El Gran Reinicio ya casi está aquí: ¿Estás preparado?
June 21st, 2023 by Brandon Smith
Notre site en Français: mondialisation.ca
Nuestro sitio en español: GlobalizacionJune 21st, 2023 by Brandon Smith
June 21st, 2023 by Rayhan Uddin
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A police report and an interview with a former Zionist operative form the basis of Avi Shlaim’s claim that he has uncovered “undeniable proof” of Israeli involvement in bombings which drove Jews out of Iraq in the early 1950s, the British-Israeli historian told Middle East Eye.
Shlaim’s autobiography Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, published earlier this month, details his childhood as an Iraqi Jew and subsequent exile to Israel.
It also includes research about a number of bombings in Iraq which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from the country between 1950 and 1951, most of whom, like he and his family, ended up in Israel.
On Sunday, Shlaim told Middle East Eye that he had uncovered “incontrovertible evidence of Zionist underground involvement in the bombs”.
As part of the evidence, the historian cited an extensive interview he carried out with Yaakov Karkoukli, a former member of the Zionist underground in Baghdad in the 1950s.
Karkoukli – who was aged 89 when he spoke to Shlaim for the book – was an associate of Yusef Basri, a Zionist intelligence operative in Iraq who was convicted by Iraqi authorities of having carried out bombings targeting Iraqi Jews.
The bombings at the time included attacks on a coffee shop, a car dealership and a synagogue, among other attacks on Jewish communities and businesses.
Karkoukli said that Basri carried out three of those attacks on Jewish sites upon the orders of Meir Max Bineth, an Israeli intelligence officer who supplied Basri with grenades and TNT explosives.
As well as weapons, Bineth allegedly provided Basri with maps, intelligence and instructions, which included an order “to terrorise and not to kill”.
Basri, along with another Zionist underground operative, Shalom Salih Shalom, were convicted and executed by Iraqi authorities over the bombings.
A third underground operative, Yusef Khabaza, was also sentenced to death in absentia, but escaped Iraq.
Karkoukli insists that an attack on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad in January 1951 – the only bombing at the time to result in Jewish deaths – was not directly carried about by Zionist operatives, but by a Muslim Arab.
Bineth, who allegedly gave Basri orders, would later commit suicide after being arrested by Egyptian authorities over his suspected involvement in the Lavon Affair, a failed Israeli false flag operation to plant bombs in Egypt and blame them on the Muslim Brotherhood and leftists.
Israeli officials have long rejected any Zionist underground or official Israeli involvement in attacks on Iraqi Jews, and instead blamed them on Iraqi nationalists.
“This is not a second-hand but a first-hand testimony by a participant,” Shlaim told MEE, referring to his interview with Karkoukli.
“True, this is oral history and therefore not conclusive, though it is inconceivable that Karkoukli would have made up the whole story.”
But the historian added that Karkoukli had provided more conclusive evidence than just his own testimony, in the form of a police report.
Shlaim received a copy of the Baghdad police report on the trial of Basri and his associates, which Karkoukli had obtained from a retired Iraqi police officer.
The report, a translation of which is included in the book and has been sent to MEE, includes details of confessions from both Shalom and Basri, where they admit to throwing bombs at Iraqi Jewish targets. Shalom also implicates Khabaza in his confession.
“No one except the police investigators could have had all the details contained in this report,” Shlaim said. “This report is clearly not a fabrication but I took one more step to authenticate it.”
The historian explained that he confirmed the veracity of the police report through Iraqi journalist Shamil Abdul Qadir, who was in possession of a 258-page Baghdad police dossier on the interrogation of alleged Zionist agents.
Abdul Qadir verified the police report, and said that it was based on the dossier he was in possesion of. An image of the cover page of the dossier was seen by MEE.
“The police report which I reprint in my book is thus incontrovertible evidence of Zionist underground involvement in the bombs,” Shlaim said. “If you wish, this is the smoking gun.”
The attack on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue, which killed four Jews, was carried out by a Muslim man of Syrian origin called Salih al-Haidari, according to Karkoukli.
Karkoukli claimed to be “the only person in the world” who knew who had carried out that attack.
He said that Haidari was put up to the attack by a corrupt Iraqi police officer who had received a bribe from the Zionist underground. Shlaim said there was no further corroborating evidence to back the claim up.
Around 110,000 Jews fled Iraq following the bombings, most of them settling in the nascent state of Israel.
Over 800,000 Jews either left or were expelled from countries in the Middle East and North Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.
As of 2005, 61 percent of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Mizrahi ancestry – the sociological term coined to refer to Jews from the region following the creation of Israel.
The attacks on Iraqi Jews came less than two years after the ethnic cleansing that took place in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), which led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Zionist forces killed 13,000 Palestinians, destroyed and depopulated around 530 villages and towns, committed at least 30 massacres, and expelled 750,000 people during the Nakba.
More than 6,000 Israeli Jews, including 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, were killed, as well as around 2,000 troops from Arab countries.
Shlaim states in the book that Iraqi Jews did not face antisemitism until the 1940s, when they were suspected of being complicit in the British invasion of Iraq in 1941 and in the Nakba.
He adds that the Zionist project led to Jews from all across Arab countries going from respected fellow citizens to akin to a fifth column allied with the new Jewish state.
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Featured image: Displaced Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel in 1951 (Wikimedia/Public domain)
June 21st, 2023 by Chris Hedges
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High Court Judge Jonathan Swift — who previously worked for a variety of British government agencies as a barrister and said his favorite clients are “security and intelligence agencies” — rejected two applications by Julian Assange’s lawyers to appeal his extradition last week. The extradition order was signed last June by Home Secretary Priti Patel. Julian’s legal team have filed a final application for appeal, the last option available in the British courts. If accepted, the case could proceed to a public hearing in front of two new High Court judges. If rejected, Julian could be immediately extradited to the United States where he will stand trial for 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act, charges that could see him receive a 175-year sentence, as early as this week.
The only chance to block an extradition, if the final appeal is rejected, as I expect it will be, would come from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe, which created the ECtHR, along with their Commissioner for Human Rights, oppose Julian’s “detention, extradition and prosecution” because it represents “a dangerous precedent for journalists.” It is unclear if the British government would abide by the court’s decision — even though it is obligated to do so — if it ruled against extradition, or if the U.K. would extradite Julian before an appeal to the European court can be heard. Julian, once shipped to the U.S., would be put on trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court refused to authorize the U.S. government’s extradition request in Jan. 2021 because of the severity of the conditions Julian would endure in the U.S. prison system.
“Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at [Her Majesty’s Prison] Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the U.S. will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide,” said Baraitser when handing down her 132-page ruling, “and for this reason I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge.”
Baraitser’s decision was overturned after an appeal by U.S. authorities. The High Court accepted the conclusions of the lower court about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions. But it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in Feb. 2021, which promised Julian would be well treated. The U.S. government claimed that its assurances “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado. No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring. ADX Florence is not the only supermax prison in the U.S. Julian can be placed in one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities in a Communications Management Unit (CMU). CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs.
None of these “assurances” are worth the paper they are written on. All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Julian do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will, the court conceded, be subject to these harsher forms of control.
If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Julian 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time to destroy him psychologically and physically.
No doubt the plane waiting to take Julian to the U.S. will be well stocked with blindfolds, sedatives, shackles, enemas, diapers and jumpsuits used to facilitate “extraordinary renditions” conducted by the CIA.
The extradition of Julian will be the next step in the slow-motion execution of the publisher and founder of WikiLeaks and one of the most important journalists of our generation. It will ensure that Julian spends the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. It will create legal precedents that will criminalize any investigation into the inner workings of power, even by citizens from another country. It will be a body blow to our anemic democracy, which is rapidly metamorphosing into corporate totalitarianism.
I am as stunned by this full frontal assault on journalism as I am by the lack of public outrage, especially by the media. The very belated call from The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — all of whom published material provided by WikiLeaks — to drop the extradition charges is too little too late. All of the public protests I have attended in defense of Julian in the U.S. are sparsely attended. Our passivity makes us complicit in our own enslavement.
Julian’s case, from the start, has been a judicial farce.
Former Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno terminated Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee, in violation of international law. He then authorized London Metropolitan Police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador. Moreno’s government, which revoked Julian’s citizenship, was granted a large loan by the International Monetary Fund for its assistance. Donald Trump, by demanding Julian’s extradition under the Espionage Act, criminalized journalism, in much the same way Woodrow Wilson did when he shut down socialist publications such as The Masses.
The hearings, some of which I attended in London and others of which I sat through online, mocked basic legal protocols. They included the decision to ignore the CIA’s surveillance and recording of meetings between Julian and his attorneys during his time as a political refugee in the embassy, eviscerating attorney-client-privilege. This alone should have seen the case thrown out of court. They included validating the decision to charge Julian, although he is not a U.S. citizen, under the Espionage Act. They included Kafkaesque contortions to convince the courts that Julian is not a journalist. They ignored Article 4 of the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. I watched as the prosecutor James Lewis, representing the U.S., gave legal directives to Judge Baraitser, who promptly adopted them as her legal decision.
The judicial lynching of Julian has far more in common with the dark days of Lubyanka than the ideals of British jurisprudence.
The debate over arcane legal nuances distracts us from the fact that Julian has not committed a crime in Britain, other than an old charge of breaching bail conditions when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Normally this would entail a fine. He was instead sentenced to a year in Belmarsh prison and has been held there since April 2019.
The decision to seek Julian’s extradition, contemplated by Barack Obama’s administration, was pursued by the Trump administration following WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the CIA’s cyberwarfare programs designed to monitor and take control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers and the operating systems of most smart phones, as well as Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Julian, as I noted in a column filed from London last year, is targeted because of the Iraq War Logs, released in Oct. 2010, which document numerous U.S. war crimes, including images seen in the Collateral Murder video, of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injuring two children.
He is targeted because he made public the killing of nearly 700 civilians who had approached too closely to U.S. convoys and checkpoints, including pregnant women, the blind and deaf, and at least 30 children
He is targeted because he exposed more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 to 89, at Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
He is targeted because he showed us that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, all part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included eavesdropping on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He is targeted because he exposed that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime.
He is targeted because he released documents that revealed the United States secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians.
He is targeted because he made public the off-the-record talks Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs, talks for which she was paid $657,000, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, as well as her private assurances to Wall Street that she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform.
For revealing these truths alone he is guilty.
The U.S. court system is even more draconian than the British court system. It can use SAMs, anti-terrorism laws and the Espionage Act to block Julian from speaking to the public, being released on bail, or seeing the “secret” evidence used to convict him.
The CIA was created to carry out assassinations, coups, torture, kidnapping, blackmail, character assassination and illegal spying. It has targeted U.S. citizens, in violation of its charter. These activities were exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House.
Working with UC Global, the Spanish security firm in the embassy, the CIA put Julian under 24-hour video and digital surveillance. It discussed kidnapping and assassinating him while he was in the embassy, which included plans of a shoot-out on the streets with involvement by London Metropolitan Police. The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of $52 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. All these clandestine activities, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have massively expanded.
Senator Frank Church, after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee, defined the CIA’s covert activity as “a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies.”
The CIA and intelligence agencies, along with the military, all of which operate without effective Congressional oversight, are the engines behind Julian’s extradition. Julian inflicted, by exposing their crimes and lies, a grievous wound. They demand vengeance. The control these forces seek abroad is the control they seek at home.
Julian may soon be imprisoned for life in the U.S. for journalism, but he won’t be the only one.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Featured image: STOP THIS – by Mr. Fish
June 21st, 2023 by Jonathan Turley
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The Irish Green Party followed many on the left around the world, including our own Democratic Party, this week and came out for censorship and speech controls. Indeed, the party went full Orwellian as its chairwoman Pauline O’Reilly called for “restricting freedom” to protect it.
O’Reilly’s comments are part of the introduction of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022. We previously discussed this massive assault on free speech.
The legislation that would criminalize “incitement to violence or hatred against” people with “protected characteristics,” as well as “condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.”
Limiting free speech has become an article of faith for many on the left. I have written about my distress (as someone who grew up in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago) in watching the abandonment of free speech values by the party. Democratic leaders now uniformly call for censorship and speech regulations. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.” Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.”
The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom. It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.”
That effort was on full display this week in Ireland with this anti-free speech legislation.
Speaking before the Irish Senate (Seanad) this week, O’Reilly declared “when one thinks about it, all law and all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. This is exactly what we are doing here. We are restricting freedom but we are doing it for the common good.”
It is the same message of New York democrats calling for limiting speech as a way of protecting democracy. Indeed, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”
O’Reilly assured citizens that giving up freedom was nothing new or threatening: “Throughout our Constitution one can see that while one has rights they are restricted for the common good. Everything needs to be balanced.”
What is particularly chilling is how low the threshold is for denying free speech, according to O’Reilly. It now appears that “deep discomfort” is enough:
“If a person’s views on other people’s identities make their lives unsafe and insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, our job as legislators is to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”
What is interesting is that O’Reilly admits that there is nothing new about hateful views but it is time to clear out such voices: “Social media has fuelled hatred but it has also put on display for all of us the dirty, filthy, underbelly of hatred in Irish society. That hatred has always existed.” Of course, she and the majority will determine what views create “deep discomfort.”
The Irish legislation is likely to be replicated around the world if the free speech community cannot hold the line against the anti-free speech movement. It is part of an unrelenting movement in Europe, particularly by the European Union, to rollback Western free speech values that once defined countries.
We have been discussing efforts by figures like Hillary Clinton to enlist European countries to force Twitter to restore censorship rules. Unable to rely on corporate censorship or convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are resorting to good old-fashioned state censorship, even asking other countries to censor the speech of American citizens.
Ireland now stands on the precipice of freedom. The embrace of such laws by the Irish is crushingly ironic. Frank Ryan, who fought against the treaty, spoke for many radicals in declaring “as long as we have fists and boots, there will be no free speech for traitors.” Those anti-Treaty forces rejected the views of free speech that long defined Western nations. Now, Ireland is declaring “no free speech for haters” and assumes the authority to define who are haters and who are not.
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June 21st, 2023 by Ernesto López
June 21st, 2023 by Peter Koenig
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“No amount of weapons or ammunition the US and its allies provide to Ukraine will be enough unless Kiev wins”, Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said on Monday [19 June 2023], during an interview with Ukrainian television.
“When we win, I’ll say ‘there were enough weapons.’ But until then, nothing will be enough, however much they send, because if there is no victory, that means it was not enough,” Kuleba said. See this.
The Zelensky team is setting the stage for “eternal war”, as the West seems to be committed to do whatever Zelensky says and wants. Zelensky has elevated himself to the Master of the Western world.
Hundreds of billions of Western people’s tax money go into weaponry and “budget support” to the most corrupt country of the planet to fight a war that is unwinnable – all under the pretext of weakening Russia and ultimately to achieving regime change, to steal and dominate Russia’s resources, Russia’s riches — and to get one step closer to a One World Oder.
Imagine, what Western nations could do for their ever-more impoverished people as they, western governments, are destroying, suicide-like, Western economies? It is part of UN Agenda 2030 and/or the Great Reset. They are religiously following the blueprint of these disastrous plans and carrying them out. The wanton destruction of Western economies is part of it. And people are miserably lied about it.
Western governments for years, for decades have not represented the people who “elected them” or more precisely, who believe they elected them, because, yes, they the people, do pay for their unworthy government’s wages and upper-echelon life style.
Totally unsustainable and this in the age of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), i.e., UN Agenda 2030, precisely the agenda that is aiming at “resetting” the world, into a fraction of the current population, converting the survivors to mind-manipulable transhumans via the deadly ultra-shortwaves 5G and soon to come 6G, and with remote directed Artificial Intelligence (AI), making them feel happy, as all their possessions have been stolen, eliminated, gone – by programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
And the tyranny goes on to total control mechanisms through digital certificates of everything from forced vaccination, to a fully loaded QR code-based ID that includes all personal data, from health, to eating habits, to carbon footprint, criminal records, to personal attitudes, compliance willingness – and especially an individual’s behavior towards “climate change” – which may go as far as 15-minute cities, or no cars for paupers, the regular people, no flying for the commons, nothing that could be said to infringe on the so-unbelievably falsified climate record.
A modern “lockdown” forever as soon as we are in digital prison. This may happen sooner than we think, if We, the People let it happen. And, with what we know today, it is literally irreversible. Once we are there, we are cooked. So, let us prevent the “being forced to go there.”
It seems most people still have not grasped this. They are happily looking forward to an all-digitized life with especially digitized money. So easy. No cash. Swipe a card, bingo.
Yes, bingo – and you are hand-cuffed and do not even notice it.
We are at this breaking point, where all comes together and could result in an immense explosion – or implosion, where things and events take over, without AI and without the possibility of human interference, the possibility of stopping a worldwide annihilation.
Let us look at the panorama and connect the dots:
NATO’s largest ever air maneuver around Russia has been ongoing for over a week and is supposed to end on 23 June. Will it? Or may it convert into a hot war? A legit question with all the converging events that seem to be pushing to a political unmanageable climax.
Western debt, exacerbated by the billions soon trillions of money shoved down into a dark Ukraine hole, is at the verge of collapsing Western economies. The Western banking system is at the brink of bankruptcy – man-made bankruptcy – because it fits in well with the plan of eradicating national debt and introducing the all-controlling CBDC.
The unelected European Commission (EC) and the corrupted Rockefeller-Gates-Pharma-run World Health Organization (WHO) have just announced adopting a joined fully digitized vaxx certificate and ID – which would be the basis for every citizen to move around freely, or not so freely, depending on how well his/her QR coded-ID and vaxx certificates are kept up-to-date, according to mandated rules.
Remember, with the beginning of the 2020 decade, we have entered an era of lawlessness, no more international laws, but elite made “rules-based orders”. There will no longer be judges, whose verdicts are based on international law. They are banned, not allowed, or outright threatened.
On the dangers of the CBDC and the all-present QR code, see this and this.
The universal drive towards central bank digital currencies, emanates most likely from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Central Bank of all central banks, controlling at least 90% of central banks around the globe, and the BIS, itself, being controlled by the Rothschild family.
As we see, all is in best-intended private hands, perfectly aligned with the fraudulently established 1913 Federal Reserve Act – that has allowed the US to create a US dollar hegemony around the world; first with the dollar replacing gold as key reserve asset, second, as all hydrocarbon had to be traded by OPEC in US dollars, a Washington imposition; and thirdly, all international trade, no matter between which countries, was to be carried out until recently in US dollars.
Most of this is faltering and stands now at a breaking point.
India may be a monetary precursor for the West.
What if the 2016 Indian government’s – a USAID-imposed project – abruptly wiping out the nation’s most important bank notes, the 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, representing 87% of the total cash in circulation, was just a trial for what might happen in the west?
See this.
A similar move is taking place now with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI, equivalent to India’s Central Bank), announcing in May 2023 the RBI will be withdrawing Rs 2,000 notes from circulation as part of the “clean note policy”, a pretext to reduce cash and convert India gradually into an all-digitized currency country.
During India’s 2016 abolishing of more than 80% of all cash, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, especially in the countryside, with no access to banks and cash, suddenly had no money, could not buy food; many perished.
What if, on behalf of Ukraine, always on behalf of Ukraine, NATO makes a wrong move before or after June 23, leading to a provoked counterattack by Russia, possibly nuclear – leading to a hot WWIII, causing “shortages” of everything, especially food and energy?
Simultaneously, the EC and possibly also the US FED may stop or reduce cash to a minimum and introduce and impose programmable CBDC on the Western population. Cash may be gone but the commercial system has not adapted yet to the new digital currency. Food is in short supply, and the little there is, cannot be bought, due to lack of money, same with energy.
A tremendous famine may ensue, on top of the war, with communications and transportation breakdown, due to lack of energy.
In addition, hacking and cyberattacks may become the order of the day – test runs have already happened and are happening as these lines are going to print; people may die like flies. All over the West.
The WEF’s Great Reset, WHO’s enslaving digitized vaxx certificate, and the UN’s Agenda 2030 might smile in satisfaction, having reached their objective way before the 2030 target date. This is indeed their intention, as they must beat the awakening masses of people.
This horror scenario shall not happen.
Because we the People, will not allow it. If we are awake, we may project our own future, spiritually shaping it – in our minds, disregarding the diabolical machinations. It is never too late, preparing our own sources of food, sources of energy – and our own civilization.
It is a challenge, but the human mind and spirit can master it. And WE WILL.
Away from tyranny.
However, first we must see and recognize the sword of tyranny hovering over our heads.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
June 21st, 2023 by Dr. John Day
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Daniel Ellsberg died at the age 92 from pancreatic cancer on June 16, 2023. I’m chagrined that I did not know more about Ellsberg’s life at the heart of American military decision-making until his death brought those stories forward. Daniel Ellsberg was at the core of American nuclear-war strategic planning from the Eisenhower through Nixon administrations.
Daniel’s mother had wanted him to be a concert pianist, which career he pursued until she was killed in a car accident when Daniel was 16. After her death he studied Economics at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1952. That same year he married Carol Cummings, the daughter of a Marine Corps Brigadier General, then began further studies of Economics at King’s College, Cambridge under a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. Those studies were directed towards a Ph.D. upon his return to Harvard. However, in 1954, as the Korean war became fixed in an armistice, Ellsberg joined the US Marine Corps, earning an officer’s commission and serving until 1958, including responsibilities as a Company Commander.
From 1958 through 1962 Ellsberg worked in Nuclear Strategy at the Rand Corporation, while completing his Economics Ph.D. at Harvard. His Ph.D. dissertation paper in the field of Decision Theory, “Risk, Ambiguity and Decision” was pertinent to economics and the prosecution of nuclear war. It describes what came to be known as the “Ellsberg Paradox”. This describes human aversion to uncertainty of risk. Given choices that are of basically equal risk, humans have a strong proclivity to choose the defined risk over the undefined risk, to choose the known evil over the unknown evil. This leads to “non-utilitarian” decisions in both economics and war and may reflect an underlying human assumption of deception risk whenever probabilities are not clearly defined.
What we know Daniel Ellsberg for is his principled decision to reveal the 7,000 pages of analysis he had done on the decision-making pertaining to the Vietnam War in 1967-1968, after he returned from two years in South Vietnam, where he worked for the US State Department. Ellsberg’s detailed analysis, showing pervasive irrationality, dishonesty and graft at all levels of decision making throughout the war, came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers”.
In early 1968 the American public was confronted directly with evidence that they had been lied to by the President and the military, and that the US was losing the Vietnam War, when the Tet Offensive broke out, and every major city in South Vietnam became embroiled in street fighting, some falling under Vietcong control. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated while taking popular anti-war political stances. Ellsberg began attending peace gatherings, while still working for Rand, and was deeply influenced by Ghandian activists from India.
While listening to a draft resister, Randy Kehler, speak in 1969, Ellsberg was feeling patriotic pride for him and for America, when Randy calmly stated that “he was very excited that he would soon be able to join his friends in prison”. His two year prison sentence was about to commence. Ellsberg experienced a sobbing epiphany from Randy’s profound altruistic action, which brought him to consider revealing his own detailed knowledge of the corruption, immorality and hopelessness of the Vietnam War.
By the end of 1969 Ellsberg and Rand colleague Anthony Russo had made multiple photocopies of the Pentagon Papers, and Ellsberg was visiting sympathetic Senators, urging them to enter the documents into the Senate record. When this was unsuccessful, he resolved to release the copies to newspapers and to temporarily go into hiding, both of which brought the Pentagon Papers very much to the attention of American voters. These Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg had created through his research of classified DoD records, embarrassed the government by revealing presidential lies to the American people and also to Congress.
Following over two weeks of this publicity, with the ongoing release of records still blocked by the courts, Ellsberg surrendered himself, to potentially face 115 years in prison under the Espionage Act, while Russo faced 35 years. The Supreme Court decided that the New York Times could no longer be legally prevented from publishing the rest of the documents, and the Washington Post had also begun publishing them. Senator Mike Gravel entered over 4,000 pages of Pentagon Papers into the Senate record.
In court, the sword hung over Ellsberg’s head as he was prevented from explaining the moral reasons for his actions to the jury. In 1973, after revelations of the burglary of his psychiatrist’s office to read his files, and of other illegal government actions, including offering the judge the directorship of the FBI for convicting Ellsberg, all charges were dismissed by the court. See this.
Daniel Ellsberg was a holder of special secrets. Keeping special secrets induces the holder to discount information from those who do not know the secrets, and to lie and mislead them since sharing the secrets is not an option. He described this effect to Henry Kissinger in late 1968, as Kissinger sought information about the Vietnam War and was about to gain above-top-secret security clearances. See this.
Gandhian activism, which influenced Ellsberg, and was the philosophical ground for his epiphany, illustrates the morality of the practitioner, compared to the immorality of the overlord or colonial power. On a deeper, karmic level, the altruistic action of sacrificing one’s own well being or life for the good of others, while selfish power-actors unjustly harm and enslave fellow humans, might even be seen as a form of white-magic.
In recent years many of us have seen the government lies, this time, almost in lock-step across the world, compelling people to isolate, and preventing them from even learning about effective antiviral therapies for COVID, while preventing their physicians from prescribing effective treatments, or even knowing that they exist. The one path to freedom was promised to be provided by novel gene-therapy vaccines, so people waited patiently and received these injections with feelings of great relief.
Others of us in the practice of medicine had done independent research, followed clinical trial preprints when they became available, treated our patients with vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, then ivermectin, and macrolide antibiotics to reduce both secondary bacterial infections and inflammation in the lungs. We did not have special top-secret knowledge but Pfizer, the FDA and Department of Defense did have it. See this.
There were leaks showing high rates of miscarriage which were covered up. Myocarditis in children became apparent in the spring of 2021 and it is now apparent that the “up to date on COVID-19 vaccinations” catch COVID at a higher rate than the “not up to date”. See this.
Some of us have lost our jobs or medical licenses for our treatment of our patients, or our stands for bodily autonomy against COVID vaccine mandates, even without researching Gandhian activism.
It is enough to discern right from wrong, truth from lies, and to stand publicly for truth and to defend human rights.
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June 21st, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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***
Stillbirth is defined as the tragic loss of a baby from 20 weeks gestation or 400g of body weight, if gestation is unknown.
Windsor, ON – 24 year old Canadian influencer Karlee Steel experienced an unexpected stillbirth on May 4, 2023
Karlee Steel, based in Windsor, Ontario, was induced into labour in early May after an ultrasound detected her baby had no heartbeat. (click here)
On May 5, Steel shared her devastating experience to Instagram, wanting to break the stigma around stillbirth. “Yesterday on May 4th, 22 weeks and 5 days, our first baby boy Luca was born sleeping”
Stillbirth occurs in about 1 out of 200 pregnancies (in Canada) and according to Statistics Canada, more than 3,000 stillbirths were reported in 2021.
Kilkeel, UK – 37 year old long distance runner Laura Graham had an unexpected stillbirth on Feb. 19, 2023
“Unfortunately on 19th February 2023 we suffered the heartbreaking loss, stillborn birth of our precious little boy Luca” (click here)
Laura recalls being in “complete shock” when told there was “no heartbeat”.
“The whole pregnancy was going good until that horrifying moment when the consultant told us the heartbreaking words ‘I’m sorry there is no heartbeat’. Nothing could prepared us for that and what came next and I don’t think it ever will. No pain will ever amount to that day.”
There are many reports of sudden stillbirths after COVID-19 vaccination:
Australian demographics experts from the Australian National University like Dr. Liz Allen tell us crashing live births are due to inflation and climate change.
However, it is clear that following a short lockdown “baby boom”, there has been a catastrophic crash in the number of babies born in Australian hospitals in 2021 and 2022, since the rollout of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Source: Professor Stefan Homburg (click here)
In this graph, the COVID-19 vaccine administration (orange line) is adjusted by 9 months and lines up perfectly with the crash in live births (the graph shows what happens exactly 9 months after COVID-19 vaccination, which is a drop in live births).
Furthermore, the higher the number of COVID-19 vaccines administered, the steeper the drop in live births and when COVID-19 vaccination pauses, live births return to baseline, suggesting this is entirely an effect of COVID-19 vaccines causing miscarriages and stillbirths rather than a long term infertility problem.
Source: El Gato Malo substack (click here)
Source: Igor Chudov substack (click here)
The COVID-19 propaganda machine is going strong in the UK, where doctors will be attributing all late stillbirths to mothers “sleeping too long”, or climate change.
It is very difficult to get good data on stillbirths caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
However, live births are crashing in Australia, Germany, Sweden and other highly COVID-19 vaccinated countries.
Doctors who have talked about stillbirths caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are heavily persecuted in the media and by the health authorities.
In November 2021, Dr. Daniel Nagase tried to expose some information about stillbirths occurring in British Columbia and he was attacked in the mainstream media (CBC) for it (click here).
“Health authorities say there’s no truth to social media rumours that suggest there were more than a dozen stillbirths in 24 hours at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, B.C.”
Dr. Nagase is now being persecuted via a complaint process by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.
Nevertheless, there are many shocking cases of stillbirths associated with Pfizer & Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines recorded in VAERS, some of which I have included in this article.
COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are not safe in pregnancy and should not be given to pregnant women.
We need to see what the live births data looks like in Canada and the US, as I expect a similar crash in live births, as what is going on in Australia and Germany. We just need whistleblowers to leak good data to the public.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
Featured image is from NaturalNews.com
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page.
June 21st, 2023 by Dave DeCamp
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***
The New York Times reported Monday that the US and its Western allies have shipped weapons to Ukraine that were broken and needed repair or were only useful for spare parts.
The report also said that Ukraine has not received weapons from contractors that it has paid for. As of the end of 2022, the Ukrainian government paid over $800 million for arms contracts that were completely or partly unfulfilled.
Sources told the Times that some of the unfulfilled weapons had been delivered or refunds were issued but said hundreds of millions of dollars were paid for weapons that never materialized. The report said the most valuable undelivered contracts were between the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and state-owned Ukrainian arms companies.
Ukraine has also had issues with contractors in other countries. According to Ukrainian government documents, Kyiv paid $19.8 million to the Ultra Defense Corporation, an American arms dealer based in Tampa, to repair 33 damaged howitzers provided by the Italian government.
The documents said that 13 of the howitzers were shipped to Ukraine but arrived not suitable for combat missions, although the CEO of Ultra Defense Corporation claimed each howitzer worked when they were delivered and blamed the Ukrainians for not maintaining them. Kyiv complained about the issue to the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is investigating the matter.
There are also multiple examples of military equipment being pulled from US military stockpiles that were not in good condition. A US Army unit based in Kuwait was ordered to send 29 Humvees to Ukraine, and the unit’s leader claimed all but one of the Humvees was ready for combat. But a Pentagon report said 26 were in need of repair.
After the Humvees were repaired, they were sent to Poland to be staged for Ukraine. But in Poland, it was discovered that 25 of the Humvees needed new tires. A Pentagon report said that finding replacement tires “delayed the shipment of other equipment to Ukraine and required significant labor and time.”
Besides the issues with damaged equipment, a recent Pentagon inspector general report found that US military personnel were not properly tracking arms arriving in Poland to be shipped to Ukraine.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
Featured image is licensed under the Public Domain
June 21st, 2023 by John W. Whitehead
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***
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
***
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.
Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.
Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.
This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.
For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.
If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.
Yet as The Intercept explains,
“the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”
In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.
These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.
As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”
For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.
What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.
To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.
To go after thieves, they become thieves.
For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.
Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Think about it.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.
The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.
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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 most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].
Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
June 21st, 2023 by FRW Production
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***
An industry forced into silence, is silent no more.
Once named heroes, fired and now forgotten, continue the fight to save lives in a shocking peek behind closed doors.What was already a fractured system is now being forced into collapse.
The Canadian Society for Science & Ethics in Medicine is a group of brave doctors and healthcare workers who have come together to stand against a government turned on its people.
Hear their heart wrenching stories and their plea for help.
British Columbians lives are at risk everyday we are without our healthcare workers.
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Featured image is a screenshot from the video
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.
We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page.
June 21st, 2023 by Timothy Alexander Guzman
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***
There’s only one conclusion when it comes to Israel, in fact it’s almost like a tradition, it’s definitely a meal ticket to political power for all US presidents, senators, congresspeople, governors, mayors from the past to the present who pledge their unconditional support for Israel.
US President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, was the first world leader to recognize Israel in only 11 minutes as a Jewish state on May 14, 1948. Truman declared “I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have faith in it now.”
Every US president since then has basically bent over forward for Israel. On September 10th, 1968, US President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), another Democrat from Texas gave a speech at B’nai B’rith which is an organization that focuses on the security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. They also fight antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. LBJ said the following:
Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life … Most if not all of you have very deep ties with the land and with the people of Israel, as I do, for my Christian faith sprang from yours …. the Bible stories are woven into my childhood memories as the gallant struggle of modern Jews to be free of persecution is also woven into our souls
War criminal and former Republican President, George W. Bush Jr gave a speech to the Knesset on May 15th, 2008:
The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul … My country’s admiration for Israel does not end there. When Americans look at Israel, we see a pioneer spirit that worked an agricultural miracle and now leads a high-tech revolution. We see world-class universities and a global leader in business and innovation and the arts. We see a resource more valuable than oil or gold: the talent and determination of a free people who refuse to let any obstacle stand in the way of their destiny
Another war criminal and the first half-African American to become a US President, Barack H. Obama gave a speech on the 61st Anniversary of Israel’s independence on April 28th, 2009:
The United States was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948, minutes after its declaration of independence, and the deep bonds of friendship between the U.S. and Israel remain as strong and unshakeable as ever
And of course, the former US president and GOP frontrunner, Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden also support Israel on every level. Bottom line, it seems that you can’t be a US president if you don’t support Israel. The Israelis, including the most powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and Jewish oligarchs literally fund and own US politicians and major several industries including Hollywood and the mainstream media.
Despite that fact, Donald Trump still thinks that Israel don’t control congress
“The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is Israel literally owned Congress — you understand that — 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today it’s almost the opposite” he continued “You have between AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and [Rep. Ilhan] Omar — and these people that hate Israel. They hate it with a passion, they’re controlling Congress, and Israel is not a force in Congress anymore. I mean, it’s just amazing. I’ve never seen such a change.”
So, according to Trump, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who is known as AOC, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and other democrats in that circle control congress? That is pure nonsense, they don’t control anything, they are just political puppets that will do whatever they are told. Trump believes that Israel should have the power over the US congress, not the US voters,
“And we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, but I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power, Israel had such power — and rightfully — over Congress, and now it doesn’t. It’s incredible, actually.”
Most of the Democrats and Republicans who are running for the 2024 presidential election or other political offices in the future will support Israel, and that’s a fact that cannot be denied.
Now we need to take a closer look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who also threw in his hat for the 2024 Democrat nomination is great on a host of major issues including his opposition to war, Covid-19 vaccine mandates, and government censorship. One of the best websites that targets Big Pharma is the Children’s Health Defense which was founded by RFK Jr.
However, RFK Jr. has joined the political establishment and sold his soul to that same old foreign power that has controlled Washington, DC since 1948. The Jewish News Syndicate (jns.org) published ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. affirms: ‘I support Israel’ on an interview from an independent podcast co-host Craig Pasta Jardula who asked Kennedy a legitimate question,
“a couple tweets were put up in support of Roger Waters and then taken down. You want to give us a little explanation of why they were taken down and also your stance on Israel and Palestine?”
RFK Jr replied
“I made the tweet applauding Roger Waters’ courage in opposing the Covid mandates and the Ukraine war. I was unaware of his position on Israel. And when I learned that I immediately took it down.”
What RFK Jr says next will allow you to conclude what his Middle East foreign policy would mean for the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world,
“I support Israel. My family has a long relationship with Israel and supporting its right to exist and its right to protect its security.”
Jardula then asked,
“And the Palestinians?”
Kennedy replied:
“And a humane outcome and a recognition ultimately of the aspirations of the Palestinian people is important for everybody.”
It all sounds too familiar, it’s like they are reading from a script.
The US political establishment, no matter who comes to power whether Democrat or Republican, they must support Israel if they want to run for political office despite that fact that the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty on June 8th, 1967, or their involvement in the September 11th attacks in New York City or any other crimes including espionage on US soil. Israel has all of the politicians in Washington in their pockets, they own the mainstream media, and they also have a say in US foreign policy matters when it comes to the Middle East.
RFK Jr is just another politician who will be subservient to the Zionist power structure in Washington and the Israeli government. On October 3rd, 2001, former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon said
“I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We the Jewish People control America, and the Americans Know it.”
I must admit, that was one of the most honest statements made by an Israeli Prime Minister to this day.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
June 21st, 2023 by Karsten Riise
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***
A lot of countries don’t have enough teachers. Neither in primary education – nor at university level.
A lot of humans also need to upgrade their skills in order to stay employed and even upgrade the earning skills. Many will lose their jobs due to AI, but AI will also help them acquire new skills fast than ever, so that they can quickly get back and earn good money in all the new jobs which AI will create.
AI can help with all that. Even if you have classes of 100 students per teacher, each student can have his/her own personal teacher in AI. And the overburdened teacher will be assisted by AI as well. A personal tutor increases the student’s results enormously. It can make the average student a master student – it can make the below-average student an above-average student. See fig.1
Figure 1: Sal Khan TED presentation
A master-assistant will also improve the human teacher’s result – being a pedagogical tutor for the teacher, take over the burden of making lesson plans – assist to make the teacher’s review of students’ achievements faster and more pedagogical. Improve the amount and quality of “face time”.
That is precisely what Khan Academy is doing – working with OpenAI. They have created Khanmigo which is an AI assisted system for students and teachers.
Have a look the founder Sal Khan’s presentation here:
If interested, more info on Khanmigo here.
Sal Khan is a successful social entrepreneur of Bangladeshi background. His grandfather Abdul Wahab Khan was the third speaker of the National Assembly of Pakistan.
But there are more exciting news. At the end of 2023, OpenAI will launch “OpenAI Academy”. It will be free, everybody can sign up and learn anything they want – when they want. Gone are the needs to provide a lot of papers to enroll in specific courses, even advanced courses. And the AI will adapt to your individual level, both as you enroll and as you progress. No longer are you limited to the courses available in your geographical area. Want to learn about Arabic music? There you have it, take an AI course in the Arab quarter-tone musical scale.
OpenAI Academy will provide an extensive selection of courses and subjects, encompassing disciplines such as mathematics, science, music, and art.
Users will have the opportunity to engage with GPT-5 as their instructor, tutor, mentor or companion.
The OpenAI Academy is set to launch in late 2023 and, in line with OpenAI’s mission to ensure the benefits of AI are accessible to all, it will be free for anyone who wants to use it, according to Sam Altman [CEO of OpeAI]. See this.
The courses mentioned are only the beginning. New courses will be added constantly. This will expand rapidly.
Say, I want to learn more about quantum physics. But I don’t want to take a master’s degree in mathematics and in physics to learn it. I have read about it, watched a range of deep teaching videos on both the math and the quantum physics – this has given me a good general understanding. But how to go deeper? And there are always some questions hanging, which a video or book cannot respond to. Soon, I can sign up to a course with exactly the modules in math and physics which I need. And with AI, I can even ask questions and receive answers outside a normal “curriculum”. I can take my learning in all directions which I want. The pace of my progress will depend on my time, interest, and effort. All questions I have will be answered. And I can concentrate my learning on precisely what interests me.
It can be anything. Maybe you want to learn to write novels. Have a personal AI tutor to help you get started.
And if you want a certificate that you have learned a new profession, AI will help you not only get precisely the courses you need, but also help you learn what you need to take those courses – and get your certificate. Imagine all those who had a hard time during the math lessons. They will need a refresher, and in a motivating way, just to get to the entry level of math required for a lot of interesting professions. AI will help individualize precisely what you need to learn to get to where you want to be in learning.
Soon, a fun, animated AI teacher can receive oral questions from children and speak to their understanding and motivation. Then, basically AI can teach children how to read and write.
We are living in exciting times.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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June 21st, 2023 by Abayomi Azikiwe
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***
African Union (AU) member-states have refused to remain silent on the crisis between the Russian Federation and Ukraine since the beginning of the special military operation in late February 2022.
As founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the early 1960s, progressive African states such as the Republic of Ghana and the United Arab Republic (Egypt) sought to halt what appeared at the time to be the inevitability of another world war which could result in a nuclear weapons conflagration.
Ghana under President Kwame Nkrumah waged an international campaign to halt the testing by France of nuclear weapons in Algeria during the armed struggle being waged by the National Liberation Front (FLN). In later years, 1965-66, Nkrumah embarked upon an effort to halt the United States bombing of North Vietnam and to end the occupation of Southeast Asia. (See this)
Ghana as a state during this period was very active in the world peace movement along with its advocacy for and material assistance to liberation movements waging struggles against colonial hegemony. According to one source:
“Nor were African voices absent in international efforts to initiate state-level moves towards disarmament. In parallel with its commitments to the Non-Aligned Movement, the government of Ghana sponsored a series of anti-nuclear conferences in the early 1960s, culminating in the 1962 Accra Assembly on ‘The World Without the Bomb’. After the conference a small organization was established in Ghana headed by a government official, Frank Boaten, to continue its efforts at disarmament. Alongside these official initiatives, small nuclear disarmament campaigns were set up by activists in countries including Sierra Leone and South Africa.”
Consequently, it is not surprising that the African Peace Initiative delegation headed by Republic of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has been calling for a diplomatic resolution to the war and the lifting of sanctions against the Russian Federation. The war and sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states and their allies has disrupted the supply of agricultural products and inputs to several African states.
These problems are aggravated by the financial impact of the western sanctions which have severely restricted the mechanism for financial payments involving global trade. At the same time, the U.S. Congress has advanced a bill which would further interfere with the capacity of AU member-states to conduct trade with the Russian Federation. See this.
Prior to the visit of the African leaders to Ukraine and Russia, a bipartisan group of Congressional members in the House and Senate sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the Republic of South Africa be punished economically for its alleged support to the Russian Federation in the war. The U.S. ambassador to South Africa has accused the African National Congress (ANC) government of providing arms to Moscow, a charge denied by President Ramaphosa.
The Eastern European state of Poland has been the major rear base for NATO in their war against Russia in Ukraine. Many of the Ukrainian troops which are armed and trained by the Pentagon and NATO, are housed in Poland. See this.
On June 15 when President Ramaphosa and his delegation arrived in Poland, they were held up by the government at the airport under the guise that the South African security detail was not authorized to carry arms. Such an assertion could easily be viewed as a threat to the protection detail which accompanies a head-of-state.
Telesur described the situation as follows:
“Polish authorities prevented the South African delegation from getting off the plane on the grounds that the president’s security personnel did not have the proper permits to bring weapons into the country. According to Pieter du Toit, a journalist on the plane, the Polish authorities finally allowed the delegation to leave the plane after more than 24 hours on the tarmac in Warsaw. The delegation, consisting of more than 100 security personnel and some 20 journalists, arrived early Thursday (June 15) morning at the Polish airport. Major General Wally Rhoode, Ramaphosa’s security chief, denounced the Polish government’s act as racism and sabotage against the president’s security, preventing him from entering Kiev with proper security protection. Presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya has said that the South African president’s security ‘has not been compromised.’ Ramaphosa has arrived at the Nemishaeve train station in Ukraine, the country’s presidency said…. The European Union has said that it will not support the African peace plan in Ukraine if it involves freezing the conflict.”
These actions, which violate the most rudimentary decorum of international diplomacy, were a clear indication that Washington and its NATO allies do not want peace at this stage of the war in Eastern Europe. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky stated during the visit of the African Peace Initiative that his government was not interested in talks to end the war.
In contrast, the delegation was greeted enthusiastically by the Russian government at the 26th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The African delegation met with President Vladimir Putin and other high-ranking officials of the Russian Federation.
A ten-point program advanced by the AU delegation was listened to attentively by the Russian leadership. President Putin said that he was open to holding discussions with Ukraine over the current crisis between the two states.
In an article on the discussions, Tass news agencies reported that:
“The African peace initiative ideally could lead to dialogue and potentially a de-escalation, says Natalia Piskunova, associate professor at Moscow State University’s Department of World Politics. ‘The call for abandoning the armed conflict suggested by the African group also reflects the long-standing universal approach to settling conflicts under UN auspices,’ she says. So far, the African peace initiative appears to be the most well-thought-through and balanced as compared to those plans previously proposed, the expert thinks…. Since the Ukrainian crisis is a logical development of worsening relations between Russia and the West, beginning back in 2011, however, any peace plan, even the most thought-out, is doomed to fail, says Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO RAS). The fighting will end only when Western countries, and the U.S. in particular, are disabused of the idea that their political goals can be attained by further stoking the conflict.”
After the meetings with the Russian officials, the African leaders traveled back to their respective states. President Ramaphosa held a press briefing prior to leaving from St. Petersburg noting that the war must end.
At present, Ukraine with its re-trained and restaffed military personnel numbering 40-50 thousand troops, have declared the beginning of a counter-offensive against the Russian armed forces. Most of the media accounts in the West have acknowledged some of the losses suffered by the Ukrainian forces. The corporate and government-controlled news agencies, despite their biases, have admitted on numerous occasions that military equipment provided by the NATO countries is being destroyed by Russia.
Russian media reports on the counteroffensive indicate that it has been a complete failure so far in the present period. This message of a well-fortified Russian military apparatus based in the federated areas of eastern and southern Ukraine which has repelled several attempts by the NATO-trained forces to break through their defense lines, does not bode well for the Biden administration.
Tass, in a headline story on the Pentagon’s response to the lack of success in the Ukraine counteroffensive, quotes from a Defense Department spokesperson who said:
“The Ukrainian counter-offensive will be tough for the Kiev government’s forces and will entail casualties among their ranks, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh has said. ‘Our assessments have been pretty clear from the beginning. I think you know, we know as you continue to see the fights that have continued to move to the east, it’s become more of a <…> battle,’ she told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday (June 20). ‘We know this is going to be a hard fight. We know this is going to take time. And we are confident that the Ukrainians have what they need. We have accounted for losses. We know there are going to be losses on the battlefield. That’s the unfortunate part of this war,’ the spokesperson continued. In her words, the United States has provided Ukraine with the systems and the capabilities that its troops need. ‘We know this is going to be a tough fight. Of course, the Russians are going to adapt as they would have from the beginning of the war,’ Singh said.
The foreign policy imperatives of the Biden White House are centered on the weakening of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, its principal strategic competitors. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing during June 18-19 only highlighted the blunders of U.S. imperialism. Russia, China, Iran and the AU are working closer together in efforts to build a world system independent of the West. Chinese foreign ministry officials pointed out the relations between Beijing and Washington are at their lowest point in history.
This deterioration of relations with China has its counterpart in regard to the Russian Federation.
As Biden’s approval ratings have dropped even further with more than 50% of registered voters holding a negative view of his presidency, the prospect for regaining the White House is brought seriously into question. The handling of the economy by the administration is a major cause for concern among a majority of the electorate. See this.
Moreover, overall support for the U.S. funding and engineering of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has declined significantly. Consequently, the White House in its Pentagon statement on June 20, appears to be preparing the people of the U.S. for the possibility of more defeats in Ukraine. The only real alternative is for the reemergence of a peace movement in the U.S. which demands the withdrawal of all funding for the proxy war and the resumption of negotiations to end the fighting. See this.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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June 21st, 2023 by Bharat Dogra
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***
Trade and investment agreements with various important countries or groups of countries can have far-reaching impacts on the country’s farmers, workers and entrepreneurs (including women farmers, workers and entrepreneurs), on the economy and environment. Hence it is important that these agreements should be negotiated, concluded or dropped in conditions of transparency and inclusiveness so that the voices of various impacted parties can at least be heard adequately before any final decisions are taken or agreements are reached.
This is particularly true when developing countries, or countries of the Global South, are involved in negotiations with some of the richest and developed countries of the Global North, as it is widely recognized that trade and investment rules have been frequently rigged in favor of the Global North and against the Global South, emphasizing the need for caution.
India has been recently passing through such an important phase of trade and investment negotiations with some of its most important trading partners like the European Union and the USA. Unfortunately this phase has not been marked with the expected and anticipated levels of transparency and openness which are not just desirable but even essential for ensuring that any adverse impacts in the context of crucial concerns and vulnerable sections of population can be avoided.
This has recently led over 130 civil society organizations and activists to write an open letter to the government regarding the urgent need for transparency and inclusiveness relating to trade and investment negotiations. The signatories to this open letter include Annie Raja of the National Federation of Indian Women, Prafulla Samantara and Meera Sanghmitra of the National Alliance for People’s Movements, Medha Patkar of Save the Narmada Movement, Madhu Bhaduri (former ambassador to Portugal), Shailesh Gandhi (former Central Information Commissioner) Nikhil Dey (MKSS or Organization of Empowerment of Workers and Peasants), Devaki Jain ( feminist economist) and Jawhar Sircar (Member of Parliament).
This letter starts by expressing deep concern and anguish at the “lack of transparency and non-inclusive consultation processes adopted by the Union Government in the negotiations with several countries such as the United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, Israel and the European Union for entering into free trade, comprehensive economic partnership or investment related agreements.”
This letter notes that at a time when the European Commission (EC) is holding consultations and dialogues with civil society stakeholders in the EU member-states on the social impact assessment (SIA) of the proposed free trade agreement (FTA )with India “ we in India, are expected to be satisfied with an occasional tweet on the progress of the negotiations and brief press notes from the Commerce Ministry about the visit of high-level delegations. The rare statements made by the Commerce Minister or the Foreign Minister are aimed at captains of business and industry and the foreign media. The millions of farmers, workers, artisans, fisherfolk, small businesses, gig workers, home-based workers and others who will be affected by these FTAs are completely invisible in these communications.”
This open letter adds that in addition to its failure to proactively engage and share information with different stakeholders, the Union Government is also rejecting formal requests for even basic details about such matters. Providing an example, this statement informs that an application submitted under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) seeking information about the agenda and the minutes of ministerial meetings with visiting EU delegations, representations received from business and trade representatives seeking to influence India’s position in the trade talks has been rejected by the Commerce Ministry on grounds of national security and trade secrets.
Pointing out the contrasting positions with respect to transparency, this letter says, “The Union Government’s rejection of even formal requests for information flies in the face of the mandate of the RTI Act for meaningful transparency in governance and stands in sharp contrast to the EC’s openness vis-a-vis its own stakeholders. Substantive reports of the four rounds of negotiations completed and the textual proposals submitted to the Government of India are all available on the website of the European Commission, for any person anywhere on the planet to access free of charge. What the EU is proposing for inclusion in the FTA on more than 20 topics such as trade in goods, services and investment, government procurement, intellectual property, sustainable food systems, small and medium-sized enterprises, digital trade, capital movements and state-owned enterprises are all publicly available on this website. The EU has even presented a textual proposal for both voluntary publication of information and responding to formal enquiries from persons about matters covered by the FTA. Unfortunately, there is no official intimation on this side of the Mediterranean about India’s response to the EU’s proposals or its own textual proposals about these matters. Maintaining opacity about India’s position on matters of immense public interest and importance can unfortunately give rise to serious suspicion as to whether the Government is being nose-led in the course of these talks.”
Drawing attention to an even more serious issue, this letter says,
“Of particular concern to us is also the absence of an obligation on the Union Government to consult with Parliament on FTA-related matters. The Constitutional scheme of division of powers grants the Union Government a monopoly over matters relating to bilateral and multi-lateral treaties, including FTAs. Parliamentary approval post facto is also not mandated by the Constitution because the power of ratification also vests with the Executive i.e., the Union Government. However, the FTAs could result in the amendment or even scrapping of several Central legislations that are firmly in the domain of Parliament. Parliament must therefore deliberate on the implications of the proposed legislative changes for the lives, livelihoods and well-being of all citizens, particularly the most vulnerable groups.”
Further this statement draws attention to yet another very significant shortcoming in the existing processes relating to these negotiations, “The Commerce Ministry’s reply to one of the RTI queries states that it is holding consultations only with Industry Associations and relevant Ministries and Departments. This does not inspire much confidence. It is a matter of grave concern that State governments have not been consulted, despite the fact that FTAs cover subjects under the State List and the Concurrent List. The Union Government has also not opened up the consultation process to farmers’ associations, labour unions, environmental rights and human rights groups, consumer associations and many others who are legitimate and critically important stakeholders.
“This non-consultative and exclusionary process signals a disregard for the questions of human rights, social justice and environmental impacts that wider stakeholder involvement would put on the table. We are concerned that ignoring these concerns at this stage will also undermine or short-circuit mandatory processes of environmental and social impact assessment.”
This open letter has demanded that the Government of India immediately take the following steps.
“1. Give wide publicity and provide open access to proposals submitted to the EU by Government of India, as well as the responses to the textual proposals tabled by the EU which are publicly available.
2. Give wide publicity and public access to the textual proposals received and responses submitted to other trading partners with whom FTA talks are going
3. Create forums and platforms for public stakeholders and experts including civil society, academia and media representatives to submit their views on ongoing FTA negotiations with the EU and other
4. Ensure effective public participation in the negotiations by providing timely and comprehensive information on the status and details of the negotiations and holding dialogues and consultations with public stakeholders in India at each stage so that the negotiations are informed by the views and aspirations of all.”
Here it may be noted that this statement has come on top of other reported recent serious shortcoming in the implementation of RTI. India was at one time considered a leader in terms of the effectiveness of its RTI law but this has suffered badly in recent times.
One hopes that the government does respond to this as well as several previous pleas for ensuring proper implementation of RTI law as well as for ensuring wider transparency in governance systems and public interest matters in keeping with the spirit of the RTI law.
The writer is a former Convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and has written several books and pamphlets on Right to Information.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071.
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June 21st, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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***
In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being extradited to the United States) that both Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo had “struck a blow for us all when they gave the Pentagon Papers to the press and to the Senate: against the war in Vietnam and against new adventures in Cambodia, Laos, or elsewhere”. And more besides, including striking against government secrecy in both domestic and foreign policy and directing a blow “for freedom of the press, freedom of the American people to be informed of what crimes their government might be committing in their name.”
The Nixon administration was mustard keen to bang up Ellsberg for what would have been 115 years, and Russo for 35. The charges, absurd reading then as they are now, were for conspiracy, espionage, and larceny. Central to this particularly vicious effort on the part of President Richard Nixon and his inner circle was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a government document running into 7,000 pages that was much at odds with public statements made by respective presidential administrations on US involvement in the Indo-China War. Both men had been analysts and researchers at the RAND Corporation, with the former tasked with nuclear wargaming scenarios. Russo had aided Ellsberg in the mammoth task of copying the papers.
The treatment dished out by the US national security state was very much the blueprint for what is taking place against the WikiLeaks founder. Initial indictment, followed by further grand jury hearings, followed by another round of indictments. As Sheinbaum remarked, the absurdity of the charges was self-evident. “Conspiracy against whom?” he asked. “The American people to whom the documents belonged in the first place? The press to whom the Pentagon Papers were given – not sold – so that they could better inform the people on how a succession of administrations had deceived them and wasted this country’s lives, resources, and honor?”
The case, thankfully, collapsed. The presiding judge, William M. Byrne Jr., even before the jury’s verdict was in, dismissed the action in May 1973, citing serious government misconduct (the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been burgled by the infamous “White House Plumbers”), not to mention illegal wiretapping. As part of that most Nixonian of sagas, the judge also revealed that he had been offered the role of FBI director by John Ehrlichman, the President’s assistant for domestic affairs.
Initially in agreement with policies in the Cold War rollback of communism, Ellsberg came to have trouble with the narrative of one’s country, right and wrong. In a sense, he became something of a model whistleblower: a figure initially besotted, a believer in the role of US power, only to then find evidence at odds with that belief.
While working at RAND, he visited Haverford College in August 1969, where his attendance at a conference of the War Resisters’ International proved turning. He had initially found the participants, as he recalls in his memoir Secrets, unduly simplistic, unnecessarily negative, dogmatic and extremist. It took a demonstration outside the trial of draft resister Bod Eaton to invest him with necessary confidence. “I had become free of the fear of being absurd, of looking foolish, for stepping out of line.”
Then came a moving talk by peace activist Randy Kehler. The impression left by Kehler, far from being banally corny and naff, helped complete the Damascene conversion: the RAND employee would commit to the task of ending a war effort he had been complicit in advancing. His establishment skin would be sloughed.
As Spencer Ackerman observes, the strength of Ellsberg’s whistleblowing was the locus of power; it came from a figure so highly placed in the national security apparatus he had the ear of presidential advisors. In the post-9/11 era, there has been no equivalent, no reputational shedding of skin. The leaks and disclosures have come from such individuals as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Daniel Hale, all vitally important, yet all several steps removed from the centre of power. “The people of Ellsberg’s equivalent rank and early-career promise more typically chose to serve the War on Terror, not resist it, going along with atrocities abroad and democratic destabilization at home.”
Ellsberg’s tenacious advocacy for Assange, for whom he acted as witness in the extradition trial in September 2020, was fortifying. “My own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been acknowledged to have performed such a radical change of understanding,” he outlined in his statement to the court. “I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance.”
He also warned about that most odious feature of the Espionage Act of 1917, upon which 17 of the 18 charges against Assange have been framed. Motivation, he recalled in his own 1973 trial, was dismissed by government lawyers as irrelevant: the offences imputed “strict liability”. As he told the Central Criminal Court in London, the Act effectively disallowed genuine whistleblowing to permit “you to say you were informing the polity. So I did not have a fair trial, no one since me had a fair trial on these charges and Julian Assange cannot remotely get a fair trial under those charges if he was tried.”
As he revealed in December 2022, Ellsberg had been the WikiLeaks “backup” for releasing the documents that were eventually published in 2010. Assange, he told the BBC Hardtalk program, “could rely on me to get it [the information] out.”
In any final reflections on what Ellsberg did, the conscientious duty of a figure to disclose evidence of government misconduct, to enlighten the citizenry more broadly as political agents rather than obedient subjects, shines. “From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect?” he reflected in an interview with Politico. “The answer is: Of course.”
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers figure, holds up a copy of a book entitled ?The Senate Watergate Report? as he appears as a panelist at a conference on the Central Intelligence Agency and covert activities on Friday, Sept. 13, 1974 in Washington. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin)
June 21st, 2023 by Dr. Emanuel Garcia
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***
Yes, that’s what I call them, those who force-feed us their stupidity from above – the so-called intelligentsia, left, right or center, the ones who hold academic appointments at the most prestigious universities, colleges, academies, ‘think tanks’, global organizations with names that include ‘health’ and ‘democracy’, those who have received high accolades from establishment science, those who have been Rhodes Scholars or Fulbright Fellows – all of the reigning intellectual elite who have foisted upon the global population the Big Covidian Lie.
They are reputed to know a great deal of something in their specialized fields, but absolutely nothing when it comes to actual science and actual medical treatments and actual vaccines and real climate and weather and the oh-so-painstakingly obvious Agenda of the Few to enslave the Many.
I’ll give you two chilling examples.
The renowned Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other books on evolutionary biology, and author too of The God Delusion, was recently interviewed by Unherd’s Freddie Sayers, who asked Dawkins whether he thought that the Covid Era represented a moment of scientific glory or ‘something that was a little bit problematic’.
Dawkins responded, citing the development of vaccines with unprecedented speed, that it was ‘magnificent, and is a tribute to science and was a glory of science’. When Sayers, to his credit, countered and pressed him about the vaccines, about how they were overpromised, about how they failed to prevent transmission as they were initially billed, and how they were pushed via mandates and near-mandates, Dawkins replied that ‘it was difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice’. Sayers is quite clearly surprised to hear this from the man who champions robust debate and the admission of scientific error, and Dawkins goes on to express his sympathy for the people in charge who had to make quick decisions. Sayers continues to press and displays one of Dawkins’ tweets wherein he avers that Covid vaccine-refusal endangers others, and then states unequivocally that those who do not take the measles vaccine are indeed a public peril. About lockdowns Dawkins claims not to have a position, although he admits that in the roil of the Covidian moment mistakes may have been made.
It is well-worth seven minutes of your time to listen to the excerpt, purely as an example of how a distinguished, celebrated and highly-honored scientist can display such an utter ignorance of basic medical concepts and medical treatment and pandemic-preparedness.
Surely he must have known that there was no real science behind the imposition of lockdowns, ‘social’ distancing, masks or a rush to a vaccine that had not and could not have had a test of time while promising treatments were being suppressed or forbidden?
My second example is from a video posted by The Institute of Art and Ideas, which includes a panel consisting of Denis Noble, Nessa Carey and Guy Brown, all renowned biologists. It is entitled ‘The Medicine Myth’ and I watched with great interest as I have come to appreciate Professor Noble’s books on evolutionary biology.
As I watched, however, Professor Carey, who is the International Director of PraxisUnico and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London, and who sported a jumper with the word ‘GEEK’ across her chest and identified herself as a member of ‘team science’, took less than a minute to praise childhood vaccinations for halting early childhood death, and also statins. She did give credit to soap, however, I am happy to report, but as I followed the rest of her discourse on medicine, aging and societal health, I was left with the same kind of chill I feel when the Gates Foundation announces a new initiative.
My intention is not to detract from either Dawkins’ or Carey’s achievements in the fields of their specialties, but to draw attention to my proposition that such achievements do not translate into authority in other domains, and that scientists, like other people, are human and can be egregiously ignorant, obtuse and even dangerous when empowered.
We have been smothered by references and appeals to ‘science’ and ‘the science’ and the greatness of science in all things Covid, Mr. Fauci being a prime example, and yet here we find ourselves face to face with eminent scientists whose presumed intelligence should at the very least have led them to question the Pharma-driven employment of vaccinations in general and the promulgation of statins, medications which I for one would avoid as I would avoid poison.
The word ‘science’ is derived etymologically from a root meaning to cut, divide, split, separate – and this points to the scientific method of isolating variables so as to divine specific causality. Yet to practice science does not necessarily mean ‘to know’, since knowledge requires a synthesis that transcends the function of individual agents. This is, in fact, why I have been much taken by Denis Noble’s The Music of Life, and am inclined to regard less highly the reductionism of Dawkins’ selfish genes (can genes have personality traits, I ask?).
‘Intelligence’ is derived from the Latin ‘inter’ and ‘legere’, meaning to be able to pick out, choose, read, gather, and the like, implying a capability for discernment and apprehension. Not all highly educated, highly degreed or highly positioned scientific figures are intelligent, as Covid, the greatest litmus test of all, easily demonstrates.
I can tell you of at least half a dozen very highly educated people I personally know who have been jabbed and boostered to the hilt and who, when themselves the victims of a jab-related adverse reaction, or who have known an intimate who has been injured even to death, will dare not ask the simplest causal question. These same people unhesitatingly accepted the imprisonment of the healthy, distancing, useless and unhealthy masks, and went along with the notion that Covid itself was untreatable save by quarantine and vaccination.
There is another word that comes to mind, deriving from a root that means being stunned or struck, beaten into a ‘stupor’ – but I prefer to call these elevated personnel sitting atop the academic pyramid who have made our lives so miserable as ‘know-nothing burgers’. They literally knew nothing when knowing something really counted. These are the very same people who no doubt will push to eliminate cattle in their frenzy to battle ‘climate change’, being happy to deprive real people of real meat and substance.
I say, let them eat their cake and, more important, let them keep their dangerous nothingness to themselves. In fact, I’d advise them to take a leaf out of a real scientist’s book, one Richard Feynman, who said: ‘I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned’.
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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Richard Dawkins (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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June 21st, 2023 by J. Michael Springmann
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***
The Beginning Was the End. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. started strongly. He made many dynamic speeches condemning the New World Order of Vaxx, Die, Cover-Up.
He spoke in the United States and in Berlin, Germany. Kennedy denounced the lies of various and sundry governments about the Covid-19 viruses and the regimes’ need to strip people of their freedoms.
His book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Kennedy, Jr., Robert F. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021) exposes the untruths used to justify their criminal behavior. To quote Luc Montagnier, Nobel Laureate and noted virologist,
“Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote that ‘A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand ties becomes the truth.’ Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK, Jr. exposes the decades of lies.”
Another author, Ralph Pezzullo, in writing about Kennedy’s book, said:
“…Your future, your family’s future, and the future of democracy are at stake.”
That’s the issue. Democracy. Kennedy, according to CNN June 1, 2023, spoke to the New Hampshire legislature:
“There’s so many Americans who believe that the system now is rigged, the economic system, but also the political system, that the elections are fixed,” he said in Concord. “And we ought to be, the Democratic Party particularly, ought to be making this election a template for democracy to our country and to the rest of the world.”
[As the British say, Kennedy was “spot on” regarding the rigged electoral system. And the need for reform. His remarks have sparked an all-out assault on him.]
Attack the Attacker. Otherwise, people might believe the truth spoken. On June 1, 2023, The Guardian, the suspect British “newspaper” wrote:
“Robert F Kennedy Jr, the conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, told an interviewer he had ‘conversations with dead people’ every day.”
In an undated Internet listing, the Washington Post, another questionable newspaper, stated:
“A lawyer and environmental activist, Kennedy Jr. is also a prominent anti-vaccine activist, pushing disproven claims that childhood vaccines are linked to autism and spreading misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.”
Continuing, on June 5, 2023, the Post (where Democracy has died in the paper’s Darkness) printed
“Kennedy was arguing that a 2019 tabletop exercise about a mock pandemic, archived on YouTube, actually revealed a secret plan involving U.S. spymasters to enrich drug companies and suppress free speech. He then rattled off clinical data from a coronavirus vaccine trial that was not designed to measure mortality, falsely suggesting that vaccines killed more people than they saved. He made no mention of the abundant science that has found that the vaccine prevented serious illness and saved lives.”
The End of the Beginning. The Beginning of the End. In a Substack article [(The Silencing of Kennedy’s Most Notable Critic (substack.com)], journalist Sam Husseini noted June 5, 2023 apropos of comments by Jared Beck, Florida lawyer and supporter of politician Bernie Sanders:
Beck: “As to RFK, Jr. – I am afraid he is playing the Bernie Sanders role this time around, to give a ‘voice’ to the disaffected, so that this ‘voice’ may be publicly gaslit and abused in the mainstream media, used as a tool to extract funds from the disaffected for the political party system, and then deployed to sheepdog the disaffected into supporting Joe Biden. That’s how U.S. ‘electoral’ politics rolls and has rolled since at least the time RFK Jr.’s uncle was publicly executed. I can’t imagine RFK Jr. is unaware of the role he is playing. But in order to play any substantial role in the family profession, it’s the only role he would ever be allowed to have. So perhaps understandable, but no less morally despicable.”
Haven’t We Seen this Before? Remember Ross Perot? Remember Ralph Nader?
Image: Ross Perot
Ross Perot dared to question the Establishment. Running for president in 1992 and 1996, he risked starting a new political party outside the existing one. Yes, ONE. (An African journalist once told me that the Great Malodorous American Behind had but two cheeks: Democrat and Republican.) Perot also presumed to interpret himself directly to the American people—not through the Lamestream Media—which then turned on him and repeatedly attacked him as a destabilizing person of questionable sanity.
Ralph Nader tried to work within the traditional Democratic (?) Party but was blocked. He ran for president as a Green Party candidate in 2000 and on a compendium of 3rd party and independent ballot lines in 2004.
The Democrats (Dumbocraps?) claimed Nader cost them the election in 2000 because he pulled ballots away from their candidate, Al Gore. They seemed never to realize it was their message the voter wasn’t buying, not that Nader was a divisive force. As Nader’s former campaign manager Theresa Amato noted “…it is a myth that anyone can run — successfully — for president outside of the two parties.”
So. Will the Dumbocraps permit Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to defeat Discombobulated Joe Biden as the party’s candidate for president? Or will they do a Bernie Sanders on him, permit him to gather delegates within the party and then take them away and give them to the aged idiot now running an illegal and unconstitutional war against the Russian Federation? And rig another election. Or, perhaps not. What nationally appealing candidate can the Rapeuglycans, the other cheek, hope to field?
But What Will Really End Kennedy’s Run? His subservience to the Apartheid Entity that styles itself “Israel”. (The illegitimate, terrorist organization that many believe murdered his uncle, President John F. Kennedy and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., also once a candidate for president.)
According to the Cleveland Jewish News on June 1, 2023 (which drew on the Jewish News Service Robert F. Kennedy Jr. affirms: ‘I support Israel’JNS.org):
Independent podcast co-host Craig Pasta Jardula asked Kennedy: “A couple tweets were put up in support of Roger Waters and then taken down. You want to give us a little explanation of why they were taken down and also your stance on Israel and Palestine?”
Kennedy responded: “I made the tweet applauding Roger Waters’ courage in opposing the Covid mandates and the Ukraine war. I was unaware of his position on Israel. And when I learned that I immediately took it down.” [N.B. Waters is a fierce critic of the very undemocratic Israel.]
Then discussing his stance on Israel more broadly, Kennedy said: “I support Israel. My family has a long relationship with Israel and supporting its right to exist and its right to protect its security.”
Jardula followed up: “And the Palestinians?”
Kennedy replied: “And a humane outcome and a recognition ultimately of the aspirations of the Palestinian people is important for everybody.”
[Sure, permit the Palestinians to live in a small bit of their country that the Zionists stole from them. That’s really humane.]
In a Tehran Times interview, Laurent Guyenot (French author and anthropologist) said:
TT: Your conclusion is that Israel orchestrated the killing of Kennedy. What was Israel’s motive?
LG: I am walking in the footsteps of the late Michael Collins Piper, who was the first to blame Israeli networks for the assassination of John Kennedy, in his book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. To understand Israel’s motive, Piper relied on several studies that have revealed that Kennedy was determined to stop Israel from developing nuclear weapons. Global nuclear disarmament was Kennedy’s dearest project. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had initiated a promising dialogue with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on this issue. So, when the CIA informed him of the nuclear program carried out by the Israelis in their Dimona laboratory, he engaged in a standoff with David Ben-Gurion, who was both prime minister and minister of defense of Israel. Ben-Gurion was convinced that by trying to prevent Israel from acquiring the bomb, Kennedy was endangering the very survival of the Jewish state, to which he had devoted his entire life.
Dimona was certainly Israel’s major reason for eliminating Kennedy and replacing him with Johnson. But there were others. The Kennedy brothers were at the origin of a procedure to reduce the influence of the American Zionist Council by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. In October 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the AZC a 72-hour notice to register as a “foreign agent.” After John Kennedy’s assassination, the AZC escaped this procedure, and its lobbying division, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (or AIPAC), became the most powerful lobby in the United States, and an indispensable tool for the corruption and intimidation of American elected officials, and for the control of American foreign policy. A third likely motive for the Dallas coup was Kennedy’s support for the Palestinian cause and his sympathy for Egyptian President Abdel Nasser. As late as November 20, 1963, Kennedy’s representative at the United Nations demanded the implementation of Resolution 194 and the return of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees, causing strong protest in Israeli circles. After Kennedy’s death, American foreign policy in West Asia was radically reversed again, without the American public realizing it. Johnson cut economic aid to Egypt and increased military aid to Israel to 92 million in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined. Israel is behind serial assassinations of Kennedy brothers: Laurent Guyenot – Tehran Times
Former university professor Kevin Barrett, Ph.D. commented in a May 28, 2018 PressTV statement that:
“The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers were largely carried out on behalf of Israel,” Barrett told Press TV on Monday.
“John F. Kennedy was dedicated to shutting down Israel’s nuclear weapons program and was killed because the Israelis, specifically [former Israeli prime minister David] Ben-Gurion believed that this was an issue of survival for Israel” he added.
“Robert Kennedy’s convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan, the patsy who was chosen to be presented to the public as the supposed killer who was actually hypnotized and had no idea what he was doing there…was used for propaganda purposes by the Zionists who murdered both of the Kennedy brothers,” Barrett said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of RFK, says he does not believe Sirhan had carried out the assassination and believes a second shooter did it. Kennedy brothers likely killed by CIA on behalf of Israel: Scholar (presstv.ir)
For a deeper, more informative discussion of this, please see Did Israel Kill the Kennedys? – Kevin Barrett (heresycentral.is)
Comment. Robert F. Kennedy will be done down by:
1. The Lamestream Media;
2. The Establishment and The Established Party(ies?);
3. the Zionists;
4. His own self.
Two percent of the U.S. population are Jews. But they control (and brag about control) of the five or so corporations providing “news” in America. They also manage U.S. domestic and foreign policy and contribute vast sums of money to candidates who do their will. If Kennedy wants to play up to them for campaign contributions and voter support, he will have to follow their dictates. He will have to change his outlook and statements on Fauci, Gates, and Big Pharma (which has many Jews in powerful positions).
He has already begun to change. Note his remarks on Roger Waters and supporting Israel. When I called and emailed Kennedy’s campaign headquarters, I asked for clarification of his statements about Waters and Israel. None has been forthcoming.
Given the foregoing, it’s my belief that the Zionists will only give lip service to Kennedy’s campaign for change, tricking him into a belief that, if he accepts their views, they will back his policies, meanwhile, they will continue to support their age-old home amongst the Democrats. This will leave Kennedy out on a limb which will either break or be cut off by an itinerant woodchopper.
So, I say to him, in advance, السلامة Ma’a salama; auf Wiedersehen; Au revoir; Arrivederci.
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J. Michael Springmann is an attorney, author, political commentator, and former diplomat, with postings to Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He previously authored, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s View, recounting how the U.S. created and used Islamic Terrorism. Additionally, he penned Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb, an analysis of the alien wave sweeping the Continent. He currently practices law in the Washington D.C. Area. He is a frequent commentator on Arab and Russian news programs.
He is also on the Ukraine’s “Enemies List”, having questioned, inter alia, the country’s refusal to honor the Minsk Accords and for stating that its government is Nazified.
All images in this article are from the author
June 21st, 2023 by Global Research News
Putin’s Shocking Revelations Show There Can be No Negotiations with Kiev
By , June 19, 2023
On June 17, during a meeting with a number of African leaders and delegates who came to Moscow to offer a solution that would end the Ukrainian conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a shocking revelation and even gave details of a March 2022 peace deal with the Kiev regime.
By , June 21, 2023
As acknowledged by both the USA and NATO, the aggression against the FRY constituted a precedent for the ensuing armed interventions. The US and NATO incursions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere followed suit in furthering unlawful use of force in international relations, paved the way for an arms race and ushered in a global instability, the repercussions of which have been suffered by Europe and the world to present day.
“Readouts” Point to Geopolitical Disjuncture and Divisions Between US and China
By , June 20, 2023
During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.
49 Truths About the Death of Two Cuban Dissidents
By , June 20, 2023
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has just published a report accusing the Cuban government of the deaths of two Cuban dissidents in 2012. But the report does not stand up to scrutiny. Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero were killed in a road accident due to the carelessness of Angel Carromero, the driver.
USA: Politics in a Banana Republic
By , June 20, 2023
American political conflicts increasingly resemble the power struggles that are routinely visible in banana republics. The unprecedented indictments of Donald Trump in New York and Florida portend a future marred by lawfare as Democrats seek to use the justice system as a means of ensuring political supremacy and Republicans respond in kind.
Alex Saab, Hostage of the Hybrid War Against Venezuela
By , June 20, 2023
Because the brutality and cruelty of the US blockade was wreaking havoc on the economy and millions of the most vulnerable in Venezuela were being deliberately denied their human rights to the most basic necessities of daily life, President Nicolas Maduro tasked Saab with travelling around the world procuring food, medicines and fuel for his country.
It Has All Hit Home: Reflections on Memory and Fact in the Age of COVID
By , June 20, 2023
To a psychoanalyst memories are a stock in trade, common coin, the currency of every session, and we tend to regard every reported memory never as actual indubitable truth, but as an amalgam of wish, fantasy, fact and emotion, an amalgam that drew across the lifespan to result in the ‘remembered’ event, a phenomenon that could conceal other memories and also lead to new insights. In short, memories are the stuff of a kind of dream.
Seymour Hersh: My 50 Years with Daniel Ellsberg
By , June 20, 2023
In all of Dan’s many hours of tutoring, as I understood years later, he understood and empathized with my eagerness—even my need—to learn all that I could about his world of secrets and lies, things said out loud and hidden in top-secret documents. And so he happily became my tutor and taught me where and how to look inside the recessed corners of the American intelligence community.
The Silent Slaughter of the Flower of Ukraine’s Youth
By , June 20, 2023
As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.
The Hate Crime Purging of “Antisemites” Is Underway!
By , June 20, 2023
There have recently been a number of incidents that would be of interest if one has concerns about the sorry state of free speech in Europe and the United States, the so-called “democracies” who tend to boast about their freedoms and the rights of their citizens.
June 21st, 2023 by Uriel Araujo
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***
US Republican Senator Chuck Grassley revealed on the Senate floor that, according to a largely unredacted version of the FBI’s FD-1023 confidential human source form, a “foreign national” who “bribed Joe and Hunter Biden” has 17 “audio recordings of his conversations with them.” The “foreign national” is allegedly none less than Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch owner of Burisma, one of the largest private natural gas producers in the country.
The company and its owner have long been the target of investigations and the Biden’s family connections to the Eastern European nation also go way back: in April 2014, Viktor Pshonka, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general, launched a probe into Zlochevsky, over accusations pertaining to tax evasion, and money laundering which was said to have taken place between 2010 and 2012. In April 2014, Burisma’s board of directors named Hunter Biden, son of then US Vice President (and today’s President) Joe Biden, to Burisma’s board as a director; he was said to have earned over $80,000 monthly. This is a very interesting timing, just a couple of months after game-changer events in that nation.
In February 2014, during the so-called Maidan Revolution, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and fled the country. This 2014 development is described by some experts as a US backed coup to overthrow a “pro-Russian” president.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs sees this as the beginning of the current Ukrainian crisis, even before the March 2014 Crimean referendum and the Donbass civil war, which started in April of the same year.
The roots of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis go even further back and can be traced to post-independence Kiev’s political elite attempt at “nation-building”, which increasingly took the shape of a rejection all things Russian, thus culminating in the 2014 Maidan, a ultranationalist revolution also backed by Washington. In an attempt to pull Ukraine away from “Russian influence”, the US and the Western powers funded and armed the most radical nationalist and russophobic militias in the nation, even neo-Nazi ones, which later came to be part of the country’s National Guard, a problem which haunts Kiev (and the West) to this day.
Currently, any “pro-Russian” stance is marginalized or even banned in Ukraine (and now also in Poland and increasingly so even in Europe). However, in the Eastern Slavic nation, there had always been a political camp which called for closer cooperation and integration with neighboring Russia rather than with the West – which is hardly surprising, considering that this is a strongly bilingual nation, with a high degree of intermarriage, where at least 34% of the population speaks Russian.
Besides these local and regional frictions, there is a larger geopolitical game at play, pertaining to US-led NATO expansion goals and Washington’s policy of “encircling” and “countering Moscow”, a process which has been described as the main cause of the Ukraine’s crisis 9 years ago, as well as today.
Much has been written about this geopolitical angle, but there is also a geoeconomic dimension to the United States role in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine – one that is less talked about and that goes beyond the notorious profits American weapons manufacturers make.
Regarding Moscow, Washington has a geopolitical rivalry as well as geoeconomic and energy interests, which are often intertwined with private and shady businesses – this could be clearly seen, as I wrote before, in the US campaign to boycott (now gone) Nord Stream 2. Biden’s own special envoy (in 2021), Amos Hochstein, was a former member of Naftogaz’ supervisory board, this being the largest national oil and gas company in Ukraine, also involved in a number of scandals.
Back in August 2021, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament denounced a corruption ring within the aforementioned Naftogaz: his testimony included alleged leaked audio records of then Vice President Biden offering then Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko a billion dollars as part of a secret negotiation to dismiss the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the business activities of his son in the country. These allegations now seem to be confirmed by the recent news about further FBI leaks.
I also wrote on the shady deals involving Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital and American multinational investment company BlackRock, as well as the evidence implicating the Democrat Party and the Bidens. In many of these episodes, Hunter Biden plays a role: his sexual scandals, the biolabs allegations, and many other accusations have been gaining traction within the US media, and haunting the current American presidency.
Going back to 2014, when Burisma’s board of directors named Hunter Biden, one should keep in mind that during that time, after the deposal of Yanukovych, Washington was happy to work with the new pro-Western government, in whose rise to power it played a role. Other Western institutions such as the European Union, the World Bank, and the IMF were all also willing to work with the new government, although the blatant corruption which plagued the country was a major concern to all of them – and remains so to this day. While his son was acting as a director in Burisma, Joe Biden became Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine and a frequent visitor there, claiming to have flown to the nation at least a dozen times between 2014 and 2016.
Far from being a concern only to the police authorities and prosecutors in both Ukraine and the US (not to mention the tabloids everywhere), the “Ukrainian-American corruption factor” has deep geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. All of the context discussed above indicates that rather than being merely dismissed as “Russian propaganda” or as Republicans trying to “find dirt” on the Democrat rivals, such allegations about Burisma and the Bidens seem to fit a pattern and should be taken seriously.
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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 21st, 2023 by Belgrade Forum
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***
March 24, 2024, will see the 25th anniversary since the beginning of unlawful, criminal and illegitimate aggression that NATO launched against Yugoslavia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the FRY), thus propelling the first post-WWII war on European soil. In doing so, NATO trampled on the fundamental principles of international law, the United Nations Charter, the OSCE’s Helsinki Final Act (1975) and the UN Security Council’s role as the sole global body competent for making decisions in the matters of peace and security.
As of 2000, the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals has been organizing its annual commemorative and analytical-scientific events, dedicated to the memory of the many lives this aggression took, and to elaborating its geopolitical goals and consequences in the Balkans, Europe, and beyond.
As acknowledged by both the USA and NATO, the aggression against the FRY constituted a precedent for the ensuing armed interventions. The US and NATO incursions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere followed suit in furthering unlawful use of force in international relations, paved the way for an arms race and ushered in a global instability, the repercussions of which have been suffered by Europe and the world to present day.
Kindly be informed that the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, the Union of Associations of National Liberation Wars of Serbia (SUBNOR), the Diaspora Fund for Motherland, the Society of Serbian Hosts, together with many more independent, non-partisan associations, are going to mark the 25th anniversary since the beginning of NATO aggression, that will take place in Belgrade from March 22-24, 2024. The program of this manifestation will be of international character, and attended by our proven friends from abroad.
You will be kept regularly informed about preparations and details of the program.
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June 20th, 2023 by Kim Petersen
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***
During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.
Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.
Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”
That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]
Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.
Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a monstrous gap between them.
The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:
China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.
Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.
That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:
The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.
That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.
The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.
China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.
The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.
China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).
China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.
The Anthony Blinken Qin Gang meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.
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Kim Petersen is an independent writer and a regular contributor to Global Research. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.
June 20th, 2023 by Salim Lamrani
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***
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has just published a report accusing the Cuban government of the deaths of two Cuban dissidents in 2012. But the report does not stand up to scrutiny. Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero were killed in a road accident due to the carelessness of Angel Carromero, the driver.
1. In July 2012, Angel Carromero, a Spanish citizen, deputy secretary general of the Nuevas Generaciones organization, a youth movement of the conservative Spanish Popular Party (PP), and a collaborator of the Community of Madrid, and Swedish citizen Jens Aron Modig, leader of the Christian Democratic Youth League (KDU), linked to the Swedish right, traveled to Cuba on tourist visas.
2. Their mission, entrusted by their respective political parties, was to meet and finance certain members of the internal dissidence and to set up action plans against the Cuban government.
3. This type of activity, which is illegal in Cuba as in most countries of the world, is heavily punished by the penal code.
4. Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), received the sum of 4,000 dollars according to Modig.
5. On July 22, Carromero and Modig were in a car with Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero Escalante of the MCL and were involved in a road accident near the town of Bayamo.
6. The two Cuban dissidents, who were in the back of the car without seatbelts, lost their lives.
7. The foreign nationals, who were in the front of the vehicle and wearing seatbelts, were unharmed.
8. Payá died on impact from head trauma, while Cepero expired some time later in hospital following respiratory failure.
9. During his deposition at the Bayamo hospital where he was being treated, Carromero stated that he had not seen the road sign indicating a work zone and that he had lost control of his vehicle, hitting a tree. The Spanish news agency EFEconfirms this version: “He did not see the slow-down sign and lost control of the vehicle”.
10. The testimonies of three people who were in the area at the time of the accident, José Antonio Duque de Estrada Pérez, Lázaro Miguel Parra Arjona and Wilber Rondón Barreroont, confirmed that the vehicle was speeding and had hit a tree after slipping on the road under construction.
11. The Swedish citizen, who escaped unhurt, returned to his country a few days later, after giving his statement.
12. Oswaldo Payá’s daughter, María Payá, who was in Havana, reported to the press that a car had collided several times with her father’s vehicle from behind, and accused the government of masterminding the assassination.
13. She stated that several people living in Sweden had received telephone text messages from Modig informing them that a vehicle had crashed into them.
14. However, the Payá family’s version of events is contradicted by compelling factual evidence and numerous witness statements. In fact, in addition to the statements made by those present at the scene, photos of the crashed vehicle show no trace of impact to the rear.
15. Modig refuted the Payá family’s version. According to him, no other vehicle was involved in the accident. Miami’s Nuevo Herald, a daily newspaper representing the point of view of the Cuban exile, confirms these statements in an article entitled “Swedish politician denies the presence of other vehicles in the accident that claimed Payá’s life”.
16. Modig also denied María Payá’s statements about the messages. According to him, he had not transmitted any messages to anyone in Sweden.
17. Carromero also denied the family version in an interview reported by Agencias and EFE: “No vehicle hit us from behind”.
18. He also denounced the Payá family’s conspiracy theories: “I ask the international community to focus on my repatriation and not to use a road accident, which could have happened to anyone, for political purposes”.
19. Similarly, the accusations do not stand up to analysis. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that the Cuban government would have taken the risk of attacking the life of a famous dissident when he was with several witnesses, including two foreign nationals, who remained alive and were later released.
20. In a statement to the Stockholm newspaper, Modig’s father, Lennart Myhr, explained that he had spoken to his son after the accident. At no time did he refer to another vehicle, or to persecution by Cuban intelligence services.
21. Dissident leader Elizardo Sánchez told Agence France-Presse that he did not believe in the conspiracy theory and that he thought it was an accident.
22. El Nuevo Herald published an article on the subject with the following headline: “Survivors reject the Payá family’s version”.
23. The Spanish daily El País, although unfavorable to the Cuban government, also cast doubt on the Payá family’s version: “The thesis of a murky conspiracy to kill Payá, which the family and part of the opposition initially suggested, fades away following the statements by Carromero and Modig, who confirm that it was all a fatal accident”.
24. After several days of investigation and questioning, Carromero was charged with manslaughter. Excessive speed was the main cause of the accident, according to the Cuban authorities.
25. According to the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, [Carromero’s] ‘lack of attention to vehicle control, excessive speed and erroneous decision to brake on a slippery surface were the causes of this tragic accident which cost the lives of two human beings”.
26. After braking, the vehicle rolled over a distance of 63 meters, confirming the extreme speed.
27. In reality, this was not Carromero’s first traffic offence. He is a dangerous repeat offender.
28. His driving license had been withdrawn in May 2012 for speeding. He was fined 520 euros and deducted six points, the heaviest penalty under the Spanish Highway Code, which is only applied when a vehicle exceeds the speed limit by more than double.
29. Carromero had therefore been driving illegally in Cuba.
30. Carromero had accumulated 45 fines for traffic offences since March 2011.
31. He had to pay a total of 3,700 euros.
32. After a trial lasting several weeks, the public prosecutor requested a seven-year prison sentence for manslaughter.
33. In October 2012, after deliberation, the Tribunal sentenced Carromero to four years’ imprisonment.
34. In December 2012, after four months in prison, Carromero was authorized to serve the remainder of his sentence in Spain, following an agreement between Madrid and Havana.
35. Due to his status as a political leader, his sentence was adjusted to avoid prison. He wore an electronic bracelet.
36. In March 2013, in an interview with the Washington Post, Carromero went back on his initial statements and claimed that a car belonging to the State had rear-ended them, causing a loss of control of the vehicle and the accident.
37. Nevertheless, photographs of the vehicle show no traces of impact at the rear, contradicting the new Carromero version.
38. Carromero also stresses that he was drugged and forced to sign a statement at the trial.
39. This version is contradicted by the Spanish Consulate General in Cuba, which described the trial as “impeccable from a procedural point of view”.
40. In August 2013, in an interview with the Spanish daily El Mundo, Carromero asserted that “the Cuban secret service murdered Oswaldo Payá”.
41. In the Washington Post interview, Carromero claimed to have lost consciousness during the accident and only woke up in the ambulance: “Neither Oswaldo, Harold nor Aron were there”.
42. On the other hand, in his interview with El Mundo, he states that he remembers that Payá “was still alive after the accident”, contradicting his own statements to the Washington Post.
43. Ofelia Acevedo, Payá’s widow, stated that “Spain has proof that her husband was murdered”.
44. Questioned on this subject, the European Union expressed its reservations, limiting itself to the following statement: “If Mr. Carromero has new evidence on the tragic death of Sakharov Prize winner Oswaldo Payá, he should present it before the competent courts”.
45. For its part, the Spanish government chose to ignore Carromero’s new statements. Questioned on the subject, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the controversy: “Our point of view on this matter has been over since the day Mr. Carromero returned to Spain”.
46. Embarrassed by Carromero’s statements, the Popular Party chose to remain silent and refused to make any statement, announcing that it would not communicate on the subject.
47. Asturias MP Gaspar Llamazares urged Carromero to take his case to court, while questioning the credibility of these new statements. According to him, “if he had any proof, he would have presented it to the courts immediately or on his return to Spain”.
48. Deputy Teófilo de Luis, a member of the Popular Party, rejected Carromero’s new statements: “My government is limited to what he [Carromero] explained in Havana. It limits itself to applying the extradition agreement, according to what was said at the time”.
49. In March 2013, following the Payá family’s visit to Spain, Mariano Rajoy’s government expressed its reservations and declared “that it will not support an investigation into the death of Oswaldo Payá”, thereby legitimizing the conclusions reached by Havana.
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Salim Lamrani holds a doctorate in Iberian and Latin American Studies from Sorbonne University, and is a lecturer at the University de La Réunion, specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States.
June 20th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
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***
Once again, the evidence makes it clear that the West wants to involve Belarus in the current conflict. In a report published by The Times it was informed that exiled Belarusian militants are being trained in Polish territory in preparation for a future insurrection in their country.
According to the newspaper, the “Bypol” group, an extremist dissident militia that actively participated in the attempted color revolution in 2020, is based in the Polish city of Poznan, where an intense military training program is being conducted. Journalists went to the field to interview some of the militiamen and reported that the number of recruits is already “in the hundreds”.
The program would have started many months ago, bringing together “common Belarusians” who want to give a response to President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s “Stalinesque campaign of torture and detention [that] has all but silenced dissent” in Minsk. To add credibility to this narrative, the paper interviewed an exiled woman involved in the training nicknamed “Predator”. The 42-year-old dissident explained that she is the mother of a child who is unaware that she is currently in a military program. The option for combat would apparently have been motivated by the need to “fight for Belarus”.
“My daughter doesn’t know I am here. I told her I was going paintballing (…) []However] I came here today (…) to prepare for the fight for Belarus”, “Predator” told journalists during an interview.
This is a well-known media strategy, widely used by western outlets. The objective is to use an emotional rhetoric to show the supported side as a victim of oppression and an example of heroism and resilience. But for those who know what really happened in Belarus in 2020, this narrative is nothing more than a weak and meaningless fallacy.
The 2020 mass protests were the result of a Western plan to overthrow Lukashenko’s legitimate government and replace him with pro-Western opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Belarusian security forces were incisive in neutralizing the Western-sponsored threat, and, as in cases of failed regime change operations, the US regarded Lukashenko’s electoral victory as illegitimate and fraudulent, pointing to Lithuania-based Tikhanovskaya as the real winner.
At the time, the Bypol group was created, formed by several dissident former employees of law enforcement agencies. Bypol engaged in active militia work, physically fighting the security forces. The group alleges the supposed “necessity” to face the government’s “state violence”, receiving financial and logistical support from the western powers for this.
As a result of Lukashenko’s victory, most Bypol’s members emigrated to neighboring countries hostile to Minsk, such as Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. This did not stop the group from operating sabotage and real combat missions on Belarusian soil, even carrying out a drone attack on a Russian A-50 radar at Machulishchy air base. However, Belarusian security forces closely monitor the militia’s activities and have been effective in preventing further damage from being caused.
In practice, Bypol is an ordinary terrorist organization, which acts like any other extremist group in the world, using terror as a political tool and causing harm to ordinary civilians during its illegal raids. But the West has been openly pro-terror in recent years, being publicly involved in financing and supporting terrorist and neo-Nazi groups such as the Ukraine’s Azov, Right Sector and Aidar, which makes it unsurprising that it gives same support for Bypol. In fact, if the terrorists’ targets are NATO’s geopolitical enemies, then the criminals have “carte blanche” for their maneuvers.
The problem is that amidst the current scenario of tensions, any miscalculated act could lead to a serious escalation. Belarus has been the target of repeated terrorist attacks since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Minsk is involved in a secondary way in the operation, only allowing Russian troops to use its territory to enter the enemy country, without sending soldiers and weapons directly. The Belarusian attitude is legitimate, considering that Belarus and Russia maintain a collective defense treaty within the Union State, and therefore military actions are absolutely integrated.
This means that western provocations against Russia’s ally are likely to be responded to by Moscow itself. And, in the same sense, considering that these are NATO countries that are training, supporting and infiltrating terrorists in Belarus, the eventual joint response of Minsk and Moscow could even be directed against NATO, which would involve the risk of nuclear escalation.
This only makes it even more legitimate for Minsk to receive Russian nuclear weapons on its territory. Minsk is taking pre-preventive action to dissuade hostile countries from realizing their war plans against the Belarusian people in order to avoid further escalation, as the consequences could be catastrophic.
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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 20th, 2023 by Dr. Peter McCullough
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***
Governments around the globe put a huge amount of faith in COVID-19 vaccines as their only intervention to reduce mortality. Yet, no prospective randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial demonstrated a reduction in death with COVID-19 vaccines. On the contrary, every single data system around the globe has reported increased mortality coinciding the the roll-out of the vaccines.
Scherb and Hayashi used Japan and Germany for study of temporal trends in mortality. Both countries have excellent reporting systems.
For Japan (125.7 M) and Germany (83.2 M), the WHO indicates as of 18, June 2023, and 14 May 2023, a total of 392,346,325 and 193,232,623 vaccine doses, respectively have been administered.
This equates to 2-3 doses per person. They found a disturbing jump in mortality coinciding with the start of mass vaccination. At the end of a pandemic, since the frail and elderly have suffered disproportionate casualties, there is usually a culling effect and mortality should go down.
If the vaccines were effective, then certainly they should have dropped the death rate even more. The figures from Japan and Germany tell a different story.
Click here to read the full article.
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Featured image is from Hal Turner Radio Show
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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June 20th, 2023 by Mark Curtis
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***
I have reviewed the reports on the UK High Court judgment against Assange (June 8, 2023). His lawyers are considering an Appeal to “the same court”, “amid growing fears he could spend the rest of his life in prison for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents” (Guardian, 9 June, 2023).
It would appear that Julian Assange’s Defense lawyers failed to request the Recusal of Judge Jonathan Swift on the grounds of “Conflict of Interest”. Why? The latter are carefully documented in Mark Curtis’ article.
In England and Wales “A judge may recuse himself [herself] when a party applies to him to do so, e.g. Assange’s Defense lawyers. “A judge must step down in circumstances where there appears to be bias or ‘apparent bias’”.
And in this case there is bias: Judge Swift described as Downing Street’s “favourite barrister” is now acting on behalf of the Home Office, which is conducting an indictment against Julian Assange. There is evidence of bias in Judge Swift’s cursory statements.
” The test for determining apparent bias is this: if a fair-minded and informed observer, having considered the facts, would conclude that there was a real possibility that the judge was biased, the judge must recuse himself (see Porter v Magill [2002] 2 AC 357 at [102]).
According to the “Guide to Judicial Conduct” in England and Wales (2018), Judge Swift should have recused himself.
We recall that in 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who was also in conflict of interest had refused to recuse herself from the Assange extradition hearings.
Has Assange’s Legal Team raised the issue of Judge Swift’s Recusal??? Nobody asked him to step down.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 20,2023
***
Jonathan Swift, the High Court judge who has rejected Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US, has a long history of working for the government departments that are now persecuting the WikiLeaks founder.
Swift, who ruled against Assange on 6 June, was formerly the government’s favourite barrister.
He worked as ‘First Treasury Counsel’ – the government’s top lawyer – from 2006 to 2014, a position in which he advised and represented the government in major litigation.
Swift acted for the Defence and Home Secretaries in at least nine cases, Declassified has found. He also acted for the Cabinet Office, Justice Secretary and the Treasury, during his time as First Treasury Counsel.
Swift also represented the Foreign Office in at least two legal cases, in 2011 and 2015.
While barristers are independent, those who regularly represent the government in the highest profile cases have to be “cleared” to do so, including via security vetting, Declassified understands.
When he stepped down as First Treasury Counsel in March 2014, the attorney general’s office “expressed their appreciation for Jonathan’s valuable support, advice and advocacy during his period as FTC.”
It was reported in 2013 that Swift had been paid nearly a million pounds – £975,075 – over the previous three years for representing the government.
Swift now presides over Assange’s extradition case being fought by the Home Office for whom he previously worked.
As with previous judges who have ruled against Assange, the case raises serious concerns about institutional conflicts of interests at the heart of the UK legal system.
Swift was appointed a deputy high court judge in 2016 and a full judge in August 2018. A June 2018 interview with Swift in a legal publication noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies” referring to his time as First Treasury Counsel.
“They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right”, he was quoted as saying.
The interview also mentioned Swift was undertaking work for “foreign governments” although Declassified has not been able to establish which governments these were.
Swift took up his current post of judge in charge of the Administrative Court in 2020. A long standing QC with prominent law firm 11KBW, he was in 2018 also a legal adviser to a committee of the City of London Corporation.
In June last year, Swift ruled that a deportation flight to Rwanda could go ahead, refusing to accept arguments to stop the flight by several asylum seekers facing offshoring to Rwanda.
Several cases in which Swift acted for the government while First Treasury Counsel concerned national security, on which the judge is now expected to adopt an impartial approach.
Swift represented the Treasury in the first case before the new Supreme Court in 2009, concerning international sanctions against terrorists.
In 2014 he acted for the defence secretary in a case against three former interpreters for UK forces in Afghanistan who won the right to bring their case to the High Court for alleged discrimination. The interpreters argued they were in danger and should be allowed to settle in Britain.
In an earlier case, in 2007, Swift also represented the UK Ministry of Defence in a case against a UK/Iraqi national who had been held by British troops at detention facilities in Iraq. The man argued his detention infringed his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Much of the WikiLeaks disclosures for which the US seeks to prosecute Assange relate to Western military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another of Swift’s cases as First Treasury Counsel concerned disclosure of information to the public. He acted for the attorney general in a long-running freedom of information case brought by the Guardian seeking to release the private correspondence between Prince Charles and government ministers.
In February 2014, attorney general Dominic Grieve blocked the publication of the letters, overruling an independent freedom of information tribunal that had ordered their release.
Swift, acting for Grieve, told the court that the minister “was entitled to take a different view on matters of public interest from the tribunal”.
In his rejection of the appeal by Assange’s lawyers, Swift curtly dismissed all eight grounds to their arguments as “no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the District Judge”, who previously ruled on the case.
Media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres said Swift’s ruling brought Assange “dangerously close to extradition”.
It added it was “absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world.”
The US government seeks to extradite Assange in order to try him in connection with WikiLeaks’ publication of leaked classified documents that informed public interest reporting around the world.
Assange faces a possible 175 years in prison and would be the first publisher prosecuted under the US Espionage Act.
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Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.
Featured image: Jonathan Swift. (Photo: Zoom)
June 20th, 2023 by Donald Monaco
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***
American political conflicts increasingly resemble the power struggles that are routinely visible in banana republics. The unprecedented indictments of Donald Trump in New York and Florida portend a future marred by lawfare as Democrats seek to use the justice system as a means of ensuring political supremacy and Republicans respond in kind.
The Democrats want to permanently remove Trump from the political scene by locking him behind bars for the rest of his life.
In American politics, involvement in a sexual scandal was typically enough to remove a prominent politician from power, as in the cases of former Senator Al Franken, former members of Congress Blake Farenthold, John Conyers, Tim Murphy, and Anthony Weiner, and New York Governors Elliott Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, to mention but a few.
Not willing to let an opportunity pass, the Democrats tried to derail Trump’s first presidential campaign by enveloping him in a sex scandal involving lurid stories of relations with Moscow prostitutes gleaned from the discredited Steele dossier. The attempt failed. Trump went on to defeat the miserable warmonger Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, a crime for which he would never be forgiven.
Next, supported uncritically by their friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other corporate news outlets, the Democrats and operatives in the National Security Autocracy manufactured the Russiagate scandal to delegitimize the Trump presidency. Results of the Mueller investigation released on April 18, 2019, failed to establish evidence of electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, imposing yet another failure upon the party whose symbol is a jackass. The report of Special Council John Durham, published in May 2023, demolishes the Russiagate fiction categorically.
Undeterred, the Congressional Democrats mounted two attempts at impeachment, the first to remove him from office and the second to ensure he could never become president again. Both Senate trials ended in acquittals.
Now, becoming increasingly desperate, they go to court. A Democratic District Attorney in Manhattan and a Special Counsel appointed by a Democratic U.S. Attorney General have leveled charges of violation of campaign finance (hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels) and unauthorized possession and conspiracy to withhold classified documents (stored at the Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach estate) against Trump. Indictments for election interference in the State of Georgia and incitement to insurrection in Washington, D.C., after the 2020 presidential election are almost sure to follow.
Like self-righteous and narrow-minded Lilliputians, the Democrats hope to ensnare the ever-menacing Trump in so many legal ropes that he will be eliminated as a political opponent, one who is almost certain to defeat them in 2024.
The Democrats are no doubt aware that such strategies have proven wildly successful in the Global South.
Brazil’s left-wing political leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was eliminated as a candidate for president by the country’s right-wing in 2017, one year before a 2018 election where he hoped to win another term in office, having previously served from 2003 through 2010. He was investigated, indicted, tried, and convicted in a corruption scandal. Lula was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was later exonerated by the Brazilian Supreme Court and released from jail. He serves as Brazil’s current president, having won the election in 2022 against the Trump-supported Jair Bolsonaro, proving once again that history is replete with savage ironies.
Lula’s successor as president in 2011 was Dilma Rousseff, who, not coincidentally, was removed from power through impeachment in 2016 as she sought to continue his policies of fighting poverty and social injustice. The charge against Rousseff was, once again, corruption. Rousseff’s successor, Michel Termer, paved the way for extreme-right President Bolsonaro, who implemented the neoliberal agenda with a vengeance, much to the delight of the Brazilian rich and their American counterparts.
The removal of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from power constituted judicial coup d’états of working-class presidents. Both leaders were innocent of the corruption charges leveled against them. Both coups were fully approved in the United States.
Christina Fernandez de Kirchner is another example of a left-wing political leader who, along with her husband Nestor, opposed the rape of their country by the International Monetary Fund by repudiating Argentina’s debt to the parasitical financial institution. President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, then Vice-President in 2019, Christina Kirchner was convicted of corruption charges in December 2022, sentenced to 6 years in prison, and forbidden to hold public office by what she contended was a parallel state led by a judicial mafia. She was, in effect, removed from power in a judicial coup d’état after having survived an assassination attempt in March 2022.
The right-wing in America is getting a small taste of its own bitter imperial medicine as the political struggle for supremacy is rotting the core of power at the center of empire. It should not be forgotten that the Trump regime tried and failed to engineer a coup d’état in Venezuela by replacing leftist President Nicolas Maduro with a right-wing nonentity, Juan Guaido, in 2018. The chickens, as Malcolm X would say, are coming home to roost.
In prosecuting Trump, the Democrats claim to be supporting democracy and the rule of law, neither of which they have done at home or abroad for over a century, dating back to World War I and the passage of the Espionage Act, the notorious piece of legislation used as a tool of political repression in the cases of Eugene Debts, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden.
The irony is that if the Democrats actually respected democracy and legality, Bernie Sanders would have been their party’s nominee in 2016 and 2020 and would have beaten Trump twice, as he spoke convincingly of the need to alleviate the economic misery of the American people. But Sanders’ support for a Keynesian New Deal in an era of neoliberal economics was not acceptable to the members of the party establishment, who serve the American ruling class no less so than their Republican counterparts. Hence, Bernie Sanders was reduced to the role of pied piper for the Democratic Party of American imperialism, an ignominious position he occupies today.
Having no substantive policy differences with mainstream Republicans on matters of concern to Wall Street and corporate America, the Democrats want to jail their leading political opponent, a routine practice in banana republics. Leaders of the Republican Party would be delighted to have Trump out of their way but would never say so for fear of alienating the party’s voting base.
The plain fact is that Trump is not being indicted for the illegalities he should be indicted for, namely, his role in perpetrating the crimes of empire. Then again, how could he when his accusers are equally guilty of conspiring to commit the same crimes.
What crimes?
Trump’s support for the aforementioned coup attempt and associated economic sanctions in Venezuela, which have cost the lives of 40,000 of its citizens and driven thousands into exile as impoverished migrants, thereby constituting a form of collective punishment of the population. Biden has eased oil sanctions on Venezuela contingent upon the Maduro government’s acceptance of democracy, meaning, legitimization of the right-wing opposition.
Trump’s missile strikes, bombing campaign, and military occupation of Syria, including the theft of its oil. The military interventions conducted under the pretext of fighting ISIS, which cost thousands of Syrian lives, amount to war crimes. Biden bombed Syria and currently supports the continuation of the military occupation.
Trump’s relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem and support for the Zionist State’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and continued occupation and brutalization of Palestine constitute crimes against humanity. Biden has not reversed Trump’s policies toward Israel and vocally supports the apartheid state and its occupation of Palestine.
Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran, the imposition of draconian sanctions, and the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani constitute crimes against peace and war crimes. Biden refuses to remove Trump’s classification of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organization,” lift Trump’s crippling sanctions, or reinstate Obama’s nuclear agreement.
Trump’s delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine and the expansion of economic sanctions on Russia are crimes against peace. Biden has dramatically escalated Ukrainian aid and Russian sanctions into a full-blown proxy war with Russia.
Trump is an irrepressible con artist who stumbled into the presidency courtesy of a Democratic Party that abandoned its principal voting base: the American working class. Although he serves the ruling class faithfully, as all presidents do, his fake right-wing populist rhetoric and quirky behavior have destabilized plutocratic rule, opened large fissures in consensus politics, and polarized the electorate in a way not seen in modern times.
For example, he violated political etiquette by exposing George W. Bush’s lies that led to the Iraq war in a televised primary debate with the imbecile’s brother, Jeb. He threatened to send Hillary Clinton to jail for the destruction of 33,000 emails held on a private server in her home during a nationally televised presidential debate. He routinely refers to the corporate media, particularly the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, as fake news. He refused to acknowledge the results of the 2020 presidential election and did not attend Biden’s inauguration, repeating the contention that the election was stolen. Most recently and significantly, Trump has pledged to end the Ukraine proxy war and forge a diplomatic settlement with Russia, thus potentially averting a nuclear war, a prospect the fanatical Biden regime seems determined to provoke.
Of course, what Trump says and what Trump does are two different things, but the salient point is that he says them and he names the names, like that of warmonger Victoria Nuland, and that is not allowed in a permanent war economy run by neoconservatives.
Furthermore, Washington displays a spectacle of venal corruption. Disgust with politicians, compounded by a loss of confidence in U.S. elections and the justice system, has created a tinderbox of smoldering discontent in a nation further divided by the Trump indictments.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s justification for the federal indictment of Trump, to wit: “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice, and our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” is a farcical assertion given U.S. imperialism’s lawless conduct around the world, not to mention the unindicted corrupt behavior of Trump contemporaries, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the “big guy’s” son, Hunter. Smith’s hypocritical proclamation is one that is sure to enrage followers of the orange icon as well as fair-minded citizens who oppose the dual system of justice that prevails in America.
The specter of a violent reaction to a Trump imprisonment involving political assassination or armed revolt is a real possibility in a country that hosts a sizeable and well-armed pro-Trump right-wing militia movement that includes many ex-military and police adherents.
Conversely, a Trump legal victory in the courts does not preclude a violent resolution to the contradictions inherent in a right-wing political movement whose leader uses fake populist rhetoric to ensure his political ascendency in the face of establishment opposition.
The threat of political violence, perpetrated by the state or by an individual, is particularly grave in a country with an infamous history of attempted assassinations of its presidents as well as contenders for the nation’s highest office. Some were successful, some were not. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan come immediately to the studious mind.
By indicting Trump, the Democrats are playing with fire. The result may be incendiary, thereby highlighting the need for progressive opposition to heightening political reaction and two-party plutocratic rule in the American banana republic.
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Donald Monaco is a writer and political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His most recent book is titled, The Politics of Empire, and is available at amazon.com.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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June 20th, 2023 by The Cradle
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***
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on 15 June at the NATO summit in Brussels to discuss Iran and other important aspects of the US-Israel relationship, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Gallant discussed with his Austin claims that “Iran stimulates attacks against Israel using proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and reiterated Israel’s right to self-defense,” the Israeli paper said.
Before departing for Belgium, Gallant said he would discuss with Austin “the implementation of the joint commitment of both our countries to make sure Iran will never possess nuclear military capabilities.”
Israeli threats against Iran have intensified in recent months amid unconfirmed reports that Washington is close to reaching an interim or partial nuclear deal with Tehran through indirect talks in Oman.
Israel opposes a US nuclear deal with Iran, while Iranian officials have made clear they will only accept a full return to the nuclear deal signed with the Obama administration in 2015. The Trump administration withdrew from the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), unilaterally in 2018. The JCPOA placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Despite US negotiations with Iran, the US military has expanded military cooperation with Israel this year and carried out exercises viewed as veiled threats against Iran, such as the Juniper Oak exercise in January.
The exercise involved 7,900 personnel, 142 combat aircraft, twelve warships, and activities across all domains (sea, air, land, space, and cyber). The main goals of the exercise were to improve interoperability and to demonstrate the ability to surge forces into the region in the event of war with Iran.
Reports emerged that the exercise simulated strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, though US officials denied this.
In March, Austin met with Gallant in Israel. At the time, Austin said that although the Biden administration “continues to believe in diplomacy,” it would “not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
Despite ongoing political differences between the Biden administration and the Israeli government regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed legislation to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, the military alliance between the two remains strong.
Austin said he “wanted to be here to make something very clear: America’s commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad, and it’s going to stay that way. As President [Joe] Biden said in his visit to Israel last year, ‘The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep.’ Israel is a major strategic partner for the US.”
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Featured image: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (L) and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant meet in Brussels on June 15, 2023. (Photo Credit Elad Malcha/Defense Ministry)
June 20th, 2023 by Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo
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***
Portuguese drone manufacturer Tekever has told Defense News it will provide some of its long-endurance systems to Kyiv to support land and maritime operations, a move bankrolled by the United Kingdom’s International Fund for Ukraine.
Earlier this month, the British Defence Ministry shared a video on social media showcasing military equipment being provided by the IFU account to Ukrainian troops. Launched last summer, the first IFU deliveries — funded by Denmark, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and the U.K. — will begin to arrive in July.
The International Fund for Ukraine is supplying critical capabilities for Ukraine, with deliveries from the first procurement round due next month.
Yesterday we announced a £92m air defence package, to be provided through the second procurement round: https://t.co/wipYETa8Ur pic.twitter.com/XOvX1yJ1qa
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) June 14, 2023
Open-source intelligence analysts were quick to identify what appears to be Malloy T150 quadcopters manufactured by the British company Malloy Aeronautics, the DeltaQuad Pro VTOL drone produced by Dutch firm DeltaQuad, and the Astero ISR system from Denmark’s Nordic Wing. Two other unspecified drone models can be seen in the footage, with one shown taking off vertically and launched via catapult.
The British Defence Ministry declined to comment on specific platforms in the video.
Defense News can, however, confirm that one of the two unidentified drones is the Tekever AR3 Vertical Takeoff and Landing system, manufactured by the Lisbon-based firm Tekever.
“Yes, our Tekever AR3 system is depicted in the video produced by the UK MoD,” a company representative told Defense News. “It includes images of the drone being deployed with support of a catapult — which we can use for extended endurance operations up to 16 hours — and in an optional VTOL configuration. Each operator can easily choose which variant it wants to use for a specific mission.”
Tekever’s CEO and founder, Ricardo Mendes, added that the company is “very proud to support Ukraine and thankful to the UK MoD and IFU for allowing us to contribute to one of the most important causes of our lifetime.”
The AR3 is a small, long-endurance drone designed to provide wide-area surveillance for both land and maritime missions. It has a maximum payload capacity of 4 kilograms (9 pounds), can fly at a cruise speed of 75-90 kph (47-56 mph) and can also be recovered via parachute.
Some of the military operators of the AR3 include Portugal, the UK, and Nigeria. Hence, its label in the footage, NAF 167 (an acronym used for the Nigerian Air Force), raised the question as to where the drones were purchased from.
“I can confirm that Nigeria purchased a number of the Tekever AR3 platforms from Tekever Ltd. of Portugal. However, all the drones acquired are currently operating in Nigeria — none have been donated in any way or form to Ukraine or any other country,” Maj. MS Muhammad, deputy defense adviser to the Nigeria High Commission in the U.K., told Defense News.
He added that the drone shown in the video with the NAF 167 label, which does indeed stand for Nigerian Air Force, “must have been provided by the manufacturer, or the clip used in the said tweet might have come from the company’s promotional videos, as the model with that particular number is presently in use in Nigeria.”
It is important to note that the individual platforms showcased in the video are not necessarily the final ones that Ukraine will receive, but rather were provided by industry partners to display some capabilities provided as part of the first $212 million defense package announced in February.
The second IFU procurement, referred to as Urgent Bidding Round 2, launched on April 11. The first capability package resulting from that second round was announced earlier this week and will include a $188 million air defense package. Capabilities requested include sensors to detect and track cruise missiles, low-flying drones and/or ballistic missiles, air burst rounds for cannon-based air defense systems, and sensor-guided air defense cannons to defeat low-flying drones and cruise missiles.
Johan Hjelmstrand, a press officer for Sweden’s defense minister, noted much of the IFU account is unspent, and that some companies either do not go public with related contracts or that not all contracts are yet signed, but that “more packages are on the way.”
In terms of how the fund operates, Martynas Bendikas, a strategic adviser with the Lithuanian Defence Ministry’s public affairs team, explained that defense ministries contribute only with financial resources. Following this, an international public tender is organized for specific military equipment, and all seven countries’ companies can participate.
“However, so far, Lithuanian drones are being sent to Ukraine in other formats,” she said.
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Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.
Featured image: A PT-8 Oceanwatch payload is seen integrated on the Tekever AR5 drone. (Courtesy of Tekever)
June 20th, 2023 by Chris Morrison
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***
Earlier this year, the Grocery Gazette reported that the UK was set to be a world-leading developer of lab-grown meat. In the recent past, Guardian climate hysteric George Monbiot claimed lab-grown food “will soon destroy farming – and save the planet”. Alas, such boosterism is being challenged by hard facts. Lab-grown meat is up to 25 times worse for the environment since it needs ‘pharmaceutical-grade’ production to make it fit for human consumption. In particular, there is a need to remove endotoxin from the cultured mix, a substance that in concentrations as low as one billionth of a gram per millilitrie can reduce human IVF pregnancy success rate by up to four fold.
These are the startling conclusions of ground-breaking work recently published by a group of chemists and food scientists from the University of California. It turns out that ‘pharma to food’ production is a significant technological challenge. The major problem with lab meat is that it uses growth organisms that have to be highly purified to help animal cells multiply. Compared with environmental savings on land, water and greenhouses gases, the whole bio-process is noted to be “orders of magnitude” higher than rearing the actual animal.
“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said co-author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The study found that even across scenarios using lower pharma standards, efficient beef production outperforms cultured meat within a range from four to 25 times. This suggests that investment to advance more ‘climate-friendly’ beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions.
The route to New Zero is littered with improbable technologies that promise much – and give endless opportunities for virtue signalling – but deliver little. While many countries press ahead with plans to destroy conventional animal husbandry, the options for new ways of actually feeding populations look thin on the ground. To be fair to Monbiot, he has picked up on the problems of lab meat, noting in a recent blog post that “the more I’ve read about cultured meat and fish, and the more I’ve come to appreciate the phenomenal complexities involved… the more I doubt this vision will come to pass”. Always the worrier, Monbiot asks, “How can mass starvation best be averted”? Not removing the 337.18 million tonnes of global meat production in favour of flaky factory solutions might be a start.
The California study could throw a major stick into the spokes of the lab-grown meat bandwagon, which to date has had a largely uncritical mainstream media ride. Grocery Gazette’s cheer-leading report noted that the sector was predicted to “rapidly increase its market share within the food industry”. Research was quoted suggesting cell cultured meat was expected to make up almost quarter of global meat consumption by 2035.
The authors in California acknowledge that lab-grown meat ventures have attracted around $2 billion of investment to date. Early reports on feasibility were bullish with some predicting a 60-70% displacement of beef by 2030-2040. But of late, sentiment has waned with more conservative estimates noting a 0.5% share of meat products by 2030. As noted, the huge problem in producing lab meat is the presence of endotoxin which is said have a variety of side effects including harm to in vitro fertilisation. In pharmaceutical labs, animal cell culture is traditional done with endotoxin having been removed. There are many ways to remove the unwanted substance, but the use of these refinement methods “contributes significantly to the economic and environmental costs associated with pharmaceutical products since they are both energy and resource intensive”.
The study also highlights concerns about past scientific consideration of lab-grown meat. There is said to be “high levels of uncertainty in their results and the lack of accounting for endotoxin removal”. It is further noted that despite researchers “clearly reporting high levels of uncertainty”, the results were often cited as clear evidence for the sustainability of lab-grown meat.
So a much-touted green Frankenstein food solution – arguably to a problem only promoted in alarmist circles – looks to be biting the dust, sweeping away a billion or two of credulous capital in the process. As the authors note, investing in scaling this technology “before solving key issues like developing an environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused”.
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Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Featured image is from TDS
June 20th, 2023 by Francisco Dominguez
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***
June 12, 2023 was the third anniversary of the illegal kidnapping and imprisonment by the US of Alex Saab.
Because the brutality and cruelty of the US blockade was wreaking havoc on the economy and millions of the most vulnerable in Venezuela were being deliberately denied their human rights to the most basic necessities of daily life, President Nicolas Maduro tasked Saab with travelling around the world procuring food, medicines and fuel for his country.
Breaking every treaty, protocol, law and norm of international diplomacy, the US plotted to have Saab arrested while in transit to Iran to fulfil his diplomatic mission, by pressing the Cape Verde government to illegally arrest him on June 12, 2020.
The plane Saab was travelling on was denied refuelling in Morocco and Senegal thus being forced to land in Cape Verde. In his book, Never Give An Inch (2023), Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo admits as much:
“No other nation has the global reach to interrupt an Iran-Venezuela plot in real time and convince a small island nation to hold a wanted man.”
In March 2019, when Venezuela suffered a national blackout caused by a cybernetic attack on the national grid, Pompeo tweeted:
“No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.”
The arrest of Saab was central to the US attempt to block the supply of food, medicine and fuel to Venezuela right in the middle of the Covid pandemic. The charges against Saab are rooted in the US’s regime change policy against the Venezuelan government.
Saab’s detention in Cape Verde was carried out without a warrant and with an Interpol red notice received by Cape Verde only after his unlawful arrest.
Additionally, he was appallingly treated as verified personally by the president of the National Human Rights Commission of Cape Verde Zeida Freitas, who observed that Saab had “bruises, cuts on his wrists and ankles, and loss of teeth.” Worse still, he was denied access to medical care despite being a cancer survivor.
The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) declared Saab’s detention “arbitrary and unlawful” in March 2021, ordered his immediate release, an end to the extradition process and compensation for damages caused. The UN human rights commission (UNHRC) asked Cape Verde to suspend the extradition of Saab to the US while they looked at his case.
Despite this, and despite the fact there is no extradition policy between Cape Verde and the US, Saab was extradited to the US.
The extradition was carried out before the October 17 Cape Verde elections, in which presidential candidate Jose Maria Nieves had announced that upon becoming president he would act as ordered by the Ecowas ruling. Nieves won the election with a 51.7 per cent majority, but it was too late for Saab.
Under heavy pressure, Cape Verde ignored Ecowas and the UNHRC, and on October 16 a special US military force extracted Saab to Miami, where Judge Robert Scola charged him with eight counts of conspiracy to launder money, later reduced to one, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
After a three-year investigation, a prosecutor in Geneva found no evidence of money laundering offences against Saab, therefore declaring his innocence. Furthermore, the alleged crime would have been committed outside US territory, over which Washington has no legal jurisdiction. Yet despite utterly failing to produce any evidence whatsoever, the Florida court (read: the US State Department) continues with the cruel farce of keeping Saab in prison.
Femi Falana, one of Saab’s lawyers, hit the nail on the head when she declared:
“Never before has politically motivated judicial overreach been deployed with such arrogance as in the way the US has treated Alex Saab.”
The Saab affair, being a case of brazen lawfare, is significant in that it gravely jeopardises the international order and the viability of diplomacy. No diplomat, no matter the country, is safe.
In a letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Saab’s wife Camilla Fabri wrote:
“The charges against him must be dropped and his diplomatic immunity respected.”
The only legal and moral course of action for the US government to take is to immediately and unconditionally release Venezuela’s special envoy.
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Featured image: Alex Saab, after his arrest in Florida, October 16 2021 (left) and (right) Venezuelans protest at US sanctions imposed on them during the Covid crisis, May 2021 (Source: Morning Star)
June 20th, 2023 by Michael Tracey
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***
On June 4, a group referring to itself as the “Polish Volunteer Corps” issued a boastful announcement confirming its participation in a series of cross-border ground offensives into Russia. News of these audacious raids was jarring enough, given the many prior assurances of U.S. and Ukrainian war planners, who insisted no attacks would be carried out inside Russian territory. It was all the more conspicuous that the incursion units were apparently comprised of Polish soldiers.
Poland, of course, is not only a NATO member state, but the NATO member state with which the U.S. has most assiduously aligned itself since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine (Polish government officials deny any formal connection to the “Polish Volunteer Corps”). So the raids raised an obvious, yet oft-neglected question: Just what the hell is U.S. policy in Ukraine?
If you turn on the TV, you’ll find pundits on every channel loyally reciting from memory the broad parameters of the U.S. mission—at least as it’s being conveyed in daily rhetorical flourishes by Biden Administration officials, assorted Congressional chest-thumpers, and brave think tank warriors. Freedom and autocracy are locked in a great cosmic battle of good versus evil, or so goes the usual storyline—most often narrated with a degree of moral complexity that can be generously compared to a lower-tier Marvel Movie.
But apart from this steady stream of heavily recycled platitudes, was it ever plainly disclosed to Americans—the chief financial sponsors of the Ukraine war effort, after all—that the scope of the war effort they’ve found themselves subsidizing would eventually expand to include platoons of Polish soldiers marching straight into Russia? Did anyone back in Washington, D.C. sign off on this, or was there ever an opportunity granted for public consideration of its potentially foreboding implications?
At least in theory, the U.S. is treaty-bound to come to the defense of Poland in the event of armed attack. And while Poland may nominally disavow the Polish Volunteer Corps, a Polish journalist writing for Poland’s largest digital publication says he was in attendance at a founding organizational meeting in Kyiv this past February, during which the unit was established not as a ragtag group of untested amateurs, but as an elite “sabotage and reconnaissance” force—which from the get-go was “reporting directly to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.” Per this account, the unit was to consist of Poland’s “most experienced soldiers,” with notable imprecision as to where specifically those soldiers hailed from.
Then there’s the fact that shortly before the formation of the “Polish Volunteer Corps,” a cross-coalition bill was submitted to the Polish parliament which would make it legal for Polish nationals to fight in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The war against Russia was to be recognized as “a special situation from the point of view of the national security of the Republic of Poland,” the text reads, “requiring non-standard political and legislative actions on the part of the state.”
The “Polish Volunteer Corps” has been conducting joint operations with the “Russian Volunteer Corps,” another fully integrated “special unit within the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine”—euphemistically referred to in “Western” media headlines with plausible-deniability monikers like “Pro-Ukraine group of partisans.” Given how these ostensibly unattached “partisans” have been bragging about taking Russian hostages and otherwise getting themselves involved in increasingly spectacular, provocative attacks, one understands why Ukraine might wish to sustain plausible deniability.
“The ground war has come to Russia,” proclaimed one Polish state-backed media organ at the news that their soldiers had breached the border.
For many, the footage provided an occasion for rapturous joy, awash as they are in the primal euphoria of armed retribution. Meanwhile, these elite soldiers billed as “volunteers” have been razing Russian border settlements with U.S.-provided weaponry, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. The units “lobbed shells and missiles on residential areas,” the Times reported, and they appeared to be aiming their attacks at “no apparent military target.”
Convoys of armored vehicles called MRAPs, initially produced for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, were observed barreling into Russia from Ukraine, with still no explanation forthcoming as to how precisely they wound up there. Maybe someone in Kyiv just happened to leave a garage full of U.S. supplied armored vehicles unlocked. Either way, the Ukraine military was conclusively shown to have used U.S. weapons to attack Russia—the very thing President Biden and other administration officials have emphatically maintained they do not support and are not enabling.
Strangely though, this revelation of systematic government deception doesn’t seem to have moved the needle much in terms of the wider debate over U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Donald Trump could misstate the temperature outside by half-a-degree Farenheit and the entire U.S. media would be falling over themselves to piously accuse him of “lying”—but pile up mounds of incontrovertible evidence that Americans have been chronically deceived about a sprawling U.S. military intervention, and you’ll mostly get eye-rolls from the savvy-minded commentariat. That is, if you’re fortunate enough to be spared the standard sneering accusations of “Russian propagandist.”
Speaking of claims that might arguably be considered “propaganda,” almost exactly one year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embarked on a U.S. media tour promising Americans from the bottom of his heart that “We are not planning to attack Russia.” These claims were echoed simultaneously by President Biden, who insisted that “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”
Yet here we are a year later, and there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that Ukraine is “striking beyond its borders,” and in increasingly aggressive fashion—from the cross-border raids to the drone-strike on the Kremlin to the bombing barrage on a residential Moscow neighborhood. And that’s only a smattering of examples from the past several weeks.
Still, it’s harder than one might expect to rouse much critical interest—especially among a media that has been politically, ideologically, and emotionally invested in Ukraine’s glorious war-fighting cause from the outset. One perfect example of late was a CNN article in which “senior U.S. officials” were reported confiding that while they had “condemned the strikes inside Russia,” they of course privately “believe the cross-border attacks are a smart military strategy.” A state official saying one thing in public but another in private used to be the most surefire sign of official deceit a journalist could hope to uncover. Yet CNN seemed to just let it flow by like a gentle spring breeze, almost as though they were actually impressed with the guile of the “senior U.S. officials” they’d been given the honor of anonymously paraphrasing.
As it stands, the U.S. government continuously pelts the American people with provable untruths in service of maintaining a war policy that bears almost no resemblance to how it was initially presented. And in the sectors of society allegedly tasked with scrutinizing government conduct, this is mostly met with a shrug.
How much more extreme does the deception need to get before sustained pushback is no longer avoidable?
If Polish soldiers launching a self-proclaimed “ground war” in Russia isn’t enough to rattle off the complacency, one shudders to think how severe of a shock would be necessary.
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Michael Tracey is an independent reporter with Substack. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.
Featured image: Polish Volunteer Corps in Ukraine emblem (Licensed under the Public Domain)
June 20th, 2023 by Ted Snider
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***
There is a revealing difference between the peace proposals for the Russo-Ukrainian War that come from the Global South and peace proposals that come from the NATO-aligned West. For starters, no peace proposals have come from the West, while several have come from the Global South. But when the West talks of a negotiated settlement, they insist on Russia losing the war, granting the essential concessions first and only then negotiating the enforcement. The Global South just wants the killing to stop: first stop the war, then negotiate the settlement.
The West has made its position clear at every stage: don’t call for a ceasefire or negotiate during the war. First defeat Russia, then hold talks to impose a settlement. In the early days of the war, when Ukraine was willing to negotiate an end to the fighting, then-United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson was quick to scold Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky that Russian President Vladimir Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” He added that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.”
The West refuses to negotiate during the war. “Now we see Moscow suggesting that diplomacy take place at the barrel of a gun or as Moscow’s rockets, mortars, artillery target the Ukrainian people. This is not real diplomacy,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price explained.
“Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy.” Don’t stop the war by negotiating peace, first win the war, then negotiate. “If President Putin is serious about diplomacy,” Price said, “he knows what he can do. He should immediately stop the bombing campaign against civilians [and] order the withdrawal of his forces from Ukraine.”
When China put forward a twelve point peace proposal, the United States dismissed points two through twelve and insisted that the proposal should “stop at point one.” Point one said that “[t]he sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld.” The American script was clear: first Russia concedes and gives into Western demands, then discuss the peace proposal. “My first reaction to it,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan scoffed, “is that it could stop at point one, which is to respect the sovereignty of all nations.” Reading from the same script, Blinken quipped, “If they were serious about the first one, sovereignty, then this war could end tomorrow.”
It is a novel theory of diplomacy that you don’t negotiate with enemies at times of war. When else do you negotiate? Who else do you negotiate with? Is it diplomacy if it is just imposing the result you won by war?
When point three of the Chinese proposal suggested “ceasing hostilities,” the United States rejected it. The Chinese proposal says that “Conflict and war benefit no one,” and requests that “All parties should support Russia and Ukraine in working in the same direction and resuming direct dialogue as quickly as possible, so as to gradually deescalate the situation and ultimately reach a comprehensive ceasefire.” But the U.S. did not want to resume dialogue “as quickly as possible.” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby explained that “a ceasefire, at this time, while that may sound good, we do not believe would have that effect,” it would not be “a step towards a just and durable peace.” He then clearly stated that “we don’t support calls for a ceasefire right now.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the peace proposal a “tactical move by Russia” that was “supported by China” and warned that “the world should not be fooled.”
The Global South sees diplomacy differently. Where the West wants to continue the fighting to allow talks, the Global South wants to stop the fighting to allow talks.
On May 16, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that he had held phone calls with Putin and Zelensky, who both agreed to separately receive a delegation of African heads of state in their capitals to discuss a possible peace plan to end the war. Joining South Africa in the delegation will be Senegal, Uganda, Egypt, the Republic of the Congo, and Zambia. In opposition to Western demands that Russian troops withdraw from Ukrainian territory as a condition for talks to begin, the African heads of state “propose that Ukraine accept opening peace talks with Russia even as Russian troops remain on its soil.” Reversing the order of the West’s agenda, South African Presidency Spokesman Vincent Magwenya said, “First is the cessation of hostilities. Second is a framework for lasting peace.”
Brazil has also “pressed for a truce.” And on June 3, Indonesia offered a peace plan that, like those offered by China, Africa and Brazil, placed the ceasefire first on the agenda to allow for the talks that would follow. Indonesia’s proposal calls for a ceasefire first, then the creation of a de-militarized buffer zone, followed by referendums that would allow the people of the “disputed territories” to democratically determine the post war boundaries.
The West, once again, rejected the order of business on the agenda. “I will try to be polite,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov responded, “It sounds like a Russian plan…We don’t need these mediators suggesting such a strange plan.” Josep Borrell, the European Union high representative for foreign policy, asked that there be a “just peace,” not a “peace of surrender.”
But how is the Indonesian proposal “strange” or a “peace of surrender”? A senior Biden administration official told The Washington Post, “African leaders have made clear to White House and administration officials that they simply want an end to the war.” The official acknowledged that Africa and the United States “disagree on what tactics to use to get to a settlement…as the Africans oppose the idea of punishing Russia or insisting that Kyiv must agree to any resolution.” Africa stresses diplomacy first; the West stresses victory first. While “The Africans want to see a diplomatic solution to this conflict,” the West wants “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” according to the official.
The Global South wants a lasting end to what they see as a European war and the global hardships it causes. They do not seek to punish Russia and defend democracy partly because they do not believe this is a war for the triumph of democracy over autocracy or a Manichean war between good and evil. It is just a devastating war that needs to be stopped. Africa remembers Western colonialism and their sponsored coups. And Indonesia’s Defense Minister, Prabowo Subianto, upon introducing Indonesia’s peace proposal, reminded the West, “We in Asia have our share of conflict and war, maybe more disastrous, more bloody than what has been experienced in Ukraine…Ask Vietnam, ask Cambodia, ask Indonesians how many times we’ve been invaded.” He might have added to ask Indonesia about the half a million to a million Indonesians who were slaughtered with the complicity of the United States.
The Global South has a very different view than the West that gives shape to a very different view on how to end the war. Most obviously, while the West refuses to push the warring parties to negotiate an end to the war and has offered no peace proposals, the Global South is pushing hard for an end to the war and has offered several peace proposals. Unlike the West who favors winning the war before allowing diplomatic talks, the Global South favors a ceasefire that would stop the war as soon as possible in order to allow diplomatic talks.
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Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.
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June 20th, 2023 by Kyle Anzalone
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In an interview with NBC News, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attacked former President Donald Trump’s pledge to end the war. He argued that if Kiev does not defeat Moscow, Russia will attack a NATO member state and force the US into a direct conflict.
Zelensky was asked about Trump’s claim he would immediately engage the Kremlin in talks and bring the war to a negotiated settlement.
“Are they ready to start a war to send their children? Are they ready to die?” he said in the interview that was published on Thursday. “If Russia occupies Ukraine, they will move on to the Baltic countries, to Poland, to any NATO country, and in that particular case the U.S. will have to choose between dismantling NATO or fighting.”
Kiev and hawks in Washington have asserted that Ukraine is a bulwark, protecting members of NATO from Moscow’s expansionist ambitions. However, there is no evidence that the Kremlin eyes attacking another country. Russian President Vladimir Putin views Ukraine as a unique security threat to his county and says seizing territory protects Moscow against the expanding NATO alliance.
Ukraine hopes to be added as a member of the alliance once the war is over.
“We need an invitation, and it needs to be clear that after this war, if we are ready, and if the Ukraine army is ready to NATO standards, then after the war we will be invited to join.” Zelensky continued, “It’s very important to hear the truth and not tell us lies.”
In 2008, Ukraine was told it would one day receive full NATO membership. At the time, Moscow denounced the proposal, saying it violated red lines and, from the Russian perspective, would create a significant security threat.
Despite the Russian objections, NATO maintains its doors are open to new members, but Ukraine does not currently meet the requirements. As Kiev is currently at war with Moscow, admitting Ukraine into the alliance will put NATO in direct confrontation with Russia.
At times, Kiev appears to be frustrated with NATO refusing to make a formal commitment to Ukraine. Zelensky is threatening to sit out a coming meeting of the North Atlantic alliance in July because Ukraine will not receive a pledge to become a member at the end of the war.
Zelensky went on to slam Trump, claiming he was unable to end the war in Ukraine while he was in office.
“Why didn’t he do that earlier? He was president when the war was going on here,” he explained. “I think he couldn’t do that. I think there are no people today in the world who could just have a word with Putin and end the war.”
The statement appears to be an admission from Zelensky that the war in Ukraine began before the Russian invasion in 2022. Prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine was embroiled in an eight-year-long civil war. Washington and NATO justify their support for Kiev by saying the Russian invasion was “unprovoked.”
The Minsk Accords were agreed to by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France with the intention of ending the civil war. However, Zelensky was unable to get neo-nazi paramilitaries fighting for Ukraine to comply with the agreement. In the days before the Russian invasion, there was a surge in fighting between Ukrainian forces and rebels in the Donbas region.
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Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.
Featured image: April 14, 2022, Kyiv, Ukraine: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during an interview with BBC reporter Clive Myrie for BBC Television from the situation room, April 14, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Credit Image: © Ukraine Presidency/Ukraine Presi/Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire)
June 20th, 2023 by Rep. Ron Paul
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Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR.
In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with Communism and thus could not cede a square foot of territory or the dominoes would fall one-by-one until the “Reds” ruled over us.
That crisis was very real to me, as I was drafted into the military in the middle of the US/USSR standoff over Cuba and we could all feel how close we were to annihilation.
Fortunately, we had a president in the White House at the time who understood the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship. Even though he was surrounded by hawks who could never forgive him for aborting the idiotic Bay of Pigs Cuba invasion, President John F. Kennedy picked up the telephone for a discussion with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, which eventually saved the world.
Historians now tell us that President Kennedy agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing missiles from Cuba. It was a classic case of how diplomacy can work if properly employed.
It is all too clear that we do not have a John F. Kennedy in the White House today. Although we no longer face a Soviet empire and communist ideology as justification for taking a confrontational tone toward Russia, the Biden Administration is still dragging the US toward a nuclear conflict. Why are they putting us all at risk? The same old “domino theory” that was discredited in the Cold War: If we don’t fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, Putin will soon be marching through Berlin.
This all started with Biden promising to only send uniforms and medical supplies to Ukraine for fear of sparking a Russian retaliation. From there we went to anti-tank missiles, multiple-rocket launchers, Patriot missiles, Bradley fighting vehicles, and millions of rounds of ammunition. The Biden Administration announced last week that it would send depleted uranium ammunition to Ukraine, which poisons the earth for millennia to come. Rumors are that long-range ATACMs missiles are to be delivered soon, which could strike deep into Russia.
Apparently, F-16 fighter jets are also on the way.
The escalation rationale from Washington, we are told, is that since the Russians have not directly retaliated against NATO for NATO’s direct support of Ukraine’s war machine, we can be sure they never will respond.
Is that really a wise bet? It is clear to many that US-built F-16 fighters taking off from NATO bases with NATO pilots attacking Russians in Ukraine – or even Russia itself – would be a declaration of war on Russia.
That means World War III – something we managed to avoid for the whole Cold War.
Congress is silent – or compliant – as we lurch forward toward disaster for no discernable US strategic goal. Biden – or whoever is actually running the show – is forging straight ahead.
As we move into the US presidential election cycle one thing is clear: we desperately need a peace president to do for us what JFK did for the US during the Cuba crisis. Hopefully it won’t be too late!
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Featured image: Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
June 20th, 2023 by Dr. Emanuel Garcia
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***
“I went to a flower shop to purchase a bouquet – during the time of mandates and masks – and because I was unmasked I was asked to step outside”
To a psychoanalyst memories are a stock in trade, common coin, the currency of every session, and we tend to regard every reported memory never as actual indubitable truth, but as an amalgam of wish, fantasy, fact and emotion, an amalgam that drew across the lifespan to result in the ‘remembered’ event, a phenomenon that could conceal other memories and also lead to new insights. In short, memories are the stuff of a kind of dream.
It is doubtful – though, perhaps, given the mind and brain’s complexities, possible – that we have stored every perception of our earthly experience, somehow, somewhere. But no matter how many times I drive along a certain highway I could never, if pressed, reproduce with complete accuracy a comprehensive picture of what I perceive. Instead I will remember road signs, junctions, turning points, just as, when reviewing my life I remember certain nodal events. In fact I am often surprised when in company a person may remind me of something I did or said years ago about which I have no memory – because it held no importance to me, because it was too threatening, or because nothing really registered? I don’t know.
What I do think I know is that memories require some sort of nourishment over the years, a calling up, a reinvestment and a reliving, in the quietness of thought, to stay alive, and memories may even grow as newer experiences resonate with the old. It’s as if they require care and watering like a plant, and with enough memories tended we may find ourselves within a pastoral glade that demarcates our life lived.
This past week I learned, quite by chance, of the death of a friend, a friend with whom I had lost contact for many years but who had probably been the most influential person of my young manhood.
You see, in these covidian times, whose long shadow stretches into our futures, I wanted to see how he was faring, I wanted to see if perhaps I might visit him when or if I returned to the States. The friendship we shared for a very bright and very intense year abroad as students at a foreign university had a kind of force that never – for me, at least – dissipated, regardless whether we spoke or met during the afteryears, which was hardly at all.
But I remembered him well, I remembered our times together, our competitions, our sports and our work in theatre, our studying, our jokes, I remembered a trip we took to Belfast during the troubles to find the divisive graffiti and barricades and armed British soldiers in that forbidding city, and a visit to a pub where but for the grace of our naivete we escaped without harm. I am, in fact, surprised by the plethora of very specific memories I harbor, which signifies to me the importance of our relationship and its enduring effect upon my life, because this friend was a paragon of very hard work and idealism.
If someone, years from now, asks me about these past three Covidian years, one particular memory comes to mind. I went to a flower shop to purchase a bouquet – during the time of mandates and masks – and because I was unmasked I was asked to step outside. I asked the proprietress why, given that I had an official, if absurd, ‘mask exemption’, and she told me that she needed to protect her daughter, at home, who suffered from an immune problem. When I tried to tell her that the masks did nothing to protect her, or me, or anybody else, she turned, flustered, away, and retreated back into the bowels of her store. I left.
Sure, there are other memories I can conjure during the vax apartheid here in Wellington – some joyful, too, about the new friends I made and the gatherings we had – but for some reason this one serves as the exemplar.
And as for my friend, I learned that he died suddenly near the end of 2021. This is fact, not memory. I cannot and will not ask the question of the loved ones he left behind, I don’t want to know.
It has all hit home.
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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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June 20th, 2023 by Seymour M. Hersh
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***
I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 1, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.
Last November, over a Thanksgiving holiday spent with family in Berkeley, I drove a few miles to visit Dan at the home in neighboring Kensington he has shared for decades with his wife Patricia. My intent was to yack with him for a few hours about our mutual obsession, Vietnam. More than fifty years later, he was still pondering the war as a whole, and I was still trying to understand the My Lai massacre. I arrived at 10 am and we spoke without a break—no water, no coffee, no cookies—until my wife came to fetch me, and to say hello and visit with Dan and Patricia. She left, and I stayed a few more minutes with Dan, who wanted to show me his library of documents that could have gotten him a long prison term. Sometime around 6 pm—it was getting dark—Dan walked me to my car, and we continued to chat about the war and what he knew—oh, the things he knew—until I said I had to go and started the car. He then said, as he always did, “You know I love you, Sy.”
So this is a story about a tutelage that began in the summer of 1972, when Dan and I first connected. I have no memory of who called whom, but I was then at the New York Times and Dan had some inside information on White House horrors he wanted me to chase down—stuff that had not been in the Pentagon Papers.
Image: Daniel Ellsberg, co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers case, talks to the media outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles on April 28, 1973. [Source: nbcnews.com]
I was planning to write about my friendship with Dan after he passed away but last weekend my youngest son reminded me that he still had some of the magic trick materials that Dan had delighted him with in the mid-1980s, when Dan was crashing with our family, as he often did when visiting Washington. “Why not write about him now?” he asked. Why not?
I first learned of Dan’s importance in the summer of 1971, when he was outed for delivering the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times a few weeks after the newspaper began a series of shattering stories about the disconnect between what we were told and what really had been going on. Those papers remain today the most vital discussion of a war from the inside. Even after the New York Times exposures, their seven thousand pages would be rarely read in full.
I was then working for the New Yorker on a Vietnam project and had learned that it was Dan who did the leaking a week or so before his name became public. His outing was inevitable, and on June 26, after hiding out in Cambridge, Dan strolled to the U.S Attorney’s office in Boston—there were scores of journalists waiting—and had a brief chat with the reporters before turning himself in for what all expected would be the trial of the decade. He told the crowd that he hoped that “the truth will free us of this war.” And then, as he fought his way to the courthouse steps, a reporter asked him how he felt about going to prison. His response struck me then and still makes me tingle: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”
I had done my bit in exposing the My Lai massacre and publishing a book about it in 1970. I was then in the process of writing a second book on the Army’s cover-up of the slaughter. “Hell, no,” I thought to myself, “No way I would go to jail—especially for telling an unwanted truth.” I followed Ellsberg’s subsequent trial in a Los Angeles federal court and even wrote about the wrongdoing of the White House creeps who broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst—at the request of President Nixon. (The government’s case was thrown out after the extent of the White House-ordered spying on Ellsberg became public.)
It was early in the election year summer of 1972 when Ellsberg and I got in touch with each other. I was banging away on the losing Vietnam war and CIA misdeeds for the Times. Nixon looked like a sure thing, despite continuing the hated war, because of stumble after stumble for the campaign of the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern. Dan had two stories that he thought could change the dynamics of the November election.
I liked him right off the bat. He was so earnest, so bright, as handsome as a movie star, and so full of the kind of inside information about the Vietnam War that few others had. And so willing to share them with no worry about the consequences. He understood that as the source of highly secret information and procedures he was taking all the risks and that as a reporter I was going to write stories that would get acclaim and put me at no risk. At some point in our chats, I brought him home for a good meal. His campaign against the Vietnam War was literally consuming him, and he immediately engaged with my wife and our two small children. He did magic tricks, he was marvelous on the piano—Dan could play the Beatles and Beethoven—and he connected with all of us. Our friendship was locked in—forever. I confess that late at night—we were both night owls—he and I would walk the dog and find time to sit on a curb somewhere and smoke a few Thai sticks. How Dan always managed to have a supply of these joints from Southeast Asia I chose not to ask. He would talk about all the sealed and locked secret files of the Vietnam War that he could recall, with his photographic memory, in near perfect detail.
In the early 1980s I was writing a long and very critical book about Henry Kissinger’s sordid days as Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of State, with a focus on Vietnam. At one point, Dan spent more than a week in our home, rising at 6 am to read the 2,300 pages of typed manuscript. He understood that I did not want his analyses or disagreements with my conclusions, but only factual errors. One morning Dan told me I had misread a mid-1960s Washington Post piece on the war by Joe Kraft, whose column was then a must-read. I argued, and he was adamant. So I drove downtown to my office, dug through boxes of files and found the column. Dan had remembered the details of a two-decade-old column in a daily newspaper. His memory was scary.
There were two White House abuses he wanted me to expose before the presidential election in the fall of 1972. Dan told me that Nixon and Kissinger—for whom Dan had written an important early policy paper after he was appointed national security adviser—had been wiretapping aides and cabinet members. The second tip Dan had for me was that Kissinger had ordered some of his aides to produce a plan for using tactical nuclear weapons in South Vietnam, in case they were needed to end the war on American terms. If I could get one or two sources—by this time there were a number of former Kissinger aides who had quietly resigned over the Vietnam War—on the record, Dan said, it just might get the Democrats into office. It was the longest of long shots, but I tried like hell all summer to find someone who had firsthand information, as Dan did not, and who was willing to confirm Dan’s information, even if on background. Of course, it was understood I would have to tell Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the Times, who my off-the-record source was.
It was a lousy summer for me, because there were a few former Kissinger aides who easily confirmed Dan’s information, but would not agree to my providing their names to the Times. In one case, with a very decent guy who very much hoped he would get a senior job in a future administration, I came close, aided by the fact that his wife—I always conducted such visits at night—said to her husband, “Oh, for God’s sakes just tell him the truth.” She said it over and over. Talk about a painful experience. Needless to say, their marriage did not last long. The wife’s anger that the truth was not being told helped me understand Dan’s obsession with a war whose worst elements were simply not known to the public. I wasn’t able to get any source on the record in time for the election, but in subsequent years I did get the stories.
There was one story Dan told me in late 1993 that seemed to capture the secret life on the inside of a major war. He had gone back and forth on short missions to South Vietnam while working as a senior State Department official, but he jumped at a chance in mid-1965 to join a team in Saigon committed to pacification—winning hearts and minds—of the villagers in the South. Its leader was Ed Lansdale, a CIA hero of counterinsurgency for his earlier efforts in routing communist insurgents in the Philippines.
I always took good notes in my meetings with Dan, not because I planned to write about him at some point—I knew he would write his own memoirs—but because I was getting a seminar on how things really worked on the inside. Read his words, and you can judge for yourself how complicated life could be at the top.
“In 1965,” Dan began, “I had done a study of the Cuban missile crisis and I had four operational clearances above top secret, including U-2 clearances” and National Security Agency clearances. He had also interviewed Bobby Kennedy two times about his role in the crisis. Ellsberg’s clearances were so sacrosanct that he was supposed to register in a special office upon arrival in Saigon and from then on he would not be allowed to travel outside of Saigon without an armored car or in a two-engine airplane or better. He got around the system by not deigning to register, a rarity in a world of war where top secret clearances were seen by many as evidence of machismo.
And so Ellsberg went off to work in Saigon with Lansdale. “For one and one half years,” Ellsberg said, “I spent nearly every evening listening to Lansdale talk about his covert operations in the Philippines and earlier in North Vietnam in the 1950s. By this time I’d been working with secrets for years and thought I knew what kind of secrets could be kept from whom. I also thought Ed and I had a good working knowledge of each other and our secrets. Every piece of information was cataloged in your mind and you knew to whom you could say and what you could say. In all of this, Jack Kennedy was mentioned and so was Bobby, but there was no mention by Lansdale of Cuba and no mention that Lansdale had ever worked for Jack and Bobby Kennedy.”
A decade later, after both Kennedy brothers had been assassinated, I wrote a series for the New York Times on the CIA’s spying on hundreds of thousands of American anti-Vietnam war protesters, members of Congress and reporters—all in direct violation of the agency’s 1947 charter barring any domestic activity. It led to the establishment of the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. It was the most extensive Congressional inquiry into the activities of the CIA since the agency’s beginning. The committee exposed the assassination activities of the CIA, operations undertaken on orders that clearly came from Jack and Bobby Kennedy, although no direct link was published in the committee’s final report. But the committee reported extensively on a secret group authorized by Jack Kennedy and run by his brother Bobby to come up with options to terrorize Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro. The covert operation had the code name Mongoose. And it was led, the committee reported, in 1961 and 1962 by Ed Lansdale.
Ellsberg told me he was flabbergasted. “When I heard about Lansdale and Mongoose,” he said, “it revealed to me an ability to keep secrets on an insider level that went far beyond what I had imagined. It was like discovering your next-door neighbor and your weekend fishing companion”—Ellsberg, it should be noted, never went fishing in his life—“and close, dear friend who, when he died, turned out to have been the secretary of State.
“It was astounding, because Mongoose was exactly the kind of operation I’d expected to hear about from Lansdale. He told about covert operations all the time. I think Ed had been told by President Kennedy to ‘keep his fucking mouth shut.’
“When you’ve been in a system with as high a level as possible of secrecy, you understand that things do get talked about. And you get a sense of what is usually held back. I was hearing all about other covert operations, but somebody—not Landsdale—had put a lid on Mongoose.”
After the assassination of Jack Kennedy, Ellsberg theorized, “any far reaching investigation into his death would have to lead to many covert operations.” His point was that there was no evidence that the Warren Commission set up to investigate the assassination had done so.
In all of Dan’s many hours of tutoring, as I understood years later, he understood and empathized with my eagerness—even my need—to learn all that I could about his world of secrets and lies, things said out loud and hidden in top-secret documents. And so he happily became my tutor and taught me where and how to look inside the recessed corners of the American intelligence community.
In return, I gave him my friendship and welcomed him into my family. He loved long talks with my wife, a doctor, teaching the kids magic tricks, and playing Billy Joel songs and similar stuff on the piano for them. We all sensed early on that there was a need for him to be an innocent kid, too, if only to serve as a brief respite from his constant anxiety and the guilt he carried in his soul about what his America had done to the Vietnamese people.
Dan was showing me an insider’s love, just as he and Patricia radiated love and acceptance to all their many friends and admirers who, like me, will never forget the lessons he taught us and what we learned.
No way I’m going to wait for him to move along without saying what I want to say right now.
To watch Ellsberg speaking to a press conference on New Year’s Eve 1971, click here. To watch the 2009 documentary on Ellsberg, The Most Dangerous Man in America, click here.
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Featured image: Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference in New York City, 1972.
June 20th, 2023 by Dr. Joseph Mercola
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The Irish government recently proposed reducing Irish cow herds by 10% over the next three years to meet the European Union’s climate change targets, which includes a 25% reduction in emissions from farming by 2030
Properly raised and grazed livestock have a tremendously beneficial impact on ecological health and local microclimate
When land is left barren, it changes the microclimate on that swath of land. Two-thirds of the landmass on earth are already desertifying, which is why macroclimate is also impacted
While climate activists claim they’re promoting a “green” agenda, everything they propose suggests otherwise. Instead of transitioning factory farming into a regenerative model, which we know works wonders, they’re willfully ignoring the laws of nature upon which organic and sustainable environmentalism are based
The war on climate change, as currently fought, is ultimately a war on humanity itself
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The war on climate change, as currently fought, is ultimately a war on humanity itself, and the evidence for this is stacking up by the day. It began with nitrogen fertilizer restrictions1 in the summer of 2022, which alone is driving farmers out of business, and has now progressed to the needless culling of livestock — all in the name of combating climate change.
But what difference will climate have if there’s no food production? Without food, humanity dies. End of story. Of course, the unspoken plan is to replace all of these banned natural foods with genetically engineered lab-created fare, but that’s not going to do our health any favors, so humanity will still be facing extinction, just a slower and more excruciating one.
In Ireland, the government recently proposed reducing Irish cow herds by 10% over the next three years to meet the European Union’s climate change targets,2 which include a 25% reduction in emissions from farming by 2030.3 The same insanity is creeping into the U.S. as well. The EU is just on a faster track. As reported by Cowboy State Daily, June 2, 2023:4
“Climate activists are coming for livestock producers and farmers. European governments have been targeting the agriculture industry for several years … Ireland’s government may need to reduce that country’s cattle herds by 200,000 cows over the next three years to meet climate targets.
Special President Envoy For Climate John Kerry recently warned at a climate summit for the U.S. Department of Agriculture that the human race’s need to produce food to survive creates 33% of the world’s total greenhouse gasses. ‘We can’t get to net-zero. We don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution,’ Kerry said.”
With those words, Kerry shows his ignorance and lack of qualifications for the job as climate czar, as properly raised and grazed livestock have a tremendously beneficial impact on ecological health and local climate. As agricultural advocate Kacy Atkinson told Cowboy State Daily:5
“Groupthink happens a lot around the climate change conversation. We get tunnel visioned on one piece of it without considering the full ramifications of what’s going to happen if we remove cattle from the land. Cattle contribute to drought resistance, soil health and wildfire reduction.
Just before cattle were introduced to North America and the industry began raising them, there were thousands of buffalo roaming the plains. Cows and buffalo are both ruminants, which is a type of animal that brings back food from its stomach and chews it again.
These animals’ digestive systems produce methane emissions. Today’s cattle population is similar in numbers to that of the buffalo herds. So, the methane emissions from ruminant animals aren’t anything new.”
In the 2013 TED Talk above, ecologist and international consultant Allan Savory explains why and how grazing livestock are the solution to climate change. Erratic climate is in large part caused by desertification (when fertile land dries up and turns to desert), which is what current conventional agricultural practices encourage.
This situation can only be effectively reversed by dramatically increasing the number of grazing livestock, Savory says. In essence, it’s not an excess of livestock that are causing the problem, but that we have far too few, and the livestock we do have, we’ve not managed properly.
To improve soil quality, we must improve its ability to maintain water. Once land has turned to bone-dry desert, any rain simply evaporates and/or runs off. The solution is twofold: The ground must be covered with vegetation, and animals must roam across the land. The animals must be bunched and kept moving to avoid overgrazing, thereby mimicking the movement of large wild herds. The animals serve several crucial functions on the land, as they:
The graphic below, which compares the carbon recycling of cows and fossil fuel emissions, is also instructive. The methane cows burp up eventually breaks down into carbon dioxide and water, both of which are taken up by plants. The carbon is then put back into the soil through the roots of the plants. This is the natural cycle, which benefits all life. Yet none of this ever makes it into the climate conversation.
In the TED Talk, Savory recounts how, as a young biologist, he was involved in setting aside large swaths of African land as national parks. This involved removing native tribes from the land to protect animals. Curiously, as soon as the natives were removed, the land began to deteriorate.
At that point, he became convinced that there were too many elephants, and a team of experts agreed. They then went on to cull some 40,000 elephants to reach a number they thought the land could sustain. Yet the land destruction only got worse. Savory calls the decision “the greatest blunder” of his life. Fortunately, the utter failure cemented his determination to dedicate his life to finding solutions.
Since then, studies have shown that whenever cattle are removed from an area to protect it from desertification, the opposite results. It gets worse. According to Savory, the reason for this is because we’ve completely misunderstood the causes of desertification.
We failed to realize that in seasonal humidity environments, the soil and vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals meandering through. Along with these herds came ferocious pack hunting predators. The primary defense against these predators was the herd size. The larger the herd, the safer the individual animal within the herd.
These large herds deposited dung and urine all over the grasses (their food), and so they would keep moving from one area to the next. This constant movement of large herds naturally prevented overgrazing of plants, while periodic trampling ensured protective covering of the soil.
As explained by Savory, grasses must degrade biologically before the next growing season. This easily occurs if the grass is trampled into the ground. If it does not decay biologically, it shifts into oxidation — a very slow process that results in bare soil, which then ends up releasing carbon rather than trapping and storing it.
We’ve also failed to understand how desertification affects our global climate. He explains that barren earth is much cooler at dawn and much hotter at midday. When land is left barren, it changes the microclimate on that swath of land.
According to Savory, two-thirds of the landmass on earth is already desertifying, and “Once you’ve done that to more than half of the land mass on the planet, you’re changing macroclimate,” he says.
In response to the Cowboy State Daily article, Elon Musk tweeted, “This really needs to stop. Killing some cows doesn’t matter for climate change.”6 Indeed, to think that eliminating cattle will put an end to climate woes is rather ridiculous. Climate cycles have always existed and will continue to exist, even if all human and animal life on earth is removed.
Besides, real-world evidence such as that presented by Savory proves we need grazing livestock to normalize local microclimates. So, the true answer to undesired climate shifts would be to normalize local microclimates around the globe, and we do that by taking animals out of indoor factory conditions and out into the fields.
In the TED Talk, Savory recounts how, as a young biologist, he was involved in setting aside large swaths of African land as national parks. This involved removing native tribes from the land to protect animals. Curiously, as soon as the natives were removed, the land began to deteriorate.
At that point, he became convinced that there were too many elephants, and a team of experts agreed. They then went on to cull some 40,000 elephants to reach a number they thought the land could sustain. Yet the land destruction only got worse. Savory calls the decision “the greatest blunder” of his life. Fortunately, the utter failure cemented his determination to dedicate his life to finding solutions.
Since then, studies have shown that whenever cattle are removed from an area to protect it from desertification, the opposite results. It gets worse. According to Savory, the reason for this is because we’ve completely misunderstood the causes of desertification.
We failed to realize that in seasonal humidity environments, the soil and vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals meandering through. Along with these herds came ferocious pack hunting predators. The primary defense against these predators was the herd size. The larger the herd, the safer the individual animal within the herd.
These large herds deposited dung and urine all over the grasses (their food), and so they would keep moving from one area to the next. This constant movement of large herds naturally prevented overgrazing of plants, while periodic trampling ensured protective covering of the soil.
As explained by Savory, grasses must degrade biologically before the next growing season. This easily occurs if the grass is trampled into the ground. If it does not decay biologically, it shifts into oxidation — a very slow process that results in bare soil, which then ends up releasing carbon rather than trapping and storing it.
We’ve also failed to understand how desertification affects our global climate. He explains that barren earth is much cooler at dawn and much hotter at midday. When land is left barren, it changes the microclimate on that swath of land.
According to Savory, two-thirds of the landmass on earth is already desertifying, and “Once you’ve done that to more than half of the land mass on the planet, you’re changing macroclimate,” he says.
In response to the Cowboy State Daily article, Elon Musk tweeted, “This really needs to stop. Killing some cows doesn’t matter for climate change.”6 Indeed, to think that eliminating cattle will put an end to climate woes is rather ridiculous. Climate cycles have always existed and will continue to exist, even if all human and animal life on earth is removed.
Besides, real-world evidence such as that presented by Savory proves we need grazing livestock to normalize local microclimates. So, the true answer to undesired climate shifts would be to normalize local microclimates around the globe, and we do that by taking animals out of indoor factory conditions and out into the fields.
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Notes
June 20th, 2023 by Richard Gale
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In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited without proper safety evaluation in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions: the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses.
Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of any pandemic proportions to Americans. The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which seemed far more plausible than previous EUAs.
Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled.
First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency.
Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat. Despite being insufficient, the evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product—diagnostic test, drug and vaccine—targets the organism, disease or condition.
Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation by the FDA, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks. In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances.
However, when we look back at the government’s debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, two other EUA requirements should be spotlighted. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA approved alternative product already available, unless the experimental product clearly shows to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits. Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.
One final EUA requirement is that there must be robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals.
Obviously there are important cautions to be considered after reviewing the EUA requirements and the dangerous implications if they are not properly followed or at worse abused. Foremost are the inherent heath risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines.
As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs and J&J’s adenovirus vaccine, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety.
But perhaps equally important, the public should only place their trust in these EUA-approved experimental drugs and vaccines if their evaluation by federal health authorities is conducted in a manner that is completely transparent and takes every potential ethical challenge into consideration. However these cautions were categorically ignored and transgressed in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests plagued the entire EUA review process.
Most egregious was that Anthony Fauci at the NIAID and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could effectively treat Covid-19 infections. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out.
Ivermectin was first introduced to the market in the early 1980s as an anti-parasitic drug for veterinary infections. However, its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential for treating human diseases. In 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans.
Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been found effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, circovirus-2 and others. The drug is capable of modulating a host immune response during viral infections and reduces pro-inflammatory cytokines that contribute to viral tissue damage.
Unsurprisingly, its discovers Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Ivermectin was not a drug simply hidden away in a back closet; rather it has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to bring ivermectin into becoming a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis. For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been greatly lessened. Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.
However, despite all the medical evidence confirming ivermectin’s strong antiviral properties and its impeccable safety record when administered properly, we instead witnessed a sophisticated government-orchestrated campaign to declare war against ivermectin and another antiviral drug, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), in favor of far more expensive and unproven experimental drugs, such as Remdesivir. Unlike the US, other nations were eager to find older drugs to repurpose against Covid-19 to protect their populations.
A Johns Hopkins University analysis offered the theory that a reason why many African countries had very few to near zero Covid-19 fatalities was because of widespread deployment of ivermectin. In February 2020, the National Health Commission of China, for example, was the first to include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for treating mild, moderate and severe SARS-2 cases. Why did the US and most European countries under the spell of the US and the WHO fail to follow suit?
Schematic showing IMPα’s role in nuclear transport of host and viral proteins, and mechanism of inhibition by ivermectin. (a) Host proteins, such as members of the STAT or NF-κB transcription factor families, localize in the nucleus through the action of the IMPα/β1 heterodimer, where the “IBB” (IMPβ-binding) region of IMPα (green curved line) is bound by IMPβ1 to enable cargo recognition by IMPα within the heterodimer; IMPβ1 subsequently mediates transport of the trimeric complex through the nuclear pore (NPC, nuclear pore complex) embedded within the nuclear envelope (NE) into the nucleus. This is followed by release within the nucleus to enable the transcription factors to carry out normal function in transcriptional regulation, including in the antiviral response. IMPα can only mediate nuclear import within the heterodimer with IMPβ1. (b) In viral infection, specific viral proteins (e.g., NS5 in the case of DENV, ZIKV, WNV) able to interact with IMPα utilize the IMPα/β1 heterodimer to access the nucleus and antagonize the antiviral response [14,27,28]. This is critical to enable optimal virus production as shown by mutagenic and inhibitor studies. Which SARS-CoV-2 proteins may access the nucleus in infected cells has not been examined (see Section 3). (c) The IMPα targeting compound ivermectin binds to IMPα (binding site shown as red lozenge) both within the IMPα/β heterodimer to dissociate it, and to free IMPα to prevent it binding to IMPβ1, thereby blocking NS5 nuclear import [11]. GW5074 (see Table 1) has been shown to exhibit a similar mechanism [29].
Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, were sharing data with American physicians about treatments they found were effective against the SARS-2 virus.
In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older drugs with antiviral properties could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results. Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their patient loads. Even those deaths reported were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies.
Very early into the pandemic, medical papers were showing that ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections. In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity had published their paper “The FDA- approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 virus in vitro.” Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no government health official paid any attention.
As of June 2023, a database for all reports investigating ivermectin against Covid-19 infections records a total of 209 studies, 161 peer-reviewed, and 98 involving controlled groups reporting an average 67 percent improvement for early infections and an 85 percent average success rate for use as a prophylaxis to prevent Covid-19 symptoms.
Moreover, prescribing ivermectin reduced mortality by 50 percent, compared to Remdesivir’s 12 percent. An Italian study observed a 416 percent increase in hepatocellular injuries among hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with Remdesivir. Even the WHO released a “conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, as there is currently no evidence that remdesivir improves survival and other outcomes in these patients.”
Although the science shows that HCQ should not be prescribed for late stage Covid-19 infections, it is highly effective as a very early stage treatment, with a 62 percent improvement rate and 72% reduction in mortality. These rates are far superior to those shown for Remdesivir and other FDA-approved EUA drugs. One study of 585 patients treated with HCQ along with azithromycin and zinc were relieved in under 3 days and none were hospitalized, required ventilation or died. Another study published in the journal Clinical and Translational Science reported 73% reduction in hospitalization with no serious adverse events.
Regarding Pfizer’s novel Covid-19 drug Paxlovid, the verdict remains open; the company does not permit independent random-controlled trials to investigate its drug. Therefore, we only have Pfizer’s own data to rely upon. Nevertheless, The Lancet published a study by a team of Chinese scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong School of Medicine that managed to look at Paxlovid’s use among critically ill patients hospitalized with Covid-19. The study reported a 27 percent higher risk of the infection progressing, a 67 percent increased risk in requiring ventilation, and 10 percent longer stays in ICU facilities.
Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines.
During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and anti-Covid-19 drugs such as Remdesivir, molnupiravir and Paxlovid. Even the PCR test failed to go through a robust evaluation to determine whether it could accurately predict a SARS-2 infection. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China.
From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear SARS-2 virus infections. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit infections from progressing. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.
Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, and with no promising treatment in sight, the FDA recommended HCQ but then quickly reversed its decision in June after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead’s novel drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s approval of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who were keeping a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems”
Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Although Merck was ivermectin’s manufacturer, the company discredited its own product. Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.” Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent). One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit. More worrisome, molnupiravir was found to potentially contribute to lethal mutations in RNA viruses. The drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.
And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. Again, the FDA worked in concert with the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit and revenues rather than improve human health and assure patient safety. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. As we have seen, alternatives were available and these were well known throughout the government health agencies. Instead of acting upon them and awarding EUAs to HCQ, ivermectin and other potential off-patent drugs, the government preferred to submit to their pharmaceutical masters’ demands and the financial mills that feed the CDC’s and FDA’s coffers.
The 3-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud.
We witnessed the CDC adopting a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit their economic and ideological agendas.
This explains Washington’s frequent uninformed decisions and its aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents. According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were funded by the NIH and Bill Gates and intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results. These studies were widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies.
Now that ivermectin, and to a lesser extent HCQ, have been recognized by more and more physicians as part of a first line defense to prevent and treat SARS-2 infections, we can realize that the FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives.
Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct, and this misconduct and conscious fraud have contributed to numerous unnecessary medically-induced injuries and deaths. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.
Nuremberg Trials. 1st row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel. 2nd row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality/Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S)
Between 1946 and 1947, Nazi medical doctors were tried in Nuremberg, Germany. Known as the “Doctors’ Trial”, the court found 16 of 23 doctors guilty of human experimentation that involved conducting experiments with lethal drugs and substances, sterilization, forced euthanasia and other heinous acts. These medical atrocities were conducted on some of the most vulnerable populations.
Seven Nazi doctors were executed by hanging. What became known as the Nuremberg Code after the tribunal is not a legally binding document, however it has held significant ethical and historical importance for medical research and human experimentation. The Code is regarded as a milestone in the development of international criminal law. It has informed international and domestic guidelines and regulations on human subjects, and many countries have implemented legal and ethical frameworks inspired by the Code to regulate their medical research and protect their citizens from medical abuse.
Despite serving as the baseline for modern medical ethics, it is unfortunate that no binding international treaty or declaration has been specifically initiated that directly abides by all of Nuremberg’s obligations. Nor has the Nuremberg Code been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association.
On the other hand, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research.
Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?
International organizations, such as the United Nations, have the moral obligation to investigate violations to human rights outlined in the Nuremberg Code. Now that it has been convincingly ascertained that Pfizer and Moderna intentionally concealed their mRNA vaccine trials’ safety and efficacy data and the government repeatedly lied to the American public, it is time to hold these parties to account. Forced and mandated Covid-19 vaccination violates the Code’s demand for “voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential” and the ICCPR’s prohibition that “no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.” Mandates to take dangerous experimental vaccines have ruined families, and livelihoods.
The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration also shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over Pfizer’s, Merck’s and Gilead’s novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former. This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above.
However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the motivation behind it to make room for a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety. This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted under the Nuremberg Code as a genocidal attack on humanity. If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history. In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice.
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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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June 20th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not students being exploited, its academics being manipulated to the point of ruinous ill-health. True, not all universities are equally rotten in the constellation of corporate manipulation, but each one is rotten in a slightly different way.
The nature of the rot starts at the top – a conventional wisdom. And that rot features workloads of an unrealistic nature (too many classes; unrecognised grading efforts; questionable budgets), all padding for the bloated managerial class that guiltlessly loots. It helps, as well, that most Australian universities have Human Resources departments larger than most academic departments. They are the stormtroopers for the managerial gauleiters, ensuring that dissenters are kept quiet, and anyone wishing to challenge the status quo kept in straitjacket and check.
Much has already been made of the enormous casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia. (One figure suggests that 70% of university workers in the sector are on casual or fixed term contracts.) They are the precariat, the equivalent of altar children whose bottoms, bodies and minds are passed around from course to course to be used by the relevant coordinator, program manager and associate dean for a finite duration.
The nature of such sessionalisation has seen an interesting twist of late. The hand-to-mouth precariat are not wanted – at least in certain institutions. Universities suddenly claim to have no money in the kitty to pay modest sums to sessional workers they have sadistically abused for years. This is despite huge financial windfalls that arose even as the global pandemic was raging. In the post-COVID landscape, the assumption is that ongoing academics (tenure is not a concept of any worth down under) will take charge, seize the reins, and teach themselves into the ground.
But as departments, schools and university sections are racketeering enterprises, those wishing to cosy up to obese, overly remunerated managers may be rewarded for their flabby morals. (Arse-crawling really ought to be a degree, but why theorise it, when the praxis is sorted out?) The crawlers can avoid teaching. They can assume administrative posts and discuss administration with others in similar administrative posts. They can dream, fiddle and fondle spreadsheets, conjuring up miracles from the ether. Their minds devoid of cerebration, they are the perfect adjutants and servants for the managerial institution.
As for research, this only matters if it can be pegged to the industrial grant making complex, which is only useful in producing more grants. The cosmos of receiving such awards is only relevant, not from the actual material it produces in terms of what knowledge, but for the process of gaining the award. Money can then go back into undeserving pockets, with recipient academics, to use a popular and atrocious term “buying themselves out” of teaching duties. As one Dean of no stature or relevance insisted with dull conviction, “It does not matter how many papers you write, or how many books you author – your work allocation is the same as the next one.”
A half-wit sloth with one publication authored with several other dunces deserves the same academic praise as the single author of numerous pieces, with a profile that is somewhat larger than the standard 200 metre radius worshipped in insular towers. The die, it would seem, is cast, before you realise an awful reality: the Dean wants you to be on her level, that of the spreadsheeting numbed wonder who draws in a fortnightly salary with minimal cognition – except to justify the dictates of the satanic college she serves.
Amidst this messy state of affairs, Australian universities continue engaging in that practice most heinous: the underpayment of staff, notably those on temporary contracts. The payment rates for casual academics – and, in some cases, ongoing staff – is nothing short of scandalous. In March 2022, the Senate Standing Committee on Economics noted that 21 out of Australia’s 40 universities had been guilty of underpaying staff.
So why express horror or surprise at the latest revelation that gift cards are being used to pay academic staff? An investigation by the Australian publication Crikey, using Freedom of Information, found this to be particularly evident at the University of Technology Sydney.
According to the report, “one faculty debated the use of gift cards as payment for academics as recently as last year.” A Microsoft Teams message from a human resources official also stated in October last year, with some agitation, that the faculty of health wanted “to have another run at the gift card idea.”
The UTS public relations team was immediately stung into action. “Gift cards are used at UTS, as they are at any other organisations, as a token of appreciation for non-employees who volunteer their time at the university, for example, as research participants, or as members of events panels or as one-off guest speakers,” reasoned one spokesperson.
The Senate Standing Committee similarly found that various “casual academic staff have been paid in gift certificates, instead of the wages, loadings, leave and superannuation to which they are entitled.” Dr Hayley Singer, a member of the University of Melbourne Casuals’ Network, told the committee that she had “contested this at the time because I know I can’t pay rent, pay for transport or pay for medical bills with gift cards. This is how casual and insecurely employed academics are treated when we bring our professionalism and our expertise onto campus and into the classroom”.
If only Singer realised that the whole function of the modern managerial university is to eschew and excoriate professionalism of any sort, notably in the areas that give education its greatest worth. To be professional is to be subversive, thereby making that individual dispensable. Best join the spread sheeters.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image is from Manya
June 20th, 2023 by Medea Benjamin
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As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.
Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.
Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece.
On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or de-mining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations as the propaganda at first claimed, but the long-awaited main offensive.
A Western official with intelligence access told the Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front… This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”
Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent and costly in Ukrainian lives.
“This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.
Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and NATO military advisers in Ukraine have confirmed that it lost 38 tanks in one night on June 8th, including newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.
Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to the New York Times that the Russians are trying to inflict as many casualties and destroy as many vehicles as possible in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first ten days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that General Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.
A senior European military officer in Ukraine provided more details of the carnage to Asia Times, calling Ukraine’s operations on June 8th and 9th a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics.
“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can,” he said. “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” he added, comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.
If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” plunges on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme Offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day (including Nicolas’s 20-year-old great-uncle, Robert Masterman), the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with over a million British, French and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only six miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.
The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders, who are sacrificing the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.
As Ukraine launches its offensive, NATO is conducting Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12th to 23rd, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, flying from German bases to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least 15 incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.
It seems that nobody involved in NATO has ever stumbled over the concept of a “security dilemma,” in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. Professor of Russian history Richard Sakwa has written, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”
These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine membership, while the U.S. and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war rages on and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.
The continued insistence that Ukraine will one day be a NATO member only means a prolongation of the conflict, as this is a red line that Russia insists cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.
But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Biden keeps U.S. Ukraine policy firmly under the thumbs of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to keep escalating U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, where Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.
Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that the neocons are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as they did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
With the retirement of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the State Department is losing the voice of a professional diplomat who was Obama’s chief negotiator for the JCPOA with Iran and urged Biden to rejoin the agreement, and who has taken steps to moderate U.S. brinkmanship toward China. While publicly silent on Ukraine, Sherman was a quiet voice for diplomacy in a war-mad administration.
Many fear that Sherman’s job will now go to Nuland, the leading architect of the ever-mounting catastrophe in Ukraine for the past decade, who already holds the #3 or #4 job at State as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
Other departures from the senior ranks at State and the Pentagon are likely to cede more ground to the neocons. Colin Kahl, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, worked with Sherman on the JCPOA, opposed sending F-16s to Ukraine, and has maintained that China will not invade Taiwan in the near future. Kahl is leaving the Pentagon to return to his position as a professor at Stanford, just as China hawk General C.Q. Brown will replace General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Milley retires in September.
Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Putin in Moscow on June 17th, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.
President Putin showed the African leaders the 18-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.
The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps.
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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
Featured image: “Plans love silence. There’ll be no announcement of the start.” Photo credit: Ukraine Defense Ministry
June 20th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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Sudden deaths — athletes, pilots, school bus drivers; what does Dr. Makis see as the correlating event behind them?
And what dangers do these pose for travelers, school children and others in the population?
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Featured image is a screenshot from the video
June 20th, 2023 by Philip Giraldi
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There have recently been a number of incidents that would be of interest if one has concerns about the sorry state of free speech in Europe and the United States, the so-called “democracies” who tend to boast about their freedoms and the rights of their citizens. The chosen weapon in the US and elsewhere in the Anglo-sphere has been the designation “hate speech” which also covers “hate writing,” “possessing hate literature or films,” and even “hate thinking.” In Europe, where “hate speech” is often referred to using the English words, the expression is often preceded by the word “illegal” to make sure that the point about consequences is made and the potential penalty is clearly understood. Some Europeans have in fact been convicted and sent to prison when they have falsely believed they were exercising free speech.
Though the “hate” designation was originally coined to discourage racist language and other forms of expression it has increasingly been exploited by Israel and its associated Jewish support groups to criminalize any criticism of Israel or of Jewish group behavior. It has extended its reach by moving into subsets, notably “holocaust denial” and “antisemitism” which are also regarded ipso facto as hate crimes in a context in which Jews are always regarded as victims, never as perpetrators of violence.
Much of what is going on might be described in fairly simple terms: Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its unprovoked lethal attacks on its neighbors might reasonably be described as “deplorable” or even genocidal in the case of the Palestinians. Beyond that, Israel, which pretends to be a democracy, operates a system of control over the Christian and Muslim minority within its own borders and also in the area it illegally occupies that is describable as “apartheid,” where the minority is compelled to accept limited resources and consistently harsh treatment from the dominant Jewish population. More to the point, the extremist government coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the situation even worse for those non-Jews that it controls, with talk of introducing mass expulsions and imprisonments. The death toll of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces has also been going up, with more than 150 Palestinians killed this year, including 26 children.
To be sure, Israel has become a home for Jews that can no longer tolerate anyone else. Some ministers in the new government are particularly vile in their views but it is to be assumed that Netanyahu and others in his administration are genuinely supportive of turning Israel into a truly and even exclusively Jewish state, which is in fact how it legally defines itself. The one minister most cited for his cruelty and racism is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for support of a Jewish terrorist group. He is a former supporter of the now deceased right wing fanatic Meir Kahane, and, like Kahane, envisions an Israel that is as Palestinian free as possible and centered exclusively on Jewish interests. He has called for deporting Arabs who aren’t loyal to a Jewish Israel, annexing all of the West Bank and exercising full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the Muslim venerated Al-Aqsa mosque is located. He supports legislation defying international agreements to “divide” the Al-Aqsa site to permit regular Jewish worshippers and there have even been suggestions that the Israeli government will seek to rebuild the so-called Biblical Second Temple, destroyed in the First Century by the Romans, in that location.
Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He has led marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns and has even brought settlers and other extremists to the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and to interrupt Friday prayers. To cap the irony, he has been since November 2022 the National Security Minister, which gives him authority over the police, to include the so-called Border Police as well as the police forces located on the illegally occupied West Bank. Indeed, as a practical matter, Ben-Gvir is seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians. He has also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.
Another extremist who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He demands a state judiciary that relies only on Torah and Jewish traditional law. Accused of inciting hatred against Arab Israelis, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, that “it’s a mistake that David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw all of you out in 1948.”
The increasing brutality of the Israeli government and its security forces have produced a reaction among many observers worldwide, so the supporters of Israel have engaged in their own first strike frequently using the “hate crime” weapon. They have basically turned the hate crime legislation to their advantage by convincing many nations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of the “hate crime” antisemitism to automatically include criticism of Israel as being equivalent to hatred of Jews. When that doesn’t work the powerful Israel lobby can also resort to much more brutal threats. When Iceland sought to make illegal infant circumcision five years ago, regarding it as genital mutilation performed on an unconsenting child, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) threatened to unleash Jewish power to destroy their economy and international reputation as punishment for making their country “inhospitable to Jews.”
Now that the “hate crime” genie together with the associated links to holocaust denial and antisemitism have been released from the bottle, they are being used regularly to silence anyone who even indirectly criticizes prominent Jews like George Soros. Conservatives including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have recently been on the receiving end of the antisemitism label after referring to Soros and his “Globalist” agenda. It is my belief that Tucker was fired at least in part due to Jewish pressure on FOX as he had been very critical of groups like the hysterical ADL and its hideous director Jonathan Greenblatt.
Roger Waters, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd, has emerged as a powerful critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As a consequence, he has been hounded by authorities in Europe, has had his concerts canceled, and has been threatened with legal action to make him shut up. The Biden Administration’s antisemitism Czar Deborah Lipstadt has also attacked him, saying
“I wholeheartedly concur with [an online] condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.” She was referring to a tweet stating that “I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis. In Germany. Enough is enough. Holocaust trivialization is criminalized across the EU.”
The State Department, speaking for the White House, then piled on adding that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust… The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”
One might observe that the depiction of Waters is basically untrue – he is a critic of Israeli crimes against humanity but does not hate Jews. One might also add how the fact that the United States State Department actually has a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism speaks for itself and tells you exactly who is in charge in Washington. I wonder how much it costs to run Lipstadt’s mouth from a no doubt well-appointed office in Foggy Bottom each year? Maybe someone should do a cost/benefit analysis and give Debbie her walking papers.
Beyond that, several other recent stories show how it all often works in practice to confront and silence critics. Swedish pop star Zara Larsson is facing what is obviously a coordinated backlash on social media after criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In an Instagram message to her 6.3 million followers, the 23-year-old declared the ongoing cross-border violence, which is killing mostly Arabs, was a “crime” against Palestinians. Her effort to be somewhat even handed was ignored, in the message, which she later deleted, where she wrote “We have to stand up for Jewish people all over the world facing anti-Semitic violence and threats, but we must also call out a state upholding apartheid and KILLING civilians, funded by American dollars.” She ended the message with the hashtag “#freepalestine.”
Larsson was hardly calling for targeting Jews or anything like that, but the reaction to her comment was symptomatic of the typical overkill response engaged in by Israel and its friends whenever anyone challenges the standard narrative of Israeli perpetual victimhood. Two other instances of comments about Israel leading to an overwhelming response to punish the perpetrators took place during the past month in the United States at college commencement ceremonies. The first was on May 12th, at a graduation ceremony for the law school of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Queens native who was selected by the graduating 2023 class to speak during the May 12 ceremony, praised CUNY for supporting student activism, citing in particular the acceptance of student groups protesting against Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians. She said “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young and even attacking funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinians homes and businesses. As it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes. Silence is no longer acceptable.”
The response to Mohammed was immediate, including a scathing news report in the New York Post, a call by several Jewish groups to cut funding to CUNY and demands that the law school dean be fired. And the controversy again made news when a second student spoke out at a commencement at El Camino community college in Torrance California. Jana Abulaban, 18, strongly criticized Israeli government policies during her speech on June 9th.
Abulaban, who was born in Jordan in a family of Palestinian refugees, reportedly felt “inspired” by the speech of Fatima Mousa Mohammed and she told the audience “I gift my graduation to all Palestinians who have lost their life and those who continue to lose their lives every day due to the oppressive apartheid state of Israel killing and torturing Palestinians as we speak.’’
There was, of course an immediate reaction to the Abulaban speech coming from a variety of West Coast and New York pro-Israel sources. Brooke Goldstein, a claimed human-rights lawyer founder of The Lawfare Project, said, “This is yet one more example of the systemic Jew-hatred we’re seeing on our college campuses. When a student gives a commencement speech targeting Jews, trafficking in modern tropes of antisemitism, it’s clear that there has been a complete failure in that school to promote social justice for the Jewish people. If any other minority group were targeted like this, there would be consequences for the bigot. The Jewish community deserves no less.”
Of course, both women only spoke the truth about what is happening in the Middle East. Neither attacked the Jewish religion or Jews per se and only criticized Israel’s appalling behavior. When I last checked, Israel was a foreign country with both foreign and domestic policies that are considered very questionable by most of the world, so why should it be protected from being challenged in the United States? The two women were brave to speak up as they did, surely knowing that they would be targeted by the Jewish state’s many friends and supporters. Those of us who continue to speak out on Israel’s genocidal policies can likewise expect no less, particularly as both the federal as well as many state governments and also the media are now on a witch hunt directed against those who seek to speak the truth. But we must persevere. As Fatima Mousa Mohammed put it, “Silence is no longer acceptable.”
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TUR
June 20th, 2023 by Global Research News
By , June 19, 2023
Many of you have probably seen that even the Washington Post is admitting to complete failure for Ukraine, NATO, and the US in their so-called “counteroffensive”. More than a week after the start of Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive, which Kyiv and its Western supporters say will push the Russian invaders back to pre-invasion lines, there are signs that Ukraine is unlikely to achieve lightning gains.
Russia-Ukraine Crisis: The Meandering Roadmap to Ultimate Peaceful Settlement
By , June 19, 2023
At the beginning, it was referred to, in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, as “special military operation” aimed largely at “demilitarization” and “denazification” in neighboring Ukraine. We know from history that both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union.
Disagreement Between NATO’s Stoltenberg and America’s Biden on Ukraine Membership in NATO
By , June 19, 2023
On June 14th, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg repeatedly insisted upon facilitating Ukraine’s becoming a member-nation of that marketing organization for the weapons that are produced by U.S.-and-allied weapons-manufacturers, but America’s President Joe Biden made clear on June 17th that he will not allow softening the existing requirements in order to admit Ukraine into NATO.
Putin’s Shocking Revelations Show There Can be No Negotiations with Kiev
By , June 19, 2023
On June 17, during a meeting with a number of African leaders and delegates who came to Moscow to offer a solution that would end the Ukrainian conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a shocking revelation and even gave details of a March 2022 peace deal with the Kiev regime. The agreement, titled the “Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine” (negotiated with the mediation of the Turkish government), was actually signed by the Kiev regime.
By , June 19, 2023
The post below is from africanagenda.net, reporting on a punchy fifteen minute speech by Kenyan President, William Ruto, to the African Union Parliament on the disrespectful manner African leaders are treated by the developed sector. (See video).
Putin and What Really Matters in the Chessboard
By , June 19, 2023
After examining the exchanges, a conclusion is imperative: Russian war media is not staging an offensive even as the collective West attacks Russia 24/7 with its massive NGO/soft power media apparatus. Moscow is not – yet? – fully engaged in the trenches of information warfare; as it stands Russian media is only playing defense.
If Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism, Then How Do You Explain All This Evidence?
By , June 19, 2023
We see an odds ratio of 5 when comparing autism in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed in MULTIPLE studies. The before:after odds are even more extraordinary. How can we ignore all this evidence?
Putin Reveals Details About the Defunct Draft March 2022 Peace Treaty with Ukraine
By , June 19, 2023
President Putin surprised his guests from the African peace delegation on Saturday by revealing details about Russia’s now-defunct draft treaty with Ukraine. It would have re-enshrined neutrality in that country’s constitution and also limited its number of military forces. According to him, it had even been signed by the Ukrainian side, which then discarded it in response to pressure from the Anglo-American Axis (AAA) despite Russia pulling its troops back from Kiev as part of an agreed-upon goodwill gesture.
Laos: Why the World’s Most Bombed Country May Still Suffer From These Wounds After a Hundred Years
By , June 19, 2023
No, the people and the country of Laos had not harmed the far away located, mighty USA in any way at all. Despite this, the people of Laos faced their heaviest destruction from the USA, worse than what they faced even during direct colonial rule, due to two factors.
NATO Attacks Europe. Manlio Dinucci
By , June 19, 2023
Because of rising energy prices, writes the Wall Street Journal, “the Eurozone is sliding into recession as inflation hurts consumption, and Europe is stuck with the economic equivalent of a long Covid.” In this Europe began “the largest multinational deployment of air forces in NATO history” with the “Air Defender” exercise taking place in Germany under U.S. command.
June 19th, 2023 by Salim Lamrani
June 19th, 2023 by Simon Allison
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Yoweri Museveni, infamously, manages his own Twitter account. Uganda’s 78-year-old president knows how to craft a viral tweet, but he does make the occasional mistake.
On 5 June, Museveni met on Zoom with six fellow African presidents.
They were discussing their proposed mission to mediate Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Also present, officially, was Jean-Yves Ollivier, a controversial French businessman who is claiming the credit for organising the African peace mission (“I will play Kissinger,” he told the Financial Times, referring to the notorious US diplomat who has been implicated in multiple alleged war crimes).
After the Zoom call, Museveni tweeted a screenshot of the video gathering. There, sharing Ollivier’s screen, was a middle-aged, greying white man, whose involvement had not previously been made public – and for good reason.
The man, whose name is Ivor Ichikowitz, owns one of the largest arms manufacturers on the African continent. Ichikowitz’s Paramount Group sells weaponised drones, infantry combat vehicles, naval patrol ships and fighter jets, among other weapons systems.
Its clients include dictatorial regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Congo. The group has been implicated in multiple corruption allegations – most notably in Malawi, where a scandal over a $145-million contract to supply patrol boats helped to bring down the government of former president Joyce Banda. Ichikowitz denies any wrongdoing, and says that neither he nor his company has ever been formally charged with corruption.
Ichikowitz’s Paramount Group sells drones, infantry combat vehicles, naval patrol ships and fighter jets, among other weapons systems.
The murky nature of Ichikowitz’s involvement was highlighted when The Continent requested comment from a spokesperson for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is ostensibly leading the African peace mission, and was present on the Zoom call.
“It’s the first time I hear of Ivor’s involvement,” Vincent Magwenya told The Continent. “I’m not certain as to what will be Ivor’s role.”
Ichikowitz is a major donor to the African National Congress, Ramaphosa’s political party.
Ichikowitz and Ollivier’s Brazzavile Foundation did not respond to The Continent’s requests to answer questions for this story. But Ollivier, in private correspondence seen by The Continent, said of the arms dealer’s role in the peace mission: “Mr Ichikowitz is for a long time a friend of the Brazzaville Foundation. In the present initiative, Mr Ichikowitz [has] offered pro bono resources, contacts, access and advice. He was officially [thanked] by the six heads of state during the 5 June Summit meeting for his contribution.”
The stated intention of the African peace mission is to end the war in Ukraine, which escalated when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But the mission is not off to an auspicious start.
By the time the delegation disembarked at the Kyiv train station on Friday morning, three presidents had already dropped out (Egypt’s Abdel- Fattah El-Sisi, the Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso and Museveni).
Ramaphosa was travelling with a reduced security detail after the bulk of his security was grounded at the airport in Warsaw. Polish police said they did not have the appropriate authorisations for their weapons. This claim is disputed by the South African government, who said Poland was trying to “sabotage” the mission.
On arrival in Kyiv, the presidents – Ramaphosa, Azali Assoumani of the Comoros, Macky Sall of Senegal and Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia – were greeted by the sound of air-raid sirens and explosions. These were caused by a Russian missile attack, which may lead to awkward questions on Saturday, when the African leaders are due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg. As their timeline was public, Russian authorities would have been well aware of the presence of four African presidents during the missile strike.
The revelation of Ichikowitz’s role, and his potential commercial interest, is likely to further complicate the negotiations. It is not known whether Paramount Group is selling weapons to either side in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, although at least one piece of military equipment produced by Paramount – a Marauder- type armoured vehicle – has been spotted with Russian forces on the front line, according to news website DefenceWeb.
Ichikowitz is known to be connected to at least one major oligarch who is close to Putin. Both Ichikowitz and the Brazzaville Foundation’s Ollivier spoke at the 2019 edition of the Rhodes Forum, described by some as “Putin’s Davos”.
The Rhodes Forum is organised by Vladimir Yakunin, a former KGB officer who later served as the president of Russian Railways. He has been under United States sanctions since 2014 due to his support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Australian sanctions on Yakunin describe him as “a close personal and financial associate of Vladimir Putin”. Despite this, in 2020, the Brazzaville Foundation – of whom Ichikowitz has been an enthusiastic supporter and funder – announced a formal partnership with Yakunin’s think tank, the Dialogue of Civilizations, saying they “share many of the same objectives”. It has since said that this partnership “was never implemented”. Ollivier’s ties to Russia are even closer, having served as an advisor to the state- owned nuclear energy company, Rosatom. This is the same energy company that was embroiled in a massive corruption scandal in South Africa under Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma – a scandal that in part paved the way for Ramaphosa to take power.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declined to comment specifically on the role of Ichikowitz and Ollivier. He told The Continent:
“When anyone in the world comes up with initiatives that ‘we will talk to Ukraine and Russia and settle everything’, we politely advise: if you want to actually help, and not pretend to mediate, so as not to take a position, focus on specific actions.”
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Featured image: Ivor Ichikowitz (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
June 19th, 2023 by Kester Kenn Klomegah
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At the beginning, it was referred to, in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, as “special military operation” aimed largely at “demilitarization” and “denazification” in neighboring Ukraine. We know from history that both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet’s collapse in 1991, all the Soviet republics became independent states, and have legal claims to their individual territorial integrity and political sovereignty within the international law recognised by the United Nations.
As time moves the military situation between Russia and Ukraine have been described differently in media reports. We read descriptions such as “crisis” or “conflict” or “war” in reports. Whatever be the standard case, the situation is seen and understood from different perspectives. There are, of course, several undermining factors or reasons for Russia’s action in Ukraine.
While Putin during his first speech announcing the operation, he added explicitly that Russia would not “occupy” the territory of Ukraine. But seemingly, among Russia’s main goals is to take “full control” over the Southern Region as well as the Eastern Donbas region off Ukraine. Some other officials say Russia wanted simply to protect its Russian-language speaking population in Eastern Ukraine, while other cite political factors.
In mid-June, talking to seven African countries in St. Petersburg, Putin interrupted the presentations to explain the the concept and the reasons behind the action in Ukraine.
He reiterated that
“all the problems in Ukraine were conceived after a state non-constitutional armed and bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014. This coup was supported by Western sponsors. As a matter of fact, they even specified the amount they spent on the preparation and execution of the coup. And this coup is the source of power of the current leaders in Kiev. That is the first thing.”
Second, afterwards, part of Ukraine’s population did not support the coup and declared that the population of these areas would not submit to the people who came to power following the event. Russia was forced to support these people, bearing in mind the historic ties with the areas, and the cultural-language bonds with the people living in these areas.
“For a long time, we tried to restore the situation in Ukraine via peaceful means. If you have heard, you must have heard something about this, corresponding agreements were signed between the opposing parties in the capital of Belarus – Minsk. In this way, the so-called Minsk settlement process was launched,” he stressed in his explanation.
As it turned out, the western countries and the Kiev government authorities, then declared practically and publicly that they would not adhere to the peaceful agreements, and actually withdrew from that peaceful process. It was after this, that Russia was forced to recognise the independent states that had been formed in Ukraine, which we had not recognised for eight years: the Lugansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic.
On the international-legal aspect of this case, Putin said that Russia had the right to recognise the independence of these territories. And it did, in full compliance with the UN Charter, because pursuant to the corresponding articles of the UN Charter these areas were entitled to declare their independence.
According to Putin, after signing the Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation, Russia had the right to render assistance to them in full compliance with the UN Charter. Because the Kiev regime made numerous attempts to resolve the issue using arms and, in fact, launched military actions in 2014 using aviation, tanks and artillery against civilians. It was the Kiev regime that sparked this war in 2014. And in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, Russia had the right to render aid to them citing the self-defence clause.
At first, Putin really appreciated the fact that the African leaders have a balanced approach towards the Ukrainian crisis and accepted the proposal to hold talks regarding the situation around Ukraine. That the African leaders have a clear and deep understanding of the situation between Russia and Ukraine.
Under the headline – Kremlin decides that goal to “demilitarise” Ukraine has largely been achieved – the Ukrainskaya Pravda reported that Kremlin’s Press Secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had said that the task of the aggressor country on the so-called “demilitarisation” of Ukraine has largely been fulfilled.
In an interview with RT Arabic mid-June, Peskov said “Indeed, Ukraine was heavily militarised at the time of the beginning of the special military operation, as the Russian Federation calls the war against Ukraine. And, as Russian President Vladimir Putin put it, one of the tasks was to demilitarise Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely completed. Ukraine is using less and less of its weapons. And more and more it uses the weapons systems, that Western countries supply it with.”
“The countries of the West, namely the North Atlantic alliance under the leadership of Washington, are increasingly – directly and indirectly – getting involved in this conflict. They intervene in this conflict and become a party to the conflict. Of course, this leads to the fact that the conflict is delayed in time. This leads to the fact that the situation in Europe becomes more tense and unpredictable. And, of course, this obliges Russia to apply more decisive measures to ensure the safety of people in Donbas and the security of the Russian Federation.”
Peskov, in another interview to Russia Today (RT) this mid-June also stated that the “special military operation” has transformed into “war” between Russia and the West. Russia’s special military operation started to defend the Donbass region and now it has virtually turned into a war with the collective West, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in the interview.
“In fact, the special military operation against Ukraine, against the Kiev regime, was launched to ensure the safety of the people of Donbass. This is correct. Now it is practically a war between Moscow and the collective West,” the Kremlin spokesman said.
Recalling Putin’s statement about establishing a “cordon sanitaire” on the territory of Ukraine if the shelling of Russian regions continues, Peskov said that as the range of weapons delivered to Ukraine expands, so will the buffer zone, “that is, the distance that we will have to move Ukrainians away from our territories.”
During this one and half years inside special military operation (to use the official Russian phrase), Russian officials have given several reasons for its current action in Ukraine. One typical interesting reason came from Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekaev, who’s the acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, when in April 2022 he announced that Russia was fighting to establish a land corridor through Ukrainian territory connecting Russia to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014.
“Since the beginning of the second phase of the special operation, one of the tasks of the Russian Army is to establish full control over Donbas and Southern Ukraine. This will provide a land corridor to Crimea,” he said, according to TASS news agency.
According to him, if Russia could get control over Ukraine’s South, that would give the country’s forces access to Transnistria, a separatist statelet in Moldova, where a contingent of Russian forces has been stationed since the early 1990s. The tension between the neighbours has been bubbling for a while. The protracted conflict first brewed over in 2014 after the widespread Euromaidan protest in Ukraine forced the parliament to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office.
The removal of Yanukovych, who was regarded as pro-Russia, vexed the leadership in Moscow, and they thought the best way to strike back was to reclaim Ukraine’s region of Crimea, which used to be under Russia’s control from 1783 to 1954. The Kremlin then kicked off operation “Returning Crimea” and it engineered a series of pro-Russia campaigns across several areas in the city. The invasion of Crimea followed as the “little green men” – masked soldiers without insignia but with distinctly Russian weaponry and equipment – took to the city.
Russia then launched a referendum in the city, and in the infamously skewed plebiscite, a staggering 97 percent of the population voted for the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The annexation of Crimea by Russia was a blow to Ukraine. But the onslaught had not reached an end for Ukraine as Russia began to secretly provide weaponry support for separatists in the country’s eastern region.
This violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty helped the rebels claim control of the eastern city of Donbas with over 14,000 lives lost in the region. To end the bloody crisis, an agreement was hammered out in Minsk, Belarus, in February 2015.
The resolution tagged the ‘Minsk agreement’ was monitored by United Nations, and it proposed a cease-fire with all parties signing to power down their machinery of war. Despite a ceasefire agreement, both parties have not been at peace, and the Russia-backed rebels have claimed further swathes of land in the east of Ukraine.
At least between January and June this year, Deputy Russian Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has interchangeably, that at different times, used the words such as military operation, crisis, conflicts and war in his speeches. The most recent statement, Medvedev said that Russia’s conflict with “Nazi Ukraine” would be permanent and if regime changed occurs in Kiev, new authorities would not ask to join NATO.
“What does this mean from a practical point of view? We don’t need Ukraine in NATO. In any case, until any remnant of this country remains in its present state. Therefore, for Nazi Ukraine the conflict will be permanent. And a new political regime in Kiev (if there is one) will definitely not ask for NATO membership,” Medvedev asserted.
According to Medvedev, negotiations are possible only on the subject of “post-conflict world order” and sees no point in conducting negotiations on the situation in Ukraine and around it at the moment. “This is certainly so. How can you engage in equal talks with a half-decayed neo-Nazi country, which is under external governance? Talks are possible only with its masters, namely with Washington. There is no one else to talk to. However, it is too early to speak about it,” the Russian official added. “That is why there is no need at all for any negotiations,” Medvedev wrote.
Any future Russian political leader that will try to change the discourse on the country’s development that emerged in 2022, will be perceived as a traitor, so there will be no return to the “pre-war” past, Medvedev opined on his Telegram channel commenting on “sweet dreams” of Russians who left the country about the return to previous times.
“As for peace plans being proposed, all of them should be considered,” Medvedev said during his May visit to Vietnam, commenting on peace initiatives put forward by China and other countries. On the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the Chinese Foreign Ministry published a document containing proposals for a political settlement of the Ukrainian crisis.
The conflict in Ukraine may continue for decades if the very essence of its neo-Nazi government is not eliminated, Medvedev, told reporters during a visit to Vietnam. “This conflict is for a long time, for decades, maybe. It is a new reality, new living conditions,” he said, and was convinced that if the incumbent Kiev regime remains in power, “there will be, say three years of truce, two years of conflict and then everything will go over again. The very essence of the neo-Nazi rule in Kiev needs to be eliminated,” he added.
The Chinese 12-point plan included calls for a ceasefire, respect for the legitimate security interests and concerns of all countries, settlement of the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, a prisoner swap between Moscow and Kiev, and refusal to impose unilateral sanctions without a relevant decision of the United Nations Security Council.
Details about the African delegation’s proposals were thin, to description given by several media reports. On the other side, Russian officials have also reacted different, some expressed signs of pessimism. For instance, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the three-hour meeting that the Africans’ peace plan consisted of ten (10) elements, but “was not formulated on paper.”
“The main conclusion, in my opinion, from today’s conversation is that our partners from the African Union have shown an understanding of the true causes of the crisis that was created by the West, and have shown an understanding that it is necessary to get out of this situation on the basis of addressing the underlying causes,” Lavrov said, but the African delegation had not brought the Russian leader any message from Zelenskyy.
“The peace initiative proposed by African countries is very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
“But, President Putin has shown interest in considering it. He spoke concisely about our position. Not all provisions can be correlated with the main elements of our position, but this does not mean that we do not need to continue working.”
On June 17, President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa; the current Chairperson of the African Union and Comoros president, Ghazali Othman; President of Senegal, Macky Sall; President of Zambia, Hakainde Hichilema and Prime Minister of Egypt, Mostafa Madbouly arrived in St. Petersburg to discuss “the African peace initiative” regarding the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine. In addition, the delegation included representatives of Uganda and Congo.
The key aim of the African peace mission primarily to propose “confidence-building measures” in order to facilitate peace between the two countries. It was to seek a peaceful settlement of the conflict which began February 24, 2022.
Ramaphosa made the proposal hoping to convince Russia and Ukraine to opt for dialogue, find a solution to the conflict.
“We would like to propose that this war must be settled through negotiations and through diplomatic means. The war cannot go on forever. All wars have to be settled and come to an end at some stage. And we are here to communicate this very clear message because the war is having a negative impact on the African continent, and indeed on many other countries around the world,” said Ramaphosa.
The day before, on 16 June, the African delegation visited Kyiv, where it took part in negotiations with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Reports say Zelenskyy criticised the rhetoric of African leaders who call Russia’s war against Ukraine a “conflict” or a “crisis”. The president was also surprised that representatives of African countries emphasised their own grain and fertiliser crises, while avoiding to comment on the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian leader, speaking during a press conference in Kyiv, “I am grateful to the participants of our meeting for their support of the principle of territorial integrity of states and the protection of nations from aggression,” Zelenskyy said.
“Today, I saw the potential of our collaborative efforts on specific aspects of the peace formula. Naturally, I have extended an invitation to African countries to participate in the upcoming Global Peace Summit, for which we are diligently preparing,” Zelenskyy said, and further expressed his determination to attract as many countries as possible to the Global Peace Summit.
During the G20 Summit in November 2022, Zelenskyy presented a comprehensive “peace formula” consisting of ten key points. These points encompass the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian troops, the release of all detainees, the establishment of a tribunal to hold those responsible for the aggression accountable, as well as guarantees of security for Ukraine. Zelenskyy’s office also emphasized that Ukraine is open to considering all peace formulas proposed by other countries, but only the Ukrainian formula can actually be implemented.
On the other side from St. Petersburg discussions, Putin assured African leaders his logic of war is flawless and consistent with United Nations Charter. But in fact, the United Nations reports categorically indicated that Russia violated international law when it invaded Ukraine’s Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts in 2014 and followed up with a much larger invasion of the entire country in 2022. Russia has primarily violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity and its political sovereignty which it attained in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS) and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 19th, 2023 by Eric Zuesse
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On June 14th, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg repeatedly insisted upon facilitating Ukraine’s becoming a member-nation of that marketing organization for the weapons that are produced by U.S.-and-allied weapons-manufacturers, but America’s President Joe Biden made clear on June 17th that he will not allow softening the existing requirements in order to admit Ukraine into NATO.
The weapons-manufacturers’ sales are booming from the hundreds of billions of dollars of current and future-expected sales that are resulting from the burnup and breakdown of their products in the battlefields of Ukraine, and from the depletion of NATO stockpiles of those weapons in order to donate them to Ukraine so as to kill Russians there.
The manufacturers benefit greatly from this war.
And those weapons-manufacturers might therefore be disappointed that long-term future sales-volumes won’t be what they had been expecting from that war, if Ukraine becomes defeated.
So: there’s intensified effort to assist Ukraine against Russia.
What’s now forcing the issue upon Biden was described by me on June 18th under the headline “U.S. Empire will either lose Ukraine to Russia, or fail to win Taiwan from China — or both”, and I explained there that even the U.S. Government’s own war-planners are now concluding that America is on the losing side in both of those central targets for conquest in WW III (Russia and China); and, so, America will have to either lose Ukraine to Russia, or else will have to give up its (Deep State’s) aim of taking Taiwan from China.
Even America’s own war-planners have now concluded that if push comes to shove over China’s province of Taiwan, then China will force America to shove-off from Taiwan, and the result of a war over Taiwan now would be a destroyed Taiwan, a weakened China, and a humiliated and clearly #3 military power U.S.; so, the new plan by America’s Deep State (which group consists of the controlling owners of U.S.-based international corporations) is for the U.S. Government to instead cut way back on the 47% of U.S. discretionary spending that currently is non-military, and to place the U.S. economy as quickly as possible onto a full-fledged war footing, such as had happened when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
Helping Ukraine now against Russia is supposed to be like helping Britain in WW II against Germany. However, though America’s war-planners are advising this de-emphasis on Ukraine, in order to increase emphasis against China, Biden wouldn’t be able to win re-election if the plan to go on a war-footing against China becomes clear to the public before Election Day, 5 November 2024. So: the war in Ukraine needs to be held in abeyance till at least then — if that is even possible.
Consistent with the recommendations of its war-planners, America, which has already seriously depleted its ammunition-supplies in order to enable Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine’s battlefields, will have to instead rebuild its supplies specifically designed for the war against China, and doing this will require several years if it even can be done at all. But NOT doing it would terminate the U.S. Deep State’s objective, ever since it took over on 25 July 1945, for the U.S. Government to become the world’s first all-encompassing global empire, and to win control over the entire planet. That is what America’s billionaires demand.
Stoltenberg, by contrast, represents not only America’s aristocracy, but also the vassal-aristocracies of the other NATO-member countries; and they don’t want to have anything to do with a war against China. They have always been aspiring to conquer Russia, for their (as Hitler called it) “Lebensraum.”
Consequently, perhaps NATO is in the process of breaking up.
The war in Ukraine will have to be put on hold, whether Stoltenberg wants to or not.
What the response of Europe’s aristocracies will be to that, isn’t yet clear, at all. But they (as always since 25 July 1945) will have to abide by it.
In my personal opinion, the likeliest outcome from all of this will be that America will soon become the world’s third-most-powerful country, and the entire pre-Truman (i.e., FDR) plan for what the post-WW-II world-order will become, will be finally placed onto the table, for serious international consideration — which Truman and Eisenhower had blocked from ever happening. If that does happen, then the U.N., IMF, World Bank, and all the rest, will be fundamentally revised. The reputations of Truman and Eisenhower will then plunge, as historians will then be viewing them rapidly receding in their rear-view mirrors. They were the two worst Presidents in U.S. history. They retarded — prevented, for almost a century — progress in the international order. The 297 U.S. military invasions (244 of which happened AFTER the Soviet Union ended in 1991) that they and their successors perpetrated (each of which invasion was aggressive, not defensive) after WW II ended, and the 60 known U.S. coups (all of them after 1947), are more hell than perhaps anyone (other than maybe Hitler) perpetrated in at least modern times. Germany (on account of Hitler) has a lot to live down (and that’s publicly acknowledged because they lost the War), but so too does America after the deaths of FDR and Hitler (and maybe the U.S. Government’s shame will be publicly acknowledged after U.S. dominance ends).
Anyway: Biden, who got placed into power largely by America’s armaments manufacturers, now needs them to be in the back seat for a while. Stoltenberg won’t be happy about that. But Europe’s billionaires won’t hold it against him. They’ll understand. However, they won’t participate in America’s war against China. And this is why America created AUKUS for that. The only European country in that is Britain.
Ukraine will now be just Europe’s problem. It was America’s coup, but — at least for a while — it will be Europe’s mess to deal with (and America, which controls NATO, won’t allow Ukraine into NATO). The plan is that, if Biden wins re-election, America will go onto a war-footing against China.
In Europe, America was allied with UK and Germany against Russia. In Asia, America will be allied with Australia, Japan, and South Korea against China. Already, Russia and China have done their first joint military exercise.
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This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
June 19th, 2023 by Drago Bosnic
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Respecting deals between countries or governments goes back millennia and includes civilizations such as Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians. This was always considered a sort of litmus test of a certain country’s or ruler’s reputation and it stuck for a very long time. In essence, this practice predates the very concept of international law and is in many ways its direct predecessor. However, it would seem certain countries haven’t really got the memo about how important respecting treaties is and what disastrous consequences may follow if one doesn’t.
On June 17, during a meeting with a number of African leaders and delegates who came to Moscow to offer a solution that would end the Ukrainian conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a shocking revelation and even gave details of a March 2022 peace deal with the Kiev regime. The agreement, titled the “Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine” (negotiated with the mediation of the Turkish government), was actually signed by the Kiev regime.
However, the Neo-Nazi junta decided to discontinue its compliance with the treaty as soon as Russia kept its own initial end of the bargain.
Apart from other, more technical details, the deal included a clause that was supposed to be one of the key points of the Ukrainian Constitution and that would guarantee the country’s permanent neutrality. The very fact that Russia was insisting on this makes the claims that Moscow allegedly wanted to “conquer Ukraine” a moot point. In return for neutrality, the Russian military was to pull out and effectively end the special military operation (SMO). To back up his claims, President Putin also presented the relevant documentation of the abortive peace deal to the African delegates.
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that, with President Erdogan’s assistance, as you know, a string of talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Turkey so as to work out both the confidence-building measures you mentioned, and to draw up the text of the agreement. We did not discuss with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be classified, but we have never presented it, nor commented on it. This draft agreement was initiated by the head of the Kiev negotiation team. He put his signature there. Here it is,” Putin stated and then presented the documents. (emphasis added)
The documents also revealed that apart from Russia, other guarantors of the agreement were the United States, the United Kingdom and France. The only non-Western guarantor was China.
The deal also specified the future size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), as well as what types of weapons and equipment it would be allowed to field. Expectedly, numbers proposed by the two sides were vastly different, as Moscow suggested the AFU shouldn’t have more than 85,000 soldiers, while the National Guard should be limited to 15,000. On the other hand, the Kiev regime insisted that the number should be 250,000.
In terms of weapons and equipment, Russia proposed that the AFU should be capped at 342 MBTs (main battle tanks), 1029 armored vehicles, 96 MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems), 50 combat and 52 support aircraft. However, for its part, the Neo-Nazi junta insisted on having 800 MBTs, 2400 armored vehicles, 600 MLRS, 74 combat and 86 support aircraft. The agreement was also supposed to include limitations on the number of ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles), MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems), mid to long-range SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems and several other types of weapons and military equipment.
To show that its goal was never to “conquer Ukraine”, as well as to demonstrate its readiness to honor the peace treaty, Moscow even pulled out its troops from northern Ukraine, including from the outskirts of Kiev it reached in mere days. Obviously, the actual aim of the SMO was to conduct an operation similar to that in Georgia in 2008, when Tbilisi was forced to sign a peace deal after it foolishly attacked Russian peacekeepers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. However, the Kiev regime withdrew from the talks immediately after the Russian military left northern Ukraine, clearly indicating that the Neo-Nazi junta never intended to honor the agreement.
“After we pulled our troops away from Kiev – as we had promised to do – the Kiev authorities … tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history. They abandoned everything,” Putin stated, adding: “Where are the guarantees that they will not walk away from agreements in the future? …However, even under such circumstances, we have never refused to conduct negotiations.”
Indeed, how is Russia to ever trust any official agreement signed by the Kiev regime when the latter repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to break any and every deal so far?
Worse yet, the so-called “guarantors” from the political West have shown that they’re equally untrustworthy, as their (current and former) leaders have not only admitted, but are even openly boasting about “giving Ukraine time” by signing deals that they knew would be broken. This only reinforces the notion former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (rightfully) insists on – negotiating deals with the political West and its vassals and satellite states only demonstrates weakness.
It should also be noted that thanks to this treachery, approximately 200,000 forcibly conscripted Ukrainians were sent to certain death, while at least twice as many have suffered permanent, life-altering injuries.
Worse yet, these are not conclusive numbers, as there’s no indication that hostilities will end any time soon. Moscow clearly demonstrated that it didn’t want this, but it also showed what its armed forces are capable of. Either way, the political West awakened a sleeping giant that is extremely unlikely to go back to hibernation now that its opponents have shown their true colors.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst and a regular contributor to InfoBrics and Global Research.
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June 19th, 2023 by Barbara Nimri Aziz
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***
“I’ve been rereading The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, I volunteered. It was a spontaneous announcement after Jim, my neighbor, and I puzzled over the forthcoming Juneteenth holiday, unsure precisely what it signified. (I eventually offered my more or less accurate explanation without an endorsement from Jim.)
He was driving me home from the clinic where he’d kindly taken me to X-ray my leg for a suspicious pain. Jim was talkative on the way out, recalling a recent weekend with his grown family, the swank restaurants, their spacious rental. His descriptions filled the hour-long drive out. I said little, possibly because of my anxiety and the pain.
More relaxed on the homeward trip, I became engaged in our conversation over LGBTQ+ activism and how it was changing our locality.
Then my enthusiasm about forgotten facts of Malcom X’s youth seeped out. With silence meeting my initial comment, I blithely went on: “The book’s really well written.” Still no comment: no question of why I’d taken it up, or how expertly it was composed. I continued: “Of course, the book is as told to Alex Haley, author of Roots”. Maybe he’ll respond to that, I think. But no.
My urge to share could not be quelled with silence. “I hadn’t realized he taught himself to read in prison, studying the dictionary, page by page!” Finally, Jim responds. “Well, of course he was intelligent, and anyone with such intelligence would do that.”
I know Jim well. A retired teacher, he is skillful in diffusing touchy social situations, smoothly excusing someone’s faults, readily mollifying criticisms, eagerly reminding us of ‘the other side’ of any issue. I could see how, for a teacher, this would be valuable in negotiating conflict or diffusing tension among students. (Maybe he has some sensitive family condition he has learned to dampen.)
Nevertheless, I persist with further observations I’d made about our outstanding historical figure: “Of course, he wrote little himself, a few articles in the New York Black press – early on, I believe.
“But what a brilliant orator! He writes how, after watching other inmates debating at the prison in Massachusetts where, thanks to his sister Ella, he’d been transferred, he joined the program. It was in prison that he learned debating. He talked about how he studied the issues from the opposition’s side.”
Jim, again in his dismissive manner, replies, “Yes, of course intelligent people would study both sides of an argument and know how to contradict.” Is Jim seething underneath, wondering how he can close this subject entirely?
It was hard not to scream; for me, that is. Again, no curiosity, not even a critical comment about the assassinated leader, or Islam; no reference to other Black activists in the sixties when Jim would have been aware of the civil rights movement.
It was as if Jim was refusing to mention Malcolm X by name. Jim’s generalization of ‘intelligence’ was a subtle and effective way to ‘disappear’ Malcolm X’s historical status, his growth, his contributions, his insights, even his mistakes. Jim’s calm generalization was a kind of sly intervention. I would welcome a counter argument; but my remark is diffused by innocuous generality.
Jim and his wife are retired teachers. They lived in Germany when he was stationed there during the Korean war. They pride themselves on their wide experience, traveling annually to different European countries or parts of the U.S., extolling the friendliness of hosts and splendor of restaurants. They are proud of their teaching careers and speak about students they’re in touch with. They would never take sides in a dispute between neighbors in our town, but will offer help to anyone needing assistance.
Jim and others enjoying their retirement will persist with these liberalizing interventions. It’s habit. My regret is that it smothers conversation; it bars healthy argument; and it denies another’s joyous discovery.
I returned home, grateful for my neighbor’s help, but yes, annoyed by his refusal to accept what I was so eager to share. I picked up my book without delay and resumed reading: —learning that when Malcolm X arrived in Saudi Arabia for his first Hajj pilgrimage, he was surprisingly naïve; that, initially suspected as a non-Muslim, his entry was delayed at the airport; that in Mecca, encountering other pilgrims from around the world, he was repeatedly recognized as Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, and warmly welcomed and celebrated as the victorious boxer; that he had not yet learned even the basic prayer formulas of Islam; that he candidly shared his fears, his ignorance, his slowly changing views.
What a rich document an autobiography can be.
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Barbara Nimri Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon.
She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
By Barbara Nimri Aziz
A century ago Yogmaya and Durga Devi, two women champions of justice, emerged from a remote corner of rural Nepal to offer solutions to their nation’s social and political ills. Then they were forgotten.
Years after their demise, in 1980 veteran anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz first uncovered their suppressed histories in her comprehensive and accessible biographies. Revelations from her decade of research led to the resurrection of these women and their entry into contemporary Nepali consciousness.
This book captures the daring political campaigns of these rebel women; at the same time it asks us to acknowledge their impact on contemporary feminist thinking. Like many revolutionaries who were vilified in their lifetimes, we learn about the true nature of these leaders’ intelligence, sacrifices, and vision during an era of social and economic oppression in this part of Asia.
After Nepal moved from absolute monarchy to a fledgling democracy and history re-evaluated these pioneers, Dr. Aziz explores their legacies in this book.
Psychologically provocative and astonishingly moving, “Yogmaya and Durga Devi” is a seminal contribution to women’s history.
June 19th, 2023 by Lawrence Freeman
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***
The post below is from africanagenda.net, reporting on a punchy fifteen minute speech by Kenyan President, William Ruto, to the African Union Parliament on the disrespectful manner African leaders are treated by the developed sector. (See video).
Below that, is a two minute clip of President Ruto discussing the need to conduct trade outside of the dollar denominations.
Just In: President of Kenya, @WilliamsRuto, Urges African Nations to Dump the US Dollar for Intracontinental Trade. WATCH pic.twitter.com/mHE8Bshquv
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) June 13, 2023
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Lawrence Freeman is a Political-Economic Analyst for Africa, who has been involved in economic development policies for Africa for over 30 years.
He is a teacher, writer, public speaker, and consultant on Africa. He is also the creator of the blog: lawrencefreemanafricaandtheworld.com. Mr. Freeman’s stated personal mission is; to eliminate poverty and hunger in Africa by applying the scientific economic principles of Alexander Hamilton.
Featured image is licensed under the Public Domain
June 19th, 2023 by Pepe Escobar
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***
President Putin’s meeting with a group of Russian war correspondents and Telegram bloggers – including Filatov, Poddubny, Pegov from War Gonzo, Podolyaka, Gazdiev from RT – was an extraordinary exercise in freedom of the press.
There were among them seriously independent journalists who can be very critical of the way the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense (MoD) are conducting what can be alternatively defined as a Special Military Operation (SMO); a counter-terror operation (CTO); or an “almost war” (according to some influential business circles in Moscow).
It’s fascinating to see how these patriotic/independent journalists are now playing a role similar to the former political commissars in the USSR, all of them, in their own way, deeply committed to guiding Russian society towards draining the swamp, slowly but surely.
It’s clear Putin not only understands their role but sometimes, “shock to the system-style”, the system he presides actually implements the journalists’ suggestions. As a foreign correspondent working all over the world for nearly 40 years now, I have been quite impressed by the way Russian journalists may enjoy a degree of freedom unimaginable in most latitudes of the collective West.
The Kremlin transcript of the meeting shows Putin definitely not inclined to beat around the bush.
He admitted there are “operetta Generals” in the Army; that there was a shortage of drones, precision munitions and communication equipment, now being addressed.
He discussed the legality of mercenary outfits; the necessity of sooner or later installing a “buffer zone” to protect Russian citizens from systematic Kiev regime shelling; and he stressed that Russia will not answer Bandera-inspired terrorism with terrorism.
After examining the exchanges, a conclusion is imperative: Russian war media is not staging an offensive even as the collective West attacks Russia 24/7 with its massive NGO/soft power media apparatus. Moscow is not – yet? – fully engaged in the trenches of information warfare; as it stands Russian media is only playing defense.
Arguably the money quote of the whole encounter is Putin’s concise, chilling evaluation of where we now stand in the chessboard:
“We were forced to try to end the war that the West started in 2014 by force of arms. And Russia will end this war by force of arms, freeing the entire territory of the former Ukraine from the United States and Ukrainian Nazis. There are no other options. The Ukrainian army of the US and NATO will be defeated, no matter what new types of weapons it receives from the West. The more weapons there are, the fewer Ukrainians and what used to be Ukraine will remain. Direct intervention by NATO’s European armies will not change the outcome. But in this case, the fire of war will engulf the whole of Europe. It looks like the US is ready for that too.”
In a nutshell: this will only end on Russia’s terms, and only when Moscow evaluates all its objectives have been met. Anything else is wishful thinking.
Back on the frontlines, as pointed out by the indispensable Andrei Martyanov, first-class war correspondent Marat Kalinin has conclusively laid out how the current Ukrainian metal coffin counter-offensive has not been able to reach even the first Russian line of defense (they are a long – highway to hell – 10 km away). Everything NATO’s top proxy army ever assembled was able to accomplish so far was to get mercilessly slaughtered on an industrial scale.
Meet General Armageddon in action.
Surovikin had eight months to place his footprint in Ukraine and from the beginning he understood exactly how to turn it into a whole new ballgame. Arguably the strategy is to completely destroy the Ukrainian forces between the first line of defense – assuming they ever breach it – and the second line, which is quite substantial. The third line will remain off limits.
Collective West MSM is predictably freaking out, finally starting to show horrendous Ukrainian losses and giving evidence of the utter accumulated incompetence of Kiev goons and their NATO military handlers.
And just in case the going gets tough – for now a remote possibility – Putin himself has delivered the road map. Softly, softly. As in, “Do we need a march on Kiev? If yes, we need a new mobilization, if not, we do not need it. There is no need for mobilization right now.”
The crucial operative words are “right now”.
Meanwhile, away from the battlefield, the Russians are very much aware of the frantic geoeconomic activity.
Moscow and Beijing increasingly trade in yuan and rubles. The ASEAN 10 are going all out for regional currencies, bypassing the US dollar. Indonesia and South Korea are turbo-charging trade in rupiah and won. Pakistan is paying for Russian oil in yuan. The UAE and India are increasing non-oil trade in rupees.
Everyone and his neighbor are making a beeline to join BRICS+ – forcing a desperate Hegemon to start deploying an array of Hybrid War techniques.
It’s been a long way since Putin examined the chessboard in the early 2000s and then unleashed a crash missile program for defensive and offensive missiles.
Over the next 23 years Russia developed hypersonic missiles, advanced ICBMs, and the most advanced defensive missiles on the planet. Russia won the missile race. Period. The Hegemon – obsessed by its own manufactured war against Islam – was completely blindsided and made no material missile advances in nearly two and a half decades.
Now the “strategy” is to invent a Taiwan Question out of nothing, which is configuring the chessboard as the ante-chamber of no holds barred Hybrid War against Russia-China.
The proxy attack – via Kiev hyenas – against Russophone Donbass, egged on by the Straussian neocon psychos in charge of US foreign policy, murdered at least 14,000 men, women and children between 2014 to 2022. That was also an attack on China. The ultimate aim of this Divide and Rule gambit was to inflict defeat on China’s ally in the Heartland, so Beijing would be isolated.
According to the neocon wet dream, all of the above would have enabled the Hegemon, once it had taken over Russia again as it did with Yeltsin, to blockade China from Russian natural resources using eleven US aircraft carrier task forces plus numerous submarines.
Obviously military science-impaired neocons are oblivious to the fact that Russia is now the strongest military power on the planet.
In Ukraine, the neocons were hoping that a provocation would cause Moscow to deploy other secret weapons apart from hypersonic missiles, so Washington could better prepare for all-out war.
All those elaborate plans may have miserably floundered. But a corollary remains: the Straussian neocons firmly believe they may instrumentalize a few million Europeans – who’s next? Poles? Estonians? Latvians? Lithuanians? And why not Germans? – as cannon fodder as the US did in WWI and WWII, fought over the bodies of Europeans (including Russians) sacrificed to the same old Mackinder Anglo-Saxon power grab.
Hordes of European 5th columnists make it so much easier to “trust” the US to protect them, while only a few with an IQ over room temperature have understood who really bombed Nord Stream 1 and 2, with the connivance of the Liver Sausage German Chancellor.
The bottom line is that the Hegemon simply cannot accept a sovereign, self-sufficient Europe; only a dependent vassal, hostage to the seas that the US control.
Putin clearly sees how the chessboard has been laid out. And he also sees how “Ukraine” does not even exist anymore.
While no one was paying attention, last month the Kiev gang sold Ukraine to $8.5 trillion-worth BlackRock. Just like that. The deal was sealed between the Government of Ukraine and BlackRock’s VP Philipp Hildebrand.
They are setting up a Ukrainian Development Fund (UDF) for “reconstruction”, focused on energy, infrastructure, agriculture, industry and IT. All remaining valuable assets in what will be a rump Ukraine will be gobbled up by BlackRock: from Metinvest, DTEK (energy) and MJP (agriculture) to Naftogaz, Ukrainian Railways, Ukravtodor and Ukrenergo.
What’s the point in going to Kiev then? High-grade toxic neoliberalism is already partying on the spot.
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
June 19th, 2023 by Steve Kirsch
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***
We see an odds ratio of 5 when comparing autism in vaxxed vs. unvaxxed in MULTIPLE studies. The before:after odds are even more extraordinary. How can we ignore all this evidence?
Here’s my favorite short list of evidence that can’t be explained if vaccines don’t cause autism. Does anyone think I’m wrong and can explain the list?
Here is a list of some of the most compelling evidence I’ve run across.
If there is a hypothesis that is a better fit to this evidence than vaccines cause autism, I’d love to hear it.
The most remarkable paper showing the MMR vaccine causes permanent brain damage and death is this 1998 paper Acute Encephalopathy Followed by Permanent Brain Injury or Death Associated With Further Attenuated Measles Vaccines: A Review of Claims Submitted to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It is written by CDC authors and has not been questioned or retracted and cited by 90 papers.
Of course, if the authors wrote the vaccines killed these kids, they wouldn’t be able to get their paper published (that’s how “science” works). So you have to read between the lines that severe brain inflammation/damage might cause death. Do you think that might be reasonable?
This excellent Substack article shows the statistically significant peaks at days 8 and 9 after the shot. That’s causality.
So the CDC knew in 1998 that the measles vaccine was causing brain damage. But the paper said that the relationship “may exist.” Right. No other way to explain the data if it wasn’t causal.
This gives us more biological plausibility.
There are numerous studies of the unvaxxed vs. vaxxed which show a statistically significant higher rate of autism and other chronic diseases in the vaccinated.
More importantly, those who argue that this is not the case cannot produce a single study of the fully unvaxxed vs. fully vaxxed showing that the number of autism cases are comparable in the two groups. In fact, even in the highly acclaimed (but deeply flawed) Madsen study, there was a statistically significant higher incidence of autism in the “got MMR vax group” vs. “didn’t get MMR vax group” (p=.01) in the raw data before they made the signal go in the opposite direction by doing undisclosed adjustments (changing the relative risk from 1.45 to .92. The “adjusted” RR value had a confidence interval of .68 to 1.24 which means that even after applying all their “adjustments” that they can’t rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine raises the risk of autism. And this is their best study!! Nobody ever tells you about this paper showing the underlying data they used is flawed. And nobody seemed to be bothered by the fact that number of black male children in this study severely underestimates the number of black kids in America. In fact, it doesn’t look at race at all in the study. Whoops! See this article for more about the Madsen study.
The Homefirst clinic in Chicago run by Mayer Eisenstein had tens of thousands of patients and not a single case of autism over 47 years. He died in 2014.
From this article in UPI:
In the past, public-health officials have said such an approach [surveying the public to look at health outcomes in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated] would be impractical due to low numbers of never-vaccinated children, but this column found tens of thousands of such children — beginning with the Amish — in various locations in the United States. In our anecdotal and unscientific reporting, the rate of autism seemed strikingly lower in never-vaccinated children, …
But this column identified several groups that might fit the bill — from the Amish in Pennsylvania Dutch country to homeschooled children to patients of a Chicago family practice.
“I have not seen autism with the Amish,” said Dr. Frank Noonan, a family practitioner in Lancaster County, Pa., who has treated thousands of Amish for a quarter-century.
“You’ll find all the other stuff, but we don’t find the autism. We’re right in the heart of Amish country and seeing none, and that’s just the way it is.”
In Chicago, Homefirst Medical Services treats thousands of never-vaccinated children whose parents received exemptions through Illinois’ relatively permissive immunization policy. Homefirst’s medical director, Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, told us he is not aware of any cases of autism in never-vaccinated children; the national rate is 1 in 175, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have a fairly large practice,” Eisenstein told us. “We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we’ve taken care of over the years, and I don’t think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines. “We do have enough of a sample,” Eisenstein said. “The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We’re all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there’s no communication. It’s frightening. You can’t touch them. It’s not something that anyone would miss.”
The before:after odds measures are the most stunning pieces of evidence there is for vaccines causing autism. Many parents notice a sudden, dramatic change in their child shortly after vaccination. But the funny thing is, none of them noticed this right before the appointment with the pediatrician to get the shot. It’s simply nearly impossible to achieve a disparity like this if the shots are safe.
This isn’t observer bias either. If a child suddenly developed autistic behaviors right before the doctor appointment to get vaccinated, you can bet the first thing out of the parent’s mouth would be telling the doctor before the shot of the sudden change. What pediatrician in the world can recall that ever happening?
Yet we are inundated with stories of parents saying their child got a fever right after the shot, the parent may have given the child Tylenol (which makes everything worse), and within hours, the child is never the same.
These clearly aren’t anti-vaxxer parents who believe Wakefield because if they were, they wouldn’t have vaccinated their child!!! So there is no way to ignore these reports.
This rapid climb was not due to a change in criteria to diagnose ASD. Such a change would create a quick step function and just shift the existing line upwards; the slope wouldn’t change.
Also, this growth isn’t due to a genetic issue because genetic traits don’t replicate exponentially over short time periods like this.
The fact that we can dramatically reduce the rate of autism by withholding all vaccines suggests that the vaccines are the major driver.
When people on the other side of the argument have to lie and distort the truth to make their point, you really have to wonder why they have to do that.
For example, For example, Matt Carey when he wrote about William Thompson’s study, he claimed that there was nothing wrong with excluding the RACE subgroup analysis from their published paper or being ordered to destroy ONLY the documents that were related to the RACE subgroup analysis (i.e., to ONLY destroy that data that goes against the CDC narrative).
Carey excels at gaslighting people who don’t know how science works. He wrote another article which deliberately misrepresented the results of the Generation Rescue survey (Matt claimed they showed the opposite of what they actually did). Nobody can read the results of the GR survey and think that the vaccines are bad. But he deliberately didn’t link to the source so you can’t easily check out that he’s lying.
As a result, none of the comments pointed out the huge misdirection.
Professor Anders Hviid had to create a bogus study which was designed not to find a signal. And when I notified him that another paper proved that his underlying data was inaccurate, he ignored me. When I asked to see the data, he blocked me. Lots more in my article.
Finally, in general, the anti-anti-vaxxers will not engage in a civil dialog to discover the truth. That should be very very concerning.
Can they simply “explain away”everything in this article? Can we talk about it?
See my slide deck.
Finally, the biggest piece of evidence comes from James Lyons-Weiler who got a call from one of the top autism experts in the world. He told James that “We all know vaccines cause autism. We just aren’t allowed to talk about it.” He was referring to his fellow autism experts.
If they admitted this, they would lose their funding, their job, their license to practice medicine, their hospital privileges, their board certifications, etc.
That’s why I can’t get a debate and when I try to reach out to these experts they ghost me.
And that’s why there are never the before:after studies and why all there are so many studies are designed to not find a signal.
Science is about matching hypotheses to data to which hypothesis is best able to explain all the data.
It’s clear that there have been studies which have been deliberately or inadvertently designed to not find a signal. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a link; it simply means the study was inadequate to find the link or the underlying data was compromised.
The thing is that if there really is not a link, then no matter what you do, you won’t find a link.
But the problem they have is that there have been other studies which show very clearly that vaccines cause autism that cannot be explained away because the signals are too strong.
Furthermore, I was unable to find a single study showing that the fully vaccinated had better health outcomes than the fully unvaccinated. Judy Gerberding, the former head of the CDC, promised to do such a study in 2005.
Twenty years later, that study has still never been done.
So in the meantime, the precautionary principle of medicine is pretty clear on what we should be doing: nobody should be getting any vaccines.
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Featured image is from the author
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.
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June 19th, 2023 by John C. A. Manley
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***
The following is an excerpt from John C. A. Manley’s forthcoming novel, Brave New Normal (the sequel to Much Ado About Corona). The Canadian government has banned those who have not been vaccinated from travelling outside of their county or region. In this scene Vince and Yamamoto are stopped at a roadside checkpoint near North Bay, Ontario…
After an uncomfortable pause, Yamamoto asked loudly in a German accent, “Your papers, please?”
That made the cop jerk and step back.
“Huh?” he said.
“Your papers, please,” repeated Yamamoto. “That’s what you were going to ask me, wasn’t it?”
The cop’s eyes darted to the side.
“You know, from Casablanca,” continued Yamamoto. “One of my favourite movies. You’ve seen it?”
“No, sir,” said the young cop.
“You gotta watch it. 1942 World War II film. Classic. Two cops stop this guy on the streets of Casablanca, and say, ‘May we see your papers?’” Yamamoto turned his head back to me. “You’ve seen it?”
“No,” I shook my head and tried to act calm. Why did he have to do this? Hadn’t I taken enough of a beating from the cops?
But Yamamoto was just getting started: “Yeah, you know the police don’t actually say please in the movie. A lot of people quote them as being that polite but they just ask to see his papers. No please.”
“They were Nazis?” I asked.
“No, French fascists.”
“Oh,” I said, not really sure what the difference between a Nazi and a fascist was. I pulled out my phone and punched in “wikipedia fascist.”
“Yeah,” continued Yamamoto. “A lot of people remember them as Nazis who say please, when really they were fascists who didn’t bother.” He turned back to the cop, keeping his hands on the steering wheel. “Anyway, the gentleman gives them his papers and one of the fascist cops says it’s expired. Then the guy makes a run for it and they shoot him in the back. ”
The police officer stared back at us, unblinking.
After a pause, Yamamoto asked again, “You sure you haven’t seen it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You really should,” insisted Yamamoto. “I mean it should be required viewing for this patently fascist position you’re executing.”
“I’m not a fascist,” he grumbled back.
“Do you even know what a fascist is?” Yamamoto shot back.
No reply.
I cleared my throat and held up my phone. “Says on Wikipedia that a fascist is an authoritarian, ultra-national political ideology…”
“Check, check, check,” said Yamamoto looking the cop up and down.
“…characterized by a dictatorial leader… “
“Big shout out to our prime minister,” said Yamamoto.
“Militarism…” I continued reading.
“Roger that,” said Yamamoto pointing his index finger out like a gun at the young constable’s utility belt.
“…forcible suppression of opposition… “
“You can vouch for that one, eh, amigo?” he said elbowing me.
“…and subordination of individual interests to the perceived good of the nation and race.”
“Yeah! There you go. I think Canada almost passes inspection. We’re just lacking one thing before we can claim to be a fully fascist state…”
The cop tipped his head to the side and asked, “What’s that?”
“Cops who can say: Your papers, please. And I really want you to say please, even though it wasn’t in the movie. It’s the Canadian thing to do. Especially if you’re going to shoot me after.”
“No one is going to be shot.”
“Are you joking?” said Yamamoto. “Our fascist government wants everyone shot, every three months.”
“I meant with a gun.”
“Both are lethal.”
“Are you an anti-vaxer?”
“No, I’m anti-fascist.”
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John C. A. Manley’s Brave New Normal will be released in 2024. The preceding book in the series, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, was released in 2022. Patrick Corbett, former director/producer for W-5, Beachcombers and Dateline, praises the novel as “a ripping story of courage, awakening and love.” Visit John C. A. Manley’s website for a free preview or to order a copy MuchAdoAboutCorona.com
By John C. A. Manley
Publisher: Blazing Pine Cone Publishing (March 29, 2022)
Paperback: 507 pages
ISBN-10: 1778123104
ISBN-13: 978-1778123108
A Novel About Real Love and a Fake Pandemic
Summer 2020. The first lockdown has ended in the small Canadian town of Moosehead. Twenty-four-year-old Vincent McKnight emerges from three months of stay-at-home orders into a surreal new normal of multi-coloured face masks, acrid hand sanitizers, and germaphobic neighbours standing six feet apart.
The new normal becomes even stranger when Vince’s Indigenous grandfather sends him to buy a loaf of bread from the town’s new baker. Stefanie Müller speaks five languages, has beautiful blue eyes… and is a certified conspiracy theorist. She believes the pandemic is a hoax to justify totalitarian “public health” measures.
But when the local cop pulls out his taser, Stefanie’s dystopian premonitions no longer seem so theoretical. And when the restrictions threaten Granddad’s life, Vince finds himself going face-to-mask with the emerging police state—forced to choose whether to follow senseless rules or to follow his pounding heart.
June 19th, 2023 by Andrew Korybko
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He wanted to reassure Russia’s African partners that it isn’t responsible for the food crisis ahead of the next foreseeable round of information warfare claiming otherwise, which will likely commence once the “grain deal” expires next month in the days leading up to the second Russia-Africa Summit.
President Putin surprised his guests from the African peace delegation on Saturday by revealing details about Russia’s now-defunct draft treaty with Ukraine. It would have re-enshrined neutrality in that country’s constitution and also limited its number of military forces. According to him, it had even been signed by the Ukrainian side, which then discarded it in response to pressure from the Anglo-American Axis (AAA) despite Russia pulling its troops back from Kiev as part of an agreed-upon goodwill gesture.
The special operation could have been over just a month after it started, thus meaning that this development marked the beginning of the NATO-Russian proxy war in hindsight seeing as how that bloc hadn’t yet gone all-out in supporting Ukraine until right after that happened. This suggests that while the AAA was indeed surprised by President Putin preemptively averting Kiev’s planned reconquest of Donbass, they eventually saw an opportunity to weaken their rival by perpetuating this conflict.
They seemingly calculated that it would quickly collapse due to combined proxy war and sanctions pressure, though that obviously didn’t happen. The following fifteen months ended up hurting the Global South a lot more than Russia as proven by the food and fuel crises that ravaged these developing countries as a result of the West’s unilateral restrictions on their target’s financial dealings. The so-called “grain deal” also failed to relieve their suffering since Kiev never shipped its supplies to those states.
It was in the context of those countries’ plight that some of their leaders decided to embark on a peace mission to the two direct combatants in this conflict. They reportedly sought to convince both sides to agree to a ceasefire and other de-escalation measures such as lifting some of the sanctions in order to restore their previously reliable grain imports from those two. President Putin was aware of why they visited him and thus took the chance to prove that Russia wasn’t responsible for their problems.
His country regards Africa as an emerging pole in the ongoing global systemic transition to multipolarity, hence the importance of comprehensively expanding their relations. To that end, the Russian leader must absolutely ensure that his counterparts and their people aren’t misled by the West’s propaganda blaming it for the food crisis, especially since the “grain deal” is unlikely to be renewed due to its terms never having been fulfilled and a renewed round of information warfare will predictably follow.
President Putin therefore chose “the perfect time” to reveal details about Russia’s now-defunct draft treaty with Ukraine in order to show them that it’s Kiev and its AAA patrons who are responsible for disrupting Africa’s previously reliable import of grain from Eastern Europe. The supplementary context of Kiev’s disastrous NATO–backed counteroffensive also enabled him to show average Westerners that this catastrophe was entirely avoidable had the AAA not meddled in the Russian-Ukrainian peace process.
About those talks, they might very well resume around wintertime after Kiev’s doomed counteroffensive finally comes to an end, during which time the African peace delegation might be requested by both sides to informally mediate. By informing them of the details contained in the sign agreement that was ultimately discarded by Ukraine under the AAA’s pressure, they’ll be able to pick up where those two left off and thus be able to more effectively facilitate their talks in that scenario.
For these reasons, it makes sense why President Putin waited until now to reveal details about this treaty. He wanted to reassure Russia’s African partners that it isn’t responsible for the food crisis ahead of the next foreseeable round of information warfare claiming otherwise, which will likely commence once the “grain deal” expires next month in the days leading up to the second Russia-Africa Summit. By sharing proof of this with their peace delegation, President Putin ensured that they won’t be misled.
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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.
June 19th, 2023 by Maher Al-Dana
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June 19th, 2023 by Bharat Dogra
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Laos is a country in Southeast Asia with a rich development potential based on vast water resources as well as minerals including gold. Its suitably located land trade routes had also contributed to the prosperity of the country in previous centuries. In more recent time its tourism potential has attracted much attention and the country even received the most favored tourist destination status from a leading European tourism organization, partly due to architecture, history and heritage aspects. In numerous villages of this rural-based economy there has been much potential for achieving food reliance in ecologically conducive ways.
Unfortunately all this potential was first harmed by the highly exploitative French colonial rule, then Japanese invaders, and then French colonialists again. The brave people of Laos continued to resist all this to finally achieve independence. Tragically, before they could properly tap the potential of various development opportunities, they were attacked in the most destructive ways by the USA Air Force as well as the CIA.
No, the people and the country of Laos had not harmed the far away located, mighty USA in any way at all. Despite this, the people of Laos faced their heaviest destruction from the USA, worse than what they faced even during direct colonial rule, due to two factors.
First, in the course of their freedom movement, it is the communist force called the Pathet Lao which had emerged as the strongest, probably because it was the closest to protecting the interests of peasants and workers. Hence it could only be expected to be friendly to the communists in their neighboring country of Vietnam, particularly as the Vietnam communists were led by such a great and popular leader as Ho Chi Minh. To start with neither the communists of Vietnam nor of Laos had any quarrel with the USA at all and in fact expected it to help them in their anti-colonial struggles.
However the USA establishment had by then taken a non-rational decision of coming down hard upon any and all communist forces and led by such thinking they got involved in a long and prolonged war first in Vietnam and then in Laos. In the case of Laos a more specific complaint of the USA was that some land routes of Laos were being used to supply provisions to the communists in Vietnam and these had to be cut off.
Anyway, the USA embarked on a twin strategy of very heavy aerial bombing of Laos, including its villages, and at the same time using the CIA to organize an illegal and secret land war on the land. The CIA organized war was largely kept secret from not just the world but even from the people and elected representatives of the USA for a long time. This illegal war initially also used the cover of development aid agencies to make contacts. Then ethnicity based groups which could be used to fight the communists were carefully identified and helped with money and arms to attack the communist forces and their supporters. This created such great divisions in the country that it became very difficult for certain people to live together in the same country again, as some of them were looked upon as traitors, and several of them had to be settled in the USA.
However even worse damage was done by bombing attacks, because of the very destructive weapons used as well as the extremely large scale of the bombings. Between 1964 and 1973, about 2.3 million tons of bombs were dropped in this small country, more than the 2.1 million tons dropped by the USA in Europe as well as in Asia together in the entire course of World War II. In terms of bombing relative to population or per capita bombing, no other country in the world has ever suffered heavier bombing than this. Over a period of about 9 years, one bombing was carried out every 8 minutes (day as well as night).
Nearly 270 million bombs, mostly cluster bombs, were dropped. Cluster bombs are known to be one of the most painful weapons. A single cluster bomb, which in turn can contain as many as 200 bomblets, explodes a little before hitting ground and the bomblets can be very violently dispersed, often getting lodged in critical organs of the person or child who has been hit, or resulting in several festering open wounds whose pain has been compared to acid burning. Completely innocent civilians and villagers were hit more often. It became impossible to live in several villages and these were deserted and people became refugees. In a small country nearly 200,000 persons died, nearly double this number were seriously injured, nearly 7,50,000 became refugees.
This was not all. About 30 per cent of the dropped bombs did not detonate immediately and remained hidden in various places to pose serious danger in future. Nearly 50,000 persons including a very large number of children have been killed, seriously injured and disabled in later years due to these hidden bombs. Many such injuries resulted in amputations. As several bombs resembled balls or toys for children, a large number of children were injured or died when they picked up bombs, despite the fact that a campaign of warning was launched.
This danger of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is likely to continue for long, with 63 such accidents being reported as late as 2021, because the USA has invested so little in removing this danger. According to one estimate, while the USA spent $16 million per DAY on the bombings for 9 years (on the basis of current prices), it has spent only average of $ 5 million per YEAR since it started contributing, that too very late, to the UXO clearing work in the 1990s. This contribution was increased after some time not so much by the USA government acting on its own, but because of the wide awareness generated by some good efforts like the Legacies of War project which increased public awareness of this great injustice and tragedy. A very small percentage of the estimated UXO has been cleared yet, probably less than 5 per cent. It has been estimated in US studies that the UXO risks can continue beyond 100 years.
It is important not only for the USA to contribute much more for UXO clearance but also to pay huge compensation to Laos because the bombings and the CIA land war in Laos were completely illegal.
The USA war against Laos was for the USA just an extension of its war with Vietnam; it had no legal justification and was shockingly unethical in all aspects. The only reason, if it can be called a reason, the USA had was that it was committed to curbing any communist force, and isn’t it an irony that after all that happened, the tiny country of Laos with its 8 million people is today more committed to communism than China is!
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071.
Featured image: Anti-aircraft troops of the Laotian Peoples Liberation Army. (Licensed under the Public Domain)
June 19th, 2023 by Middle East Eye
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Israel is set to bring 10,000 workers from India to staff jobs in construction and nursing industries, in a sign of deepening economic and political cooperation with New Delhi, according to multiple Hebrew language news sites.
Reports say workers will arrive in stages, with 2,500 filling jobs in both construction and nursing. The final agreement for labour is still being worked out between Israeli and Indian officials.
“We expect the agreements to be approved shortly, and we will soon be able to start setting up the necessary mechanisms to employ skilled labour in a proper and supervised manner,” a spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Population and Immigration said.
The talks come on the heels of Foreign Minister Eli Cohen’s visit to India in early May where he signed an agreement with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to bring some 42,000 Indian foreign workers to Israel, with 34,000 earmarked for construction and 8,000 in elder care.
Israeli officials reportedly toured workplace training centres in India in March ahead of the talks. Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority described the Indian workers as diligent, experienced and fluent in English.
Israel and India have been forging closer ties for years. In January, India’s Adani Group acquired a 70 percent stake in the now privatised Haifa Port, for $1.2bn. The two are also part of US efforts to deepen security and economic cooperation with the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Washington is promoting a plan for a vast infrastructure network that would connect Gulf and Arab countries to India via rail and shipping lanes. President Joe Biden’s top national security advisor met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and officials from India and the UAE to discuss the plan this month.
But the influx of Indian workers to Israel would be one of the most tangible signs of cooperation with New Delhi filtering down to daily life in Israel.
Roughly 100,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza work legally in Israel, with the bulk of those jobs in the construction sector. They often face hazardous working conditions and exploitation. Almost half of the West Bank workers are forced to pay around 2,500 shekels ($746) a month to brokers to secure work permits.
Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel have also faced discrimination for their political actions. In 2021, when Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were swept by mass protests, hundreds of workers were fired by Israeli employers for participating in a general strike.
Israel also regularly uses the issuing of work permits to exert influence and control over the Palestinian economy, experts say.
Indian officials have pointed to Israel’s policies as a model for their control of Kashmir, where New Delhi has been accused of conducting a mass eviction drive against Muslims to alter the disputed valley’s demographics.
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June 19th, 2023 by thelastheretik
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In 1967 The CIA released a dispatch that coined the label “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorists” to attack anyone who challenged the official narrative from the Warren Commission. It’s interesting to note that the document is labelled “psych”, for psychological operations or disinformation. It’s also marked “CS copy” at the bottom, meaning “Clandestine Services” Unit.
This document was requested and released to The New York Times in 1976 via The Freedom of Information Act. Below is the CIA dispatch. Read it for yourself.
CIA Dispatch: Weaponizing “conspiracy theorist” label Page#1
CIA Dispatch: Weaponizing “conspiracy theorist” label Page#2
After the 1960’s the word “conspiracy theory”, “conspiracy theorist”, and “conspiracy” started having a negative connotation and is enough to silence anyone who questions the official narrative. To this day we still view conspiracy theorists as crazy tinfoil hatters.
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June 19th, 2023 by Mariana Álvarez Orellana