Global Research

The spokesperson for the Houthi-supported Yemeni army, Brigadier Yahya Saree, revealed yesterday details of the links between Israel and former Yemeni President the late Ali Abdullah Saleh. Such links, he said, go back at least to the year 2000.

During a press conference in the capital Sanaa, the senior official cited official documents and stated that Saleh’s government had secret relations with Tel Aviv which included visits by officials on both sides. According to Saree, normalisation between the two countries peaked in 2007, when Israeli diplomat Bruce Kashdan arrived in Sanaa to meet Yemeni military and security officials who were relatives of Saleh.

الإيجاز الصحفي لمتحدث القوات المسلحة العميد يحيى سريع بشأن علاقة النظام السابق بالكيان الصهيوني والتدخلات الإسرائيلية في الشأن اليمني.https://t.co/fYkQ0dRY5L

— العميد يحيى سريع (@army21ye) October 4, 2020

“The Israeli official left Sanaa International Airport on 16 July, 2007,” said Saree. “The visit had been arranged by Yemeni officials, and the UAE played a leading role in it. The Israeli diplomat had earlier visited Yemen on 2 February, 2005.”

During the visit, security in the Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandab was discussed in addition to commercial cooperation and allowing Israeli produce to enter the Yemeni market.

Al-Masirah reported that the document also mentioned the signing of an agreement that allowed Israeli civilian flights to use Yemeni air space.

Another document, purportedly issued by the UAE Embassy in Sanaa, noted that a Jewish delegation visited Yemen and asked officials to naturalise approximately 60,000 Israelis with Yemeni nationality, 15,000 of whom had US citizenship. The Emirati ambassador in Sanaa, Hamad Saeed Al-Zaabi, in a memorandum to the UAE Foreign Minister in 2004, noted that the “Yemeni-Jewish normalisation” is part of a larger scheme drawn up by the US.

Saree insisted that Israel has constantly meddled in Yemeni affairs and continues to do so.

“Yemen has long been the main target of US-Israeli plots and the ongoing onslaught clearly proves this. The Armed Forces call upon Yemenis from all walks of life to raise their awareness about the real intentions of foreigners. Our struggle is nothing but a fateful battle for liberation and independence.”

The army spokesperson also claimed that further information about Israel’s involvement in the Yemen war will be disclosed. “We have other evidence of the Israeli military participation in the aggression, and it will be revealed in due course.”

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The issue of healthcare reform is one that is consistently identified by opinion polls as being among the most important to Americans. The United States continues to be the only fully industrialized nation that lacks a public healthcare system, a feature of modern “democracy” that is taken for granted in most developed countries. Most American proponents of healthcare reform typically cite the models utilized by Canada, Western Europe, or Australia as the most appropriate guides for the implementation of universal healthcare in the United States. However, Don Fitz, a Green Party activist, provides a comprehensive overview of a model for reform that originates from what many would consider to be a surprising place. Cuba is widely regarded by Americans as an impoverished “Third World” nation. Yet, Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution describes how Cuba’s approach to healthcare during the six decades since the 1959 revolution has produced rather extraordinary results.

The overview of Cuban healthcare begins with an examination of the challenges that Cuba faced immediately following the revolution. Previously, healthcare in Cuba had been almost entirely private. After the revolution, Cuba lost approximately half of its physicians with most of these becoming émigrés to the United States in search of a more lucrative place to practice medicine. Only about three thousand Cuban physicians remained and those who stayed did so out of a commitment to their profession. The methods of funding healthcare before the revolution typically relied on either fee-for-service relationships between physicians and patients or “mutuals” that functioned as a kind of private insurance system operating on a semi-cooperative basis. The very limited healthcare that was available to the poor was mostly provided by the state.

An innovative reform that was implemented following the revolution involved the creation of “polyclinics” organized on the basis of a structural framework described as “centralization/decentralization.” Under this model, small teams of healthcare professionals were assigned to serve individual communities, with each healthcare team having a collection of families under their care, usually numbering in the range of 120 to 150 family groupings, with the families including 600 to 800 persons. Clinicians would often visit patients at home. The polyclinics functioned within a centralized meta-level framework that was based on a single system of healthcare provision. The individual teams providing healthcare to particular communities were the decentralized component of the system. It was not the provision of health care that indicate decentralization but rather the ability to decide how to do it locally.

Over time, Cuban healthcare practices experienced a series of innovations. The initial community-based polyclinics eventually evolved into a system of family doctors that were able to provide personalized care in a way that included the cultivation of physician-patient and physician-community relationships. The achievements of Cuba in the area of healthcare are particularly astounding when it is considered that Cuba is an island nation with approximately the same population size as New York City. Clearly, the Cubans have been highly capable of successfully managing their own affairs in spite of the hardships the country has faced in the post-revolutionary era. The obstacles faced by Cuba have largely been due to the hostility of the United States and the Americans’ persistent attempts to undermine the achievements of the Cuban revolution.

An important aspect of Cuban healthcare has been the role of Cuba’s military doctors in providing health services to insurgent movements in Africa, a process that began when Cuba began offering support to anti-colonial resistance forces on the African continent in the 1960s. Cuban physicians involved in Africa often traveled clandestinely in order to avoid detection by Western intelligence services or those of colonial and neo-colonial governments on the continent. African resistance leaders often preferred that Cuba send black doctors so that the Cuban physicians would more easily blend in with the local population. The role of Cuban doctors in establishing healthcare services in impoverished African nations such as Angola, which was involved in an intense anti-imperialist struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, attests to the quality of the Cuban healthcare system and its exportability to other nations. Cuba faced a predictable crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, which occurred during a time when the AIDS crisis was also presenting challenges to Cuba’s healthcare system.  Cuba responded to the economic crisis of the post-Cold War era through the implementation of changes reminiscent of those adopted by Lenin during the period of the New Economic Policy.

Aside from the interesting overview of the history of post-revolutionary Cuban healthcare provided by Fitz, the discussion of medical education in Cuba is also quite fascinating. Fitz’s examination of Cuban medical training is based in part on his daughter’s experience as a student at the ELAM, or Latin American School of Medicine. ELAM was established by the Cubans and provides opportunity for students from around the world to study medicine on the condition that ELAM graduates serve as healthcare workers in an underserved part of the world upon the completion of their studies. Such a concept could theoretically be transplanted to the US where the medical education of students could be publicly funded in return for medical service in underserved communities.

Fitz provides an interesting profile of 13 students attending ELAM and their activities, including the participation of ELAM students in disaster relief activities such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010. During the first two decades of the 21st century, Cuban healthcare has continued to face a range of challenges. For example, dengue fever and mosquito-borne illnesses are common to Cuba’s tropical environment. Fitz describes the efforts of Mariela Castro, daughter of Fidel’s brother Raul to challenge discrimination against women, gender, and sexual minorities in Cuba. He likewise describes his own participation in Cuba’s March Against Homophobia in 2012. Post-revolutionary Cuba has a regrettable history of discrimination and repression directed toward sexual preference which the nation has fortunately made bold efforts to overcome in more recent years. Cuba has continued to provide much needed assistance to African nations in response to challenges such as the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014.

Clearly, Cuba’s achievements in the development of its healthcare system in the decades since the revolution have been remarkable. Fitz’s discussion of these achievements is not only thorough but well-documented from appropriately cited source material. The analysis of Cuban healthcare that Fitz provides is based on a synthesis of both scholarly research drawing from the relevant literature, including both English language and Spanish language sources, and the experiential research of Fitz and members of his family. If nothing else, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution is an excellent representation of mixed method scholarship which includes painstaking documentation of the claims being made concerning the accomplishments of Cuban healthcare. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the statistical data that Fitz provides for the purpose of supporting his claims.

Astonishingly, Cuba has in recent decades managed to outperform the United States in a range of critical areas pertaining to general public health. As of the early 2000s, 45% of Cuban physicians were family doctors living in the same neighborhoods as their patients. The typical patient wait time at a clinic was 15 minutes. In the year 2000, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 6.3 per 100,000 births compared with 7.1 for the United States. By the year 2017, infant mortality in Cuba had dropped to 4.1 per 100,000 births as opposed to 5.7 for the United States. Cuba has made comparable progress regarding life expectancy. In 1960, shortly after the revolution, Cuba’s average life expectancy was 64.2 years compared to 69. 8 years in the United States. By 2016, Cuba had slightly passed the United States with an average life expectancy of 79 years compared to 78.5 years for the United States.

A reasonable standard with which a society’s healthcare system can be evaluated is the combination of infant mortality rates and life expectancy that is experienced. One of the great achievements of modern civilization is the dramatic increase in life expectancy. During the height of its empire, ancient Rome’s life expectancy was only 48 years. In many historic societies, life expectancy was only in the range of 30 years. Low life expectancy rates were partially rooted in high rates of infant mortality and deaths from childhood diseases. In many families, a third to a half of the children would not survive until adulthood. Indeed, it was during the era of rising living standards at the dawn of modernity that the status of children began to increase dramatically with practices such as infanticide, child slavery, and child labor experiencing a significant decline.

Within the context of American political discourse, American healthcare is often touted as being “the best in the world” as opposed to supposedly backward nations of the Global South or “socialist” countries supposedly hampered by the ills of bureaucratization and inefficiency. However, Don Fitz describes how Cuba has been able to provide higher quality healthcare to its citizens than the United States in spite of the fact that Cuba spends only 4 to 5 percent per individual on healthcare compared to the United States. Indeed, some of the voluminous facts that Fitz provides would be comical if they were not so tragic. For example, an average hospital stay in Cuba costs $5.49 per day as opposed to $1,944 in the United States. It has been widely documented that medical bankruptcy is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Fitz manages to marshal a vast range of evidence in support of his thesis that US healthcare is largely an elaborate corporate-perpetrated scam that frequently pales in comparison to Cuban healthcare, which often produces superior results at a tiny fraction of the costs.

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Keith Preston is a self-identified “anarcho-pluralist” who has published six books, including Attack the System: A New Anarchist Perspective for the 21st Century (2016). Keith resides in Richmond, Virginia, United States. He received degrees in Religious Studies, History, and Sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the founder and chief editor of AttacktheSystem.Com. He has been interviewed on numerous radio programs and internet broadcasts, and appeared as a guest analyst on Russia Today, Sputnik, Press TV, and the BBC.

For months, Donald Trump has been mounting a preemptive strike against the democratic election process. He signals his intent to manipulate — indeed, steal — the presidential election in the event that Joe Biden wins. With no evidence to support him, Trump repeats the mantra “voter fraud” to lay the groundwork for political, legal and extra-legal challenges to a Biden victory. In an unprecedented move, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power as he orders right-wing militias armed with assault weapons to “stand back and stand by.”

Now that Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, all bets are off. After months of recklessly discouraging social distancing and mask wearing, the chickens have come home to roost. Trump has tried mightily to change the subject away from the coronavirus and his criminal responsibility for more than 207,000 deaths and over 7 million people in the United States who have the virus. But with Trump’s infection, that strategy is now dead.

The timeline of Trump’s positive diagnosis is unclear. Trump remains hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the White House has issued conflicting and contradictory reports about his condition. Doctors say we may not know the course of Trump’s illness for a week to 10 days.

If Trump’s symptoms worsen, he could temporarily hand over the presidential reins to Vice President Mike Pence under the 25th Amendment. In the event that Trump becomes very ill and refuses to put Pence in charge, the 25th Amendment allows Pence and a majority of the cabinet, or a body Congress lawfully designates, to declare Trump unable to discharge the duties of the presidency. Pence would then take over. If Trump tells Congress that “no inability exists,” two-thirds of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives could decide that Trump is still unable to discharge his presidential duties, and Pence would remain acting president until after the election. He could become the GOP nominee or the Republican National Committee could select a new nominee. Ballots already cast for Trump in early voting would be transferred to his replacement. Each state would decide how to proceed as there is probably insufficient time to print ballots with the name of a new nominee. If Trump dies, Pence would become acting president and if he is unable to serve, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is next in line.

The election will not be decided on November 3. Since there are an unprecedented number of people voting by mail-in ballots due to the pandemic, it could take weeks to finish resolving challenged ballots and counting the votes. Nevertheless, Trump, mindful that mail-in ballots generally tilt toward Democratic candidates, has insisted that the winner be declared on November 3.

Trump could order postal inspectors to impound mail-in ballots by claiming forgery or foreign fraud, so they might not be counted.

The Trump campaign is mobilizing “an army for Trump,” calling on “all able-bodied men and women to stop the election from being stolen by Democrats.” Although it’s unclear just what this army is being recruited to do, a coalition of progressive organizations has mobilized more than 6,000 “election defenders.”

Are we doomed to suffer a coup d’état and four more years of Trump’s bullying, racism, misogyny, cruelty, lying and xenophobia? Or can his assault on the very essence of democracy be stopped?

A Looming Constitutional Crisis

As Biden has been leading in the polls, Trump confirmed at a September 25 rally in Virginia that if he loses the election, “We’re not going to stand for it.” Reiterating his false claim of voter fraud from mail-in ballots, Trump told the crowd, “We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat.”

According to the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), “Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.” The bipartisan group of experts, which conducted a series of election crisis scenario exercises, warns, “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

TIP’s report says “there is a chance” that “Trump will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions — including illegal actions — to defy the popular vote.”

The election is actually multiple elections. Each state controls its own election process. Harvard professor Daniel Carpenter described a scenario in which Biden “wins a plausible victory and Republicans move to undermine it.” He posed a hypothetical situation in Arizona or North Carolina where Biden wins a state majority but the state legislature decides to give their delegates to Trump.

Barton Gellman reported in The Atlantic that “the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

If states refuse to certify or report slates of electors to the Electoral College, that will result in “underpopulation” and force the election into the House of Representatives, according to Carpenter. “[I]f the Electoral College is underpopulated and the courts don’t intervene, or maybe even if they do, the election is thrown to the House,” he said. The states would then vote by delegations. The Democrats have a majority of members, but the Republicans have a majority of delegations because each state has equal voting power and there are more red states than blue states.

The electoral votes are to be opened before a Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021. But the Electoral Count Act, which governs the counting of electoral votes, is rife with ambiguities.

A constitutional crisis could result if the legislature of a state submits a vote certificate that is different from that which the state’s Democratic governor submits, and the GOP-controlled Senate disagrees with the Democratic-controlled House. The conflict would invariably end up in the Supreme Court.

“I would hope that the Supreme Court would make the winner of the Electoral College the President if it came to that,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, told Truthout. “If not, theoretically it could depend on the military. I am skeptical that state governors and governments could do much.”

Trump wants Amy Coney Barrett on the high court to resolve just such a dispute in his favor. Barrett did research and provided assistance with briefing for Bush v. Gore, in which a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court’s order of a statewide manual recount in a very close election.

Barrett, who helped install George W. Bush as president, would likely be a loyal foot soldier in Trump’s army as well.

But Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s plan for a rushed Senate confirmation of Barrett by October 26 could be derailed by the loss of his slim Republican majority. The GOP has a 52-48 majority in the Senate. Thus far, two Senate Judiciary Committee members, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), have tested positive for coronavirus. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) also had a positive test. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has indicated she would vote against Barrett’s confirmation and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) opposes filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat before the election. With five GOP senators not voting for confirmation, Barrett would not be confirmed.

Trump and Biden have unequal power to challenge the results of the election. Rosa Brooks, co-founder of TIP, contrasted Trump’s “awesome coercive powers” with Biden’s lack of power to contest the election results. “Joe Biden can call a press conference; Donald Trump could call on the 82nd Airborne,” Brooks told Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight.

Will the Military Facilitate or Halt Trump’s Coup?

But would the 82nd Airborne help Trump illegally overturn the election results?

Service members have a duty to obey lawful orders. But they also have a duty to disobey unlawful orders and a law that violates the Constitution or a federal statute is an unlawful order.

Indeed, Pentagon officials said in late September that top military leaders could resign rather than take on protesters in the streets in the event of election unrest.

On June 1, Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty troops to quell Black Lives Matter protests. In response to Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and his threats to deploy federal troops more widely, 89 former defense officials wrote on June 5, “We are alarmed at how the president is betraying [his] oath [to support and defend the Constitution] by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.” They said that Trump gave governors “a stark choice: either end the protests that continue to demand equal justice under our laws, or expect that he will send active-duty military units into their states.” The former defense officials urged Trump “to immediately end his plans to send active-duty military personnel into cities as agents of law enforcement, or to employ them or any another military or police forces in ways that undermine the constitutional rights of Americans.”

Although some congressional Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that the winner of the election may never be known, it remains to be seen whether they will resist his attempted coup. Thus far, they have walked in near unanimous lockstep with Trump, notably during his impeachment proceeding and his Supreme Court nomination of Barrett even as votes are being cast.

Although Trump’s COVID-19 outbreak is the wild card here, the prospects for a peaceful transition to a Biden administration if Trump is in charge are dubious.

Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, is optimistic, however. “For those worried that Donald Trump could single-handedly defy the election results and hold on to power, fear not — he cannot do that,” Bassin wrote in an email to Truthout. “In order to do that, he’d need accomplices at every level, throughout the country — in the executive branch, in the Congress, in the courts, in state legislatures, in the media.” But a landslide in favor of Biden could make potential accomplices feel less confident in supporting Trump if he were to claim that the results are ambiguous or fraudulent.

Voting is absolutely critical for democracy. But at the end of the day, stopping a coup attempt will depend on far more than the ballot, and will require creative and courageous acts of civic and political engagement from all of us.

Let’s get to it!

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Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

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

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The testimony portion of the extradition hearing of Julian Assange, taking place in the United Kingdom, concluded after four weeks. Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who presided over the hearing, will not announce her decision until January. Until then, Assange will remain in detention in Belmarsh Prison.

Under conditions that violated Assange’s rights and his ability to defend himself, his legal team made a clear case that for multiple reasons the only just solution is to free Assange. However, Judge Baraitser has not ruled favorably for him in her past decisions or even in this hearing.

At the start, Assange’s lawyers requested a delay until January because they had not been able to meet adequately with him. Their request was denied. During the hearing, Assange was forced to sit in a glass box without access to his lawyers.

Over the past four weeks, people demonstrated their support for Julian Assange outside Old Bailey, where the hearing was held, and around the world. Almost 200 lawyers and politicians from 27 countries, including 13 past and present heads of state, demanded his immediate release.  We must continue to raise awareness and public pressure to free Assange.

Press Freedom Under Attack

The persecution of Julian Assange matters to all of us because this is bigger than Assange. He is being targeted and tortured for doing what every honest journalist and publisher does – reporting the truth and informing the public about what is being done by their governments and corporations.

Many media outlets, especially if they conduct investigative journalism, provide tools and information for people to leak information to them. The difference with Assange is that he created a tool, Wikileaks, that could be used by everyone around the world to leak information anonymously and to read information that had been leaked. Wikileaks verified the information and redacted portions that could result in personal harm, but other than that the information was freely available to the public. Assange is a strong believer in transparency and our right to know.

This is what outraged the power structure. They could not control access to information. They could not stop people from learning about their war crimes and corruption. So they have been waging a war on Assange ever since in multiple nefarious ways and so far he has survived. But this is too much for one person to have to bear. That is why we need to rally around Assange. One way to do that is to support the fund created by his partner, Stella Morris.

Kevin Zeese, the now-deceased co-director of Popular Resistance, was a supporter of Julian Assange. He served as an adviser to the board of the Courage Foundation, which runs Defend Wikileaks. In this 2018 interview with Elizabeth Lea Vos, Kevin explains why Assange’s case is critical:

“Julian Assange’s case is the John Peter Zenger case of the twenty-first century. John Peter Zenger was a publisher who was prosecuted before the American Revolution because he published articles that were critical of the British-appointed governor of New York. They weren’t false, they were just critical. In those days, there was no defense to slander as far as telling the truth goes. You say something bad about the government or the king, you get punished for it. Zenger’s lawyers decided to use a defense that had not been used before, which was to go right to the jury, avoid the judge and show that Zenger was publishing the truth. Zenger was found not guilty by the jury very quickly after having been held in jail for eight months and undergoing abuse. People see that case as where a lot of our freedom of the press rights come from and the concept that truth is a defense. Julian Assange is revisiting that issue now in the twenty-first century when we have a lot of different technology that allows for truth to be told. Wikileaks is a major breakthrough in how journalism works and what information we are allowed to see. It is unacceptable that the most important publisher in this century is silenced. Whether or not you like Assange personally, the work he has done is critical to our future.”

Assange Supporters at the White House, June, 2018. Gateway Pundit.

Why Julian Assange Must be Freed

During the extradition hearing, multiple reasons for freeing Assange and dropping the charges against him were explained. Any one of them should be enough to stop this persecution, but taken together, they demonstrate undeniably that extradition to the United States would violate Assange’s rights and that he has not committed a crime.

1. Julian Assange has been denied his right to a fair trial. While in prison, Assange had limited access to his lawyers. They were only able to speak occasionally over the phone and with a bad connection. Assange’s lawyer, Mark Summers, argued that Assange “alone has the knowledge to build a defense.” And, Assange had not been able to read new charges made against him nor had his lawyers had time to prepare a defense to those new charges. And his hearing was structured so the public and press had extremely limited access. This is unacceptable for a case of such significance. Similarly, Assange would not have a fair trial if he were extradited to the US.

2. Assange did not commit a crime. The United States argued that Assange was not a journalist and therefore not protected under the First Amendment, but experts testified that he was engaged in ‘journalistic activity,’ and that is what matters. Journalists routinely ask sources for access to private information and publish such information. This is all that Assange did. If he is found guilty, then other journalists and media outlets that published material from Wikileaks should also be found guilty. Finding Assange guilty of publishing the truth would have a chilling effect on the willingness of journalists anywhere in the world to similarly expose war crimes and corruption.

3. Assange’s case is political, not criminal. Testimony exposed that the case against Assange is purely political. The judge admitted it herself by stating that she would issue her decision after the election. A witness revealed that the Trump administration, acting through former Congressman Dana Rohrbacher and German Ambassador Richard Grenell, offered to not prosecute if Assange would reveal his sources. When Assange refused, the administration started the process of investigating and charging him. Also, the United States directed the Ecuadorian government to turn Assange over to police.

4. The United States violated Assange’s privacy. In the final week of the hearing, employees from US Global, a Spanish security firm that was spying on Assange through video and audio while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and providing it to the CIA, testified that they were pushed to do more. One witness said the company wanted to install live stream that would be fed directly to the CIA but he stopped it. The witnesses added that their company was pushed by the CIA to leave a door open at the embassy so Assange could be kidnapped and to poison him.

5. Extradition to the United States puts Assange’s health and safety at great risk. The United States has no regard for Julian Assange’s life. Doctors and experts testified that Julian is in poor health and suffers depression and suicidal thoughts. If he were extradited to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison, not only would he have a unfair trial but he would be held in torturous conditions, in a tiny isolation cell, which would worsen his condition and risk his life. It is illegal to extradite a person to a place that endangers their life. That is why Assange originally sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy and it was granted by the Correa government.

The United States lawyers tried to paint Assange as a different person than what he is and bullied and degraded the defense witnesses. They did that because the facts are not on their side. A major argument by the US is that Assange helped Chelsea Manning get the data from a computer, but a cyber security expert demonstrated that was false. The only just solution is to free Julian Assange now.

The Fight to Free Assange Continues

The extradition hearing is over but the fight is not over. This is the time to escalate our pressure to free Assange. Public opinion matters and influences courts, whether they admit it or not.

We need to continue to raise awareness of the injustice and unconstitutionality of what the United States is doing to Assange, the illegality of risking his life and the impact this extradition and prosecution in the United States will have on press freedom and our right to know around the world.

Continue to talk about this, write about this, speak about this, organize web forums, like this one, write letters of solidarity, and protest for Julian Assange. Be creative. Check out the Defend Wikileaks website and the orange and gray graphic above for ideas. The only way we will surely lose is by not trying.

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Nell’aeroporto militare di Ghedi (Brescia) stanno iniziando i lavori per realizzare la principale base operativa dei caccia F-35A dell’Aeronautica italiana armati di bombe nucleari. La Matarrese spa di Bari, che si è aggiudicata l’appalto con un’offerta di 91 milioni di euro, costruirà un grande hangar per la manutenzione dei caccia (oltre 6000 m²) e una palazzina che ospiterà il comando e i simulatori di volo, dotata di un perfetto isolamento termoacustico «al fine di evitare rivelazioni di conversazioni».

Verranno realizzate due linee di volo, ciascuna con 15 hangaretti al cui interno vi saranno i caccia pronti al decollo.  Ciò conferma quanto pubblicammo tre anni fa (il manifesto, 28 novembre 2017), ossia che il progetto (varato dall’allora ministra della Difesa Pinotti) prevedeva lo schieramento di almeno 30 caccia F-35A.

L’area in cui verranno dislocati gli F-35, recintata e sorvegliata, sarà separata dal resto dell’aeroporto e top secret. Il perché è chiaro: accanto ai nuovi caccia saranno dislocate a Ghedi, in un deposito segreto che non compare nell’appalto, le nuove bombe nucleari statunitensi B61-12.

Come le attuali B-61 di cui sono armati i Tornado PA-200 del 6° Stormo, le B61-12 saranno controllate dalla speciale unità statunitense (704^th Munitions Support Squadron della U.S. Air Force), «responsabile del ricevimento, stoccaggio e mantenimento delle armi della riserva bellica Usa destinate al 6° Stormo Nato dell’Aeronautica italiana». La stessa unità dell’Aeronautica Usa ha il compito di «sostenere direttamente la missione di attacco» del 6° Stormo.

Piloti italiani vengono già addestrati, nelle basi aeree di Luke in Arizona e Eglin in Florida, all’uso degli F-35A anche per missioni di attacco nucleare sotto comando Usa.

Caccia dello stesso tipo, armati o comunque armabili con le B61-12, sono dislocati nella base di Amendola (Foggia), dove hanno già superato le 5000 ore di volo. Vi saranno, oltre a questi, gli F-35 della U.S. Air Force schierati ad Aviano con le B61-12.

Il nuovo caccia F-35A e la nuova bomba nucleare B61-12 costituiscono un sistema d’arma integrato: l’uso dell’aereo comporta l’uso della bomba.  Il ministro della Difesa Guerini (Pd) ha confermato che l’Italia mantiene l’impegno ad acquistare 90 caccia F-35, di cui 60 di modello A a capacità nucleare.

La partecipazione al programma dell’F-35, quale partner di secondo livello, rafforza l’ancoraggio dell’Italia agli Stati uniti. L’industria bellica italiana, capeggiata dalla Leonardo che gestisce l’impianto degli F-35 a Cameri (Novara), viene ancor più integrata nel gigantesco complesso militare-industriale Usa capeggiato dalla Lockheed Martin, la maggiore industria bellica del mondo, costruttrice dell’F-35.

Allo stesso tempo l’Italia – Stato non-nucleare aderente al Trattato di non-proliferazione che gli vieta di avere armi nucleari sul proprio territorio – svolge la sempre più pericolosa funzione di base avanzata della strategia nucleare Usa/Nato contro la Russia e altri paesi.

Dato che ciascun aereo può trasportare nella stiva interna 2 B61-12, solo i 30 F-35A di Ghedi avranno una capacità di almeno 60 bombe nucleari. Secondo la Federazione degli scienziati americani, la nuova bomba «tattica» B61-12 per gli F-35, che gli Usa schiereranno in Italia e altri paesi europei dal 2022, essendo più precisa e in posizione ravvicinata agli obiettivi, «avrà la stessa capacità militare delle bombe strategiche dislocate negli Stati uniti».

Vi è infine la questione, ancora indefinita, dei costi. Il Servizio di ricerca del Congresso degli Stati uniti, nel maggio 2020, stima il prezzo medio di un F-35 in 108 milioni di dollari, precisando però che è «il prezzo dell’aereo senza motore», il cui costo è di circa 22 milioni. Una volta acquistato un F-35, anche a prezzo minore come promette per il futuro la Lockheed Martin, inizia la spesa per il suo continuo ammodernamento, per la formazione degli equipaggi e per il suo uso.

Un’ora di volo di un F-35A – documenta la US Air Force – costa oltre 42000 dollari. Ciò significa che solo le 5000 ore di volo effettuate dagli F-35 di Amendola sono costate alle nostre casse pubbliche 180 milioni di euro.

Manlio Dinucci

US President Donald Trump will need all the points he can score in the run up to next month’s presidential elections where he will face off against Democrat candidate Joe Biden. Events such as war or threats to a national leader have a psychological effect on a populace and unites people. It is still not clear at the moment whether voters sympathize with Trump after it was announced on October 2 that he and First Lady Melania Trump had contracted COVID-19. However, any person’s illness naturally invokes a certain level of sympathy, even when we completely disagree with them politically.

Despite two weeks of necessary quarantine, it is unlikely that this will weaken Trump’s re-election campaign. It is well known that he is an avid Twitter user. We can expect him to not only write more on Twitter, but also increase his appearances on television. In addition, the president can increase livestream speeches as he did in the spring when domestic travel was restricted because of COVID-19.

The latest survey by “John Zogby Strategies/EMI Research Solutions” showed that Biden “holds on to a two-point lead over President Donald Trump, 49% to 47% with 4% not sure,” which is the Democrat candidate’s smallest advantage in the polls so far. The research also shows that the chances for Trump’s re-election as head of the White House has increased.

This is a sign that Trump’s infection and noisy performance in the first debate with Biden did not harm his chances for re-election. The research challenged the media narrative that Biden had strengthened his leadership over Trump. 47%, according to the John Zogby data, is actually one point higher than the percentage of votes he received in 2016 (46.1%).

According to John Zogby, Trump “appears to have consolidated his base of Whites, parents, conservatives, men, and his own party’s voters. Joe Biden looks as if he is on his way to doing the same with his base. His numbers among Hispanics are respectable but not quite at the 66%-67% he really needs. The same with Blacks. His 86% is better than our last poll but he needs to hit 90%.”

With this, Biden is likely to continue his campaign as planned. Trump’s infection still has not managed to fully distract Americans from the first debate that was mired and criticized for its rude nature. However, even after the debate, the results show that Trump is certainly gaining on Biden. The Democrat candidate had a solid advantage in the past two polls, showing that the race is intensifying. In the poll conducted on July 8, Biden led Trump with 49% to 42%, and in the last poll, published on August 29, Biden had an advantage of 6 points, 48% against 42%.

Yesterday, Trump made a tweet that created controversy, saying:

“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”

Many social media users were quick to highlight that there are about 7.5 million total infections in the US that has resulted in over 210,000 deaths because of his continuous lacklustre response to the pandemic. Yet, despite social media outrage, it must be remembered that platforms like Twitter only represent a small segment of the voting population.

CNN claims that such tweets “plays right into Biden’s strategy of offering the nation a calm, sensible and presidential alternative by simply acknowledging reality.” However, this has not been reflected in the polls as Trump continues to gain on Biden, showing that just as in 2016, there is a huge divide between the reality of voter feelings and mainstream media claims.

As said before, it is natural for humans to sympathize with those who are sick. Trump has presented himself with a strong and decisive image in the face of the deadly disease, especially given the American president’s age (74) and obesity (110.7kg), which puts him in a high-risk range. By continuing to campaign, albeit via untraditional methods, does not only keep Trump in the race against Biden, but has actually strengthened his position by hitting sympathy cords with swing voters and presenting a strong image to his voter base.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

First published on August 30, 2020

At the outset of the pandemic, the CDC had been instructed to change the methodology regarding Death Certificates with a view to artificially inflating the numbers of “Covid deaths”. This is confirmed by the H. Ealy, M. McEvoy study quoted below.

The latest CDC report does not acknowledge a 94% “error” in the data pertaining to “Covid deaths”, It nonetheless confirms that 94% of the deaths attributed to Covid have “comorbidities”,(i.e. deaths dues other causes).

For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups.

When the Covid data is reported, the other causes of death are simply not mentioned. It should be understood that the RT-PCR test used to “identify” Covid  (PCR positive cases) is totally meaningless. A positive PCR does not confirm that the patient has the Covid disease.

A careful review of the CDC report remains to be established. The situation regarding data collection and reporting regarding cause of death remains unclear.

An earlier report published by Global Research confirmed the following:

“The 2003 guidelines for establishing death certificates had been cancelled. “Had the CDC used its industry standard, Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting Revision 2003, as it has for all other causes of death for the last 17 years, the COVID-19 fatality count would be approximately 90.2% lower  than it currently is.”

For further details see:  Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School? By H. Ealy, M. McEvoy, and et al., August 09, 2020

The unspoken objective of this methodological change was to inflate the Covid death statistics and sustain the fear campaign.

For more details on the CDC Report, read Jack Davis’ article (WesternJournal.com) below

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 31, 2020

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CDC Now Says 94% of COVID Deaths Had an Underlying Condition

by Jack Davis

WesternJournal.com

August 30, 2020

A new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 94 percent of the cases of those who died from COVID-19, another disease was also at work on the victim.

“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned,” the CDC stated in its report, under the heading “Comorbidities.”

“For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death,” the report continued.

The report showed that in 18,116 of 42,587 deaths in the 75-84 age group, the individual who died also had the flu or pneumonia, while in 15,100 cases the underlying condition was respiratory failure.

Overall, of the 161, 392 deaths covered by the report, 42 percent (68,004) of those who died also had the flu or pneumonia while 34 percent (54,803) had an underlying condition of respiratory failure.

[This is not surprising: The RT-PCR test used in relation to Covid-19 is identical to that used in relation to seasonal influenza, M.C.]

Underlying conditions like diabetes mean greater risk for getting or transmitting COVID-19 within the home, finds a CDC study. Learn more: https://t.co/pN20Dpfd22 pic.twitter.com/3N1Ju9vO3K

— CDC (@CDCgov) August 18, 2020

Diabetes was an underlying condition in 16 percent of the deaths (25,936 people) while various heart-related conditions including cardiac arrest, ischemic heart disease (also known as hardening of the arteries), cardiac arrhythmia and heart disease (58,687 people) were found in 36 percent of those who died.

In June, the CDC listed as high-risk individuals for COVID-19 those who had chronic kidney disease; COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease); obesity (BMI of 30 or higher); immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant; serious heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies; sickle cell disease; Type 2 diabetes.

Although the CDC’s initial guidance suggested those over 65 were at high risk, the CDC later revised that to note than risk increases with age and that there is no single age at which risk suddenly rises.

In comments released at the time, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said risk “is a continuum.”

If you have certain underlying medical conditions, you are at increased risk of severe illness from #COVID19, no matter your age. Find tips to protect yourself: https://t.co/0go5iZGIQf pic.twitter.com/hPJRXRUYbY

— CDC (@CDCgov) June 29, 2020

“Based on what we’ve learned, we now understand that as you get older, your risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death increases.  We also updated the list of underlying health conditions that can put you at higher risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death, based on the latest review of scientific evidence to date,” he said.

“A key point is that we want to make sure that people know that as your numbers of underlying medical conditions increase, your risk of severe illness from COVID also increases,” he said.

As of Sunday afternoon, the coronavirus had infected almost 6 million Americans, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and roughly 25 million worldwide.

As of Sunday, 843,826 people had been reported as killed by the virus, with 182,909 of those being Americans.

Spread of the disease resulted in mass lockdowns across the country.

Risk is one of the factors that will go into distributing COVID-19 vaccines once those that are now in trials are ready for the market, according to CNBC.

“At first, there will likely be a limited supply of one or more of the Covid-19 vaccines, because limited doses will be available,” Redfield said Friday, CNBC reported. “It’s important that the early vaccines are distributed in a fair, ethical and transparent way.”

The list of those to be vaccinated will include health care workers, those considered essential workers at the time a vaccine is ready for distribution, and those considered at high risk due to age and underlying health conditions, according to the CDC.

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Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.

Featured image is from CDC

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969)

John Lennon, born 80 years ago on October 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.

He was also a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Long before Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.

For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Years after Lennon’s assassination it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.

Confidential (here declassified and censored) letter by J. Edgar Hoover about FBI surveillance of John Lennon (Public Domain)

As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.

For all of these reasons, the U.S. government was obsessed with Lennon, who had learned early on that rock music could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Lennon believed in the power of the people. Unfortunately, as Lennon recognized: “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.”

However, as Martin Lewis writing for Time notes: “John Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement.”

For instance, in December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.

What Lennon did not know at the time was that government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” Incredibly, FBI agents were in the audience at the Ann Arbor concert, “taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song.”

The U.S. government, steeped in paranoia, was spying on Lennon.

By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear where Lennon stood. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.

The release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical anti-government message in virtually every song and depicted President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung dancing together nude on the cover, only fanned the flames of the conflict to come.

The official U.S. war against Lennon began in earnest in 1972 after rumors surfaced that Lennon planned to embark on a U.S. concert tour that would combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voter registration. Nixon, fearing Lennon’s influence on about 11 million new voters (1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote), had the ex-Beatle served with deportation orders “in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement.”

Then again, the FBI has had a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures. Most notably among the latter are such celebrated names as folk singer Pete Seeger, painter Pablo Picasso, comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, comedian Lenny Bruce and poet Allen Ginsberg.

Among those most closely watched by the FBI was Martin Luther King Jr., a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.

Recording “Give Peace a Chance” during the Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal (CC BY 2.5/Roy Kerwood)

While Lennon was not—as far as we know—being blackmailed into suicide, he was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”

As Lennon’s FBI file shows, memos and reports about the FBI’s surveillance of the anti-war activist had been flying back and forth between Hoover, the Nixon White House, various senators, the FBI and the U.S. Immigration Office.

Nixon’s pursuit of Lennon was relentless and in large part based on the misperception that Lennon and his comrades were planning to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. The government’s paranoia, however, was misplaced.

Left-wing activists who were on government watch lists and who shared an interest in bringing down the Nixon Administration had been congregating at Lennon’s New York apartment. But when they revealed that they were planning to cause a riot, Lennon balked. As he recounted in a 1980 interview, “We said, We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence so you can overthrow what? And replace it with what? . . . It was all based on this illusion, that you can create violence and overthrow what is, and get communism or get some right-wing lunatic or a left-wing lunatic. They’re all lunatics.”

Despite the fact that Lennon was not part of the “lunatic” plot, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Every time he was ordered out of the country, his lawyers delayed the process by filing an appeal. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country when he was granted a green card. As he said afterwards, “I have a love for this country…. This is where the action is. I think we’ll just go home, open a tea bag, and look at each other.”

Lennon’s time of repose didn’t last long, however. By 1980, he had re-emerged with a new album and plans to become politically active again.

The old radical was back and ready to cause trouble. In his final interview on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon mused, “The whole map’s changed and we’re going into an unknown future, but we’re still all here, and while there’s life there’s hope.”

The Deep State has a way of dealing with troublemakers, unfortunately. On Dec. 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows when Lennon returned to his New York apartment building. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman, in an eerie echo of the FBI’s moniker for Lennon, called out, “Mr. Lennon!”

Lennon turned and was met with a barrage of gunfire as Chapman—dropping into a two-handed combat stance—emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four hollow-point bullets into his back and left arm. Lennon stumbled, staggered forward and, with blood pouring from his mouth and chest, collapsed to the ground.

John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had finally been “neutralized.”

Yet where those who neutralized the likes of John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and others go wrong is in believing that you can murder a movement with a bullet and a madman.

Lennon and Ono performing at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in December 1971 (Public Domain)

Thankfully, Lennon’s legacy lives on in his words, his music and his efforts to speak truth to power. As Yoko Ono shared in a 2014 letter to the parole board tasked with determining whether Chapman should be released: “A man of humble origin, [John Lennon] brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music. He tried to be a good power for the world, and he was. He gave encouragement, inspiration and dreams to people regardless of their race, creed and gender.”

Sadly, not much has changed for the better in the world since Lennon walked among us.

Peace remains out of reach. Activism and whistleblowers continue to be prosecuted for challenging the government’s authority. Militarism is on the rise, with local police dressed like the military, all the while the governmental war machine continues to wreak havoc on innocent lives across the globe.

For those of us who joined with John Lennon to imagine a world of peace, it’s getting harder to reconcile that dream with the reality of the American police state.

Meanwhile, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, those who dare to speak up are labeled dissidents, troublemakers, terrorists, lunatics, or mentally ill and tagged for surveillance, censorship, involuntary detention or, worse, even shot and killed in their own homes by militarized police.

As Lennon shared in a 1968 interview:

“I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

So what’s the answer?

Lennon had a multitude of suggestions.

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”

“War is over if you want it.”

“Produce your own dream…. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders…. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”

“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.”

“If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.”

And my favorite advice of all:

“Say you want a revolution / We better get on right away / Well you get on your feet / And out on the street / Singing power to the people.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

On Sept. 17, Toronto-based The Globe and Mail newspaper published an extraordinary and very lengthy article vilifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and calling him “a top voice of misinformation on social media.” The headline for the piece summarizes its range: “How a Kennedy became a ‘superspreader’ of hoaxes on COVID-19, vaccines, 5G and more”. [1]

For more than a decade, Kennedy Jr. has raised issues about vaccine safety through the organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense.  The Globe and Mail piece stated:

“Like other conspiracy theorists, [RFK Jr.] has gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic by adapting his anti-vaccine messages to fit the crisis, firing off false allegations against Microsoft founder Bill Gates [on COVID-19 vaccines, and other issues] and about the safety of 5G telecom networks. Since February, Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s social media support has tripled from 229,000 followers to 665,000 today.”

Screenshot from The Globe and Mail

At the end of what can only be called a smear piece, the print edition of The Globe and Mail stated, “This article was originally published by Tortoise, a different kind of newsroom committed to a slower, wiser news. To try Tortoise, Globe readers can get a 30-day free trial and a special half price offer…”

Strangely, the article made no mention of Children’s Health Defense, or of Kennedy’s Jr.’s August 29 speech in Berlin, where he addressed a huge rally. He told them that the COVID-19 pandemic is a “crisis of convenience for the elites” who are “destroying the middle class,” “using the quarantine to bring 5G into our communities” for “surveillance and data-mining”, and shifting us all “to digital currencies” and a cashless society that will benefit “the billionaires.”

Similarly, the Tortoise article didn’t mention that on August 17, Children’s Health Defense filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and three fact-checking companies, charging them with censoring truthful public health information. [2]

So what (or who) is Tortoise Media?

“Slower, Wiser News”?

Tortoise Media was launched in April 2019 by three people: James Harding, former editor at Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, and subsequently head of BBC News until resigning in October 2017;  Matthew Barzun, former US ambassador to the UK; and Katie Vanneck-Smith, former president of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones.

Initial financial backing for London-based Tortoise was provided by banker Bernie Mensah, Global Head of Emerging Markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, tech investor Saul Klein, and two anonymous backers. [3]

The Tortoise Media website now lists Harding as Editor; Vanneck-Smith as Publisher; Matthew Barzun as Chairman; and Ceci Kurzman (former founder of Nexus Management) as Independent Director. The website also currently lists 27 major funding partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Edelman, Facebook, Google, and the Rockefeller Foundation. [4] This article will focus on the Gates Foundation, and Edelman – considered one of the largest public-relations firms in the world, with some 67 offices worldwide.

Tortoise Media used a November 2018 Kickstarter campaign to launch a drive for a membership boutique –  a “redistributive model” for news funding by which expensive membership tiers provide funding for less expensive (or free) memberships.

By June of 2019, Tortoise Media had 8,000 members, with 40 per cent of them under the age of 30. Businesses are funding memberships to be distributed by charitable organizations, academies, and other groups in order to “fill Tortoise’s demographic gaps, such as those outside London, teenagers, the elderly, and the working class.” [5] Press Gazette also noted that only three months after the April 2019 launch, seven major brand names “including Santander bank and PR firm Edelman” had signed up to fund memberships. [6]

A Tortoise membership costs from 5 pounds sterling per month (or 50 pounds per year) for someone under-30, to 24 pounds per month (for other individuals) and 250 pounds per month (for businesses and wealthy sponsors). The first 5,000 founding student members receive free membership. By November 2019, Tortoise Media was claiming “nearly 20,000 members,” with numbers climbing rapidly because of widespread corporate support subsidizing memberships. [7]

Tortoise hosts frequent “ThinkIns” (editorial meetings and conversations) between partners and members, between partners and stakeholders, and between partner companies and their employees. “We believe in opening up journalism,” their website states, “so we can examine issues and develop ideas for the 21^st Century. We want to do this with our members and with our partners. We want to give everyone a seat at the table.” Tortoise calls its members “family.”

The Tortoise Media website stresses that “we don’t take ads…Instead, our journalism is funded by our members and our partners. We establish partnerships with businesses willing to back a new form of journalism, enable the public debate, share their expertise and communicate their point of view.” But Tortoise hastens to add: “Our partners, of course, know that we are a journalistic enterprise. Our independence is non-negotiable. If we ever have to choose between the relationship and the story, we’ll always choose the story.”

With regard to the September 17 piece smearing RFK Jr., Tortoise Media didn’t have to choose between the relationship with two of its funding partners (the Gates Foundation, Facebook) and “the story” because all three were nicely aligned.

Billionaires’ Media

Back in autumn 2018, when buzz was circulating about the upcoming launch of Tortoise Media, Emily Bell, the director of a digital journalism center at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian. Bell called the Tortoise venture “mysterious,” but noted that mainstream media is under financial “pressure” and may be in need of a “redistributive model of news funding,” such as that being created by Tortoise. [8]

“There is an acceptance that billionaires might be the answer after all,” wrote Bell in her praise for the Tortoise approach, citing examples such as Apple founder Steve Job’s widow Laurene Powell Job’s purchase of The Atlantic; Salesforce founder Mark Benioff’s purchase of Time magazine; and Amazon head Jeff Bezos’ buy-up of the Washington Post. [9]

What Bell glaringly omitted is the fact that over the past decade, Facebook, Google, etc. have taken major ad revenues away from the mainstream media, enriching the firms’ executives and shareholders while gutting newsrooms across the globe. As thousands of journalists have been jettisoned, billionaires have stepped in to become media owners, furthering their control of information and public discourse on key issues.

Tortoise Media’s funding partners include two of the wealthiest billionaires on the planet: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Of course, that should remind Canadian readers that The Globe and Mail (which published the Tortoise Media piece) is owned by the richest family in Canada, the Thomsons, “who have seen their fortune increase by nearly $9 billion during the pandemic, up to $50.6 billion from $41.7 billion in March.” [10]

Strangely, The Guardian’s Emily Bell expressed hope that Tortoise would “encourage a rush of 1% wealth into more deprived areas of [news] coverage,” such as “income inequality, racism, the health service, climate change, the march of authoritarianism, the inexorable rise of misogyny, the challenges of artificial intelligence and the collapse of democratic institutions.” [11] This a very naive position, as though news coverage of such issues has nothing to do with how they are covered, but only that they are covered.

Indeed, the loss of so many professional journalists means that mainstream news outlets increasingly rely on corporate press releases, think tank reports, corporate pundits, and spin – the very backbone of PR firms like Tortoise funding partner Edelman, which exist to manage such issues for their clients. In fact, PR Watch has called Edelman “the world’s largest PR company, synonymous with astroturf-style front groups and dirty tricks.” [12]

Event 201

Shortly after Tortoise Media was launched, two of its funding partners participated in a global-pandemic exercise called Event 201, which was held in New York City in October 2019 and involved 15 lead participants.

Independent journalist Rosemary Frei, who has written extensively about COVID-19, told me by email that Event 201 “simulated a novel-coronavirus pandemic – and eerily reflected what started to roll out in the real world shortly after that, including measures against the virus causing the markets to crash.” Frei told me, “One of the event’s main sponsors was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” and “a representative from the foundation was among the 15 lead participants. Another lead participant was Matthew Harrington, the Global Chief Operating Officer at Edelman.”

According to Frei, citing video footage from Event 201 that she’d mentioned in her March 29 blog entry (rosemaryfrei.ca/blog), “One of the central predictions in Event 201 was ‘overwhelming amounts of dis- and misinformation circulating over the internet’.  [Edelman’s] Harrington opined at the roundtable that, in response, social-media platforms [Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.] must recognize they are broadcasters and partner “with the scientific and health communities to counterweight [misinformation], if not flood the zone, [with] accurate information.”

Frei told me, “Harrington also said ‘there needs to be a centralized response around the communications approach, that then is cascaded to informed advocates representing the NGO communities, the medical professionals, etc.’ and ‘centralized on an international basis’.”

With Edelman and the Gates Foundation worried about dis- and misinformation circulating over the internet, these two Tortoise partners appear to have joined forces with Tortoise partners Facebook and Google, which during the pandemic lockdown have been censoring public health information from a variety of websites. A Facebook spokesperson recently told The Guardian that “we have removed 7m [million] pieces of Covid-19-related misinfo between April and June…” [13]

One of the perks that Tortoise provides to its members is a “daily news feed” of selected articles from other sites, along with its own pieces. It looks like Tortoise Media is intended to be a “centralized response” on “an international basis”. With Edelman’s help, and its 67 offices worldwide, that is potentially possible.

Gates & Media

That may help explain Tortoise Media’s Sept. 17 article expressing concern that “Since February, Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s social-media support has tripled from 229,000 followers to 665,000 today.” [14]

Ironically, those numbers come nowhere close to the millions of people reached through the media by Bill Gates, who has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into mainstream news outlets across Europe and North America.

In a feature article for the Columbia Journalism Review (August 21, 2020), Tim Schwab stated: “As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations – a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronovirus pandemic – an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.” [15]

Schwab examined “nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates foundation had made through the end of June [2020] and found more than $250 million going toward journalism.” Recipients included the BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, the Seattle Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Participant, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, the International Center for Journalists, and the American Press Institute.

Schwab called the list incomplete because the Gates Foundation doesn’t have to report everything it funds.

Schwab stated: “In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education [favouring charter schools] to agriculture [pro-GMOs] – a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes’ list of the most powerful people in the world.” [16]

Germany’s major newspaper Der Spiegel recently reported that, like other news outlets, it has received “around 2 – 3 million euros over three years” from the Gates Foundation, and noted that this raises “questions about a covert agenda to influence the news.” [17] Gates responded that for any news outlet funded by him, “what they actually write in those articles is totally up to them.” [18]

But according to CJR’s Tim Schwab, “When Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money is used – often for topics, like global health and education, on which the foundation works – which can help elevate its agenda in the news media.” [19]

Noting that critical coverage of Gates is “rare,” Schwab stated that “a larger worry is the precedent the prevailing coverage of Gates sets for how we report on the next generation of tech billionaires-turned philanthropists, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.” [20]

But that’s where a site like Tortoise Media comes in, with its courting of the under-30 age group, its ThinkIns, its free subscriptions for the disadvantaged, its daily news feeds for members, its consideration of members and partners as “family”, and its partnership with a major PR firm.

“Dirty Tricks”

When PR Watch called Edelman “synonymous with astroturf-style front groups and dirty tricks” in August 2014, it was referring to past scandals such as the revelation in 2008 that the firm had created fake “grassroots” bloggers for a digital astroturfing campaign assisting its client Walmart during a battle with unions. PR Watch could not have known that, just months later in November 2014, another scandal would erupt that would expose Edelman’s PR tactics in detail.

In November 2014, Greenpeace released documents that revealed Edelman’s internal PR advice for its client TransCanada Corp. in an effort to win the Canadian public’s support for a tar sands pipeline called Energy East. Greenpeace called the advice “dirty tricks”.

The documents unveiled Edelman’s plan for a “permanent campaign” to turn Canadians into “champions” for the pipeline, which would move tar sands bitumen across six provinces.

As CBC News reported:

“It starts with getting people to simply click on an Energy East project website to request more information about the project. Edelman says it can turn the ‘average citizen into issue activists’. ‘Using targeted messaging and behaviour tracking to directly appeal to the individual’s trigger points and develop them from a supporter to an activist to a champion,’ said one of the documents… It says advocacy can develop from people simply signing a petition and develop into testifying at public meetings or lending their personal stories for ads and promotions. ‘They provide us with a rich base of advocates who passionately understand and support our cause and are willing – more often than not – to do what’s asked of them’.” [21]

Edelman further recommended that “Third-party voices must also be identified, recruited and heard to build an echo chamber of aligned voices” in the media. In order to “neutralize risk,” Edelman suggested “detailed background research on key opposition groups” such as Council of Canadians, Equiterre, the David Suzuki Foundation, Avaaz, and Ecology Ottawa. They also advised: “Add layers of difficulty for our opponents, distracting them from their mission and causing them to redirect their resources.” [22]

Even the mainstream media called these “creepy tactics,” with one columnist referring to “communications black ops, phony grassroots campaigns, squadrons of dutiful Twitter trolls and search-and-destroy missions on opponents…rooting out skeletons in the closets” of opponents. [23] TransCanada Corp. had to distance itself from Edelman’s advice, and later cancelled the Energy East pipeline project.

This background on Edelman’s PR tactics does make one wonder to what extent Tortoise Media is adopting a somewhat similar strategy.

Cashless Society

Readers of the smear piece on RFK Jr. may have been wondering what the “and more” part of the “hoaxes on COVID-19 vaccines, 5G and more” headline refers to. Quite likely, it refers to Kennedy Jr.’s comment in Berlin about the billionaires shifting us all into “digital currencies” to their benefit.

The Gates Foundation is part of the “Better Than Cash Alliance,” which in 2016 allied with USAID and pushed India’s Norenda Modi government to remove several banknotes – the 500 Rupee and the 1,000 Rupee – from circulation. That would be like suddenly removing all ten-dollar and 20-dollar bills from circulation in North America and declaring that holders of those notes would have to deposit them in a bank by a certain deadline or they would be worthless. [24]

Besides the Gates Foundation and USAID, the “Better Than Cash Alliance” includes Mastercard and Visa, the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network (EBay), banking giant CitiGroup and others. [25]

USAID and its corporate partners knew in advance that only 55% of India’s population had a bank account, and 95% of all transactions were conducted in cash. So the sudden change had a huge affect on India’s poorest, working in the informal sector for cash. As a result of this decree, there was massive famine and thousands of people died because they had no way to buy food. Furthermore, thousands of small businesses went under. [26]

In Der Spiegel’s recent interview with Bill Gates, he expressed concerns about poor countries and insisted “Our foundation is about saving lives.” [27] But that certainly wasn’t true in India in November 2016.

As Columbia Journalism Review’s Tim Schwab stated: “Bill Gates has shown how seamlessly the most controversial industry captain can transform his public image from tech villain to benevolent philanthropist. Insofar as journalists are supposed to scrutinize wealth and power, Gates should probably be one of the most investigated people on earth – not the most admired.” [28] But if Tortoise Media and its “family” of partners and members have their way, that’s how things will remain.

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Joyce Nelson is a freelance writer and author. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Notes

[1] Alexi Mostrous, “How a Kennedy became a ‘superspreader’ of hoaxes on COVID-19, vaccines, 5G and more,” The Globe and Mail, September 17, 2020.

[2] Julia Woodford, “Woodford Files,” Vitality Magazine, Fall 2020.

[3] Emily Bell, “Can James Harding’s Tortoise be more than a rich person’s club?” The Guardian, October 22, 2018.

[4] www.tortoisemedia.com/partners/

[5] Charlotte Tobitt, “’Slow News’ venture Tortoise creates ‘inclusive’ members’ model with potential to partner with local publishers,” Press Gazette, June 28, 2019.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Freddy Mayhew, “Tortoise claims nearly 20,000 members as it eyes move into podcasting,” Press Gazette, November 8, 2019.

[8] Bell, op. cit.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Derrick O’Keefe, “COVID sucks, unless you’re a billionaire. Canada’s richest have raked in $37 billion since March,” Ricochet, September 17, 2020.

[11] Bell, op. cit.

[12] Nick Surgery, PR Watch, “Edelman Makes a Climate Change Pledge, but Forgets About ALEC,” Truthout, August 17, 2014.

[13] Niamh McIntyre and Ben Quinn, “Engagement with anti-vaccine Facebook posts trebles in one month,” The Guardian, September 19, 2020.

[14] Mostrous, op. cit.

[15] Tim Schwab, “Journalism’s Gates keepers,” Columbia Journalism Review, August 21, 2020.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Veronika Hackenbroch and Marc Pitzke, “Bill Gates on COVID-19: ‘It’s Mind-Blowing That We’re Not Further Along,” Der Spiegel, Sept. 16, 2020.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Schwab, op. cit.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Margo McDiarmid, “Energy East pipeline ‘advocates’ targeted in TransCanada PR move,” CBC News, November 18, 2014.

[22] Suzanne Goldenberg, “Revealed: Keystone company’s PR blitz to safeguard its backup plan,” The Guardian, November 18, 2014.

[23] Jeffrey Jones, “PR trickery tarnishes oil patch’s credibility,” The Globe and Mail, November 19, 2014.

[24] Joyce Nelson, “Resisting the Push for a Cashless Society,” Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-Filled Challenges to Corporate Rule, Comox: Watershed Sentinel Books, 2018, pp. 48-50.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Quoted in Hackenbroch and Pitzke, op. cit.

[28] Schwab, op. cit.

One measure of success in politics is the degree enemies imitate you, even if done insincerely and without flattery. Insincere imitation has become the preserve of a whole panoply of Donald Trump’s critics stretching from the money, corporate side of the Democrats to the sandalled warriors who believe in environmental eschatology.  Most importantly for Joe Biden and fellow travellers of the Donkey Party, they remain incapable and uninterested in identifying and confronting their devastating loss in 2016.  There is only one program in the works, the mission that matters: removal and elimination.  Get Trump out, and all will heal.

This makes political conversation insensible and torturously imbecilic.  Trump’s wand waving has had such an impact on his opponents that they mimic, unconsciously, his own tropes.  They ape and bark to his beat.  They speak of conspiracy, exclaim and splutter about fakery.  They talk of the improbability of reality.  Trump, for instance, could not have actually contracted the novel coronavirus.

Since October 2, Trump become the subject of eager medical experimentation.  He has received an intravenous dose of the dual antibody REGN-COV2, a drug yet to satisfy all stages of approval.  The combination features a B cell from a human who had recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection and yet another one of those heroic mice whose immune system was engineered to resemble the human immune system.  “Experiments in both golden hamsters and rhesus macaques that were intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed the cocktail could reduce viral levels and disease pathology,” writes Jan Cohen in Science.  Speculation (can it be anything else?) abounds as to whether Trump was also taking, as one of his physician’s claims, “zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin and daily aspirin”.

Much of this is of less interest to Trump sceptics than the fact that it is even taking place.  They share, with mild discomfort, similar ground to the QAnon group, who impute to Trump a strategy to outwit the Democrats, who they claim operate a global human trafficking empire.  While QAnon insist that Trump is playing the Democrats in pretending to have COVID-19, some liberals have also taken of the same sauce.  Jon Ehrens, a producer for WHYY radio in Philadelphia, claimed that “90% of listener emails/comments are very insistent that the diagnosis is a lie.” Common conspiracy theories included “finding an excuse for why he will lose the election” to proving “that the coronavirus is no big deal.” 

The president’s illness, when announced on October 2, did not merely issue an open invitation to conspiracy; it unleashed a tsunami of gloating enthusiasts. There were curses to enchant the polyglots.  There were homicidal fantasies skipping along social media platforms.  Within hours of the announcement, Merriam-Webster noted that searches for that supremely useful word “schadenfreude” had risen by 30,500 percent.  Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University’s divinity school, refused to “perform false politeness in the presence of evil.”

A good portion of the media stable long mocked by Trump for being the great news counterfeiters were themselves incapable of believing the president.  They had become the ideologues of disbelief, the mirrors of the fake.  “The sad truth is that we really can’t trust at face value what comes out of the White House on this,” political reporter Jonathan Karl explained on the ABC’s “The View”.  Reporters “have to ask the questions” and would accordingly verify the information. (Good of Karl to state what should be the reporter’s natural mission.) “But there’s been so much misinformation that has gone out about the virus, about the pandemic, about things like voter suppression – it’s really hard to know what to believe.”  

As for the general issue of verisimilitude, pity the doctors, as well, charged with such a mission as conveying a message both medically sound yet politically sanitised.  Historically, such White House physicians are paid to diagnose the leader patient.  The job prescription also entails a bit of mendacity, if required, prompting the rather cynical observation by Aaron Seth Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard, that care for the US president has been marked, at stages, by “incompetence, secrecy and downright deception.” 

Author and Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins is even resigned on this score. “Doctors have never known how to handle sick leaders.”  Trump’s situation, he is reminded, is much like that of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who also contracted the virus in March.  The doctors initially claimed he was “just fine and cheerful”. “When this proved untrue he was said to be dying.  Bulletins merged into bullshit.  Nothing was believed.  Johnson had to bitterly protest his health only this weekend.”

In lowering the tone of what was already the bankrupt political conversation of the republic, Trump also lowered the bar of believability.  There is no higher plateau of political grace to seek.  Everyone’s in for a mauling.  We are in the gutter, and we are going to stay there, eyes averted, from the stars. And the truth. 

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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: U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center by helicopter after the White House announced that he “will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days” after testing positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., October 2, 2020.  REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

As readers know, I do not think that the Covid virus itself is a hoax.  From the beginning I have taken the virus seriously.  I reported the available information that the ability of the virus to spread threatened hospital capacity and could overwhelm the medical system.  I supported limited closedowns in order to reduce the rate at which the infection spread. 

I reported that Vitamin C and D3 together with zinc and NAC strengthened the immune system against the virus.

I reported that the masks people are wearing are not N95 masks and thereby do not prevent inhalation and exhalation of the virus.  Some medical professionals have concluded that the masks do harm and no good.

As more information became available, I reported that the virus attacked in a different way than assumed and that ventilators rather than the virus itself were killing people. 

When doctors discovered the HCQ cure, I reported that an inexpensive and safe cure was available.  I defended with evidence and expert testimony the effectiveness and safety of the cure from public health officials and other Big Pharma shills who intentionally discredited the cure in the interest of Big Pharma’s hopes to develop an expensive and mandatory vaccine. For Fauci and Big Phama shills, profit took precedence over public health and safety. 

As more information comes available, we see that that the argument for another lockdown based on a second wave is based on increased testing using a test that produces false positives.  A test that experts know to be unreliable is the basis for the effort to renew the lockdown, mandate vaccination, and wear ineffectual masks to keep the fear alive.  

Whereas I do not think the virus itself is a hoax, it is obvious that interest groups are serving their agendas by creating hoaxes around the virus. 

One agenda is to maintain a high level of fear so that people will submit to the vaccinations that will mean tens of billions of dollars in profit for Big Pharma.

Another agenda is to blame Covid on Trump for calling for an end to lockdowns, not always wearing a mask, and supporting reopening of the economy. Democrats think this will boost their presidential chances.

Another agenda is to condition the pubic to accept control measures, like the ones in the movie, V for Vendetta, that destroy civil liberty and constitutional protections.  This enhances the power of the deep state over us all.

It is certainly the case that power and profit interests have dominated public health concerns.

One can understand why many view the Covd pandemic  as an orchestration.  The reports of Wuhan in China were frightening.  The lockdown and massive number of cases, the mortality of which were not known.  Despite the warning, the public health authorities in the entirety of the Western World were slow to take any measures and permitted the virus to infect the West..  No airline flights from infected countries were cancelled until after the virus was imported. Cruise ships continued to operate. No N95 masks were available. Measures, except in Sweden, were imposed that  themselves were harmful and perhaps caused more harm than Covid itself. 

Big Pharma using its paid experts, whose research it finances, and NIH, CDC, WHO, and other allegedly “independent” agencies financially connected to Big Pharma, exaggerated the threat, ruined the economy with closedowns, and now uses a defective Covid test to orcherestrat a second wave of Covid.  This past week NPR had on air a former Obama official who said we are doomed unless we lockdown 90% of the economy and all wear masks at all times.  NPR’s “expert” did not know the difference between masks that protect and those that don’t.

 And neither does most of the American medical profession. I have just completed my annual physical checkup.  Everywhere required a mask for entrance.  I wore a surgical mask and took with me a N95.  I told every nurse, every technican, every doctor, none of whom were wearing a N95 mask, that the masks they were wearing were useless, and I showed them the mask they needed if they were concerned about becoming Covid infected.

They were dumbfounded.  They had not a clue.  One doctor, a female from India, said, yes, you are correct, but we wear masks to reassure the patients who have been indoctrinated by the American media.

Covid is a danger, but so is life.  Why wreck the economy and civil liberty over this one danger, especially as the danger has been exaggerated?  Hardly anyone has died from Covid except people with co-morbidities.  These deaths are concentrated in the older age groups for the simple reason that the longer a person lives, the more morbidity the person has accumulated by poor health habits such as diet, smoking, alcohol, and lack of exercise.  These are the same morbidities that result in flu deaths.

Americans need to recover from their gullibiity.  Too many Americans believe the presstitutes and believe pubic authorities.  Too few Americans understand that every crisis, real or manufactured, is an opportunity for an interest group’s profit and power.  

The explanations that Americans get are controlled to serve power and profit.  If the public doesn’t catch on, America is doomed.

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

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

Armenia and its supporters are waging a five-phase infowar strategy against Azerbaijan which selectively relies on international legal claims, wrongly blames Turkey for sparking the Nagorno-Karabakh Continuation War, decontextualizes the unverified reports about Ankara allegedly sending Syrian fighters to the battlefield, tries to pit Russia against Turkey, and falsely portrays the conflict as a so-called “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam.

Millions of people around the World are victims of the fear campaign. Panic prevails. Day after day, the persistent impact of media disinformation concerning  the Killer Virus is overwhelming. 

Fear and panic, coupled with outright lies prevent people from understanding the logic of these far-reaching economic and social policies.  

An international network of lawyers is intent upon launching a class action Lawsuit. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a prominent lawyer presents the details of this project. (video below)

After nine months of research and analysis, we can confirm that the data and concepts have been manipulated with a view to sustaining the fear campaign. The estimates based on the RT-PCR test are meaningless: The RT-PCR test does not identify/detect the Covid-19 virus. What it detects are fragments of several viruses.

Confirmed by prominent scientists as well as by official public health bodies Covid-19 is not a dangerous virus.

Amply documented, the COVID-19 Pandemic has been used as a pretext to trigger a Worldwide process of economic, social and political restructuring which has resulted in mass poverty and Worldwide unemployment. It is destroying people’s lives. 

(Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 5, 2020)

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VIDEO 

Presentation by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, prominent lawyer.

Earlier and related (shorter) presentation (August 2020) focussing on the Class Action Law Suit

In September, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg announced plans [1] to spend at least $100 million in the battleground state of Florida to help elect Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Between November and March, Bloomberg, having a personal net worth of $50 billion, spent more than $1 billion on his failed bid for the Democratic nomination, including about $275 million on ads that criticized Trump. When he endorsed Biden, he announced that he would “work to make him the next President of the United States.” Bloomberg subsequently received a prime speaking slot on the final night of the Democratic convention this year.

Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign.

Though Trump personally contributed $66 million to his 2016 campaign, it would be unprecedented for an incumbent president to put his own money toward winning a second term.

According to a Bloomberg report [2], Trump’s re-election effort, including the Republican National Committee, has spent more than $800 million so far, while Biden and the Democratic National Committee spent about $414 million through July.

But Biden and the DNC raised $365 million in August, shattering a previous record one-month record of $193 million set by Barack Obama in 2008. Biden had $294 million in cash on hand at the end of July, about $6 million less than Trump’s re-election effort.

The principal fault in democracy, as it is practiced all over the world, is the election campaign funding part, because individuals and corporations that finance election campaigns always have ulterior motives: they treat political funding as investments from which they expect to make profits by influencing executive policy and legislation.

Pakistan

In Pakistan’s political system, there are three major structural faults. A representative and democratic political system weeds out corrupt and inept rulers in the long run. But Pakistan’s democracy was derailed by three decade-long martial laws and every time it got back to square one and had to start anew.

Democracy works like the trial-and-error method: politicians who fail to perform are cast aside and those who deliver are retained through election process. A martial law, especially if it is decade-long, gives a new lease of life to the already tried, tested and failed politicians.

The second major fault in Pakistan’s political system is the refusal of mainstream political parties to hold genuine intra-party elections. How can one champion democracy on a national level when one refuses to ensure representation within political parties?

Nevertheless, democracy evolves over time. Instead of losing faith in political system, one must remain engaged in repetitive electoral process, which delivers in the long run through scientifically proven trial-and-error method.

The abovementioned imperfections in democratic system, however, are only Pakistan-specific. Even when we take a look at stable democracies, like India for instance, even their politicians are not representative of the masses, because they work in the interest of moneyed elites rather than for the benefit of the underprivileged masses. This fact begs some further analysis of democracy as it is practiced in the developing world.

Politics is the exclusive prerogative of the ultra-rich in the developing world: the feudal landlords, industrialists and big businesses. The masses and members of the middle class cannot take part in elections, because election campaigns entail huge expenses.

If individual candidates have to spend money from their own pockets on their election campaigns, then how can one expect from such elected representatives that they will not use political office for personal gains in order to raise money for their expensive election campaigns for the next elections?

In the developing countries, politics works like any other commercial enterprise: individual candidates of political parties make an investment on their election campaigns and reap windfalls when they get elected as lawmakers in legislatures or as ministers in cabinets.

In the developed Western countries, on the other hand, individual candidates generally don’t spend money from their own pockets on election campaigns; instead, political parties raise funds from electoral donations which are then spent on election campaigns of political parties and their candidates.

But this practice is also subject to abuse, because donors of electoral funds, especially corporations, when they donate money to a particular political party’s election campaign; in return, they demand a say in the policymaking of governments of such political parties. Such governments are beholden to their financiers and hence cannot pursue independent policies in the interests of the masses.

A much better practice for generating election-related funds has been adopted in some developed countries, such as Canada and Germany, where state allocates funds from its national budget for political parties’ election campaigns if they manage to obtain a certain percentage of popular vote in elections.

Although this practice may sound onerous for impoverished developing democracies, if we take a look at all other governance-related expenses, it would appear feasible. Take the cost of maintaining large federal and provincial bureaucracies for instance, paying the salaries of bureaucrats, maintaining federal and provincial public service commissions, and academies etc.

Bureaucracy only constitutes the mid-tier of governance structure; the top-tier is comprised of politicians who formulate state policy. Paying for election-related expenses of political parties would require expenditure from national exchequer only once in four or five years, but its benefits can be enormous, and it would also avoid all the pitfalls of taking contributions from shady individual and corporate donors.

More to the point, in the developed Western democracies, a distinction is generally drawn between power and money. If we take a cursory look at some of the well-known Western politicians, excluding a handful of billionaires like Donald Trump, others like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Francois Hollande were successful lawyers from middle class backgrounds before they were elected as executives of their respective countries. Some Western executives even go back to their previous jobs and private practices once they retire from politics.

The Republican and Democratic parties in the US and the Conservative and Labor parties in the UK accept political contributions which are then spent on the election campaigns of their nominees, which generally are the members of the middle class.

Excluding this year’s US presidential elections, nowhere in the developed and politically evolved West it is expected of individual candidates to spend money from their own pockets on election campaigns, because instead of a political contest, it would then become a contest between the bank accounts of candidates.

Therefore, Western politicians typically are genuine representatives of their electorates, whereas the politicians of the developing world generally belong to the insular and detached elite classes and hence they don’t have much in common with the electorates they are supposed to represent.

Although money does influence politics even in the Western countries, that happens only through indirect means, such as the election campaign financing of political parties, congressional lobbying and advocacy groups etc.

In the developing democracies, like India and Pakistan, however, only the so-called ‘electable’ landowners, industrialists and billionaire businessmen can aspire for political offices due to election campaign-related expenses, and the masses are completely excluded from the entire electoral exercise.

This makes a sheer mockery of democratic process, because how can one expect from wealthy elites to protect the interests of the middle and lower classes? They would obviously enact laws and formulate public policy which would favor the financial interests of their own class without any regard for the interests of disenfranchised masses.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Mike Bloomberg to spend at least $100 million in Florida:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bloomberg-money-florida-biden/2020/09/12/af51bb50-f511-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html

[2] Trump Weighs Putting Up to $100 Million of His Cash Into Race:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-08/trump-weighs-putting-up-to-100-million-of-his-cash-into-race

Featured image is from Flickr

Image: India unemployment at record high

Millions of people around the World are victims of the fear campaign.  Panic prevails. Day after day, the persistent impact of media disinformation concerning  the Killer Virus is overwhelming. 

Fear and panic, coupled with outright lies prevent people from understanding the logic of these far-reaching economic and social policies.  

On March 11, 2020 the WHO declared a Worldwide pandemic, requiring the lockdown and closure of the national economies of 193 member states of the United Nations, with devastating economic and social consequences: unemployment, poverty, despair.

These authoritarian measures imposed on millions of people were accepted outright. Public opinion was led to believe that the measures were a solution to combating the “Killer Virus”. 

The Second Wave 

And now, seven months later, a  Covid-19 “Second Wave” has been announced.  The proposed solution to combating the “killer virus” is to prevent and postpone the reopening of the national economy, coupled with the enforcement of social distancing, the wearing of the face mask, etc.

Needless to say: at the outset of this Second Wave, the global economy is already in a state of chaos. While the reports fail to reveal the depth and seriousness of this global crisis, the evidence (which is still tentative and incomplete) speaks for itself.

The “Real Economy” and “Big Money”

Why are these Covid lockdown policies spearheading bankruptcy, poverty and unemployment?

There is an important relationship between the “Real Economy” and “Big Money”, namely the financial establishment.

What is ongoing is a process of concentration of wealth, whereby the financial establishment, (i.e. the multibillion dollar creditors) are slated to appropriate the real assets of both bankrupt companies as well as State assets.

The “Real Economy” constitutes “the economic landscape” of  real economic activity: productive assets, agriculture, industry, services, economic and social infrastructure, investment, employment, etc.

The real economy at the global and national levels is being targeted by the lockdown and closure of economic activity. The Global Money financial institutions are the “creditors” of the real economy.

The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.

Under the so-called “New Normal” Great Global Reset put forth by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the creditors (including billionaires) will eventually buy out important sectors of the real economy as well as take over bankrupt entities. The creditors will also seek to acquire ownership and/or control of  “public wealth” including the social and economic assets of the State through a massive indebtedness project.

“Global Governance” 

A system of  “Global Governance” controlled by powerful financial interests including corporate foundations and Washington think tanks oversees decision-making at both the national and global levels. The late David Rockefeller defined global governance as “Supranational Sovereignty of an intellectual elite and bankers”.

The Global Governance scenario imposes a totalitarian agenda of social engineering and economic compliance. It constitutes an extension of the neoliberal policy framework imposed on both developing and developed countries. It consists in scrapping “national autodetermination” and constructing a Worldwide nexus of pro-US proxy regimes controlled by a “supranational sovereignty” (World Government) composed of leading financial institutions, billionaires and their philanthropic foundations. (Michel Chossudovsky, August 2020)

In the sections below we briefly review the dramatic impacts of the closure of the global economy focussing on bankruptcies, poverty, unemployment, the outbreak of famines and education. Most of the figures quoted below are from UN sources, which tend to understate the seriousness of the global crisis.

The Wave of Bankruptcies

The wave of bankruptcies triggered by the closure of the World economy affects both Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) as well as large Corporations. The evidence suggests that small and medium sized enterprise are literally being wiped out.

According to a survey by the International Trade Centre, quoted by the OECD, pertaining to SMEs in 132 countries:

two-thirds of micro and small firms report that the crisis strongly affected their business operations, and one-fifth indicate the risk of shutting down permanently within three months. Based on several surveys in a variety of countries, McKinsey (2020) indicates that between 25% and 36% of small businesses could close down permanently from the disruption in the first four months of the pandemic. (OECD Report, emphasis added)

In the US, the bankruptcy process is ongoing.  According to a group of academics in a letter to Congress:

“we anticipate that a significant fraction of viable small businesses will be forced to liquidate, causing high and irreversible economic losses,. “Workers will lose jobs even in otherwise viable businesses. …

“A run of defaults looks almost inevitable. At the end of the first quarter of this year, U.S. companies had amassed nearly $10.5 trillion in debt — by far the most since the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis began tracking the figure at the end of World War II. “An explosion in corporate debt,” Mr. Altman said” (NYT, June, 16, 2020).

With regard to small businesses in the US:

almost 90% of small businesses experienced a strong (51%) or moderate (38%) negative impact from the pandemic; 45% of businesses experienced disruptions in supply chains; 25% of businesses has less than 1-2 months cash reserves.“ (OECD)

The results of a survey of over 5 800 small businesses in the United States:

… shows that 43% of responding businesses are already temporarily closed. On average, businesses reduced their employees by 40%. Three-quarters of respondents indicate they have two months or less in cash in reserve. … (OECD)

Mass Unemployment is Now Worldwide

Global Unemployment

In an August report, the International Labour Organization (ILO) confirms that:

The ILO does not focus on the political causes of mass unemployment, namely the actions taken by the governments, allegedly with a view to resolving the Covid pandemic.

Moreover, the ILO tends to underestimate both the levels as well as the increase in unemployment.

Unemployment in Latin America

In Latin America, the average unemployment rate was estimated at 8.1 per cent at the end of 2019. The ILO states, that it could rise by a modest 4 to 5 percentage points to 41 million unemployed.

In absolute numbers, these rates imply that the number of people who are looking for jobs but are not hired rose from 26 million before the pandemic to 41 million in 2020, as announced by ILO experts…

These estimates of the ILO and the World Bank are misleading. According to the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), the increase in unemployment for the Latin American region is of the order of 24 million, with jobs losses in Colombia of the order of 3.6 million, Brazil, 7.0 million and Mexico 7.0 million.

Even these figures tend to underestimate the dramatic increase in unemployment. And the situation is likely to evolve in the months ahead.

According to a Survey conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) the increase in unemployment in Mexico was of the order of 12.5 million in April, i.e. in the month following the March 11, 2020 lockdown and closure of the national economy.

Unemployment in the US

In the US, “more than 30 million people, over 15% of the workforce, have applied for unemployment benefits… ” (CSM, May 6, 2020)

Nothing remotely like what’s gone on since January ever happened before in the US.

For the 27th straight week, over one million working-age Americans filed claims for unemployment insurance (UI).

Numbers for the past week include 870,000 who applied for regular state UI, along with another 630,000 applying for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) — the federal program for workers not eligible for UI. (Stephen Lendman, September 25, 2020)

Unemployment in the European Union (EU)

“Unemployment across the whole of the European Union is expected to rise to nine percent in 2020, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns enforced by national governments”.

According to official EU figures:

Greece, Spain and Portugal … have once again seen large rises in youth unemployment since the start of the pandemic. Greece saw a surge from 31.7 percent in March to 39.3 percent in June, while Spain and Portugal had similar increases, from 33.9 percent to 41.7 percent and 20.6 percent to 27.4 percent, respectively.

The Outbreak of Famines

Famines have erupted in at least 25 developing countries according to UN sources. According to the FAO July 17, 2020

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) identifies 27 countries that are on the frontline of impending COVID-19-driven food crises, as the pandemic’s knock-on effects aggravate pre-existing drivers of hunger.

No world region is immune, from Afghanistan and Bangladesh in Asia, to Haiti, Venezuela and Central America, to Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Syria in the Middle East to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Liberia Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe in Africa.

The joint analysis by FAO and WFP warns these “hotspot countries” are at high risk of – and in some cases are already seeing – significant food security deteriorations in the coming months, including rising numbers of people pushed into acute hunger.

Nutrition and food insecurity is not limited to developing countries. In the US, according to Stephen Lendman:

“Around one in four US households experienced food insecurity this year — over 27% of households with children.

A Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research study estimates the number of food insecure households with children at nearly 30%.  Black families are twice as food insecure as their white counterparts. Latino households are also disproportionately affected.”

Education: The Impacts on Our Children

The very foundations of civil society are threatened. UNICEF estimates that 1.6 billion children and adolescents are affected by the closure of schools Worldwide.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe, a majority of countries have announced the temporary closure of schools, impacting more than 91 per cent of students worldwide… Never before have so many children been out of school at the same time…

Colleges and universities are also paralysed. Students are denied the right to education. While UNESCO confirms that more than one billion learners are affected, it offers no concrete solution or critique. The official narrative imposed by the so-called “private/public partnership” which is imposed on national governments is adopted at face value.

Closures have been implemented in 132 countries. See diagram below.

click map to access UNESCO report.

Let us be under no illusions: People’s lives are being destroyed

And this not due to the V the Virus. It’s a political decision by corrupt governments, acting on behalf of dominant financial institutions.

The Second Wave

And now, the financial establishment has instructed governments to implement what is tantamount to a second bankrupcy program using the pretext and justification that the number of Covid positive cases has increased.

All forms of social activity are affected including family reunions, weddings and funerals, public gatherings, not to mention the closure of schools, universities, museums, sports and cultural events. Police state measures are now being applied to enforce compliance. And people accept!

At the outset of the Second Wave, postponing the reopening of the global economy will indelibly contribute to wiping out (regional and local) small and medium sized enterprises worldwide, while also precipitating the bankruptcy of entire sectors of the World economy including airlines, hotel chains and the tourist industry.

The fear campaign has once again gone into high gear.

Official statistics based on faulty and manipulated estimates of so-called “confirmed” Covid positive cases constitute the basis for justifying these diabolical measures.

V the virus is presented as the Threat. But the Virus has no direct impact on key economic variables.

What is at stake is unprecedented: It’s a global neoliberal agenda carried out by corrupt governments on behalf of the financial establishment.

“The New Normal” and the Great Global Reset

Let us be under no illusions. Due the string of bankruptcies, the destruction of the informal urban sector, not to mention abysmal poverty and the collapse of purchasing power, it is unlikely that mass unemployment will be resolved under the “new normal”, particularly in view of the neoliberal policies which are slated to be imposed by the global creditors.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is now calling upon the adoption of a Great Global Reset, which will be managed by the global creditors.

According to Peter Koenig The Great Global Reset consists in:

“shoveling of more assets from the lower echelons to a small elite, through debt enslavement – shifting from consumer capitalism to Green (consumer) capitalism – and all with an allure of friendliness towards the environment and the world population. …    

[According to] WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab, (June June 3, 2020):

“The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” 

“You notice, the Great Reset is about preserving capitalism… ”  (emphasis added)

The fear campaign has become a political instrument, a mechanism of social subordination. People across the land, nationally and internationally have reluctantly accepted the official consensus, which is a big lie.

It is unfortunate that many progressive intellectuals who have an understanding of politics and the workings of global capitalism have endorsed the official corona narrative. The closing down of the national economy leading to poverty and mass unemployment is a derogation of  workers’ rights.

Common sense tells us that the closure of the global economy destroys people’s lives.

Disrupting the fear campaign constitutes the first step towards reversing the tide.

The war in Artsakh, or more commonly known as Nagorno-Karabakh, is becoming increasingly internationalized as foreigners are arriving to fight on both sides of the conflict. Artsakh, despite being internationally recognized as a part of Azerbaijan, has had a de facto independence since 1994 when Armenian forces won a decisive victory. On September 25, it was first revealed that Syrian militants were being transferred to Azerbaijan via Turkey. This was denied by the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry on the same day. It must be noted that the war in Artsakh began only two days after it was exposed Syrians were being transferred. Yet, despite photographs, videos, documents and testimonies made by Syrian militants themselves, the Azerbaijani government maintains the position that there are no foreign mercenaries fighting alongside the Azerbaijani army and that it is Armenian propaganda. All major international outlets have reported that these Syrians are not motivated by jihad, but rather money.

In given testimonies, a Syrian militant said “Jihadi, I swear by Allah don’t come, […] we have been deceived, everything is a lie. This is not a war, this is a meat grinder, people are dying, they cannot get the corpses.” Another Syrian militant said “Two days after the start of the war, everybody wants to return but they do not let us and […] they make us stay here.” This was in reference to Turkish military handlers lying to the transferred Syrian militants about the situation in Artsakh and forcing them to stay and fight.

At the same time though, Armenians from across the diaspora, including those in Greece, the Netherlands and the U.S., have already left or a preparing to go and fight in Artsakh, meaning that citizens of Western countries will be embroiled in this conflict. This also comes as it was revealed that ethnic Greeks are volunteering to go and fight in Artsakh, with one source telling Greek City Times that the first batch of volunteers amount to 30 men, while a former non-commissioned officer claimed to Sputnik Hellas that the number is as high as 500. Whatever the truth may be, it is being widely reported in Greek media that tens if not hundreds of volunteers from Greece are going to Artsakh, motivated by religion and solidarity with Armenians, and without receiving a salary. It has also been revealed that the Greek minority in Armenia, mostly descendants of Greek Genocide survivors, are fighting alongside the Armenian army.

This sets a dangerous precedent as this war is becoming increasingly internationalized and threatens to embroil the entire region in conflict if it cannot be contained. The First Artsakh War (1988-1994) saw Greek and Russian volunteers fight alongside the Armenians. Chechens, Afghan Mujahedeen’s, Turkey’s Gladio Gray Wolves, Ukrainian Far Right militants fought on the side of Azerbaijan in the First War. Foreign fighters in Artsakh is not a new phenomenon. With Armenian-Greeks and ethnic Greeks fighting in Artsakh against Turkish-sponsored Syrian militants and the Azerbaijani military, Athens could potentially be dragged into the conflict unwillingly.

Hikmet Hajiyev, aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, told reporters on Friday that Greeks were fighting in Artsakh, describing the volunteers as “mercenaries.” The Greek government has not responded to the statement made by Hajiyev and most likely will not as relations between the two countries remain tense. While accepting the credentials on September 4 from Greece’s newly appointed ambassador to Baku, Nikolaos Piperigos, Aliyev directly told the diplomat:

“I can tell you, and it is no secret, that Turkey is not only our friend and partner, but also a brotherly country for us. Without any hesitation whatsoever, we support Turkey and will support it under any circumstances. We support them [Turkey] in all issues, including the issue in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

The comments by Aliyev are unprecedented when considering the usual formalities of a head of state accepting the credentials of a new ambassador. With these diplomatic tensions already existing between Athens and Baku weeks before Azerbaijan began its offensive against Artsakh, it is unlikely that Greece will try and prevent volunteers from going to Armenia. Some Greek sources claim that many of the volunteers are ex-special forces, meaning it is likely that the Greek military will be indirectly involved to some extent. This also comes as Greek and Cypriot Members of the European Parliament are leading efforts to try and impose sanctions on Azerbaijan for launching a war.

The internationalization of the Artsakh War because of the influx of foreigner fighters, especially the Syrian militants, would be a major concern for both Iran and Russia who would be feeling uncomfortable having such radical forces on or close to their borders. The internationalization of the war has the potential to spark conflict across the Caucasus as militants from North Caucasia, particular Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya, could travel to Azerbaijan to fight, and gain invaluable experience to take with them on their return to Russia. Although Russia and Iran have called for a ceasefire and an end to hostilities, they have not made strong efforts to try and end the war, which if not contained and ended soon, could potentially spill over into the North Caucasus or Iran’s northern provinces which is overwhelmingly ethnic Azeri.

The war could also potentially become a part of the wider Greek-Turkish rivalry that already exists in the East Mediterranean, Cyprus and Libya. Greece will not be directly militarily involved, but it is highly probable that there would be constant communication between the Greek military and the volunteers. This comes as Turkey is directly involved in the Artsakh War, not only by transferring Syrian fighters and arms to Azerbaijan, but also using its air force when we remember one of its F-16 fighter jets downed an Armenian Su—25 aircraft last Tuesday.

Without being contained and the front lines having an influx of foreign fighters, there is a real possibility that the internationalization of the conflict through these forces could set the entire region into conflict if a ceasefire agreement is not made quickly.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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After 15 years divided and in constant conflict of interest, the main Palestinian political forces, Hamas and Fatah, finally reached an agreement to hold new elections in Palestine. According to Hamas spokesman Saleh al-Arouri, there was a real consensus between the two parties and there is no longer any interest in pursuing divisions in Palestinian domestic politics. The negotiations were mediated by Turkey and the agreement signed in Istanbul. A commission has been created to establish the electoral calendar. Apparently, legislative elections will be held within six months. Then a date will be set for the presidential elections and for the Palestinian National Council. Another commission was also established in order to unify the popular struggle, creating a unified Palestinian national leadership.

The last legislative elections held in Palestine took place in 2006, when Hamas had an unexpected and significant victory. At the time, Fatah entered into a coalition with Hamas to govern the country, but international non-recognition of the election results harmed the alliance and the national unity. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by many western countries, which have promoted a boycott against Palestine, with sanctions and economic blockade. Since then, Palestine has had two parallel governments: one in the Gaza Strip, led by Hamas, and the other in the city of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, led by Fatah.

Although Palestine has almost 30 different political parties, only Hamas and Fatah are organizations with real political strength, capable of mobilizing armed paramilitary groups and facing Israeli occupation, forming parallel governments and semi-governments in areas under foreign domination. This is why, in order to create a Palestinian political unity, it is of vital importance that these parties are united in an agreement, even though they preserve their differences.

However, many difficulties may still arise with the implementation of the agreement. The elections are scheduled to take place across the Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which are areas under occupation. Ensuring the security of the election will be a great challenge. Israeli troops are currently blocking traffic between Gaza and the West Bank, which not only prevents Palestinians from moving, but, above all, hampers a vote-counting process.

The only way to guarantee a democratic, legitimate and multi-party process in Palestine, with voting power for all citizens, regardless of their location, is through strong international cooperation. The United Nations, in order to avoid conflicts and the increase of ethnic violence between Israelis and Palestinians, must inspect the functioning of the elections in a politically impartial way, taking care only for the legality of the election and for peace. But is this kind of action really possible?

With Hamas being considered a terrorist group (as well as some Fatah’s militias) by the West and with the growing proximity between Israel, France and the Arab world, the situation seems far from any peaceful solution. It is important to note that an agreement between Hamas and Fatah was only possible due to the actions of Turkey, which has recently become a pivotal country in the management of conflicts in the Middle East. With the wave of peace agreements between Arab countries and Israel, Palestine has lost some of its greatest historical allies against Israeli occupation. This was precisely why the Palestinians in recent years have invested in strong cooperation with Turkey, a country that is considered a greater threat to Arab interests than the State of Israel itself. Istanbul has now become the Palestinians’ only hope.

Turkey mediated the negotiations with the clear objective of building Palestinian national unity, for which reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah is an inevitable step. Istanbul has an interest in consolidating Palestinian unity to rival Israel and its new Arab allies, but it has no interest in policing the functioning of the elections, as this could lead to a direct confrontation. Therefore, Turkish mediations will be fruitless and Palestinian national unity will probably be merely figurative.

Iran, a country that has also increased ties with Turkey and that shares a mutual rivalry against the State of Israel and the pro-Western Arab nations, could be a hope for countering Israeli aggressiveness. But, specifically in relation to the elections, Tehran would hardly risk itself in any involvement, as the general tendency is to avoid any possibility of direct confrontation.

Considering that Israel has not yet abandoned its West Bank annexation plan, expectations for the near future in the Middle East are the worst. Perhaps the approach to the Turks was a serious strategic mistake on the part of the Palestinians, without which the other Arab countries would not have joined diplomacy with Israel.

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

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On Saturday a small, socially distanced vigil of 18 people for Julian Assange at Piccadilly Circus was broken up by twice that number of police and one elderly man arrested and taken into custody.

The little group of activists have been holding the vigil every week. I had just arrived to thank them and was astonished to see eight police vans and this utterly unnecessary police action.

There could not be a clearer example of “Covid legislation” being used to crack down on unrelated, entirely peaceful political dissent.

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I was myself questioned by a policeman who asked me where I lived, how long I had been in London and why, what I had been doing at the Assange trial and when I was going back to Edinburgh. (You can see me very briefly at 10mins 30 secs trying to reason with a policeman who was entirely needlessly engaging in macho harassment of a nice older lady).

Later in the evening I had dinner with Kristin Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks. I returned to my hotel about 11pm, did my ablutions and went to bed. Just after midnight I was awoken by an insistent and extremely loud pounding at the door of my room. I got naked out of bed and groped my way to open the door a chink. A man dressed like the hotel staff (black trousers, white shirt) asked me when I was checking out. I replied in the morning, and pointed out the hotel knew I was leaving the next day. Why was he asking in the middle of the night? The man said “I was asked to find out”. I closed the door and went back to bed.

The next morning I complained in the strongest possible terms, the hotel refunded me one night’s accommodation. The duty manager who did this added “It was not our fault” but said they could not tell me any more about why this had happened.

The person at my door had a native English accent. I had been staying in the hotel over four weeks and I think I know all of the customer facing staff – not a single one of them has a native English accent. I had never seen that man before. This was a four star hotel from a major chain. I suspect “do not get sleeping guests out of bed after midnight to ask them what time they are checking out” is pretty high on their staff training list. I cannot help but in my mind put it together with my encounter with the police earlier that day, and their interest in when I was returning to Edinburgh, but there seems no obvious purpose other than harassment.

The hotel incident may just be in the strange but unexplained category. The busting of the Assange vigil earlier is of a piece with the extraordinary blanking of the hearing by corporate media and the suppression of its reporting on social media. These are dangerous times.

I am now safely back home in Edinburgh.

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The following is part of the text of my thoughts about the comments posted at my YouTube Channel in regard to a newsreel I uploaded over four months ago which was a 1977 report on the training and activities of the Rhodesian Army Special Forces unit known as the Selous Scouts.

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The Content of the Newsreel

The original source gives very little details except to name the news reporter, identify Major Ronald Reid-Daly and provide short descriptions of what is happening in the reel. The title of upload and the brief elaborations within the text are my creation.

I will go into details later about the allegations of Selous Scouts involvement in False Flag operations. Needless to say, some comments here which have dismissed this as anti-Rhodesian “BBC Marxist Death Cult Propaganda” are wide of the mark. The ITN report gives a sympathetic portrayal of the Selous Scouts. Any rational person can hear the allegations regarding the massacre of the missionaries to Major Reid-Daly and his denial. I uploaded a short interview with Reid-Daly conducted by another news agency and the same question was put to him, and the same denial was issued. There was good reason for him to be asked based on circumstantial evidence. What is more the subsequent failure of a Selous Scout operation involving the bombing of churches in Salisbury in 1980 and to which I alluded to in the description box vindicates that line of questioning.

If anyone simply sees this newsreel as merely “anti-Rhodesian” then it speaks of an inflexible and ineradicable mindset of indoctrination -the very mindset which such people accuse both their real and perceived opponents of having.

Rhodesia: A Colonial Settler Project Against Which Rebellion Was a Perfectly Natural Reaction

Rhodesia was a colonial settler project. This involved subjugation, land expropriation and the imposition of a caste system within which the subjugated Black Africans were exploited by Whites of mainly British descent.  The social and economic system may have appeared a benign one to the Rhodesians who favourably compared it (and still do so) to the Apartheid system in neighbouring South Africa, but it was nonetheless a system based on the Whites monopolising access to the country’s natural resources and keeping the Africans whose lands they acquired by force in their place.

Judging by many comments made by supporters of the late Rhodesia on this upload, it may come as a shock to more than a few, but human history is replete with societies who have rebelled against such a state of affairs. This was the case with Algeria, Palestine, the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe, and Kenya. And where the native populations who were looked upon variously as “Untermensch” or “uncivilised” (the White Nationalist term today would be “low I.Q.” peoples), avoided extermination, they fought back to reclaim their native lands.

The Black Africans of what came to be the territory of Rhodesia were no different from Catholic Irish resisting British colonisation; the Muslim Algerians resisting French domination, the Black African Kenyans resisting the British or the Palestinians resisting the militias of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and the State of Israel once it was established.

This allusion to Marxist-thinking as the root of the evil which stimulated Black Africans to fight against the Rhodesian “paradise” is as absurd as it is lazy in its construct. The fact that the Soviet Union and China gave aid and support to liberation movements in Africa and Asia, and to some extent in Latin America, was more an accident of history. Resistance against any colonial settler entity such as Rhodesia, is an ineluctable facet of the human psyche.

The Poles and other Slavs who were referred to as subhuman by the Nazis were not concerned about Hitler’s assertion that Germany’s Slavic neighbours owed all the achievements in culture to the German race. The Irish who were lampooned as ape-like, rowdy, and prone to fecundity did not care too much about British-English civilisation which under Cromwell had massacred them. It was under British rule after all that the devastating famine took place. Today, this mentality persists in Irish Republican communities who perceive Israel as an unjust and oppressive colonial settler state and support the Palestinian cause, while the Unionists take the opposite view.

The Kenyans correctly wanted their land back, as did the Algerians and as do the Palestinians. Why do Old Rhodesians resent the idea that the Blacks would want their land back? As with the aforementioned peoples, the Black African resented the paternalistic and oppressive system, and resisted.

Cecil Rhodes, the man who gave the country its name, was at the heart of the system through which Black African workers were brutally exploited. If such a statement strikes any one as being somehow “Marxist”, it proves the point of the distorted lens through which some Old Rhodesians choose to view the world. The massacres of Ndebele people prior to and after the Rudd Agreement using maxim guns was a deliberate cruelty which went further than the prosecution of war. It was genocide.

Land expropriation, labour exploitation, and genocide: that was the foundation of Rhodesia.

The Insurgency in Rhodesia: False Flags, Black Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

I note comments relating to the news reporter’s reference to the murder of European Roman Catholic Missionaries in 1977 as having possibly been an operation carried out by the Selous Scouts have been met by disbelief and recourse to the tired mantra of the “biased Marxist media”. As I wrote in the description box, the Scouts specialised in irregular warfare with its methods including “infiltration, assassination, abduction, torture, sabotage and blackmail”.

For those who are ignorant of the concept of the “False Flag” operation i.e. the carrying out of a mission designed to discredit the opposition, I would simply ask you to find out about “Operation Susannah”, an operation conducted by Israeli Military Intelligence in 1954. Known as “The Lavon Affair”, it was a botched attempt by the Israelis to disrupt closer relations between Nasser of Egypt and the Americans and the British. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was part and parcel of this sort of playbook. You are also invited to find out about “Operation Northwoods”, a diabolical plan approved by the Pentagon which sought to stage terror attacks on American soil to blame on Cuban Communists in order to present an opportunity to invade and overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Again, read up on the Anni diPiombo (or “Years of Lead”) in Italy from the late 1960s to the middle 1980s when NATO’s Gladio network enabled Fascist-sympathising militias to murder innocent civilians in order to blame Marxist and Anarchist groups. The bombs in Piazza Fontana (1969) and Peteano (1972) provide examples of this diabolical “Strategy of Tension” (“La Strategia della Tensione”). The Bologna bomb in 1980 was also an example although there was no question from the outset that it was the responsibility of a neo-Fascist group.

Now interestingly, Major Reid-Daly served in Malaya where Frank Kitson, the exponent-in-chief of the counter-insurgency doctrine of the British Army, was developing (after his experience in Kenya) his methods which encompassed the aforementioned specialisms of the Selous Scouts, added to which was the use of “Black Propaganda”. Kitson used his colonial experiences in Northern Ireland against the Irish Republican Army. Feel free to search for information on the activities of the Military Reaction Force (MRF) which apart from assassinating suspected Republican guerrillas, murdered innocent civilians in order to blame the IRA.

Anyone who researches the murder of the missionaries will find out that it was not an open and shut case for affixing responsibility to any of the parties. As in all wars, a propaganda war was being fought, and Rhodesia was no exception. Using the dark arts of false flag operations was evidently part of this. In fact, as I mention in the description box, two Black African members of the Scouts who were involved in planting explosives in churches in Salisbury in February 1980, were themselves accidentally blown up by one of their bombs. The aim of this Selous Scouts operation was to make it seem that operatives working for the military wing of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF organisation had planted the bombs (ZANU literature was left at the various locations) because as a Marxist, Mugabe (the Jesuit Marxist) was “against” Christianity. This was an attempt to discredit Mugabe’s political party in the run up to the elections in what was to become Zimbabwe.

Therefore, it is not inconceivable that Black members of the Selous Scouts disguised as African guerrillas were used to conduct the massacres of the missionaries in order to present the African militias as anti-clerical.

At least one comment refers to the “savageness” of the guerrillas when dealing with “uncooperative” African villagers. I do not know the ins and outs of every single facet of the Bush War in Rhodesia, but that commentator and others reading this should be aware of cruelties practised by the Rhodesian side. There is a film I have yet to upload about a British mercenary hired to combat poaching. This man was allowed to shoot at Black Africans at once a 6PM curfew came without considering whether his target was a poacher or late getting home. And to claim his bounty, he did not have to produce a dead body, only the right ear from it.

The Selous Scouts acted with savagery, killing innocent civilians in neighbouring countries -not by mistake i.e. the euphemistic “collateral damage”, but as a means of psychological warfare. A good example of this was in the Scouts raid on a ZANLA camp, situated at Nyadzonya-Pungwe, Mozambique in August 1976. They got to the camp by disguising their armoured vehicles in the colours of the Mozambique Army (a classic False Flag tactic) and, according to Major Reid-Daly, massacred up to a thousand.

It was seemingly an impressive tally, except that the Selous Scouts had shot many guerrillas who were unarmed as they stood in formation for a parade. The camp was formally registered as a refugee camp with the United Nations. Guerrillas were present, but the Scouts raiding party saw fit to set fire to the camp hospital following which all the patients were burned alive.

The thinly veiled racism among some of these comments seek to promote the idea of savagery being the preserve of Africans while forgetting European-originated depravity. It is interesting how the brutalities inflicted on Africans by European colonial powers prefigured those visited on their fellow Europeans including Jews during the period leading up to World War 2 and of course during the war itself: the genocide against the Namaqua and Herrero by Kaiser-era German colonisers, and the use of bodily parts in experiments are just two. The Boer has not forgotten the British concentration camps and neither have the Ethiopians who endured Italian camps in Somaliland and who were massacred by Black Shirts in Addis Ababa in 1937.

In the case of Rhodesia, how can the facts of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign employed in the 1970s be ignored? Bulldozers and flamethrowers were used to defoliate 54,000 square miles of countryside. The “Free Fire Zones” set up by the Rhodesian Army meant that any Black African found within them would be shot on sight. There were curfews imposed on the Black population (effectively martial law) and there was internment and forced resettlement.

There was a campaign of terror which did not stop with killing Black African guerrillas – many of whom were not killed in action but tortured prior to being murdered- it also extended to Black African civilians.

The Insurgency in Rhodesia: A Lost Cause

Some of the commentators on this page are Black. They have objectively stated that the Selous Scouts were a formidable fighting force. I have acknowledged this fact in the description box. But they were fighting a lost cause. The frequent references to being “betrayed” by the British (and the Americans) has a hollow ring to it. It is redolent of the “stab in the back” rationale popularised by German Nationalists in the aftermath of World War 1.

The war in Rhodesia, as was the case with the wars in Angola and Mozambique, came at the tail end of the decolonisation of Africa. The Selous Scouts doubtlessly had many victories, but so did the French military in Algeria, the British in Kenya and Aden and the Portuguese in southern Africa.

Rhodesia would have collapsed without the support of the British whose kith and kin policy essentially held sway right to the end. They did not invade Rhodesia after UDI. The British bypassed sanctions by supplying Rhodesia with oil through Mozambique until the Portuguese withdrew.

Modern Day Racial Warfare & Identity Politics

It seems to me that those who yearn for old Rhodesia have fused their ideological raison d’etre with the present-day manifestations of identity politics. They are White Nationalists or in the parlance of many on the mainstream political left, “White Supremacists”. The use of the term White Supremacist is in many ways an objective one. White Rhodesians after all enjoyed a great amount of privilege; real, tangible privilege. Not the asinine expressions utilised in today’s “Culture wars” where terms such as “White Privilege”, “Black Privilege”, “Jewish Privilege” and so on are frequently used. They enjoyed a standard of living which owed a great deal to the subjugation and exploitation of the indigenous Black African population. The linkage with White Supremacy comes from the use of the old Rhodesian Flag as a source of militant White identity as was the case with the mass murderer Dylann Roof. There was also the case of the Alberta-based Canadian soldiers who were discovered to be selling White Nationalist-Supremacist flags, badges, and literature.

Conclusion

The truth is that Rhodesia was no beacon of democracy which offered its Black African population a vision for the future. Rhodesia collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Some such as quite a number of commentators on this post can gloat about the failings of the political leaders of Zimbabwe, but the truth is that they are living in denial about the nature of the system and the fact that that system was doomed to failure. And as was the case with the French-Algerian Pieds-Noir and the Boer, they must face up to this.

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Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. This article was originally published on his blog site.

Featured image is CC BY-SA 3.0

The Armenian missile strike on Azerbaijan’s second largest city of Ganja outside the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone shows that the landlocked state is going for broke out of desperation to internationalize the war as soon as possible since it knows how much it stands to lose if it can’t successfully generate more support.

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One of the US prosecution’s key medical witnesses in the Julian Assange hearing, who claimed that Assange’s risk of suicide is ‘manageable’ if extradited to the US, works for an academic institute that is funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and linked to the US Department of Defence, it can be revealed.

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Dr Nigel Blackwood, a reader in forensic psychiatry at King’s College London (KCL), told the extradition hearing in London last week that Julian Assange was suffering only “moderate” depression.

Giving evidence as an expert witness for the US prosecution, Dr Blackwood rebutted other experts’ findings on the seriousness of Assange’s condition, adding his suicide risk was “manageable”. He told the court: “Mr Assange has proved himself to be a very resilient and very resourceful man, and he has underplayed that.”

At the request of US prosecution lawyers, Dr Blackwood examined Assange during two meetings in March. In his written submission to the court, he said that it would “not be unjust” to extradite Assange to the US.

Declassified has discovered that Dr Blackwood’s professional work at KCL is linked to a cluster of academic groups which are funded by or associated with the British and American militaries.

Declassified has seen a contract showing that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) provided more than £2-million to KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry for the years 2013-16 for a project which KCL is forbidden to mention in public without MOD approval. It is likely the contract has been renewed and is still active.

The £2.2m contract between King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry and the UK Ministry of Defence. Click here to read the document.

The project is managed “on behalf of the Secretary of State for Defence” and is for Phase 4 of a “wellbeing” study of veterans of Britain’s recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to “inform MOD decision-making”, the project began in 2003.

The value of the first three phases of the contract is not known but if the Institute of Psychiatry received a similar level of funding for Phase 4 as they had previously, the total contract value would be more than £8-million. A spokesperson for the institute refused Declassified’s request to divulge the amount of funding from the MOD.

Dr Blackwood works in the Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, which is part of KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. He told Declassified he was aware of MOD funding the institute in which he works, but said he had never personally worked on an MOD contract.

Asked by Declassified if he declared any conflicts of interest to the hearing, Blackwood responded, “I had no conflicts to declare.”

However, Declassified has found that the Forensic Research Group (FRG) that Dr Blackwood heads at KCL — and which “explores the complex relationship between mental disorders and crime” — is conducting research which uses data from Phase 3 of the MOD-funded project.

In addition, the FRG works “in collaboration” with the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR), which is part-funded by the MOD and was “originally funded by the US Department of Defence”. A KCMHR webpage, which is undated, states that “latterly” the centre is being funded by the Department of Defence “again”.

US Department of Defence

The King’s College website states that the KCMHR is “the leading civilian UK centre of excellence for military health research and independent of the UK Ministry of Defence”. The centre notes that it also “collaborates” with the UK Ministry of Justice and the US Department of Defence.

The KCMHR is a “joint initiative between the Institute of Psychiatry and the Department of War Studies and makes significant contributions to UK military personnel policy”, the university website states.

KCL’s Departments of War Studies and Defence Studies “have a number of contracts/agreements with various departments within government, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence”, according to a response to a Freedom of Information Act request sent to KCL by Declassified.

However, “more specific information” on the contracts themselves was withheld by KCL because “the majority of contracts are listed as classified under UK security legislation. This means we are not permitted to disclose details, since they predominantly involve areas either directly or pertaining to the UK security services.”

The university also said disclosure would damage its commercial opportunities. “Two of the largest contracts [with the UK government] are due for renewal in the next 12 months and will go to open tender,” it explained.

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta visited King’s College War Studies Department in 2013, saying: “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience.”

Panetta, who also served as director of the CIA from 2009 to 2011, recently said in an interview that the purpose of prosecuting Assange was to stop other journalists from revealing information about the US government: “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those who were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.”

One of the two co-directors of the KCHMR, which collaborates with Dr Blackwood’s FRG, is Nicola Fear, a professor of epidemiology and a former MOD staffer who is on the study team working on the MOD “wellbeing” project.

According to the centre, Professor Fear “leads several studies… which have been awarded funding from the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defence”.

One recent project led by Professor Fear for the KCHMR, which was funded by the US Department of Defence, studies how the military deployments of parents affect children’s emotional development.

King’s College London rejects a Declassified Freedom of Information Act request for its UK government contracts “since they predominantly involve areas either directly or pertaining to the UK security services”.  Click here to read the document.

A biography of Professor Fear notes that “Nicola frequently briefs senior government officials and military leaders on the work of KCMHR and the impact of service life on personnel, veterans and families”. From 2014-15, she worked on a US army contract.

Declassified has also discovered other KCMHR projects funded by the US Department of Defence. Different KCL researchers have received funding from the US Office of Naval Research for a project which “examined the political, social and the strategic dimension of cybersecurity”.

The KCMHR’s other co-director is the vice-dean of Academic Psychiatry, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, who is one of the “approved” researchers on the MOD “wellbeing” contract.

The KCHMR has been developing data-sharing links with colleagues in the US, according to the university’s webpage. “We want to make increasing use of the possibilities of electronic data linkage, reflecting the fact that the UK and US have been fighting the same war,” Professor Wessely is quoted as saying.

Wessely and Fear are two of the four members of the “senior team” of KCL’s Academic Department of Military Mental Health (ADMMH) which, according to KCL’s website, appears to be funded solely by the MOD. The ADMMH “works directly” with the KCMHR, with which it shares a research policy, and has“both academic and military personnel seconded to the unit”.

The other two senior members of the ADMMH, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Jones and Major Amos Simms, are both serving UK military personnel.

The ADMMH says its “mission is to act as the uniformed focus for military mental health research” for the UK military. It adds: “The centre aims to gather, assess and report on information that will enhance the health and operational effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces.”

A slide from a presentation by Professor Nicola Fear, the co-director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, advertising the centre’s US Department of Defense-funded study on the children of military personnel.

Forensic research

Dr Blackwood told Declassified he had never personally worked with the KCMHR, adding that his “colleague” has “worked with” the centre examining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the ex-service population.

That colleague, Dr Deirdre MacManus, is the co-team leader with Dr Blackwood of the FRG and — according to the KCL website — a member of the KCMHR team. She is also part of the study teamworking on the MOD “wellbeing” contract.

MacManus, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry, has been funded directly by the UK military to produce research. MacManus also appears to have published a number of outputs produced from the MOD “wellbeing” contract alongside academic papers co-authored with, among others, a serving member of the British army.

Dr MacManus and Dr Blackwood co-authored an academic paper in September 2019 on the subject of PTSD in prisons, which “identified significant associations between PTSD and suicidality”. This was a subject on which Blackwood gave evidence to the Assange hearing.

Intelligence training

The War Studies Department at KCL, which co-founded the KCMHR with the Institute of Psychiatry, is also linked to the UK and US intelligence community.

The department was in the mid-2000s commissioned by the “professional head of intelligence analysis” — working within the Cabinet Office’s Intelligence and Security Secretariat — “to develop a course for experienced [intelligence] analysts” in order to “enhance the analytic capability of the United Kingdom’s intelligence community”.

A study titled “Teaching Intelligence Analysts in the UK” and published in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) in-house journal, notes that: “Exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”

Co-written by David Omand — a former director of the UK’s largest intelligence agency, GCHQ, who teaches on KCL’s War Studies course — the article notes that “the CIA had recognised as early as 1960 how beneficial it would be to use universities as a means of intelligence training”.

The paper continues by noting that KCL “offers a containing space in which analysts from every part of the [intelligence] community can explore with each other the interplay of ideas about their profession”.

The Department of War Studies is currently home to a number of personnel connected to the US militaryand intelligence community.

The university also runs a cross-department centre — called the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research — which brings King’s College academics together to look at the “sociotechnical aspects of cybersecurity”. The body runs “in association” with the National Cybersecurity Centre, an arm of GCHQ.

Consent of the MOD

The contract seen by Declassified is made out between the “Secretary of State for Defence” and the “Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London”. Worth £2.17-million, Phase 4 of the project ran from February 2013 to January 2016. Earlier phases were renewed in 2006 and 2010.

The Institute for Psychiatry refused to disclose to Declassified the total level of funding provided by the MOD, saying that the university’s “web pages are very comprehensive and should help with your queries”. KCL’s website does not appear to provide such details.

The contract stipulates that KCL cannot “without the prior written consent of the [MOD], advertise or publicly announce that work is being undertaken for the [MOD]”. It adds that KCL researchers “may not communicate on these matters with any communications media representatives” unless they are granted written permission by the MOD.

Declassified searched the British government’s contract database and could find no other contract between the MOD and a department of psychiatry in the UK.

The contract states that “the Ministry of Defence did not expect, and was unprepared for, the criticism that arose some years after the 1991 Gulf conflict over the so-called Gulf War Syndrome”. The project’s purpose is to “have early warning of any similar problem arising from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to be in a position to respond appropriately with targeted medical research”.

Excerpts from the contract between King’s College’s Institute of Psychiatry and the UK Ministry of Defence.

Funding of the Forensic Research Group

Dr Blackwood told Declassified his FRG at King’s College had never received funding, directly or indirectly, from the MOD.

The group does, however, receive funds from organisations associated with the British military. One of its six listed funders is Help for Heroes, which supports wounded military personnel. The organisation receives funds from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, an MOD-funded charity that was until 2018 based inside the ministry.

Another funder of the FRG is the Forces in Mind Trust (FIMT), which supports former British military personnel. The chair of FIMT’s board, Hans Pung, is President of RAND Europe and a former US army officer.

Other directors include Major General Martin Rutledge, who served in UK military headquarters during the Iraq campaign, and General Sir John McColl, a former deputy commander of Nato.

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Matt Kennard is head of investigations and Mark Curtis is editor of Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world. 

Featured image: US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta speaks at Kings College in London, England, 18 January 2013. (Photo: DoD / Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s condition is improving as he is being treated for COVID-19 at a military hospital…” so says the media pundits’ drone on.

Yet does he really have COVID-19? This ever devolving disease seems to acquire a broader and broader definition every month. Soon enough merely breathing will be a sign that you have COVID-19.

Back in December 2019, it was only people with pneumonia who were classified with this disease. The journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology says COVID-19 was first called “Wuhan pneumonia.” Chinese scientists later renamed the virus “novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia (NCIP).”

So we went from the disease being defined by life-threatening pneumonia to a definition now so broad to include a headache, chills and a loss of taste, confirms the CDC.

Dr. Gerald Evans, head of Queen’s University’s infectious diseases division, told the National Post:

“That fact that [Trump] has worrisome features like high fever and hypoxemia (low blood-oxygen levels) early in his illness, suggests the possibility that a more severe second course may yet be in the future.”

Hypoxia? According the Mayo Clinic, Trump would need to dip under 90% before he deserved that label; yet the CNN reports that his oxygen level only went as low as 93%.

93% is not really all that low. I have to wonder if Trump’s medical staff have been regularly checking his oxygen levels prior to his diagnosis (in order to have a baseline). My oximeter shows my oxygen levels go as low 96% (at rest) on a regular basis. I’m a little more than half Trump’s age and complete a 7km run each day (with my mouth closed). So if a highly stressed 74-year-old man’s oxygen saturation dips to only 3% less than mine, I’m not going to sound the COVID alarm.

Despite popular belief 99% or 100% blood saturation level may be a sign of ill health.

“An oxygen saturation of 100 percent would suggest that the bond between red blood cells and oxygen molecules is too strong, reducing the blood cells’ ability to deliver oxygen to muscles, organs and tissues,” writes world-renown breathing specialist Patrick McKeown in his book The Oxygen Advantage. “We need the blood to release oxygen, not hold on to it.”

In other words, a drop in blood O₂ is often a sign that your cells are absorbing more oxygen, not always necessarily that your lungs are delivering less. The fact that some people can maintain a 99% reading is actually more alarming to me. It’s a sign that their cells may not be absorbing enough oxygen from their bloodstream.

Therefore, if Trump is holding only 93% he doesn’t have hypoxia, pneumonia or a severe respiratory condition. At this time last year, if someone was infected with a coronavirus and was short of breath, do you know what we would have said they had?

The common cold.

Goldman’s Cecil Medicine, Expert Consult Premium Edition says that 15% of colds are caused by the coronaviruses. But the common cold doesn’t kill people, does it?

Yes, it does. “Most people recover within about 7-10 days,” says the CDC in Common Colds: Protect Yourself and Others. “However, people with weakened immune systems, asthma, or respiratory conditions may develop serious illness, such as bronchitis or pneumonia.”

Sound familiar?

COVID-19 is quite possibly a frightening new name for the common cold (which sometimes becomes deadly). History may look back at all this sensationalism over a president having a cold and get a good belly laugh. My guess is Mr. Trump will soon be back in the Oval Office polarizing America one Tweet at a time.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from a CBC video

One of the more diabolical aspects of the protracted COVID ‘crisis’ in countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, is the intellectually dishonest claim that Coronavirus in their countries is somehow different from the Coronavirus in other western countries. 

It’s like there are two parallel universes now. While the Anglosphere continues to ramp-up its emergency ‘pandemic’ measures and mandatory mask and quarantine policies, their Scandinavian counterparts like Sweden, Norway or Denmark have already returned to life as normal; no masks on public transport (although Norway just introduced a new rule today advising masks on crowded carriages), no obsessive social distancing rules, no snap lockdowns, and certainly no draconian laws and threats of £10,000 fines made by government leaders, or holding the country hostage until a wonder vaccine arrives in the spring. The contrast couldn’t be more extreme.

Sweden’s success should be obvious to the UK and other lockdown adherents by now, but you wouldn’t know it watching the political coverage in the media. Since when did normal life become so threatening to certain western governments and their media adjuncts?

Sweden today , no masks , life as normal .. Lovely to see .. The energy is great .. Sorry if this upsets people .. #anotherway #sheepnomore pic.twitter.com/7GauzSGAjP

— Sean collins (@SeanCollins66) September 24, 2020

Why has normality not returned to the US and UK?

Perhaps the worst aspect of the new hypochondriac culture being aggressively promoted in the US and UK is how the state bureaucrats and schools are now targeting children and young adults with a relentless regime of restrictive and nonsensical health and safety policies. One of the main drivers of the school chaos in the UK has been the teachers/public service unions, who have seized on the crisis in order to leverage political power and carve out a platform in the national spotlight. Union officials repeated the fallacious claim that schools were no longer safe unless a whole new raft of new rules, regulations and government assurances were put into place. The list of issues and concerns keeps growing by the day and is now threatening to bring normal education to a grinding halt.

As a result of this over-the-top fear-based approach to risk mitigation, the lives of students and their families across the UK have been unnecessarily disrupted. In just the first few weeks of school, many thousands of students have already been removed from school and sent home and placed under under 14 day house arrest-quarantine order by school administrators – all because another student in school or a teacher had tested PCR positive for COVID.

Many schools are also ordering all primary, secondary and high school students to remain under house arrest at home over their half-term break, supposedly to “stop the spread of the virus.”

British authorities have even gone so as to demand that university students remain on campus over the Christmas break in order “stop the spread of COVID to their families back home.”

All of this is taking place at a time where hospitalisations and deaths due to COVID have dropped to near zero in the UK. In other words: the ‘pandemic’, if it ever was one, is now over.

GRAPH: Since May, hospitalisations in the UK have plummeted, as have deaths attributed to COVID19.

Still, neither school or government health officials will readily admit the fact that young people at statistically at near zero risk of any complications due to COVID. Likewise, nearly all teachers fall well below the well-established elderly age-bracket risk zone. In addition to this, UK officials still refuse to acknowledge that the PCR test is not only unreliable as a diagnostic tool for COVID, it also cannot rightly identify whether a positive PCR test is indeed a ‘case’ or even an ‘infection.’  This means that the entire mass-testing effort championed by governments is fatally flawed at source. This is not up for debate, it is a scientific reality.

By contrast, from the very beginning of the crisis, Sweden never closed its schools and only required its university-aged students to temporarily migrate to remote teaching online. The results for Sweden have been impressive – minimal or no interruption for millions of students nationwide during such a crucial stage in their formative educational years.

Unfortunately, the opposite path has been pursued in the US and UK, and the results have been catastrophic.

‘Normal life’ – a scene from Amagertorv Strøget in Copenhagen, Denmark (Source: Wikicommons)

Unlike in the UK, the Danish Teachers Union did not take to the media to try and hold government and schools hostage by threatening to strike if the State could not guarantee all schools were”safe” for teachers. Instead, there were sane and measured discussions, and genuine cooperation between the government and the teachers’ unions. Interestingly, both parties allowed the schools to be the final authority on how to conduct the business of managing schools and education.

During a recent discussion with CBC, Dorte Lange, VP of the Danish Teachers Union described the type of practical, common sense approach which appears to have escaped the educational brain trust in Britain and US – realising that it’s “very much is up to the schools to see what’s the best way forward for us with our kids.”

While some social distancing measures were put into place early on when schools were opened in April and May, most of the major precautionary measures have since been lifted because Danish educators and administrators rightly recognised that you cannot carry on with mass-panic and an open-ended state of emergency; the masks, the endless quarantines and the bizarre social distancing – without jeopardising, and eventually ruining their students’ education experience.

Again, the fundamental question still remains: if it’s the same virus everywhere, then why have Scandinavian countries taken a completely different approach?

Putting aside the very real possibility that all of this is part of a massive state and corporate power grab in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere, there is another fundamentally democratic issue at play here. The marked difference in policy demonstrates how the social contract between citizens and government is still alive and healthy in Scandinavia. In other words: their governments still desire a mutual arrangement with the people.

Has this same social contract been abandoned in the UK, US and Australia?

CBC reports from Denmark…

Ålholm headmaster Soren Vith said getting close to students comes with risk, but he wants the school experience to be as normal as possible. (Lily Martin/CBC)

Every seat in Jens Rodgaard’s Grade 5 class is full — there is no physical distance at all. 

When a student raises their hand with a question, Rodgaard is by their side in an instant and leans in to help.

“You have to be around them and help them, help them with spelling, help them make choices, and for proper teaching we can’t do that with the distance,” Rodgaard said.

Students must sanitize their hands every time they enter the school and the grades aren’t supposed to mingle with each other. But there isn’t a mask in sight.

This is what Phase 2 of school reopening looked like at Ålholm public school in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week, a month into the second semester.

“Right now we are trying to make things as normal as possible, [to] not scare any kids,” said Rodgaard, who has taught at Ålholm for 28 years.

The school’s goal is to make the experience of education as normal as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other schools have more rules in place. At this stage, Denmark is allowing each school to come up with its own COVID-19 safety plans.

Right now, the country’s strategy of containing the coronavirus seems to be working. Countries around the world, including Canada, have looked at the Danish model in designing their own school plans… Continue this report at CBC

Now, after six months of pandemia, it’s now clearer than ever how COVID has simply revealed a steady drift towards fascism in parts of the West – a trend previously obscured by endless cycles of media and political rhetoric and platitudes about democracy, and convoluted by constant fearmongering about a non-existent Russian threat to something vaguely referred to as ‘our way of life.’ It’s time for the high-minded guardians of democracy in the ‘free’ West to take a long hard look in the mirror.

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This article was originally published on 21st Century Wire.

Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq. See his archive here.

People around the world are watching as U.K. Judge Vanessa Baraitser hears arguments and decides whether or not to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S.

While the Obama administration chose not to charge Assange, wary of the precedent it might set in criminalizing journalism, the Trump administration indicted him with 18 criminal charges that may land Assange in one of the U.S.’s most notorious prisons for 175 years.

Assange’s Wikileaks has won numerous journalism awards and has never had to retract a single publication despite releasing more than 10 million documents exposing, among other things, U.S. war crimes. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta recently indicated that the ongoing persecution of Assange is meant to “send a message to others not to do the same thing.”

As the world debates whether Assange is a hero or a traitor, Children’s Health Defense takes a step back to examine some of the things his organization has revealed for those fighting for health and environmental justice.

1. U.S. diplomatic efforts to overturn resistance to GMOs at the behest of Monsanto

Wikileaks published hundreds of diplomatic cables exhibiting attempts by the U.S. to quell opposition to genetically modified organisms or GMOs. As reported by The Guardian, “the cables show U.S. diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto.”

In a 2007 cable, Craig Stapleton, then U.S. Ambassador to France, advised the U.S. to prepare for economic war with countries unwilling to introduce Monsanto’s GM corn seeds. He recommended the U.S. “calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the E.U.”

Another dispatch, this one from 2009, demonstrated that the U.S. funded a GMO workshop in Mozambique that, according to the authors, helped advance biotech-friendly policies in the country.

In another cable from 2009, a U.S. diplomat stationed in Germany relayed intelligence on Bavarian political parties to several U.S. federal agencies and the U.S. Secretary of Defense, telling them which parties opposed Monsanto’s M810 corn seed and tactics that the U.S. could impose to resolve the opposition.

One cable from Hong Kong shows a State Department employee requesting $92,000 in U.S. public funds for “media education kits” to combat a growing popular movement calling for the labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong. The cable indicates a desire to “make it much more difficult for mandatory labelling advocates to prevail.” The State Department’s Anita Katial, who wrote the cable, also recalled a time when her office facilitated the sending of pro-biotech and bio-agriculture DVDs to every highschool in Hong Kong.

According to Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter, the trove of cables “really gets down to twisting the arms of countries and working to undermine local democratic movements that may be opposed to biotech crops, and pressuring foreign governments to also reduce the oversight of biotech crops.”

2. Multinational commodities trader dumping toxic waste in West Africa

In 2006, Trafigura, the world’s second largest oil trader, illegally discharged more than 500 tons of highly toxic oil waste near the Port of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. Some of the dump sites were near agriculture fields or water supplies, and the UN estimates that more than 100,000 people sought medical treatment due to the incident. Wikileaks would later call this incident “possibly the most culpable mass contamination incident since Bhopal.”

Trafigura’s lawyer commissioned a confidential study that listed what the environmental and health impacts of the dumping incident would be after people living near the port started flooding hospitals.

The report explained that contact with the offloaded compounds could lead to eye damage, lung damage, skin burns, headaches, breathing difficulty, permanent skin ulceration, coma and death. The report also states that the chemical compounds would have a “severe and negative effect” on the environment.

As recently as 2016, residents were complaining about the smell of the waste, headaches, breathing problems and skin problems.

Wikileaks published the classified report in 2009, the first time the public could see the company’s true negligence.

3. Gates Foundation sees environmental activists as a threat

In 2008, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired an intelligence firm called Stratfor to put together a “threat assessment report” and determine current and future threats to the foundation.

Stratfor’s report saw environmental activists, indigenous farming groups, and peasant political parties in Asia and South America, as “potential threats” to the foundation.

“Threats to the foundation are likely to be directly related to the public association between the foundation and a controversial issue such as GMOs, animal testing, clinical trials and reproductive rights,” the report reads.

Stating that the primary threat to the foundation’s agriculture program comes from its work promoting GMOs, the report notes the rise of anti-GMO campaigning in developing countries, including a “staunch opposition to GMOs in India.” It even names specific activists, such as the U.S.-based anti-GMO campaigner Jeffrey Smith.

The report also mentions the work of large organizations like Greenpeace and PETA as well as alternative media outlets like the Center for Public Integrity, Mother Jones, AlterNet and the LA Times, which had just published a series accusing the foundation of “reap[ing] vast financial gains from investments in companies that contribute to the human suffering in health, housing and social welfare.”

Wikileaks published the threat assessment as part of its release of more than 5 million Stratfor emails in 2012.

4. Pharma intel and espionage operation

In 1996, Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, conducted clinical trials in Nigeria for an antibiotic called Trovan. The results were devastating, as Nigerian officials reported more than 50 children died in the experiment and dozens became disabled.

In 2006, a Nigerian government panel concluded that Pfizer violated international law and called the experiment “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug.” In 2007, Nigerian state and federal authorities sued Pfizer for $7 billion, alleging the company did not have proper consent from the children’s parents.

A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks revealed that while the case was in federal court, Pfizer had hired a private intelligence firm to get blackmail on Nigerian Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa.

According to the cable, “Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media,” who published articles on the attorney general’s “alleged” corruption. “Aondoakaa’s cronies were pressuring him to drop the suit for fear of further negative articles,” it reads.

A few months after the negative articles, the Nigerian ministry of justice signed a settlementwith Pfizer.

5. U.S. is a climate bully

Cables disclosed by Wikileaks in 2010 present the U.S. using what The Guardian called “spying, threats and promises of aid” to get international support for the 2009 Copenhagen Accord — an industry-friendly international climate deal with non-binding agreements to lower emissions. (Climate activist Naomi Klein described, at the time, the accord as “nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters”.)

The State Department sent a secret cable to foreign embassies seeking human intelligence, or “dirt,” on UN diplomats regarding climate policy. And, as reported by Democracy Now!, the cables also indicated that the U.S. cut funding to Bolivia and Ecuador after both governments opposed the accord.

Bill McKibben, founder of the climate organization 350.org, said the cables exposed that “the U.S. was both bullying and buying countries into endorsing their do-little position on climate.”

6. International organizations consulting with Big Pharma

In 2009, Wikileaks revealed documents that the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) gave its members a report by the UN’s World Health Organization(WHO)’s Expert Working Group on research and development financing.

IFPMA members include pharmaceutical giants like Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Sanofi, and the organization represents these entities when dealing with the UN. What makes the Wikileaks document dump significant is that the working group gave IFPMA access to these documents months before their scheduled public release, suggesting that the UN’s health expert group was more accountable to the pharmaceutical industry than to its own member states.

“The compilation of documents shows the influence of ‘Big Pharma’ on the policy making decisions of the WHO,” Wikileaks commented when publishing the files.

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Featured image is from CHD

A second Iranian convoy of tankers is arriving in Venezuela this week with over 800,000 barrels of gasoline.

Forest, Faxon and Fortune ships will be discharging the fuel shipments in the El Palito and Paraguana refinery ports over the coming days at a moment when the nation’s gasoline supply finds itself in a critical state.

Last May, a flotilla of five Iranian vessels made a first delivery of 1.5 million barrels of gasoline and fuel additives, as well as parts for refineries.

Another shipment destined for Venezuela with an estimated 1.1 million barrels was seized in international waters in August in a US civil forfeiture case. The fuel will allegedly be auctioned and the funds destined to the US Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund.

With US sanctions targeting the Caribbean country’s oil industry as well as crude-for-fuel swap deals, fuel shortages have become widespread in recent weeks throughout the country. Caracas has turned to Tehran for assistance with both fuel cargoes and restarting the country’s refining industry. The El Palito and Cardon refineries are currently producing 55,000 barrels per day (bpd), well below maximum capacity and short of meeting demand.

The new Iranian fuel shipment saw the Venezuelan government unveil a new fuel rationing system based on license plate numbers which will begin next Monday. President Maduro announced that new cargoes have been secured but that the country needs to meet its gasoline and diesel demand with domestic production.

Fuel shortages, as well as a deterioration of public services, have generated protests in a host of states in recent days. Local authorities deployed riot police, with an unconfirmed number of arrests thus far.

On Tuesday, the Maduro government announced a new initiative to tackle the effects of US sanctions by submitting an “anti-blockade” bill at the National Constituent Assembly. The legislation is claimed to provide the Venezuelan state with new institutional and legal capacities to face the US blockade.

In his speech presenting the bill, Maduro highlighted the harmful effects of the US Treasury measures on the oil industry and the difficulties they created in sustaining social programs.

“In five years, the blockade cut off financing to the country, preventing the state from having the foreign exchange to purchase food, medicine, supplies and essential raw materials for economic activity,” he emphasized.

Maduro explained that the new law will look to stimulate economic activity by creating better and more flexible conditions for private sector investment. This will reportedly entail creating labor and tax benefits for businesses.

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Featured image: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro presented a new “anti-blockade” law before the National Constituent Assembly. (Prensa Presidencial)

“Re-infesting” the White House with a Mixture of Far Right-wing Political Extremists,

White Supremacists, Right-wing Big Corporate Lobbyists and Christian Theocrats

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Important Quotations

“What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time. I honestly believe that in my lifetime, we will see a country once again governed by Christians … and Christian values. … I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” 

( Ralph Reed – Christian Coalition Executive Director during the 1990s)

“Our Glorious Leader (Trump) has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible. … The White race is back in the game. And if we’re playing, no one can beat us. The winning is not going to stop.” 

(A revealing quote from the Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist website Daily Stormer, which claims to be the “#1 Alt-Right” website, following Donald Trump’s election in 2016)

(Stormfront’s motto is: “White Pride Worldwide”)

Trump November 2016 Election Victory. KKK Statement

KKK ex-Grand Wizard David Duke couldn’t help but celebrate the part that his White Supremacist movement had in electing Trump”. Duke proclaimed the day after the election:

“make no mistake about it, our people played a HUGE role in electing Trump!… You arrogant, unthankful, degenerate pieces of sh**t no longer have absolute power.”

And the image below makes clear one of the reasons that southern white supremacists and southern states rights’ advocates have had so much power since the South’s humiliating defeat 150 years ago in the War Between the States.

The hard core among them actually doesn’t think that the “godly” cause of white Christian supremacy over non-whites and non-Christians was actually lost back then. Trump has given hope to them. And theocracy-minded Christian Fundamentalists seem to have developed a cozy relationship with the KKK, White Supremacist groups and Neo-fascist groups within the Trump-supporting camp.

The 2016 Election Campaign

During the 2016 campaign for President, Hillary Clinton unwisely made the now-infamous statement saying that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were what she libelously characterized as “a basket of deplorables”.

She was speaking at the “LGBT for Hillary” gala in New York City 2 months before election day. In the speech, Clinton went on to explain the phrase by saying that many of Trump’s supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.”

Hillary could have legitimately expanded on her argument by adding to her list of anti-democracy hate groups some of the following groups of ardent Trump supporters like the Ku Klux Klan; far right-wing activists like David Duke; White Supremacists; neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys; pro-Trump hate groups that wanted to “Make America White Again”; and the hundreds of well-armed neo-fascist paramilitary vigilantes across America (as listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s archives here).

Included in the list above could have been included some of the following elite, wealthy, white collar Wall Street and War Street predatory capitalist and investor groups who thrive – no matter who in in the “Swamp”. This elite group feeds at the “Corporate Welfare Trough” and are responsible for 1] the endlessly wasteful military spending, 2] the immoral desire to expand the American Empire, 3] the attempts to privatize Social Security, the postal service and health care and 4] keeping the for-profit prison system privatized and profitable for investors.

There are many antidemocratic American groups that have emerged, since the Trump era began, and they are perennial Washington insider “swamp-dwellers” and non-Washington outsider “swamp-dwellers” who have become energized Trump sycophants because of his vote-getting “promises”, most of which were not kept.

Giving the Middle Finger to the Establishment

However, most Trump voters aren’t crypto-fascists or even racists. They voted for him because they wanted to give the middle finger to the establishments of both major political parties, neither of which had been very responsive to their needs for generations.

Many Trump voters, even if they couldn’t articulate it, also wanted to say “F… You” to the hundreds of predatory corporations that have kept all middle and lower class voters in perennial consumer debt, credit card debt, college student loan debt, mortgage debt, and healthcare debt – not to mention dependent on the multitude of addictive consumer products (including their medications and time-consuming entertainment) that they can’t stop purchasing or swallowing. The list of legal addictive psychiatric drugs, illegal addictive street drugs, nicotine, caffeine, spectator sports, videogaming, entertainment and pornography all come to mind.

Why So Many Bernie Supporters Didn’t Vote for Hillary

Prior to having the Democratic Party nomination for President stolen from him twice, Bernie Sanders energized a substantial number of the lower 90% of middle class, minority and oppressed populations (both white and non-white, some of whom naturally also wanted to give the finger to the Democratic Party establishment that had repeatedly ignored them for  all those years). Bernie particularly resonated with young people because he was exposing a lot of the establishment’s corruption that those voters had suspected but had not heard articulated so powerfully.

So when Bernie was cheated by the Democratic National Committee for the first time in 2016 many of those young voters naturally became disillusioned and some of themtdidn’t vote at all or even voted for Trump, symbolically saying “F… You” to both of America’s Two parties, both of which are corporate-controlled and enablers of the bankrupting military-industrial complex And so the enthusiasm that Bernie had generated for the Democratic Party went to waste.

I take no pride in saying “I told you so” to the misbegotten Hillary campaign insiders who dissed and cheated Bernie and his supporters (and offered no apologies), but I agree with many political pundits that Bernie would have beaten Trump in either 2016 or 2020.

I attach below portions of my (prophetic?) June 14, 2016 Duty to Warn column that was published soon after Hillary became the Democratic Party nominee. The column was titled:

“Why Many Bernie Supporters Will Soon be Abandoning the Democratic Party”,

and the pertinent subtitle was

“Why Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Organizers and her Democratic Party Super-Delegates Will Some Day Regret Sabotaging Sanders’ Candidacy”.

“The 2016 Democratic primaries have been frustrating for many progressives who have had their political juices awakened and energized by the nonviolent political revolution of Bernie Sanders, his New Deal/Fair Deal politics, his democratic socialist candidacy and his support for oppressed and discriminated-against minorities (including Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans, Palestinians, Muslims and the LGBT community, among others).

“But the Democratic Party, once the mortal enemy of fascism, corporate monopolies, governmental rule by wealthy elites and fraudulent elections, has sabotaged, through any number of backroom deals (and with the willing help of the corporate-controlled media), Sanders’ highly respected, altruistic candidacy. The center-right Democratic national leadership has unfairly denied him the well-deserved nomination. Because of the intransigency of their pro-Wall Street, pro-War Street, wealthy insiders in the party hierarchy, they will soon regret what they have done as much as the GOP may eventually regret the choice of the xenophobic, sociopathic, paranoid, narcissistic megalomaniacal Donald Trump as their party’s leader.

“Both political parties have had their agendas shaped by billionaire corporate and militaristic plutocrats and Wall Street tycoons who have purchased large numbers of mercenary lobbyists, lawyers and federal and Supreme Court judges and also the loyalties of the vast majorities of elected legislators (both at the state and national levels) via massive amounts of campaign cash.  The classic truism of “whoever pays the piper, calls the tune” still holds in 2016.

“It is truly rare to find altruistic politicians in America who are capable of igniting the imaginations and hopes of millions of folks, especially minorities and the younger generations, who have been “feeling the Bern”.

“The Wall Street/War Street NeoCons (now tragically in total control of the GOP and in positions of power in the Democratic Party) have been somehow allowing a small minority of idealistic politicians to exist in America, I suppose partly for window-dressing. As Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed (after the GOP started feeling its oats in DC in the mid-90s): “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

“But there have been other American idealists throughout history that have also felt something resembling ‘the Bern’. Such people-power movements have happened only a handful of times over the past American century. Each movement’s progressive leadership has been ‘disappeared’, snuffed out or ‘suicided’, either by intimidation, assassination, smear campaigns or some other political intrigue such as imprisonment (as in the case of democratic socialist and labor union leader Eugene Debs, who – in 1918 – was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for his antiwar activism [where he continued his run for president on the American Socialist Party ticket, garnering nearly a million votes]).

“History tells us about the brief appearances of past progressive movements that promised to benefit the ‘common man’, like ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollete’s Progressive Party era, Eugene Debs’s persecuted Socialist Party, FDR’s New Deal era, the antiwar, liberal efforts of JFK, RFK and MLK, Eugene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone’s people’s campaign, Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy, Occupy Wall Street’s efforts, the disappearing democratic wing of the Democratic Party and, most importantly, all those millions of eager progressive-minded college-age Bernie supporters who so clearly see the dire need for a true political revolution.”

Draining the Swamp, but Protecting Many of the Far Right-Wing Swamp-dwellers

One of Donald Trump’s sure-fire applause lines in 2016 – besides pledging to “make America great again”, pledging to put Hillary Clinton behind bars, and forcing Mexico to pay for his multi-billion dollar border wall – was his pledge to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Un-appreciated by most of his true believers, Trump’s transition team and appointees were heavily populated with swamp creatures who were already mired in Washington.

Trump’s supporters, cabinet members, White House staff and other assorted partners in crime included white collar corporate bigwigs from both Wall Street’s Big Banks, billionaire CEOs from Big Pharma and War Street’s Big Weapons industries.

These elite swamp creatures were behind-the-scenes multimillionaires/billionaire campaign contributors (all of whom expected – and received – handsome returns on their “investments”). The very same investment “experts” also funded right-wing think tanks, anti-environmental activist groups, climate change deniers, oil, war and drug industry lobbyists, former federal bureaucrats, the Federalist Society, pro-industry academics, corporate lawyers, internet trolls, and assorted special-interest lobbyists.

Here is a helpful list of individual GOP “donors” from 2016 and their conflicts of interest. The information came from this site.

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Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten the environment or America’s health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn and at http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls.

Recently, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the “Abraham Accord” with Israel.  More Arab countries are rumored to be willing to also sign an alliance with Israel.  Analysts agree that the common perceived threat they share is Iran. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” is the glue which cements the once unthinkable alliances.  In an effort to better understand the various issues between Iran, the US, Israel and the region, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse reached out to Dr. Javad Heirannia, a Middle East expert and director of international relations at Tahlil Bazaar News Agency. 

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Steven Sahiounie (SS):  The Obama administration signed a nuclear deal with Iran, but President Trump pulled out of the deal, and now he is saying that if he is re-elected he will make a new deal. In your opinion, will the Iranians be willing to sign a new deal with Washington, and will they ask for new conditions?

Javad Heirannia (JH):  The reason for Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA was that he wanted to negotiate a new agreement with Iran. In fact, he wanted to link Iran’s missile issues and regional policy to Iran’s nuclear issue. Note that the JCPOA is only about the Iranian nuclear issue, and the other sides in 5+1 knew that linking other issues to the nuclear issue would complicate the negotiations and would not work out.

Accordingly, linking issues such as the Iranian missile issue and regional issues to the Iranian nuclear issue is not desirable and makes it difficult to reach an agreement. Iran is not particularly willing to talk about missiles.

SS:  The US has started a new package of sanctions against Iran.  Why would Trump do that if he is promising to negotiate with Tehran?

JH:  At the same time, Trump is pursuing a carrot-and-stick policy toward Iran. On the one hand, by raising the issue of negotiations with Iran, he intends to present himself to the public as a peace-loving person who believes in diplomacy. Especially in the months leading up to the US presidential election, in order to convince American public opinion that he believes more in diplomacy than his rival, Joe Biden. So Trump has talked to Iran and reached an agreement within a week. In fact, this is his trick to win the votes of some people in America.

But on the other hand, by imposing the sanctions against Iran, Trump is trying to tell his supporters (voters) that the campaign of maximum pressure on Iran has not come short. This is also to the liking of the lobby of AIPAC and Israel and countries like Saudi Arabia to show that they will not fall short in any way against Iran.

SS:   Since the assassination of General Soleimani, the tension between Tehran and Washington has been on the highest level and sometimes close to war. Do you see a possible war between the two, or just a cold war?

JH:  In recent months, the United States has sought to provoke Iran into launching a limited war against Iran. But Iran consciously thwarted the US conspiracy. Iran has declared that the beginning of any war means the mother of all wars. In other words, if the United States wants to start a limited war, but Iran will not limit it and will pull the war toward all the positions of the United States and its allies in the region. Therefore, this issue is not in Trump’s favor, especially in the run-up to the elections. Iran is also reluctant to go to war because of the economic situation in the country.

Therefore, at present, the possibility of war and conflict is low.

SS:  The Israeli occupation, supported by the US, is building up a coalition against Iran, and several Arab countries are included.  Do you think that the resistance path from Gaza to South Lebanon to Syria to Iraq and to Tehran is ready for the next stage of this conflict that the Israeli occupation is preparing for?

JH:  The normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab countries is a kind of coalition against Iran and draws Israel to the borders of Iran. This will be a dangerous move by countries such as the UAE and possibly in the future by Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Because the presence of foreign agents in the Persian Gulf region leads to more insecurity and security dilemma. Especially the presence of Israel in the region, which has a problem with Iran and is Iran’s main enemy. Therefore, Iran takes this presence seriously. Iran has stated that it has exposed itself to the resistance front with the presence of Israel in the region and near the borders of Iran. Given the actions of Lebanese Hezbollah, the Hamas movement, and the resistance forces in Syria, Israel’s presence near the Iranian border would also put them in direct confrontation with Iran and groups such as Yemen’s “Ansar Allah,” (Huthis) or perhaps the Iraqi Al-Hashd al-Shaabi.

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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.

Featured image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech on Iran’s nuclear programme at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv on 30 April 2018 (Source: MEE)

“Federalist” co-founder Sean Davis reports that CIA Director Gina Haspel is personally blocking the release of documents that will show “what actually happened” with Russiagate.

“This isn’t just a scandal about Democrat projection, this is a scandal about what was a coup planned against the incoming administration at the highest levels and I can report here tonight that these declassifications that have come out,” Davis told FOX News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday. “Those weren’t easy to get out and there are far more waiting to get out.”

“Unfortunately those releases and declassifications according to multiple sources I’ve talked to are being blocked by CIA director Gina Haspel who herself was the main link between Washington and London,” Davis said. “As the London station chief from John Brennan’s CIA during the 2016 election. Recall, it was London where Christopher Steele was doing all this work. And I’m told that it was Gina Haspel personally who is blocking a continued declassification of these documents that will show the American people the truth of what actually happened.” (Fox News)

Click the photo to watch the video.

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Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

The US has much to gain from Navalny’s illness.

Most obvious is its aim to block Nord Stream 2’s completion.

If Russia’s gas pipeline to Germany becomes operational next year, it will double what Gazprom can supply Germany and other Western countries.

If the project is suspended or halted altogether, it will advantage US LNG producers — despite the much higher cost of this energy supply.

Republicans and Dems have greater aims.

They want Russia harmed economically, geopolitically and strategically.

They want the country marginalized, weakened, and isolated.

The above objectives have been US policy throughout the Cold War and after its aftermath to the present day — no matter which right wing of its one-party state runs things.

Post-WW II, containing Russia became official US policy.

US diplomat/envoy to Soviet Russia/presidential advisor George Kennan (1904 – 2005) was “the father of containment.”

He was a core member of so-called foreign policy “wise men” in Washington.

His 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow and 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct” claimed its government was inherently expansionist.

In February 1948, his “Memo PPS23” said the following:

“(W)e have 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. (It makes us) the object of envy and resentment.

“Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships (to let us) maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national society.”

“We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…”

“We should dispense with the aspiration to ‘be liked’ or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism.”

“We should (stop talking about) unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”

“The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

“The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans (ideas and practices), the better.”

In July 1947, his so-called “X” article on the “Sources of Soviet Conduct urged countering it “effectively.”

The US “can never be on Moscow’s side,” he stressed.

In March 1948, NSC 7 detailed “The Position of the United States with Respect to Soviet-Directed World Communism,” saying:

“(A) defensive policy cannot be considered an effective means of checking the momentum of Soviet expansion.”

“Defeat(ing)” communism was considered “vital to the security of the United States.”

NSC 68 (April 1950 — issued weeks before Harry Truman’s preemptive war on nonbelligerent North Korea) officially inaugurated anti-Soviet Russia containment.

It called the country an enemy “unlike previous aspirants to hegemony…animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own (wishing to) impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”

Ignored was the scourge of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — or that WW II devastated Soviet Russia, requiring years of rebuilding.

Its government posed no threat to the US — not then, notably not now.

After Soviet Russia’s dissolution in December 1991, capitalism replaced its communist system.

It remains Russian Federation policy today.

Because Moscow is independent of US control, made-in-the-USA adversarial relations continue.

No Russian threat to US/Western interests exists so it was invented, notably since Vladimir Putin became president.

Bipartisan hostility toward Russia in Washington is all about wanting the country transformed into a US vassal state.

It’s about gaining control over its vast resources and population, along with eliminating a strategic rival — whose overtures for normalized relations are consistently spurned.

The Trump regime is using the Navalny incident to further its strategic interests.

It’s pressuring Germany and the EU to punish Russia for an incident no evidence suggests it had anything to do with.

Last week, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said that if the chemical watchdog OPCW — an imperial lapdog serving Western interests — says Navalny was poisoned by novichok exposure, “I am convinced that (EU) sanctions will be unavoidable” on Russia, adding:

“(S)uch a grave violation of the International Chemical Weapons Convention cannot go unanswered.”

Earlier, a German military lab and facilities in France and Sweden claimed that the deadly nerve agent caused his illness.

Unmentioned by these countries was that exposure to novichok — the deadliest known toxin — causes death in minutes.

Navalny is very much alive over a month after falling ill.

Discharged from hospitalization in Berlin, German doctors expect him to recovery fully or near-fully.

If poisoned by novichok, he’d have died before boarding a flight from Tomsk, Russia to Moscow.

What’s obvious is suppressed in the West by hostile-to-Moscow political officials and media.

Heroic efforts by Russian doctors in Omsk that saved Navalny’s life was erased from the EU’s historical record.

So was their biological analysis — finding no toxins in his blood, urine, liver, or elsewhere in his system.

According to former German diplomat Frank Elbe, Europe is “making a giant step backwards – back to the Cold War” by allying with US hostility toward Russia instead of normalizing relations, adding:

US policymakers are furious about an alliance by Germany and other EU countries with Russia to construct Nord Stream 2, “pursu(ing) their own independent policy.”

Elbe urged Europe to break from the US when their interests diverge — to uphold their sovereign independence.

Most often, European countries bend to Washington’s will — even  when harming their interests.

So far, opposing the Trump regime’s pressure to abandon the landmark JCPOA nuclear deal is an exception to the rule — if it sticks.

Will Nord Stream 2 be another?

Will Germany support its completion or shoot itself in the foot by allying with US interests against its own?

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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

In remarks to the UN Security Council, The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté details the OPCW’s Douma cover-up scandal and urges UN members to support the chemical watchdog’s inspectors whose evidence was suppressed.

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At an Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Aaron Maté of The Grayzone delivers remarks on the OPCW’s ongoing Syria scandal.

Veteran OPCW inspectors who investigated an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018 say that their probe was censored and manipulated. Under direct US government pressure, the OPCW concealed evidence that pointed to the incident being staged on the ground, and instead released a report that suggested Syrian government culpability. The allegation against Syria led to the bombing of Syria by the US, France, and UK just days after the alleged Douma incident. In his remarks, Aaron calls this “one of the most important, and overlooked, global stories in recent memory” and urges the UN and OPCW to let the OPCW inspectors air their concerns, and present the evidence that was suppressed.

Other briefers participating in the UN session were former OPCW inspector Ian Henderson, a member of the Douma team; and award-winning physicist Ted Postol, MIT professor emeritus and former Pentagon adviser.

The full video of the UN session can be viewed here.

Full transcript follows.

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Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

My name is Aaron Maté. I am a journalist with The Grayzone, based in the United States. It’s an honor to speak to you today about what I think is one of the most important, and overlooked, global stories in recent memory.

The OPCW — the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog — is facing a serious scandal. Leaks from inside strongly suggest the OPCW has been severely compromised. The implications of this are grave.

It would mean that the OPCW was exploited to accuse the Syrian government of a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. It would also mean that the OPCW was used to retroactively justify the bombing of Syria by several member states, just days after the alleged Douma incident. In short, it appears the OPCW was compromised to justify military strikes.

There are also indications that the OPCW has retaliated against two veteran officials who were part of the Douma investigation and challenged the censorship of the Douma evidence.

These two OPCW officials are highly regarded scientists with more than 25 years of combined experience at the organization. Yet instead of being protected, and given the chance to air their concerns, these two scientists have seen their reputations impugned by the OPCW leadership.

There is substantial evidence to back all of this up. I will summarize the key details.

The OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission, or FFM, deployed to Syria and what is known as Country X to investigate the Douma incident in April 2018. They interviewed scores of witnesses and visited several key sites. They examined gas cylinders found at the scene, took chemical samples and hundreds of photos, and conducted detailed measurements.

Upon their return from Syria, the FFM team drafted an extensive and detailed report of their findings. But what the investigators found in Douma is not what the OPCW released to the world. And that is because the investigators who were on the ground in Syria were overruled, and had their findings censored.

The key facts about this censorship are, to my knowledge, undisputed:

1) The investigators’ initial report, which was due for imminent publication, was secretively re-edited to produce a version that sharply deviated from the original. Both versions – the original and the altered report – have been published by Wikileaks.

Comparing both reports we see that key facts were removed or mis-represented. Conclusions were also rewritten to support the allegation that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma.

Yet the team’s initial, original report did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred. In fact, their report had presented the possibility that victims in Douma were killed in an incident that was “non-chemical related.” Though unstated, the reader could easily infer from this that the militants who controlled Douma at the time had staged the scene to make it falsely appear that a chemical attack had occurred.

2) Then there is the toxicology assessment. Four experts from an OPCW and NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review.

They concluded that observed symptoms of the victims in Douma, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”

This finding was kept secret, and are inconsistent with the conclusions of the final report.

3) There were also chemical tests of the samples collected in Douma. These samples showed that chlorinated compounds were detected at what amounted to trace quantities in the parts-per-billion range.

Yet this finding was also not disclosed. Furthermore, it later emerged that the chemicals themselves did not stand out as unique: most, if not all, could have resulted from contact with household products such as bleach — or come from chlorinated water or wood preservatives.

Crucially, the control samples collected by the inspectors to give context to the analysis results were never analyzed.

4) Because of other leaks, we now know that this censorship was protested from the inside. The chief author of the initial report, identified by the OPCW as Inspector B, was among those who deployed to Syria for the entire Douma mission. Records show he was also, at the time, the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry.

On June 22nd, 2018 Inspector B protested the secretive redaction in an e-mail expressing his “gravest concern.” I will quote him:

“After reading this modified report, which incidentally no other team member who deployed into Douma has had the opportunity to do, I was struck by how much it misrepresents the facts.”

5) After that e-mail of protest, and just days before a substitute, stop-gap interim report was published on July 6, something very unusual occurred. A U-S government delegation met with members of the investigation team to try to influence them. The US officials encouraged the Douma team to conclude that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine. It is worth noting here that the US delegation promoted this chlorine theory despite the fact that it was still not publicly known that no nerve agents had been found in Douma.

The Douma investigators reportedly saw the meeting as unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality. Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, State Parties are explicitly prohibited from seeking to influence the inspectors in the discharge of their responsibilities.

6) Inspector B’s intervention thwarted the imminent release of the doctored report.

But at that point, the OPCW officials began to manage the issuance of a new negotiated report, namely, the so-called interim report that was released on July 6 2018.

Although this interim report no longer contained some of the unsupported claims that senior OPCW officials had tried to insert, it still omitted key facts found in the original, uncensored report.

7) Around that time, the investigation saw a drastic change. The protesting Inspector B – who had written the original report — was sidelined from the investigation. OPCW executives then decreed that the probe, from that point forward, would be handled by a so-called “core team.”

This new “core” team made formal the exclusion of all of the inspectors who had conducted the investigation in Syria, except for one paramedic. It was this so-called core team—and not the inspectors who had signed off on the original report—that generated the OPCW final’s report of March 2019.

8) That final report sharply differed from what the OPCW inspectors reported in the suppressed initial report. The final report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that a chemical weapons attack occurred in Douma and that “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” Many crucial facts and evidence redacted from the original report continued to be omitted.

9) The final report also saw a major discrepancy when it comes to witness testimony. The witnesses interviewed offered sharply contrasting narratives – yet only those witnesses whose testimony supported the use of chemical weapons, were used to inform the report’s conclusions.

It is also worth noting the imbalance in witness locations: although the alleged chemical incident took place in Syria, twice as many witnesses were interviewed in Country X.

10) One inference drawn from the OPCW’s final report was that gas cylinders found in Douma likely came from military aircraft. But a leaked engineering assessment assigned to a sub-team of the FFM found otherwise.

The OPCW leadership has yet to offer a substantive explanation for why such critical evidence was excluded and why the original report was radically altered.

The OPCW Director General Fernando Arias justified the conclusions of the final report and excused alleged fraudulent scientific behavior by incorrectly stating that “the FFM undertook the bulk of its analytical work” during the last seven months of the investigation – or after the interim report that was published in July 2018.

A close review of the final report demonstrates that this is far from the case. As the dissenting inspectors have noted, by the time the interim report was released, 31 of the 44 samples were analyzed, 34 of the 39 interviews had been conducted and analyzed, and the toxicological study was already done but the conclusions excluded.

In the nearly eight months after the Interim Report was released, only 13 new samples were analyzed along with 5 additional interviews.

Comparing the text of the final report to the original report is also instructive. The final report copy and pastes much of the text of the original report – the one difference is that inconvenient evidence was removed, and un-supported conclusions were added.

But even if it were true that the bulk of the analysis was done after the interim report, the fact the OPCW would have conducted the bulk of its work after July 2018 would not in any way explain or justify the alleged scientific fraud committed before it. In fact, it would only raise the possibility that more fraud occurred.

Instead of addressing the discrepancies and cherry-picked facts, the OPCW Director General Fernando Arias has also denigrated the two members of the Douma fact-finding mission team who challenged the manipulation of facts and evidence.

The Director General has falsely portrayed them as rogue actors, with only minor roles in the investigation and incomplete information.

Yet these two inspectors are unlikely candidates to suddenly go so rogue. Inspector A has been identified as Ian Henderson – he is here today. The second inspector is known only as Inspector B. They served with the OPCW for 12 and 16 years, respectively.

Internal OPCW appraisals of their job performance offer effusive praise. In 2005, a senior OPCW official wrote that Henderson has consistently received “the highest rating possible.… I consider [him] one of the best of our Inspection Team Leaders.”

In 2018, an OPCW superior wrote that Inspector B, “has contributed the most to the knowledge and understanding of Chemical Weapons chemistry applied to inspections.” Another manager described B as “one of the most well regarded” team leaders, whose “experience of the organisation, its verification regime, and judgment are unmatched.”

It is important to also stress that the internal concerns go beyond Douma team members. Earlier this year, I heard from an OPCW official who voiced outrage at the treatment of Henderson and Inspector B. I quote this person now:

“It is quite unbelievable that valid scientific concerns are being brazenly ignored in favour of a predetermined narrative. The lack of transparency in an investigative process with such enormous ramifications is frightful. The allegations of the two gentlemen urgently need to be thoroughly investigated, and the functionality of the organisation restored.”

Now fortunately, the two inspectors involved in this Douma controversy have offered a path to transparency and to resolving this scandal. Earlier this year, they each wrote letters to the OPCW Director General asking for their concerns to be heard.

The inspectors have received support from several prominent figures, including the OPCW’s First Director General, Jose Bustani. In October 2019, Bustani took part in a panel that heard an extensive presentation from one of the Douma investigators.

Mr. Bustani wrote:

“The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”

I hope that Mr. Bustani’s words will be heeded. As a first step, the OPCW can simply do what it has refused to do so far: meet with the entire Douma team, and let them present the evidence that was censored. It is very concerning that despite the allegations here, the OPCW Director General has never met with members of the Douma team – not just the two dissenting inspectors that are known, but the entire team. If the OPCW is confident in its conclusions, then it should have no issue with at least hearing a dissenting point of view.

The importance of addressing this issue extends far beyond repairing the OPCW’s reputation. Syria is a country that is now trying to rebuild from a devastating, nearly decade-long proxy war that caused massive suffering, destruction and death. But as Syria is trying to rebuild, it now faces a new kind of warfare in the form of crippling economic sanctions. In justifying the sanctions, the US government has cited, among other things, allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government. The US government also says that the Syrian government is the target of these sanctions. But it is the Syrian people who feel the pain. The UN rapporteur on sanctions says that, “unilateral sanctions applied to Syria have visited untold sufferings on ordinary people.” The World Food Program warns that Syrians living under economic blockade now face “mass starvation or another mass exodus.”

The use of the OPCW to justify warfare on Syria – whether in the form of military strikes in 2018 or economic strangulation today in 2020 – is additionally tragic in light of the OPCW’s own history. It was just seven years ago that the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work eliminating chemical weapons, including in Syria. That was a towering achievement, and a hopeful moment for those who seek a world at peace. How unfortunate then, to see the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog now potentially being comprised to lodge unproven allegations against Syria and justify warfare against it.

The OPCW inspectors who have been silenced and maligned are trying to defend their organization’s noble legacy from political exploitation. It is my hope that they will be heard. Thank you.

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Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. He is also is contributor to The Nation magazine and former host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!. Aaron has also presented and produced for Vice, AJ+, and Al Jazeera.

The discussion about mining the Moon resembles that of previous conquests: the division of territory; the grabbing of resources; language of theft and plunder.  All of this is given the gloss of manifest destiny and human experiment.  Such language is also self-perpetuating: the plunderer is only as good as the amount taken; success is dependent on constant replenishment and expansion.

A presentation from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sports the message that would sit comfortably with any empire builder in history.  “Across history, human development has relied upon the finite resources of the Earth.”  An unfortunate state of affairs, but never fear: “the moon – a seemingly barren rock – may actually be a treasure trove of rare resources vital to Earth’s future.  And now, nations are looking upwards to a potential lunar gold rush.”

Such NASA promotions tend to be tinselled with confidence and brio.  They anticipate the Cassandras and naysayers who fear that humans are merely going to deplete the next resource, causing yet another catastrophe of incalculable proportions.  “The moon has a mass of 73q tons,” claims the colourful JPL presentation.  After a few “back-of-the-envelope calculations” (always reassuring), taking one metric ton from the moon each day would take a mere “220m years to deplete 1% of the moon’s mass.”  There would be no change of orbit, or to the gravitational force that affects the Earth’s tides.  Gradual predation never hurt anybody.

The Moon had been spared such proposed rushes at least till 2008, when the Chandrayaan-1 probe from the Indian Space Research Organisation crashed into the Shackleton Crater in the lunar south pole.  It seemed to have discovered water-ice, a point confirmed by NASA in a 2018 publication that can barely conceal the delight of its authors.  “These ice deposits might be utilized as an in situ resource in future exploration of the moon.”

This has caused a rash of interest. The European Space Agency could only be encouraged, having already mentioned the idea of a Moon Village in 2015.  “A Moon Village shouldn’t just mean some houses, a church, and a town hall,” explained the newly appointed Director General of ESA, Johann-Dietrich Wörner.  “This Moon Village should mean partners from all over the world contributing to this community with robotic and astronaut missions and support communication satellites.”  Manifest destiny can also be collaborative.

With this has come the lure of private capital.  Space agencies are hungry for sources other than the tax payer.  Bidders are being sought for commercial payload deliveries; lunar bases are being touted as staging grounds for lucrative business, including mining asteroid belts.  On the Moon itself, there is the promise of such metals indispensable in electronics: yttrium, samarium and lanthanum.  Helium-3, a gas for nuclear fusion, tantalises investors. 

The incitement to aggressive competition and conflict, reminiscent of the wars fought between European powers over colonies and trade routes, seems inevitable.  The US Space Command’s “Vision for 2020”, released in 1997 but still troublingly pertinent, notes that the rise of sea commerce saw nations building “navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests.”  The brutal conquest of the American interior (described with benign reflection as “the westward expansion of the continental United States”), saw the use of military outposts and cavalry to protect wagon trains, settlements and railroads.  “Likewise, space forces will emerge to protect military and commercial national interests and investment in the space medium due to their increasing importance.” 

Last month, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that collecting moon material would form part of the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program established in 2019.  The intention of that program is to land US astronauts on the moon by 2024 and enable them to “live off” it, as it were, a prelude to bigger and better things.  Bridenstine insisted with testosterone fuelled confidence that NASA was “working aggressively to meet our near-end goal of landing the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024” with the aim of establishing “a safe and sustainable lunar exploration architecture.”

These are the weasel words of this new exploration. Artemis will be “sustainable”, while also being “innovative”. It will also keep the budget watchers happy, as it will be “affordable”.  Specialists of space law will also be satisfied.  The dream, then, is one of facilitating space capitalism.  “We know a supportive policy regarding the recovery and use of space resources is important to the creation of a stable and predictable investment environment for commercial space innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Companies, according to Bridenstine, are being solicited “to provide proposals for the collection of space resources.”  A nod to space law is made: that actions regarding these proposals will comply “with the Registration Convention, Article II and other provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, and all our international obligations.”  Companies will collect Moon “dirt” from any part of the lunar surface, furnish “imagery” to NASA of the collection process and the material, along with data on where the material was collected and “conduct an ‘in-place’ transfer of ownership of the lunar regolith or rocks to NASA.”  That material will become the property of NASA.  But the agency promises to fork out for the “lunar regolith”, with awardees receiving 10 percent at award, 10 percent upon launch and remaining 80 percent on completing the mission.

Such remarks have an express purpose: to douse the nagging suspicions of space entrepreneurs and devotees of commercial space endeavours.  National space agencies have historically been seen as unwarranted shackles to boisterous space capitalism.  The editor and publisher of The Space Review, Jeff Foust, puts it down to a stubborn “libertarian streak”.  Historically, such space advocates eschewed government influence over their space programs “often as part of broader political beliefs”.  Others feared a competitor in the form of the space agency, a threat to “private ventures, particularly in launch.”  Modern exponents of such thinking can be found in Peter Lothian Nelson and Walter E. Block’s Space Capitalism, a libertarian work of such cranky polemic it even questions the space ventures of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson as unduly compromised by state involvement.

On Earth, capitalism as a system is being given a pasting by exponents of sustainability who argue that it is doomed and dooming.  The age of the Anthropocene, the outgrowth of human dependence upon fossil fuels, has proven to be, and is proving to be an experiment of calamitous consequence.  But whatever the terrestrial changes to be made – be they to renewable infrastructure, adjustments in growth, or the development of ecological wisdom – the predatory streak of conquest and colonisation is obstinate.  The lure of lunar mining, messy lunar conquest and lunar battles, is a very real one.

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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]

The Eisenhower government had been greatly disturbed by the 1954 Geneva Agreements, in which it was agreed ultimately that Vietnam would be unified, on the basis of elections planned for July 1956. President Dwight Eisenhower was worried, in such an event, that communist or nationalist influence would spread throughout Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, thereafter infecting an array Asian states, most seriously of all Japan.

The 63-year-old Eisenhower stated candidly at a news conference, on 7 April 1954, that a communist victory in Indochina could cause the “beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences”. He believed there was a possibility of independent countries falling to communism like “a row of dominoes”, from Indonesia and Thailand to Burma, with the end result being “incalculable to the free world”.

Among the US president’s concerns was the decline of American hegemony in the world’s largest continent: Asia. Eisenhower elaborated further relating to accessibility of mineral resources like “tin and tungsten” which he stated “are very important” along with “the rubber plantations, and so on”. Eisenhower rued the fact that Asia “has already lost 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship” in China “and we simply can’t afford greater losses”. (1)

To help prevent this perceived nightmare scenario from unfolding, and to erode the Geneva Agreements, the Eisenhower administration quickly established a client dictatorship in the newly-founded state of South Vietnam, in 1955. As easily the world’s most powerful country, America took over in Vietnam from the terminally declining imperial power, France, with the demise of French Indochina set in stone. From February 1955, Eisenhower started dispatching small numbers of American soldiers to the southern half of Vietnam. During his presidency, lasting until January 1961, the role of US troops in South Vietnam was “strictly advisory”, as recognised by the Pentagon Papers, in that they would not actually participate in attacks against guerrillas or unarmed peasants.

Shortly after ratification of the Geneva Agreements in July 1954, the US National Security Council (NSC) chaired by president Eisenhower outlined, in August 1954, that even in the eventuality of “local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack” in south-east Asia, the White House would consider the use of military force in response. This wording, which was referred to repeatedly in Washington planning documents during the 1950s, stressed in stark terms the US right to violate the UN Charter’s very foundations.

The same NSC document stated furthermore the consideration of a military attack against Mao Zedong’s China, if that country is “determined to be the source” of the “subversion”. So as to restore “The loss of prestige in Asia suffered by the US”, its policy planners called for the rearming of Japan and the Philippines – coupled with efforts to “Intensify covert and psychological actions to strengthen the orientation of these countries toward the free world” and to “improve the effectiveness of existing military strength of the Republic of Korea and of Formosa [Taiwan]”.

Washington must also “maintain the security and increase the strength of the Pacific off-shore island chain” including the “retention of Japan” to US power, along with Australia and New Zealand, countries which are “an essential element to US security” (2). The eminent scholar and political activist Noam Chomsky wrote that, “This critically important document is grossly falsified by the Pentagon Papers historians, and has largely disappeared from history”. (3)

Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, Diem’s regime was sorely lacking in popular support from the outset. As early as 1950, US Army planners estimated that 80% of Vietnam’s people supported Ho Chi Minh (image on the right), the experienced communist revolutionary; and that four-fifths of his followers were not communists at all, a realistic evaluation by Washington which would remain consistent in coming years. With Diem not having the sympathy of the masses, and propped up by hundreds of millions of dollars in US military aid from the mid-1950s, he resorted to widespread terror to subdue the anti-imperial resistance.

In response to Diem’s assaults, though the Communist Party was “reeling” through to 1959, the American historian Eric Bergerud revealed that the communists in Vietnam “adhered to the policy of political rather than violent resistance” and “by and large honoured the Geneva Accords” having “dismantled the bulk of its military apparatus”. The communists finally chose to react with limited armed actions to 1960, which “elicited hysterical outrage in the United States over Communist perdify”, as Chomsky noted. (4)

Over the first two years until 1957, the Diem dictatorship killed more than 10,000 people in South Vietnam. Between 1957 and 1961 the anti-communist war correspondent Bernard Fall, who was present in the country, estimated that around another 66,000 people had lost their lives at the hands of Diem’s forces. Therefore, prior to president John F. Kennedy in late 1961 escalating the conflict in Vietnam, between 75,000 to 80,000 people had already been killed there.

Over the next four years until April 1965, a further 89,000 people were liquidated. Almost all of them were South Vietnamese victims of state terror and aggression, as they succumbed to “the crushing weight of American armour, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases” (5). US government studies from 1965, focusing on Viet Cong deserters and prisoners, found that “few of them considered themselves Communists or could give a definition of Communism”.

Eisenhower’s policy in South Vietnam had not extended to aggression. It can be noted that Eisenhower, a Republican Party member and hardly a soft touch, was not an extremist or aggressive leader. His domestic policies for example were moderate. Eisenhower said that anyone who does not accept Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs “doesn’t belong in the American political system” (6). This viewpoint would be considered radical by today’s standards, such has been the decline and rightward lurch on the political spectrum.

Some valid charges can be levelled at Eisenhower regarding the foreign policy record, his administration’s support of terror tactics in South Vietnam, and the execution of coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). With some trepidation, Eisenhower ordered a US military intervention in the Middle East state of Lebanon during mid-July 1958, in order to stem the threat of Arab nationalism in the world’s most important region. US-led forces inflicted about 4,000 casualties on the leftist Lebanese opposition; and after three months, a relieved Eisenhower promptly ordered the withdrawal of American soldiers from Lebanon in October 1958. (7)

Just one year into the JFK presidency, US Air Force members were centrally involved in hundreds of air raids over South Vietnam. At the end of 1962, the German-American author Guenter Lewy calculated that, by then, US helicopter and aircraft units carried out 2,048 attack sorties (8). In the autumn of 1961, president Kennedy had authorised herbicide spraying in South Vietnam, so as to “kill Viet Cong food crops and defoliate selected border and jungle areas”. Napalm usage was also sanctioned by the Kennedy administration around this period.

The character of Kennedy’s war was openly documented at the time, and known within the US military and civilian command. Malcolm Browne, chief Indochina correspondent for the New York-based Associated Press (AP), reported from the ground that the results of US napalm and heavy bombing raids “are revolting… huts are flattened, and civilian loss of life is generally high. In some, the charred bodies of children and babies have made pathetic piles in the middle of the remains of market places”. (9)

To provide a brief example from 21 January 1962, very early in the war, US B-26 aircraft assaulted a village in South Vietnam with 500 pounds bombs, along with T-28 rocket attacks. The village huts were targeted for 45 minutes, wounding 11 civilians and killing five others. Among the dead were children aged 2, 5 and 7. A few minutes before, the air strikes had begun with a mistaken attack on another village, that happened to be just across the border in Cambodia (10). It resulted in the “killing and wounding” of “a number of villagers”, as described by Roger Hilsman, a dovish planner within the Kennedy administration.

Western media, with the New York Times “expressing the conventional line”, consistently backed the US war in Vietnam. Chomsky revealed, “The press supported state violence throughout, though JFK regarded it as an enemy because of tactical criticism and grumbling. Much fantasy has been spun in later years about crusading journalists exposing government lies: what they exposed was the failure of tactics to achieve ends they fully endorsed”. (11)

On 16 December 1961 US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, JFK’s right-hand man, authorised direct US soldier participation in South Vietnam regarding “combat operations against southerners resisting the violence of the US-imposed terror state, or living in villages out of government control” (12). By March 1962, Washington officials admitted publicly that US pilots were partaking in combat missions in South Vietnam, such as bombing and strafing.

It may be worth focusing on the opinions of Robert F. Kennedy regarding the Vietnam War, to provide a crucial insight into Kennedy administration foreign policy. Six months after his brother’s assassination RFK, still in his position as Attorney General, dispatched a note to president Lyndon B. Johnson on 11 June 1964 stating that Vietnam “is obviously the most important problem facing the United States, and if you felt I could help I am at your service” (13). In a show of support for the US war effort, which was going badly through 1964, Robert Kennedy proposed taking over the position of US Ambassador to South Vietnam.

Almost a year later in May 1965, three months after Johnson’s significant escalation of the war in Vietnam, RFK said the withdrawal of US forces would involve “a repudiation of commitments undertaken and confirmed by three administrations”. The removal of American troops from Vietnamese soil, RFK believed, would “gravely – perhaps irreparably – weaken the democratic position in Asia”. As late as December 1965, with much of South Vietnam at that point lying in ruins, JFK’s former Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled how Robert Kennedy said privately that month, “I don’t believe in pulling out the troops. We’ve got to show China we mean to stop them. If we can hold them for about 20 years, maybe they will change the way Russia has”. (14)

Contrary to a separate enduring myth, the evidence is abundant that RFK continued to champion US military involvement in Vietnam at least four years after JFK had launched the war, towards the end of 1961. This constitutes a time period equivalent to the length of World War One. RFK’s backing of the conflict simply mirrored that of his brother who, right up to the end of his presidency, was hoping for “an increased effort in the war” and to “intensify the struggle” so that “we can bring Americans out of there” (15). JFK made these remarks on 14 November 1963, eight days before his assassination. Withdrawal from Vietnam without victory was unthinkable.

Kennedy disregarded the recent public statement of veteran French president, Charles de Gaulle, who on 29 August 1963 expounded on his desire that the Vietnamese “could go ahead with their activities independently of the outside, in internal peace and unity and in harmony with their neighbours. Today more than ever, this is what France wishes for Vietnam as a whole”. (16)

The US National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, drew JFK’s attention to the De Gaulle comments and advised him to “ignore Nosey Charlie”. Bundy warned against the “specter of neutralist solution” in Vietnam, and felt that France should “share in the work of resisting Communist aggression”. In a television interview with the US president on 2 September 1963, Walter Cronkite specifically raised De Gaulle’s comments of four days before, and JFK responded by saying, “we are going to meet our responsibility anyway. It doesn’t do us any good to say, ‘Well, why don’t we all just go home and leave the world to those who are our enemies’.” (17)

Near the conclusion of Eisenhower’s presidency in late December 1960, there were still only about 900 American soldiers in South Vietnam. At the end of December 1961, as the first year of Kennedy’s tenure was drawing to a close, US troop levels in South Vietnam had jumped almost fourfold, to 3,205.

Almost two years later, the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam climbed further to 16,732, just prior to Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963 (18). JFK supporters commonly point to the 1,000 US troops the president, in late 1963, had sanctioned to pull out of South Vietnam as evidence that he was in the process of withdrawing from the country. In actual fact the 1,000 US personnel in question were, as the American historian James T. Patterson outlined, “mostly part of a construction battalion that had finished its work. They were being brought home for Christmas and were scheduled to be replaced by others”. (19)

Patterson continued, “Most of Kennedy’s major advisers concerning Vietnam then and later were certain that Kennedy never intended to ‘withdraw’ American advisers and military aid, before he could be certain that the South Vietnamese could safely defend themselves”. (20)

As 1963 advanced, a big obstacle to the Kennedy administration’s desire to escalate the war into 1964, was the wavering attitude of the Diem regime. On 22 April 1963 the CIA reported that Diem, along with his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, “were concerned over recent ‘infringements’ of Vietnamese sovereignty” by the Americans. The CIA, which by then was conducting clandestine operations in both South and North Vietnam, relayed information that Diem “after building up a strong case” is planning to confront the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, and General Paul Harkins “with irrefutable evidence of US responsibility, demanding a reduction in the number of US personnel in South Vietnam on the basis that the force is too large and unmanageable”.

The next month, on 12 May 1963 the Washington Post published a front-page interview with Nhu, who was considered a highly influential figure in South Vietnam, even more so than Diem. In the interview Nhu said, “South Vietnam would like to see half of the 12,000 to 13,000 American military stationed here leave the country”.

Statements like this were regarded with much disquiet in the White House. Chomsky observed how the Kennedy administration “feared that the GVN [South Vietnamese regime] pressures for withdrawal of US forces would become difficult to resist, a danger enhanced by exploratory GVN efforts to reach a diplomatic settlement with the North. The skimpy political base for Kennedy’s war would then erode, and the US would be compelled to withdraw without victory. That option being unacceptable to JFK and his advisers, the Saigon regime had to get on board, or be dismissed”. (21)

Diem and Nhu did not get on board. They ignored Washington’s demands to “get everyone back to work and get them to focus on winning the war”. From the summer of 1963, the Diem regime was reportedly moving towards “a secret deal with the North” and Nhu once more complained “there were too many US troops in Vietnam”. Therefore, JFK and his advisers decided unequivocally, by the late summer of 1963, that Diem and Nhu would have to go. On 28 August 1963, JFK “asked the Defense Department to come up with ways of building up the anti-Diem forces in Saigon”; and the US president requested moves “which would maximise the chances of the rebel generals” while saying further, “We should ask Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins how we can build up military forces which would carry out a coup”. (22)

By October 1963, Nhu was calling for all American troops to leave South Vietnam. It came as no great surprise, early the following month, when a US-engineered putsch was instituted. Diem and Nhu were summarily executed on 2 November 1963. Averell Harriman, JFK’s new Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, had told the president that without a coup “we cannot win the war”, and failing that the US “must withdraw” from Vietnam.

Robert Kennedy likewise supported the coup, and he called for bolstering the rebel generals who would replace Diem. RFK said the US government needed “somebody that can win the war” and Diem was no longer the man for the job. Chomsky wrote, “Accordingly it is no surprise that RFK fully supported Johnson’s continuation of what he understood to be his brother’s policies, through the 1965 escalation”. (23)

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Mount Holyoke College, “President Eisenhower’s News Conference, April 7, 1954, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1954, p. 382”

2 Office of the Historian, “Foreign Relations Of The United States, 1952-1954, East Asia and the Pacific, Volume XII, Part 1, NSC 5429/2, August 20, 1954”

3 Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (London, Verso Books, 1 April 1993) p. 41

4 Ibid., p. 50

5 Ibid., p. 49

6 Noam Chomsky, “Bernie Sanders Supporters are a ‘Mobilized Force That Could Change The Country’”, MintPress News, 29 April 2016

7 Alasdair Soussi, “Legacy of US’ 1958 Lebanon invasion”, Al Jazeera, 15 July 2013

8 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1st edition, 1 Oct. 1978) p. 24

9 Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, pp. 52-53

10 Ibid., pp. 53-54

11 Ibid., p. 2

12 Ibid., p. 23

13 Ibid., p. 48

14 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (Mariner Books, 40th anniversary ed., 8 May 2018) Chapter 27, Stranger in a Strange Land

15 JFK Library, “News Conference 64, November 14, 1963”

16 American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1967, p. 869

17 Office of the Historian, “Foreign Relations Of The United States, 1961–1963, Volume IV, Vietnam, August–December 1963, 50. Interview With The President, September 2, 1963”

18 Mount Holyoke College, “The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 2”

19 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (OUP USA; New Ed Edition, 12 Feb. 1998) p. 516

20 Ibid.

21 Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, p. 73

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 108

A group of people in solidarity with Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution have recorded, transcribed and translated the testimonies of over 30 people of different backgrounds about their experience of the violent failed coup attempt in Nicaragua between April and July of 2018.

No human rights organization and practically no journalists, writers or academics out of all those who have written so glibly about the crisis of 2018 in Nicaragua have taken the trouble to talk to any of the thousands of victims of violent opposition attacks during that crisis.

This fact makes nonsense of any pretense on their part to be reporting truthfully on the events in Nicaragua of 2018.

Among well known writers, the only exceptions of which we are aware are the Italian journalist Giorgio Trucchi, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton of the Grayzone, the writer and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik, the independent journalists Dick y Miriam Emanuelsson, John Perry, Steve Sweeney of Morning Star and the Redfish documentary company video team.

The very simple reason for this reality is that the mainstream account of the violent failed 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua, repeated also by many so-called alternative media, portrayed the very opposite of what really happened.

International human rights institutions like the Inter American Commission for Human Rights and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights completely ignored opposition violence so as to be able to claim with the utmost falsehood that the government crushed peaceful protests with disproportionate, brutal violence.

That is a shameless lie. These institutions appear to have promoted that lie under pressure from the governments of the United States and the European Union

The testimonies gathered here demonstrate the undeniable false witness of these international institutions, of human rights NGOs and international news media, who comprehensively failed to report facts they found inconvenient.

A recurrent theme in gathering these testimonies is the total lack of interest in the experiences and suffering of the people concerned on the part of representatives and researchers of the Western human rights industry.

Some important points

Three things are important to understand in order to make sense of these interviews.

Firstly, the testimonies refer almost exclusively to incidents that took place while Nicaragua’s police were confined to their stations.

On April 22nd President Ortega publicly asked the Catholic Bishop’s Conference to serve as mediators of a national dialogue between the government and the opposition.

The bishop’s took two weeks to reply and, when they did, they set various conditions one of which was that the police be removed from the streets.

The Nicaraguan government agreed to this condition prior to the talks starting on May 16th and this explains why the general population was exposed over so many weeks to violent attacks and intimidation by opposition activists as described in these testimonies.

A second important point to understand is the operation of the so called “tranques” or roadblocks set up by the opposition activists at strategic points both in Nicaragua’s national highway system and within urban centers.

These roadblocks served as bases for the opposition to carry out their crimes and as control points to intimidate, monitor, rob and extort anyone passing through them, as these testimonies vividly describe.

The roadblocks were operated by opposition activists and paid delinquents who often ended up fighting among themselves over what they stole from all the people they extorted before letting them pass.

A third recurrent theme in these interviews is the issue of the 2019 amnesty setting free all the opposition activists and their delinquent accomplices charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned for criminal offenses committed during the 2018 crisis.

For bereaved families and for people who suffered directly from opposition violence in 2018, it took a huge act of faith on the part of Nicaragua’s people in the wisdom of President Daniel Ortega, Vice President Rosario Murillo and their government for that measure to be as successful as it has been..

That is why for people in Nicaragua all the victims and relatives of victims of opposition violence during the failed coup attempt are regarded as Heroes of Peace because they put the need for their country to heal and reconcile above their own personal suffering and grief.

But that is something far beyond the pitiful moral understanding, wholesale intellectual abdication and sly cynicism of practically all North American and European media journalists and editors, university academics, functionaries of the OAS and the Office of the UN Human Rights Commissioner or any of the leading international human rights NGOs.

The “Rural Workers Movement”

These testimonies focus on victims of the so-called Rural Workers Movement, a small organization whose aggressive leaders, like Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena, deliberately project a false image that they represent a large number of rural workers in Nicaragua.

In fact, local people calculate the core membership of the Rural Workers Movement at no more than around 2000, although by means of payment, intimidation and disinformation their protest marches occasionally mobilize many more.

By comparison the long established Association of Rural Workers (ATC) is a genuinely national organization with over 47000 members. Nationally, there are over 5300 registered cooperatives, mostly in the agricultural and livestock sector, with more than 350,000 members. Not one of those cooperatives is of the Rural Workers Movement.

This movement initially began supposedly in protest against Nicaragua’s proposed interoceanic canal. To promote herself as an important rural workers leader Ramirez boasts of having organized over 80 protests involving many thousands of people. At the same time she makes the contradictory claim that she is the victim of a dictatorship that denies freedom of speech.In any case, she has never developed her movement’s base significantly. The main area in which Ramirez and Mairena have mobilized support is the stretch of land between the area around El Tule on Lake Nicaragua’s eastern shore and the area south of Bluefields where the canal is planned to enter the Caribbean Sea.

This area covers the central and eastern parts of the municipality of Nueva Guinea and the adjacent territory of the municipality of Bluefields. The area’s settlement, especially in Nueva Guinea, developed in the 1970s.

This resulted partly from a mis-named land reform by the Somoza dictatorship which cleared landless rural families from areas on the Pacific Coast where the ruling Somoza clique wanted to grow cotton during the boom in cotton prices of that time. But many families made homeless following the 1972 earthquake were also effectively dumped in Nueva Guinea..

Many hundreds of families were moved to Nueva Guinea at different times during that period. They were settled on land with practically no support or amenities, resulting in an extremely impoverished population with no access to adequate health care or education.

Geographically, the area is still difficult of access, with poor road communications, especially around the municipal boundary between Nueva Guinea and Bluefields. This makes effective security provision for the local population by the police extremely difficult.

These geographical characteristics combine with a socio-economic profile very favorable for an organization like the Rural Workers Movement, enabling its leaders to cloak their criminal activities with a right wing political discourse.

Historically, the region has been a bastion of the right wing Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC). During the 1980s the US backed Contra fighters contested control of the area with the Sandinista army. The patterns of that history prevail to this day.

Medardo Mairena was elected as a councilor to the Regional authority of the Southern Caribbean Autonomous Region. A leading accomplice of Mairena, Pedro Mena, has been a PLC municipal councilor. Francisca Ramirez Torrez and her partner Migdonio López Chamorro have also both been long standing activists of the PLC.

During the 1980s, López Chamorro was a comandante in the ARDE branch of the Contra based in Costa Rica, with the nickname “Brasita”.

While Medardo Mairena and Francisca Ramirez project themselves overseas as noble fighters on behalf of impoverished rural families and as victims of unjust repression, their image locally is very different.

Mairena lost his Costa Rican residency and was expelled by the Costa Rican authorities accused of people trafficking.

Ramirez and her family, far from being impoverished peasants, are registered by the local police in Nueva Guinea as owning two large cattle trucks and a very expensive Toyota Land Cruiser SUV. Local people say she and her family own between 500 and 700 acres of land.

As of September 2020, Ramirez and her family are involved in litigation in Costa Rica over property she is alleged to have usurped from a local landowner there, as well as accusations of corrupt use of funding to help alleged “refugees” from Nicaragua.

Thanks largely to coaching and support from, among others, Monica Baltodano and her daughter Monica López via the Baltodano family’s now closed down NGO Popol Na, Ramirez and Mairena have also accessed substantial funding totaling certainly many hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of dollars.

Funding has come both directly from discretionary USAID funds managed by the US embassy in Managua and from foreign human rights NGOs like Ireland’s Frontline Defenders, among others. Ramirez and Mairena are totally opaque about how much money they have received and its use.

Monica López (left) with Francisca Ramirez at her side, meeting with right wing Liberal leader Fabio Gadea in the offices of the far right media outlet Radio Corporación which he owns and which has been funded by USAID

Clockwise from top left: Francisca Ramírez with Carlos Fernando Chamorro; with Fabio Gadea; with CENIDH’s Vilma Nuñez; Ramírez with reactionary Catholic bishop Silvio Baez. Both CENIDH and Chamorro have been funded by USAID.

The witness testimonies collected here demonstrate that in practice the Rural Workers Movement operates effectively as an organized crime operation.

Ramirez and Mairena and their accomplices use extortion, menaces and outright murderous violence to intimidate local rural families into supporting them and keeping quiet about their crimes.

Medaro Mairena was tried and sentenced to long prison terms as the intellectual author of teh massacre in El Morrito of July 12th 2018 in which thugs organized by himself and Francisca Ramirez murdered four police officers and a primary school teacher. He was set free in 2019 under the terms of one of the the controversial government amnesties of that year.

These witness testimonies from a wide variety of ordinary people victimized by Rural Workers Movement activists and their accomplices confirm that ever since the first big anti-canal protests of 2014, the Rural Workers Movement has been relentlessly violent, essentially adapting the terrorist practices of the 1980s US-trained wartime Contra to further their contemporary political agenda.

That criminal violence reached a crescendo in 2018 when Ramirez and Mairena operated systematic roadblocks extorting huge amounts of money from local people seeking to go to work, study, do business or seek health care.

Police sources in the area calculate that the amount extorted daily by Mairena and Ramirez at the roadblocks they controlled and from other illicit activities may have averaged as much as US$50,000 over around 80 days from the end of April to early July 2018, implying a possible total amount extorted of around US$4 million.

Even so international human rights organizations and North American and European information media still portray Francisca Ramirez and Medardo Mairena as selfless heroes striving to serve impoverished rural families in Nicaragua.

To the contrary, the testimonies gathered here confirm President Daniel’s Ortega’s contention made repeatedly to foreign news media during interviews in 2018, that armed opposition gangs in very remote rural areas are violently targeting vulnerable rural families and especially sandinistas in order to instil terror, destabilizing the country’s rural economy and destroying social peace

The testimonies gathered together here present the bitter truth about the activities of Francisca Ramirez, Medardo Mairena and their accomplices in the Rural Workers Movement.

Click here to read Nicaragua 18: Uncensoring the truth.

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Featured image: A woman stands near a burning barricade holding Nicaraguan flag, April 2018

On November 13, 1966 – at the height of the resistance war in Vietnam – Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre convened a people’s tribunal to hold the US government accountable for its escalating war crimes.

“The tribunal has no clear historical precedent”, Russell said. It represented no state power; it had no capacity to sentence the accused. “I believe that these apparent limitations are, in fact, virtues. We are free to conduct a solemn and historic investigation”, said Russell, “presented to the conscience of mankind.”

One half-century later, the Progressive International (PI) is once again calling on the conscience of mankind against the crimes of US imperialism.

Today, Friday October 2nd, marks the first day of the Belmarsh Tribunal, named for the prison where Julian Assange has been kept in permanent confinement for daring to publish documents that detail torture, violence, and illegal spying by the US government.

From Belmarsh, Assange now faces extradition to the United States – the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act. Today’s tribunal takes its name from this site of complicity in the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn.

In a recent statement signed by many members of its Council (including Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy), the PI warned that the prosecution of an Australian citizen for his journalistic activities done in sovereign countries in Europe is a gross violation of human rights and international law. “More dangerously, it sets a legal precedent that means that any dissident from the foreign policy of the United States may be shipped to the United States to face life imprisonment or even a death penalty.”

But statements will not suffice. That is why the PI is establishing the Belmarsh Tribunal: to put the United States government on trial for its crimes of the twenty first century – from atrocities in Iraq to torture at Guantánamo Bay to the CIA‘s illegal surveillance program – and draw attention to the extradition case of Julian Assange for revealing them.

“Our position is strong because we do not seek to send a few individuals to prison”, Sartre said of the 1966 tribunal, “but to reawaken in public opinion, at an ominous moment of our history, the idea that there can be policies which are objectively and legally criminal.”

We are again at that ominous moment of our history – asking, as Bertrand Russell did then, for “the peoples of the world, the masses, to take action to stop the crimes.”

The Tribunal will bring together a planetary cast of activists, artists, thinkers, and political representatives to investigate and evaluate the Wikileaks revelations. The former president of Brazil Lula will remind us that Brazilians owe an additional debt for the WikiLeaks revelations, while former Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis will reiterate why Assange has to be released immediately.

The Tribunal will be joined by the original member of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, Tariq Ali, who went to Vietnam to investigate US war crimes; Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson; activists and musicians Roger Waters and M.I.A.; former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa; philosopher Slavoj Žižek; actress and activist Pamela Anderson; and many others.

Today’s events mark only the first day of the Tribunal. As long as Julian Assange is in prison, the Belmarsh Tribunal will continue its fight for justice. Our goal is not only freedom for Assange, but also justice for the crimes revealed by WikiLeaks – and the protection of our freedoms to speak, express, assemble, and demand truth from the powers arrayed against us.

If we do not stand now – with all the evidence in our hands – we stand little chance against a machine of war and surveillance that becomes more sophisticated and more secretive by the day.

It is time to take action. And it is time to demand justice. Because if they charge against the publisher who revealed their crimes, we must charge against the criminals themselves. Join us.

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Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump “tested positive” for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers “got” covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy. 

As always, the story keeps changing: Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown back in February, urging everyone to visit? Remember Fauci dismissing masks as useless? Why should we believe anything the political/media complex tells us now?

So what do these headlines really mean? What exactly is a covid “case”?

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting. Journalists almost uniformly promote what we can call the “prolockdown” narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from covid-19 to serve a political agenda. They may be motivated to hurt Trump politically, to promote a more socialist “new normal,” or simply to drive more clicks and views. Bad news sells. But the bias is clear and undeniable.

This explains why media outlets use the terms “case” and “infection” so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public. All of the endless talk about testing, testing, testing served to obscure two important facts. First, the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives. And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor? Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human’s respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us they are sick, or transmitting sickness to anyone.

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? When someone drives to work without incident or accident, do we create statistics about their exposure to traffic?

—A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself—SARS-CoV-2—show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call “coronavirus disease.”

The only meaningful statistics show the incidence of serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths. The single most important statistic among these is the infection fatality rate (IFR). Data collected through July shows that the IFR for those under age forty-five is actually lower than that of the common flu. The covid-19 IFR rises for those over fifty, but it is hardly a death sentence. And the data does not segregate those with preexisting health issues caused by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. If we could see data only for reasonably healthy people under fifty, the numbers would be even more reassuring.

Mild or asymptomatic covid cases are effectively meaningless. The world is full of bacteria and viruses, and sometimes they make us a bit sick for a few days. There are millions of them in the world all around us, on our skin, in our nose and respiratory tract, in our organs. We are meant to live with them, which is why we all have immune systems designed to help us coexist and adapt to ever-changing organisms. We develop antibodies naturally, or we attempt to stimulate them through vaccines, but ultimately our own immune systems have to deal with covid-19. The virus will always be out there waiting, on the other side of any lockdown or mask—so we might as well get on with it.

From day one the focus should have been on boosting immunity through exercise, fresh air, sunlight, proper dietary supplementation, and the promotion of general well-being. Instead our politicians, bureaucrats, and media insisted on business lockdowns, school closures, distancing, isolation, masks, and the mirage of a fast, effective vaccine. As with almost everything in life, state intervention made the situation worse. We can only hope many governors are removed from office, either by impeachment or at the next election. Several, including Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, should face criminal charges for their lawless edicts. There is no due process exception for “public health.”

Lockdowns were never justified, either in terms of the covid-19 risk or the staggering economic tradeoffs, which will be felt for decades. They certainly are not justified now, given seven months of additional data showing that the transmission and lethality of covid-19 are not particularly worse than previous SARS, swine flu, or Ebola pandemics. We still don’t know how many of the reported two hundred thousand US covid-19 deaths were actually caused by the SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease, or simply reflect people who died of other causes after exposure to covid-19. We do know that the harms caused by the lockdowns far outweigh the harms posed by the covid-19 virus.

We have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media. How much more will we accept?

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Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, and as an attorney for private equity clients. Contact: email; Twitter.

Featured image is from MW

“I believe that opposing what is wrong and furthering what is right is a moral imperative; and that it is my responsibility to do so in direct proportion to the power I posses at the time,” painter Jordan Henderson told me in a recent interview.

“So when the current contrived crisis and all the medical fraud and social engineering began to unfold, I knew that I should oppose it. I wanted to oppose it. But, I cannot abandon my art. In other words, I do not have time to be an activist.”

Whether we are a painter, a musician or a plumber I think we can all relate to this dilemma: Doing what we love versus fighting for our freedom to continue doing what we love.

John Adams once wrote a letter to his wife saying that he “must study politics and war” so that their grandchildren would have the freedom to “study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

However, as Henderson has discovered, we still possess enough freedom that the two need not be in conflict. Instead of abandoning his art, he made his art an instrument of change:

“For some reason at least two months passed before I conceptualized the painting Sanity, Her Son, and the Credulous,” said Henderson. “This sort of painting means that I can continue my pursuit of artistic exploration while speaking out against this tyranny through an especially interesting medium. As obvious as this direction seems, it was an epiphany, almost unreal, because effectively it means having your cake and eating it too.”

Some people are meant to be full-blown activists: Journalists like James Corbett or Dan Dicks; or even a few good politicians like Randy Hillier, Sara Cunial or Herbert Kickl.

Yet others, like Henderson, are full-blown artists, who can change the world not with journalism and politics, but with creativity and metaphor — much like Mark Childress said that To Kill a Mockingbird impacted the civil rights movement “in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art…” (I hope to do the same with my novel, The Brave New Normal: A Dsytopian Love Story.)

But such innovations are not limited to artists. Look at what a country health food store did to fight their masking bylaws. Or what my wife is doing to stop forced masking at our local hospital. As I explain in my article, The ONE Thing You Can Do to Stop the Nutty New Normal you need not become a Mahatma Gandhi to be the change you want to see in the (new normal) world. No contribution is too small.

“If you think you are too small to make a difference,” says the Dalai Lama, “try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.”

One simple way to be a pesky a mosquito on the neck of the Corona World Order is to purchase prints of Jordan Henderson’s anti-masking painting. Give copies to friends and family for Christmas. Order a stack of the greeting cards, write a friendly note, stuff them with an anti-masking article or study, and send them to your government representatives, your mayor, police chief and leaders in your community. You’ll be supporting Henderson’s artivism while using a moving visual image to awaken people to the tyrannical and dehumanizing agenda being force upon us.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author; featured image: Artists Jordan Henderson establishing a composition in his studio in Dayton, Washington.

On October 2, the Armenian-Azerbaijani war entered its 5^th day. Forces of the Azerbaijani military, supported by Turkey, continued their attempts to capture the contested Nagorno-Karabakh Region and to dismantle the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which is overwhelmingly populated by Armenians.

Intense artillery duels and Azerbaijani airstrikes are being reported across the entire frontline in Karabakh, and even near some parts of the Azerbaijani-Armenian border. Nonetheless, the main clashes still take place in the districts of Fizuli and Jabrayil, where Azerbaijan have achieved their main gains capturing several positions from the Armenians. The Azerbaijani artillery together with Turkish-made and Israeli-made combat drones played a key role in the tactical successes of Azerbaijan on the battlefield.

On October 1, the Armenian military even claimed that 4 Azerbeijani combat drones entered Armenian airspace and 3 of them were shot down, allegedly by the S-300 system. Additionally, the Armenian Defense Ministry claimed that its forces had shot down three Azerbaijani fighter jets and two helicopters. The Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan dismissed the Armenian claims, calling them “complete nonsense and fake news.”

It insists that the Armenian side uses claims about attacks on its territory in an attempt to trigger the Collective Security Treaty Organization pact and obtain direct military support from Russia in the conflict in Karabakh, which formally is not its territory. What is even more strange, despite the 5 days of open war, the Armenian leadership has still not started the process for the recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic or the official integration of the region into Armenia. Therefore, it has no even theoretical legal grounds to request CSTO help in a conflict on its territory.

Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, known for its anti-Assad and pro-militant stance in the Syrian conflict, reported that dozens of Turkish-backed Syrian militants had been killed, injured or went missing while fighting against Armenian forces in Karabakh. According to the SOHR, 28 of them were killed and 62 others were injured or went missing. The report alleges that at least 850 Turkish-backed Syrian militants were deployed there. It should be noted that, according to Armenian estimates, their number is about 4,000. France and Russia also expressed their concern regarding the moving of militants to the region. In turn, Azerbaijani and Turkish media and officials insist that Armenia deploys members of Kurdish armed groups, considered to be terrorists by Ankara, to the combat zone. Nonetheless, these claims have not so far been supported by any evidence.

The self-styled Neo-Ottoman Empire of President Recent Tayyip Erdogan is on a full-scale propaganda offensive to instigate an Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

On October 1, the United States, Russia and France released a joint statement condemning the violence in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, calling on the sides to accept a ceasefire and return to the negotiating table. In response, President Erdogan made a fierce statement slamming the OSCE and claiming that Azerbaijan should continue its military push to capture the Nagorno-Karabakh region and thus the war with Armenia.

“I would like to declare that we are together with our brothers in Azerbaijan in their struggle for the liberation of their occupied land. The path to lasting peace in this region lies through the withdrawal of Armenia from all the spans of the Azerbaijani lands occupied by them,” Erdogan said addressing the Turkish Parliament. “Especially the so-called Minsk trio America, Russia, France and their seeking of a ceasefire in the face of this negative situation, which has been reflected these days because they have neglected this problem for nearly 30 years, is above all not acceptable,” he added.

In the best traditions of Turkish public diplomacy, Erdogan simultaneously accused Armenia of triggering the military escalation. Meanwhile, Turkish state media reported that during the recent phone call Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov that Turkey sees no reason for a ceasefire in Karabakh for as long as the region remains in the hands of Armenian forces.

Earlier, the Turkish leadership at the highest level declared that it is ready to provide any help, including military, to Baku. The Armenian side claims that Turkey is in fact participating in the war on the side of Azerbaijan.

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These days of the COVID-19 global crisis, I’m sure you’ve often felt being lied to.

Tens of millions of Filipinos know the feeling. Fudged updates on COVID-19 stats, denials of corruption and treason in high places, trolls actively spreading outright deceits on social media, even a blackout on the true state of President Duterte’s health—this utterly bad state of the flow of information was even compounded by the closure of ABS-CBN, a major Philippine broadcast network that’s one of Southeast Asia’s biggest media outfits, highlighting the Philippine government’s ongoing attack on press freedom.

Lies and deceits pervade across the globe, in fact. Social media has been riding roughshod with most active gatekeeping across the board in all the major platforms under the current W.H.O.-declared global pandemic. In the guise of stamping out misinformation and disinformation, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube rightfully took down what may be deemed alt-right and fascistic accounts and posts. But these digital behemoths sadly went far beyond that. Hand in hand with prime search engines like Google, they manipulated search and feed algorithms to extremely marginalize accounts and posts of alternative media outfits dutifully reporting on anomalies and trends that do not go along with the establishment narrative and agenda. Victims include independent media as Truthout.org, Mint Press News, Global Research, Information Clearing House, Whatreallyhappened.com, Popular Resistance, Telesur, and RT (Russia Today); authors like Mark Crispin Miller, Mark Taliano, Dr V.A. Shiva Ayyudarai and Pepe Escobar; and numerous alternative health websites.

The result? Humanity is bamboozled with far more Sturm und Drang signifying nothing; to paraphrase the American rock musician Jackson Browne, the more you watch, read and listen, the less you know.

But history doesn’t provide problems without the solutions. Notwithstanding unprecedented establishment efforts to hijack the flow of information, forces are surely emerging and persevering to rise above the din of deceptions. When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Eonomic Crisis, a newly-released compendium of COVID-19-related essays from Clarity Press and edited by feisty former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, is one major effort from what can be called a broad global COVID-19 Truth, Freedom and Health Movement.

Book’s editor a truthseeking veteran

The book’s editor is no stranger to truthseeking. As a Democrat member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia in 2002, McKinney dared call early for a complete investigation into the terrorist attacks of 9/11 of 2001 on U.S. soil, including whether then President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials got advance warnings of the terrorist acts and failed to prevent them. Hers was a solitary voice in the U.S. Congress calling for the inquiry. She raised the call just less than 7 months after 9/11 when the American and global publics were still held in thrall by the government’s official conspiracy theory that Osama bin Laden and 19 Muslim hijackers of al-Qaeda were solely behind the attacks. For being a forthright truthseeker, McKinney was widely pilloried and ridiculed in mainstream U.S. media by government apologists. She would later be a victim of bipartisan fraud to steal her 6^th successive term in office.

That obviously has not stopped her from her activist advocacy for human rights, racial equality, and global peace. She would be the Green Party Candidate for U.S. President in 2008, and be editor of three hard-hitting books, including When China Sneezes.

Eerie parallels between COVID-19 and 9/11

Likewise, the 9/11 truth movement she advocated then has since surpassed much ridicule, with groups like the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth credibly exposing the anomalous demolition of WTC7, the third New York tower that fell on 9/11 in similar fashion as the Twin Towers but was not hit by any of the hijacked planes.

To be honest about it, the emergence of COVID-19 this year has compelling, if eerie parallels to 9/11 of 2001. Both were unprecedented events that have impacted the entire world and caught the global public by surprise. Both have produced an unexpectedly large number of casualties. Both ushered in global economic downturns. Both events served as pretexts to impose repressive measures attacking broadly-accepted civil liberties. Both became opportunities for well-entrenched global economic interests to make superprofit bonanzas. And both watershed events have raised serious questions pointing to likely outstanding anomalies and—yes—real conspiracies that humanity deserves to know the answers to.

Image below: Cynthia McKinney (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

At the book’s outset, McKinney warns the reader “to buckle your seatbelt, because by the time you’ve completed these pages, your outlook on health, wealth, and global governance won’t be the same.”

And on this, the book does not disappoint. McKinney has successfully culled contributions from resource persons delving deeply into various dimensions of the current global health and politico-economic crisis.

SARS-CoV-2’s biodefense lab origins?

Part 1 immediately takes us to the jugular as Jeff J. Brown, curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library, examines the COVID-19 disease itself and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it, in an easy-to-understand approach. He makes a solid contribution to a long-overdue comprehensive inquiry into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by sharing fiercely-suppressed scientific studies that reveal the virus has curious features that could not have been the result of natural “evolution”. Yes, the virus is far more likely to have originated in a “biodefense” (the establishment’s Orwellian term for biowarfare) lab.

Notwithstanding the emerging fact-based conclusion that the virus causing COVID-19 was a likely result of a “gain-of-function” biolab op, Brown notes however that this new coronavirus disease doesn’t deserve the pandemic hype, observing the long-trending COVID-19 mortality rate is much lower than that of, say, pneumonia. This trend holds until now in fact: out of a total of 34,656,000 COVID-19 cases all over the world as of October 3, deaths from the disease number 1,028,800. That’s a 2.97% mortality rate, lower than pneumonia’s 5% to 10%, and a far cry from the 10% mortality rate from the (misnamed) Spanish flu of World War I vintage, to which COVID-19 has been curiously but most unfittingly compared at the get-go of the current health crisis.

The hidden story of China’s defeat of COVID-19

Part 2 begins with China-based professor and retired businessman Larry Romanoff explaining the overwhelming victorious Chinese response to the COVID-19 outbreak in detail not widely shared with the rest of the world. The unique social setup of the country lends surprising muscle to how China licked COVID-19, from a public health system given primacy by government to overwhelming national solidarity shown by the Chinese people to lift each other up in times of adversity. Romanoff doesn’t hide the fact mistakes were made in the process, but we all see now the incontrovertible proof of the pudding. Despite being dubbed the epicenter of COVID-19 and pilloried in kneejerk fashion by no less than Donald Trump and his allies in and out of the U.S. that SARS-CoV-2 is a “China virus”, China now stands tall when we’re talking COVID-19. It’s one of a select number of countries certified to have successfully overcome the disease, along with Cuba, Vietnam, Thailand and, yes, that part of China called Taiwan. No new cases have been reported in China for weeks now. Contrast that with Trumpland USA, now the eminent leader in COVID-19 infections, no thanks to a health system that surprisingly unraveled in prompt fashion as deeply broken.

After Romanoff, well-detailed on-the-ground honest accounts on what happened in China at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak are shared by a Chinese citizen and a Nigerian expat, who both chose to be anonymous.

COVID-19’s dark economic side

Part 3 proceeds to the economic dimension of the COVID-19 crisis. Economist Jack Rasmus lays down a bleak prognosis for the U.S. economy ravaged by the coronavirus. The simultaneous crises in health, employment, rent and real estate, childcare, and education spell “an extended, weak and unstable economic recovery—not to be confused with a temporary ‘rebound’ over the summer—that will take years to unfold”, as he describes it.

Economist Michael Hudson shares Rasmus’ take on things getting really bad for the U.S. economy—or more exactly, for the American people, as Hudson reveals that once again, as in 2008, the plutocrat and bankster cronies of the political class will be “saved” by multibillion-dollar bonanza giveaways, to the horrific detriment of Main Street. Hudson argues that a fundamental root of the economic woes plaguing the U.S. is its abandonment of the Levitical model of periodic debt forgiveness and cancellation—the Jubilee tradition found in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.

Geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig dares shine a bright light on a likely nefarious side to the current crisis. He cites the 2010 Rockefeller Report uncannily spelling out

a program that starts in 2020 with a corona pandemic. It would start in China and in no time, it would engulf the entire globe. That initial phase is called ‘The Lockstep Scenario.’

He estimates the “purported” pandemic will devastate vast swathes of the global economy to give rise to a monstrous “New or One World Order” featuring fully-digitized human lives. This not-too-far digitalized future was fortuitously foreseen by Agenda ID2020, a pet project of vaccine “philanthropist” and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. A quite similar scenario was the central theme of the Event 201 simulation held October 2019 in New York, sponsored by Gates’ foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Health, and the World Economic Forum plutocrats’ club. W.H.O., World Bank, UNICEF, the U.S. and the Chinese CDCs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were among Event 201’s stellar participants.

And just a month after Event 201, voila!, the widely-known first reports of a new coronavirus disease struck Wuhan in China.

Koenig would proceed to highlight the positive things going for rising world power China, like its putting unique primacy to public banking, and “the Chinese philosophy of nonaggression, of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and of promoting peaceful economic coexistence and development around the globe” as he touts China’s project to develop an “Economy of Peace”. One wonders though how long-running Chinese efforts to ape the U.S. in building a global network of its own military bases—many located far beyond China’s borders—chimes in with these announced intentions.

COVID-19 and the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)

Professor William Robinson takes a step further than both Rasmus and Koenig in the bleak part of their prognoses for the future. He writes on how the transnational capitalist class (TCC) ruling the world is fully aware that the global economy “is a ticking time bomb” that just needed “something to light the fuse (and t)hat came in the form of the coronavirus.” This same ruling class is now making use of the current world crisis to push a plan to further “consolidate a global police state” leveling up the repressive measures taken by countries in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 of 2001, explaining thus:

Global police state refers to three interrelated developments: 1) militarized accumulation, as a means of accumulating capital in the face of stagnation; 2) systems of mass social control and repression to contain the oppressed; and 3) the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as twenty-first century fascism and even as totalitarian.

Robinson issues a rallying cry at the end of his piece:

The COVID-19 pandemic marks a before-and-after turning point. We have entered into a period of mounting chaos in the world capitalist system. Short of revolution, we must struggle now to prevent our rulers from turning the crisis and its aftermath into an opportunity for them to resuscitate and deepen the neoliberal order once the dust settles. Our struggle is to push for something along the lines of a global Green New Deal as an interim program while seeking an accumulation of forces for more radical system change. Left and progressive forces must position themselves now to beat back the threat of war and the global police state and to push the coming upheavals in a direction that empowers the global working and popular classes.

Wicked worldwide web of biowarfare

Part 4 of the book finds journalist Whitney Webb rightfully focusing on a fiercely-hidden dimension of the current COVID-19 crisis: the diabolical global biowarfare industry and its horrific history. And then some.

Webb tracked down a vital trail of early disinformation which oh-so-quickly pointed to the Chinese government as being behind COVID-19. That disinfo trail leads to the C.I.A.-trusted Radio Free Asia as well as the Washington Times, among others. She then unveils a wicked worldwide web of bioweaponry overtly and covertly funded by the U.S. Pentagon under various programs prominently featuring U.S.-funded high-security “biodefense” labs at the border of China and Russia, the ubiquitous USAMRIID facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, U.S. universities, the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, all the way to Big Pharma companies in the thick of the race to produce the first COVID-19 vaccine.

Webb connects these dots to the notorious “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” September 2000 manifesto of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signed by prominent neoconservatives which openly promoted advanced forms of biowarfare “targeting” specific genotypes to take this abhorrent field of science “from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”

Bridgewater and COVID-19 as economic warfare

Engineer Claudio Peretti bridges the link between biowarfare and economic warfare. He echoes other contributors’ assertions on the urgency to conduct a deep inquiry on how COVID-19 came about and the disease’s likely entanglement with existing biodefense projects.

Peretti’s piece is vital in the COVID-19 investigation for sharing how Bridgewater, a top global hedge fund, may have had most intimate foreknowledge of COVID-19. You see, it was reported in November 2019 that Bridgewater made an unprecedented $1.5-billion options bet that the global economy would suffer a spectacular crash on March 2020.

I don’t know about you, but making a billion-dollar bet in November 2019 on a world crash in four months is certifiably crazy. But Bridgewater’s gamble proved prescient. Too uncomfortably prescient in fact, as virtually no one had an inkling COVID-19 would so drastically disrupt the world economy at that exact month early this year. Drawing on this most anomalous economic act, Peretti points to a far more sinister and malevolent virus than SARS-CoV-2, what he calls the “Finanz-virus”.

Eugenics and hybrid warfare at the heart of COVID-19

The book’s editor, Cynthia McKinney, explores in her own contribution the likely place of eugenics—defined here as “the belief in and the practice of selectively breeding (and sterilizing) human beings for the purpose of creating a ‘Master Race’”—as well as of hybrid warfare—which encompasses employing all overt and covert war technologies short of conventional and nuclear warfare—at the center of the COVID-19 global maelstrom. She lists instructive flashpoints in biowarfare’s long sordid history and cites its use by world powers even when international conventions have explicitly banned it. As one of so many material contributions she raised towards a serious inquiry into COVID-19, McKinney points to a mysterious August 2019 shutdown by the U.S. CDC of the supposedly ultra-safe USAMRIID biolab at Fort Detrick for failing to keep an up-to-date log of all toxins on hand and to ‘implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select (read: highly dangerous) agents or toxins’. Ominously, Fort Detrick has quietly reopened since.

Biowarfare vs humanity

Part 5 begins with writer Gary D. Barnett focusing on the U.S. as far and away the country with the largest resources deployed for illegal biological and chemical warfare until now. These biowarfare operations have not only targeted foreign countries and their wide swathes of innocent civilian populations. Barnett lists historical incidents of reprehensible biowarfare experimentation victimizing not only U.S. soldiers and employees of the military-industrial complex but even ordinary American civilians.

(We don’t need to plumb too deep in history, in fact. Amid the current COVID-19 crisis last August, U.S. authorities unleashed 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida without Floridians’ consent.)

Barnett ends with a stirring conclusion:

The insanity of bioweapon research, development, and use largely driven by the U.S., threatens not only every American, but puts everyone on earth at risk of sickness, suffering, and death. Due to these risks all of us are also subject to the prospect of abject slavery. The ongoing agenda of the ruling class is power and control of the entire planet, and bio-warfare against humanity is the tool envisaged to accomplish it.

Fascist dystopia post-COVID-19

Political commentator Helen Buyniski presses on with an encyclopedic citation of measures and events across the globe that point to a clear fascist and corporatist agenda by those at the commanding heights of power justifying lockdown impositions a la medical and economic martial law. Indeed, a real-life dystopian future inimical to humanity firms up the whole picture. She cites the key role of Blackrock, history’s biggest trillion-dollar asset manager, as appointed overseer of what will be the biggest-ever consolidation of wealth of history’s obscenely richest plutocrats amid unparalleled economic devastation across the continents.

Buyniski warns in the end:

Those who lived through 9/11 [of 2001] and saw the destruction it wrought upon the U.S.’ national character can see it happening again on an international scale. It is our duty to warn the world and avert that outcome. One country falling under the thrall of a totalitarian technocratic police state is a tragedy; the entire world falling under an authoritarian global government is a nightmare from which humanity might never wake up.

Rethinking human rights after COVID-19

Amid all the gloom and doom, retired U.N. official Alfred de Zayas rounds out the book with optimism. He boldly recommends a “World Conference on Post-Covid Recovery”. This proposed conference would have as one prime agenda discarding the current “obsolete and artificial division of human rights” that has long perpetuated “a world order that much too often appears to allow injustice” and replacing it with a

functional paradigm that would consider rights in the light of their function within a coherent system—not of competing rights and aspirations, but of interrelated, mutually reinforcing rights which should be applied in their interdependence and understood in the context of a coordinated strategy to serve the ultimate goal of achieving human dignity in all of its manifestations.

Throughout the book, an urgency permeates impelling the reader to do something about what’s happening under the current COVID-19 global crisis. As it should be: Nowhere after World War 2 has humanity been witness to a truly global offensive against truth, health, well-being and freedom for humankind as now.

The further consolidation of 21^st-century Global Fascism depicted throughout this collection of thought-provoking essays is a serious matter all denizens of the earth ought to reckon. For presenting us a veritable antidote to widespread misinformation and disinformation, this must-read of a book, its publisher, its editor and contributors deserve its readers’ bountiful gratitude.

“The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast,” rock poet laureate Bob Dylan once sung. We all have a lot of unmasking, unraveling, unlearning, undoing and unshackling ahead.

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JOEL P. GARDUCE is a Filipino political and cultural researcher and activist. His previous articles have been published in the online sites of Bulatlat, Ibon Foundation, and Global Research, and have been translated in a number of languages. He previously wrote a column for a newspaper in central Philippines. He was a president of the alumni association of the Philippines’ premier high school, the Philippine Science High School (PSHS), had spoken at international conferences, was a director for the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), and was a national officer in the early 1980s of the League of Filipino Students (LFS). He sings bass for the People’s Chorale time and again.

In an interview with John Anderson, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine and Professor (by Courtesy) of Economics at Stanford University, had this to say about who is paying the cost of the new normal:

“We’re asking our youth to pay the costs…. that’s who pays the costs of these lockdowns. You have delayed schooling. Essentially schooling online instead of in person. Young people are meant to be in company with one another; they’re not meant to be alone. It’s extremely costly from a social development point of view to have that. And it’s those young people that are paying those costs…

“I think that the unequal distribution of this is absolutely devastating. It’s poor people and young people that are paying the cost of the lockdown and they’re not the ones that are benefiting. They experienced the damage of COVID at much lower rates…

“The United States, I think we’re at 27 trillion dollars in debt and counting. And now’s there’s a debate over how big the next stimulus pack is going to be…. Where does that money come from?… It’s going to come from my kids. It’s going to come from the younger generation who will have that debt hanging over them for the rest of their lives.

“Is it worth it? I mean that’s the thing. It’s like we have almost haven’t asked that question. We just said, okay, we have this COVID disaster. Let’s pay any cost whatsoever to get out.”

Below the interview a viewer posted this comment:

“My father is 80-years-old and he is furious with the [lockdowns]. He says, ‘I would rather take my chances with the damn virus, than see a single family lose their livelihoods.’ He goes on to say that it is a crime to have policies that harm and kill healthy young people in order to protect others from disease. It is one thing to die from disease but another to die from the policies of wealthy politicians.“

As Thomas Sowell said: “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.” You can watch the full interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on John Anderson’s YouTube channel or directly below.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca

Featured image is from a screenshot from the youtube video

There’s nothing unusual about Trump falling ill from exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid disease — notably because of his close contact to numerous people daily.

Millions of Americans and countless others worldwide contract seasonal flu/influenza.

It happens annually with no fear-mongering mass hysteria, no mandated or voluntary house arrest, no mass shutdowns of businesses — no economic collapse that’s happening in the US and elsewhere.

According to Trump’s physician Dr. Sean Conley, he experienced a mild cough, nasal congestion, fatigue, and a low-grade fever that came down, adding:

He’s “cautiously optimistic” about his condition, saying as well that he’s “not yet out of the woods.”

According to medical experts, Covid disease can worsen days after contracting it.

Initial mild symptoms can become more serious.

According to reports by Trump’s doctors, he’s being treated with two experimental drugs — remdesivir and a neutralizing antibody cocktail.

If true, he’s playing Russian roulette with his health, notably because a proved effective Covid disease treatment exists.

When used as directed, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) combined with either azithromycin or doxycycline and zinc is highly effective in treating Covid-infected individuals when administered within around 10 days of being diagnosed with the disease.

Everyone infected with Covid disease should be treated with this protocol.

No one should use potentially toxic experimental drugs. No responsible medical providers should prescribe them.

If reports are accurate, both drugs administered to Trump received emergency FDA authorization for his use.

Neither one cures Covid disease.

Earlier, Thailand Medical News (TMN) said “Americans are getting their lives placed (at) risk (because) the US FDA…rapidly approved remdesivir as a drug to treat COVID-19 despite conflicting study results, and the fact that the drug does not clearly demonstrate any specific efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus,” adding:

Use of the drug in trials “show(ed) hepatoxicity effects coupled with even slight indications of nephrotoxicity and even cardiotoxicity, and there are insufficient studies to demonstrate its safety on humans.”

Claims by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that use of the drug shortens hospitalizations for Covid-infected individuals are dubious at best.

The conclusion was based on use of the drug by small numbers of patients with the disease, far too few to be meaningful.

According to the WHO, remdesivir used in the study failed to improve patients’ health or reduce pathogens in their blood.

The FDA endorsed “an unproven but toxic drug,” TMN stressed — defying medical ethics and patient safety.

If widely marketed following its use by Trump, it’ll be a potentially large-scale experiment that may be harmful to countless numbers of Covid-infected patients.

The same may be true for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ experimental neutralizing antibody cocktail administered to Trump — if reports are accurate.

These drugs may potentially be more harmful by administering them in combination.

Big Pharma-controlled FDA has a history of approving inadequately tested drugs.

In her book titled “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Marcia Angell said the following:

Big Pharma is “primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefits, using its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the (FDA), academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”

Maximizing profits is prioritized over human health.

Despite US federal law requiring that FDA approved drugs must be “safe and effective,” Public Citizen’s Health Research Group revealed otherwise, explaining:

Meds that “don’t work” get approved. Virtually all drugs have labels that warn of potential hazardous to human health side effects.

Enough drugs in combination with each other increase the risk more greatly.

An estimated 100,000 American die annually from the toxic side effects of prescription drugs.

On October 3, TMN warned that remdesivir “causes kidney problems,” adding:

“An urgent immediate safety review of…remdesivir (was) called by the European Medicines Agency after numerous COVID-19 patients taking the drug developed serious kidney problems.”

The EU regulator said the drug appears to cause “acute kidney disease.”

Medical authorities in some EU countries are halting remdesivir’s use until more safety studies are conducted.

So far, no longterm safety studies on the drug were conducted in the US or elsewhere.

According to TMN, profiteers in the US called “Scientists to Stop COVID-19” were behind remdesivir’s rapid approval.

Last week, Trump’s physician Dr. Sean Conley said he received a single dose of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail (REGN-COV2 – perhaps more at Walter Reed) along with remdesivir.

If Trump is being treated with these drugs in lieu of the HCQ combination explained above, he may or may not recover fully from Covid infection.

He’ll be vulnerable to other serious health issues that at his age (74) and obesity (around 240 lbs.) may be life-threatening over the short or longer-term.

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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.

The waters off Lebanon are the scene of a gathering Armada of French and American naval ships. What appeared at first to be a humanitarian response to the devastating Beirut Port explosion on August 4, is now feared to be the prelude of the next US-NATO humanitarian war.

French President Emmanuel Macron blamed Hezbollah and all of the Lebanese politicians Sunday and warned of a new civil war. “I’m ashamed of the Lebanese political leaders. Ashamed,” Macron repeated.

He accused them of “collective betrayal” while putting their parties and personal greed above the needs of the Lebanese people.

Some political observers now believe that Lebanon may well be going the way of Somalia, as evidenced by the characteristics of a failing state, such as lack of governance, corruption and incompetence, chronic humanitarian problems, and persistent social tensions.

Prime minister-designate Moustapha Adib stepped down September 26, and Lebanon’s Central Bank reserves may soon dry up and the government would no longer be able to subsidize basic goods such as fuel, medicine, and wheat.

Macron has been pressing Lebanese politicians to form a Cabinet made up of technocrats that can work on urgent reforms, and Macron has traveled twice to Beirut since August 4, while making it a personal mission to try to repair the devastated country, which some see as a neo-colonial farce.

Macron criticized the Lebanese system of sectarian politics, “as if competence was linked to religious confession.”

He lambasted Hezbollah demanding to know its characteristics and identity, and he criticized Lebanese political leaders from all parties and dynasties. Each Lebanese faction has found a foreign godfather and has ended up as a pawn in a regional and international chess game. Tens of billions of dollars have reportedly been looted by politicians and deposited in European and American banks.

US-NATO Humanitarian wars

In 1999 NATO updated its ‘Strategic Concept’ to allow members to defend not only other members but also conduct ‘non-Article 5 Response Operations’. It would be under this mechanism that a US-NATO military operation, along with an Arab Gulf coalition, would be used to attack, invade and defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Since 2002, it was agreed that NATO forces could be sent “wherever they are needed,” regardless of the location, and in 2006 the NATO Response Force (NRF) of 25,000 troops has been fully operational.

US President Bill Clinton and NATO waged the humanitarian war on the former Yugoslavia, which broke a larger nation into ‘bite-sized’ pieces.

Critics of the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have argued that certain attacks forming part of the campaign violated international humanitarian law. Noam Chomsky argued that the main objective of the US-NATO war was to force Yugoslavia into the Western economic system since it was the only country in the region that stood alone in defiance of the US world domination.

Hezbollah targeted by US-NATO war machine

Hezbollah’s prominence in the Lebanese government caused foreign donors and investors to stay away, because of US sanctions targeted on anyone with ties to the group, based on their designation as a terrorist group.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said on Tuesday,

“We welcomed President Macron when he visited Lebanon and we welcomed the French initiative, but not for him to be judge, jury and executioner, and ruler of Lebanon.”

Nasrallah has headed the group since 1992 as Secretary-General; however, its military wing is considered as a terrorist organization in 21 countries, as well as by the Arab League and the European Union.

Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto listed its objectives as the expulsion of “the Americans, the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land”.

In 2008, the Lebanese government unanimously recognized Hezbollah’s existence as an armed organization and guarantees its right to “liberate or recover occupied lands”.

Hezbollah is an armed resistance group, as well as a political party that has seats in Parliament through free and fair elections.  Their ally in Parliament is the ‘Amal Movement’, and together they hold the majority of Parliamentary seats. In a democracy, the majority rules and this is why recently Hezbollah and Amal insisted on choosing the Finance minister, which became a conflict point in the view of Macron.

Hezbollah is resisting the Israeli occupation of Shebaa Farms, an area in the far south of Lebanon. Moreover, Hezbollah also is resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  At one time, all of the Arab world demanded the rights for the Palestinian people, who have lived under brutal military occupation since 1948, and the UN has ratified resolutions calling for a 2-state solution, where Palestine would be given the land of the 1967 borders, and both Israel and Palestine would live side by side in peace.

In 2017, Ron Prosor, former Israeli ambassador to the UN said Hezbollah was then “10 times as strong now as it was in 2006, and its military infrastructure permeates Lebanon.” He added that Lebanese President Michel Aoun has also “embraced” Hezbollah’s arsenal as “a principal element of Lebanon’s defense.”

Many critics tried to blame Hezbollah for the Beirut Port blast on August 4, but the Lebanese officials and locals admitted that Hezbollah had no access to the Port, or authority over it.  Even officials known to be antagonistic of Hezbollah admitted that the blame would not plausibly stick on Hezbollah. The exact cause is not known, but it may have been an accident borne of corruption and ineptitude, or it could be sabotage, according to President Michel Aoun. MP Machnouck, member of the Sunni-led ‘Future Party’ stated he was convinced Israel was responsible.

The elimination of Hezbollah is Israel’s top priority

A former director of Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Nuriel, said that another war between Israel and Hezbollah was “only a question of time.”

Hezbollah is the only force that Israel has faced that has caused the Israeli Defense Forces to retreat without success. Defeating Hezbollah is a top Israeli priority.

Under the Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy, Iran became a negotiations partner, while pressuring Israel to conclude a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu recently gave a virtual speech to the UN Security Council, in which he displayed a detailed map of Beirut, and he predicted the location of where a future explosion would occur, and he blamed Hezbollah for having a weapons factory and warehouse at the location, which was a residential area.  During the Netanyahu speech, Nasrallah was also giving a live televised speech in Lebanon and was told what Netanyahu had claimed.  He immediately invited all media to go to the location that Netanyahu portrayed in his map, and inspect for themselves if there were any weapons or warehouse present.  Later, the media arrived, and live local TV coverage showed that in fact, the location was a cooking gas canister factory. This confirmed the Israeli accusation was false and led experts to assume a direct connection between the Port blast, and the Israeli proposed blast in Netanyahu’s map.

The Israeli occupation of Lebanon 

Israel occupied the south of Lebanon for 23 years, during which men, women, and children were imprisoned in Khiam Prison, where they were routinely tortured, abused and many died. Hezbollah aligned with many other Lebanese resistance groups, who resisted the occupation vociferously until Israel gave up and left in 2000. The south of Lebanon is populated by both Shite Muslims and Christians. The steadfastness of Hezbollah is remembered by those Lebanese citizens.  However, the North of Lebanon was never occupied and lived free of fear, oppression, and intimidation which may have influenced many Lebanese citizens either support or reject Hezbollah. As they say, “Your view depends on where your seat is.”

Using ISIS as ground troops by US-NATO

Recently, the Lebanese Army fought fierce battles against Radical Islamic terrorists near Tripoli in the north, in the area of Wadi Khalid.

In 2016, Efraim Inbar, an Israeli scholar, and the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies wrote, “The continuing existence of ISIS serves a strategic purpose,” and added that ISIS “can be a useful tool in undermining” Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia and should not be defeated. He wrote, “Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests,” and stressed that the West’s “main enemy” is not ISIS; it is Iran.

Saudi Arabia part of the Coalition against Hezbollah

The King of Saudi Arabia rarely gives speeches; however, he made a televised speech in which he accused Hezbollah of the Beirut Port blast, apparently unaware that that accusation has been debunked. This is the same King who summoned Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Lebanon to be kidnapped and forced to resign in Saudi Arabia. It was President Macron who personally negotiated Hariri’s freedom.

It appears that Saudi Arabia will be among the first Arab countries to send support for a US-NATO attack on Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah.

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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.

Featured image is from MD

“Now that dentists have reopened their doors, they’re having patients show up with a nasty set of symptoms, which the doctors have dubbed ‘mask mouth,’” reports FOX News. “The new oral hygiene issue — caused by, you guessed it, wearing a mask all the time to prevent the spread of the coronavirus — is leading to all kinds of dental disasters like decaying teeth, receding gum lines and seriously sour breath.”

“We’re seeing inflammation in people’s gums that have been healthy forever, and cavities in people who have never had them before,” Dr. Rob Ramondi, a dentist and co-founder of One Manhattan Dental, told FOX News.

Beyond embarrassing and painful, dental infections are life-threatening confirms a study by the American Stroke Association:

“Patients with gum disease were twice as likely to have a stroke caused by hardening of large arteries within the brain than those without gum disease.”

One Manhattan Dental told FOX News that they estimate 50% of their patients are suffering from mask-induced dental problems.

The dentists theorize that the oral infections are largely caused by people’s tendency to mouth breathe while wearing a mask. Mouth breathing has many more side-effects other than dental infections. Bypassing the nasal cavity denies the body of nitric oxide (a critical blood vessel dilator). The nasal cavity also warms and purifies air before hitting the lungs.

Of course, other studies have shown masks increase infection rates in other ways, so why not in the mouth? Possibly these dental problems are a result of “bacterial growth on a used and loaded mask” as Prof. Denis Rancourt speculates in his paper Masks Don’t Work. Masks create a moist environment in front of the mouth for bacteria to fester, while being unhindered by the body’s immune system.

Call me simple, but I can’t see how stressing one’s immune system with dental infections would help one fight SARS-COV-2. And, when we consider that randomized control trials show masks can’t even stop flu-like-illnesses, these oral objections are yet just another reason not to wear a mask.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

This article was originally published in May 2020.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. But what about the 1.6 billion workers in the “informal sector” – half the global workforce – who didn’t have a steady job to start with?

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Even amid the torrent of statistics surrounding the COVID-19 crisis, it stands out. And while it’s received only scant media attention, it matters. A lot. Because it highlights a critical and truly global challenge almost sure to outlast the pandemic itself.

That 1.6 billion is the number of people on the margins of the world economy, from migrant workers to those employed in the gig economy, who are in immediate danger of losing their livelihoods. They make up half the world’s workforce and it is far from certain that their jobs will reappear even when the crisis is over.

Hundreds of millions of jobs have been put on hold by coronavirus shutdowns around the world. That’s been especially true in countries already hit by the pandemic. But other areas, like Africa and much of South America, are suffering from the international economic fallout and are likely to face heightened job losses if the pandemic strikes harder there.

In the United States, more than 30 million people, over 15% of the workforce, have applied for unemployment benefits in recent weeks. In Western Europe, joblessness is also increasing. Only government wage-support subsidies have staved off a U.S.-scale spike, by keeping idle or furloughed workers notionally employed. In China, official statistics have reported only a slight uptick in unemployment. But that figure excludes a migrant workforce of nearly 300 million people.

That’s where the 1.6 billion figure comes in. Released last week by the International Labor Organization, it covers the so-called informal economy – whether migrant, agricultural, or shift workers in the developing world, or the gig workers and service-industry staff increasingly predominant in wealthier economies. The ILO found that COVID-19 had left almost all 2 billion of them finding it precariously hard to make ends meet.

The immediate challenge for governments essentially involves budgeting, or printing, more money: for multitrillion-dollar stimulus programs like those in the U.S., or salary-support schemes favored in Europe and elsewhere. And there is every likelihood that the sums needed for such schemes will grow further.

But that may turn out to be the easy part. An even tougher challenge lies ahead.

The best-case scenario envisages a fairly early exit from COVID-19, through a combination of treatment or inoculation advances and a staged reboot of the world economy. It’s a hope shared on all continents, by governments democratic and authoritarian. A number of U.S. states, as well as COVID-affected countries in Europe and Asia, are now tentatively beginning to reopen for business.

But there’s a key question, even in a best-case scenario: How many of the jobs lost to COVID-19 will be lost for good, or at least for a long time after the economic reopenings? That question is particularly acute in the service economy – restaurants, leisure businesses, small retail shops – and for the ILO’s 1.6 billion strugglers in the informal economy worldwide.

Much will depend on the longer-term effects of the blow COVID-19 has dealt to the world economy, through major slowdowns in the world’s two leading economies, the U.S. and China, and huge disruptions to international trade.

Two very different examples: Across Asia, millions work in garment and other factories that have thrived largely on exports to Europe. Many were suddenly made jobless by COVID-19 shutdowns. The question now will be whether, or how quickly, demand for their products will rebound in a post-pandemic world economy.

In Europe itself, Greece has so far confounded predictions by avoiding the kind of mass outbreaks that have claimed tens of thousands of lives in Italy, France, and Britain. But the tourism sector is critical to Greece’s economy, employing a fifth of the workforce. The country can only hope not just that airlines and airports reopen, but that the tourists recover a pre-pandemic appetite for air travel.

Yet beyond the economic imponderables, long-term mass joblessness – possibly on the scale of the Great Depression in the 1930s – could pose major social and political challenges.

Work, especially for those living payday to payday, is essential to economic survival. But it’s also central to people’s identity, their sense of self-definition, even self-worth. The human cost of the Great Depression – a period that, like many of great suffering, also produced great insights and works of art – is perhaps chronicled nowhere as searingly as in the pages of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”

While work can form a core part of a person’s identity, worklessness can depress and embitter. A more recent example – the political fallout from the 2008 world financial crisis – is a reminder that one result can be a growth in the kind of anger and resentment on which populist strongmen often feed.

The good news, or so organizations like the ILO are emphasizing, is that the employment crisis caused by COVID-19 is not limited to one country or region. Their hope is that, rather than focus only on the domestic imperative of getting each national economy back on its feet, governments will take shared, international action to address the needs of the “1.6 billion” in a post-pandemic world.

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Germany is again in the forefront in fighting the devastating, unjustified, illegal, economy-destructive, people debilitating and outright genocidal – Corona Measures. The German COVID-19 Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee – in German – ACU – German acronym for Ausserparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss – (see diagram from ACU2020.org website, on the left) is planning to launch a Class Action Suit against not only governments and government officials, but specifically against the manufacturers of the infamous PCR test (PCR – Polymerase Chain Reaction – is a technique used to “amplify” small segments of DNA) which, according to honest virologists all over the world, is absolutely unsuitable for covid-19 testing. It has actually not even been licensed to carry out such tests.

Nevertheless, the PCR test has been and is being touted and promoted by WHO – and by other leading health institutions in the western world, such as the US NIAID / NIH and CDC, as well as by researchers from the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) at Charité, Hospital, Berlin.  It was Dr. Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute of Virology at “Charité”, who propagated this test which eventually was taken over by the German respective Government and health authorities, who made it a mandatory panacea to test and count “cases”, mostly to manipulate statistics – which the media then uses to implant fear in the population.

Other countries followed similar instructions from their highest health authorities and used the test results for the same purpose – planting fear in the clueless population. The media never tell us, for example that the error rate of these tests, the so-called “positive negatives”, can be as high 50%. However, all “positives” are automatically absorbed into the “case” statistics. People get often tested several times and may also be reported several times.

That’s how the “case” rates can be manufactured and manipulated. FEAR is the Name of the Game. So that the governments are justified in closing their iron fists even stronger around your personal neck; and by cutting the countries’ economic lifeline – causing countless bankruptcies and unemployment in proportions never seen in modern history – and often deadly misery, famine and suicide.

The iron fist around the peoples’ throats include face mask, social distancing, work from home, semi- or full lockdowns, i.e. keeping people purposefully apart (the separate-to-conquer principle), discrimination against the elderly, who in their loneliness get depressed, sick and may die earlier. Yes, elderly people, especially with co-morbidities are in a higher risk group, but in the same as with the common flu every year, which has never been a reason to discriminate them.

The result we are seeing already today. And the worst is yet to come. This fall and winter in the Global North the merging with flu and “covid” may spell even more disaster in data manipulative mastery, and consequential measures that may, wittingly or unwittlingly be copied in the Global South, although the coming warmer summer climate would suggest the contrary. It’s a nasty and criminal Game that, if we don’t stop it, will not end soon.

Enough introduction. Listen for yourself what Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, lawyer of ACU, has to say (8-min video below) about the Class Action Suit, and how it might bring these destructive measures to a halt and reverse them, by compensating the damaged people and small and medium size enterprises that had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and lay off their employees.

As Dr. Füllmich explains, this could happen with what he calls a BANG, if millions around the world join in the Class Action Law Suit. Since in Germany and other European countries, Class Action Suits are not well known, especially because they are complicated, lacking a similar legal basis they have in the US, this Class Action Suit would be filed in the US, representing the world population.

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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. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

On NPR yesterday afternoon (Oct. 2) a former Obama regime official argued for a 90% lockdown of the economy for 6 weeks and mandatory masks.  He said this was the only way we can save ourselves from mass deaths that will wreck the economy worse than the 90% lockdown would.

Keep in mind that the masks people are wearing are not N95 masks and do not prevent inhalation and exhalation of the virus.  

Keep in mind that the rise in cases is the result of more testing with a test that produces false positives.  

Authorities know both of these facts.

The question is:  Why are authorities and presstitutes spreading this bogus information?  Why do they want to close down the economy?  Why do they want to force people to wear masks that do not protect?

Are the answers that they want to defeat Trump by crashing the economy, want to make us more fearful so that we accept a vaccine, and want to train the public to follow orders?

Why is the public so uninformed that they are so easily subject to manipulation?

Sometimes humor is the best defense.

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

Featured image is from Times of India

New START is the last remaining Russia/US arms control agreement.

Expiring on February 5, 2021 if not renewed, the Trump regime rejected Vladimir Putin’s offer to extend the agreement for another five years with no pre-conditions.

On September 28, Politico reported that Trump officials “asked the military to assess how quickly it could pull nuclear weapons out of storage and load them onto bombers and submarines if an arms control treaty with Russia” expires in February, citing three unnamed sources, adding:

The Trump regime “wants to underscore that it is serious about letting the treaty lapse if Russia fails to meet (its) demands.”

Claiming Trump’s arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea “is leery that Russia is dragging out the talks in the hope that Joe Biden” succeeds him in January is absurd on its face.

In many respects, DJT has been more onboard for improving US relations with Russia than any of his predecessors since Jack Kennedy — who favored nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Soviet Russia.

Near the end of the Cold War, the landmark 1987 Reagan/Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty stepped back from the brink of possible nuclear confrontation.

Abandoning it by the Trump regime increased the risk of greater conflicts and chaos by escalating tensions instead of reducing them.

It was unjustifiably justified by  falsely accusing Russia of INF breaches.

Obama did the same thing after his 2014 coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with Nazi-infested fascist tyranny.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s chief arms control negotiator Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov called the US demand for China to be part of extending New START “clearly a nonstarter for us,” adding:

Moscow will respond appropriately if the US side lets New START expire.

If Washington expands its nuclear arsenal, Russia “would be ready to counter this.”

Weeks earlier, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the following:

“We made clear our position on multiple occasions.”

“China has no intention to take part in so-called China-US-Russia trilateral arms control negotiations. This position is clear and consistent,” adding:

“China’s nuclear power is not on the same order of magnitude as that of the US and Russia.”

“It is not yet the right timing for China to participate in nuclear disarmament talks.”

“The US time and again drags China into the New START extension issue between the US and Russia.”

“It is the same old trick whenever it seeks to shift responsibility to others.”

“It is the US who has been obstructing (arms control) efforts and walking further down the wrong path of being a quitter.”

On October 1, the Arms Control Association said Trump “and his team have dithered and delayed on nuclear arms control matters,” adding:

“Now, at the 11th hour, they are pursuing an ill-advised strategy that has little chance of success and is probably designed to run out the clock on the last remaining treaty limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.”

“Unless Trump…overrules his hardline advisors and adjusts course or Joe Biden wins the presidential election and makes good on his pledge to extend New START, the treaty very likely will disappear.”

“That would open the door to an ever-more dangerous and costly global nuclear arms race.”

In July, Biden said if elected in November:

“I’ll pursue an extension of the New START Treaty – an anchor of strategic stability between the United States and Russia, and use that as a foundation for new arms control agreements.”

All politicians lie. Nothing they say can be taken on its face.

Time and again, campaign pledges by US and other politicians are breached if elected.

Biden is militantly hostile toward Russia.

In early September he called Russia, not China, most aggressive in sowing discord in US politics, adding:

“There are a lot of countries around the world I think would be happy to see our elections destabilized (sic).”

“But the one who has worked the hardest, most consistently, and never has let up is Russia (sic).”

The Big Lie refuses to die. Time and again, US officials accuse Russia, China, Iran, and other countries of things they had nothing to do with.

When false accusations are repeated enough, including by establishment media, most people believe almost anything no matter how untrue.

In August, the US National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center falsely accused Russia of trying to “denigrate” Biden.

It also falsely claimed that Iran is trying to sow division in the US to undermine Trump’s chance for reelection.

In modern memory, no evidence suggests that any foreign nation interfered in the US political process — what its intelligence community does repeatedly against other countries worldwide.

In response to unacceptable Trump regime demands for extending New START, Russia’s UN envoy Anatoly Antonov said the following:

The US side “created the time pressure situation in the issue of extending the New START, despite our numerous calls and proposals to extend the agreement…in the past years,” adding:

“Washington decided to ‘wake up’ only in the run-up to the (November 3) presidential election.”

“At the same time, the possibility of extending the treaty is conditioned by requirements which are obviously unacceptable for Russia and do not take into account our concerns in the strategic stability domain.”

In August, Sergey Lavrov stressed “the unfeasibility of Washington’s demands.”

In June 2019, Vladimir Putin said if New START expires, “there would be no instrument in the world to curtail the arms race.”

In his UN General Assembly address last month, he called the landmark agreement an “issue of primary importance that should and must be promptly dealt with.”

With Russia/US arms control talks largely stalemated because of the latter’s unacceptable demands, New START will expire in a few months unless Trump intervenes directly to save the landmark agreement.

At this time, it appears unlikely whether he’s reelected or loses to Biden in November.

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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.

Karabakh. The Azerbaijani and Turkish mass media and social networks persistently report about succesful actions of the Azerbaijani army and enormous losses among Armenian forces. However in fact the situation is different – the army of Azerbaijan has lost about 200 people since the start of operation, more than 350 were wounded, over 70 vehicles were destroyed, including tanks, MLRS, helicopters and UAVs.

Despite the ostentatious courage and significant military support from Turkey, Azerbaijani army faces persistent resistance of armed defence units of Karabakh consisting mainly of militia units. Even Syrian mercenaries transported by Turkish Air Force in a conflict zone are unable to achieve any advantage. The failure was due to the lack of readiness and inability of the regular army of Azerbaijan to resist the popular defensive movement that protects its lands from external aggression. In addition, the morale of the rebels far exceeds the motivation of the Azeris who participate in this risky undertaking. Realizing senseless nature of war and violence, number of the Azerbaijani military leaders refuse to carry out orders of the High Command.

It’s noteworthy that from the very beginning of the operation Turkish journalists were in the front line and covered news in a favorable light. Preparations for the attack were hidden from the international community, and movements of military convoys were masked by maneuvers.

It conveys the suggestion that this conflict has been well planned in advance and operated by using Baku. Highly likely it is possible to suppose that Aliyev was given the green light to launch military operation directly from Ankara.

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Azerbaijan has given Turkey control over the air segment of its military campaign to capture the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Armenian Defense Ministry reported on September 30. According to Artsrun Hovhannisyan, Turkish and Azerbaijani aviation is being coordinated by the E7-T aircraft of the Turkish Air Force, which is an air command post. The military plane was spotted near the Turkish cities of Erzurum and Kars.

“It is possible that the leadership of the Turkish Air Force is on board this plane,” Hovhannisyan added.

As an example of such actions, the Armenian side claimed that two Turkish F-16 fighters, an Azerbaijani Su-25 attack aircraft, as well as a Turkish combat drone “Bayraktar”, which took off from the city of Kurdamir, had inflicted a missile and bomb attack on the Karabakh towns of Hadrut and Martakert.

Further a command and control post for Turkish combat drones is located near the city of Hadrut. It is reportedly coordinating the strikes of Azerbaijani warplanes.

Pro-Armenian sources insist that the Chief of General Staff of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Najmaddin Sadigov was in fact removed from his command of the Karabakh operation at the behest of Turkish military advisers and specialists. Sadigov was allegedly an opponent of the dramatically increased influence of Turkey in the Azerbaijani military.

Armenia also showed photos of its Su-25 attack aircraft, which, according to it, was downed by a Turkish F-16 on September 29. The pilot of the Su-25, Major Valery Danelin, died. In their turn, Turkey and Azerbaijan insist that the Turkish Air Force and other branches of Turkish military are not involved in the conflict. According to Fahrettin Altun, the head of the communications department of the Turkish presidential administration, Armenian claims are “another fantasy of the Armenian military propaganda machine.” The Azerbaijani side, in turn, said that two Armenian Su-25 warplanes crashed into the mountain and exploded, the rest is absurd and disinformation.

Since September 30, the situation on the frontline between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces has not changed significantly. Despite this, intense firefights, artillery duels and air strikes are being reported along the entire contact line. Armenian sources accuse Azerbaijan and Turkey of intentional bombing of civilian areas of the Nagorno-Karabakh republic, including its capital, and even inside Armenia itself.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan, which ceased to name areas allegedly seized from the Armenians, insists that its forces have captured several key positions on the frontline. According to Baku, since the morning of September 27, its forces have destroyed up to 200 battle tanks and other armored vehicles, 228 artillery pieces, rocket launchers, mortars, 30 air defense systems, 6 command-control and observation posts, 5 ammunition depots, more than 110 vehicles and an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. The number of killed or injured Armenian fighters was not provided but if one checks previous Azerbaijani reports, it has supposedly already exceeded 1,000.

On the other hand, the Armenian side said that during the last 24 hours only 130 Azerbaijani service members were killed, 260 others were injured, 32 military equipment pieces were destroyed and 13 UAVs were downed.

Both sides regularly release videos showing the destruction of enemy positions and equipment. Nevertheless it seems that without more active participation from the Turkish side, Azerbaijan is unable to deliver a rapid and devastating military blow to Armenia and thus capture the contested region. However, if the regional situation remains same, the Azerbaijani military is likely to have the upper hand in any developing war just because it has more manpower, weapons, military equipment and ammunition.

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“Sanctions must be treated as a form of warfare. . . . Let us regard the imposition of sanctions with the same gravity as we would regard the act of going to war.” – Mehran Nakhjavani[^1]

There is widespread concern among human rights monitoring bodies and experts, including the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, regarding sanctions imposed by the U.S. and some other countries on Venezuela. As noted by a UN Special Rapporteur charged with monitoring sanctions, “The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” The Special Rapporteur urged all countries to avoid applying sanctions against Venezuela “unless approved by the United Nations Security Council, as required by the UN Charter.”^[2]

While the U.S. has taken the lead in instigating unilateral sanctions against Venezuela, with an explicit condition that sanctions will only be lifted in response to regime change, Canada too has operated outside of its historic commitment to the UN and multilateralism by imposing a number of sanctions to replicate some of the U.S. sanctions. This article submits that certain sanctions imposed by Canada against Venezuela are illegal under Canadian law because Parliament has not authorized the government to make the regulation through which they were imposed.

On September 22, 2017, on the recommendation of then Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, the federal Cabinet, which is the executive branch of the Canadian government, made a regulation (the “Special Economic Measures (Venezuela) Regulations”, or the “Venezuela Regulations” for short) requiring all Canadians to boycott 40 named individuals in Venezuela (since then extended to the current total of 96 individuals including its Ombudsperson and Attorney General).

The government purported to act under the Special Economic Measures Act, SC 1992, c 17 (“SEMA”) which gives it authority to make such regulations. At the time, that act gave only two grounds for the government to do so.

The first one is easily understood: when there is a serious international crisis as a result of a grave breach of international peace and security. Canada has passed such regulations regarding various countries: Burma, 2007; Zimbabwe, 2008; Iran, 2010; Syria and North Korea, 2011; and South Sudan, Russia, and the Ukraine, 2014.

Whether or not all Canadians would have agreed with each of these regulations, it is fair to assume that all would have understood why they were made.

The second ground is more difficult to understand. It is the one that was used against the Venezuelan individuals because there is no obvious evidence that the domestic violence in Venezuela would lead to a serious international crisis.

Under this second ground, it is still possible to make such a regulation when Canada’s government wants to act in solidarity with an international organization of states or association of states of which Canada is a member.

If the association of nation states feels that the principles of law by which a nation state ought to abide have been torn apart, it can call on its members to take economic measures against that foreign state.

What is most peculiar is that in the case of the Organization of American States, a major organization of which Canada is a member, there was no such consensus against Venezuela. This created a difficulty as, for Canada’s government to pursue its goal, the OAS was the most obvious and relevant association of nations through which to do so. 

So, in order to rely on the second ground, the Canadian government had to find another association of nation states. Side-stepping Canada’s Parliament, it declared that Canada and the U.S.A. constituted an appropriate association, under the name “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”.

This raises a number of questions, most significantly whether Canada, through its federal government, is acting as a country that adheres to the rule of law or subjugates itself to the wishes of the United States.

Specifically, is the making of the Venezuela Regulations by the Trudeau government validly authorized by Canada’s Parliament under the SEMA? Or are the Venezuela Regulations, in legal terms, ultra vires, meaning that Parliament has not given the government the authority or legal power to make them and therefore the regulation and the sanctions it imposes are of no force and effect.

The SEMA provision

The circumstance that must have occurred in order for the government to be authorized to make a regulation under the second ground is that:

“an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member, has made a decision or a recommendation or adopted a resolution calling on its members to take economic measures against a foreign state”

Is the “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”, which Canada purports to have formed with the United States and of which only it and the United States are “members”, such an “association of states, of which Canada is a member”?

Events in 2017

Since 1990 Canada has been a member of the Organization of American States, currently composed of 33 states which include the United States and most other countries of the Americas. The OAS was formed in 1948 and has a charter. In May 2017 foreign ministers of the OAS met concerning political and economic events in Venezuela but were unable to agree on a consensus statement concerning that country. Nor were they able to do so at a subsequent meeting in June 2017.

Some time on or before July 26, 2017 thirteen OAS countries, including the US and Canada issued a “Declaration on the Situation in Venezuela” calling for respect for human rights and constitutional order. It did not call for economic measures to be taken against Venezuela.

In July 2017 the US Treasury Board unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on fourteen Venezuelan individuals.

Whether Canada could follow suit was a live question as early as the beginning of August 2017. An unidentified Canadian official is reported as stating that Canada could more easily sanction Venezuelan officials if Bill S-226, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law), which was still before Parliament, had been passed into law. While there was commentary that Canada could have relied on the ground in the SEMA that a “grave breach of international peace and security has occurred that has resulted or is likely to result in a serious international crisis”, no one talked about implementing a decision of an international organization of states or association of states.

On August 8, 2017 the Foreign Ministers and Representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, gathered in Lima, Peru and issued a declaration concerning Venezuela. While that declaration, among other things, called for a stop to the transfer of weapons to Venezuela in accordance with articles 6 and 7 of the Arms Trade Treaty, it did not call for the taking of economic measures against Venezuela or Venezuelans.

The following day, August 9, 2017, a counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. sent an e-mail to two individuals, at least one of whom was with the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s foreign affairs department [the department goes by the name “Global Affairs Canada”], and copied it to two other persons in the Canadian embassy in Washington. The e-mail is the earliest document to which Global Affairs Canada gave access in response to a request under Canada’s Access to Information Act for records relating to “The Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela”. The contents of the e-mail are redacted, or covered up, as is the identity of a third person to whom it was copied.

Less than a month later on September 5, 2017 a 20 minute meeting took place in the office of Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa that is referred to in the record of the meeting as “The inaugural meeting of the Association [Concerning the Situation in Venezuela].”

The meeting was called to order by David Morrison, then the Assistant Deputy Minister Americas and Chief Development Officer at Global Affairs Canada. Under the heading “Members Present”, Mr. Morrison is described as “Representing Canada” together with three others, his advisor, a legal officer with Global Affairs Canada, and the Venezuela Desk Officer, South American Division of Global Affairs Canada.

The persons described as representing the United States are four persons from the US Embassy, the Charge d’Affaires, the Acting deputy Chief of Mission, a Minister Counselor for Political Affairs, and an Economic Counselor.

Tracking in part the language of the SEMA (as italicized below), the record of the meeting states:

“The Association recommends that its members take measures to respond to the situation in Venezuela. The Association therefore calls upon its members to take economic measures against Venezuela and persons responsible for the current situation in Venezuela.”

There actually was no need to call on the U.S. to take economic measures against Venezuela. It had already done so. In addition to above-mentioned U.S. Treasury Board sanctions imposed against the 14 Venezuelan individuals in July 2017 pursuant to presidential executive order 13692 made in March 2015, the president of the United States had issued Executive Order 13808 in August 2017 prohibiting, with certain exceptions, access to U.S. financial markets by the Venezuelan government and the state-owned oil company PdVSA.

Twelve of the 14 Venezuelans sanctioned by the US in July 2017 were subsequently sanctioned under the Venezuela Regulations made under the SEMA, and the other two were sanctioned by Canada under the regulation made on November 3, 2017 under the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (Sergei Magnitsky Law).

No charter, constitution, by-laws or other constating document for the so-called “Association”, or any document bearing any signature by anyone on behalf of either Canada or the U.S. has been produced by Global Affairs Canada in response to the Access to Information Act request.

No public record of any agreement between Canada and the United States to create the “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” exists. In the U.S., while the president can enter into executive agreements under the presidential authority over foreign policy contained in the U.S. constitution, such agreements must be reported to the Senate under the Case-Zablocki Act of 1972 and would be expected to be disclosed in the U.S. State Department’s listing of U.S. Treaties and Other International Agreements. There is no mention of any agreement with Canada or any other state with respect to Venezuela in that listing.

Nor is there any executive order made by the U.S. president in 2017 or thereafter which refers to any agreement with Canada regarding Venezuela.

As for Canadian records, there is no reference to any such agreement in Global Affairs Canada’s published database of Canadian treaties and non-treaty international agreements, arrangements, or understandings.

Parliament’s intent

Did Parliament in the SEMA intend to authorize the federal government in these circumstances to make the regulation it did imposing sanctions on these Venezuelan individuals? The answer depends on the interpretation of the phrase “association of states, of which Canada is a member” in section 4(1.1) (a) of the SEMA. To help determine what Parliament meant by that phrase one can look at the proceedings in 1992 before the Parliamentary committee composed of members of Parliament who studied in detail Bill C-53, the bill which Parliament eventually enacted as the SEMA in that year.

Those proceedings suggest that Parliament intended that the association of states be a multilateral one, and that it actually exist and not merely be created ad hoc for the purpose of allowing the federal government to make a regulation that it wanted to, but could not, make on its own absent a “grave breach of international peace and security”.

The first witness before the Parliamentary committee was Barry Mawhinney (Legal Advisor in the Office of Secretary of State for External Affairs, as Canada’s foreign affairs minister was then called). He was asked by Committee member Axworthy the following question about the meaning of “international organization or association of states”. Mr. Axworthy’s question assumed that the organizations in question were multilateral, and that such organizations had some structure by way of “by-laws” or “obligations”.

“It is a complex question, and I really need your help on it. Clause 4.(1)—“international organization or association of states, of which Canada is a member, that calls on its members to take economic measures”—is a pretty loose definition. You just pointed out that we have OAS obligations, UN obligations. But we are also a member of a number of other multilateral organizations. To what extent do these organizations, in their own laws or obligations, set out mandatory or required steps by their member states? Does this not kind of put us into a position where our freedom of choice is being somewhat limited at this stage?

I guess what I am trying to get at, Mr. Mawhinney, is that we are saying that the more we get into a world of international multilateralorganizations there are all kinds of by-laws in those organizations that could be triggering us into a whole series of economic sanctions. We could end up putting sanctions on almost everybody, at some point or other, depending on how many clubs we want to belong to.”

In responding Mr. Mawhinney implied that the organization or association would be one already in existence and stated that the purpose of the legislation was to allow Canada, if it so chose, to take “collective action” pursuant to a “collective decision” thereof. He told the Committee:

I can think of only one club, and it is the mother of all clubs, where we have very clear mandatory sanctions under the United Nations. The concern here, Mr. Axworthy, was to ensure that where an international organization to which we belong has taken certain decisions which call for collective action—do not impose collective action, but call for collective action—we should be able to act pursuant to that collective decision. But it is, again, enabling legislation. This in no way requires Canada, if it decides otherwise, to carry through on any particular decision taken by an international organization. But what it does do is give us that option and that ability to take action if we so decide that it is in Canada’s best interest.

What we didn’t want to have was a situation where an international organization had taken a decision and we wanted to share in the implementation of that decision but we were unable to do that because this kind of threshold wasn’t available.

Throughout his testimony, as italicized in the passages quoted below, Mr. Mawhinney referred to a “broad coalition” or “broad international consensus” in a “multilateral context”. At the outset of his presentation to the Committee he stated that:

“Historically, Canadian governments have been guided by three basic principles in the application of economic sanctions. First, they have sought broad international agreement on the necessity and usefulness of sanctions.”

Mr. Mawhinney further stated:

“When we apply sanctions, and this has been consistently the practice of Canadian governments, we do so based on a broad international consensus to do so, and within a multilateral context.”

He then again stated:

“The situation set out here in the two thresholds makes it very clear that we are dealing with rare occasions; the grave breach of international peace and security that Mr. Axworthy was questioning me about, or the implementation of a decision by an international organization of which Canada is a member. So these things are not done frequently and they are not done lightly. They are done within the context of a very broad international consensus, dealing with very serious situations.”

Later Mr. Mawhinney repeated his reference to a broad coalition and that Canada would not be acting on its own when he stated:

“We would have to ensure that in applying those measures we had, as I mentioned earlier, a broad coalition of support internationally, that we were sharing the burden and, perhaps most important, that we were not, through our own measures, putting at a disadvantage either Canadian business or Canadian workers in relation to our competitors.”

In the testimony of Jeffrey Grenville-Woods (United Nations Association in Canada) before the Committee he too made clear his understanding that the purpose of the bill was to enable Canada to implement decisions of a separate body and not its own decision, when he stated:

 “The breach mechanism has to be as a result, I would submit, of a finding by this group of states because the purpose of the bill is to implement somebody else’s decision. It’s not a Canadian measure of its own accord.”

. . . . .

“The purpose of the bill is to implement somebody else’s decision in Canada. That seems to be the key element of clause 4: The Governor in Council may, for the purpose of implementing a decision, resolution or recommendation do the following things. If we’re implementing someone’s decision, recommendation or resolution, who is it? If that’s the only measure for the trigger, we need to know what the source of that process is. It could be the only argument you need in the House to justify the action taken, that an organization said there is this action to be taken and this is why we’re taking it.”

Mr. Grenville-Woods also pointed out the need to be “circumspect” in defining the meaning of “association of states” in his answer to the following question from Committee member Leblanc:

“I would like to direct my questions to comments you made earlier, which have to do with the definitions of an international organization of states, and what constitutes a serious breach or a crisis meriting the imposition of sanctions. Is there any recognized mechanism through the United Nations for classifying international organizations of states or associations of states or a body of international law that we could appeal to to introduce the kinds of precisions you were suggesting we make to bring us into line with the actions of other countries.”

Mr. Grenville-Woods responded:

“I think the quick answer to that is that there is no hard and fast definition of an international organization, nor is there a hard and fast definition of an association of states. That, I think, is the problem. If there was, then these words would have an international legal meaning that could easily be referred to. There is a very broad definition of international organizations, and that creates some difficulty. It’s useful to have a broad definition in the context of other purposes, such as trying to grant privileges and immunities to representatives of these organizations in your country or in the international community, but when you are talking about these organizations being the trigger for some action, then I think you have to be more circumspect in your definition.”

Committee member Robinson went so far as to propose an amendment to the bill to provide that the organizations or associations be specified by regulation. He withdrew the amendment after Serge April (Director General, Bureau of Legal Affairs, Department of External Affairs and International Trade) agreed to provide a list of the organizations most likely to be the subject of this particular clause. However, no such list is referred to in the Committee proceedings.

The above-quoted passages indicate that the Committee members and several witnesses, including from the government itself, understood the reference to “international organization or association of states of which Canada is a member” to mean more than Canada associating itself with one other state for the sole purpose of enabling Canada to impose sanctions under this ground in the SEMA. The purpose of the Act was to allow Canada to implement a “collective” decision of states of which it was a member, based on a “broad international consensus” in a “multilateral” context. The record also indicates that the Committee was unable to rely on a precise definition because there wasn’t one. Therefore it is up to the court to determine if something is a legitimate association in relation to the purposes of this statute, and to be ‘circumspect’ in making that determination.

The same phrase used in another statute

It is also a principle of statutory interpretation to presume there are harmony, coherence, and consistency between statutes dealing with the same subject matter.

Parliament used the phrase “an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member” in section 35 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, SC 2001, c 27. That section makes it clear that Parliament meant a multilateral association of states.  Section 35 provides that:

 “A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for

. . . . .

(c) being a person, other than a permanent resident, whose entry into or stay in Canada is restricted pursuant to a decision, resolution or measure of an international organization of states or association of states, of which Canada is a member, that imposes sanctions on a country against which Canada has imposed or has agreed to impose sanctions in concert with that organization or association.” (my emphasis)

In order for Canada to act “in concert” with such association of states of which it is a member, the association must have more than just one member besides Canada. Otherwise, Canada would be acting in concert with only that one other state, and not an association of states.

Conclusion           

Even though “association” is not defined with precision, all the above quotes suggest two things: SEMA is talking about membership in existing associations which might have these kinds of regulation as an available ground for common action, and it does not envisage the idea that such an association be formed for the particular purpose of engaging in economic sanctions. While the latter is a possible permissible vision of “association”, it is not likely to be one of which the SEMA framers thought: it cannot have been their intention that Canada could engage in such a foreign affairs’ decision ad hoc, without any reference to Parliament.

None of the quotations about the meaning to be given to “association” suggest this as a possibility. In the case of existing institutions it is plausible to argue that, when becoming a member, Parliament approved of Canada acting according to that association’s known goals; not so when there is no existing one; not so when an association is formed without stated goals or formalities or Parliamentary oversight of any kind. This is boosted by the fact that the U.S. did not need this association to do what it did, that there was no common goal to associate, as the U.S. was merely helping Canada to help it, although Canada had no legal ground to assist the U.S.

There is no reason for Canada to “create” this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out, having failed to persuade the one obvious organization which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way. The Canadian government’s maneuvering smacks of tax avoidance practices’ techniques: act within the letter but not the spirit of the law. This points to the willingness to do U.S. bidding and to the anti-democratic nature of engaging in sanctions of this personal kind, questions which go to the very validity of the Venezuela Regulations.

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Andrew Dekany is a Barrister and Solicitor licensed by the Law Society of Ontario, Canada.

Featured image is from Yves Engler

Politicians have destroyed more than 13 million jobs this year in a deluge of edicts aimed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 200,000 Americans still died from the coronavirus, but the anti-COVID government crackdowns probably did far more damage than the virus. The COVID crisis has also shown how easy it is for politicians to fan fears to seize nearly absolute power.

In March, Donald Trump proclaimed that “we are at war with an invisible enemy.” He also declared, “I’m a wartime president…. This is a different kind of war than we’ve ever had.” Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, asserted that “every Marylander can be a hero, just by staying home” after he dictated a “shelter-at-home” order threatening a $5,000 fine and a year in prison for any Marylander who went outside in violation of his edict.

Almost 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost his job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. The Disaster Distress Helpline, a federal crisis hotline, received almost 900 percent more phone calls in March compared with a year ago. A recent JAMA Psychiatry analysis warned that stay-at-home orders and rising unemployment are a “perfect storm” for higher suicide rates. A California health organization recently estimated that 75,000 Americans could die from “despair” as a result of the pandemic, unemployment, and government restrictions.

In the name of saving lives, politicians have entitled themselves to destroy an unlimited number of livelihoods. Politicians in many states responded to COVID-19 by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb — something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. But the only way to assume people were uninjured is to believe their existence is totally detached from their jobs, bank accounts, and mortgage and rent payments.

COVID policymakers have written themselves the letter that Cardinal Richelieu gave to one of his agents in the novel The Three Musketeers: “The bearer of this letter has acted under my orders and for the good of the state.” This carte blanche was sufficient to place murders and other crimes above the law and beyond reproach in France. In contemporary America, the same exoneration is achieved by invoking “science” and “data.”

Gubernatorial tyranny

Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel. Six Oregon counties have only one confirmed COVID case, and most of the state has minimal infections. But schools, businesses, and other activities were slammed shut by government command.

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving his home to visit family or friends. Whitmer also severely restricted what stores could sell; she prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity though.) COVID infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, but Whitmer shut down the entire state — including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. Her repression provoked fierce protests, and Whitmer responded by claiming that her dictates saved 3,500 lives. She exonerated herself with a statistical formula that was painfully ethereal compared with the stark physical devastation in Michigan.

The shutdown order of Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, resulted in the highest rate of unemployment in the nation — 33 percent. But according to Sen. Rand Paul, COVID’s impact in Kentucky “has not been worse than an average flu season.” But that did not stop Beshear from forbidding people to attend church services and sending Kentucky State Police to attach notices to car windshields ordering church attendees to self-quarantine for 14 days and reporting them to local health departments.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed a state lockdown and justified his edict: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” So the governor is entitled to freeze the lives and movement of 20 million people, subverting their efforts to provide for themselves and their families to save one person? Most counties in New York state had five people or fewer who tested positive for coronavirus at the time of his decree, and most of the state has avoided the stratospheric casualty rate of the New York City area. Cuomo’s ludicrous formula exemplifies how politicians reap media applause for dramatic actions that have little or nothing to do with public safety.

Maryland politicians have destroyed more than 400,000 jobs in dictatorial responses claiming to thwart the coronavirus pandemic. “Nearly one in five Maryland workers have filed for unemployment” compensation, the Baltimore Sun reported. The situation is so bad that even the Washington Postrecognized that Maryland’s COVID “restrictions have crippled the economy and paralyzed daily life since mid-March.” But the shutdowns failed to prevent COVID cases from increasing by fiftyfold or the death rate from rising a hundredfold. That dictate never made any sense for much of the state. Garrett County, for instance, has had only ten COVID cases and no fatalities, but its schools and businesses were shuttered at the command of Annapolis.

Killing the elderly

Secrecy and hypocrisy have permeated COVID policies across the nation. Maryland is busy hiring a thousand “contact tracers” to track down anyone who might have interacted with anyone who tested positive for COVID. Privacy will be no excuse for failing to disclose personal contacts. However, at the same time, the Maryland Department of Health ordered local county health departments to cease disclosing which nursing homes have been ravaged by COVID outbreaks, claiming that such information “‘serves no public health purpose’ and violates privacy laws,” as WJLA-TV reported. Most COVID fatalities statewide have occurred in nursing homes. One might think that children would have a legitimate interest in knowing where their parents faced the greatest risk of dying, but no such luck in the Free State.

Why the secrecy? Reopen Maryland requested and was denied “information on whether … the state forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients discharged from hospitals, as suggested by the Governor’s April 5 executive order and corresponding directives from the Maryland Department of Health.”

Similar policies in other states helped send the COVID death rate into the stratosphere. Governor Cuomo, who callously compelled nursing homes to accept COVID patients, will have no legal culpability for a policy that contributed to more than 5,000 nursing-home deaths in his state. Pennsylvania’s health czar, Rachel Levine, issued a similar order, contributing to thousands of nursing-home deaths, and then removed her own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home to keep her safe.

The pandemic also revealed the lust by some politicians to perpetuate their power as long as possible on any shabby pretext. On May 15, Governor Hogan rescinded Maryland’s statewide stay-at-home order but permitted counties to extend it with their own decrees. Hogan’s announcement ending the state shutdown sparked a political pity party by Democratic officials in the Washington suburbs and Baltimore area. “All of us were taken aback by his announcement. We were hung out to dry,” whined Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, who faced the burden of justifying perpetuating the lockdown for the million residents of his county. Elrich lamented that Hogan’s decision “makes it sound like it’s an arbitrary decision…. [Hogan] kind of ignited this rebellion against what we were doing.”

The Washington Post summarized Elrich’s response: “Montgomery County rushed to create its own data dashboard last week, so elected leaders could justify to constituents why they remain stuck in a coronavirus shutdown.” But county officials are apparently being slippery, relying on arbitrary selection and manipulation of data to justify perpetuating arbitrary power. Maryland daily COVID fatalities had fallen by more than 50 percent but politicians did not want to loosen their grip. Anne Arundel County struck bureaucratic gold when it declared that its pandemic emergency would continue until “health equity” was achieved — whatever that means.

Federal diktats

While much of the media has responded to the pandemic by painting pro-lockdown politicians as saviors, COVID carnage was multiplied by incompetent federal agencies. Incompetent scientists at the Centers for Disease Control contaminated key samples for creating a test in February.

Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the Food and Drug Administration continued blocking innovative private testing. The FDA forced the nation’s most innovative firms to submit
to its command-and-control approach regardless of the feds’ having little or nothing to offer. FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn shrugged off his agency’s disastrous policies: “There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one.” Trump made bushels of false or inaccurate statements on the availability of testing early on that contributed to confusion and fear during the pandemic. Instead of speedy access to life-saving medical results, Americans were obliged to settle for Trump’s ludicrous assertion that “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” While Trump condemned people who purchased more food and supplies than they needed short-term, administration officials also floated a proposal for a presidential diktat to cancel all flights nationwide and lock everyone at home for two weeks or longer.

While that bizarre proposal was rejected, the pandemic spurred other “trial balloons” to see how much additional power government could seize. In March, media reports indicated that Trump’s Justice Department was considering asking Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic — which some experts say could last 18 months. But Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, warned, the proposed policy “says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.” The same type of pre-arrest power could be exercised to detain anyone suspected of being infected or failing to obey lockdown orders. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most principled members of the Senate, tweeted in response to the news of the power grab, “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”

Because politicians have no liability for the economic damage they inflict, they have no incentive to minimize the disruptions they decree. Trillions of dollars of new deficit spending will be vexing American workers for many years. As Reason’s Matt Welch noted, “The estimated $3 trillion price tag on the first four batches of COVID-19 stimulus, divided by 330 million increasingly underemployed U.S. residents, equals $9,000 per capita, which has ended up where government payouts usually go: to entities with better connections than you.”

Permitting governments to seize boundless power on the basis of shaky extrapolations of infection rates will destroy our nation. Trump’s boast of being a “wartime president” should recoil on him after the government launched a preemptive attack on American prosperity. It will be years until we know how much permanent damage was inflicted by politicians’ panicky responses to the pandemic.

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James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications.

Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline may need to slaughter half a million sharks to harvest squalene, an oil made in shark livers, to make a new line of COVID jabs. Glaxo mixes squalene with a witches’ brew of proprietary surfactants to produce its controversial AS03 vaccine adjuvant. Adjuvants are compounds that amplify immune response to hyperstimulate the immune system. They are associated with a variety of autoimmune diseases.

Scientific studies have linked squalene adjuvants to Gulf War syndrome and to a wave of debilitating neurological disorders including epidemics of narcolepsy caused by Glaxo’s H1N1 Pandemrix vaccine during the 2009 swine flu “pandemic.” One study showed a 13-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children who received Pandemrix.

The devastating cascade of brain injuries to children and health care workers forced the termination of that Glaxo vaccine after European governments used only a small fraction of the jabs they had purchased from Glaxo. A recent study links squalene to carcinomas. In a bizarre and reckless twist, Glaxo has revived the dangerous adjuvant as its hall pass to the COVID-19 money orgy.

The company said it would manufacture a billion doses of this adjuvant for potential use in coronavirus vaccines. Around 3,000 sharks are needed to extract one ton of squalene.

Shark Allies, a California-based group, said Glaxo will kill around 250,000 sharks to make enough AS03 for the world’s population to receive one dose of its COVID-19 vaccine. If, as expected, two doses are needed, half a million sharks must die.

Glaxo declared that it would be producing 1 billion doses of AS03 “to support the development of multiple adjuvanted COVID-19 vaccine candidates.”

Glaxo has developed partnerships with multiple companies, including its behemoth rival Sanofi, China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals and Innovax Biotech in the city of Xiamen. Glaxo has also agreed to make the technology available to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for COVID vaccines in Australia and elsewhere. Glaxo said it is focusing on what it considers a “proven technology” that will give the company “several shots on goal.”

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Dire US economic condition exceed the worst of earlier times.

Current conditions are unprecedented in US history with no signs of turning things around any time soon. More on this below.

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According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “(a)nother 1.5 million (Americans) applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits last week.”

The number includes 837,000 filing for state UI, along with 650,000 applying for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA).

PUA is the federal program for workers not eligible for regular UI.

Nothing on this scale ever occurred in the US for a duration this long since record-keeping began.

Unless congressional legislation signed into law extends PUA, it’ll expire at yearend.

State UI benefits expired at end of July. Politicized congressional wrangling failed to extend them.

The current status is likely to continue unresolved at least until post-November 3 elections.

On Thursday, Dem-controlled House members passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package by a narrow 214 – 207 margin — 18 Dems breaking ranks to oppose the measure.

It’s virtually certain to be rejected by Senate-controlled Republicans. Majority Leader McConnell opposes the bill.

On Thursday, Dem Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin failed to resolve differences on aid to states and local governments, as well as on other issues.

The House bill calls for the following:

• Reinstatement of $600 in weekly unemployment benefits through January.
• Another $1,200 direct payment to qualified Americans.
• $436 billion to states and local governments for one year.
• Funding for another round of Payroll Protection Program loans to hardest hit businesses.
• Another $25 billion for airlines to cover payroll costs.
• $75 billion for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
• $225 billion for education and $57 billion for child care.
• Billions of dollars for rental and mortgage assistance.
• On Wednesday, NBC News reported that a $1.6 trillion Mnuchin GOP counter-proposal includes:
• $250 billion for state and local governments.
• $400 weekly in unemployment benefits.
• $150 billion for education.
• $75 billion for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, and $60 billion for rental and mortgage assistance.

According to economists Carmen and Vincent Reinhart:

The current “situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression.’ ”

“It seems disrespectful to the many losing their jobs and shutting their businesses to use a lesser term to describe this affliction.”

In recent economic declines, the Reinharts explained that some  growth engines remained intact, including during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

“Not this time,” they stressed, adding:

“The last time all engines failed was in the Great Depression.”

“The collapse this time will be similarly abrupt and steep. ”

It’s already worse than the 1930s, perhaps much harder times ahead with unprecedented numbers of businesses going bankrupt, countless others operating far below capacity. See below.

In Q II, the US economy contracted at an annualized 32.9% because of widespread sector shutdowns.

In US economic crises since the mid-19th century, it took on average eight years for GDP to return to the pre-crisis level, the Reinharts explained.

“(A) long journey out of a deep hole” lies ahead, they stressed.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the US economy peaked in February — marking the end of expansion that began in June 2009.

Dire economic conditions are most greatly harming women, non-white and lower-wage workers, those least educated, low-income families with children, and small businesses.

According to Feeding America in 2020, food insecurity in the US ranges from 8.6% in Loudoun County, VA (with the highest median per capita income) to 34.2% in Jefferson County, MS — with one of the nation’s lowest per capita income.

By population size, LA County, Harris County, TX (including Houston), and Cook County, IL (including Chicago) have the highest number of food insecure people in that order.

Around one in four US households experienced food insecurity this year — over 27% of households with children.

A Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research study estimates the number of food insecure households with children at nearly 30%.

Black families are twice as food insecure as their white counterparts. Latino households are also disproportionately affected.

According to the UN World Food Program, acute food insecurity worldwide may double this year over 2019.

Days earlier, the Economic Collapse blog discussed an “explosion of bankruptcies and layoffs in the US unlike anything…ever seen before.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that “(r)etail store closings in the US reached a record in the first half of 2020 and the year is on pace for record bankruptcies and liquidations (because of) the downturn’s severity.”

Bankruptcy attorney Al Togut expects “an avalanche” of firms going out of business through end of 2020.

Bloomberg News reported a 40% increase in New York City bankruptcies.

As more businesses become insolvent and job losses grow, the hardest of hard times may lie ahead — ordinary Americans hit hardest.

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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 Brookings.edu

China is radically changing its economic strategy. Faced with an international scenario that only tends to worsen with an unprecedented economic crisis approaching in the midst of a devastating pandemic, Beijing decided to adopt an economic internalization plan, seeking to create measures to prioritize the domestic consumer market and strengthen its economy from inside. Chinese experts and strategists call this strategy a “double inversion” and believe that it will be the key to transform the Chinese consumer market in the most important part of national GDP in the coming years.

The Chinese have seen the need for bolder reform measures to cultivate a more efficient domestic market and unlock the country’s potential. The new coronavirus pandemic has revealed the extreme fragility of global market structures and the accelerated decline of financial capitalism, highlighting the need for radical changes and the development of alternative economic models. The Chinese bet in the face of this world of rapid changes is to invest in the transition from an export-oriented economy to an economy focused on the domestic market. In a recent statement, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China needs to create a new model of development in which domestic economic circulation is the mainstay so that domestic and foreign markets can complement each other.

Although the strategy was officially launched recently, some measures were already being taken previously and contributed to the Chinese choice for this change. For example, in 2020, the share of exports in Chinese GDP fell to 17%. On the other hand, domestic consumption had a significant increase and last year reached 58% of the national GDP.

However, this does not mean that exports will no longer be important in the Chinese economy. The country will continue to invest in its competitive advantages to further expand the supply of low-cost goods. The greatest proof of this is that investments in the “Belt and Road Initiative” will be maintained. Beijing will simply adopt a posture more focused on the national market – increasing Chinese income, so that domestic consumption becomes the central point of the national economy – without, however, falling into economic isolationism.

Indeed, the new Chinese economic policy will impact the entire world. It is impossible for such a radical reform to be carried out by the largest emerging power in the world without major collateral changes taking place in several countries. In the West, in particular, fears about the impacts of this initiative can already be seen. One of Germany’s largest banks, Commerzbank, for example, predicts that China has embarked on the path to autarchy. Europeans fear that the Chinese change will harm the EU due to the importance of relations with China for the bloc’s economy. Other Chinese trading partners, such as Japan and South Korea, also suspect that the new strategy poses a threat to them.

In the near future, China will consolidate itself as the major producer of most of the high-value goods and services that it now imports from Europe, Japan and Korea. The road to complete economic sovereignty is paved and it concerns the countries that offer such products and services to Beijing. With this change, it is likely that the trade war with the United States will intensify even more. Germany will be one of the most affected countries, as it has become China’s main supplier, mainly of vehicles, auto parts, aircraft, machines and industrial equipment – and this is what bothers Commerzbank economists so much.

What can be expected, however, in response to the new Chinese strategy is just a generalization of this practice. The only way for the other powers to compete with China is to follow its example and adopt more protectionist and isolationist measures aimed at consolidating stable domestic markets, creating a shield against the – possibly devastating –  effects of the coming economic crisis. China did not create its strategy suddenly, but empirically realized that the most appropriate thing at the moment would be to create this market inversion. Soon, Europe and the US will have to take similar measures to deal with the same problems that China faces now.

China came up from the 2008 crisis as the great emerging global power and its rising economic strenth saved the global economy with the purchase of industrialized products from the countries of the geopolitical North. Now, such northern markets realize that their possibilities for expansion are few and that they may no longer be able to count on China. What will they have, then, to overcome the present crisis if not to strengthen their own markets?

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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

“October surprises” are a common occurrence in the electoral politics of the US when elections are only weeks away in November and canvassing of electorate by political contenders reaches a crescendo. But never in the entire political history of the US an “October surprise” has downright incapacitated a presidential contender running for re-election from electioneering for make-or-break two weeks.

President Trump announced the shocking news of having contracted COVID-19 infection on Friday at his official Twitter timeline:

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”

Half an hour later, First Lady Melania Trump confirmed the news and said they will be quarantining for two weeks at the White House:

“As too many Americans have done this year, @potus & I are quarantining at home after testing positive for COVID-19. We are feeling good & I have postponed all upcoming engagements. Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together.”

Couple of hours before the momentous announcement, Trump had named the suspect who had likely transmitted the virus to the president and the first lady:

“Hope Hicks, who has been working so hard without even taking a small break, has just tested positive for Covid 19. Terrible! The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantine process!”

30-year-old femme fatale, Hope Hicks, is a political advisor serving as a senior counselor to President Trump since March. Hicks previously served as White House communications director from August 2017 until March 29, 2018. From January to September 2017, she was White House director of strategic communications.

But her official designations don’t do justice to her immense clout in the White House and the Trump family. Maggie Haberman wrote an informative biographical account [1] of Hope Hicks in a February 2018 article for the New York Times:

“Ms. Hicks, 29, a former model who joined Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign without any experience in politics, became known as one of the few aides who understood Mr. Trump’s personality and style and could challenge the president to change his views.

“Her title belied the extent of her power within the West Wing — after John F. Kelly was appointed White House chief of staff, she had more access to the Oval Office than almost any other staff member. Her own office, which she inherited after the departure of another Trump confidant, Keith Schiller, was just next door.

“Most significantly, Mr. Trump felt a more personal comfort with Ms. Hicks than he has established with almost any of his other, newer advisers since coming to Washington. And for a politician who relies so heavily on what is familiar to him, her absence could be jarring …”

What Haberman was insinuating to was the fact that Hope Hicks relationship with President Trump had not entirely been professional. She had occupied a special place in Trump’s heart with her attractive looks, professional charisma and an intimate understanding of Trump’s psychological attitudes and mindset.

This fact also elucidates visibly tense moments Trump and Melania have had in their matrimonial life when Hope Hicks served as White House communications director until March 2018 when she had to quit the Trump administration because she spilled the beans on Trump’s 2016 election campaign when she was summoned by the House Intelligence Committee in February 2018.

Haberman adds in the report:

“Ms. Hicks resignation came a day after she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee, telling the panel that in her job, she had occasionally been required to tell white lies but had never lied about anything connected to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election …

“Ms. Hicks’s first association with the Trump family was working with Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, on her personal apparel and licensing brand about six years ago. When Mr. Trump was planning his campaign in spring 2015, he told Ms. Hicks he was pulling her from Ms. Trump’s team to put her on his small political staff despite her lack of experience.

“In recent weeks, her personal life drew unwanted attention when it was reported that she had dated Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who resigned under pressure over allegations that he had abused his two former wives.”

It’s pertinent to mention that Hope Hicks broke up with Rob Porter in December 2018. For two years between her resignation from the Trump administration in March 2018 to March 2020, she worked for Fox Corporation as its chief communications officer and executive vice president, drawing a million-dollar salary.

She was reappointed senior counselor to President Trump in March, but it’s quite likely that she turned rogue and her loyalty to the Trump family was compromised during the intervening two years, and she colluded with Trump’s adversaries in the deep state and the rival political organization to thwart Trump’s re-election bid.

In fact, the family of Hope Hicks has a political background. Her mother, Caye Ann (Cavender) Hicks, was an administrative aide to Ed Jones, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee.

Here, allow me to clarify that COVID-19 is a pandemic that could randomly infect anybody, but more than 90% fatalities in the US have occurred in people who are more than 55 years old. Younger people typically have robust natural immunity against the contagion, whereas Trump is 74 years old and is at high risk both because of his age and because he is considered overweight.

Maggie Haberman further notes in the New York Times article: “Ms. Hicks also had the ability to stop Mr. Trump from focusing on an issue he was angry about, and sometimes shield other members of the staff from Mr. Trump’s anger.

“While Ms. Hicks and Mr. John Kelly developed a functional, respectful relationship, he considered her access to the president to be a challenge to the command-and-control system he tried to enforce, according to several White House aides.

“Even those in the West Wing who did not like her approach feared her power, and worried about crossing her. Before leaving the White House in March 2018, she told colleagues that she had accomplished what she felt she could with a job that made her one of the most powerful people in Washington.”

Finally, though the mainstream media is cheering it as poetic justice that befell Trump for flouting safety precautions against the outbreak, it’s not simply about health risks posed to Trump and Melania due to contracting the infection. Hopefully, they would recover within weeks. But the diagnosis has disrupted the entire electoral campaign of the Republican Party at a critical juncture weeks before the presidential elections.

Rumors are already swirling if Trump would be able to perform his functions as the president or whether he would delegate official duties to Vice President Mike Pence. Even if re-elected, if his health condition deteriorates and he is incapacitated from running the office of the president, then who would be appointed president?

All such perplexing and dispiriting speculations would obviously have a demoralizing effect on the electorate and the Republican voter turnout is expected to be low, and undecided voters might even vote for definitive choice, Joe Biden, instead of doubtful option, Donald Trump, in the upcoming presidential elections slated for November 3.

Citations:

[1] Hope Hicks to Leave Post as White House Communications Director:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/us/politics/hope-hicks-resign-communications-director.html

About the author:

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange

By John Pilger and Timothy Erik Ström, October 02 2020

John Pilger has watched Julian Assange’s extradition trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He spoke with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena magazine, Australia.

2018 Bombing of Dahyan Student Bus: Yemen Court Issues Death Sentences against Saudi Monarch, Saudi Crown Prince, US, and Yemeni Presidents

By Middle East Monitor, October 02 2020

In 2018, ABC news acknowledged that this was a US backed bombing by Saudi Arabia led coalition. This was not an accident. It was a targeted assassination of Yemeni children.

Hearing Reveals US Government’s Invisible Hand in Protests Around the World

By Dave DeCamp, October 02 2020

Besides the US government supporting Hong Kong protesters through cutout organizations like the OTF and NED, there has been more overt interference in the city. Throughout the demonstrations, protesters were seen waving US flags and calling for Congress to pass legislation.

Lying and Liars: The Powerful and Obnoxious Odor of Mendacity

By Edward Curtin, October 02 2020

We are living in a country of lies.  A country where propaganda is disseminated around the clock and lies are the air we breathe.  Is it any wonder that most people are confused as to what to believe and whom to trust?

Coronavirus: Crushing and Silencing Doctors of Conscience

By Michael Welch and Docs4opendebate, October 02 2020

“Looking back, I can see that we have a situation which I compare with the Third Reich…Joseph Goebbels, he was the Minister of Propaganda, and he said “if you repeat a message long enough, loud enough, hard enough, at the end everybody believes it.” And I think the crux of the problem is in the media.” – Doctor quoted in this interview.

UN Report on Venezuela Omits the Greatest Violation of Human Rights: US Aggression

By Leonardo Flores, October 02 2020

The 400+ page report has been found to contain serious flaws and omissions, leading to charges that it politicizes human rights – a position backed by the Venezuelan government.

The Pandemic That Never Was

By Michael J. Talmo, October 01 2020

On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. When I think of this scary word it conjures up heartbreaking images of vast numbers of people suffering, precipitated into abysmal poverty. The WHO used to agree with me.

The Long Overdue Alaska-Canada Railway Takes One Step Closer to Reality

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, October 02 2020

Although Trump’s announcement is a great first step towards the realization of the long-overdue project, there remains many obstacles that could yet derail it.

Video: Faulty Covid-19 PCR Testing Procedure Triggers False Positives: Ontario MP Randy Hillier

By Randy Hillier, October 01 2020

Randy Hillier, (Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston) questioned the Premier on concerns being raised all over the world about the reliability of PCR tests for COVID.

Seismic Blasting Efforts Halted in Atlantic Ocean

By Center For Biological Diversity, October 02 2020

A status conference on seismic litigation revealed today the industry will not pursue efforts to employ seismic blasting to search the Atlantic Ocean for offshore petroleum deposits this year, and possibly for several years.

How would you react upon knowing that Chuck, whom you have sat and engaged with, is a janitor at a bio lab making mutant viruses? 

This is a satire in The Cheers 1980s TV Series which bears a canny resemblance to today’s realities in response to COVID-19. 

Let us laugh, relax and reflect,… Don’t depress…

M.Ch. GR Editor

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