, who is it being shared with, can people have access to their own data. They’re not asking those questions.”

A former USCIS asylum officer who asked not to be named because she still works in the U.S. immigration sphere said, “It’s sort of an open joke that it’s a mystery” who has access to what kind of data. “It’s like a black hole.”

Access concerns are compounded by not just what the data is, but how it’s organized in the system. When the FBI stores DNA in its CODIS database, the information is stored without names or other identifying characteristics. For its part, DHS intends to use DNA for the purposes of establishing genetic relationships, meaning that the DNA would be stored with biographic information with linkages between individuals.

The proposed rule would also allow for the DNA to be used “as authorized by the immigration and naturalization laws,” a vague clause that has privacy advocates worried.

“Once you start collecting that information from people, it’s pretty easy to start mapping out whole immigrant communities,” said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

While DHS currently only requests biometrics from adults, the proposed rule would eliminate age constraints, meaning minors — incapable of giving consent — will be caught in the dragnet of invasive surveillance. Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said that would be unethical and counterfactual, citing research that has shown that biometric identification is wildly inaccurate for young children.

“It’s fact-free. It’s science-free. It’s just, ‘Here’s what we want, and we’re gonna get it, and we’re going to explain it away by saying the words identity theft and fraud and terrorism.’ That’s what this is,” said Dixon.

DHS’s own privacy assessment of HART flags the possibility that the data could be inadvertently released, stating that as of the initial rollout, there was no security plan in place to prevent leaks and that a number of different contractors would have direct access to HART data.

Privacy advocates worry that DHS won’t do enough to ensure that there will be limited access and usage for the data, for government employees and contractors alike.

“There’s just no central place where you can find information on what the regulations are for access to various databases, what the restrictions are, and how data’s been shared,” said EFF’s Lynch.

The government is required to provide disclosures as to how the data can be used and accessed, but, much like political dark money run through webs of impenetrable LLCs, the trick is to create a tangled mess of usage permissions and exemptions that is ultimately indecipherable. So a database might have certain privacy restrictions, but can be accessed by another government agency with a different set of restrictions, which in turn is part of a larger contractor-run analytic framework, and so on and so forth.

Despite DHS’s policy of adherence to the FIPPS, it is often up to its individual agencies to ensure contractors’ compliance. On that front, there’s already plenty of cause for concern. In a report published this September, the Government Accountability Office concluded that, since CBP had first started using facial recognition for identity verification for air and sea travel in 2017, it “had audited only one of its more than 20 commercial airline partners and did not have a plan to ensure that all partners are audited for compliance with the program’s privacy requirements.”

The GAO hasn’t conducted an evaluation of the new rule, Rebecca Gambler, the director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice division, told The Intercept. Still, Gambler said that as CBP expands its facial recognition program, “those privacy risks are just going to continue to grow.” She emphasized that CBP agreed to a set of recommendations in the report and has appeared to try to implement them; yet these reforms seem to have come about as a result of direct urging.

While the stated goal of the biometrics collection is identity verification and a biometric collection, there are few constraints on the use of the data, which can be shared with a host of different law enforcement agencies and governments. The rule’s ill-defined continuous vetting program could effectively mean an endless parade of invisible checkpoints for those whose information is collected, like an always-on no-fly list that could unexpectedly trigger enormous consequences, with little chance of recourse.

Privacy advocates worry that a system now focused on immigrants and their family members could eventually be expanded to the broader public. “There’s no basis in history for being sanguine about the idea that once these things are trialed on foreigners, who have few legal rights anyway, and where the American public won’t complain,” said Edward Hasbrouck, a travel and privacy expert, “that they will then become the new normal for U.S. citizens as well.”

Update: Nov. 19, 2020
This article has been updated to include information about a new CBP biometrics rule proposed by DHS after publication. 

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Joe Biden has won states worth 306 Electoral College votes, 36 more than the 270 needed to win, and received in excess of 5 million more popular votes than Donald Trump. Yet Trump insists the election was stolen from him and he is the victor.

Trump started attacking the election months before it happened. He leveled unsupported charges of massive voter fraud from mail-in ballots to create doubt about the integrity of the election. Knowing that Democrats would cast mail ballots in the midst of the pandemic, Trump told his supporters to vote in person on Election Day to prematurely inflate his vote totals.

When he had an apparent lead on election night, Trump claimed victory and demanded that the vote-counting stop. Sure enough, as the tabulations continued, the mail ballots counted after Election Day put Biden over the top.

Trump is setting the stage for an electoral coup. Republicans and the Trump campaign have filed frivolous lawsuits, alleging mostly technical violations of voting procedures, which would not change the outcome of the election even if they were meritorious.

The real goal of this litigation is to create the perception of widespread voter fraud to whip up distrust for the election results. This would “give state legislatures political cover to appoint their own electors,” Robert Reich wrote.

Trump’s lawyers are seeking court orders to delay the certification of the votes in key states so GOP-controlled legislatures can appoint Trump electors notwithstanding Biden’s victories. Trump’s legal team has filed litigation in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona to prevent state officials from certifying the vote count.

On November 13, judges in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona dismissed Trump lawsuits. State judges in Michigan have refused Trump’s requests to delay the certification of the vote count. Judge Timothy Kenny rejected the petition of two Republican poll watchers to delay ballot count certification in Detroit, calling misconduct allegations “not credible.” The plaintiffs’ request for an outside audit of the voting tallies would cause such a delay that electors might not be chosen by the mid-December vote in the Electoral College. Kenny, who characterized some accusations as “rife with speculation and guesswork,” said, “It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process.”

The same day, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur abruptly withdrew from the federal lawsuit they had filed in Pennsylvania on Trump’s behalf earlier in the week, out of concerns they were being used to undermine the integrity of the electoral process. Also last week, Snell & Wilmer withdrew from representation of Arizona’s Republican National Committee.

“These law firms have been under tremendous pressure as it became clear these claims were baseless, and that they were part of a broader campaign to delegitimize the election,” Wendy Weiser from the Brennan Center for Justice told ABC News.

Both Democratic and Republican election officials in virtually every state reported to The New York Times that there was no evidence fraud or other irregularities affected the election results.

Moreover, on November 12, a joint committee of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed the reliability of the election results, calling the November 3rd election “the most secure in American history.” The high-level committee concluded, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

On November 17, CISA Director Christopher Krebs denied that there was a manipulation of the election systems, tweeting, “59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’ ” Later that day Trump fired Krebs for making a “highly inaccurate” statement, but Trump provided no evidence of his allegation.

Even Trump advisor Karl Rove wrote in a November 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed that Trump’s challenges “are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden’s column, and certainly they’re not enough to change the final outcome.”

Attorney General William Barr is aiding and abetting Trump’s attempted coup. Just weeks before the election, the Justice Department changed its longstanding ban on voter fraud investigations before an election. Although he told department officials after the election that he didn’t see massive voter fraud, Barr saluted and marched to Trump’s orders. On November 9, Barr empowered federal prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” Sixteen federal prosecutors in charge of monitoring the election wrote to Barr that there is no evidence of substantial voting irregularities.

Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official in charge of voter fraud investigations left his job in protest against Barr’s order. But just the fact that the Department of Justice is authorizing investigations is designed to cast a cloud over the election. Indeed, a Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 70% of Republicans now think the election was not fair or free, compared with 35% of Republicans before the election. The purpose of Trump’s strategy of falsely alleging fraud from mail ballots combined with Barr’s baseless edict establishes fake doubt about the reliability of the vote tallies.

The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to decide how electors are selected. Article II says, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” U.S. Code, Title 3, Section 1 requires that electors be chosen on Election Day. However, when a state “has failed to make a choice on [that] day,” then “the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct,” under Section 2.

But the states did not fail to choose the electors on Election Day. As a result of the voting process, which ended on November 3, Biden garnered more than 270 electoral votes. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security affirmed that the election was the most secure in U.S. history. Even if charges of fraud were supported, that would not amount to a failure of state voters to choose electors on Election Day. Thus, state legislatures have no authority to select Trump’s electors in the states Biden won.

Trump supporters are targeting Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona – all of which Biden won – by raising allegations of fraud in hopes of persuading their state legislatures to override the will of the voters and appoint pro-Trump electors. All four states require that electors be awarded to the winner of the state’s popular vote on Election Day.

In October, the Republican majority leaders from Pennsylvania’s Senate and House co-authored an op-ed saying that the GOP-controlled legislature would not select electors to overrule the popular vote. They wrote, “The Pennsylvania General Assembly does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.” But on November 10, members of the Pennsylvania legislature announced their intention to investigate voter fraud allegations.

The Republican leader of Wisconsin’s assembly has long maintained that the legislature would not override the will of the voters and he reiterated that view on November 13. But the Wisconsin legislature is also investigating the election.

Republican leaders in Michigan’s legislature say legislative intervention would violate state law although the GOP-controlled legislature has mounted an investigation of the election. Michigan’s majority leader said, “It is not the expectation that our analysis would result in any change in the outcome.”

On November 17, in a dramatic and overtly political move, the two Republican elected officials on the four-member board of canvassers in Michigan’s largest county blocked certification of Wayne County’s vote count. But hours later, after powerful public comment and fierce outcry on traditional and social media, board chair Monica Palmer and William Hartmann reversed their “no” votes and the board unanimously certified the tally.

Trump called Palmer after the board meeting and also spoke with Hartmann. The next day, the two GOP board members tried to rescind their “yes” votes, claiming they were pressured into certifying the election with the promise of an audit of voting tallies in Detroit, which is 80% black. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Secretary of State, said the resolution requesting an audit was not binding. The small number of votes that could be affected by the audit is not enough to change the election results.

Benson’s spokeswoman stated, “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote.”

On November 19, Trump invited the Republican leaders in the Michigan legislature to visit the White House on November 20. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers will review and certify the county certifications on November 23.

Arizona’s Republican House speaker affirmed that the legislature is “mandated by statute to choose according to the vote of the people,” but left open the possibility of changing electors if there is “some type of fraud – which I haven’t heard of anything.” At this point, he added, “I don’t see us in any serious way addressing a change in electors.”

Although Republican leaders in those four states deny they intend to replace Biden electors with Trump electors, allegations of fraud – however spurious – could reverse those intentions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is hinting that Trump could win in the Electoral College.

States must count electoral votes and settle election disputes by December 8, the “safe harbor” deadline. On December 14, members of the Electoral College in each state will meet to elect the president.

If legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin attempt to appoint Trump electors against the will of their voters, the Democratic governors in those states would refuse to sign the certification of electors and submit Biden slates. Arizona has a Republican governor, who may well sign a slate of Trump electors notwithstanding Biden’s victory in that state, according to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig.

On January 6, Vice President Mike Pence will preside over the opening of the certified results before a joint session of the new Congress. If there are competing slates of electors in Arizona, Pence might decide to recognize the slate signed by the governor, Lessig says. If both a senator and a member of the House of Representatives sign an objection, the Senate and House would vote on whether to uphold the objection. In all likelihood, the House would vote to sustain the objection. If the Senate votes to overrule the objection, the slate signed by the governor would be counted. Even without Biden electors from Arizona, however, Biden should still have more than 270 electoral votes. But if the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and/or Wisconsin submit competing slates of electors, that dispute would also end up in Congress.

If neither Biden nor Trump secure 270 electoral votes, the 12th Amendment provides that the House would decide who becomes president. Each state gets one vote and since there are more red states than blue ones, Trump would win.

In the event that an electoral clash reaches the Supreme Court, all bets are off. In a recent concurrence, Brett Kavanaugh adopted the position that state legislatures are unconstrained in their selection of electors regardless of the popular vote. Kavanaugh based his theory on Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurrence in Bush v. Gore– the case that selected George W. Bush as president in 2000. But that theory has not attained majority support on the high court.

Indeed, in Chiafalo v. Washington earlier this year, a unanimous Supreme Court cited the “tradition more than two centuries old” that “electors are not free agents; they are to vote for the candidate whom the State’s voters have chosen.” Chiafalo affirmed the power of states to punish “faithless electors,” who don’t vote in accordance with the popular vote.

But in light of the willingness of Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch to stay the counting of votes mailed by November 3 but arriving by November 6, in spite of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s allowance of the three-day extension, those three might vote for Trump in a case of dueling electors. And Amy Coney Barrett could provide the fifth vote to hand the presidency to Trump.

Trump is apparently taking steps to quash popular opposition to his attempted electoral theft. On November 9, he fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Last summer, Esper refused to support Trump’s proposed deployment of active-duty troops against anti-racist protesters in the wake of the public lynching of George Floyd. Esper opposed the invocation of the Insurrection Act to call out active-duty military on U.S. soil. Mindful that massive protests would erupt if he succeeds in launching an electoral coup, Trump wants his loyalists in place to attack anti-coup demonstrators. Service members, however, have a duty to disobey unlawful orders and may refuse to follow Trump’s illegal directives to repress protesters.

On November 14, thousands of Trump loyalists, including the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups, assembled in Washington D.C. and claimed that Biden was stealing the election. Trump drove by on his way to play golf and gave the demonstrators a thumbs-up. Later that day, in a violently inciteful tweet, Trump urged police not to “hold back” and to crack down on “antifa scum.”

During the campaign, while he leveled false accusations of massive voter fraud, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. His refusal to concede and his strategy to illegally overturn the election results by stealing Biden’s electoral votes confirm his intention not to go peacefully.

“Since 1800, when the incumbent John Adams was defeated, every president who lost a reelection bid has left office,” Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told Jurist. “Not every transition was graceful, but every one occurred.  We have seen so many instances around the world where that didn’t happen. I am hopeful that our institutions will work again and keep Trump from impermissibly remaining in office.”

The results of the election must be honored and the presidency awarded to Joe Biden. Hopefully, that will be accomplished with all deliberate speed and the absence of bloodshed. Donald Trump must leave the White House on January 20. As Elena Kagan wrote in the last line of the Chiafalo opinion, “Here, We the People rule.”

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Marjorie Cohn is emerita professor of law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, California, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild.

Featured image is by viarami / Pixabay

GCHQ spooks are monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions, according to reports.

The London Telegraph (Paywall) reports that spies from Britain’s most secretive intelligence and security organisation, Government Communications Headquarters, have embedded a ‘cell’ within Number 10 Downing Street in order to provide Prime Minister Boris Johnson with real time information pertaining to the public’s movements.

Words we didn't expect to read in 2020:

"GCHQ analysts have been given access to mobile phone data to track the public's movements during the national lockdown. The up-to-the-minute reports on compliance are passed to the Prime Minister"https://t.co/SKqk5uRw0z

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) November 19, 2020

The Daily Mail also reports on the development, which notes that GCHQ, normally tasked with spying on terrorists and foreign powers, has been turned on the British public to gauge whether people are following the COVID ‘rules’ or not.

The report notes that as well as tracking the movement of people, the spies are collecting information on “internet searches for holidays and jobs.”

A source told The Telegraph that the spying is aiding ‘better policymaking,’ concerning the coronavirus pandemic, and will be used in order to make a decision on whether the lockdown will be extended beyond December 2, even though Johnson insisted that it definitely wouldn’t.

The report also claims that the GCHQ has collected all the information from the maligned ‘Track and Trace’ app, and is ensuring that it is ‘anonymised’, so it cannot be accessed by ‘hostile states’.

The spy agency is also being employed to combat ‘anti-vaccination conspiracy theories’ being spread on social media, in relation to the pandemic.

Speaking anonymously to the London Times earlier this month, a source noted that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda.”

The report noted that the spy agency was considering taking down websites and content that isn’t pro-vaccination, as well as ‘disrupting’ those creating the content  by “using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State.”

GCHQ has previously been embroiled in controversy where spying on the public is concerned, as it was revealed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that the agency was scouring all online and telephone data in the UK via a program code named ‘Tempora’.

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Former US President Barack Obama has admitted in an interview with German channel NTV on Wednesday, November 18, that his administration failed to deal with Syria during his presidency.

He was asked about the failures in his administration, and he answered,

“In the area of foreign policy, the tragedy in Syria is still bothering me. During the Arab Spring, Egypt was in the spotlight, and later Libya, but at the same time, Syria was beginning to fall apart. In any case, I was not in a position to win the international community over to hold Syria together. I can’t stop thinking about the human suffering that followed.”

Obama acknowledged that his legacy has been negatively affected by his refusal to invade Syria with a US occupation force.  However, his successor, President Donald J. Trump has invaded Syria, and the US military is occupying Syria and stealing the oil resources, in a scene reminiscent of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush administration’s history in Iraq.

The Red Line crossed

Seymour M. Hersh wrote in April 2014, “The Red Line and the Rat Line”, concerning Obama, Turkey, and the US-backed terrorists.

In August 2013, after the sarin attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama was ready to launch an airstrike on Syria, for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.

Obama changed his mind because of research conducted at Porton Down, the UK defense laboratory. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas didn’t match the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal.

A former senior US intelligence official told Hersh that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan of Turkey had operatives who believed they could force Obama to attack the Syrian government by staging a sarin attack inside Syria.

Erdogan was supporting Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, as well as other foreign Radical Islamic terrorist groups. Hersh was assured by a former senior US intelligence official that, ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’

The US joint chiefs also knew that the media claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The US and UK intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some terrorist units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a highly classified report which stated that Jibhat al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell, and was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’.

Jibhat al-Nusra changed their name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to circumvent the US restrictions on support of Al Qaeda terrorist groups, and are today holding the 3 million civilians in Idlib as hostages and human shields. The US-NATO-EU continue to demand protection for the terrorists, by insisting on a ceasefire which seeks to prevent Russian and Syrian military attacks on the terrorists, which contravenes the UN-mandated global war on terror.

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated by a special UN mission to Syria, there was evidence linking the terrorists to the first gas attack, on March 19, 2013, at Khan Al-Assal. Investigators interviewed the victims and their doctors, and it was clear that the terrorists used the gas.

The Obama target list to attack Syria in 2013 included all the electric grids, oil and gas depots, all weapons depots, and all military buildings. But, Obama put the brakes on the plan after the UK defense findings were sent to the US joint chiefs, effectively telling them they were being set-up by the terrorists.

The US military had already questioned who would benefit from the use of sarin gas attack, and they concluded that from a military standpoint, Syria would not use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war against the terrorists.

Obama supported the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria

David H. Petraeus, who was then CIA director, first proposed a covert program of arming and training terrorists in the summer of 2012. Obama signed a presidential order authorizing the CIA to secretly arm and train terrorists at bases in Jordan in 2013. Obama’s decision came after intense lobbying by US allies, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who were united in their support of using the Muslim Brotherhood ideology to topple the Assad government.

White House officials also received reports that the CIA-trained terrorists had executed prisoners and committed war crimes and atrocities.

“The Dark Side of the Free Syrian Army” was published in December 2012, and exposed the US government’s support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was being armed by financial and military assistance from NATO, EU, and Arab Gulf nations allied with the US.  The FSA was being used as the boots on the ground for the US and their allies, for regime change.

Western media had portrayed the FSA as ‘the good guys’ and was not reporting details of human rights violations, attacks on civilians, rapes, kidnappings, and torture. Western media was turning a blind eye to the facts, and painting the battle as between a dictator, and the FSA, which was labeled freedom-fighters.

Of the 23 million citizens in Syria, about eight million are minorities such as Christians, Druze, Alawites, and Kurds, who are protected by the government, and the majority of the Syrian people support President Assad. The facts on the ground, were of an armed terrorist group, following Radical Islam, with the intent of establishing an Islamic government in Syria, while being supported by democratic western government, fighting against the majority of the Syrian people and their legitimate government. The FSA acted as a force opposed to the citizens of Syria, and never intended democracy to be the outcome.

The FSA had instituted Sharia law in a secular country that has never known Sharia Law, and the FSA targeted the infrastructure of the country, as they destroyed power plants, water systems, schools, hospitals, and factories.

The FSA was being supported by the US, and Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate, was being supported by the Saudis and Qataris. Once the FSA and Jibhat al-Nusra became partners on the battlefield, the US was in the position of supporting Al Qaeda in Syria; something that Americans had thought impossible after 9/11.

The Obama sanctioned war crimes in a Syrian Christian village

‘Timber Sycamore’, the secret CIA program to support the terrorists in Syria was focused on pushing into areas of which were considered to be government strongholds, such as the northern coastal strip. On the morning of March 21, 2014, the US-supported terrorists, along with international terrorist partners, attacked the village of Kassab, which is an Armenian Christian village on the Turkish border. They attacked from the Turkish side, with the help of the Turkish military who used helicopters and canons to break down the defenses.

The US-backed FSA caused the entire village to flee for their lives, as people were shot, homes were ransacked and looted, women raped, and elderly immobile residents kidnapped to Turkey.

On April 11, the Syrian opposition leader, Ahmad Jarba, visited his troops at Kassab, and congratulated them on their victory, and predicted the Syrian government would soon fall.  The village would remain occupied for three months, during which time all three churches were burned, religious icons and books destroyed, the graveyard dug up and bones desecrated, and virtually every home, farm, and business destroyed.

Just weeks later in May, President Obama, and Susan Rice met with Ahmad Jarba in the Oval Office and praised the Syrian National Coalition’s role in trying to find a political solution to the crisis in Syria.

The US officially recognized the Syrian National Coalition as the sole representative of the Syrian people, with Ahmad Jarba as its president, and boosted financial assistance to the group.

“President Obama welcomed the coalition’s leadership and constructive approach to dialogue, and encouraged the coalition to further its vision for an inclusive government that represents all of the people of Syria,” the White House said. The statement should have added that only those following the Muslim Brotherhood would be part of the ‘inclusive government’, and Christians need not apply.

History repeats itself

The US ties with Radical Islamic groups were cemented in the 1980s when the Reagan administration used Islam as an ideological tool to use jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

Using Radical Islam for geopolitical aims has come to diminish global security, including the rise of the jihadists, or “holy warriors,” and as a result, the US still props up the Wahhabist monarchs in Saudi Arabia, while secular Arab states, such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq have fallen victim to the US sponsored regime change and sanctions.

Sen. John McCain’s support of Radical Islam 

In 2011, Brahma Chellany wrote in ‘The Japan Times’, recalling President Ronald Reagan in 1985 introducing the Afghan mujahedeen leaders at the White House as, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”  Osama bin Laden was later to be found not so moral as Regan espoused.

In 2011, US Senator John McCain had announced after meeting Libyan jihadists that they are “willing to reimburse us and our allies” for the costs of effecting the regime change. By May of 2013, McCain was crossing illegally into Idlib, Syria to meet with his ‘freedom-fighters’ the FSA, but was caught in a photo-op with Mohammad Nour, who was identified as a known international kidnapper.

McCain had denounced Obama’s decision not to put boots on the ground, while aware of the US support for the Radical Islamic terrorists, pretending to be freedom-loving heroes.

Trump cut-off the Obama funding to terrorists in Syria

In 2017, President Trump cut funding for the $1 billion CIA support of the terrorists in Syria. It was well known that the FSA had been selling and giving their US supplies weapons to Jibhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and ISIS.

The US liked to support Jibhat al-Nusra, despite being Al Qaeda, because they were fierce fighters. The US had used the rationale that the group was focused on battles in Syria, and not on plotting terrorist attacks against the US and Europe. However, the French government recently stated they are at war against Radical Islam, and some of the attacks which occurred on French soil have connections to training in Syria. The US, UK, France, and Germany continued to feed a monster of their creation and now will continue to pay the price with the blood of their citizens.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Credits to the owner of the featured image

Nearly one year into the COVID pandemic, even a modicum of critical thinking should tell us that lockdown politics as practiced in the United States is an unmitigated disaster, and with no end in sight. The reference here to lockdown politics is meant to signify a particularly assaultive, tyrannical set of government policies that in less than a year have brought severe harm to millions, more likely tens of millions of Americans and others across the world. Sadly, a Joe Biden presidency is only bound to aggravate this already intolerable repression and misery.

One grievous problem with the lockdown mania is that by obsessively fixating on the virus, a power-mad elite has ignored what must drive any public intervention: the need for a comprehensive, detailed cost-benefit analysis informing social policy. Stale rhetoric about “following the science” turns out to be not only one dimensional and useless, yet it remains a justification for continuing mass shutdowns, in state after state. The worst consequences include millions of lost jobs and businesses, escalating poverty, record numbers of bankruptcies, educational chaos, new health crises, a sharp rise in addictions and myriad psychological problems.

Meanwhile, it has become abundantly clear that lockdown rules – the very rules overlooked at times of street demonstrations and upheavals – apply only to Trump supporters, the great “super-spreaders”, wherever they gather. Those arbitrary directives have been cynically used by Democratic governors, mayors, and their health czars as a dictatorial political weapon – in part to bolster their own power, in part to subvert Trump’s second presidential run. For them, the pandemic is welcomed as a godsend, to be leveraged for a “global reset” on the road to maximum power, an incipient fascism. What we have here is what C. Wright Mills long ago called the “higher immorality” in his classic The Power Elite.

Entirely predictable fallouts from months of destructive lockdowns were recently acknowledged by even the staid World Health Organization, which urged a worldwide end to the shutdowns – a message, however, never processed by an insular political/medical/media establishment in the U.S. The WHO projects a future of intensified global poverty, food insecurity, disease spread, and other health crises so long as the lockdown remains in place. Food-supply chains have already been harshly disrupted from the combined effects of COVID and harmful government controls. What leading Democrats such as Berkeley professor Robert Reich and California Governor Gavin Newsom commonly (and senselessly) refer to as an “inconvenience” will, as WHO leaders stress, bring added impoverishment to possibly hundreds of millions of people in lesser-developed nations already trapped in endless cycles of social misery. Such damage scarcely registers across the corporate media, where the horrors are casually written off as “collateral damage”.

The WHO warning has been reaffirmed by thousands of medical professionals and scientists aligned with the “Great Barrington Declaration” – a well-grounded denunciation of the lockdown politics that retains a dogmatic hold on Biden and the Dems. The “Declaration” was orchestrated by three world-respected scientists: Jay Bhatticharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorf of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. Their message, drawn from a painstaking assemblage of international research, is clear and urgent – end draconian restrictions in favor of “focused protection”, which sensibly allows those (the vast majority) at minimum risk of extreme sickness to return to normal social lives. Those least threatened (under age 50) have a 99.98 likelihood of surviving any bout with COVID – less risky than the ordinary flu. The “Barrington” scientists urge a shift toward what in fact has been the historical norm for virus-mitigation: policies taking into account the full range of economic and social as well as medical factors, logically necessary to curtail the amount of total harm.

The nonstop political/media fearmongering behind mass shutdowns assumes, wrongly, that this particular virus (unlike most others) can somehow be banished from human existence, never to return. They further believe, against all logic and experience, that lockdowns must be imposed until a vaccine is discovered and administered (by mandate?) to entire populations, the ostensible goal being some type of general immunity. Generally forgotten is the poor efficacy of so many vaccines that are promoted as uniform remedies. In fact a vaccine has long been available for influenza, yet the success rate hovers between 20 and 60 percent while hundreds of thousands of people die yearly (roughly 650,000 on average) across the world from that stubborn virus.

The lofty medical experts have little to say, moreover, about the state of public health in general. In the U.S., deaths for 2018 totaled nearly three million, with heart disease (655,000) and cancer (600,000) topping the list. What particularly stands out, however, are the mortality levels for all respiratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia (both viral and bacterial): roughly 220,000, close to the yearly average and little more than the current COVID death toll. Never in 2018 nor at any time in the past has any government, health, or media figure called for mass lockdowns to either “flatten the curve” or “destroy the virus” in response to such health challenges. Not even a murmur in that direction, much less moral panic.

No moral panic either, when it comes to such health catastrophes as drug addiction, severe reactions, and overdose deaths. In the U.S., overdose deaths (the majority from pharmaceuticals) rose from 39,000 in 2010 to 70,000 by 2017, while opioid fatalities alone increased from 21,000 in 2010 to more than 48,000 by 2018 – trends met with deafening silence across the media, its revenues enriched by nonstop Big Pharma advertising. The journal Lancet recently (October 24^th) reported that overdose deaths globally have risen more than 20 percent from combined mental and physical traumas resulting more from the lockdowns than the pandemic itself.

Just as revealing is the irresponsible failure of “experts” to consult the abundance of relevant historical experience. To start: what might we conclude from the great 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic – a horrific disease that, in the U.S., was greeted with . . . business-as-usual? It was said that this virus infected more people than even the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed up to 50 million people. While data collection in the 1950s was rather shaky, American deaths alone were estimated at 120,000 with a fatality rate of 0.67 percent, far worse than for present-day COVID. More shocking, global Asian flu deaths were reported in the range of between one and four million – now equivalent to possibly ten million deaths when considering a near tripling of the world population since the late 1950s. That could mean as much as nine times the world COVID mortality count today (about 1.3 million, if that count is not wildly exaggerated). Do we need to mention here that the Asian flu provoked no moral panic, no mass lockdowns, few (and only very brief) school closings?

Nor does the lockdown fanaticism survive any serious present-day comparative scrutiny. Two of the strictest lockdown countries – the U.S. and Britain – rank among the very worst in deaths per million population. According to Statista, the numbers are 700 and 732 respectively. Other states with the most extreme authoritarian practices follow: Italy at 686 per million, France at 595, Spain at a world-record 824. Compare these dreadful numbers to those of countries that refused total lockdowns, that relied more on compliance than on force: Japan at 15 per million, Cuba at 12, South Korea at 9.4, China at 3.4, Vietnam at 0.36 (with no cases in the past 200 days), Taiwan at 0.25. Even much-castigated, lockdown-free Sweden, at more than 500 deaths per million (though few in the past month) ranks far better than the U.S. and most European countries. And Sweden’s economy remains fully intact, with minimal social harm from power-hungry governing authorities.

In Japan, after somewhat brief and sporadic closures for an initial state of emergency, daily life has essentially returned to normal – shops, restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, gyms, and schools now mostly open, internal travel restrictions lifted. In contrast to the U.S., there has been no media fear-based propaganda, thus no social or political overreach. In Tokyo, any talk of mass lockdowns has been fiercely resisted. With a population of 127 million settled in densely-concentrated cities, Japan has seen coronavirus deaths (early November) limited to 1600, fewer than most American states.

The Vietnam experience could be more impressive yet: with a large urban population of nearly 100 million, COVID deaths so far number only 35. After some initial travel restrictions and brief local quarantines, no serious nationwide lockdowns have been ordered. Relying on social compliance instead of institutional force – like many Asian countries – the Vietnamese have deftly and creatively managed disease outbreaks in much the same way they have routinely dealt with influenza. The availability of universal healthcare, as in Japan and elsewhere, offers resources far less expensive and more inaccessible than in the U.S., but that is hardly the full story. The lessons from Japan and Vietnam demonstrate that lockdown despotism is not only seriously misguided but drastically counterproductive, vastly more harmful than helpful.

Similar comparisons hold for individual states in the U.S. Thus New York, a Democratic state with probably the longest, most severe lockdown regime, has a disastrous record of more than 33,000 deaths for a population of roughly 20 million, exactly double the numbers for Republican Florida (16,900 fatalities) with its 22 million inhabitants. The media, however, has chosen to heap praise on New York and its brutally inept governor Mario Cuomo while bashing Florida and its Republican governor Ron DeSantis.

The lockdown mania remains an unmitigated calamity for American society – an avoidable travesty feverishly stoked by every major center of power: Big Pharma, the tech giants, deep state, Wall Street along with Democrats and their media publicists. With the likely ascendancy of Biden to the White House, surrounded as he is by a wide circle of Strangelovian medical “advisers” embedded in those very centers of power, any radical departure from the American pattern of coercion and failure now seems hard to imagine. Sadly, while these elites love to speak about “listening to the scientists”, they are among the least inclined to follow actual historical and comparative experience. Theirs is an oligarchic, authoritarian system of rule.

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Prefatory Note: Posted below is a greatly modified interview on the entirely inappropriate and distasteful visit of the U.S. Secretary of State to Israel for three days. It was distasteful and regressive to a degree that defied normal levels of its criticism. I would call particular attention to its boastful endorsement of Israel’s cruel and unlawful behavior during the Trump presidency, which was harmful to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights and to Palestinian victimization resulting from the Israeli apartheid regime that has been imposed on the Palestinian people as a whole. The interview questions were submitted by the Brazilian journalist Rodrigo Craveiro on behalf of Correio Brazilence on Nov. 20, 2020.

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For me the entire event was a grotesque occasion of national embarrassment from start to finish. Even the most dimwitted imperialist would know better than to declare Pompeo’s subservience to Israel in these scary words: “Israel is everything we want the entire Middle East to look like going forward.”

It is impossible not to take note of the cruel absurdity of Pompeo’s visit to Israel, further ingratiating himself to his Israeli minders by celebrating the lawlessness of the Trump diplomacy of the last four years. It was far more plausible to imagine Netanyahu visiting Washington to bid farewell to his benefactor in the White House, with a side trip to one of Sheldon Adelson’s Vegas casinos. An Israeli expression of gratitude to Trump for a level of U.S. Government diplomatic support that went well beyond the pro-Israeli partisanship of prior American leaders would have been annoying but quite understandable. But why would Pompeo want to call attention to such unseemly exploits after enduring a political humiliation at home by a display of homage to the worst excesses of an outlaw foreign country. If given the unsavory task of casting a TV series on theme of ‘geopolitical buffoonery’ I would look no further than Mike Pompeo for a role model! Even Saturday Night Live would be stymied if they attempted to satirize such obtuse political behavior. Is it any wonder that the only support that Israel could find to oppose the recent 2020 annual General Assembly Resolution affirming the Palestinian right of self-determination and independent sovereign statehood were such pillars of international order as Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Nauru in the 163-5 vote.

Correio Brazilence: How do you assess the symbolism of this travel of Mike Pompeo  to West Bank and to Golan Heights? What kind of message did he want to transmit?

Richard Falk: First of all, the timing of the visit given the outcome of the American presidential election is mighty strange and beyond suspect, undoubtedly motivated by undisclosed illicit goals. I would call attention to three:

• first, Pompeo is unabashedly positioning himself in relation to the pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 elections, especially burnishing his already incredible credentials as an over-the-top reliable and unconditional supporter of Israel. Presumably, this makes him the best bet to receive financial backing from wealthy militant Zionist donors. To reinforce the claim of doing whatever possible to ingratiate himself with his gloating Israeli hosts, Pompeo delivered a welcome symbolic message by becoming the first U.S. political leader to visit an Israeli settlement during an official visit. He paid a visit to Psagot Settlement which is not far from Ramallah in the West Bank. Psagot operates a winery, which was not bashful about going all out to please Pompeo, bizarrely expressing their gratitude by naming one of their red wines in his honor, which may be a peculiar form of recognition for Pompeo who presents himself at home as a devout Evangelical Christian;
• secondly, to highlight the tangible contributions of the Trump presidency to the realization of maximal Zionist goals, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, intensifying the anti-Iran coalition by increasing sanctions, supporting the annexation of the Golan Heights, brokering the normalization agreement with Arab governments that have ended Israel’s regional isolation, legitimating the Israeli settlements, by doing, blurring the distinction between de facto annexation which has been proceeding ever since 1967 and the Israeli goal of extending its sovereignty to at least 30% of the Occupied West Bank, and pledging to commit the U.S. Government to brand the BDS Campaign as ‘anti-Semitic’
• thirdly, an incidental part of the Pompeo mission seems designed to inhibit the Biden presidency from making moves to undo the Trump legacy on Israel/Palestine.  Netanyahu, AIPAC, and most of the U.S. Congress will scream ‘foul play’ if Biden makes even slight moves to reverse, or even moderate, Trump’s lawlessness, insisting that and departure from the Trump initiatives would be proof of an anti-Israeli policy turn in Washington. Actually, there is no reason to suppose that Biden needs inhibiting when it comes to confronting Israel, except possibly with respect to formal annexation.

CB: What about the fact that Pompeo agreed that products made in West Bank settlements could now be sold in the United States with the notation ‘made in is Israel’?

RF: Such a step seems partly designed to box in the Biden presidency and to contrast the U.S. pro-Israeli approach with that of the European Union and the UN. The European Court of Justice recently overturned a French judicial decision allowing labeling of settlement imports as ‘made in Israel,’ requiring that settlement imports be labeled as ‘made in Israeli settlements.’ Up until the Trump presidency, the US had not directly challenged the UN view that the settlements were unlawfully established in violation of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A few months ago, Pompeo released an official statement declaring, in a break from previous U.S. policy, that the settlements are ‘not per se inconsistent with international law.’ Such a declaration is inconsistent with a widely endorsed view of the requirements of international humanitarian law, and has no relevance except to show American cynical disregard of the most basic precepts of international law when it comes to issues bearing on Israel’s expansionist policies and Palestinian rights.

CB: Also how do you see fact he told BDS is a antisemitic movement?

RF: Again, Pompeo’s gratuitous remark is a gesture of solidarity with the Netanyahu government, and irresponsibly treats the BDS Campaign as antisemitic. Additionally, Pompeo declares an intention to withdraw government support from any organization that supports BDS, thereby threatening funding sources of such leading human rights NGOs as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and also forcing a Biden presidency to face a dilemma of allowing such policy to persist or reversing it, with either course of action producing a strong backlash.

It should be appreciated that BDS is a nonviolent means of exerting pressure on the Israeli Government, and seeks to induce Israel to uphold Palestinian rights under international law. BDS was an effective instrument of pressure on the South African racist apartheid regime in the 1980s. It was widely supported by religious institutions, labor unions, and universities in the United States, and enjoyed the backing of the UN. It also was criticized in investment and conservative circles, but never was it suggested that the anti-apartheid BDS campaign directed at South Africa was somehow immoral, or even unlawful, or was itself racist in character. For Pompeo and others to brand BDS as antisemitic is to confuse a legitimate expression of concern for human rights of the Palestinian people with hatred of Jews. In this sense, what Pompeo did to please Israeli hardliners should be rejected as the worst kind of opportunistic politics that seeks to harm legitimate peaceful political activity in the United States, including advocating punitive action against respected human rights organizations.

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Featured image: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on August 24, 2020 in Jerusalem. (Photo: Pompeo/Twitter)

This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture. 

Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”

Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you.

Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this.

This story/study was so poor and so absurd that it was too much even for Isabel Oliver, Director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England. She sent out the following note:

Thank you. One down, a thousand to go.

The New York Times pulled a mighty fast one with this piece: “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” This would be huge news if true because it would imply not only that lockdowns save lives (which no serious study has thus far been able to document) but also that granting people basic freedoms are the reason for bad health outcomes, an astonishing claim on its own.

The piece, put together by two graphic artists and seemingly very science-like, speaks of “outbreaks,” which vaguely sounds terrible: packed with mortality. It’s odd because anyone can look at the data and see that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut lead the way with deaths per million, mostly owing to the fatalities in long-term care facilities. These were the states that locked down the hardest and longest. Indeed they are locking down again! Deaths per million in states like South Dakota are still low on the list.

How in the world can the NYT claim that states that did not lock down have the worst outbreaks? The claim hinges entirely on a trivial discovery. Some clever someone discovered that if you reflow data by cases per million instead of deaths per million, you get an opposite result. The reasons: 1) when the Northeast experienced the height of the pandemic, there was very little testing going on, so the “outbreak” was not documented even as deaths grew and grew, 2) by the time the virus reached the Midwest, tests were widely available, 3) the testing mania grew and grew to the point that the non-vulnerable are being tested like crazy, generating high positives in small-population areas.

By focusing on the word “outbreak,” the Times can cleverly obscure the difference between a positive PCR result (including many false positive and perhaps half or more asymptomatic cases) and a severe outcome from catching the virus. In other words, the Times has documented an “outbreak” of mostly non-sick people in low-population areas.

There are hundreds of ways to look at Covid-19 data. The Times picked the one metric – the least valuable one for actually discerning whether and to what extent people are sick – in order to generate the result that they wanted, namely that open states look as bad as possible. The result is a chart that massively misrepresents any existing reality. It makes the worst states look great and the best ones look terrible. The visual alone is constructed to make it looks as if open states are bleeding uncontrollably.

How many readers will even know this? Very few, I suspect. What’s more amazing is that the Times itself already debunked the entire “casedemic” back in September:

Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time….

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

All of which makes one wonder what precisely is going on in this relationship between cases and severe outcomes. The Covid Tracking Project generates the following chart. Cases are in blue while deaths are in red.

Despite this story and these data, the graphic artists at the Times got to work generating a highly misleading presentation that leads to one conclusion: more lockdowns.

(My colleague Phil Magness has noted further methodological problems even within the framework that the Times uses but I will let him write about that later.)

Let’s finally deal with Salon’s attack on Great Barrington Declaration co-creator Jayanta Bhattacharya. Here is a piece that made the following claim of the infection fatality rate: “the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher.” That’s an astonishing number, and basically nuts: 10 million people will die in the US alone.

Here is what the CDC says concerning the wildly disparate risk factors based on age:

These data are not inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s suggestion that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 years of age is closer to 0.05%.

The article further claims that “herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity.” And yet, the New York Times just wrote that:

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.

Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.

How is it possible for people to make rational decisions with this kind of journalism going on? Truly, sometimes it seems like the world has been driven insane by an astonishing blizzard of false information. Just last week, an entire state in Australia shut down completely – putting all its citizens under house arrest – due to a false report of a case in a pizza restaurant. One person lied and the whole world fell apart.

Meanwhile, serious science is appearing daily showing that there is no relationship at all, and never has been, between lockdowns and lives saved. This study looks at all factors related to Covid death and finds plenty of relationship between age and health but absolutely none with lockdown stringency. “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate,” says the study, echoing a conclusion of dozens of other studies since as early as March.

It’s all become too much. The world is being seriously misled by major media organs. The politicians are continuing to panic and impose draconian controls, fully nine months into this, despite mountains of evidence of the real harm the lockdowns are causing everyone. If you haven’t lost faith in politicians and major media at this point, you have paid no attention to what they have been doing for the better part of this catastrophic year.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

The rollout of COVID-19 immunity certificates across the UK could become a reality in 2021. A draft of the scheme, one where people who have contracted the virus and have recovered, or have naturally develop antibodies to fight the virus, could be given the golden ticket to resume a normal life.

UK’s Downing Street plans covid passes for anyone who gets two COVID-19 negative tests per week or has immunity to the virus or has yet to contract the virus. The Telegraph notes Whitehall officials are planning to call the scheme “freedom passes.”

The strategy is a move to jump-start the ailing economy next year by allowing healthy people to conduct daily activities without being impeded by strict social-distancing measures.

A digital certificate, stored on a smartphone device, would be given to someone who meets the requirements for the new pass.

A source told the Telegraph:

“They will allow someone to wander down the streets, and if someone else asks why they are not wearing a mask, they can show the card, letter or an App.” 

Conservative Tom Tugendhat recently said he could “certainly see the day” when proof of vaccination was required to return to normal life.

“If vaccination works and if we’re confident it’s safe, and all indications so far are good, then I can certainly see the day when businesses say: Look, you’ve got to return to the office and if you’re not vaccinated, you’re not coming in,” Tugendhat said.

Plans for covid passes in the UK have been in the pipeline for months.

In April, health minister Matt Hancock said at a Downing Street press conference that an “an immunity certificate is an important thing that we will be doing and are looking at, but it’s too early in the science of the immunity that comes from having had the disease.”

UK Health Secretary: "We are looking at an immunity certificate. How people who have had the disease, have got the antibodies, and therefore have immunity, can show that, and so get back… as much as possible to normal life." pic.twitter.com/SVLV8U2YwG

— The Hill (@thehill) April 3, 2020

We noted a couple of times (see: here & here), covid passes are coming to the Western world and will act as a “digital health passport” that will contain your COVID-19 test history and other “relevant health information.”

Billionaire Bill Gates has been promoting the passes since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown.

At this point, there’s nothing stopping the rollout of covid passes as these programs may start in the UK and other European countries before coming to the US.

Besides covid passes, Chinese President Xi Jinping told the G20 Summit on Saturday that globally-recognized health QR codes could be a way to restore international trade and travel.

What becomes clear is that global elites want to track everything in the world…

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Credits to the owner of the featured image

The PCR test “is unable to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, that such positivity result corresponds, in fact, to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus”, said the Lisbon Court of Appeal.

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The Lisbon Court of Appeal also considered that the quarantine period imposed by the Directorate-General for Health during the state of alert is illegal. The judgment states that the body of judges ruled that such a situation can only be taken in a state of emergency (currently in force).

The decision, taken on 11 November, which has as its object an appeal by the Regional Health Administration of the Azores, following a request for habeas corpus – immediate release – of four German citizens who had been forced by the health authority to comply with isolation for 14 days in the hotel room

According to the process:

“There is no evidence that this diagnosis was actually carried out by a professional qualified under the Law and who had acted in accordance with good medical practices”. These acts are reserved for the exclusive competence of a doctor.

“The only element that appears in the proven facts is the performance of RT-PCR tests, one of which presented a positive result in relation to one of the applicants”, reads the document.

Additionally,

“Any person or entity that gives an order that leads to deprivation of physical, ambulatory, freedom of others (whatever the nomenclature that this order assumes: confinement, isolation, quarantine, prophylactic protection, health surveillance, etc.), which do not fall under the legal qualifications, namely not provided for in article 27 of the CRP, you will be making an illegal detention, because ordered by an incompetent entity and motivated by a fact for which the law does not allow it”, it can be read.

Noting that, at the date of the facts, we were in a state of alert, the state of emergency allows more exceptions to freedom rights.

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Featured image is from GreatGameIndia

Responding to the United States Department of State announcement designating the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic and planning to identify organizations supporting BDS with a view to reviewing and halting their funding, Bob Goodfellow, the Interim Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, issued the below statement:

“The Department of State’s targeting of groups advocating for using peaceful means, such as boycotts, to end human rights violations against Palestinians as antisemitic violates freedom of expression and is a gift to those who seek to silence, harass, intimidate and oppress those standing up for human rights around the world. This is simply the latest attack from a US government determined to undermine the universality of human rights and the global fight against racism and discrimination, including antisemitism.

“Advocating for boycotts, divestment and sanctions is a form of non-violent advocacy and of free expression that must be protected. Advocates of boycotts should be allowed to express their views freely and take forward their campaigns without harassment, threats of prosecution or criminalization, or other measures that violate the right to freedom of expression. Instead of attacking and restricting BDS activities the US should end such measures and instead ensure that BDS advocates are free to express their views and take forward their campaigns without harassment or threats of prosecution.”

“The US administration is following Israeli government’s approach in using false and politically motivated accusations of antisemitism to harm peaceful activists, including human rights defenders, and shield from accountability those responsible for illegal actions that harm people in Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and here at home. The process comes across as particularly hypocritical and deceitful coming from an administration that has emboldened neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other groups who advocate violence and discrimination, shown a callous disregard for international law, and favored Israeli policies that result in institutionalized discrimination and systematic human rights violations against millions of Palestinians.

“This process also hurts Jewish people by equating Israel with Judaism and likening criticism of Israeli government policies and practices to antisemitism. It undermines our work in the Middle East and other regions to protect the rights of religious and other minorities.

“We will continue to support our Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, including BDS activists, who like human rights defenders around the world, speak up when justice, freedom, truth, and dignity are denied.”

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First published on October 14, 2018.

Yesterday [October 2018] we witnessed one of the greatest Facebook account and page purges since its formation over a decade ago. In total, 559 pages and 251 personal accounts were instantly removed from the platform, for having “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior” according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity and former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy under Obama. This is but one of similar yet smaller purges that have been unfolding in front of our eyes over the last year, all in the name of fighting “fake news” and so called “Russian propaganda”.

What very few people know though, is that about 5 months ago, Facebook announced that is was officially partnering with the Atlantic Council in the form of an “election partnership […] to prevent [their] service from being abused during elections.” Indeed, the US midterm elections are only a couple of weeks away, so the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab are now going at it with full force, closing facebook accounts left and right that they personally deem could be fake accounts, or accounts spreading misinformation, based on very shady criterias.

One doesn’t need to look far to understand who the Atlantic Council are and what they stand for : it is a think tank essentially funded by NATO, weapons manufacturers, Middle-Eastern oil-state monarchies, billionaires and different branches of the US military. In short, it has been described as being nothing less than NATO’s unofficial propaganda wing. The Atlantic Council doesn’t shy away from its political intents across the world, which can be seen solely by looking at who sits on its directors board – the crème de la crème when it comes to US neocons & war criminals: Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. George P. Shultz, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, Colin Powell, Robert Gates, and many more.

Needless to say, the Atlantic Council has been on the same side as every single war and conflict engendered by US and NATO imperialism over the last 50 years, and has itself played a role in abusing democratic elections around the world as well as spreading propaganda and misinformation both in home countries and abroad to achieve its political means.

https://atlanticcouncil.org/support/supporters

Hence, it should come as no surprise that when the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab gets down to work weeks before the upcoming midterms, it has little intention of putting a stop to actual disinformation groups and rather silences those that speak a message opposing their own. Many of the pages and accounts taken down have been political (often leftist), anti-war, independent journalists and media outlets that are known to go against the grain of mainstream media outlets. Anti-Media (antimedia.com), a reputable source of independent journalism, saw its page with over 2 million followers taken down overnight with no concrete explanation as to why. Shortly after, Twitter decided to take them down as well, as well as Carey Wedler‘s (editor at Anti-Media) own personal account for literally no reason:

Many of the pages taken down had already been targeted back in 2016 by the McCarthyist webpage PropOrNot.not, endorsed by the Washington Post, in an effort to arbitrarily mark pages that they believe somehow are connected to Russian propaganda efforts. Already back then it was clear that many of the pages targeted by PropOrNot were leftist, anti-war pages, and almost none of them had anything to do with Russia whatsoever. The Washington Post finally later on retracted their article endorsing PropOrNot, but this didn’t help the fact that these websites had now already been flagged as propaganda by many.

Other pages taken down are The Free Thought Project, also an anti-war critic of establishment politics with around 3.1 million followers on Facebook. RT Reporter Rachel Blevins with 70.000 followers on facebook and investigative journalist Dan Dicks with 350.000 followers also both saw their accounts taken down overnight – both were very critical of mainstream journalism. These are but some of the many accounts affected, with certain accounts on the fringe far right also targeted. Facebook has suffered great pressure lately from Congress for its apparent role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, being blamed for not having taken on enough active measures to fight the spread of fake news. Under such pressure it is not surprising that Facebook choses to cooperate with a congress-approved think tank – the Atlantic Council -, and basically give them a free hand to censor as much as they want, in order for themselves to avoid any future heat from the US government. This can be argued as to seriously stain the name of Facebook as an independent social media platform, if it is going to bend down to any unreasonable demands coming from the US government.

In the name of fighting fake news and targeting “inauthentic behavior” and “misleading users”, Facebook has essentially indulged in what was in 1934 Germany called the “Gleichschaltung” of the media – a synchronized outphasing of dissident voices in the media and a consolidation of political opinions. The internet has traditionally always been a bastion of free speech, and it is hence not surprising that those in power seek to undermine its ability to openly criticize the powerful. The truth does not do them favor, hence they would rather not have it expressed too far and wide – something that the internet has otherwise made possible. Given that censorship is still extremely frowned upon by the general public, doing so (just like when seeking to sell a war) requires the majority of people to approve of it. The fight against fake news and foreign propaganda efforts has done just that : it has given those in power a pretext to openly censor dissident voices all while being praised in the making for so-called “safeguarding western democracies”. More of the same behaviour can be expected from both Facebook and Twitter in the future, and we cannot expect major media outlets like The New York Times,The Washington Post, CNN or MSNBC to stand up against it. After all, many of these censored independent medias are the only actors left who dare hold the mainstream media into account for their role as mere propaganda outlets of the establishment.

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Jonathan Sigrist is a student at the University of Tromsø in Northern Norway, currently studying the geopolitical, environmental, cultural and economic relations between the Arctic nations (The US, Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark/Greenland and Iceland), as well as the future of the Arctic’s role in global politics. He has lived in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France, and is a fervent observer and critic of US foreign policy.

Die deutsche Nationalhymne war als staatliches Symbol in besonderer Weise vor Verunglimpfung geschützt. Doch seit Monaten wird sie von einer korrupten Politiker-Clique im Auftrag einer Milliardärs- und Macht-„Elite“ immer tiefer in den Dreck gezogen und gilt nur noch für sie, nicht mehr für das gemeine Volk. Eine Minderheit von Menschen, die die anderen ausbeutet, knechtet, Zwietracht sät, Unrecht walten lässt und Unfreiheit, hat weltweit das Zepter übernommen. Und wer glaubt, dass er mit dieser anderen Seite, diesen herrschenden Nutznießern, die das Ganze in der Hand haben, sprechen und verhandeln kann, der hat sich getäuscht. Nein! Die sind so krank, dass mit ihnen kein Verhandeln möglich ist. Es war noch immer so in der Geschichte: Wenn die arbeitende Bevölkerung für ihr Recht auf Freiheit, Gerechtigkeit, Sicherheit, Ruhe und ein menschwürdiges Leben gestreikt hat und für ihre Kinder auf die Straße gegangen ist, dann haben die Regierungen zuerst die Polizei und dann das Militär eingesetzt – und schließlich schießen lassen.

Der Text der deutschen Nationalhymne ist die dritte Strophe des Gedichts „Das Lied der Deutschen“ und wurde von August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben 1841 auf Helgoland verfasst und von Joseph Haydn vertont:

„Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit / für das deutsche Vaterland!

Danach lasst uns alle streben / brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit / sind des Glückes Unterpfand:

Blüh im Glanze dieses Glückes, / blühe, deutsches Vaterland!“ 

Was ist in Deutschland von alledem geblieben? Die Verabschiedung des neuen sogenannten Infektionsschutzgesetzes in der vergangenen Woche ist nur ein Beispiel von vielen für die Allmachts-Phantasien der Politiker und den zunehmenden Zwang, die permanenten Regeländerungen und Drohungen, die krank machende Isolationshaft von Erwachsenen und ihren Kindern, die eingeschränkte Bewegungsfreiheit, die psychische Programmierung und schließlich die systematische Zerstörung der menschlichen Psyche (David Icke). Die ehemals „stille Diktatur“ der Demokratie wurde klammheimlich in eine offene Diktatur umgewandelt.

Mahatma Gandhi, der indische Rechtsanwalt, Morallehrer und Pazifist, zeigte im letzten Jahrhundert der Welt, welche Stärke ein Mensch mit einem unbeugsamen Willen entwickeln und was er dadurch bewirken kann. Sein Leitspruch lautete:

„Kraft kommt nicht aus körperlichen Fähigkeiten. Sie entspringt einem unbeugsamen Willen.“

Die indische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung, deren geistiger und politischer Anführer er war, griff seine Idee der gewaltfreien Aktionen und des „Zivilen Ungehorsams“ auf und erreichte im August 1947 das Ende der britischen Kolonialherrschaft über Indien. Warum sollten nicht auch wir diesen unbeugsamen Willen entwickeln?

Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, / Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,

Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schließen, / Und meine heißen Tränen fließen.

(Heinrich Heine, Nachtgedanken) 

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Diplompsychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.