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On 18 August, Israeli troops forcibly shut down the offices of several Palestinian civil society and human rights NGOs in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

At dawn, occupation forces stormed Ramallah and began breaking into the offices of the organizations, confiscating their equipment and welding their doors shut.

The organizations targeted are Al-Haq, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC), the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), and the Union of Health Work Committees (UHWC).

In October of 2021, Israel’s Defense Ministry designated the NGOs — with the exception of UHWC — as “terrorist organizations,” over alleged links to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a leftist Palestinian resistance movement.

In July of this year, however, the foreign ministries of nine EU countries issued a joint statement rejecting Tel Aviv’s designation of the Palestinian NGOs, to which the concerned EU states serve as donors.

“They raided our offices at dawn, broke the doors, they took documents, computers, we are still assessing what’s gone. They wrecked the place and welded the doors shut with metal,” the head of UHWC’s board of directors, Mazen Rantisi, told media.

“The goal is to put obstacles in the way of civil society so that it doesn’t develop, it is part of destroying Palestinian society, and to make people feel defeated,” he added.

Several hours after the raid, a group of Palestinian activists held a demonstration in front of Al-Haq’s offices in order to protest Tel Aviv’s unlawful closure of the NGOs.

Just a few hours before the raids, Israel clamped down on the Palestinian rights groups, Israeli troops raided Nablus to secure the entrance of Joseph’s Tomb and facilitate the entry of extremist settlers into the Islamic holy shrine.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), 18-year-old Palestinian Waseem Nasr Khalifa was killed, and another 36 were injured during intense clashes in the vicinity of the tomb.

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The writing is on the wall for Europe in terms of this coming winter – It’s going to get ugly.  With natural gas imports from Russia cut by 80% through Nord Stream 1 along with the majority of oil shipments, the EU is going to be scrambling for whatever fuel sources they can find to supply electricity and heating through the coming winter.  Two sources that were originally suggested as alternatives were Iran and Venezuela.

Increased Iranian oil and gas exports to the west are highly dependent on the tentative nuclear deal, but as Goldman Sachs recently suggested, such a deal is unlikely anytime soon as deadlines on proposals have not been met and the Israeli government calls for negotiators to ‘walk away.’

Venezuela had restarted shipments to Europe after 2 years of US sanctions under a deal that allows them to trade oil for debt relief.  However, the country’s government has now suspended those shipments, saying it is no longer interested in oil-for-debt deals and instead wants refined fuels from Italian and Spanish producers in exchange for crude.

This might seem like a backwards exchange but Venezuela’s own refineries are struggling to remain in operation because of lack of investment and lack of repairs.  Refined fuels would help them to get back on their feet in terms of energy and industry.  Some of Venezuela’s own heavy oil operations require imported diluents in order to continue.  The EU says it currently has no plans to lift restrictions on the oil-for-debt arrangement, which means Europe has now lost yet another energy source.

Sanctions on Venezuela along with declining investments have strangled their oil industry, with overall production dropping by 38% this July compared to a year ago.  Joe Biden’s initial moves to reopen talks with Maduro triggered inflated hopes that Venezuelan oil would flow once again and offset tight global markets and rising prices.  Europe in particular will soon be desperate for energy alternatives, which will probably result in a scouring of markets this autumn to meet bare minimum requirements for heating.

If this occurs and no regular sources of energy can be found to fill the void left by Russian sanctions, prices will rise precipitously in the EU.  Not only that, but with European countries buying up energy supplies wherever they can find them, available sources will also shrink for every other nation including the US.  Get ready for oil and energy prices to spike once again as winter’s chill returns.

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Since the beginning of the COVID vaccine rollout, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have made false and unsubstantiated claims that have misled and harmed many people. For over a year, the CDC contended that the mRNA quickly degrades in the body after it is injected. They also claimed that the translated spike proteins stay in the deltoid muscle, where they are quickly neutralized by immune-responsive cells. These vaccine-encoded spike proteins were heralded as a “safe and effective” immunization, preparing the body to fight SARS-CoV-2. However, the entire process has made vaccinated individuals more susceptible to future strains of the virus. Even worse, the persistence of spike proteins in the blood causes blood clots and inflammation of other organs, especially the heart.

CDC silently retracts “settled science” after misleading millions of people

Scientists, doctors and researchers who questioned or challenged the CDC’s assertions were blocked across social media and accused of spreading “misinformation.” Many have lost their jobs or had their license threatened. Now, the CDC is silently retracting “settled science” they once demanded the public worship. The CDC quietly altered its website, confessing that the mRNA and the spike proteins persists in the body for an extended duration of time. Also, the CDC finally admitted that there is no logical reason to treat vaccinated people differently than unvaccinated people because both can readily contract and transmit coronavirus variants. Even worse, the vaccine subverts the initial surveillance immune cells, leading to inferior intracellular T-cell response.

The CDC once claimed that “our cells break down mRNA from these vaccines and get rid of it within a few days after vaccination.” Now the CDC says, “Scientists estimate that the spike protein, like other proteins our bodies create, may stay in the body up to a few weeks.” Additionally, the CDC recently removed this statement from their website: “mRNA and the spike protein do not last long in the body.” The vaccine manufacturers drastically underestimated the replication force of the mRNA. The regulatory agencies never fully understood how the immune responsive cells would react to these foreign proteins.

Runaway spike protein synthesis has serious implications for human health. If the mRNA does not degrade quickly, it can force human cells to replicate inflammatory spike proteins for a longer duration, causing cardiovascular and organ damage. This would inevitably block the production of natural proteins that the body needs in order to function properly. If the spike proteins are not being properly neutralized by the immune system, they may colonize in distant organs, causing inflammation in unpredictable locations throughout the body.

Another CDC lie debunked: COVID vaccines DO negatively affect human DNA

Under a tab titled, “Facts About mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines, the CDC also claims that the shots “do not affect or interact with our DNA.” “[The] mRNA from these vaccines do not enter the nucleus of the cell where our DNA (genetic material) is located, so it cannot change or influence our genes,” the CDC contends. However, a study out of Sweden finds evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 spike enters the nuclei of the cell and impairs the DNA damage repair process. The study, SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro, confirms that the COVID vaccines interfere with human DNA just hours after vaccination. The spike proteins that are translated by the mRNA vaccines were found to enter the nuclei of cells, blocking the cell’s ability to repair damaged DNA.

The researchers found that the mRNA vaccines impede important DNA repair proteins (BRCA1 and 53BP1). In essence, the COVID vaccines are altering DNA through a molecular mechanism that damages adaptive immunity. Breached cell nuclei could also spell further harms in the long term. “Our study shows that [Pfizer’s mRNA injection] … can be reverse-transcribed to DNA … and this may give rise to concern if BNT162b2-derived DNA may be integrated into the host genome and affect the integrity of genomic DNA, which may potentially mediate genotoxic side effects,” wrote the researchers.

The CDC is collapsing, and every lie emanating from the vaccine industry will be exposed.

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In the wake of the record-breaking heatwave and intense drought, China has been trying to induce rains in some parts of the nation’s central and southwest areas. According to the CNN report, Chinese planes are shooting rods into the sky to increase rainfall as certain places of the Yangtze River begin to dry up. It is worth mentioning that Asia’s longest river, the Yangtze, is currently at record low levels. Although some Yangtze River regions have started weather modification initiatives, several drought-stricken areas of the river’s basin have stayed on standby due to insufficient cloud cover. 

In addition to this, on Wednesday, the Ministry of Water Resources cautioned in a notice that the Yangtze River basin’s drought has been negatively “affecting drinking water security of rural people and livestock, and the growth of crops.” Further, the Hubei province in central China announced on Wednesday that it will use ‘silver iodide rods’ to create clouds and induce rainfall.

According to the CNN report, the silver iodide rods which are basically the size of cigarettes, are fired into existing clouds to aid in the formation of ice crystals. The cloud is subsequently given a boost for producing rains by the crystals, further increasing the amount of moisture in the cloud and its likelihood of release.

Notably, China has the largest system in the world and has been using the cloud seeding technique since the 1940s. This technique may also be used to soften hail or create snowfall.

China is facing severe drought condition

As per Hubei’s Provincial Emergency Management Department, a severe drought has afflicted nearly 4.2 million people in Hubei since the month of June. Approximately 400,000 hectares of crops have been harmed by the heat and drought, and over 150,000 people there have trouble getting access to drinking water, CNN reported.

Moreover, large areas of China are experiencing unexpectedly high temperatures and a persistent drought, which are impacting agriculture output and drinking water supplies. Chinese authorities have issued alerts for temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, and many regions of the nation have already surpassed previous records for high temperatures in 2022, Associated Press reported.

The droughts in provinces like Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Sichuan have been brought on by sustained high temperatures and a lack of precipitation since July, according to state television CCTV, which on Wednesday aired clips of dried-up soil and crops in southern China. In the meantime, temperatures in Sichuan and other regions have surpassed 40C, as per a BBC report.

Furthermore, factories in China’s southwest have closed as a result of hydropower reservoirs running low due to an intensifying drought. According to news reports published on Wednesday, businesses in the Sichuan Province, including those that produce solar panels, cement, and urea, shut down or decreased output after receiving orders to ration electricity for up to five days. That happened as reservoir levels dropped and the demand for electricity for air conditioning rose amid sweltering heat.

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Featured image: Dusk on Chang Jiang (Yangtze) (By Andrew HitchcockFlickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

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In January 2021, FranceSoir interviewed Canadian lawyer Michael Swinwood regarding COVID-19 and his filing of lawsuit on genocide and crime against humanity. 

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The Biden administration’s latest reckless anti-China escalation is playing out on the economic front with newly-unveiled negotiations for a trade deal with Taiwan. The Chinese government said today that it “firmly opposes” the talks, which were announced yesterday by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. 

The negotiations aim to reach agreements in key areas to boost the volume of trade between the two countries by minimizing regulations and making it more difficult to do business with China. The official announcement from the U.S. Trade Representative stated that the two sides would seek accord on “ways to address distortive practices of state-owned enterprises and non-market policies and practices.” This is clearly a reference to China, whose state-owned enterprises play a key economic role and which pursues socialist policies that could broadly be defined as “non-market”. Despite the extremely tense political situation, China is still Taiwan’s most important trading partner – something the U.S. government and secessionist Taiwanese leaders want to change.

This new economic initiative comes just two weeks after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s high-profile visit, a profoundly provocative move that raised the specter of all-out war. Pelosi is the most senior U.S. political leader to visit the island in decades, a level of recognition that China considers a clear signal to those who want to permanently sever Taiwan from the mainland. The Biden administration made Pelosi’s visit possible through a major show of naval and air power aimed at ensuring her safe arrival and departure.

The Chinese armed forces held large-scale military drills in the waters and airspace surrounding Taiwan in response to Pelosi’s trip. But even still, another delegation of U.S. politicians led by Senator Ed Markey visited Taiwan this week. The political elite in the United States remains determined to move even further down the path towards catastrophic confrontation between the two major world powers.

China is right to view Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory. Taiwan only has a separate government because the forces of dictator Chiang Kai-Shek retreated to the island after being defeated in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, and massive U.S. military and political support allowed him to consolidate a lasting regime on the island. Taiwan is not ethnically distinct from the rest of China, its population speaks Chinese, and the Taiwanese government calls itself the “Republic of China”. The conflict is purely about politics – with the Taiwanese authorities representing the capitalist, pro-western forces that were long ago defeated in the civil war. This division of their homeland is of course considered to be unacceptable by China.

The new trade talks with the United States take aim at one of the only remaining avenues of positive interaction between Taiwan and the mainland. While Taiwan and the rest of China are geopolitically at odds, the two became increasingly commercially connected over the years as China emerged as an economic powerhouse. Trade between the two totaled over $328 billion in 2021 – double what it was in 2011. Taiwan gets 21 percent of its imports from the mainland, and 56 percent of its exports go to the mainland. Deepening economic ties with the United States, and taking action against “non-market policies”, could reduce this proportion and remove one of the few remaining barriers to escalation.

Authorities in Beijing are concerned that any agreement that comes out of these negotiations could serve as a stepping stone towards a full-scale free trade agreement between Taiwan and the United States. Free trade agreements in general are aimed at protecting the interests of big business at the expense of the working class in all of the countries involved. Moreover, a U.S.-Taiwan FTA could be seen as essentially de facto recognition of Taiwan as an independent country – something that has the potential to trigger a war.

The Biden administration and the U.S. ruling class as a whole is addicted to escalation as it pursues its dangerous “new Cold War” policy against China. The people of the world need to force them to change course before it’s too late.

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Featured image: Protest in Boston Aug. 8 against U.S. provocations towards China. Credit — Pivot to Peace

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US Bombs Somalia for the Third Time this Summer

August 19th, 2022 by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

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The United States conducted another round of airstrikes in Somalia — the third this summer. If you were unaware that we were bombing Somalia, don’t feel bad, this is a completely under-the-radar news story, one that was curiously absent from the headlines in all of the major newspapers this morning.

Thanks to Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com, however, we know that over a dozen of al-Shabab fighters were killed in an Aug. 14 operation by (US Africa Command) AFRICOM, as described in an official statement Wednesday. He writes:

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced the airstrike on Wednesday and claimed it killed 13 al-Shabaab fighters. The command said the strike was launched against al-Shabaab members that were attacking Somali government forces in a remote location near Teedaan, Somalia.

AFRICOM said its “initial assessment” found that “no civilians were injured or killed,” but the Pentagon is known for severely undercounting civilian casualties in Somalia.

The last US airstrike AFRICOM announced in Somalia took place on August 9, and before that was July 17. The escalation comes after President Biden ordered up to 500 troops to be sent to the East African nation, reversing a Trump-era drawdown.

The AFRICOM statement goes on to say that “US forces are authorized to conduct strikes in defense of designated partner forces.” There is no clarity on what that means, so we can only guess it is referring to the agreements the United States has with the fragile central government there, which is never not under siege by one militant opposition or another.

When pressed, the military would no doubt say that it is authorized to strike whenever it wants under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force because al-Shabaab is considered an al-Qaida offshoot. We know that justification is a stretch. Other justifications in the past have included “tactical defense” of U.S. forces and partners, which was used after questions were raised about a 2016 airstrike. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has given so little energy to sussing out authorizations anymore that it’s practically a moot point.

Al-Shabab, by the way, was created when the United States helped to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union after 9/11, which left a convenient vacuum for a new form of violent repressive rule to take hold in the embattled country. There was no serious al-Qaida presence in Somalia, but the U.S. military and CIA have been able to keep a foothold here, conducting over “several hundred declared and alleged US actions…involving drones, AC-130 gunships, attack helicopters, naval bombardments and cruise missile strikes – which between them according to local communities have killed scores of civilians” since 2007, according to Airwars.

There were 52 airstrikes in 2020 and nine since Biden took office, according to DeCamp.

Bottom line, it’s been a long time since the United States was not bombing Somalia. This comes after a particularly bloody period during the GWOT in which the CIA was using the country to detain and torture terror suspects from across North Africa. Whether this has ultimately been a good thing for the country or for the broader security of the region, one need only to look at the continued instability and impoverishment of the people, and of course, the persistent presence of al-Shabab itself.

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Featured image: Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles drop 2,000-pound joint direct attack munitions. (Michael B. Keller/U.S. Air Force)

The Continuing Isolation of Russia? But Wait…

August 19th, 2022 by Ted Snider

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In his State of the Union address, President Biden announced that Russia was “isolated from the world more than [it] ever has been.” He said that “We are choking off Russia’s access to technology that will sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come.”

But the facts on the ground are less certain than Biden’s words.

Oil

In an attempt to relieve world markets from the pain and pressure caused by sanctions on Russian oil, Biden went to Saudi Arabia as a supplicant seeking oil. The Saudis gratefully accepted everything Biden brought them and then, laughing, escorted him out of their house. The Saudis did increase their oil production: by a drop. The 100,000 barrels per day increase, “equivalent to 86 seconds of global oil demand” was described by analysts “as an insult to U.S. President Joe Biden.”

Biden asked for help isolating Russia; Saudi Arabia seemingly sided with Russia.

What’s equally problematic for the isolation of Russia is that Saudi Arabia has actually more than doubled its imports of Russian oil, importing 647,000 tons compared to 320,000 tons the same time last year. And Saudi Arabia and China are discussing paying for Saudi oil in yuans as well as US dollars.

China and India have done the same. The New York Times reports that “In May, China’s imports of Russian oil rose 28 percent from the previous month, hitting a record high and helping Russia overtake Saudi Arabia as China’s largest supplier, according to Chinese statistics.” China is now importing 1.98 million barrels a day of Russian oil: a 55% increase over this time last year. The Times says that “India, which once purchased little Russian oil, is now bringing in more than 760,000 barrels a day.” That level of important, which has increased to 819,000 barrels a day, now makes Russia the second largest supplier of crude oil to India, overtaking Saudi Arabia. China and India alone, The Times reports, have balanced Western sanctions on Russia by increasing imports by about the same amount as the West has decreased them.

Exports

And it is not just that countries are increasingly importing Russian oil. They are also increasingly exporting goods to Russia.

According to analysis of a sample of 39 countries that accounted for 72% of Russian imports prior to the war, as the sanctions kicked in, exports to Russia dropped by 57%. But, since April, that has started to reverse. By June, exports were nearly back to pre-war levels, going back up by 47%. Most of that recovery was attributable to countries, including European countries, who signed up for sanctions.

And the trade trend is continuing. Chinese exports to Russia in July went up by 35% over June, lifting them above prewar levels. Like China, Turkey is currently exporting more to Russia – 40% more – than they were before the war.

And Turkey is doing more than sending goods to Russia. Turkey is increasingly engaging in trade and tourism with Russia. Imports of Russian oil account for almost half of Turkey’s energy requirements. This month, Erdogan and Putin met, agreeing to increase energy, economic and other ties. And Russia is helping Turkey build its first nuclear power plant.

Friends

Russia also seems to be far from friendless. Much of the world has declined to join the US led sanctions. BRICS is an important Russia and China led international organization that aims to balance US hegemony. Members also include India, Brazil and South Africa. But far from being ostracized and contained, BRICS seems to be building. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirate, Argentina and Iran are all seeking membership. In May, Indonesia – who also invited Putin to the G20 summit they were hosting in defiance of US pressure – was welcomed as a guest to a BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting for the first time, as were the foreign ministers of several other countries, including Kazakhstan, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and Thailand. And with Brazil’s elections coming up in October, and Lula da Silva leading in the polls by 12%, Brazil seems poised to put the BRIC back in RIC, correcting a lapse that has partially occurred during the unsteady Bolsonaro years.

The other crucial Russia-China led organization that shares the aim of balancing US hegemony is also gaining in popularity. Iran has been accepted into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), officially becoming a full member in April 2023. In September, 2021, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar were admitted to the SCO as a dialogue partner. Bahrain and the Maldives have also acquired dialogue partner status, and Azerbaijan and Armenia are now included as observers. The UAE wants to be next.

Much of Latin America and Africa have refused to join the sanctions on Russia. The US recently felt the need to scold Africa and warn them away from violating US led sanctions even if they haven’t joined the sanction regime. It seems they don’t get the choice. In early August, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told African countries that, although they “can buy Russian agricultural products, including fertilizer and wheat . . . if a country decides to engage with Russia, where there are sanctions, then they are breaking those sanctions.” What happens if they break sanctions? “They stand the chance of having actions taken against them.”

Biden’s claim that Russia is more isolated from the world than it has ever been seems to be increasingly questionable. From oil sales to imports to countries staying out of sanctions and growing friendships, Russia may not be as isolated as Biden boasts.

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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

Featured image is from intellinews.com

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First published on August 4, 2022

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A new US-funded report out of Kiev assesses $108.3 billion in economic damages for Ukraine, but requests a 7x replenishment of $750 billion so that the country can “Build Back Better.”

The Kyiv School of Economics has released a new assessment claiming that Ukraine will need hundreds of billions of dollars to “Build Back Better” from its war against Russia.

As of August 1, 2022, the new update from the Ukrainian institution assesses $108.3 billion in economic damages from the war, roughly the equivalent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2020.

But as you’ll see in a moment, those damages are rookie numbers. In this era of money printing madness, Ukraine has much more ambitious plans than simply replacing damaged infrastructure. These “expert” economists are about to send the tab soaring.

The study says Ukraine will need a bare minimum of $185 billion, almost twice the amount in damages, in order to repair the nation, citing what they refer to as the “Build Back Better principle.” The slogan was popularized by The World Economic Forum, and is used by governments to refer to their plans to impose digital tyranny and accomplish ESG-compliant objectives.

Ukraine is seeking the “modernization of assets that have not suffered damage and destruction,” the report adds That request will mark up the economic aid request to the tune of $750 billion dollars.

Notably, President Volodomyr Zelensky’s office has previously cited the exact $750 billion number, but claimed it was the total cost of losses.

“Now we are working on a long-term plan for the recovery of Ukraine. It defines the list of national reconstruction programs. We have incorporated the Build Back Better principle into this plan,” Zelensky’s deputy said last month.

 

At the end of the report, we find that the robust damages assessment is not an independent effort. In fact, it is funded by the U.S. taxpayer, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The “assessment” is just the latest document that advances the continuing global campaign to solicit funds for the rebuilding, reconstruction, and “modernization” of Ukraine, despite the fact that the war is ongoing. There has been a concerted effort in the D.C. lobbying and military contracting space to score massive funds for the “reconstruction” effort.

Meanwhile in D.C., Congress is beginning  to whip the votes for a new funding round for Ukraine, yet very few lawmakers having any idea where the first $40 billion ended up.

The Biden Administration continues to send regular military assistance to Ukraine, depleting U.S. stockpiles in the process, and it hasn’t helped the country turn the tide of the war. On Monday, the White House authorized an additional $550 million in weaponry for Kiev.

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Will Europe Easily Survive Next Winter?

August 19th, 2022 by Uriel Araujo

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As winter approaches, Europeans, both in the continent and in Britain, are facing hard times, with extreme inflation as well as economic, political, and migration crises.

In the UK, inflation is taking a heavy toll on its population.  About 13 million Britons are expected to be pushed into debt by the rise in energy prices. According to Citizens Advice, one in four won’t be able to afford bills. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose to 10.1% in July. This means that, for the first time in 40 years, the inflation rate hit double figures.

As is often the case, a political crisis accompanies an economic one. Although Boris Johnson remains the incumbent PM until a new one is chosen by his party, he has announced his resignation on July 7, over a series of indecent scandals (such as the so-called “Partygate”) which have completely demoralized his government. One could say then that right now the UK is without a PM de facto.

In France, after being re-elected, President Emmanel Macron’s party has lost its absolute majority in the legislature, which amounts to a moral and political defeat. Macron has also been the target of a lot of investigations pertaining to several shady deals, such as the issues exposed by the “Uber files”, the McKinsey Affair and so on. The Italian parliament in turn was dissolved by President Sergio Mattarella in July, after Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned. Draghi remains in office as a caretaker PM, and the crisis goes on. In both the Italian and French cases one can see the rising influence of the far-right.

Amid such political turmoils, the coming European winter will likely be accompanied by a recession. According to Eurostat estimates, sales in the Euro area have fallen by 3.7 percent year-on-year, while retail trade volume shrank by 2.8 percent compared with June 2021. Transportation and other costs are all rising, which brings more downward pressure on demand. Germany’s stagnated economy is also in a bad shape, much affected by supply shortages.

The EU is encouraging its member states to save energy consumption, but even that is not sure to work, as distribution ability and gas storage capacity varies within the bloc. Austria, Italy, and Germany have announced their plans to restart coal power projects (with a tremendous environmental impact), but this will not come in time for this year’s winter.

Of course, rising inflation has been a global phenomenon even before the current Ukrainian crisis – which has of course made things worse. Amongst the industrialized nations, the US too has been suffering the impact of it. Europe’s energy dependence on Russia however makes its situation unique. It is in fact quite ironic that the European powers have chosen to antagonize Moscow (by playing along with NATO’s policy of inviting Ukraine into the Alliance). Much is talked about such dependence, but the truth is that the Nord Stream-2 pipeline project could have at least partly avoided the energy price in the continent in 2021 had it not been delayed and then abandoned.

The real dependence issue here is Europe’s lack of a sovereign foreign policy and its political submission to the United States. It is about time European countries rethink the sanctions policy – which has obviously backfired – and start opening communication channels with Russia for a negotiated settlement to put an end to the conflict.

The truth is that US interests and European ones are different, no matter how much NATO rhetoric tries to mask this fact. In his June lecture on the causes of the Ukraine conflict at the Robert Schuman Centre, University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer claimed the main European powers in fact did not quite support the US policy on Russia which was detrimental to their own interests, but they had to play along because, quite simply, the Americans “run NATO”, in spite of all the talk about “joint decision making” within the alliance.

With discredited governments, the specter of poverty haunting their middle classes as well as their shop-keepers and workers, and a migration crisis, Europeans should expect a rise in political extremism, both from the far-left and from the far-right. This in turn can certainly have an impact on elections in the future and then change European countries’ foreign policies.

One should remember that Marine Le Pen, for example, defeated by Macron in April, wanted France out of NATO. This rise of populism and extremism will certainly be a challenge for current Western European notions of democracy. This very notion has been in crisis for a while in much of the world, including the West. Alternatives to it have been proposed, such as Hungary’s own brand of so-called “illiberal democracy”, but, in the meantime, a lot of instability and political turmoil might ensue. Be it as it may, even by opening its arms to Ukraine, the European bloc has already short-circuited its “European values”, and no amount of Vogue photo sessions will be able to cover up Azov battalion swastikas. In the end, this is about a real identity problem, a crisis of values.

These are some of the challenges for Europe in the long run, pertaining to reinventing its democracy and its very self-image. In any case, the most pressing and urgent issue remains the winter. It is coming – and the European continent does not seem to be ready for it.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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August 19th, 2022 by Global Research News

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The takeaway from China’s insight into the “Kabul moment” is that the US is seeking to impose the same failed hegemonic model onto the Asia-Pacific as it earlier attempted to impose in Eurasia. Rhetoric about “democracy”, “human rights”, and the “rules-based order” is nothing but a smokescreen for disguising its unipolar agenda that’s being pushed at everyone else’s expense and aims to destabilize their region.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin was asked on Monday about what CCTV described as the “Kabul moment”, which refers to the Taliban retaking control of the Afghan capital on 15 August 2021 without firing shot. This symbolically occurred prior to the full withdrawal of those Western forces that had been occupying this geostrategically positioned state for the past two decades. The images that accompanied that moment have since come to infamously represent the failure of that US-led war.

The diplomat responded by sharing some worthwhile insight. In his words, “The ‘Kabul moment’ marks the failure of the ‘democratic transformation’ imposed by the US”, which he said can never be imposed by foreign forces, let alone in advance of ideologically driven aims that contradict the targeted society’s culture and history. Mr. Wang then added that the pretext of the US invading other countries to spread “democracy” and protect “human rights” has conclusively been discredited.

Nevertheless, he predicted that more such “Kabul moments” might be inevitable so long as the US refuses to learn its lessons from Afghanistan. This diplomat’s professional assessment is that “the US has never ceased to engage in political interference and manipulation worldwide in the name of democracy and human rights. It has even tried to build ‘small circles’ in economic and technological spheres.” The last part is presumably in reference to the anti-Chinese coalition that the US is attempting to assemble.

In particular, last September’s AUKUS alliance between Australia, the UK, and the US is regarded by most experts as one of the most regionally destabilizing developments in decades. It’s especially concerning since it involves the sharing of nuclear technology in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby leading to fears that this troika’s Anglo-American members might one day help their Australian partner secretly develop nuclear weapons in the worst-case scenario.

The economic aspect of this larger trend concerns various programs that the US has unveiled in recent years, all of which share the commonality of being closed blocs intended to counteract what Washington wrongly regards as Beijing’s “destabilizing influence”. The reality is that the dozens of countries that cooperate with China through the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) have universally recognized governments that voluntarily decided to enter into mutually beneficial cooperation with it.

By contrast, these emerging US-led structures either rely on countries that are already antagonistic to China like Australia has recently been manipulated by America into becoming or coerce prospective members into joining under the implied threat of information warfare consequences if they refuse. Some comparatively smaller- and medium-sized lack the confidence to reject this bullying, especially if the US has succeeded in influencing them through neo-colonial means.

Against this context, it’s clear that more such “Kabul moments” might occur in the coming future, albeit in the Asia-Pacific instead of Eurasia considering the fact that the first-mentioned is being transformed by the US into a theater of competition with China against the regional countries’ will. Just like in Afghanistan, the US is seeking to advance its unipolar hegemonic interests under the false pretext of spreading “democracy” and supporting “human rights” through rhetoric about the “rules-based order”.

That phrase is nothing more than the latest propaganda point intended to imply that all regional states must unilaterally concede on their objective national interests by complying with the US’ demands since this is supposedly a better alternative that subjecting themselves to China’s alleged “hegemony”. The truth, however, is that China has consistently fought against hegemony wherever it may be and regardless of whoever’s attempting to impose it since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

As the world’s largest developing country, China has a responsibility to its peers across the Global South to help them follow in its footsteps by facilitating their full liberation from the US-led West’s neo-colonial yoke. BRI is the means to this end since it embodies mutually beneficial and sustainable economic cooperation without any strings attached, unlike those that always come with American “aid”, which is just a euphemism for buying off corrupt elites and/or clandestinely expanding its influence.

The takeaway from China’s insight into the “Kabul moment” is that the US is seeking to impose the same failed hegemonic model onto the Asia-Pacific as it earlier attempted to impose in Eurasia. Rhetoric about “democracy”, “human rights”, and the “rules-based order” is nothing but a smokescreen for disguising its unipolar agenda that’s being pushed at everyone else’s expense and aims to destabilize their region. Just like in Afghanistan, however, the US is also doomed to fail in the Asia-Pacific.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The US has imposed new export restrictions affecting China’s semiconductor industry. The new ban includes export restrictions of Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) and diamond – used for semiconductor substrates instead of silicon and is the latest generation chip. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the US Department of Commerce has announced new export control measures for national security reasons. Although the document does not mention China, it is clear that the decision was made to prevent the Asian country from accessing advanced technology.

US President Joe Biden signed on August 9 the “Science and CHIPS Act of 2022” to create an impetus to produce semiconductors in the US. Under the law, $52 billion is allocated in subsidies to leading chipmakers to develop manufacturing in the US. This law has two goals:

  • to increase the US share of the global chip market as the country currently accounts for no more than 12% of global semiconductor chip production; and,
  • to prevent US investments from contributing directly or indirectly to the development of manufacturing in China.

In the past, Washington forced Dutch consortium ASML – which has a monopoly position in the manufacture of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) systems – to stop exporting EUV machines to China. The company complied with the demand, but in the end, it was not enough to hold back the growth of China’s semiconductor industry. China is the production platform for end products for all the leading manufacturers, such as Intel, TSMC and Texas Instruments. All these companies have their own chip testing and packaging facilities in China.

Chip companies in China, such as SMIC, continue to develop and master new technologies. Recently, the press reported that China’s SMIC was able to master the production of chips based on the 7nm process. Furthermore, SMIC is using ASML equipment of previous generations: Deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography is not prohibited. The US tried to persuade ASML to ban the export of DUV systems to China, but the Dutch company is thus far resisting pressure since China accounts for about 16% of ASML sales, which is the third largest market after South Korea and Taiwan. In addition, ASML emphasises that DUV equipment has been sold on the global market for a long time and China has been able to create a significant reserve of it.

Washington realizes that the existing bans on the Chinese semiconductor industry are no longer effective – China can still move forward in making next-generation chips. Indeed, the ban on providing chip manufacturing technology using the 28nm process, or even the 10nm process, looks ridiculous when China has just produced chips based on the 7nm process. As a result, the US made the decision to ban the supply of promising technologies that no major manufacturers were using yet.

A microchip is a collection of electrical circuits containing semiconductor components. In modern chips there are billions of such components. In order to reduce the size of the chip and reduce power consumption, the transistors on the chip are getting denser, and the silicon wafer itself is becoming thinner, i.e. “nanotechnology”. The problem is that it is impossible to reduce the size of silicon wafers to infinity – essentially new microprocessor architectures and materials are needed to make silicon wafers.

In addition, diamonds and gallium oxide will be used to make chips. Unlike silicon, such materials can withstand higher voltage, frequency and temperature loads. Because of this, it will be possible to multiply the density of transistors and connections on a chip. With this development, Samsung has announced that it will start manufacturing chips on the 3nm process using Gate-All-Around technology. Widespread use of the new technology is expected no earlier than 2024-2025.

The export restrictions imposed by the BIS are all aimed at such promising technologies and attempts to restrict China from accessing it. Importantly, it is probably a long time before these technologies become widely used. Therefore, in the short term, such restrictions will not have any significant impact on the development of China’s semiconductor industry.

Limitations are related to 3nm process technology, and China currently produces the majority of 28nm chips – technology of a previous generation. In fact, currently, there is a great demand for chips manufactured according to this technology and manufacturers receive their largest income from this product.

The long-term effects of these restrictions on China will depend on how the country develops its own industry. China’s long-term goal is to develop its own technologies and this is not hinged on the successes of Western developers, but China’s own scientific thought. The Asian Giant is completely capable of coming up with breakthrough solutions.

Huawei, as an example, conquered the global market after the company developed its own SingleRAN radio access technology, which allows operators to support all communications standards according to 2G, 3G and 4G standards. In the semiconductor industry, China is developing its own technology to use silicon carbide in chip production – a task outlined in the five-year plan to develop smart manufacturing.

Besides, China can get out of this situation by using old equipment to make next-generation chips, as happened with DUV equipment. This will increase production costs but China spares no expense in Research and Development in promising industries and technologies. Last year, China allocated 2.44% of GDP – a record 2.79 trillion-yuan ($441.3 billion) budget to Research and Development. This makes it nearly impossible for the US to stop China from developing its own technology.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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Moderna documents regarding their COVID vaccine trial on animals, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, showed that some of the offspring of rats that were injected with Moderna’s mRNA shot developed rib malformations.

The 700 pages contain a portion of the formal Biologics Licensing Application (BLA) package that a manufacturer is required to submit to the FDA for approval.

The documents have not yet been made public, but were analyzed by former pharma executive Alexandra Latypova and reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Included in the documents are test results that show that Moderna mRNA shots caused statistically significant skeletal malformations in the offspring of the rats that took the mRNA-1273 (Spikevax mRNA) doses.

“mRNA-1273-related variations in skeletal examination included statistically significant increases in the number of F1 rats with 1 or more wavy ribs and 1 or more rib nodules. Wavy ribs appeared in 6 fetuses and 4 litters with a fetal prevalence of 4.03% and a litter prevalence of 18.2%. Rib nodules appeared in 5 of those 6 fetuses,” according to Moderna’s internal documents.

F1 refers to the rat offspring and litter indicates a group-birth of rats.

“Maternal toxicity in the form of clinical observations was observed for 5 days following the last dose (Gestation Day 13), correlating with the most sensitive period for rib development in rats (Gestation Days 14 to 17)” the documents state.

Epoch Times Photo

A document package on biodistribution studies obtained by Judicial Watch. (Courtesy of Alexandra Latypova)

“Wavy ribs” refers to ribs not properly shaped.

In other words, 6 out of about 149 baby rats had wavy ribs and 5 of those also had rib nodules.

According to Latypova’s analysis, only female rats were studied (male rats were not treated with the Moderna vaccine).

The females got a human dose of 100mcg Spikevax mRNA, 28 and 14 days prior to mating and gestation days 1 and 13.

“1/2 rats euthanized before delivery to examine fetuses, the rest followed to 21 days after delivery,” Latypova stated, “No numbers are provided for the study size.”

In addition, there is no study report, but only Moderna’s own interpretation of the outcomes.

The results were part of reproductive toxicology tests done by Moderna, which is the only reproductive toxicology test for the product, according to Latypova.

It is not known how the dose translates from humans to rats.

“Neither Moderna nor Pfizer provided any dose calculations or justification information for dose selection in animal studies,” Latypova told The Epoch Times.

“Doses of drugs, or especially biologics do not necessarily have linear relationships with toxicity or efficacy. It is likely a much more complex relationship and unfortunately not known at all.”

“Reproductive toxicology is the study of adverse effects of medicinal products on reproduction. The FDA requires reproductive toxicity testing for any NME to be used in women of childbearing potential,” added Latypova, who has worked in more than 60 pharmaceutical companies, mainly focusing on creating and reviewing clinical trials, many of which were submitted to the FDA.

Despite the abovementioned lab results, the FDA issued a statement on Jan. 30 saying that there were no adverse effects on postnatal developments.

“No vaccine-related fetal malformations or variations and no adverse effect on postnatal development were observed in the study,” the FDA stated on the label for Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine.

“In a developmental toxicity study, 0.2 mL of a vaccine formulation containing nucleoside-modified mRNA (100 mcg) and other ingredients that are included in a 0.5-mL single human dose of SPIKEVAX was administered IM to female rats on four occasions: 28 and 14 days prior to mating, and on gestation days 1 and 13,” reads the FDA publication.

Pfizer Vaccine Also Caused Abnormal Ribs in Rats

In August of 2021, Elsevier published a peer-reviewed study (pdf) titled “Lack of effects on female fertility and prenatal and postnatal offspring development in rats with BNT162b2, a mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine.”

BNT162b2 is the Pfizer jab.

All the authors of the publication were employed by Pfizer, BioNTech, or Charles River, a Pfizer contractor.

This publication suggests that there was a “lack of effects” in postnatal offspring development, but the study shows that there was a 295 percent increase (8.3 percent compared to 2.1 percent in the control group) in abnormal ribs in vaccinated rat offspring. A huge increase in what is described as the “supernumerary lumbar.”

‘This Was an Extremely Dangerous Warning’

“Skeletal abnormalities in the bony rib cages are absolutely important and were statistically increased in the rat offspring of the experimental group compared with the placebo group,” James Thorp, an MD board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as maternal-fetal medicine, told The Epoch Times after reviewing Latypova’s analysis of Moderna’s BLA package.

“In clinical obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine we see similar findings in skeletal abnormalities prior to birth that are extremely serious and often lethal. This was an extremely dangerous warning signal in reproductive toxicology studies and was never brought to the light of day to protect our global citizens. The CDC, Pfizer, Moderna, and the flagship medical journals of the medical industrial complex lied to the American public and should be held accountable,” Thorp said.

Thorp recently analyzed and verified the most recent Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data related to COVID-19 vaccines and compared them to the influenza vaccines, finding numerous abnormalities.

The CDC website recommends the COVID vaccines during pregnancy in order to “prevent severe illness and death in pregnant women.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also “strongly recommends that pregnant individuals be vaccinated against COVID-19,” adding that pregnant women’s complete vaccination should be a “priority.”

Moderna, Pfizer, the CDC, and the FDA did not respond to requests for comment.

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Enrico Trigoso is an Epoch Times reporter focusing on the NYC area.

Featured image by Janet Stephens, licensed under the Public Domain

Monkeypox Vaccine Insanity — Too Many Risks and Now, Liability-Free

August 18th, 2022 by Children’s Health Defense

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Using vaccine “shortages” as an excuse, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arranged a liability shield for the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine by issuing a new Emergency Use Authorization for “fractional doses” using a different mode of administration, and allowing the vaccine’s use in “high risk” children under age 18.

For totalitarians and technocrats bent on shredding constitutional protections and wresting control from ordinary people over personal decision-making in areas ranging from health to finances, the events of the past two-and-a-half years were a proving ground — showing that promises of safety via injection could persuade many people to act against their own best interests, often with disastrous results.

But with the public growing increasingly ho-hum about the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. discarding tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccines — including over a quarter of some states’ doses — tyrants wanting to “further advance draconian biosecurity policies and global power grabs” needed a new emergency to keep the injection scam going.

In May 2022, right on cue, entered monkeypox, with (echoes of decades past) cases reported “predominantly … in networks of men who have sex with men.”

Just like the coronavirus Event 201, the reported monkeypox outbreak was prefigured by a “tabletop simulation” one year prior and by “suspiciously” timed, before-the-fact clinical trials of monkeypox treatments and vaccines.

With the “outbreak” thus positioned in the headlines, what happened next?

  • After allowing suspense to build for a couple of months but with fewer than a dozen deaths worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in late July “side-stepped” his own advisors to pronounce monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern,” the WHO’s first such ruling since SARS-CoV-2.
  • With no U.S. deaths, the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) followed suit, declaring a public health emergency.
  • Around the same time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf soothingly told Americans, “We understand … an emerging disease may leave people feeling concerned and uncertain, but it’s important to note that we already have medical products in place …”

One of the “products in place” was the Jynneos smallpox vaccine (brand names Imvanex or Imvamune), which the FDA licensed for adults in September 2019, conveniently approving it not only for smallpox but for “prevention” of monkeypox — even though in primate studies, pox lesions developed just the same.

At the time of licensure, the CEO of Bavarian Nordic — the Danish biotech company that developed the smallpox jab in partnership with the U.S. government, funneling millions of doses into America’s Strategic National Stockpile — crowed that the green light for monkeypox would create “new commercial opportunities.”

At present, a suddenly woke WHO is “accepting proposals” to rebrand monkeypox so as to “avoid offense,” but with the historically loaded “pox” word planted in the public’s subconscious — a word that calls to mind not only unsightly skin eruptions but social stigma and Shakespearean curses — the damage has been done.

Officials no doubt expect the latest “pox” — which also has exotic associations with prairie dogsand African rodents — to stoke the types of fears that will send people running straight into the arms of the nearest vaccinator.

In cities like San Francisco — where long lines of “mostly men” reportedly have been queuing up in the wee hours of the morning for a chance at a shot — the drum-beating about a “rapid rise in cases” already appears to be working.

What’s the big deal?

The same fallacious PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology used to conjure up large numbers of COVID-19 “cases” out of thin air — a technology that inventor Kary Mullis warned should never be used for diagnosis — is once again the WHO’s preferred laboratory test for monkeypox.

Setting aside the thorny PCR issue, there are many other questions one could ask about monkeypox and its supposed discovery in humans in 1970, including why, after half a century in which the condition labeled monkeypox “never really [got] off the ground outside of a couple of countries in Africa,” it is “suddenly in every Western nation and being hyped up by public health authorities, the mainstream media and the World Health Organization.”

Other than the skin lesions, the symptoms of so-called monkeypox “could describe hundreds of millions of cases of simple flu-like illness or even the common cold.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) characterizes monkeypox as “generally a mild disease,” involving little more than rashes, fevers and chills that typically require “no specific treatment.”

A public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said, “Monkeypox is not likely to kill anybody in the United States,” with short-lived pain being about the worst that it might do.

In the 2021 pandemic tabletop exercise focused on monkeypox, one of the features of the “fictional” scenario under discussion was that an “unusual strain” of monkeypox would come along to wreak global havoc.

Obligingly, media accounts in 2022 are evoking a monkeypox that “seems to have changed,” though reporters are issuing mixed messages.

In a conversation on NPR, for example, a science reporter described “very localized” and “extremely subtle” monkeypox symptoms not “matching up” to the “horrible rash” depicted in medical textbooks, prompting the interviewer to remark on the “good news” of a milder disease — at which point the reporter felt compelled to correct the benign impression, adding, “it can also be really severe and really painful” and “make you sick for, like, up to four weeks.”

Skin reactions of all kinds are well-documented adverse consequences of vaccination. In Israel, a renowned vaccine scientist has been making the case that the immune system breakdown caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines is the culprit responsible for the current monkeypox situation.

Why else, others are asking, would symptoms appear simultaneously in multiple countries and continents that just happen to correspond to the locations that deployed Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab?

Atrocious smallpox vaccine track record

From their earliest days through today, smallpox vaccines had a dreadful track record — and this fact is not even particularly controversial.

In 2003, researchers openly characterized the smallpox vaccine available at the time, Wyeth’s Dryvax, as “less safe than other vaccines,” describing “known adverse events that range from mild to severe,” including death, brain swelling, lesions and other skin problems.

They concluded the “net harm would result if smallpox vaccine were made available to the general public on a voluntary basis” and that some individuals would be “unable to weigh the risks and benefits for true informed consent.”

Although Dryvax fell out of favor in the mid-1980s, it continued to be used to vaccinate groupssuch as military personnel, lab workers and others deemed “high risk.”

In 2007, the FDA approved Acambis’s ACAM2000, made with a “clone” of Dryvax and grown in lab cultures of African green monkey kidney (Vero) cells.

Right after Acambis won a 10-year contract to supply the U.S. government with the vaccine, the company was gobbled up by Sanofi Pasteur.

The U.S. military, which by then had given Dryvax to more than 1.4 million military personnel and contractors, immediately switched to ACAM2000, albeit with a first-ever, FDA-imposed requirement that each person vaccinated receive a “medication guide.”

ACAM2000’s “unwieldy” method of administration involves using a two-pronged needle to make “a series of tiny jabs at the skin” designed to elicit a “kind of gnarly pustule” which, if it doesn’t show up a week later, necessitates yet another attempt.

In an article published by The Defender in November 2020, Pam Long, an Army veteran, described smallpox vaccination (whether Dryvax or ACAM2000) as one of “four horsemen of pharma” destroying veterans’ health.

Long highlighted cardiac risks, in particular.

Back in 2003, CDC authors described adverse reactions from Dryvax ranging from “benign, if frightening in appearance” to “life-threatening,” conceding that myopericarditis was “truly” an adverse outcome but admitting to not knowing about long-term consequences.

In 2021, when the Military Vaccine Agency published a study involving monthly surveillance of clinically “adjudicated” cardiac and neurological adverse events experienced in temporal association with ACAM2000 vaccination, it reported a significantly higher rate of myopericarditis in younger men (under age 40), and overall rates of “any cardiovascular event” of 1.14 per 1,000.

As Long noted, the FDA documented a much higher incidence of 6.9 cardiac events per 1,000 for ACAM2000, and one study reported myocarditis in one in every 175 recipients.

New kid on the block

By June 2022, the media build-up promoting monkeypox vaccination and the Jynneos injection in particular was on full display, with headlines playing up the idea of hordes eager for jabs that are in short supply.

To tee up demand for the “newer generation” — and largely unfamiliar — Jynneos vaccine, CNBC classified its competitor, ACAM2000, as practically a dinosaur, an “older generation smallpox vaccine that can have serious side effects.”

In late July, Vox agreed there would be “trade-offs” if the U.S. were to tap into its “100 million-odd doses” of ACAM2000 “currently sitting on the shelves at the Strategic National Stockpile, largely untouched” — trade-offs such as “potentially concerning side effects, the complex way it has to be administered, and limits on who can safely receive the vaccine” (no immunocompromised individuals, no pregnant women, no one with eczema and no babies).

While ACAM2000’s “cumbersome” mode of administration does not lend itself to “assembly-line” distribution, Jynneos, Vox assured us, “can be given in public venues, like festivals and even bathhouses.”

However, we know very little about Jynneos, other than the serious adverse events listed in the package insert — Crohn’s disease, sarcoidosis (an inflammatory disease affecting multiple organs, notably the lungs), eye weakness and throat tightness (a potential sign of anaphylaxis).

A higher proportion of Jynneos recipients (1.3%) also experienced cardiac adverse events compared to placebo recipients (0.2%) who received saline.

A CDC scientist who led a clinical trial that was supposed to provide information about efficacy and side effects — a trial that recruited subjects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2017 to 2020 — gave a monkeypox briefing to CDC advisors in late June but, according to Dr. Meryl Nass, scientific advisor to Children’s Health Defense, he was “coy” about sharing the study’s results.

Liability-free yet again

Nass also pointed out that although Jynneos is licensed and, under ordinary circumstances, would be susceptible to vaccine injury lawsuits, the FDA and HHS pulled a fast one yet again that effectively shields Bavarian Nordic and the U.S. government from liability.

Using vaccine “shortages” as their excuse, they arranged the liability shield by putting Jynneos under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) umbrella that shifts the U.S. over to administering “fractional doses” and using a different mode of administration (injection into the skin rather than between skin and muscle).

The EUA also permits administration of Jynneos to children if they are deemed “high risk.”

After the EUA announcement, Bavarian Nordic’s CEO expressed “reservations” about the altered dosing and mode of administration, stating further studies would have been a “prudent” step “before overhauling the nation’s monkeypox vaccine strategy.”

The Biden administration’s rejoinder was that Bavarian Nordic was just voicing sour grapes about “a potential loss in profits.”

The company needn’t worry — its stock has gone up by more than 150% since the announcement of a “moneypox” outbreak.

As for Americans, we have a choice: We can join the crowds supposedly clamoring for yet another vaccine that doesn’t prevent anything.

Or we can “just say no,” recognizing that there just might be something “unusual about a global pandemic occurring just months after a simulation of a global pandemic of exactly that kind, followed shortly after by the first-ever global outbreak of an even-more-obscure virus just months after a simulation of an outbreak of exactly that kind.”

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Washington’s Fear of Non-Existent Chinese Bases

August 18th, 2022 by Daniel Larison

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Eric Miller wants to sound the alarm about future Chinese bases in Africa, but mostly he just recycles the same unpersuasive claims we have been hearing for months:

Chinese military basing efforts abroad have become a topic of great international interest and scrutiny. The completion of Beijing’s first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017, revelations last year of a potential military base in the United Arab Emirates, and the announcement this spring of Chinese investment in a Cambodian military base with suspected exclusive Chinese use all support the realization that China is methodically moving forward on improving its ability to project power globally. Deciphering where Beijing plans to place its next flag is challenging because it is a dynamic equation—one that must factor in China’s goals and those of a host nation, along with the willingness of those involved to deal with the invariable regional and international questions and blowback. One area of the world where this calculus appears favorable for China is Africa.

Miller is U.S. Africa Command’s director of intelligence analysis, so it is a bit worrisome that there is so little analysis in this article. The entire piece comes across as a longer version of the threat inflation we saw in news reporting about a possible Chinese base in Equatorial Guinea that does not exist and may never be built. Nine months later, there have been no moves towards establishing a base, and neither government has given any indication that there ever will be. Even if Equatorial Guinea agreed to a Chinese base on its territory, that would bring the number of Chinese overseas bases in the world all the way up to two. The U.S. has 29 bases and outposts just in Africa.

Pointing to a naval base in Cambodia as evidence for Chinese ambitions in Africa is hard to take seriously. It is not even certain that China will be granted exclusive use of any part of the facility at Ream. The U.S. has been overreacting to the possibility of a Chinese presence in Cambodia, but at least there is something real to overreact to. In Equatorial Guinea, there doesn’t appear to be anything to the rumors of a future base. It is questionable whether the Chinese government has much interest in establishing a military presence on Africa’s Atlantic coast to begin with. That hasn’t stopped the head of Africom from asserting in March that China is “actively seeking” a base and zeroing in on Equatorial Guinea as the “likeliest” candidate for a host country.

The main problem for Miller’s argument is that there is very little evidence that the Chinese government is even trying to establish any additional bases in Africa, and there is even less evidence that they are having success in doing so. Miller addresses this problem by waving away the lack of evidence and appealing to an unproven assumption about Chinese ambitions:

The lack of visible, publicly available evidence of Chinese basing progress in Africa has fueled skepticism, with some commentators suggesting that concern about such basing efforts is overblown. This is understandable, but it overlooks the secretive nature and substantial timelines associated with these diplomatic and military negotiations. One just has to look closely enough and understand that China has a patient, long-term approach to achieving its global military ambitions.

Concerns about these basing efforts are indeed overblown, as Cobus van Staden explained in an article earlier this year. He commented on the reporting about a possible base in Equatorial Guinea, saying that “the current flurry of rumors seems to reveal more about Washington’s priorities than Beijing’s.” He added that “worries among U.S. officials about a Chinese naval presence on Africa’s Atlantic coast seem to be based more on speculation than superior intelligence about Beijing’s intentions.” That seems right to me, and I would add that this speculation starts from the assumption that China has “global military ambitions” that would require them to acquire bases in the Atlantic and then moves to conclude that this must be what they are doing to realize the ambitions that Washington assumes them to have.

Africom has some obvious incentives to exaggerate Chinese military ambitions in Africa, since every U.S. command is hoping to make itself relevant to “great power competition” or “strategic competition.” Van Staden argued that the head of Africom is doing exactly this: “Townsend, as head of U.S. Africa Command, may be less focused on any real threat of Chinese expansion than on getting emotional buy-in from policymakers on Capitol Hill, who will be deciding his command’s future budgets.” The head of Centcom, Gen. Kurilla, did the same thing earlier this year when he boasted that “[t]his region [i.e., the Middle East] is at the center of America’s strategic competition with Russia and China” despite the fact that the Middle East is mostly a sideshow when it comes to competing for influence with those states. The public worrying about Chinese military installations in Africa seems to be mostly an attempt to bid for more attention from Washington and to get more resources to “counter” the imagined Chinese presence.

According to a report in the South China Morning Post earlier this year, this fixation on Chinese bases in Africa is largely an American one:

However, senior research fellow Zhou Yuyuan, with the Centre for West Asian and African Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said that from his communications with some officials “it seems China has no new plans to build a military base”.

Zhou said that, while the topic was a hot discussion in the US, there was little talk in China on the issue, and there appeared to be no interest in establishing another military base.

“America’s concern on this, in my opinion, is mainly driven by its domestic considerations, or by demand from different stakeholders,” he said.

In order for analysis to inform policymaking constructively, it cannot start off assuming that another state must be doing something unseen because that is what is required to pursue its unproven “ambitions.” To determine what another government is likely to do in the future, analysis has to begin with an accurate assessment of what it has done and what it is currently doing, and it must also understanding that government’s view of its own interests. What we have here in Miller’s article does neither of these things. This article ascribes grand ambitions to the Chinese government because that fits the enemy image many people in Washington have of them, and then it works backwards from that to fill in the gaps when there is no evidence that supports the exaggerated assessment of the other state’s goals.

As van Staden said in his article, “Reports about Chinese plans for another African base have been both alarmist and vague.” They remain just as alarmist and vague in Miller’s argument, and they should be viewed with considerable skepticism.

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US-Iran Deal Dangling in the Air

August 18th, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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In an interview on The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro Show, the former prime minister of Israel — and the likely next PM — Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that he had an ingenuous Plan B for forcing regime change in Iran. Netanyahu said, “With low-flying satellites” and other miniature devices, “you might break their (regime’s) hold—their monopoly on information. That begins to challenge them.” 

Netanyahu insisted that “there are devices the size of a matchbook” that could help destabilise the Iranian regime. “There are many other things I could talk about, but I won’t,” he added. 

The hawkish politician was speaking at a defining moment when Tehran was expected to give its “final thoughts” to the European Union’s “final text” on behalf of the Americans, at the end of the 16-month long negotiations in Vienna that would enable Washington to return to the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA.) 

Netanyahu’s thesis was that Israel cannot and will not put all its eggs in the American basket. He sarcastically illustrated the point, narrating  how naive top American diplomats could be, as the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan testifies. 

Conversely, the big question is also how naive would the Iranians be to place their eggs in the American basket when it comes to their national security. From details available so far, Iran’s response, which was transmitted to Brussels Monday evening mostly focuses on outstanding questions related to sanctions and guarantees around economic engagement. An EU spokesman reacted today, “We are studying it and are consulting with the other JCPOA participants and the US on the way ahead.”

An IRNA report says that Iran’s response is “calling for flexibility” from the US side, without elaborating, as a final deal is “closer than ever if the US accepts the requirements of a sustainable, reliable deal in action.” [Emphasis added.] 

Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said yesterday that Iran has shown enough flexibility and the US knows this and that it was the latter’s turn “to show flexibility this time.” Indeed, the IRNA report also adds vaguely that “the disagreement is over three issues, two of which have been orally accepted by the US, but Iran insists on including them in the text.” 

Importantly, Tehran’s response falls short of a rejection of the EU’s proposal. The Nour News, Iranian website linked to the Supreme National Security Council, reported yesterday after an extraordinary meeting chaired by President Ebrahim Raisi that a “final result” will depend on the US response to “the legal demands of Iran.” 

The bottom line appears to be that Tehran needs guarantees that the West’s promise of economic engagement will not once again remain a chimera as it turned out with the 2015 deal. Conceivably, Iran wants this aspect to be included in the text of the agreement. 

From available details, Tehran no longer makes an issue of the IAEA seeking Iran’s accountability for the “missing uranium” or over the IRGC continuing to remain in the US watchlist of terrorist groups. But the emphasis is on the efficacy of implementation and the durability of the new agreement. 

Past experience shows that unless the POTUS puts his weight behind the agreement, it becomes rudderless. The paradox is that the shelf life of a new agreement is far from certain, although no expiry date is put on its label. It all depends on the end-user — in this case, the western companies who may be  wary about a long-term relationship with Iran, with an eye on Washington. 

But then, Iran’s oil is much sought-after today, and for a conceivable future, it will be an indispensable energy source for western economies. This was not the case previously in 2015 when Europe (and the US) could easily access Russian oil, which was in abundant supply at low prices.

In turn, the criticality of the Iranian oil to salvage the EU economies means that Brussels will now be a genuine stakeholder ensuring the implementation of the new agreement that lifts the sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports and fire walling the deal in the near and medium terms. 

Meanwhile, the expert assessment is that even if large scale investments are made by oil producing countries, there is a gestation period for the  results in the form of increased production capacity to appear. 

Then, there is also the question of the oil producing countries having their own interest in high oil prices. A report in the weekend showed that Saudi Aramco has doubled its profits due to the high oil prices. 

Suffice to say, this time around, the market forces — high demand for oil and the need of the western economies to recover from recession — provide a reasonable guarantee that the EU and the US dare not upset the apple cart. Surely, Iran cannot but be aware of it. 

The odds, therefore, may seem to be favouring the conclusion of the new agreement at Vienna. As a statement on Monday by the so-called Elders shows, there is no dearth of advice cajoling the Iranian regime to be reasonable and cooperative. And it is difficult to see how Tehran will let this moment pass as history.

That said, Tehran can also afford to wait. The status quo is not so bad, as some may make out. After all, Iran is selling its oil and generating appreciable income, and, importantly, the international environment has created more space lately for it to manoeuvre, while also advancing its nuclear programme. (See a recent interview with Ali Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei on international affairs and a former foreign minister for over sixteen years during 1981 to 1997.)

Fars news agency which is close to the IRGC has quoted FM Amirabdollahian as saying that Iran has a “Plan B” if no agreement could be reached. As he put it, “failure to revive the pact would not be end of the world.”

From the American perspective too, Biden Administration cannot hope to make any political capital out of the deal in the November 8 mid-term elections as if this is some great arms control deal. Of course, Biden is sure to be criticised by the Republicans. 

If anything, after the knife attack on Salman Rushdie and the purported plot to kill former White House national security adviser John Bolton, the optics are probably not congenial for the Biden team to have a photo-op with Iranian officials. 

The Reuters has noted wryly in an analysis, “The lack of better policy options for Washington, and Tehran’s view that time is on its side, could leave the deal dangling.” Netanyahu probably senses that his matchbox like contraption may still have its uses. Elections are due in Israel on 1st November. 

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Trump and the Department of Justice

August 18th, 2022 by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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Former President Donald Trump will soon be indicted by a federal grand jury.

He is the victim of a federal government that knows no bounds and has assumed powers nowhere granted in the Constitution by the sheer force of its own will. It has created a security state, replete with three lettered acronymic-named agencies — FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, DIA — that are nowhere recognized in the Constitution, regularly break the written and moral laws, and are themselves far more dangerous to human freedom than the folks they pursue.

How many laws have the feds broken? Ha. No one knows how many criminal laws Congress has enacted. Estimates range from 4,400 to 5,500. How can this be? For starters, members of Congress in both parties rarely if ever read the legislation they enact. House members were given 15 minutes to read the 132-page Patriot Act, which passed overwhelmingly. And much federal law is so convoluted that a simple reading leaves even an experienced lawyer and judge bewildered as to how many different behaviors were made criminal by the statute in question.

Yet, nearly all federal criminal laws — including those now confronting Trump — are wildly unconstitutional. That’s so because the Constitution only authorizes the feds to enact criminal statutes in two areas — criminalizing treason and debasement of the money supply. All remaining criminal laws — those that are intended to protect life, liberty and property, even those intended to protect government assets — were intended by the drafters of the Constitution to be addressed by the states.

The search warrant of Trump’s home could only have followed the submission of one or more detailed affidavits by FBI agents explaining to the federal judge who received them that the Department of Justice has evidence to conclude that it is more likely than not that a crime was committed by someone in connection with the acquisition and retention of government documents, and it is more likely than not that evidence of that crime was located inside Trump’s home.

The affidavits are normally filled with much detail, and they explain and justify what the DOJ believes and why it believes it. The judge must agree with the DOJ’s conclusions in order to sign the warrant.

The signing of the warrant was also preceded by a stenographically recorded interrogation of the FBI agents by the judge. It would have centered on not only what the FBI believes Trump was concealing but also how it knows that.

We now know that Trump took many documents with him to Florida when he left the White House. He returned 15 boxes of them to the National Archives. When he failed to satisfy the Archives with the documents that he returned, the Archives called in the DOJ, which empaneled a grand jury to hear evidence of potential criminal behavior.

The grand jury subpoenaed the documents remaining at Trump’s home, and Trump’s lawyers met with DOJ lawyers to discuss compliance with the subpoena. After that meeting and the surrender of more documents, one of Trump’s lawyers wrote to the DOJ and assured its lawyers that there were no documents subject to the subpoena remaining in Trump’s home.

Thereafter, the FBI learned from a confidential source that there were documents marked “Top Secret” remaining in the home and thus subject to the subpoena. We learned from the inventory of documents that the FBI took that Trump’s lawyer’s representation of full compliance with the subpoena was inaccurate.

This is critical as, if the lawyer intentionally misled the DOJ, then that lawyer will become a defendant and cannot represent Trump. If Trump intentionally misled his own lawyer and caused the lawyer to make a material misrepresentation to the DOJ, the lawyer must resign as Trump’s counsel, as that lawyer will become a witness. Since the matter involves deception, the attorney-client privilege does not apply.

The warrant itself reveals three categories of crimes that the DOJ told the judge it is investigating. They are (a) gathering and transmitting national security secrets, and (b) concealing and removing national security secrets, and (c) destroying or altering national security secrets.

All of these statutory crimes are contained in the Espionage Act of 1917, which Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has rightly moved to repeal. It punishes speech, reading and dissent. Trump himself, in a misguided moment, once offered it as a basis for executing Edward Snowden. In another misguided moment, when Trump announced that his home had been the subject of the execution of the warrant, he also announced that he had declassified all documents in his possession while he was still president. Criminal Defense 101: Never deny until you are accused.

Declassification is not a defense to the allegations stated in the warrant, as secrets — information that, if revealed to any person not authorized to see them, would likely cause grave harm to the nation — need not be classified. As well, President Joe Biden — unbeknownst to Trump — could easily have reclassified the documents as top secret prior to the search, thereby giving the DOJ another potential charge against the former president.

Many of Trump’s legal woes were brought about by himself. He is institutionally averse to strategic silence, to accepting norms and to abiding professional advice that does not immediately produce what he wants. Yet, the feds contemplate a prosecution of him for silently reading and securing pieces of paper. And they call that espionage.

Crime is intentionally caused harm proscribed by law or nature. Who was harmed by documents sitting in Trump’s safe? The egos of the security state.

After four years as president fighting the security state, Trump should know that the federal government is a monster that can only be tamed, occasionally by a fair jury, or permanently when it collapses of its own weight. The latter will happen sooner rather than later. But not soon enough to help Donald Trump.

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The US publication pv magazine reported on 16 August 2022 that a large quantity of Chinese solar panels had been seized by US customs authorities. The seizure were carried out under US anti-China legislation, the so-called “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” (UFLPA).

The legislation is one of many US government actions designed to wage economic warfare against China and to undermine adoption of affordable renewable energy. The US is both the world’s largest producer and the largest consumer of oil, and has the world’s highest per capita emissions of CO2.

The pv magazine cited US industry sources had reported that as much as 3 GW of Chinese solar equipment had been seized since the law came into effect in mid-2022. These sources said that as much as 12 GW of solar equipment were likely to be seized and “prevented from entering the US market by the end of the year.”

NPR reports that a related, massive US Department of Commerce investigation focusing on whether Chinese manufacturers could be “skirting US customs duty rules” on solar imports from China by “funneling components through affiliates in four nearby countries — Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam”.

Industry bodies in the US say that “hundreds of large-scale solar power projects are on hold in the US” as the solar industry awaits the outcome of the investigation into solar panels bought from Asian suppliers. According to the Financial Times, 7 June, 2022:

More generally, China supplies roughly 80% of global production of silicon used to make polycrystalline wafers for solar panels – which does not need to be as pure as the silicon used in semiconductors — with about half of that coming from Xinjiang, the main target of the US regime’ anti-solar energy sanctions (i.e. economic warfare).

According to Niki Asia (4 July 2021), US sanctions against the Chinese solar manufacturing industry “are now casting a shadow over the solar industry” as “one of the world’s biggest sources of silicon.” This has resulted in market instability as solar panel makers and buyers became concerned about the potential disruptions to global supply chains and manufactures hurried to build up silicon stock piles. It has, according Niki Asia significantly pushed up the price of solar panels by around 30-40%.

The pv magazine reported that these sanctions by the Washington regime is also causing a serious decline of up to 50% in US domestic solar deployment. The article reported that the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) had said that developers across the US had planned to install 17.8 GW of new solar capacity in 2022. However, in the first six months of this year, “only 4.2 GW has been installed and brought online as module supply challenges led to cancellations and delays”, and this trend was expected to continue.

In June 2022, following bitter internal division within the US, Biden exempted solar panel imports from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam from tariffs (up to 240%) in order to get stalled solar power project moving.

China has repeatedly denied US allegations of so-called “slave labor” in Xinjiang. Earlier this month delegation of 32 envoys and senior diplomats from 30 Muslim-majority countries have paid a 5-day visit to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region at the invitation of China. The envoys were widely reported to have found that “freedom of religious belief and various rights of Muslims are duly guaranteed” in Xinjiang.

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Sources

PV Magazine, August 16, 2022. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/16/more-than-3-gw-of-solar-panels-held-by-us-customs-under-forced-labor-law/

NPR, May 11, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1097644931/solar-panels-solar-power-u-s-investigates-china-trade-rules

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The people of Venezuela for the last several years have taken to the streets to reject sanctions, asset freezing, and coup attempts by the far-right.

“The world must know that there is no legal security in London nor in the Bank of England, because at any moment, any country can have its international reserves stolen. There is no respect for the law!” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro made this damning statement in a televised address on August 3 following the decision by a British high court to reject the Venezuelan state access to its gold reserves worth $1.8 billion in the Bank of England.

Since 2019, Venezuela has had over $7 billion in foreign assets seized by banks in North America and Europe. Many, including the Bank of England, have used the excuse that since their governments recognize (or recognized) the self-proclaimed, former member of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as the legal representative of the country, they cannot hand over the money to an entity controlled by Maduro’s government.

This seemingly coordinated international action coupled with the increased sanctions on Venezuela’s financial transactions and oil production, deepened the economic crisis in the country that was already suffering under heavy unilateral coercive measures from the United States and its allies since 2014.

Pandemic

In May 2020, countries across the world struggled to understand and combat the coronavirus pandemic and protect their populations. Venezuela was one of a handful of governments – most of whom were socialist and progressive – that put human life before profit. It quickly pivoted to take measures to ensure the protection of its population from COVID-19, implemented strong public health policies and public awareness campaigns to instruct people about how best to protect themselves, and as much as possible, attempted to meet the material needs of the people.

However, the seizure of over $8 billion of its assets, in addition to the stranglehold on its central productive economic sector – the oil industry – severely limited Venezuela’s capacity to respond. It decided to take critical action. In May 2020, two months into the pandemic, Venezuelan government officials confirmed that its Central Bank was taking the Bank of England to court in the UK to demand that it release the $1.8 billion (previously undervalued at under $1 billion) in gold reserves held there.

Venezuela’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, wrote on May 19, 2020,

“Venezuela files a lawsuit in British Court against Bank of England for stealing 31 tons of Venezuelan gold in its vault. Pillage is a crime of extinction by denying people crucial means to confront the worst pandemic in a century. It is a colonial war against Venezuela!”

For Venezuela, a country where the national government invests heavily in social programs and support, this gold represents food, medicine, healthcare, housing, and jobs for the Venezuelan people.

In making its case, the Central Bank of Venezuela, went to extra lengths to ensure that the decision over its gold did not fall victim to a political decision and reached a deal with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for the direct transfer of a portion of those assets to the UNDP to purchase crucial food and medicine for Venezuela.

Legal dispute

The Bank’s agreement with UNDP and its suit, were rejected by the UK court. John McEvoy, an investigative journalist with Declassified UK told Peoples Dispatch that “the Foreign Office specifically responded by saying that the UK government explicitly recognizes Juan Guaidó as the President of Venezuela and based on…the “one voice” doctrine in the UK…if the executive or the government recognizes Juan Guaidó, then the judiciary has to follow suit by also recognizing Juan Guaidó.”

In an appeal to this decision, Venezuela argued that this recognition was not so unequivocal. The Commercial Court agreed and ruled that the government’s recognition was “ambiguous” as the UK still relies on the Bolivarian government for all diplomatic activities between the two countries.

However, in the latest hearing on the case, on July 29, the High Court held up the initial ruling that the “one voice” doctrine must be maintained and that they could not hand Venezuela its assets. McEvoy explained “Long story short, the UK government in 2019, decided to recognize Juan Guaidó who never ran the presidential office, who had never received the vote in a presidential election…Three years down the line, we’re still going through a legal battle and it looks like Guaidó will eventually receive custody of these Venezuelan state assets.”

Junior partners in US imperialism

The dispute over Venezuela’s gold is much more than a legal battle. For the investigative journalist McEvoy, it is “fundamentally a political case.” He detailed that the UK’s decision originally to recognize Guaidó as the president of Venezuela and to freeze the gold in the Bank of England was taken under instruction of the US government.

In the days following Guaidó’s self-declaration on January 23, 2019, the UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was in Washington DC where he met with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. McEvoy explained that while the documentation of these discussions has been kept private by the Foreign Office, in Bolton’s tell-all book The Room Where it Happened, he details Hunt’s visit and said that while he was in Washington he said he would be delighted to comply with the US sanctions measures by freezing Venezuela’s gold.

For McEvoy, the political goal was clear: “to suffocate the Venezuelan economy and to create sufficient domestic pressures so that the Venezuelan people would overthrow the Venezuelan government without any more kind of dirty, direct measures to have to be involved.”

An “embarrassment”

”[I]f the British government drops its recognition of Guaidó, at any point, the case dissipates, the case is over. This case can only exist based on the political decision to recognize Juan Guaidó. And that’s why we’re in the situation that we are at the moment,” McEvoy emphasized.

Britain is one of the last remaining governments to continue to recognize Guaidó. Since his “swearing in” on January 23, 2019, Guaidó has mostly been in the news for corruption allegations and running several large companies he took control over into bankruptcy. He also no longer holds a seat in the National Assembly, which was his “legal” basis for claiming the interim presidency. Most of the far-right parties which constitute his base of support, engaged in dialogue with Venezuela’s constitutional government in Mexico in September 2021 and reached an important agreement to participate in local elections after having boycotted all electoral processes for six years. These elections were also observed by the European Union for the first time since 2015.

Many of the over 50 countries which had initially recognized Guaidó, such as the European Union member states and many countries in Latin America, have since resumed normal relations with the Bolivarian government. One of the latest to resume relations was the US government which sent a high-level diplomatic delegation to Venezuela to meet with the government of Nicolás Maduro. The center point of their dialogues was around their commercial relationship around oil. These talks began just a month after the war in Ukraine broke out which prompted the US and its allies to sanction and boycott Russian energy.

Once again the British government has backed itself into a corner following US political orientations. The country not only is suffering from one of the worst energy and cost of living crises in its history following the loss of its major fuel supplier, Russia, but its continued recognition of Guaidó against the global tide puts it in “an incredibly embarrassing position”.

For McEvoy, this move could have unexpected repercussions for the UK and the Bank of England because “other governments will be looking to England thinking ‘if we cease diplomatic relations with Britain, if we pursue a path of economic and social development that is contrary to what Britain wants us to do, then we might that our state assets become frozen in the Bank of England.’ So we might see a rush of state assets leaving Britain basically based on this decision.”

Financing an illusion

If the Venezuelan government loses its lawsuit in the UK, the question remains of what will happen to its $1.8 billion in gold.

Guaidó set up an ad-hoc board to the Central Bank of Venezuela to serve as the “interim” governing body over the bank, parallel to the Bank’s official board. In the case of a final ruling against the Central Bank of Venezuela, this parallel entity would ultimately receive the funds. However, since Guaidó still is not managing actual institutions in Venezuela, where would these state assets go?

After the US government officially recognized Guaidó, they also authorized the transfer of all Venezuelan state assets and funds to Guaidó and his parallel government. According to John McEvoy, “Guaidó’s parallel government has been using these hundreds of millions of dollars of Venezuelan state funds to sustain its own parallel fictitious government. It’s pouring tens if not hundreds of millions into a so-called foreign ministry. Guaidó is paying himself out of these funds and millions of dollars, it seems, based on the accounts.”

McEvoy added that this money has also been used to pay for legal representation in the case in the UK so that he can take even more state funds from Venezuela.

While he has been delegitimized, meme-ified, and rejected by most of the opposition in Venezuela, Guaidó still holds on to his (and the US government’s) political goal to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro. To achieve this goal, Guaidó has already staged a border crisis, attempted a military coup, made a multi-million dollar mercenary agreement in order to assassinate Maduro, and given undeterred support to criminal sanctions against Venezuela which have already cost the lives of over 100,000 people. These are costly endeavors and as McEvoy points out, “If Guaidó gets his hands on the 2 billion worth of gold held in the Bank of England, the UK is going to bear some, and I would say significant, responsibility for what happens next.”

In the meantime, for the Bolivarian government and the people of Venezuela, the struggle continues. On Tuesday August 9, a massive mobilization was held in Caracas to demand that the assets and property of the Venezuelan people blocked internationally be returned, specifically Venezuela’s gold in London.

President Nicolás Maduro wrote “The Venezuelan people took to the streets to give a strong message to the world: we demand the return of our gold taken hostage in London, the Conviasa airplane, and the other national assets that they are trying to steal from us. No more abuse! We will not stop raising our voices!”

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Spain: Law Allows Geoengineering Experiments

August 18th, 2022 by Free West Media

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Chemtrails are considered to be one of the most reviled conspiratorial theories of recent decades. Anyone who addresses this topic is immediately pushed into the corner of the really insane conspiracy theorists.

But the World Economic Forum has already admitted that techniques like “spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere” were part of a science called geoengineering and touted as a “large-scale solution to climate change”.

It’s also no secret that tech billionaire and vaccination messiah Bill Gates believes in interventions in nature.

Why is the CIA interested in climate change experiments?

Alan Robock has sounded the alarm over CIA funding of a National Academy of Sciences report on different approaches to combating climate change, and the fact that the CIA has not yet explained its keen interest in an engineered “nuclear winter“.

Lawyer Aitor Guisasola meanwhile highlighted the legal situation on the subject of “artificial weather manipulation” in Spain. The climate in Spain can be influenced by geoengineering because these interventions have been regulated by law since July 27, 2001 by Royal Decree 1/2001.

In this decree, under Chapter 1, Article 3 , under the title “Modification of atmospheric conditions”, it reads: “The modification of the atmospheric conditions of the hydrological cycle may only be artificially modified by the state administration or its agents.”

Of course, this also means precipitation or the lack thereof, explained Guisasola. “The Royal Decree clearly states that they may do it. This is very clear, obvious and evident. They can do it and they do it. Because a government doesn’t make laws and then doesn’t apply them.”

Also on the official website of the state meteorological agency, AEMET, one can find information on geoengineering in Spain and other countries around the world.

Drought can be engineered

AEMET conceded that over 50 countries were currently conducting “artificial weather modification” activities. The expert committee of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is informed about their status in “regular reports”.

These modifications are aimed at increasing the amount of precipitation, the reduction of the associated damage and the size of the hail and to the dissipation of clouds. It is also claimed that dry spells are engineered only “in certain airports or important traffic routes”. These activities are based on “developing technologies” that may not yet have a “solid scientific base”, AEMET noted.

Why does geoengineering exist?

The term geoengineering is used to refer to a wide range of techniques, including more recent experiments in weaponizing the weather associated with “climate change“. The objective is to manipulate the climate to reduce mainly two aspects: the variations in solar radiation and the increase in CO2 and thus alleviate the increase in temperature. These techniques suggest theories aimed at reducing the solar radiation that reaches the earth’s surface by increasing the reflection capacity of the surface or the atmosphere. This second group of techniques have an impact on a regional and even global scale.

Various experiments have also been carried out in cities near the poles to provide light during the winter night, using satellites that reflect sunlight on the earth’s surface using sails.

Military interest in the weather is not new: Over North Vietnam, Laos and South Vietnam, the US military had secretly seeded clouds to increase and control the rainfall for military purposes.

Experiments that do not work

From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the Federal Government of the United States, experiments and financed campaigns began at the beginning of the 1960s, as was the case of the Stormfury project, which sought to attenuate the intensity of hurricanes. This project, despite criticism from countries like Cuba, was maintained for two more decades, until it was recognized that it did not influence the behavior of hurricanes. It was likely used as a cover for a military interest in a Cuban adversary.

In addition to protection against frost, traditionally through the use of fans or irrigation of crops, the most important project in Spain has been the one carried out in the Duero basin between 1979 and 1981, proposed and carried out by the WMO, with the name of “Project of Intensification of Precipitation” (PIP).

In this trial only the first phase was completed, the results were disappointing and impractical. The main conclusion was that it was necessary to deepen the knowledge of cloud physics and the structure of cloud systems before undertaking new research or operational projects.

The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment in its latest report alluded to food security and curiously stated: “It should be kept in mind that the energy associated with weather systems is of such a magnitude that it is impossible to create cloud systems that drop precipitation, modify wind patterns to bring water vapor to a region, or completely eliminate extreme weather events. Artificial weather modification technologies that claim to achieve such large-scale or extraordinary effects lack a solid scientific basis (for example hail guns or ionization methods) and are not scientifically credible.”

Harmful substances

Some of the substances used, for example silver iodide, are certainly toxic and harmful to the environment, although the amounts used in artificial rainfall intensification programs are allegedly small, according to WMO reports.

In the absence of other nuclei, one gram of silver iodide supposedly widely distributed in the cloud could lead to a precipitation of 1 l/m2 in an area of ​​1000 km2. Annual worldwide cloud seeding has been estimated to account for 0.1 percent of the amount of silver iodide incorporated into the atmosphere by human activities in the United States.

In addition to the US, other leading countries for investments in operational weather modification programs are China, Thailand and India.

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Featured image: Strange clouds: Photo credit: Joachim Süß 

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Should a human rights organisation apologise for publishing important evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses?

If it does apologise, what does that suggest about its commitment to dispassionately uncovering the truth about the actions of both parties to war? And equally, what message does it send to those who claim to be “distressed” by the publication of such evidence?

Those are questions Amnesty International should have pondered far more carefully than it obviously did before issuing an apology last week over its latest report on the war in Ukraine.

In that report, Amnesty accused Ukrainian forces of committing war crimes by stationing troops and artillery in or near schools, hospitals and residential buildings, thereby using civilians effectively as human shields. Such practices by Ukrainian soldiers were identified in 19 different towns and villages.

These incidents did not just theoretically endanger civilians. There is evidence, according to Amnesty, that return fire by Russian troops on these Ukrainian positions led to non-combatants being killed.

The Israeli army regularly accuses Palestinian factions like Hamas of hiding among civilians in Gaza, while obscuring its own, long-documented practice of using Palestinians as human shields.

But whatever the truth of Israel’s claims, unlike the tiny and massively overcrowded Gaza, which offers few or no hiding places outside of built-up areas for Palestinian fighters to resist Israeli aggression, Amnesty concluded of the situation in Ukraine: “Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas.”

In other words, it was a choice made by the Ukrainian army to put its own civilians in harm’s way.

Mounting pressure

Notably, this is the first time a major western human rights organisation has publicly scrutinised the behaviour of Ukraine’s soldiers. Until now, these watchdog bodies have focused exclusively on reports of crimes committed by Russian forces – a position entirely in line with the priorities of their own governments. By its own admission, Amnesty has published dozens of reports condemning Russia.

The pushback against the latest report was relentless, coming even from Amnesty’s own Ukrainian team. Oksana Pokalchuk, its head, quit, explaining that her team “did everything they could to prevent this material from being published”.

Under mounting pressure, Amnesty made a statement last week in which it said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused by its report, while at the same time stating: “We fully stand by our findings.”

The idea that only one side has been committing war crimes in Ukraine was always implausible. In wars, all sides commit crimes. It is in the nature of wars.

Faulty lines of communication mean orders are misunderstood or only partially relayed to those on the front lines. There are technical malfunctions. Inevitably, soldiers prioritise their own lives over those of the enemy, including civilians. Terrorising the other side – through human rights violations – can be an effective way to avoid combat, by sending a warning to enemy soldiers to desert their posts and civilians to flee. Sadists and psychopaths, meanwhile, find themselves with plenty of opportunities to exploit during the fighting.

But conversely, parties to wars invariably struggle to acknowledge their own abuses. They prefer simple-minded, self-serving narratives of good and evil: our soldiers are heroes, morally spotless, while their soldiers are barbarians, indifferent to the value of human life.

Western governments and establishment media outlets have readily peddled this foolish line in Ukraine, too, even though neither Europe nor the United States are supposed to be directly involved in the war. They have reflexively amplified Ukrainian claims of Russian war crimes, even when the evidence is lacking or the picture murky, and they have resolutely ignored any evidence of Ukrainian crimes, such as evidence that Russian prisoners of war have been executed or that Ukraine has been using petal cluster bombs in civilian areas.

More self-censorship

In such circumstances, only the human rights community is in a position to provide a more faithful picture of how events are unfolding, and hold to account both sides for their crimes. But until Amnesty stepped out of line, western human rights groups had moved in lockstep with western governments, the same governments that appear to want endless war in Ukraine, to “weaken Russia”, rather than a quick resolution.

Even the author of Amnesty’s new report, Donatella Rovera, has conceded: “I think the level of self-censorship on this issue [Ukrainian war crimes] has been pretty extraordinary.”

Amnesty should not be apologising for providing a rare window on such crimes. It should be emphasising the importance of monitoring both sides for serious breaches of international law. And for very good reason.

Amnesty’s apology sends a message to those partisans trying to shut down scrutiny of Ukrainian crimes of just how easy it is to put the human rights community on the defensive. Efforts to deter reporting of a similar nature in the future will intensify.

Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was among those who lost no time vilifying Amnesty by characterising its report as “Russian disinformation”.

Amnesty’s apology suggests such pressure campaigns have an effect and will lead to increased self-censorship – in a situation where the evidence already indicates that there is a great deal of self-censorship, as Rovera pointed out.

The apology betrays the civilians who have been, and will be, used as human shields – putting them in lethal danger – over the coming months and potentially years of fighting. It means Ukrainian forces will feel even less pressure to rein in behaviour that amounts to a war crime.

Amnesty would never apologise to Russian partisans offended by a report on Russian war crimes. Its current apology indicates to the victims of Ukrainian human rights abuses that they are less worthy than the victims of Russian abuses.

Flooding the battlefield

Turning a blind eye to Ukrainian crimes also lifts the pressure on western governments. They have been recklessly channelling arms worth many billions of dollars to Ukraine, even though they have little idea where most end up. (In a further worrying sign of self-censorship in the west, CBS recently postponed the broadcast of an investigation suggesting as little as a third of western weapons reach their intended destination in Ukraine.)

That is all the more dangerous because, even before Russia’s invasion in late February, Ukrainian forces – including the neo-Nazi elements now glossed over in western narratives – were engaged in a vicious civil war with ethnic Russian communities in Ukraine’s east. That region, the Donbas, is where Moscow has been focusing its military advances.

Human rights violations by Ukrainians against other Ukrainians were regularly committed during the eight-year civil war, as western monitors documented at the time. Such crimes are almost certainly continuing under cover of the war against Russia, but with the aid now of western arms shipments.

Ignoring abuses by Ukrainian forces gives them a free hand to commit crimes not only against Russian soldiers but also against the large number of Ukrainians who are not seen as loyal to Kyiv.

A failure to closely scrutinise how and where western artillery is being used is almost certain to result in more, not less, of the kind of Ukrainian crimes Amnesty has just highlighted.

Western governments, and publics, need to be confronted with the likely consequences of flooding the battlefield with weapons before they prefer such a policy over pursuing diplomatic solutions.

Ultimately, allowing one side only to be criticised for its crimes – reinforcing the simple-minded narrative of good guys versus bad guys – is likely to fuel the war rather than resolve it.

War-mongering

Amnesty’s conduct over this latest report is not exceptional. It is part of a pattern of behaviour by a western human rights community vulnerable to political and financial pressures that detract from its ostensible mission.

As the near-exclusive focus on Russian crimes in Ukraine illustrates, international humanitarian law is all too often interpreted through the prism of western political priorities.

There has long been a revolving door between the staff of prominent human rights groups and the US government. And pressure from elite donors – who are invested in these dominant narratives – doubtless plays a part, too.

Anyone departing from the narrow political consensus imposed by western political and media elites is defamed as spreading Russian “disinformation”, or for being apologists for dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Libya’s late ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Criticisms of Israel, meanwhile, are demonised as proof of antisemitism.

Certainly, Russian, Syrian and Libyan leaders have committed war crimes. But the focus on their crimes is all too often an excuse to avoid addressing western war crimes, and thereby enable agendas that advance the interests of the West’s war industries.

I experienced this first hand during the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Israel accused Hezbollah of using its own population as “human shields” – framed by the Norwegian politician and United Nations official Jan Egeland as “cowardly blending” – an allegation lapped up by the western media.

Whatever the truth of that claim, it presented a very one-sided picture of what took place during that summer’s fighting. Though no one was allowed to mention it at the time because of Israel’s strict military censorship laws, it was common knowledge among Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens that many of their own communities in northern Israel were being used as locations for Israeli tanks and artillery to fire into Lebanon.

The Israeli army had forcibly recruited these third-class citizens as human shields, just as the Ukrainian army is now accused by Amnesty of doing to civilians.

I saw for myself a number of the locations where Israel had installed batteries in or next to the minority’s communities. There were later Israeli court cases that confirmed this widespread practice; Palestinian politicians in Israel raised the matter in the Israeli parliament, and a local human rights group later issued a report documenting examples of these war crimes.

But these revelations never gained any traction with either the western media or human rights groups. Western publics were left with an entirely false impression: that Hezb0llah alone had endangered its own civilians, even though Israel had undoubtedly done the same or worse.

The reality could not be acknowledged because it conflicted with western political priorities that treat Israel as a valued ally with a moral army and Hezb0llah as a depraved, bloodthirsty terrorist organisation.

Saints and sinners

Human rights groups reporting on the 2006 Lebanon war actively echoed these self-serving western narratives that unfairly differentiated between Hezb0llah and Israel, as I highlighted at the time.

I found myself in a very public row with Human Rights Watch over comments made by one of its researchers to the New York Times claiming that Hezb0llah had intentionally targeted Israeli civilians whereas Israel had avoided targeting Lebanese civilians.

He stated: “I mean, it’s perfectly clear that Hezbollah is directly targeting civilians, and that their aim is to kill Israeli civilians. We don’t accuse the Israeli army of deliberately trying to kill civilians.”

In my subsequent back-and-forth with HRW – which can be read about here, here and here – the organisation sought to defend this claim. But there were two glaring problems.

First, it completely failed to fit the known facts of the war. Israel’s strikes on Lebanon had caused a disproportionately large number of civilian deaths, despite the use of precision weapons. Hezb0llah, using far more primitive rockets, meanwhile, had killed mostly soldiers, not civilians.

But more problematic still, HRW had ascribed intentions to each side – good and bad – when it could not possibly know what those intentions were. As I wrote at the time of its researcher’s comments:

“Was he or another HRW researcher sitting in one of the military bunkers in northern Israel when army planners pressed the button to unleash the missiles from their spy drones? Was he sitting alongside the air force pilots as they circled over Lebanon dropping their US-made bombs or tens of thousands of ‘cluster munitions’, tiny land mines that are now sprinkled over a vast area of south Lebanon? Did he have intimate conversations with the Israeli chiefs of staff about their war strategy? Of course not. He has no more idea than you or I what Israel’s military planners and its politicians decided was necessary to achieve their war goals.”

HRW’s comments made sense only in a political context: that the group faced enormous pressure from US politicians and funders to focus on Hezb0llah’s crimes. It also faced a damaging vilification campaign led by Israel lobbyists who wished to shield Israel from scrutiny. They accused the group’s senior staff of antisemitism and spreading a blood libel.

It looked very much like HRW caved into that pressure, just as Amnesty is now effectively doing in apologising for upsetting Ukrainian partisans and those emotionally invested in the one-sided narrative they hear constantly from their politicians and media.

Neither Amnesty nor Human Rights Watch responded to a request for comment.

The reality is that western publics need more, not less, scrutiny of the crimes committed in wars, if only to tear the facade off narratives designed to paint a picture of saints and sinners – narratives that dehumanise official enemies and fuel more war.

The minimum needed to achieve that is an independent, fearless, vigorous human rights community, not an apologetic one.

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Jonathan Cook is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net

Featured image: A Ukrainian soldier carries a Javelin anti-tank missile through a trench in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Photo courtesy the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Facebook.

上海、平壌の市民とともに立ち上がろう

August 18th, 2022 by Emanuel Pastreich

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***

Read the original English version:

The Globalists have Launched a New Offensive against the Citizens of the Earth.

By Emanuel Pastreich, August 08, 2022


グローバリスト達は、地球上に住む人々に対して新たな攻撃を開始しました。グローバリスト達は、最も狡猾な方法で、文化、人種、習慣を利用して私達を分断させようとしています。この目的は、世界経済フォーラム(WEF)のような犯罪シンジケートを打倒し、解体することに特化した同盟、連合、さらにはコミュニティまでも形成できないようにさせ、市民達の連帯を妨害することです。世界経済フォーラムはグローバルガバナンスを掌握し、ますますその支配力を国や地方政府にまで猛然と拡大させつつあります。

民間の投資家が雇ったこの影の傭兵は、私達の間でも高い教育を受けた人々に賄賂を贈り、人々をそそのかすことによって、このような所業を行ってきたのです。抜け目のない人達は、高額な対価を得て、悪に対して目をつぶる方が得策であるということをよく分かっているということです。

一方の側である想定上の「西側」と他方の側であるロシア、中国、北朝鮮、イランとの間に「偽」の世界大戦を作り出すと同時に、これらの全ての国、さらには、世界の全ての国の経済的・政治的システムを操作し、支配しようとする現在の試みは、その規模において前例のない、卑劣で巧妙な計画であると言えるでしょう。

しかしながら、そのような絶対的な支配の計画は、歴史上、新しいものではないということは確かであり、単にAI、スーパーコンピューター、CTVカメラ、5G、低軌道衛星、ドローン、そして国境を持たない武器と化したメディアエンターテインメント複合体を使用したものに移り変わったにすぎません。

皆さんがそのような大それたことをするような悪人や、自己中心的な人はいないと思うなら、残念ながら、それは大きな間違いです。

「偽」の世界大戦を生み出すための最初のステップは、ロシアをウクライナに侵攻させるためにとられた(今も機密でありアクセスできない)作戦行動から始まっているのです。

この作戦は長期的かつ複雑であり、米国、ドイツなどのNATO加盟国、その他の国々、そしておそらくはロシア国内の一部派閥も関与していたことは明らかです。ロシアは、世界経済フォーラムとその影の支援者たちの犯罪的なアジェンダに立ち向かってはいませんでした。むしろ、プーチン大統領はこれらのグローバル組織の仲間でした。しかしながら、キエフで運命の分かれ道がありました。そして今、ロシアは今回の襲撃を受けて、WHOからの脱退をはじめとして、グローバル・ガバナンス・システム全体の解体に向かって動き出しているのです。

対話の余地はもう残されていません。ドイツと日本をはじめとする欧州、アジアの国々は、軍事予算と国内の監視体制を抜本的に強化し、核兵器を保有する国の数は今後10年間で簡単に倍増する可能性があるのです。だから、同じように、核兵器の総数も倍増する可能性があるのです。要するに、油断のならない政治家達がそこまでのことを意図していなかったとしても、私達は世界大戦の危機に直面しているのです。

ウクライナへの侵攻の後、目に見えない力によって上海でロックダウンが発生しました。これは大富豪達によって計画されていたものであり、多額の報酬と引き換えに実行されたと見て間違いないでしょう。

上海は監獄となり、特殊部隊はCOVID-19という偽の名目で人々を家に閉じ込め、人々を飢餓におびえさせるようになりました。

全世界に向けて、明確なメッセージが発信されたのです。

もちろん、これまでにも民間の投資家や多国籍企業が上海を支配してきたのは事実です。今回異なるのは、超富裕層を除いた全ての人々がロックダウンされたということなのです。

大手企業系列のメディアは、上海のストーリーをあり得ないほど歪めました。大手企業系列のメディアは、上海を牛耳ったのは寄生虫のような大富豪家達ではなく、むしろ「左翼」、「社会主義」によるものだ、そして何よりも、血で汚れた「中国共産党」によるものだと発表したのです。

「西側」の大手企業系列のメディアは、李克強首相が地方政府を支援し、COVID-19のロックダウンに反対している一方で、現在「共産主義者」として赤いレッテルを貼られた習近平国家主席が全体主義のゼロコロナ政策を推進し続けていることを嬉々と伝えています。

おそらく習近平は、国内外のグローバリストが扇動したロックダウンの責任を押し付けられ、李は西側が手を組める英雄的人物に祭り上げられているのです。グローバリスト達が自分たちの痕跡を慌てて隠している間に、李は、グローバリスト達の勢力下に入りつつあるということなのです。

グローバルファイナンスは上海でこの悪夢を生み出し、それを社会主義のせいにしました。その結果、現在グローバルファイナンスによって完全に支配されている国である米国、英国、そして日本では、市民は、「自分達は自由であり、中国は独裁的な共産主義国家である」と信じ込まされています。

政府がグローバルファイナンスを支配し、富を再分配し、労働者を保護する役割を果たす「社会主義的な」体制は、独裁国家として馬鹿にされ、否定されることになります。

右翼のブロガー達は、欧州、オーストラリア、米国などの先進的な白人諸国が、アジア人によって作り上げられた致命的な計画によって人口減少の標的になっているという、レポートやグラフを発表しています。

この戦争が白人に対するものであるかどうかは疑わしいですが、その視点を裏付けるために提供される統計データ(本物かどうかは別として)は、階級戦争を人種戦争と誤解させるように流布される可能性があります。実際に、第二次世界大戦ではそれが起こりました。米国には、1850年代にさかのぼれば、人種戦争の影に階級闘争を隠すという古い伝統があります。

同様の戦略は、公然に「西側」のもう1つの敵となっているイランでも用いられています。イランは大抵の国々よりもグローバリストの攻撃に対して上手に抵抗していましたが、今では食料の購入に生体認証ID、つまり、デジタルパスポートを義務付ける最初の国として紹介されるまでになっています。

グローバリストの工作員は、イランを取り込む手段として、貧しい人々や無力な人々を対象にこの政策を推進しています。それはまた、反グローバリストの右派、つまりグローバリストからのキックバックを受け、偏った人種差別的な方法でグローバリズムを攻撃している人達が、イランは敵であり、非キリスト教的に国民を独自に虐待していると主張する機会にもなっているのです。

最後に、朝鮮民主主義人民共和国があります。この国は、COVID-19詐欺に最も長く抵抗し、国民がこの空想上の病気に感染したことを発表したり、ワクチン、社会的距離、マスクなどの医療兵器システムを支持したりすることを、拒否し続けました。

その後、2022年5月12日、北朝鮮の金正恩委員長は、自国でCOVID-19、特に、馬鹿げた変異株であるオミクロン株の感染者が発生したことを突然発表し、平壌がロックダウンの対象になると宣言しました。

発情期にあるハイエナのように、大手企業系列の新聞社はこの捏造された危機に嬉々として飛びつきました。

私達が何が起こったのかを知る前に、北朝鮮人は愚かなマスクを着用し、役立たずで危険な消毒剤を至るところにまき散らし始めました。

北朝鮮は、世界経済フォーラムや超富裕層向けの他のグローバリスト機関を運営している勢力と同じ、裏の勢力の攻撃を受けています。北朝鮮は理想的な国ではありませんでしたが、かつてはこの買収に抵抗することができました。しかし、今ではもはやそうすることができません。おそらく、平壌の意思決定者は脅迫され、買収されたのでしょう。同じことが他の全ての国でも起こりました。

特筆すべきことは、韓国がマスクの着用要件を緩和し、レストランやショップのワクチンパスポートを廃止したのと同じタイミングで、北朝鮮がCOVID-19の取り締まり始めたことです。この一連の出来事は偶然とは言えないでしょう。

予想通り、大手企業系列のメディアは、これらのイデオロギー的に異質な国々が、開放的で、合理的且つ民主的な「西側」とは対照的に、極端なCOVID-19対策で人々を抑圧していると報道しました。

この計画は中国、北朝鮮、イランに対して、全体主義のイメージを植え付けることです。この瞬間にも大富豪家達は、テレビ、インターネット、学校や研究機関を通じた、CCTVカメラ、ジオフェンシング、5Gによる徹底したターゲット広告を使って、米国、ドイツ、イスラエル(および他の国々)の民間技術企業によって支配されている「西側」諸国で技術専制政治の基盤を築いています。

つまり、新自由主義思想に抵抗した国々は、結果として全体主義の元凶とされているのです。これは、プロパガンダの専門家達による巧妙な仕業であると言えるでしょう。

その渦中において、彼らは企業国家によっていつでも運用を停止することができるデジタル通貨、スマートシティ、そして、スマートカーを私達に強引に推奨しています。これらは、私達を家の中に囚人として閉じ込め、常に監視の対象とすることを可能にしているのです。

シンディ・ナイルズ氏の言葉を借りれば、「地獄への道は、持続可能な開発目標(SDGs)で舗装されている」のです。

つまり、私達はグローバリストの乗っ取りに断固抵抗して、平壌、上海の市民と一緒に立ち向かわなければならないということです。私達は、仲間である犠牲者達を侵略者として扱うように私達を信じ込ませようとする大富豪家の自己陶酔的なレトリックを決して許してはなりません。

地域単位で代替的な臨時政府を形成すると同時に、企業のファシズムに対抗する「グローバリスト」ではない国際的な同盟を形成しない限り、グローバリスト達を打ち負かすことはできないのです。

大富豪家達は、私達が共通の目的のために地球の全ての国で志を同じくする人々を連帯させれば、自分達に勝ち目はない、ということを知っています。大富豪家達は、地球上の過激な構造改革を実行するために、私達を混乱させ、分裂させ、可能な限り多くの公人を脅し、買収しようとします。そして、大富豪家達は、その目的のためなら、幾らでもお金を支払うでしょう。

グローバリストの陰謀の一部として、意図的に敵へと仕立て上げられた国々の国民に手を差し伸べることは、私達の戦いを有利に進めるための、非常に重要な戦略です。

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Maybe Mob and the Rushdie Attack

August 18th, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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He has survived death threats and attempts on his life since February 1989.  But Salman Rushdie’s luck just about ran out at the Chautauqua Institution, southwest of Buffalo in New York State.  On August 12, at a venue historically celebrated for bringing education to all, the writer was stabbed incessantly by a fanatic who felt little sense of guilt or remorse.  Hadi Matar only had eyes for Rushdie’s neck and abdomen.  As a result of the attack, the author is likely to lose sight of one eye and possibly the use of an arm.

It was a chilling reminder that the fatwa condemning him to death never risked going stale, even if it might have been put into a form of archived cold storage.  Declared by the Iran’s sickly spiritual ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rushdie’s remarkable crime was to have blasphemed against the Prophet Muhammad in the novel The Satanic Verses.  The supreme leader, having hardly distinguished himself in a bloody war against Iraq, needed a supreme distraction.

The entire exercise was an example of how irony and humour have no place for dour, dogmatic priestliness.  How dare an author, in a work of fiction, playfully and plausibly claim that the Prophet was not the sole editor of the message to Angel Gibreel (Gabriel), and that Satan had cheekily inserted his role into it?  And that this was done using the medium of Gibreel Farishta’s hallucinations?

Dare Rushdie did, and this exhortation to state-sanctioned killing of an author and all those associated with translating and disseminating the book exposed the underbelly of cowardice that often accompanies attempts to defend literary freedoms.  Rushdie’s translator Hitoshi Igarashi was, in fact, murdered, while his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was gravely wounded.  The Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, escaped a mob assault that led to 37 deaths in Silvas, Turkey.

It was one thing to find fanatics who had never read the book and wished to do away with the author in a fit of state subsidised zealotry.  But then there was that camp: those who, in principle, opposed the fatwa but still wished to attack Rushdie as an act of cultural understanding and solidarity with his enemies.  (Grahame Wood of The Atlantic calls them the “Team To Be Sure”, who rubbished the West’s free speech defence of Rushdie, claiming that mischief might have been averted if only he hadn’t been so inclined to offend.)

The events of 1989 cast a long shadow.  There were those in holy orders, who thought that the Ayatollah had a point.  There was Dr. Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, who called for a strengthening of blasphemy laws to cover religions other than Christianity, though he was also careful to “condemn incitement to murder or any other violence from any source whatever.”  Very Church of England.

And there was former US President Jimmy Carter, who seemed to take issue that an author’s rights were considered fundamental even in the face of insulting religions.  What, came the insinuation, about the insulted?  Where would their anger go?  Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms might be “important”, but there had been “little acknowledgment that this is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence”.  Contemplated homicide against an author, in other words, was being excused, even if the “death sentence” was an “abhorrent response”.

It was even more galling to see fellow novelists mauling the underdog, showing how solidarity among scribes is rarer than you think.  The Marxist author John Berger did not think much of Rushdie’s case, hiding behind a sham argument that producing threatening literature might well endanger “the lives of those who are innocent of either writing or reading the book.”  Berger’s ingratiating note was an attempt to convince other Islamic leaders and statesmen to avoid “a unique 20th-century holy war, with its terrifying righteousness on both sides.”

Roald Dahl, man of dysfunctional virtue and author of disturbed children’s tales, decided in a letter to The Times that Rushdie was a “dangerous opportunist”, as if engaging in irony in such matters is to be avoided.  He had to have been “aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims.”  His suggestion: a modest dose of self-censorship.  “In a civilized world we have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work to reinforce this principle of free speech.”  Censors from Moscow to Tehran would have approved.

Nor did John le Carré, consummate writer of espionage novels, disagree.  “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity,” he told The New York Times in May 1989.

In November 1997, with le Carré complaining of being unfairly branded an anti-Semite, Rushdie wrote a pointed reminder it would have been easier “to sympathize with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.”  It would have been gracious were “he to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at last in his own opinion, he’s the one in the line of fire.”

Le Carré sniped back accordingly, taking the position he claimed to have had in 1989: “that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.”  Little time was spent then, and now, on the malicious, sinister nature of religious totalitarianism that has been a monstrous burden on expression, critique and sober thought.  Instead, the creator of Smiley and the Circus wished to strike a “less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers’ camp.”

As Wood writes, the honourable response to the attack on Rushdie would have been to admit a failure to protect a brave author and declare “that we are all Rushdie now”.  Read his work; throw his name in the faces of the regime’s apologists and their homicidal dolts.  After all, while the Republic of Iran has claimed to have lost active interest in killing the author, it will not object to an independent enthusiast doing the same.  The decision encouraging Rushdie’s murder, stated Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “is a bullet for which there is a target.  It has been shot.  It will one day sooner or later hit the target.”

This crippling germ of authorial assassination is incarnated in more current forms, without the lethal element: cancel culture, the desire to actively enact one’s offended disposition to liquidate, banish and extirpate the views of your opponent.  They offend you because you, somehow, have answers beyond question.  Assassination is simply one of the most extreme forms of censorship, an attempt to silence and kill off the vibrant chatter that makes an intellectual world live.  Sadly, as Rushdie recovers, the maybe mob and their complicity should be noted, their names marked on walls high.  The inner censoring assassin is everywhere.

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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: Salman Rushdie in 2018 (By ActuaLitté, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Syria Suffers Under US Military Occupation

August 18th, 2022 by Steven Sahiounie

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On August 15, an illegal US military base in Syria came under a drone attack.  The base is located at Al-Tanf in southern Syria on the Damascus-Baghdad highway.

A number of drones were used in the attack, and while some hit their mark, others were thwarted and no casualties were reported.

US Army Maj. Gen. John Brennan, commander of the US-led international coalition in Iraq and Syria, said “Coalition personnel retain the right to self-defense, and we will take appropriate measures to protect our forces.”

Under international law, the US military have no right to self-defense as they are illegally occupying Syria, and it is the Syrians who have the sole right to self-defense.

This was the latest attack on American forces and the militias they support in Syria.  The Al-Tanf base was illegally established when the US invaded Syria as part of the US-led coalition to fight ISIS.  That ended years   ago, and President Trump ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria in December 2018, but the Pentagon would not agree with the order, and the US troops remain in two locations: one in the oil-rich north east region, and the other in the south east at Al-Tanf.

In June, Russian aircraft bombed an outpost affiliated with Al-Tanf after Russian officers reported to their US counterparts that Syrian government troops had been attacked by the US-supported mercenary group known as Magahawir al-Thawra (MaT). The Americans responded that MaT is only supposed to fire or attack ISIS.

In April 2020, members of the MaT who were drug smugglers left the US base.  Not far from Al-Tanf is the Rukban refugee camp which holds thousands of men, women and children in dire conditions.  Jordan won’t help, the US military won’t help, and the Syrian government can’t help the residents for fear of engaging in a military confrontation with the illegal American occupiers.  The residents are in a no-man’s land and are in a chronic state of desperation, in which the MaT act as their jailers and suppliers.  Every drop of water, and morsel of food from humanitarian aid passes first through the hands of the MaT, who extract as much benefit as they can from it, first to feed their own numerous wives and children, and next to extract money or favors from the camp residents who remain subservient to the MaT.

Yankee go home

Maher Ihsan is a journalist and political expert. He exposes the real purpose the US remains in Syria as occupiers. According to Ihsan, the US is stealing resources and imposing its will upon the political future of Syria.

“Look at the situation now, the United States is controlling key gas and oil fields in oil-rich areas in Syria, it’s also controlling key agricultural areas … the United States didn’t come here to help, but to take advantage of the situation and impose their own will,” Ihsan said.

Ahmad Al-Ashqar, a journalist and political expert, echoed Ihsan’s views, that the US occupies and plunders the oil-rich regions in Syria.

On August 8, the Syrian oil ministry said in a statement that the average daily output of Syrian oil in the first half of 2022 is 80,300 barrels, while the US occupying forces and their mercenaries are stealing an average of 66,000 barrels a day, accounting for over 83 percent of Syria’s oil output.

According to the ministry, the prolonged crisis in Syria has cost Syria’s oil sector about 105 billion US dollars in direct and indirect losses.

It is the illegal US occupation of Syria which is the main obstacle to normal life, the urgent reconstruction of Syria, and the lack of electricity which sees most households receiving one to two hours of electricity per day.

“From sanctions to controlling the Syrian natural resources, the United States has actually caused severe damage to Syria as a state and people. Look at the people now, humanitarian organizations say most Syrians live under the poverty line, but they do not mention who is responsible,” Ihsan said.

Erdogan election 2023

On August 11, protesters in Azaz burned the Turkish flag in response to the statement by the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, that Turkey may repair its relationship with Syria.

Turkey had been sponsoring the Radical Islamic terrorists who fought the Syrian government beginning in 2011.  The US CIA office which was headquarters for the terrorist fighters was shut down in Turkey in 2017 by President Trump.  The Obama-Erdogan war on Syria for regime change had failed.

In less than a year, President Erdogan faces re-election, and his economy has collapsed, and the Turkish society wants the 3 million Syrian refuges to go home.  By repairing the relationship with Syria, Turkey’s economy would flourish as the largest market of Turkish goods would be restored, and the Syrians can be forcibly sent home by not renewing their residency status.

On August 13, Turkish Minister of Interior, Suleiman Soylu, announced the arrest of two people on charges of burning the Turkish flag during the protest in Syria, and it was Syrians aligned with Turkey who handed them in.

Syrian refugees going home from Lebanon

On August 15, Syrian and Lebanese officials met in Damascus to discuss the return of Syrians in Lebanon.

Hussein Makhlouf, Syrian Minister of Local Administration and Environment, held a meeting with Issam Charafeddine, Lebanese Minister of the Displaced, during which they discussed measures taken by Syria to secure a safe home return for the refugees based on a timeline set by both countries, Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

Lebanon and Syria agree on the necessity to facilitate the return of all refugees to their homeland, not just 15,000 monthly, as stated in the plan presented by the Lebanese side,” Makhlouf told a joint press conference with the Lebanese minister.

According to Maklouf, the Syrian government has pledged to secure basic services including transportation, accommodation, medical care, and education for all the refugees who want to return home.

The war in Syria is long over, and most of the territory is administered by Damascus and is safe and secure. The sole remaining terrorist controlled area is Idlib in the north west and returnees would not be going there.

4 million internally displaced Syrians, and over 1 million Syrian refugees have returned home from outside the country so far.

The officials asked for the UN to be an active participant in the return of refugees, but the UN have been reluctant to support the plan for political reasons.

Charafeddine said “we discussed our plan in detail with Syrian authorities who expressed readiness to receive all refugees, pledging to provide them with needed facilities,” according to Lebanon’s National News Agency.

Lebanon is hosting the largest number of refugees per capita, with the government estimating 1.5 million Syrian refugees, 880,000 of whom are registered with the UN.

Charafeddine said earlier in August that Lebanon would implement its plan regardless of the UN position as his country suffers from an unprecedented financial crisis and the influx of refugees has weighed heavily on the economy and infrastructure

Austin Tice negotiations

On August 15, US spokesman Ned Price said,

“We have engaged extensively, and that includes directly with Syrian officials and through third parties.”

 “Unfortunately despite our calls, despite our engagement, despite the engagement of third parties in other countries, Syria has never acknowledged holding him. But we are not going to be deterred in our efforts,” Price said.

The 10-year anniversary of Tice’s disappearance has renewed pressure on the Biden administration to secure his release.

Austin Tice is a veteran US Marine Corps officer, who entered Syria illegally in the company of terrorists in order to report favorably in the US media concerning the US-sponsored Free Syrian Army (FSA).  He went missing on August 14, 2012 in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus.

At the time of Tice’s presence in Daraya, the FSA was in control and occupation of Daraya, with about 3,000 fighters. Two months before his disappearance, the Syrian military forces had withdrawn from the town.

Tice was embedded with the FSA, who were supported by the CIA program in the south of Turkey, code name Timber Sycamore, which was shut down by Trump in 2017.

The FSA have a history of selling Americans in Syria to ISIS. Kayla Mueller was a young woman from Arizona.  She went to Aleppo to volunteer in a hospital treating terrorists and civilians.  The FSA provided security for her, and sold her to ISIS.  She was killed in 2015.

The FSA had a very dark side which included rapes, kidnappings and executions. Eventually, the FSA morphed into Al Qaeda, and finally some of its members were in ISIS.  Idlib is currently under the occupation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who were previously Jibhat al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.  The US has killed the head of ISIS, Baghdadi, in Idlib, and more recently another commander of ISIS. This proves the close working relationship between Al Qaeda and ISIS in Idlib.  Radical Islamic terrorist groups have many names, but are all cut from the same cloth.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from MD


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**Voices from Syria**

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As far back in history as the period of enslavement of African people in North America, resistance and rebellion has been met with retaliatory repression from the ruling interests.

Freedom fighters such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, among many others named and unknown, have been either brutally executed or left with no alternative other than to seek flight from oppression.

This same legacy of confinement, brutality and lynching continued into the post-slavery era of the 20th and 21st centuries. Between the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of African Americans were extra-judicially murdered by mobs of law-enforcement agents and vigilantes.

When the Civil Rights Movement erupted on a mass level during the 1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and other actions, activists were subjected to unjustified arrests, sentencings and the bombing of homes and churches. During the 1960s, scores of Civil Rights workers were arrested, beaten, intimidated into leaving their home areas, wounded by gunfire and killed. People such as Medgar Evers (1963) and Herbert Lee (1961) of Mississippi were gunned down for their organizational work against racism and disenfranchisement.

In Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four African American girls. During the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi, three Civil Rights workers: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were lynched by KKK members who were employed as law-enforcement officers.

In later years, key leaders such as Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969) were all assassinated in plots carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) working in conjunction with police agencies and mercenaries. With the emergence of armed self-defense organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Monroe, North Carolina chapter led by Robert F. Williams, the Deacons for Defense (DOD) founded in Louisiana, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), the first independent political formation to utilize the black panther symbol in Alabama; the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Republic of New Africa (RNA), Black Liberation Army (BLA), among others, the Justice Department’s FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies heightened their disruptive tactics against the African American liberation struggle.

Assata and the BLA

Assata Shakur, born in 1947, joined the Black Panther Party in the New York City area while she was a college student in 1970. She had already been active in Black students organizing when she made contact with the BPP, which during 1970, maintained dozens of chapters across the United States as well as an International Section in Algiers, Algeria in North Africa.

Many militant youths in urban areas joined and were influenced by the BPP during 1967-1970 as the level of repression coordinated by the federal government accelerated. A split within the Party leadership during early 1971 over tactics, led to the activation of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which advocated armed struggle as a defensive measure in response to the widespread harassment and imprisonment of BPP members.

The BLA and the International Black Panther Party with its newspaper entitled “Right On”, supported the International Section in the 1971 split. Panther leaders such as Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Field Marshal Don Cox, Connie Matthews, etc. had maintained the Algiers office since the August 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival, when the Algerian government recognized the BPP as the official representatives of the African American people. The International Section hosted an Afro American Cultural Center during the festival and would later move into an official diplomatic residence which had been occupied by revolutionaries from Vietnam.

Panthers inside the U.S. who were aligned with the BLA continued to work in their underground structures. There were several armed engagements with law-enforcement agents between 1971-1973.

On May 2, 1973, an encounter between Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli resulted in the wounding and capturing of Acoli and Assata Shakur and the death of Zayd. One New Jersey State Trooper was killed in what was described as a routine traffic stop on the Turnpike.

This incident came amid enormous propaganda within the U.S. corporate and government-controlled media that characterized the BLA as a violent criminal gang bent on the killing of police officers. However, almost no mention was made by the mainstream press outlets related to the systematic repression under which the BPP and other revolutionary organizations were subjected to by the federal government.

In an open letter from Assata which coincided with the National Jericho March in Washington, D.C. in 1998, that demanded a general amnesty for all U.S. political prisoners, she articulates her position saying:

“Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial. We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.” (See this)

By late 1981, other BLA cadres and their supporters were the subject of a nationwide dragnet by the FBI. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncture specialist, was targeted by the U.S. government claiming he was the leader of the BLA and other revolutionary organizations operating in the New York/ New Jersey area. Scores of activists were subjected to surveillance, grand jury questioning, jailing and imprisonment. Dr. Shakur went underground in 1980 after establishing an acupuncture clinic in Harlem. Today, Dr. Shakur, having been unjustly held in prison since 1986, is suffering from bone marrow cancer and has been given only a few months to live. A campaign to win compassionate release has been underway for several months.

Assata Shakur and the Cuban Revolution

After being liberated from a maximum security prison in New Jersey, Assata lived underground for five years. In 1984, she was granted political asylum by the socialist Republic of Cuba then under the leadership of President Fidel Castro.

Image: Cuban and Angolan leaders Fidel Castro and Jose Eduardo dos Santos (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Cuban revolutionaries within the July 26th Movement had won genuine liberation for the Caribbean island-nation on January 1, 1959. The revolutionary government immediately outlawed racism and national discrimination while committing themselves to assisting the national liberation struggles in Africa.

In 1961, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams were granted refuge in Cuba where they fled after being subjected to threats of arrest and prosecution in North Carolina. Williams was given a program called Radio Free Dixie which broadcast via shortwave deep into the U.S.

Later other political refugees were welcomed by the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. When Assata arrived in Cuba in 1984, there were thousands of Internationalist volunteers operating in the Southern African state of Angola in efforts to secure the revolutionary government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) under fierce attack by the racist apartheid South African Defense Forces (SADF) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 1988, the apartheid military forces had been driven out of Angola and the-then racist government based in Pretoria soon agreed to withdraw from neighboring Namibia where they had attempted to suppress the Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the sole legitimate voice of the Namibian people.

The Republic of Namibia was declared independent on March 21, 1990, just weeks after the release of African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa political prisoners such as future President Nelson Mandela. The apartheid regime would eventually fall after the first democratic nonracial elections of April 1994. Since this time period, the MPLA of Angola, SWAPO of Namibia and the ANC of South Africa have remained in power.

Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, the socialist government has continued to exemplify international solidarity with oppressed and working people around the world. Hundreds of students from African American and Latin American communities in the U.S. have studied medicine in the Republic of Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) through full scholarships provided by the Communist Party government.

These developments since 1959 have endeared the Cuban Revolution to revolutionaries in the U.S., Africa, Latin America and other geo-political regions. The political biography of Assata Shakur provides a clear reflection of the interrelationship of revolutionary movements from the U.S., Latin America, the African continent and throughout the globe.

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Featured image: Cuban solidarity with African American people (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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Read Part I:

Analysis of the Early Fighting in the First World War, 108 Years Ago

By Shane Quinn, August 08, 2022


After extensive military analysis the French Army’s plan of campaign for a continental war, titled Plan XVII, was completed in February 1914, about 6 months before the First World War broke out.

Germany, and its formidable armed forces, had for decades been recognised by a large part of the French elite as their country’s principal foe. This was especially the case from 1871, when early that year German-led troops defeated the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict which lasted for 6 months.

France was stripped of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, located in north-eastern France, which were annexed to the new German Empire in 1871. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was felt very deeply in France. The famous German philosopher Karl Marx had warned at the time,

“If Alsace and Lorraine are taken, then France will later make war on Germany in conjunction with Russia. It is unnecessary to go into the unholy consequences”.

Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, had also expressed misgivings about the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. He believed, correctly, that it would increase French hostility towards Germany.

The French Army’s war strategy in 1914 suited the Germans so well, it was almost as though it had been compiled by Berlin’s military staff. General Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French forces, was right in assessing that the German Army would attack neutral Belgium at the outbreak of hostilities; but General Joffre, through inept strategic planning, did not believe the bulk of the German Army would advance west of the Meuse river, and swing back around Paris through northern France. In reality, for almost a decade before 1914, it was planned in Berlin that in the event of war most of Germany’s divisions would indeed advance through Belgium and northern France, which the author covered in the previous article.

Such a strategic move was the central concept of the Schlieffen Plan, named after its chief strategist Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, who died in January 1913 aged 79. Field Marshal von Schlieffen had been Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1905, when he retired late that year. He was succeeded early in 1906 by General Helmuth von Moltke (The Younger), who was the nephew of the renowned 19th century commander, Helmuth von Moltke (The Elder).

French military intelligence committed a grave misjudgement in 1914, by underestimating German manpower strength in the west by 12 corps. In Germany’s case this amounted to over half a million men. The German 1st Army and 2nd Army comprised altogether of 12 corps, totalling around 580,000 soldiers. These 2 armies would lead the offensive through northern France, in the hope of capturing Paris and destroying the French forces in the field.

Such was France’s desire to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine, their opening attack of World War I was directed into that region. At 5 am on 7 August 1914, the French VII Corps (General Louis Bonneau) from the 1st Army advanced towards the city of Mulhouse, in southern Alsace, close to the border of Switzerland. This French offensive into Alsace, sanctioned by commander-in-chief General Joffre, served no strategic purpose at all. It was launched for mystical reasons, not military ones. General Joffre, who was not a devoutly religious man, found other outlets for what would normally be religious sentiment, and so he was fixated to an unusual degree on Alsace and Lorraine.

Field Marshal von Schlieffen had, in fact, anticipated years before that the French would almost immediately enter Alsace and Lorraine, should war break out. He had hoped that would be so, as such a venture could only draw French forces away from the decisive northern sector, where the German right wing would be advancing southwards from Belgium to the Paris region.

French soldiers presented arms as they crossed the long-desired frontier into Alsace, saluting the redemption of their Promised Land. The next morning, 8 August 1914, as according to the Schlieffen Plan the German 7th Army, which was based in Alsace, fell back, allowing the French VII Corps to capture Mulhouse without fighting. The French troops in Mulhouse rejoiced, drank wine and complimented themselves for making history, rather than preparing defensive positions. The following day, 9 August, the Germans counterattacked and swept the French forces out of Mulhouse. The city was retaken by German soldiers on 10 August. Donald J. Goodspeed, a military historian, observed how “There had been no point to this futile French expedition”.

Beginning on 14 August 1914, the first major French offensive of World War I was launched into the other lost province, Lorraine, which borders Alsace to the north west. As with Alsace, the French assault in Lorraine served as another potentially disastrous adventure. Goodspeed wrote “if Schlieffen rather than Moltke had been German commander-in-chief, this silly French offensive into Lorraine would, in all likelihood, have spelled the defeat of France”.

With the French attack on Lorraine set to commence, on the right General Auguste Dubail’s French 1st Army was to drive forward in the direction of Strasbourg in Alsace, its right flank protected by a newly formed force, the Army of Alsace, under General Paul Pau. On the French 1st Army’s left, General Edouard de Castelnau’s French 2nd Army was to capture the commune of Morhange in northern Lorraine.

Almost a third of the entire French Army was committed to an intervention in Lorraine which, even if successful, would bring France no strategic prize. For 4 days from 14 August 1914, the German 6th and 7th armies in Lorraine withdrew as intended before the French, allowing the latter to become committed, while the Germans inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers through their rear guards and artillery strikes. The Germans counterattacked on 20 August, which was a strategic error on their part, for they would have been wiser to allow the French to enter more deeply into the trap.

Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the German 6th Army commander, had seen the possibility of a tactical victory with a counterattack, and he could not resist the temptation to pursue it. Rupprecht asked the German commander-in-chief, General von Moltke, for permission to counterattack in Lorraine on 20 August. Rupprecht’s request was granted with disconcerting ease, showing von Moltke’s lack of strategic awareness, a mistake von Schlieffen would not likely have made. Moreover, von Schlieffen had visualised Supreme Headquarters holding all 7 German armies in the field on a tight rein; but von Moltke, based far back at the city of Coblenz in western Germany, exercised a much looser control over his armies.

In Lorraine, the French 1st Army resumed its attack at first light on 20 August 1914, but they were stopped by the Germans, and then driven back in some confusion. The French 2nd Army on the left also came under assault, and the situation there was more serious. Comprising part of the French 2nd Army, General Ferdinand Foch’s XX Corps fought brilliantly, and its stand saved the day from complete disaster; but the French centre and right corps panicked and fled from the battlefield, the sort of indiscipline which the Germans had not displayed.

The French 2nd Army retreated to the fortified positions on the Grand Couronné, the heights above Nancy, Lorraine’s biggest city. Since the left flank of the French 1st Army was now exposed, it had to retire to its original starting line on the Meurthe river. The Battle of Lorraine, which lasted for 12 days, concluded in German victory on 25 August 1914. General Joffre was not greatly disheartened by the inability to take Lorraine, along with the sharp defeat there of the French 1st and 2nd armies. The Germans had appeared in greater numbers than anticipated in that area, so they could not be strong everywhere, which is what General Joffre expected.

Slightly further north of Lorraine, beside the Ardennes forest, the French high command calculated that a maximum of 18 German divisions were present there. This was more wishful thinking. Actually, 25 German divisions were operating in the Ardennes region, consisting of the German 4th Army commanded by Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, and the German 5th Army commanded by Crown Prince, Wilhelm; the latter being the eldest child of the ruling Kaiser, Wilhelm II.

In preparation for the imminent French assault, on the afternoon of 21 August 1914 German troops moved into the fringes of the Ardennes forest, which provided excellent cover. There the Germans waited, preparing ambushes in which to snare the impetuous French attackers. On 22 August the French began their second large-scale offensive, this time towards the Ardennes; with the French 3rd Army on the right commanded by General Pierre Ruffey, and on the left the French 4th Army led by General Langle de Cary. A newly formed Army of Lorraine, under General Michel-Joseph Maunoury, would act as the right-flank guard against a possible German counterattack from the city of Metz, in northern Lorraine.

Very seriously, not only were the French continually underestimating German troop numbers, but neither did they take the trouble of sending out proper reconnaissance sorties in the Ardennes area. The French conduct of battle was therefore based on vain imaginings. They pushed boldly, but blindly, into such areas of the Ardennes called Virton, Ochamps, Rossignol and Neufchâteau, located mainly along the French-Belgian frontier. In these places, as the Battle of the Ardennes began, the advancing French troops entered killing grounds, where they were slaughtered by artillery and rifle fire from the mostly unseen German soldiers.

At the commune of Longwy, at the northernmost edge of Lorraine, a corps in the centre of the French 3rd Army broke to the rear, leaving its 2 adjoining corps isolated and vulnerable, both with open, unguarded flanks. Much the same thing happened in the French 4th Army at Tintigny, in the far south of Belgium beside the Ardennes.

Most French soldiers fought with courage, but it is undeniable that the French Army was failing in the test of war against the well organised Germans. An emphasis on flair and spirit (élan) pervaded the French military ranks, often at the expense of following sound and prosaic details of warfare. Even Napoleon Bonaparte had very occasionally committed blunders in his career but he would not, of course, have sent his soldiers into potential deathtraps without firstly discovering the lay of the land. Unfortunately for the French, Joseph Joffre was no Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was the case too, after the Franco-Prussian War, that something of an inferiority complex permeated French thought regarding the Germans. They tried to overcome this unpleasant feeling, by stressing the need for élan among their troops and a desire for revenge against Germany, which they hoped would overcome any deficiencies. By 1914 the German population had risen to 67 million, while the French population was 40 million; the German birth rate was increasing further and the French birth rate was dropping; even worse, Germany had become a stronger industrial state than France; in 1914 Germany was the 2nd most powerful nation in the world, behind the United States.

France, once the dominant country in mainland Europe, had been regressing as a power for a century before the First World War. General Charles de Gaulle said, “Napoleon’s disastrous decision to attack Alexander I [of Russia] is the biggest mistake he ever made. Nothing obliged him to do so. It was against our interests, our traditions, our genius. Our decline dates back to the war between Napoleon and the Russians”.

In the meantime, the Battle of the Ardennes was quickly descending into a massacre. On 22 August 1914, a tragic loss of life occurred as 27,000 French soldiers were killed, the single most bloodstained day in the history of the French Army. With the attacking forces having gained no ground, the Battle of the Ardennes concluded in German victory on 23 August, lasting in all for a couple of days. Total French casualties were unsustainable, amounting to 42,557, almost 3 times that of German casualties of 14,940.

It was far too soon in the war for French commanders to lose faith in the offensive, but the frontline soldiers were learning better. By 23 August 1914, after less than 3 weeks of fighting, France’s war strategy (Plan XVII) lay in ruins. The French Army was already losing men at a rate it could not afford, while it was becoming clear that the weight of the German advance was falling through Belgium and northern France, west of the Meuse river.

The French left flank was now so endangered that General Joffre could no longer ignore the threat, but he did not suspend the Ardennes offensive until 26 August. General Charles Lanrezac, leading the French 5th Army guarding the extreme left of the French line of battle, knew that between him and the English Channel were only a few hastily prepared units and some cavalry. All of General Lanrezac’s instincts told him the main German attack was going to reach far to the west, enveloping his open left flank. An intelligent and perceptive commander, Lanrezac had previously implored the French high command not to send its troops into “that deathtrap of the Ardennes”.

Through August 1914, the Germans had the best of both worlds. When they advanced into Belgium and northern France, the countryside was relatively open and provided good marching ground, while they were opposed by inadequate forces; where the Germans reverted to the tactical defence, the French obliged them by unwisely attacking in close country. Thus, the Germans retained the initiative both in offensive and defensive warfare, and the French conformed to their will.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

Holger H. Herwig, The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (Random House Inc., 1 Dec. 2009)

Oliver Stein, “Schlieffen, Alfred, Graf von”, 1914-1918-online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 21 February 2017

Karl Marx, The Political Writings (Verso, 3 Sept. 2019)

Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 2nd edition, 3 April 1985)

Pierre de Gaulle, “Ukraine, Trapped In A Spiral Of War”, Geopolitica, 5 July 2022

Stéphanie Trouillard, “August 22, 1914: The bloodiest day in French military history”, France24, 22 August 2014

Michael Kennedy, “Battle of the Ardennes, 1914”, UnderstandingWars.com, 15 February 2019

Featured image: French poilus (soldiers) posing in a trench, 16 June 1917. (By Paul Castelnau base mémoire Ministère de la Culture (France), licensed under the Public Domain)

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A group of family members of 9/11 victims has sent a letter to President Biden urging him to return the $7 billion in frozen Afghan reserves held by the US Federal Reserve to the Afghan people.

Earlier this year, President Biden signed an executive order that would make $3.5 billion of the Afghan funds available to 9/11 families. But in the letter that was sent Tuesday, 77 family members of 9/11 victims said receiving that money would be “morally wrong.”

The letter reads:

“Any use of the $7 billion to pay off 9/11 family member judgments is legally suspect and morally wrong. We call on you to modify your Executive Order and affirm that the Afghanistan central bank funds belong to the Afghan people and the Afghan people alone.”

US officials said this week that the Biden administration has decided not to return any of the $7 billion to Afghanistan and suspended talks with the Taliban on the issue. One year since the Taliban’s takeover of the country, Afghanistan is facing a dire humanitarian crisis, with millions of Afghans facing starvation.

The letter says that a small number of 9/11 families sought the Afghan funds to pay off a debt from a default judgment they won against the Taliban years ago. But the 9/11 families that signed the letter argue that the money does not belong to the Taliban. “This money comes from Afghanistan’s central bank, and as such, it belongs to the Afghan people,” they said.

The letter’s signatories said that they have joined other lawsuits and do seek a “measure of justice.” But they add that “no 9/11 family member joined these lawsuits to take money away from starving Afghans.”

“We ask you to use your executive power to modify your recent order and commit to the only legally and morally correct approach – affirming that all $7 billion of the Afghan central bank funds being kept in New York belong to the Afghan people,” the letter concludes.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

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On Saturday, August 6, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., in Manila and pledged greater U.S. military support for the Philippines because of “rising tensions in Asia, including those involving China and Taiwan.”

In a press conference following the meeting, Blinken emphasized the Biden administration’s commitment to working collaboratively with the Philippines to “defend the rule of law, protect human rights and fundamental freedoms—including freedom of expression.”

Blinken was noticeably silent two days after his visit, however, when Filipino authorities arrested Walden Bello, a renowned scholar and former vice-presidential candidate, on charges of cyber-libel.

These charges had originally been filed against him by a former Davao City employee, Jefry Tupas, whom Bello reportedly called a “drug dealer.”

Tupas had worked under Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio—the daughter of former President Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022) and current Filipino Vice-President —and attended a party where ₱1.5 million worth of illegal drugs were seized.

Speaking to the media present at his arrest, Bello—who has been released on bail—said that he was “innocent of the charges,” and that its only been a few weeks but the new Filipino administration was “already showing its fangs.”

Since Marcos Jr. took over in May, the websites of several progressive media organizations in the Philippines have been banned and, in July, a conviction against the online news platform Rappler for cyber-libel was upheld by the Court of Appeals.

Laban ng Masa—the socialist coalition that Bello leads—said that Bello’s arrest “speaks volumes on the state of democracy and freedom in the Philippines. It also serves as a warning to democracy and human rights advocates on what would befall them while standing up for the right to express one’s views and criticize wrongdoings by the rich and powerful.”[1]

Joseph Gerson, Director of the Committee for a SANE U.S. China policy, wrote in a letter to the Philippines ambassador to the U.S., José Manuel del Gallego Romualdez, that “the arrest of this Vice-Presidential candidate [Bello] appears to be an act of retribution by Vice President Duterte against her opponent in the recent election. It also appears to be designed to serve a chilling warning to democracy and human rights advocates at the time when the son of former dictator Marcos assumes power in the Philippines.”

Back-to-the-Future Nightmare

Filipinos today find themselves living in a back-to-the-future nightmare with Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., as their president.

From 1965 to 1986, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., ruled the Philippines with an iron fist, detaining more than 53,000 people and killing upwards of 3,200 after martial law was declared.[2]

A secret 1969 CIA report on Marcos stated that he and his wife Imelda had stolen “funds ranging from not lower than several hundred million U.S. dollars to two billion U.S. dollars”—much of which was hidden away in CIA banks in Hawaii (Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong) and Australia (Nugan Hand).[3]

According to journalist Sterling Seagrave, Marcos Sr. first worked for the CIA in the 1950s as a congressman when he participated in a CIA-engineered rebellion against Indonesia’s socialist President Sukarno.

The CIA subsequently assisted Marcos in his rise to the presidency, writing a phony biography that made him into a war hero, while training his police forces to repress all opposition.[4]

Marcos was valued because he provided the U.S. with air bases that were used to bomb Vietnam while supplying Filipino troops to Vietnam and opening the Philippines’ economy to U.S. corporations.[5]

Today, Marcos’s son—who called the period of martial law under his father a “golden age in Philippines history”—is valued by the U.S. for similar reasons.

During Mr. Blinken’s visit, he and Marcos Jr. spoke of deepening the economic relationship and building on the mutual defense arrangement between the U.S. and the Philippines.

The New York Times reported that “the two countries are treaty allies, and the U.S. military has long maintained a presence in the Philippines. American officials have been discussing possible greater access to military bases in the country, doing more exercises between the two militaries and making their defense systems more interoperable—part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy aimed at increasing cooperation with allies and partners to counterbalance China.”

Marcos Jr. has earned particular plaudits from the U.S. for his pledge to uphold the ruling by an international court at The Hague rejecting China’s claims to territorial control over waters and land in the South China Sea where the Philippines and Taiwan have competing claims.

Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, had tried to adopt more conciliatory policies toward China, including backing down from territorial assertions over the South China Sea, while also threatening to end an important military agreement with the U.S.

Duterte was best known for the excesses of his War on Drugs, which the Marcos-Duterte regime is expected to continue.

Bello’s arrest is another marker of Philippines’ rising authoritarianism, which undercuts the official purpose of the New Cold War; namely to advance democracy against China’s authoritarianism. No wonder then that Mr. Blinken was silent.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

  1. Charles Santiago, chairperson of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, said that Bello’s arrest was “nothing but an act of political harassment and persecution aimed at silencing one of the most prominent critics of the Duterte administration.” 

  2. Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 118. 
  3. Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 121. 
  4. Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, 121; Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 118, 119. 
  5. Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, 186. 

Featured image: Walden Bello in 2007 (By Socy major, licensed under the Public Domain)

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Video: A Review of What Occurred in Israel Since the Onset of the Corona Crisis

August 18th, 2022 by Corona Investigative Committee

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This session is a review of what happened in Israel in the last 2.5 years, an analysis of injuries and death reports on VAERS among infants and children, testimony of a vaccine-injured person… and more!

The Corona Committee Israel was initialized by attorney and economist Viviane Fischer and attorney Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, together with Avital Livny, Dr. Yaffa Shir-Raz, and Ilana Rachel Daniels. Avital Livny, Dr. Yaffa Shir-Raz, and Ilana Rachel Daniels head this committee branch and conduct an evidence review of the Corona crisis and actions.

 

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“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” —James Madison

The IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.

The Veterans Administration (VA) purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.

According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) owns 600 guns. And the Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”

This is how it begins.

We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil.

This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

Mind you, this de facto standing army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies may look and act like the military, but they are not the military.

Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.

There are now more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines. As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”

While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.

Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops and swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will have arrest-and-firearm authority) and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.

The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.

What began with the militarization of the police in the 1980s during the government’s war on drugs has snowballed into a full-fledged integration of military weaponry, technology and tactics into police protocol. To our detriment, local police—clad in jackboots, helmets and shields and wielding batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, and assault rifles—have increasingly come to resemble occupying forces in our communities.

As Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz report, more than $34 billion in federal government grants made available to local police agencies in the wake of 9/11 “ha[ve] fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations… across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment… [P]olice departments around the U.S. have transformed into small army-like forces.”

This standing army has been imposed on the American people in clear violation of the spirit—if not the letter of the law—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the government’s ability to use the U.S. military as a police force.

A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom.

It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force.

Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Unfortunately, with the Constitution under constant attack, the military’s power, influence and authority have grown dramatically. Even the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force, has been greatly weakened by exemptions allowing troops to deploy domestically and arrest civilians in the wake of alleged terrorist acts.

The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Indeed, there are a growing number of exceptions to which Posse Comitatus does not apply. These exceptions serve to further acclimate the nation to the sight and sounds of military personnel on American soil and the imposition of martial law.

Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of administrative, police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military with little to no regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

The menace of a national police force—a.k.a. a standing army—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution, cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored.

Historically, the establishment of a national police force accelerates a nation’s transformation into a police state, serving as the fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity.

Then again, for all intents and perhaps, the American police state is already governed by martial law: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.

This is what martial law looks like, when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it.

The ease with which Americans are prepared to welcome boots on the ground, regional lockdowns, routine invasions of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses is beyond unnerving.

We are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.

All of these assaults on the constitutional framework of the nation have been sold to the public as necessary for national security.

Time and again, the public has fallen for the ploy hook, line and sinker

We’re being reeled in, folks, and you know what happens when we get to the end of that line?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll be cleaned, gutted and strung up.

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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.

US Recent Ballistic Missile Test Boosts World’s Re-nuclearization

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, August 17, 2022

Nuclear tensions are rising more and more. The US military said on August 16 that it had conducted a test with the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. In the official statement, it was also informed that the operation was already previously scheduled, having been postponed in order to avoid increasing tensions with Beijing during China’s show of force near Taiwan earlier this month.

Glyphosate

Neurodegenerative Illnesses: Commonly Used Glyphosate Herbicide Crosses Blood-brain Barrier, “Infiltrates the Brain”: New Study

By Richard Harth, August 17, 2022

Neurodegenerative illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are among the most perplexing in medical science. The underlying causes of such diseases range from genetic factors and overall cardiovascular health to dietary influences and lifestyle choices.

When Roger Waters Cried. “Has any Israeli shed tears for a boy from Gaza?”

By Gideon Levy, August 17, 2022

Has any Israeli shed tears for a boy from Gaza? Are many Israelis even aware of what happened to children in Gaza during those three days of colossal success that deluged Israel in waves of pride and self-satisfaction such as we haven’t seen here in a long time? There hasn’t been a success like this since Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Another few days of fighting and there would even be albums.

Mumia Abu-Jamal Remains the Voice of the Voiceless

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 17, 2022

During the late 1960s, Mumia Abu-Jamal became a youth activist in the city of Philadelphia where a succession of racist police chiefs engaged in widespread abuse against the African American community.

Israel’s Friends Struggle to Justify Unprovoked Attack that Killed 17 Children

By Philip Weiss, August 17, 2022

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza last week was shocking to many of us. It was unprovoked by any Palestinian attack and comprised three days of strikes on a captive, fenced-in population. Those strikes were aimed at the leadership of a militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and killed and injured many children.

History of the FBI: J. Edgar Hoover’s Evil Brainchild. John Kiriakou

By John Kiriakou, August 17, 2022

COINTELPRO, an abbreviation for Counter-Intelligence Program, was the illegal brainchild of the F.B.I.’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose obsession with communism and “subversion” allowed him to justify violating the civil rights and civil liberties of millions of Americans.

NATO’s 2030 Strategic Concept Threatens to Destabilise the World

By Ahmed Adel, August 17, 2022

The new NATO 2030 Strategic Concept indicates a disturbing change in the Alliance’s strategic orientation. As a result, provocations towards Moscow, as well as Beijing, are escalating, especially after the former was labelled by NATO as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

WEF’s “Global Intelligence Collecting AI” to Erase Ideas from the Internet

By Igor Chudov, August 17, 2022

The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.

Canada, Sweden and Finland Announce Sending of Military Instructors to Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, August 17, 2022

The West continues to insist on indefinitely prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The policy of sending military aid seems to have no limits. In addition to financial remittances and arms shipments, Western countries are also mobilizing to give military instructions to Kiev. Considering the war crimes and human rights violations repeatedly committed by Ukrainian forces, supporting Kiev militarily means co-participating in the crimes – and the West must be judged responsible for that.

With Help from WEF, Canada to Launch Federal Digital ID Program

By Michael Nevradakis, August 17, 2022

The Canadian government, building on a partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), is developing a new federal “Digital Identity Program.” The aim of the new initiative is to develop a digital proof-of-identity document, which could be used across different systems and environments ranging from government services to airports and border control, according to Slay News.

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Neurodegenerative illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are among the most perplexing in medical science. The underlying causes of such diseases range from genetic factors and overall cardiovascular health to dietary influences and lifestyle choices. 

Various environmental contaminants have also been implicated as possible players in the development or advancement of neurodegenerative disease. Among these is a broad-spectrum herbicide known as glyphosate. Glyphosate is commonly used herbicide, applied to agricultural crops around the world.

In a new study, Arizona State University Graduate Research Assisstant Joanna Winstone, Assistant Professor Ramon Velazquez and their colleagues at the Translational Genomics Research Institute explore the effects of glyphosate exposure on the brains of mice.

Infographic on neuroinflammation

Glyphosate is a widely used herbicide sprayed on a variety of crops worldwide. A new study explores the possible effects to the brain of glyphosate exposure. The herbicide is shown to cross the blood-brain barrier and may be correlated with hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Graphic by Shireen Dooling. Download Full Image

The research demonstrates, for the first time, that glyphosate successfully crosses the blood-brain barrier and infiltrates the brain. Once there, it acts to enhance levels of a critical factor known as TNF-α.

TNF-α is a molecule with two faces. This pro-inflammatory cytokine performs vital functions in the neuroimmune system, acting to enhance the immune response and protect the brain.

When levels of TNF-α are dysregulated, however, a host of diseases linked with neuroinflammation can result. Among these is Alzheimer’s disease.

The study further demonstrates in cell culture studies that glyphosate exposure appears to increase the production of soluble beta amyloid (Aβ) and reduce the viability of neurons. The accumulation of soluble beta amyloid, the sticky protein responsible for the formation of soluble beta amyloid plaques, is one of the central diagnostic hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

Further evidence suggestive of potential hazards to neurological health were observed when the researchers examined changes in gene expression via RNA sequencing in the brains of mice following glyphosate exposure.

These RNA transcripts hinted at disruptions in the expression of genes related to neurodegenerative disease, including dysregulation of a class of brain cells responsible for producing the myelin sheath critical for proper neuronal communication. These cells, known as oligodendrocytes, are affected by elevated levels of TNF-α.

“We find increases in TNF-α in the brain, following glyphosate exposure,” said Velazquez, the senior author of the paper. “While we examined (Alzheimer’s disease) pathology, this might have implications for many neurodegenerative diseases, given that neuroinflammation is seen in a variety of brain disorders.”

Velazquez and Winstone, the first author on the study, are researchers with the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center and Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences.

The research appears in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroinflammation.

An enigmatic disease; a path of destruction

A hundred years have passed since the first diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Despite vast investments in research and drug development, the affliction remains without effective treatment. A suite of therapies, developed over many decades at extravagant cost, have one by one failed to alleviate the symptoms of the disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. The progression of the disease usually begins with mild memory loss. As the disease develops, increasing confusion and a breakdown in communication abilities often result, as the affliction attacks brain pathways involved in memory, language and thought.

Some 5.8 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, as of 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike heart disease or cancer, the death toll for Alzheimer’s disease is on a frightening upward trajectory. By 2040, costs of the disease are projected to rise dramatically to between $379 billion and more than $500 billion annually. The staggering toll of the illness is currently projected to nearly triple to 14 million people by 2050.

The onset of symptoms typically occurs after age 60, and the risk to individuals doubles every five years after age 65. Although genetics are believed to play a role in some cases of Alzheimer’s disease and a family history of the disorder is considered a significant risk factor, environmental factors are believed to play a significant role in the disease.

Researchers are trying to learn how genetic correlates may subtly interact with environmental and other factors to decrease or enhance the likelihood of developing the affliction. Some recent research suggests that lifestyle changes, including proper physical activity, nutritious food, limited alcohol consumption and not smoking may help prevent or slow cognitive decline, noting that brain and cardiovascular health are closely linked.

Toxic effects: The jury is out

The new study examines the neurological effects of glyphosate, the most ubiquitous herbicide in global use. Each year, around 250 million pounds of glyphosate are applied to agricultural crops in the U.S. alone. Although the chemical is regarded as generally safe to humans by the Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Authority, researchers are taking a second look.

Studies of acute herbicide use suggest they are not harmful, but little is known about possible long-term effects from prolonged exposure. One issue of considerable concern is that glyphosate can cross the blood-brain barrier, a layer of endothelial cells preventing dissolved substances in the circulating bloodstream from readily passing into the extracellular fluid of the central nervous system, where the brain’s neurons reside.

Potential risks to brain health posed by glyphosate should be critically evaluated, particularly for those consistently exposed to the herbicide.

“The Alzheimer’s connection is that there’s a much higher prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in agricultural communities that are using this chemical,” Winstone said. “We’re trying to establish a more molecular-science based link between the two.”

The study exposed mice to high doses of glyphosate, then detected elevated levels of TNF-α in their brains. The researchers then exposed extracted mouse neurons in petri dishes to the same levels of glyphosate detected in the brains of mice, observing elevated amyloid beta and cell death in cortical neurons. Dysregulated oligodendrocyte RNA transcripts, which could indicate disruption of myelination, were detected in brain tissue.

Taken together, the results demonstrate a correlation between glyphosate exposure and classic symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, though the authors stress that much more work will be required before a causative link can be established.

Nevertheless, the widespread use of the chemical and the disturbing correlates highlighted in the current study underscore the need for intensified investigation. Among the pressing questions to be answered: How does prolonged, low-dose exposure to glyphosate affect the brain; does glyphosate act synergistically with other chemicals present in common herbicides; and can glyphosate be detected post-mortem in patients who died of Alzheimer’s disease?

On the horizon, new drugs designed to reduce TNF-α in the brain are being explored, offering renewed hope for those with Alzheimer’s disease as well as other neurodegenerative ailments.

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Richard Harth, Science writer, Biodesign Institute at ASU. 

US Recent Ballistic Missile Test Boosts World’s Re-nuclearization

August 17th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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Nuclear tensions are rising more and more. The US military said on August 16 that it had conducted a test with the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. In the official statement, it was also informed that the operation was already previously scheduled, having been postponed in order to avoid increasing tensions with Beijing during China’s show of force near Taiwan earlier this month. For some unexplained reason, Washington considered the current moment to be the most “appropriate” for the maneuver.

The missile was launched from the Vandeberg Space Force base in California and traveled about 6,760 km. Military spokespeople indicated that the self-propelled projectile was unarmed and equipped with a test reentry vehicle. Additionally, the statement makes clear that the mission was intended to demonstrate the readiness of US nuclear forces.

“Air Force Global Strike Command Airmen launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with a test re-entry vehicle from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Aug. 16 at 12:49 a.m. Pacific Time to demonstrate the readiness of U.S. nuclear forces and provide confidence in the lethality and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent”, the statement says.

Manufactured by Boeing, the Minuteman III is a missile with nuclear capability and high destructive power. Currently, this missile is a key element in the US military’s strategic arsenal. The weapon has a range capability of over 9,660 km and can travel at a speed of approximately 24,000 km per hour. Minuteman III is also considered a part of the so-called American “nuclear triad”, along with the submarine-launched ballistic missile Trident and nuclear weapons carried by long-range strategic bombers.

Commenting on the relevance of the test, Colonel Chris Cruise, 576th Flight Test Squadron Commander, said:

“Make no mistake – our nuclear triad is the cornerstone of the national security of our country and of our allies around the globe (…) This scheduled test launch is demonstrative of how our nation’s ICBM fleet illustrates our readiness and reliability of the weapon system. It is also a great platform to show the skill sets and expertise of our strategic weapons maintenance personnel and of our missile crews who maintain an unwavering vigilance to defend the homeland”.

It must be mentioned that tests with this equipment had previously been canceled by the US on at least two occasions, one in April and another in early August. The first cancellation was motivated by the need to avoid nuclear tensions with Russia in the midst of the special military operation in Ukraine. The second one was due to tensions with China over Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei.

What is not clear, however, is why the current moment was considered appropriate by the US military to conduct this type of test. Tensions with Russia and China have not ceased – not even decreased. Washington continues to destabilize Eastern Europe’s security by sending weapons to the Ukrainian government in order to “delay” Russian victory in Ukraine – even though it is well known that these weapons are being used to hit civilian targets and nuclear plants (Zaporozhye). In the same sense, provocations against China are still on the rise, with recent new visits by American officials to the island, even after constant Chinese messages for the US to stop violations of Beijing’s sovereignty.

So, in fact, the American test can only be interpreted as a real show of force. Despite previous cancellations, the choice of the current moment was not motivated by being a “more stable” scenario – because it is not. The choice was made precisely to, in the midst of the global security crisis, show the world the power of the American war arsenal. Furthermore, it is obviously a response to Chinese military activities in the Taiwan Strait, considering that this issue is the current major global focus of tensions.

The result of the American attitude will be only one: boosting even further the militarization and re-nuclearization of the world. What is expected for the near future is that the US rival countries put themselves in a state of alert – including nuclear alert, in the case of the powers that have this technology. For example, the North Korean government, according to recent reports, is planning a new nuclear test. With the US launching ballistic missiles, it is likely that projects in this direction will be heightened. Something similar can be said about Iran, which, in the face of the US threat, is expected to become even more resistant in negotiations on a new nuclear deal.

Once again, the US is pushing for the re-nuclearization of international politics. It is unreasonable for a country to provoke its rivals and then, faced with the responses, decide to dissuade them by launching missiles. Washington needs to understand that the multipolar world order will be built through multilateral dialogue and non-interventionism, not through military intimidation.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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Roger Waters cried Wednesday. It was on his Twitter page, as he read, on camera, an essay he had read on the Mondoweiss news website the night before. It was about a boy from the Gaza Strip.

“I really wish I could rest, or have some psychologist help me like other people in the world who suffer wars,” said Mohammed. “No one during or after the war asks me or my family ‘How are you doing?’”

He’s the family breadwinner, a boy of 13. And only his crying, wrote Tareq Hajjaj, “melts the manly shield” he is forced to wear. “I do not want my mother to suffer like the mothers of the kids who were killed,” the boy sobbed.

Mohammed wished he could have grown up somewhere else, where he would only die “when his body is fully grown,” Hajjaj wrote. And this is where Waters could no longer restrain his tears and burst out crying. No decent person could remain indifferent to the sight of the musician’s tears. Waters, the great man of conscience.

But for Israelis, this was a performance from a different planet. They have a thousand defense mechanisms against Waters’ tears. Let’s even assume that Waters really is an “antisemite” and “someone who hates Israel” – which he isn’t. But crying over a boy from Gaza? What about the children of Sderot?

Has any Israeli shed tears for a boy from Gaza? Are many Israelis even aware of what happened to children in Gaza during those three days of colossal success that deluged Israel in waves of pride and self-satisfaction such as we haven’t seen here in a long time? There hasn’t been a success like this since Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Another few days of fighting and there would even be albums.

Only the death of Zili, a Border Police dog, in Nablus – which garnered a front-page headline in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, along with his funeral, the tears, the grave, the eulogies and the official statement of mourning by the prime minister – weighed a bit on the intoxicating mood of victory. It wasn’t disturbed for a second by the scenes from Gaza, because scenes from Gaza were never shown here. Never before has there been such a sterile killing operation here. The Israeli media showed nothing this time, absolutely nothing.

This was one of the most corrupting operations in Israel’s history. Instead of being priced at a steep discount, like its predecessors in Gaza, it was completely free. Not a drop of Israeli blood, not a single destroyed home and no condemnations from the world, not even lame ones. With a zero cost like this, the appetite for further operations will obviously grow. In Nablus on Tuesday, it would at least have been possible to argue about the results.

The usual arrogance was accompanied this time by the addictive feeling of a sweet, easy victory. Just bring us more wars at rock-bottom prices. After all, no one was killed and almost no homes were damaged in last weekend’s Operation Breaking Dawn.

But it’s impossible to ignore another factor that fed these feelings of victory. This time, the operation was launched by the good Israelis. They’re the ones in power now. Look at how they embarked on this war, with flying colors.

Consequently, this was the most political war Israel has ever fought. The right was united; it can never utter a word of criticism about killing Arabs. The center-left was bursting with pride – what a success, what management, what daring. The flattery for the operation’s commanders – Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who are two of “our own” – ran overtime.

Yossi Verter described how Lapid’s wardrobe changed due to this success. His “empty suit has been filled,” he wrote understatedly. And the next day he added, “Without a doubt, this is a feather in the cap” for Lapid (Haaretz, August 8). The suit that was filled (with blood) and the feather in the cap are the real spoils of this war, which ended in “a dream for Israel.” A dream of war.

Verter was soon followed by Uri Misgav, who shed all the disguises. The real victory picture from this war, he wrote, was that of Lapid briefing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu (Haaretz in Hebrew, August 7). It was worth going to war for this victory picture. For Misgav and his ilk, nothing could be sweeter.

Roger Waters cried. “What is wrong with the fucking Israelis? What is wrong with them?” he asked, in anger and despair. I just wish I knew how to answer him.

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***

The US has thrown down the gauntlet. A showdown may come “in the coming weeks,” if sanity does not prevail.

White House and Pentagon spokesmen keep insisting, as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl did on Aug. 14:

“What’s important for us right now is to make sure that Beijing understands that our forces in the region will continue to operate, to fly, to sail wherever international waters allows. That includes the Taiwan Strait.

“I think you should expect that we will continue to do Taiwan Strait transits, as we have in the past, in the coming weeks. …”

What About President Biden?

Not to worry. To the degree it matters, he seems relaxed. On Aug. 8, after China announced new post-Pelosi-visit military drills in the seas and airspace around Taiwan, Biden expressed mild concern about China’s deployments, but spoke reassuringly to reporters:

“I’m concerned they (the Chinese) are moving as much as they are,” but I don’t think they’re going to do anything more than they are.”

Is Biden Listening to His Own PR People, and …

Here is White House Strategic Communications Director John Kirby at a briefing on August 1:

“… Nothing has changed – nothing has changed – about our One China policy … Put simply, there is no reason for Beijing to turn a potential visit [by Pelosi] … into some sort of crisis or conflict, or use it as a pretext to increase aggressive military activity in or around the Taiwan Strait. [Emphasis added.]

“And yet, over the weekend, even before Speaker Pelosi arrived in the region, China conducted a live-fire exercise. China appears to be positioning itself to potentially take further steps in the coming days and perhaps over longer time horizons.

“Now, these potential steps … could also include actions in the diplomatic and economic space, such as further spurious legal claims like Beijing’s public assertions last month that the Taiwan Strait is not an international waterway. [Emphasis added.]

“Some of these actions would continue concerning trendlines … but some could be of a different scope and scale.”

… and is Kirby Listening to the Bobbsey Twins?

Kirby’s boss, whiz-kid national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his elder (but equally innocent twin) Antony Blinken have served Biden poorly. In the fine schools they attended, they seem to have concentrated on courses on US Exceptionalism, skipping over what John Mearsheimer calls “Balance of Power Politics 101.”

On the key question of Sino-Russian relations, they seem to have been operating out of textbooks a half-century old when they told President Biden that China was “squeezing” Russia – the exact opposite of what has been happening for several decades now. Worse still, they seem to have learned close to nothing about what the Soviets used to call the “world correlation of forces.”

In a word, these extremely bright whiz kids have helped drive the Chinese and the Russians into each other’s arms. That’s what has changed – plus China’s recent military buildup that makes it a formidable foe.

Not Hard to See This Coming

On May 25, 2021, when the date of June 16 was announced for the in-person summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, it seemed necessary to warn Biden and his neophyte advisers that a major shift in the “world correlation of forces” was bound to heavily influence the June talks. China, of course, would not be taking part in the bilateral talks, but it would be very much present.

We worried:

“Whether or not Official Washington fully appreciates the gradual – but profound – change in America’s triangular relationship with Russia and China over recent decades, what is clear is that the US has made itself into the big loser. The triangle may still be equilateral, but it is now, in effect, two sides against one. …

“There is little sign that today’s US policymakers have enough experience and intelligence to recognize this new reality and understand the important implications for US freedom of action. Still less are they likely to appreciate how this new nexus may play out on the ground, on the sea or in the air.”

It was clear that the new phenomenon of Russia-China entente would dwarf the significance of less important issues; and we could not be sure Biden would be appropriately informed. He wasn’t.

The Chinese “Squeeze”

President Biden did not get the word. Here is the bizarre way Biden described, at his post-summit presser, his decades-behind-the-times approach to Putin on China:

“Without quoting him [Putin] – which I don’t think is appropriate – let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.”

At the airport, Biden’s co-travelers did their best to whisk him onto the plane, but failed to stop him from sharing more of his views on China – this time on China’s strategic “squeezing” of Russia:

“Let me choose my words. Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”

Have Biden’s innocent advisers, by now, sought out new textbooks, updated from the ones they may have read in the 70s and 80s. Have they learned that Russia and China have never been closer – that, indeed, they have what amounts to a virtual military alliance?

Why This Matters

Back to what may be in store for U.S. warships should they try to enter the Taiwan Strait “in the coming weeks.” Will China try to impede or harass them?

Experts on China tell me there is low likelihood of that, and I defer to their judgment. At the same time I cannot banish from memory what they told me before Russia invaded Ukraine; namely, that China’s principled stand against interference in the affairs of other countries would make it impossible for China to support such an invasion. And yet, the Chinese have been in the forefront of defending it, explaining that Russia’s “core interests” are at stake. Bejing is now reminding all that Taiwan is a “core interest” of China.

Would the Chinese expect Russia to have their back, so to speak, if they moved to interdict or harass US warships in the Strait? I believe they would expect that. Russia’s immediate endorsement of China’s policies on the Pelosi visit is one tangible sign pointing in this direction. (Use your imagination and pick the various ways President Putin could up the ante so as to advantage his friend and ally Xi Jinping.)

Is this worth testing by trying to sail into the Taiwan Strait? Only an innocent hawk would think so. And yet the Chinese have every reason to believe that it is the hawks who are calling the shots in Washington – not Biden. (I discuss some of these issues in a short interview I gave early yesterday Sunday, though the connection dropped at minute 8:40.)

Bottom line: The White House has left little incentive for the Chinese to keep pushing what they call a “Win-Win” policy. According to reliable sources, when top Chinese officials pressed the mutual advantages of “Win-Win” with White House National Security Council China guru Kurt Campbell, they were set back at his response. They described it as “Your win-win IS BULLSH*T!.”

Aside from the use of vernacular, this is not difficult to believe, given what is known about Campbell, who very early on said “the era of engagement is over.” Sadly, Campbell is no wiser than the Bobbsey twins with respect to the implications for the US of the virtual alliance that now exists between China and Russia.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Mumia Abu-Jamal Remains the Voice of the Voiceless

August 17th, 2022 by Abayomi Azikiwe

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***

During the late 1960s, Mumia Abu-Jamal became a youth activist in the city of Philadelphia where a succession of racist police chiefs engaged in widespread abuse against the African American community.

Philadelphia has a centuries-long history of African self-organization dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the Free African Society, African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and other institutions were formed by Richard Allen, Sarah Allen and Absalom Jones.

During mid-19th century, the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society provided avenues for men and women to build support for the Underground Railroad and the movement to completely eradicate involuntary servitude in the antebellum border and deep southern states. By the 1960s, the city became known as one of the first municipalities where African Americans would rise up in rebellion on the north side during the late August 1964.

Max Stanford (later known as Muhammad Ahmed), a co-founder of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in 1962, was from Philadelphia. RAM proceeded the Black Panther Party (BPP) and sought to form an alliance with Malcolm X (also known as El Hajj Malik Shabazz), a leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam and later the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). RAM advocated for the development of a revolutionary movement in the U.S. and consequently became a target of the Justice Department.

In 1969, Mumia joined the Black Panther Party at the age of 15 when the organization was deemed by the then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoover as the “greatest threat to national security” in the United States. The Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) had a special division which was designed to monitor, disrupt, imprison and kill various leaders and members of African American organizations from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the BPP as well as a host of other tendencies. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since the mid-to-late 1970s indicate that the BPP was a principal target of the U.S. government and local police agencies.

Why was the BPP considered so dangerous by the leading law-enforcement agency inside the country? In order to provide answers to this question it must be remembered that between 1955 and 1970, the African American people led a struggle for civil rights and self-determination which impacted broad segments of the population in the U.S. helping to spawn movements within other oppressed communities.

The Black Panther Party was first formed in Lowndes County Alabama in 1965. Its origins grew out of the organizing work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose field organizer, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) was deployed to the area in the aftermath of the Selma to Montgomery march in late March of the same year. Working in conjunction with local activists, an independent political party was formed known as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group utilized the black panther as its symbol while rejecting both the Republican and Democratic Party.

In subsequent months, there were other Black Panther organizations formed in several cities including Detroit, Cleveland, New York City and other urban areas. In Oakland, California during October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

This movement represented an emerging phase of the Black liberation struggle where there were calls for armed self-defense, mass rebellion and the political takeovers of major municipalities by those who had been excluded from the reins of official power. Thousands of African American youth flocked to the Black Panther Party viewing the organization as a symbol of uncompromising resistance to racism, national oppression and economic exploitation.

Mumia and the BPP

Although the BPP was projected in the national corporate media as gun toting militants willing to use weapons against the police when they were threatening the Party and the community, most of the work of the organization revolved around distribution of its weekly newspaper, the establishment of free breakfast programs for children, community health clinics for the people in the most oppressed areas of the African American community while building alliances with revolutionary forces among other sectors of the population including, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans and whites committed to fundamental change within U.S. society.

Mumia noted the diversity of programmatic work during his tenure in the BPP of the late 1960s and early 1970s in his book entitled “We Want Freedom”:

“As the Breakfast program succeeded so did the Party, and its popularity fueled our growth across the country. Along with the growth of the Party came an increase in the number of community programs undertaken by the Party. By 1971, the Party had embarked on ten distinctive community programs, described by Newton as survival programs. What did he mean by this term? We called them survival programs pending revolution. They were designed to help the people survive until their consciousness is raised, which is only the first step in the revolution to produce a new America.… During a flood the raft is a life-saving device, but it is only a means of getting to higher ground. So, too, with survival programs, which are emergency services. In themselves they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until conditions change.” See this.

On December 4, 1969, the Chicago police under the aegis of the Illinois State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan and the Chicago field office of the FBI, raided the residence of BPP members on the city’s west side. Two Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed while several other occupants of the house were wounded.

These police actions along with hundreds of other attacks on BPP chapters across the country resulted in the deaths of many Panther members and the arrests and framing of hundreds of cadres. Numerous BPP members were driven into exile as others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

The Voice of the Voiceless from the Streets to Death Row

On December 9, 1981, Mumia was arrested in Philadelphia and charged with the murder of white police officer Daniel Faulkner. He was railroaded through the courts and convicted on July 3, 1982. The following year, Mumia was sentenced to die by capital punishment. He remained on death row until 2011 after an international campaign to save his life proved successful.

However, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole. Mumia and his supporters have maintained that he is not guilty of the crime of killing a police officer.

After his sojourn in the BPP, Mumia utilized his writing and journalist skills learned in the Party to become a formidable media personality in Philadelphia. He was a fierce critic of police brutality and a defender of the revolutionary MOVE organization which emerged during the 1970s in the city.

Mumia was a co-founder of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in the 1970s. He worked as a radio broadcaster and writer exposing the misconduct of the police surrounding the attack on the MOVE residence in August 1978. In 1979, he interviewed reggae superstar Bob Marley when he visited Philadelphia for a concert performance.

While behind bars Mumia has become an even more prolific writer and broadcast journalist. He issues weekly commentaries through Prison Radio where he discusses a myriad of topics including African American history, international affairs, political economy, the deplorable conditions existing among the more than two million people incarcerated in the U.S. along with police misconduct. (See this)

A renewed campaign entitled “Love Not Phear” held demonstrations around the U.S. and the world during the weekend of July 3 marking the 40th anniversary of his unjust conviction in 1982. Love Not Phear says that it is committed to the liberation of all political prisoners including Mumia Abu-Jamal.

An entry on their website emphasizes that:

“The landscape has changed over the last 40 years, a time frame that also marks the years Mumia has been incarcerated. The fight for the release of political prisoners requires a recalibration in order to challenge police corruption and racism as they have evolved in this new landscape. We cannot deny the racism, corruption, and misconduct that permeated the so-called ‘Halls of Justice’ during Mumia’s arrest and unjust kangaroo court trial. The people today know the truth; commonplace bribed witnesses, suppressed evidence, biased judges, and backroom deals put Mumia behind bars.” (See this)

Mumia through his attorneys have filed another appeal based upon evidence related to prosecutorial misconduct which has been further revealed over the last four years. The hearing will take place on October 19 in Philadelphia. Supporters of Mumia and other political prisoners will attend the hearing in this latest attempt to win the long-awaited freedom for this activist who is now 68 years old.

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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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***

It was a good but bizarre day when the CDC finally reversed itself fundamentally on its messaging for two-and-a-half years. The source is the MMWR report of August 11, 2022. The title alone shows just how deeply the about-face was buried: Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems — United States, August 2022

The authors: “the CDC Emergency Response Team” consisting of “Greta M. Massetti, PhD; Brendan R. Jackson, MD; John T. Brooks, MD; Cria G. Perrine, PhD; Erica Reott, MPH; Aron J. Hall, DVM; Debra Lubar, PhD;; Ian T. Williams, PhD; Matthew D. Ritchey, DPT; Pragna Patel, MD; Leandris C. Liburd, PhD; Barbara E. Mahon, MD.”

It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall in the brainstorming sessions that led to this little treatise. The wording was chosen very carefully, not to say anything false outright, much less admit any errors of the past, but to imply that it was only possible to say these things now.

“As SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to circulate globally, high levels of vaccine- and infection-induced immunity and the availability of effective treatments and prevention tools have substantially reduced the risk for medically significant COVID-19 illness (severe acute illness and post–COVID-19 conditions) and associated hospitalization and death. These circumstances now allow public health efforts to minimize the individual and societal health impacts of COVID-19 by focusing on sustainable measures to further reduce medically significant illness as well as to minimize strain on the health care system, while reducing barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.

In English: everyone can pretty much go back to normal. Focus on illness that is medically significant. Stop worrying about positive cases because nothing is going to stop them. Think about the bigger picture of overall social health. End the compulsion. Thank you. It’s only two and a half years late.

What about mass testing?

Forget it: “All persons should seek testing for active infection when they are symptomatic or if they have a known or suspected exposure to someone with COVID-19.”

Oh.

What about the magic of track and trace?

“CDC now recommends case investigation and contact tracing only in health care settings and certain high-risk congregate settings.”

Oh.

What about the unvaccinated who were so demonized throughout the last year?

“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

Remember when 40% of the members of the black community in New York City who refused the jab were not allowed into restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, or theaters? Now, no one wants to talk about that.

Also, universities, colleges, the military, and so on – which still have mandates in place – do you hear this? Everything you have done to hate on people, dehumanize people, segregate people, humiliate others as unclean, fire people and destroy lives, now stands in disrepute.

Meanwhile, as of this writing, the blasted US government still will not allow unvaccinated travelers across its borders!

Not one word of the CDC’s turgid treatise was untrue back in the Spring of 2020. There was always “infection-induced immunity,” though Fauci and Co. constantly pretended otherwise. It was always a terrible idea to introduce “barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.” The vaccines never promised in their authorization to stop infection and spread, even though all official statements of the CDC claimed otherwise, repeatedly and often.

You might also wonder how the great reversal treats masking. On this subject, there is no backing off. After all, the Biden administration still has an appeal in process to reverse the court decision that the mask mandate was illegal all along. “At the high COVID-19 Community Level,” the CDC adds, “additional recommendations focus on all persons wearing masks indoors in public and further increasing protection to populations at high risk.”

The problem from the beginning was that there never was an exit strategy from the crazy lockdown/mandate idea. It was never the case that they would magically cause the bug to go away. The excuse that we would lock down in wait for a vaccine never made any sense.

People surely knew early on of the social, economic, and cultural devastation that would ensue. If they did not, they never should have been anywhere near the control switches of public health. Badges and bureaucracies do not terrify a virus destined to spread to the whole planet. And not one person with even the most casual passing knowledge of coronaviruses could have sincerely believed that a vaccine would magically appear to achieve something never before achieved in the whole history of medicine.

When the Great Barrington Declaration appeared on October 4, 2020, it caused a global frenzy of fury not because it said anything new. It was merely a pithy restatement of basic public-health principles, which pretty much instantly became verboten on March 16, 2020, when Fauci/Birx announced their grand scheme.

The GBD generated mania because the existing praxis was based on preposterously unproven claims that demanded that billions of people buy into complete nonsense. Sadly many did simply because it seemed hard to believe that all world regimes but a handful would push such a damaging policy if it was utterly unworkable. When something like that happens – and there never was the hope that it could work – the regime imperative becomes censorship and shaming of dissent. It’s the only way to hold the great lie together.

So finally, nearly two years later the CDC has embraced the Great Barrington Declaration rather than doing a “quick and devastating takedown” as Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci called for the day after its release. No, they had to try out their new theory on the rest of us. It did not work, obviously. For the authors of the GBD, they knew from the time they penned the document that it was a matter of time before they were vindicated. They never doubted it.

Dr. Rajeev Venkayya is widely credited with coming up with the idea of lockdowns while he was working for the Bush administration back in 2005. He had no training at all in public health or epidemiology. He later marveled that it fell to him, a young desk-dwelling White House bureaucrat, to “invent pandemic planning.” Maybe he should have demurred that day that George W. Bush asked him to lead the charge to inaugurate a new war on pathogens.

Somehow his views gained converts, among whom was Bill Gates, the foundation for whom he worked for years. The rest is history.

In April 2020, Venkayya called me to explain why I needed to stop attacking lockdowns. He said that the planners need a chance to make their scheme work.

On the phone, I asked the same question over and over: where does the virus go? The first two times, he did not respond. I pressed and pressed. Finally he said there will be a vaccine.

It’s hard to appreciate just how preposterous that sounded at the time, and I said something along those lines: it would be a medical miracle never before seen to have a shot for a coronavirus that was sterilizing against wild type and all inevitable mutations, and to do it in a reasonable time so that society and economy had not completely fallen apart.

The whole approach was clearly milliennarian at best and utter madness at worst. And here I was, in the thick of global lockdowns, on the phone with the architect of the whole idea, an idea that had reduced billions to servitude, wrecked schools and churches, and sent communities and countries into complete upheaval. I wondered at the time what it would be like to be Dr. Venkayya that day. After all this ended in disaster, would he take responsibility? His LinkedIn profile today says otherwise: he is prepared to “tackle current and future epidemic & pandemic threats as the CEO of Aerium Therapeutics.”

There never was an exit strategy from lockdowns and mandates but they eventually did find an exit nonetheless. It came in the form of a heavily footnoted and opaquely written reversal, published by the main bureaucracy responsible for the disaster. It amounts to a repudiation without saying so. And thus does the great experiment in mass compulsion come to an intellectual end. If only the carnage could be cleaned up by another posting on the CDC’s website.

By the way, the Biden administration has extended the declaration of Covid emergency. And my unvaccinated friends in the UK still can’t board a plane to come for a visit.

All of this gives rise to the great question: what was the point? Maybe it was all a mistake and now it is gone forever but that’s unlikely. The intellectuals who pushed this project on the world have a view of the world that is fundamentally ill-liberal. They differ among themselves on the details but the general approach is technocratic central planning rooted in deep suspicion of basic tenets of freedom.

How many people on the planet have now been acculturated to top-down control, socialized to live in fear, accept whatever comes down from above, never to question an edict, and expect to live in a world of rolling man-made disasters? And was that the point after all, to cultivate low expectations for life on earth and relinquish the soul’s desire for a full and free life?

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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***

On the evening of Aug. 10, 2022, the Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) and Vietnamese Military TV held a special event marking the 61st year since the United States military first dropped the chemical weapon known as “Agent Orange” on the people of Vietnam. People’s World was invited to attend this important event. The goal was to raise awareness and funds for Agent Orange clean up and for resources to care for the victims.

The program opened with remarks from Senior Lt. General Nguyen Van Trinh, director of VAVA. The program then shared some success stories, such as the clearing of Da Nang International Airport of the remaining dioxin. Examples of other places still in the process of being cleared were also shared. The program featured interviews with victims, their families, and their caregivers.

The program ended with thanking various people from across Vietnam that have raised funds, donated, or volunteered to help those suffering the ill effects of the toxins. This aid came from across the social and economic spectrum. Philanthropists, students, youth groups, and other grassroots initiatives were all well represented.

Starting in August 1961, until the end of the war in 1973, the U.S. military dropped Agent Orange and similar chemical weapons on 5.6 million acres of Vietnamese land. Over 90% of these lands were poisoned at least twice. By the end of the war, an estimated five million Vietnamese people were poisoned by these illegal weapons.

But the crime didn’t end with the U.S. retreat from Vietnam. The awful effects of Agent Orange have been passed down from parent to child and from child to grandchild. This means that every year there are new victims born. Every year there are new victims that suffer the horrible disabilities and deformities caused by the toxins in Agent Orange and other dioxin weapons. Today, there are nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese still suffering from the toxins first dropped on Vietnam 61 years ago.

Despite many promises made by the U.S. government to help the Vietnamese government and people with the aftermath of the U.S.’ illegal warfare, aid has been lacking. To date, 61 years later, the U.S. government has only ever helped with environmental cleanup and has never provided any help for the millions of people that suffered and continue to suffer from dioxin poisoning.

Today, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., remains the only consistent voice calling for the U.S. government to take responsibility for its past crimes in Vietnam. Year after year, Lee proposes legislation to help care for the victims of Agent Orange. She is joined by the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC) and other advocacy groups that try and lobby for funding for the victims. Unfortunately, year after year, the rest of Congress fails to give the initiative enough support, leading to its failure.

It is important to note that the victims of Agent Orange were not exclusively those bombed by the U.S. military. Many U.S. veterans who handled and managed the containers of the chemicals and their decedents fell ill due to their handling of the toxins. While some veterans did receive minimal compensation, the chemical companies that made the toxins have been protected by the U.S. courts from having to take any responsibility for their crimes.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the U.S. government was running biological labs in Ukraine. This horrifying revelation suggests the lessons from history have not been learned. While other countries seek to ban the use of unconventional weapons and create safeguards to deter their use, the U.S. military still goes in the other direction.

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Amiad Horowitz studied history with a specific focus on Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. He lives in Hanoi, Vietnam.

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A federal jury in New York last month convicted former CIA officer Joshua Schulte on nine felony counts under the Espionage Act for providing information to WikiLeaks that became known as Vault 7.

Schulte has consistently denied that he was the source of the information.

Two years ago, he was convicted on two of the original 11 charges, while the jury hung on the remaining nine.

The most recent trial, in which Schulte represented himself, was on those nine counts, and he now faces as many as 80 years in prison. Schulte is yet to be tried on state child pornography charges.

Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to WikiLeaks.

But they contended that he was a computer genius who is so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks.

They alleged that he leaked the information because he was a disgruntled former CIA employee who hated his boss, couldn’t get along with his coworkers, and sought revenge against the Agency.

That was enough for the jury.

CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Sean Roche called the Vault 7 leak “a digital Pearl Harbor.”

Chief prosecutor Damian Williams said the revelations were “one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history.” And Vice magazine said it was “the worst leak of CIA information ever.”

The CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo ordered the Agency to come up with a plan to kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London. One former Trump Administration national security official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”

All of the major media outlets reported on the finalization of Schulte’s case. What they haven’t reported on, though, is exactly what Schulte was accused of leaking in the first place.

What did we learn from Vault 7?

Vault 7 was a series of 24 collections of documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages that included the most sophisticated computer hacking, surveillance, and cyberwarfare tools that the CIA ever developed.

WikiLeaks published the first tranche, called “Year Zero,” on March 7, 2017.

Just this first installment contained more information than all of that released by Edward Snowden and included vulnerabilities known to the CIA within web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera and the operating systems of most of the world’s cellphones, including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

The fact that the CIA knew about these vulnerabilities and didn’t inform the companies was a violation of a longstanding policy that the Agency claims to have that it would assist U.S. tech companies with their security if it learned of security weaknesses.

Instead, it exploited those problems in its digital operations. We have no idea if the Agency used these vulnerabilities to spy on Americans. Ashley Gorski, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney said at the time, “Our government should be working to help the companies patch vulnerabilities when they are discovered, not stockpile them.”

A second Vault 7 revelation came on March 23, 2017 and included accounts of CIA efforts to hack Apple’s iPhones and Mac computers.

Additional tranches were released every week or two until September 2017.

Their revelations included proof that the CIA was able to hack into cars’ computer systems and could take over control of the vehicle.

Was the purpose of this to force the vehicle off the road? Off a cliff? Into a tree? The CIA never commented.

Still other documents showed how CIA officers could take over an unsuspecting person’s smart TV and turn its speaker into a microphone to surreptitiously bug a room, even while the television appears to be turned off.

Yet other documents showed that the CIA was running digital operations against the National Security Agency (NSA). It is unclear whether this was done as an exercise between the two agencies or if it was something more sinister.

Other revelations were that the CIA had created a program to track documents transferred by would-be whistleblowers to media outlets (the program is called “Scribblers”), malware that can take over and control computers using the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system (called “Athena”), and malware that can be transferred from one “clean” computer to another through internal systems that are otherwise protected by anti-virus software (called “Pandemic”).

Schulte’s revelations were not limited to software. He also revealed a program called “HammerDrill,” that injects a trojan horse onto CDs and DVDs and then documents information on the discs for later transmission to the CIA.

An operation called “Dark Matter” revealed security vulnerabilities unique to Apple operating systems. And Schulte revealed that the CIA had compromised vulnerabilities in a huge range of Cisco Systems router models. Apple and Cisco spent untold millions of dollars to redesign their products and correct the security flaws.

Despite the fact that this was supposedly the worst data breach in the history of the CIA, Schulte and his revelations did not get much press play.

There are several likely reasons for this. First, Schulte claimed innocence. He insisted that he was not a whistleblower and he has maintained throughout his ordeal that he did not provide WikiLeaks with anything.

Second, the state of New York, simultaneously with the federal charges, charged Schulte with multiple counts of child pornography, which has given many of Schulte’s natural supporters pause.

Prosecutors maintained that they only discovered the pornography when they seized the computer hard drives in Schulte’s apartment while looking for Vault 7 information. Schulte’s defense to the child pornography charges will be that he considers himself to be a libertarian anarchist and that he set up a server to allow people unfettered “free speech,” something akin to the 4chan and 8chan servers.

He maintains that he has not “received” or “disseminated” any child pornography personally. However, when child pornographers saw that Schulte’s server supported “unfettered free speech,” they used it to trade illegal images and videos. Schulte is adamant that none of the pornography was his. His protestations likely won’t matter.

I’m of two minds on Joshua Schulte. On the one hand, the American people have a right to know what the government is doing in their name, especially if what the government is doing is illegal. On the other hand, Schulte is adamant that he is not the person who provided WikiLeaks with the information. Does that mean we walk away from Schulte and celebrate an anonymous whistleblower?

Either way, one of the things that I feel strongly about is the treatment that Schulte has endured.

He has been held in barbaric conditions over the past two years, kept in a literal cage in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Brooklyn, New York.

pictures depicting a typical ADMAX SHU cell and show (moving clockwise from top left) the bunk bed, shower, seating area, and combination toilet and sink fixture.

Picture of solitary confinement cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in Brooklyn where Schulte was kept for two years. [Source: oig.justice.com]

Now that he has been convicted, he’ll likely be placed in a Special Administrative Unit or a Communications Management Unit in a maximum-security or Supermax penitentiary.

The government will seek to cut him off from the rest of the world for as long as possible. That alone should be worth our interest and disgust.

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John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing. John can be reached at: [email protected].

Featured image: Joshua Schulte is seen using a contraband cell phone while located within the premises of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. (Source: United States District Court – Southern District of New York, licensed under the public domain)

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COINTELPRO, an abbreviation for Counter-Intelligence Program, was the illegal brainchild of the F.B.I.’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose obsession with communism and “subversion” allowed him to justify violating the civil rights and civil liberties of millions of Americans.

Under COINTELPRO, which Hoover initiated in 1956, the F.B.I. surveilled, infiltrated, discredited, disrupted, burglarized and harassed American citizens and organizations as diverse as the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War protestors, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, the American Indian Movement, environmentalists, animal rights organizations, Puerto Rican nationalists and even the National Lawyers’ Guild.

The program continued until 1971, when a group of progressive activists broke into an F.B.I. field office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole documents related to COINTEPRO, and sent them to the press.  Nobody in the F.B.I. was ever punished for the program’s many illegalities, but the “burglars” who revealed the program were hunted for decades.  None were ever caught.

And now, 51 years after it ended, a bill has been introduced to the U.S. Congress that would expose still classified details of the F.B.I.’s abuse of power.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) on May 4 sponsored the legislation that would do some exciting things.  The COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act would require the U.S. federal government to publicly disclose, within six months of being signed into law, all records related to the F.B.I.’s illegal COINTELPRO operation “that would not cause harm” to the national security.

It would also establish something called the “COINTELPRO Records Review Board” to review determinations by government offices that do not fully disclose their records after six months.  To top it off, the bill would also require the removal of J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the F.B.I.’s headquarters building in Washington.

The measure was assigned to the House Oversight and Reform Committee as well as to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.  A day later, it was referred to the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management.  There has been no action on the bill since May, and no concurrent bills have been sponsored in the Senate.

The FBI’s Aims

COINTELPRO had specific goals.  According to the book Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond by Mathieu Deflam, F.B.I. agents were tasked with creating a negative public image for the groups and people targeted; breaking down the organizations by creating internal conflicts; creating dissension among groups that otherwise might be allied; restricting access to public resources, such as through non-profits; restricting the ability to organize protests, such as by having F.B.I. agents who had infiltrated the groups threaten violence against police or initiate violence; and restricting the ability of individuals to participate in group activities through character assassination, rumor, innuendo, and false arrests.

MIT professor and activist Noam Chomsky told the BBC in 1996,

“COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks, but by the national political police, the F.B.I., under four administrations.  By the time it got through, it was aimed at the entire New Left, at the women’s movement, at the whole Black movement.  It was extremely broad.  Its actions went as far as political assassination.”

Certainly, the F.B.I. carried out political assassinations against members of the Black Panther Party.  An even better known COINTELPRO target, though, was Martin Luther King.  Immediately following the 1963 March on Washington, F.B.I. Special Agent William Sullivan, the officer in charge of COINTELPRO, wrote to Hoover, saying,

“In light of King’s powerful demagogic speech (the “I Have a Dream” speech), we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. (Gareth Milner, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Within weeks, the F.B.I. had bugged King’s home and his hotel rooms, they had planted informants around him and they had designated King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a “subversive organization.”

Hoover’s most degenerate action within COINTELPRO was a plan in 1964 to try to convince King to commit suicide.  King had begun to criticize the F.B.I. publicly in 1963 for not treating the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization.  In response, Hoover ordered that King’s communications be intercepted.

And on Nov. 21, 1964, just two days after the announcement that King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the F.B.I. sent him a “suicide package” that contained audio recordings of his liaisons with various women.  An attached letter said,

“There is only one way out for you.  You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

The letter went on to say that the tapes would be released to the media if he did not kill himself before accepting the Peace Prize.  And, indeed, Hoover ordered that the tapes be sent to Newsweek and Newsday. Even after King was assassinated in 1968, the FBI continued to malign his memory by providing his enemies with information to enable attacks on his character.

This building in Media, Pennsylvania, now known as County Court Apartments, was the site of the March 8, 1971, break in of the local F.B.I. office that resulted in the exposure of the CoIntelPro program. (Smallbones, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

There was literally nothing good about COINTELPRO.  It was illegal.  It was unethical.  It was immoral.  It was used to prevent Americans from exercising their constitutional rights.  It was a dark period in American history — one of the darkest in modern American history.  Our government owes it to the American people to lay the information bare.  All of COINTELPRO should be declassified.  Bobby Rush’s bill would do that.

I say would, rather than will, because this bill has an almost zero chance of passing through both houses of Congress and being signed into law by the president.  That it was referred to a subcommittee in May and has had no subsequent action is akin to a death notice.

But it is possible to give it life.  I’ve spent years on Capitol Hill, working first for a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and later as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  I can tell you that a letter from a constituent has a great deal of authority, far more so than an email.  Members of Congress really do react to letters from the people they represent.  It may sound quaint, or even a little silly, but that’s democracy at work.   This bill can be discharged from the subcommittee if the public demands it.

Bobby Rush was right to sponsor this bill.  The F.B.I. should have declassified COINTELPRO decades ago.  Remember, the American people own this information.  They deserve to know what their government has done in their name.

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John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Featured image: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1959. (Wikimedia Commons)

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***

Guest is Prof. Dr. Martin Schwab, lawyer and University Professor.

In this session, he argues that institution-related vaccination obligation should end this year. He presents new mechanism for retirement and nursing homes and its consequences.

Commission for Hospital Hygiene and Infection Prevention (RKI) is to “determine the vaccinations, the state of medical science and nursing science”. These measures would be binding for affected service providers.

Consequence: The recommendations (for dealing with unvaccinated staff/visit/patient or client) are likely to be strictly implemented solely out of fear of being held legally responsible later by reference to infringement. (Legislator pulls himself out of the affair by relinquishing responsibility for control).

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***

The new NATO 2030 Strategic Concept indicates a disturbing change in the Alliance’s strategic orientation. As a result, provocations towards Moscow, as well as Beijing, are escalating, especially after the former was labelled by NATO as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” Under this context, the Atlantic Alliance urged member states to allocate more resources for military purposes, as well as to increase the rapid reaction forces on its Eastern European front from 40,000 troops to a staggering 300,000. This is in addition to escalations in the South China Sea.

NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, explained that, unlike the previous document of the same title, which was adopted in Lisbon in 2010, there are no longer any guidelines on cooperation with Moscow, not even in the areas of arms control, the fight against terrorism or drug trafficking. Relations with Russia are continuously deteriorating as the West instigates less cooperation and more conflict.

The behaviour of NATO’s main members – the US and the United Kingdom, as well as Germany and France, in Ukraine, but also in the Caucasus and Central Asia, signify that Russia is the most direct threat to Western hegemony despite China’s massive economic rise. Therefore, there is nothing epochal about the positioning on NATO’s eastern borders since it is a logical epilogue of a process that has been ongoing since at least 2014. Arguments can be made though that this process began with the Syrian War in 2011, or perhaps even as early as 2008 with the NATO-instigated Russo-Georgia War.

The change in strategic orientation, projected in the medium term, also concerns China’s relations with the West and Russia. The tightening of relations between China and Russia is contrary to the interests of the Alliance because, according to NATO, “China seeks to undermine the current world order by controlling global logistics and its economy,” hence NATO’s strengthening of relations with its Asia-Pacific partners.

It is also for this reason that the US encouraged the dismantling of the EU-China investment agreement, openly supports protesters in Hong Kong and repeats claims of a Chinese-perpetrated genocide against the Uyghurs, escalates tensions in the South China Sea, and helped dismantle the 17 + 1 format, which in practice can no longer function. This is also in addition to Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taipei and the establishment of the AUKUS alliance.

For the most part, in NATO’s new strategic orientation, China could arguably be heading towards a similar situation to that of Russia in 2014. For NATO strategists, China’s response to Pelosi’s visit, manifested by military and naval exercises in the South China Sea, is excessive. They are of this view because China exposed how easily Taiwan could be isolated from the outside world, with the US only able to watch on.

NATO is moving very explicitly and in a targeted manner against China. Perhaps such a step was induced or accelerated by Beijing’s refusal to align itself with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions and condemnation of the demilitarisation of Ukraine.

Proceeding with such provocations and escalations is also very risky for NATO though. A NATO-instigated war against China, just as the Alliance left Russia no choice but to demilitarise Ukraine to ensure its own national security, would reshape the world much faster and fundamentally than what has already occurred due to the war in Eastern Europe. The attempted isolation of Russia not only failed, but in fact accelerated the changing of the global geopolitical and economic system away from Western hegemony.

As China is the largest industrial power in today’s world, as well as a massive market for consumer goods and a key investor and creditor in numerous regions, without a stable China, there is no global stability. If the Alliance was not able to achieve its goal in Ukraine, a region where several NATO members directly border Russia too, there is little prospect that it can make any major achievement on the Asian front.

If the Alliance is not capable of coping with a direct confrontation with Russia in Europe, it raises the question on how it will be able to cope with a direct confrontation on two fronts against a potential Russian-Chinese coalition. NATO’s anti-Chinese and anti-Russian strategic commitment, which has been framed until at least 2030, is a dangerous provocation, and not only for the targeted countries.  The West’s provocations are a danger to the entire world as it can dramatically affect global stability and the quality of life of everyday citizens, hence why the NATO 2030 Strategic Concept is alarming.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

A foreign affairs columnist called the move by the Biden administration a “shortsighted, morally unconscionable, and potentially calamitous decision for a country on the cusp of universal poverty.”

Exactly a year after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s government, the Biden administration said it would not return any of the $7 billion in Afghan central bank assets that it commandeered earlier this year, despite pleas from both human rights groups and economists to help pull the impoverished country out of its economic crisis.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, U.S. envoy Tom Wolf told the newspaper that talks between the White House and the Taliban regarding the release of at least half the funds have ended, following the U.S. drone strike which killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

U.S. officials say al-Zawahiri’s location near a Taliban official’s home shows that officials will not “manage assets responsibly” and will therefore withhold all of the funds as inflation and other factors push the prices of Afghan goods up by nearly 100% in some cases.

The U.S. had been considering placing $3.5 billion in a trust fund for Afghanistan to spend addressing its humanitarian crisis—with the other half of the money being set aside for the families of 9/11 victims, over the objections of some of those family members who believe all the money should be used to benefit Afghan civilians.

The U.S. has pledged more than $774 million in aid to Afghanistan over the past year, but economists including Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland and a board member of Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), have warned that foreign humanitarian assistance “is not a solution” to the widespread suffering that has taken hold across the country.

“Many poor women and children will not be able to buy bread and other necessities of life,” Mehrabi told the Journal. “Those reserves belong to the central bank, and have to be used for monetary policy.”

Anti-war group CodePink added that while the U.S. has criticized the Taliban for keeping women out of government positions over the past year and shutting down schools for girls, withholding funds from the country only gives women “a harder time fighting for their rights.”

As the U.S. announced it had scrapped plans to return any of the seized funds, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said 97% of the Afghan population is expected to live below the poverty line by the end of 2022 and more than 24 million people—nearly two-thirds of the population—are without enough food to eat each day.

The United Nations has estimated that more than 90% of people in Afghanistan lack sufficient food.

“With each week that goes by, more Afghans are forced to resort to the unimaginable to survive: that means skipping meals, taking on debt, pulling children out of school to save money–and even more extreme measures such as selling young daughters into marriage or selling organs,” said the IRC. “One woman recently told IRC staff that she is forced to pick food from the garbage and if she can get enough of the hair and dirt off, she brings it home for her six children. Otherwise they go days without eating.”

Considering the dire circumstances facing millions of Afghan people, Daniel DePetris of the foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities called the Biden administration’s decision “shortsighted, morally unconscionable, and potentially calamitous.”

The Biden administration has been rebuked by economists and human rights advocates for refusing to release the funds out of the stated fear that the money will go to supporting the Taliban instead of ordinary Afghans.

Michael Galant, secretariat of Progressive International, accused the White House of “starving the Afghan people to avoid a bad PR day” for President Joe Biden.

On “Last Week Tonight” Sunday, host John Oliver acknowledged that releasing the funds carries the risk of inadvertently funding the Taliban.

“The key question here isn’t just what happens if we send Afghanistan money and aid,” said Oliver. “It’s what happens if we don’t. And we know the answer to that: Millions of innocent Afghans will suffer and die under a government they did not choose.”

“The reality is, there is no one simple solution here that is without risk,” he added. “But 38 million people’s lives are at stake.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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***

The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.

So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.

To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.

By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.

What is this about? What’s new?

The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.

So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.

This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.

They want to collect intelligence from “millions of sources”, and train their “AI systems” to detect thoughts that they do not like, to make content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This is a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.

For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.

This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory from hell: WEF collecting information on everyone everywhere, and then telling all platforms what posts to remove, based on a global decision-making AI engine that sees everything and can identify individual people and ideas beyond any given platform.

If someone ever told me that it would be contemplated, I would probably think that this person is insane. It sounds like a sick technological fantasy or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, this crazy stuff is real, is in a WEF agenda proposal that is officially posted on their website’s “WEF Agenda” section. And WEF is not messing around.

You will have no voice and you will be happy!

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***

The European Commission is secretly considering the full deregulation of certain types of genetically modified (GM) crops – yet it has not admitted as much publicly. Under such policy scenarios, deregulation could mean scrapping safety checks, traceability, and labelling for GMOs that are claimed to be able to arise naturally – and removing GMO labelling for GM products declared “sustainable”.

The Commission’s detailed policy plans for 2030-35 are revealed for the first time in a targeted survey, which we’ve published in the public interest after it was only sent to certain stakeholders. The survey is being run by consultants to the Commission. These plans are the basis for the impact assessment that will accompany the Commission’s proposal to change the GMO regulations, planned for spring 2023.

In response to the targeted survey, the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament has written a letter to the Commission complaining that its “policy scenarios have not been made public but only released to a select group of individuals” via the survey. The letter continues, “We consider that this is not the appropriate way to ensure participants to the consultation have access to all relevant information to make an informed answer and call on you to publish this survey without delay.”

What has the Commission said publicly?

The Commission has announced a new legal framework for plants obtained by “targeted mutagenesis” (by which it seems to mean gene editing of the SDN-1 and SDN-2 types) and cisgenesis (genetic engineering in which genes are artificially transferred between organisms that could otherwise be conventionally bred). The Commission has said it wants to set up a separate regulatory regime for these GM crops, excluding them from existing EU rules for GMOs. It also wants to promote supposedly “sustainable” GM crops – those that it believes can contribute to the EU’s Green Deal objectives.

So far, little has been known about this new framework. The Commission has only set out certain “policy elements” in a so-called Inception Impact Assessment, published in September 2021:

  • Risk assessment and approval requirements “proportionate to the risk involved”
  • A sustainability analysis
  • “Appropriate traceability and labelling provisions”
  • Mechanisms to be able to rapidly adjust elements of the legislation.

These “policy elements” are not further explained in the Commission’s public consultation, which closes on 22 July (GMWatch has submitted its response).

In line with earlier announcements, the consultation talks about legislation for GM “plants produced by targeted mutagenesis or cisgenesis”. It assumes, without evidence, and ignoring a large pile of evidence showing extensive DNA damage caused by gene editing, that some such GM plants “could have been produced through conventional plant breeding or classical mutagenesis” (questions 3 and 12). “Classical mutagenesis” means the decades-old techniques of radiation- or chemical-induced mutagenesis breeding. The Commission also assumes, again without evidence, that some such GM plants could have “traits contributing to sustainability” (question 7).

The Commission has always rejected the term “deregulation”. It has said it is going to introduce an “appropriate” and fit-for-purpose regulatory framework for certain GM crops derived from new GM techniques, which it calls “new genomic techniques”. It has also said it will not compromise on consumer and environmental safety.

However, the detailed policy scenarios show another picture – that full deregulation of some GM crops is a realistic option.

What are the Commission’s plans?

The Commission’s consultants targeted survey describes seven policy scenarios considered by the Commission – which are not mentioned in the public consultation. These scenarios are important because they form the basis for the upcoming regulatory impact assessment, which compares different policy scenarios with each other and against a baseline scenario (i.e. no policy action).

The seven policy scenarios, A1 to C2, reveal that the Commission is considering scrapping all GMO regulatory requirements for GM crops that “could also be obtained naturally or by conventional breeding”.

The scenarios show that:

  • The Commission wants to distinguish two new categories of GM plants: GM crops that “could also be obtained naturally or by conventional breeding” and GM crops that have “desirable sustainability impacts”.
  • For GM crops that the Commission claims could be obtained naturally or by conventional breeding, the Commission is considering scrapping all GMO regulatory requirements (scenarios A2, B3). This includes the requirements for
    – pre-market safety assessment
    – product traceability across the supply chain
    – GMO detection method supplied by the developer of the GMO in question
    – GMO labelling.

These GM crops would essentially be regulated like non-GM crops, disregarding any risks to public health and the environment, the need of non-GM producers to rule out GM contamination, and the public’s right to know what is in their food.

Commission proposes the “Bayer option”

Commission scenarios A2 and B3 are exactly what Bayer has publicly asked for. In its response to the Commission’s public consultation, Bayer said it wants a screening step in the regulation to decide whether any GMO regulatory steps at all are needed. Bayer said there should be a “first step… assessing whether the changes in the DNA… are similar to the ones that could have been obtained through conventional breeding methods or spontaneous mutation”. According to Bayer, “products with similar safety profiles” should “then be subjected to the same marketing specific regulations” – in other words, there would be no GMO regulation for GMOs that are claimed to have similar changes to what could have happened naturally.

UK Bill

Not coincidentally, this is exactly the same deregulatory scenario that is currently being pursued by the UK Conservative government, in the form of the draft “Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill” that is currently working its way through Parliament. Because the UK is no longer in the EU, the UK government can pass this England-based law unilaterally, aligning England with the USA’s weak standards on GMO regulation. The EU Commission clearly wants the EU to follow England in this “race to the bottom”.

“Sustainable” GMOs

The Commission is also considering the option to scrap the requirement for a GMO label for supposedly “sustainable” GM crops. It also considers lowering the risk assessment requirements for all GM crops engineered with “targeted mutagenesis and cisgenesis” (A1). Again, this information has not been presented publicly and is not available to anyone answering the public consultation.

All GM crops must be subject to existing GMO rules

The Greens state in their letter to the Commission, ”As Greens/EFA group, we oppose the introduction of separate legislation for products of new genetic modification (GM) techniques such as targeted mutagenesis (i.e. SDN-1, SDN-2 and ODM [oligo directed mutagenesis]) and cisgenesis. We believe that all genetically modified (GM) crops must be subject to the existing GMO legislation with its requirements for risk assessment, traceability and clear labelling.

”Indeed, the European Court of Justice clarified in 2018 that new GM techniques cannot be excluded from the scope of EU GMO legislation unless they have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record. Since this is not the case for gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, these techniques should be regulated under the EU GMO legislation, in order not to undermine the EU’s Precautionary Principle. As Greens/EFA, we fully support the Court’s ruling.”

The Greens make three demands for all GMOs: That they are subjected to a full and robust risk assessment; that no market access should be permitted without traceability and a detection method; and that there should be clear GMO labelling on the final product so that consumers have the choice of whether to buy it.

All these principles are in place under the current GMO legislation – which the Commission is secretly planning to dismantle.

The Greens rightly conclude: “The sustainability of our food system is not a matter of individual products. A plant trait in isolation, without considering the agricultural context in which the plant is grown, is insufficient to draw any meaningful conclusion. Until today, conventional breeding has consistently outstripped genetic engineering techniques (old and new) in producing crops tolerant to stresses such as drought, floods, pests, and diseases.* Claims that GM plants will contribute to improved EU food systems are not supported by current evidence. The European Union should not weaken its GMO regulations to accommodate empty promises of ‘sustainable’ GM plants.”

Commission proposals spell “disaster” for Non-GMO sector

Commenting on the revelations in the targeted survey, Heike Moldenhauer, Secretary General of the Non-GMO industry association ENGA, said: “The deregulation proposals put forward by the Commission aim to remove the labelling of New GMOs. Should a new legal framework abolish traceability and labelling, then New GMOs will effectively become invisible and the Non-GMO sector would run the risk of unknowingly and unintentionally selling New GMO products. In this new world of unregulated GMOs, untested and invisible GMOs will find their way on to European fields, supermarket shelves and on to the plates of consumers – irreversibly.

“Consumers’ right to know what is in their food, via clear labelling, is a key social and political achievement, guaranteed through the currently legally-binding GMO label. To abolish this or replace it with a sustainable label, and therefore making New GMOs invisible, would be an unjustifiable step backwards and would encourage distrust: Why do New GMOs have to be invisible to gain market acceptance?

“For the Non-GMO food sector this move to deregulate and abolish labelling would spell disaster! It effectively removes the sector’s selling point, meaning massive financial setbacks, if not the end of its business entirely.”

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Twenty years after first suggesting it, federal regulators on Monday proposed adding a group of plastic additives common in toys, flooring and fabric coatings to its list of toxic chemicals, concluding that it can “reasonably be anticipated to cause cancer and serious or irreversible chronic health effects in humans.”

The ruling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency affects DINP, a family of di-ester phthalates widely used as plasticizers. It comes 22 years after the EPA first proposed adding DINP to the list, known as the Toxics Release Inventory.

Manufacturers treat plastics with DINP-category chemicals to provide greater flexibility and softness to the final product, the EPA said.

Toxics Release Inventory

If finalized, the rule will require manufacturers that make or process more than 25,000 pounds of DINP-category chemicals per year – or use more than 10,000 pounds annually – to report certain information to the agency. That data include quantities of DINP-category chemicals released into the environment or otherwise managed as waste.

The Toxics Release Inventory is meant to give the public information about chemicals at facilities in their area, how they are being managed, and if they are being released into the environment. Facilities that make and use the chemicals and the waste sites where the products end up are disproportionately found near impoverished neighborhoods, often home to People of Color.

DINP health risk

DINP-class chemicals are suspected carcinogens. The European Food Safety Authority considers them to be endocrine-disrupting compounds that interfere with testosterone. The EPA attributes exposure to developmental effects and kidney and liver toxicity.

Earlier this year, the Healthy Environment and Endocrine Disrupting Strategies coalition, a group of senior researchers concerned about chemicals that hijack hormonal function, issued a warning about DINP to manufacturers seeking a replacement for other harmful plasticizers such as DEHP.

“Enough is known to classify it as an anti-androgen, a developmental neurotoxicant, and a potential obesogen,” the group said. “Precautionary science argues against that replacement.” HEEDS is a project of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of EHN.org.

New approach to chemical regulation

Patricia Taylor, former director of the Plastics and Waste Reduction Project at Environment and Human Health, Inc., called this a “possible sea change” for federal chemical management.

“The public will gain access to this information and this will allow them to better protect themselves against exposures and to ask for monitoring, regulations, and restrictions or bans,” she said. That data, she added, can be used by researchers to analyze health and environmental impacts in studies such as health and life-cycle assessments.

Taylor noted two other striking takeaways from Monday’s decision:

First, federal regulators first raised alarm about health impacts associated with the chemical in 2000. “This is a clear example of the glacial pace of the review process at EPA,” she said.

Second, the ruling covers a class of chemicals, rather than a specific one – suggesting the EPA is “inching towards” policies that regulate chemicals by class. “This is something being strongly recommended by independent scientists who research chemicals such as phthalates, bisphenols and other endocrine disruptors used to make plastics,” Taylor said.

“Such restrictions by class would prevent some of the ‘regrettable substitutions'” – many compounds used in “BPA-free” products are just as harmful as BPA, for instance – “which are now standard practice by industries when faced with information that a chemical in their product is harmful to health or the environment.”

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The West continues to insist on indefinitely prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The policy of sending military aid seems to have no limits. In addition to financial remittances and arms shipments, Western countries are also mobilizing to give military instructions to Kiev. Considering the war crimes and human rights violations repeatedly committed by Ukrainian forces, supporting Kiev militarily means co-participating in the crimes – and the West must be judged responsible for that.

On 12 August, Canada and Sweden announced that they had sent teams of military instructors to participate in a joint program with the UK to train Ukrainian troops. Currently, London leads a project of military assistance to Ukraine by training soldiers with Western instructors. The objective is to pass on the technical and practical knowledge necessary for the Ukrainians to use the military equipment received from the West in the best possible way, thus helping Kiev to continue its “resistance” against the Russian special military operation.

Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said that 225 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officers will be sent to the UK to participate in the project. The first phase of participation would consist of a four-month period of joint military actions, in which Ukrainian combatants would be instructed in knowledge “related to frontline combat, weapons handling, first aid, field craft, patrol tactics, and include the law of armed contact “. She also made it clear that, in addition to training soldiers, Ottawa will also be contributing by sending 39 armored vehicles to Kiev.

In the same day, Swedish government also made it clear that it intends to actively participate in this London-led international mobilization. Stockholm announced the deployment of 120 military instructors to participate in the program. The act follows a previous announcement, in which Finland also committed to act in the training, albeit in a more moderate way, sending about 20 instructors. This is just another step towards militarization, revealing the bellicose turn that both countries have taken since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, when Sweden and Finland started to react irrationally to Moscow’s measures, even asking for NATO membership.

In fact, it must be noted that countries like Canada, Sweden and Finland are historically weak nations from a military point of view, whose security has always depended on two key factors: neutrality or automatic alignment. In the case of the Scandinavian nations, neutrality has always been a central factor, which began to be reversed as local governments adopted more favorable stances towards NATO – culminating in the current application for membership. In the Canadian case, however, the pillar of defense policy has always been automatic alignment with the US, complying with all decisions taken by Wasington in exchange for a place in the security umbrella.

These countries remain militarily weak. Their participation in the program does not imply real changes. Most Canadian, Swedish and Finnish military officers do not even have real war experience, which shows the practical irrelevance of being participating in the UK-led project. More than that: the very existence of a training program is of questionable relevance. Although the UK and other NATO countries have great military expertise and undoubtedly have qualified instructors to train their allies, the short training time makes it almost impossible for soldiers to prepare properly.

British military assistance to Kiev with training of personnel is not new. Since 2014 London has been assuming projects to train Ukrainian soldiers. Some of these programs took place publicly, while others were conducted secretly – such as the clandestine “Operation Orbital”, in which more than 22,000 Ukrainian troops were trained by British agents. What the UK is doing now is simply continuing its actions of the last eight years, with the only difference that now NATO’s plans for Ukraine have already failed. The aim is no longer to arm Kiev so that it can become a local power against Russia – it is simply to prolong the conflict indefinitely in order to “postpone” Russian victory.

For the UK, continuing with the instructions is an opportunity to encourage the operation with Western military equipment and thus try to extend the conflict. For Canada, Sweden and Finland, it is a mere gesture of “political goodwill”, without any relevance. But, above all, those involved in these trainings and in all forms of military aid to Kiev share on the fact that they become co-responsible for the Ukrainian atrocities. Since it is proven that Western-trained Ukrainian soldiers use Western weapons against civilians in Donbass, then the West itself is participating in these crimes and should be sanctioned for doing so.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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The Psychological Warfare Apparatus Creates False Beliefs

By Stephen Sefton, August 16, 2022

An increasingly large number of people now agree that information of all kinds in the countries of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies is deployed overwhelmingly to serve the interests of Western corporate oligarchs and the politicians who front for them.

One Year Later: How the Biden Admin, Big Tech, and Pfizer Fooled Americans into Taking “FDA Approved” COVID Vaccines that Never Actually Existed

By Jordan Schachtel, August 16, 2022

It has been almost one year since the FDA gave full approval to Pfizer’s mRNA COVID injection. Yet many will be surprised to find out that this particular vaccine, in FDA approved form, has never actually existed, and will never exist. The Biden Administration’s highly touted FDA approval was a mere sleight of hand.

Nuclear War Will Eliminate More Than 5 Billion People – Oppose War

By Farooque Chowdhury, August 16, 2022

More than 5 billion people could starve to death following a nuclear war between the US and Russia, finds a study published on recently in the journal Nature Food. Ash and soot from cities burning following the war would enter the atmosphere and block out sunlight, consequently leading to crop failure, etc., and death.

CIA, Pompeo Sued for Allegedly Spying on US Attorneys and Journalists Who Met with Assange

By Kevin Gosztola, August 16, 2022

A group of journalists and lawyers, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, sued the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo. They allege that the agency under Pompeo spied on them in violation of their privacy rights.

Semiconductor Crisis: China-Taiwan Standoff Might Increase Global Chip Shortage

By Lokesh Choudhary, August 16, 2022

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew into Taiwan ruffling many a Chinese feathers. The Chinese state media called it an “open salvo of war”, and the country has reportedly sent over two dozen fighter jets into Taiwan’s air defence zone. The situation is more than just a regular geopolitical escalation in some remote part of the world. For if it escalates, it is highly likely that the prices of all electronic appliances, including the much-sought after Apple products would go up.

Anti-War Veterans Group Asks Biden to ‘Read Our Nuclear Posture Review Before Releasing Yours’

By Jessica Corbett, August 16, 2022

Amid heightened global fears of a nuclear war or accidental catastrophe, Veterans for Peace this week urged President Joe Biden to review its recommendations for U.S. policy related to weapons of mass destruction.

Supersized Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Will Shrink Liberty

By Rep. Ron Paul, August 16, 2022

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently claimed the 15 percent corporate minimum tax contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, which should be called the Inflation Creation Act, is not a tax increase. Instead, he claimed, the bill simply closes a loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying all the taxes they owe.

How Britain Fueled Ukraine’s War Machine and Invited Direct Conflict with Russia

By T.J. Coles, August 16, 2022

Britain has played a key role in NATO forward troop deployments and training exercises on Russia’s borders. With war underway, the UK sends billions in arms, special forces, and volunteers to ensure escalation.

Russia in Africa: Connecting Continents with Soft Power

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, August 16, 2022

While the Trans-Atlantic community may loyally follow the directive to cut ties with Russia – despite the economic backlash on their own citizens – other nations, including most of Asia and Africa, don’t appear to be taking this call very seriously.

The Failings of Westminster: Australia’s Former PM Scott Morrison’s “Shadow Government”

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 16, 2022

Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock?  In one of the world’s most secretive liberal democracies, the revelation that the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a shadow government overseen by personal quasi-despotic whim spanning several ministerial positions has caused chill and consternation.  That’s not the way we do things – except when we do.

Video: Biggest Disaster in Medical History

By Dr. Charles Hoffe, August 16, 2022

In the video, Dr. Hoffe gives a riveting speech on the COVID pandemic and the vaccination campaign in Canada. “Never before in medical history has any medical treatment maimed and killed so many people…”

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The mobile billboards are a brainchild of standup-comic-turned- activist Randy Credico. Each one is 15 feet long and circulates around DC’s most famous landmarks, skewering the hypocrisy of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Jerald Nadler, Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats.

D.C. residents and tourists—as many as 40,000 a day—are stopping in their tracks, doing a double take, then breaking into big smiles whenever one of comic-turned-activist Randy Credico’s huge 100-square-foot billboards drives by.

Randy Credico talks about his Assange motorized billboard campaign with Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal.

Publicly shaming government officials this way, with ridicule and sarcasm, is being welcomed by D.C. residents as entertainment, since this is a city where political commentary is usually tedious, boring and ponderous—more likely to put you to sleep than make you perk up and smile.

One billboard features a blow-up of the infamous “fist-bump” that Joe Biden lovingly delivered to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on July 15, nakedly revealing Biden’s hypocrisy to the entire world. The billboard speech balloon has Joe Biden saying:

“Here’s the deal. I won’t mention Khashoggi if you don’t mention Assange.”

This is total moral hypocrisy on Biden’s part.

As the world well knows, after bin Salman masterminded the grisly murder and dismemberment of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value” that murdered “innocent people.

Billboard truck in front of the courthouse for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange will be tried if he is extradited, and where so many whistleblowers have been sent to prison by CIA-friendly judges and juries. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Randy Credico]

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden insisted that bin Salman and the Saudis “have to be held accountable,” and that “a Biden-Harris administration will … make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

Pandering to a Bloody Autocrat for Arms and Oil

But Biden certainly did check America’s values at the door. He gave bin Salman a pass for Khashoggi’s murder—and for hundreds of thousands murdered in Yemen—precisely to buy more oil at lower prices (which, in fact, for all his pandering, he did not succeed in getting, returning home from his Middle East trip embarrassingly empty-handed).

So it is no surprise that Biden caved to pressure from the intelligence community, and is pursuing the same warped vendetta against Julian Assange as Trump’s former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo. The Biden administration is brutally murdering Assange just as deliberately as bin Salman murdered Khashoggi—and for the same reason—because Assange exposed incriminating information that the government wanted to cover up.

In a just world, Assange would be celebrated for exposing deceit, corruption and criminal behavior. Instead, he is being victimized on behalf of the very criminals whose crimes he exposed.

Most upsetting of all is how Assange has been abandoned by his former media partners at The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel. This abandonment is ironic, since the secret documents that Assange gave them to publish—and for which they earned numerous journalistic accolades—are the very documents for which the U.S. is indicting Assange under the Espionage Act.

Assange’s crime was to tell the American public about the evil its government was committing in its name. The public’s crime would be to allow him to be imprisoned for life by the very government that committed those crimes.

Billboard truck driving past Washington Monument. [Source: Photo courtesy of Randy Credico]

That’s what Credico’s giant motorized billboards hope to prevent. They are alerting the public to this parody of justice, and hopefully will pressure Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the case against Assange.

If the U.S. government succeeds in jailing Assange for revealing its crimes, it will kill independent investigative journalism forever. It will allow any journalist, from any country in the world, who dares to reveal U.S. crimes, to be extradited for treason, dragged to this country, and imprisoned.

If you want to support Credico’s mobile billboard campaign to free Assange (it requires money to keep those trucks rolling), you can make a donation HERE.

NOTE 1: Randy Credico is a recent winner of an “Award for Journalistic Excellence” from the Society for Independent Investigative Journalism. He hosts the influential radio and podcast series Assange: Countdown to Freedom and is a tireless creator of “awareness events” to generate public and political pressure for release of the most important publisher of the 21st century.

NOTE 2: Credico first tried to buy billboard space for his “Free Assange” campaign from Clear Channel, the world’s largest outdoor media company, whose billboards dominate the entire DC area. But Clear Channel is tightly tied to the U.S. extreme right, and–no surprise—refused to run billboards urging (gasp!) freedom for a Hillary-hugging, Russia-loving traitor like Julian Assange. “Your billboards don’t meet our community standards,” he was told.

Fortunately, Randy was rescued by the plucky owner of a one-man outdoor media company called DC Mobile Ads, who convinced Randy to forget about traditional billboards and put his campaign on wheels—which he happily did. The company owner loves the billboards so much that he volunteered to drive one of the trucks all over D.C. himself. An especially nice touch is that the graphic designer for the billboards is an Australian resident named Somerset Bean (@somersetbean), who is delighted to do his part to help an Aussie countryman out of a tough spot.

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Steve Brown is a member of the Editorial Board of CovertAction Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Randy Credico’s Billboard truck driving past Capitol Building while House and Senate are in session. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Randy Credico]

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It has been almost one year since the FDA gave full approval to Pfizer’s mRNA COVID injection. Yet many will be surprised to find out that this particular vaccine, in FDA approved form, has never actually existed, and will never exist. The Biden Administration’s highly touted FDA approval was a mere sleight of hand. It was bureaucratic trickery. There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine that is actually available in the United States, and there may never be one.

On August 23, 2021, the FDA approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty shot, the FDA cleared version of the emergency use authorized Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Marked as a turning point in the battle against the virus, the Biden Administration, Government Health agencies, and Pfizer went on a full PR blitz to crush what they deemed “vaccine hesitancy.” Big Tech and media “fact checkers” also joined in on the mRNA uptake blitz campaign, with all of these forces maintaining a false reality in which FDA approved vaccines were readily available.

Four emergency use authorization shots (and counting) later, It has became very clear, despite shoddy academic papers to the contrary, that the mRNA drug does not work, is particularly risky for young men, and is not in any way, shape, or form a vaccine by its traditional definition. But at the time of the FDA approval, “fully vaccinated” meant just two shots, and the government rubber stamp measure was weaponized to convince Americans to get the shot. “Safe and Effective,” and now, “FDA approved.”

Additionally, the Biden Administration leveraged this fraudulent FDA approved status to pressure private companies into coercing their employees to take the shot, Of course, they did not actually have access to an FDA approved shot. However, the campaign succeeded with flying colors, as millions of Americans were forced to take the shot under duress, as they couldn’t afford to be rendered unemployed by the biomedical security state.

The American government engaged in a pharmaceutical sales campaign, based on polling data, to trick its own citizens into taking a shot that they thought was FDA approved. However, everyone in America was being injected with — and continue to take — the legally distinct emergency use authorization (EUA) version of the shot. The FDA approved Comirnaty shot has never become available to the American public in the United States.

In the months following the initial FDA approval, Pfizer continued to make new excuses for why it was not rolling out the FDA approved version of the mRNA injection. The pharmaceutical company seemed to be playing what amounted to a shell game.

Finally, in June, as reported in The Dossier, Pfizer acknowledged in quiet filings to the CDC that they would never produce the FDA approved version of Comirnaty that was authorized on August 23, 2021.

The Dossier has the full timeline in our piece, “Ghost Shot,” which you can click below.

The Dossier has been “fact checked” by the likes of Politifact and USA Today, which falsely claimed that there was indeed an FDA approved vaccine available to the public, when that is absolutely, provably not the case.

Now, as the one year anniversary for the FDA approval of Comirnaty approaches, we are left with more questions than answers. The Biden Administration, Big Pharma, and Big Tech teamed up to fool Americans into taking a shot that they thought was FDA approved, but it turns out, that shot never actually existed, and will never exist.

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More than 5 billion people could starve to death following a nuclear war between the US and Russia, finds a study published on recently in the journal Nature Food. Ash and soot from cities burning following the war would enter the atmosphere and block out sunlight, consequently leading to crop failure, etc., and death.

The study findings should alert all the people around the world. “The data tell us one thing: We must prevent nuclear war from ever happening”, climate science professor and study co-author Alan Robock said. Robock said: “The five-year-old UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 66 nations, but none of the nine nuclear states. Our work makes clear that it is time for those nine states to listen to science and the rest of the world and sign this treaty.”

Till today, most of the assumptions about nuclear war focus on the deaths and destructions due to the bombing.

But the latest study finds that the real suffering of humanity would come in the years after the war, as there’ll be breakdown of supply chains and devastation of infrastructure, and problems from these will increase with the effect of a nuclear winter on food crops. So, there’s no other option, but oppose war. On the question of nuclear war, imperialism, and economies and politics of interests leading to nuclear armaments are to be opposed.

The study (Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K. et al, “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection”, Nature Food, 2022, (see this), August 15, (see this) has been conducted by scientists at Rutgers University, US.

In a nuclear war, the cooling effect would be created when the ash from a nuclear devastation would enter the atmosphere, and it would reach a peak within a year or two. The study finds the reduction in temperature would last for over a decade and would also involve reduced precipitation.

The cooling effect of ash entering the Earth’s atmosphere was recorded following major volcanic eruptions including the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland or the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. Both of these eruptions led to famines and political upheavals.

Referring to a number of studies, the study report said:

“In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet. Such soot loadings would cause decadal disruptions in Earth’s climate, which would impact food production systems on land and in the oceans.”

“[T]he ozone layer would be destroyed by the heating of the stratosphere, producing more ultraviolet radiation at the surface. We need to understand that impact on food supplies”, said Lili Xia, lead author of the study.

The scientists estimated crop yields by country, changes to livestock pasture and marine fisheries; and analyzed potential mitigation policies including utilizing livestock grains to feed humans and increasing fishing operations. But these factors had a negligible effect on world food supplies.

The study analyzed six nuclear war scenarios including five smaller nuclear conflict scenes while the sixth looked at a large-scale US-Russia conflict. The smaller scenes included Pakistan-India nuclear conflict.

The study report said:

# More than 2 billion people could die from an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

# More than 5 billion could die from a US-Russia nuclear war.

The study report said:

“For a nuclear war, the global cooling would depend on the yields of the weapons, the number of weapons and the targets, among other atmospheric and geographic factors.”

“A war between India and Pakistan, which recently are accumulating more nuclear weapons with higher yield, could produce a stratospheric loading of 5 – 47 Tg of soot. A war between the United States, its allies and Russia — who possess more than 90% of the global nuclear arsenal — could produce more than 150 Tg of soot and a nuclear winter. While amounts of soot injection into the stratosphere from the use of fewer nuclear weapons would have smaller global impacts, once a nuclear war starts, it may be very difficult to limit escalation.”

After a US-Russia nuclear conflict, the study models found, the quantity of global food production would go down by 90% within three to four years, and 75% of the global population would be starving within two years.

The study found: In the case of smallest scale nuclear war scene, the global food supplies would have disastrous effect – the average caloric production would be reduced by 7% globally within five years, which would be the highest change since the Food and Agricultural Organization started keeping records in 1961.

The study report said:

Recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3–1 Tg of smoke (0.006–0.02 Tg soot), which was subsequently heated by sunlight and lofted high in the stratosphere. The smoke was transported around the world and lasted for many months. This adds confidence to our [the scientists’] simulations that predict the same process would occur after nuclear war.

The study report said: Local radioactive contamination and climate change from nuclear war would impact the insect community.

However, it said, the influence on pests, pollinators and other insects is unclear, and hence further studies are needed.

The study didn’t consider inland fish capture, as inland fish contribute only 7% of total fish production, and inland fisheries would not change the main conclusions of this study.

Direct climate change impacts on livestock and fish, and large-scale use of alternative foods, requiring little-to-no light to grow in a cold environment, reduced human populations due to direct or indirect mortality and possible reduced birth rate were not also considered in the study. However, alternative foods, requiring little-to-no light to grow in cold environment could be a lifesaving source of emergency food if such production systems were operational.

The scientists used a state-of-the-art global climate model to calculate the climatic and biogeochemical changes caused by a range of stratospheric soot injections, each associated with a nuclear war scenario; combined results with assumptions about how other crop, livestock and fish production and food trade could change; and calculated the amount of food that would be available for each country in the world after a nuclear war.

According to the study report, “for a regional nuclear war, large parts of the world may suffer famine. Using crops fed to livestock as human food could offset food losses locally but would make limited impacts on the total amount of food available globally, especially with large atmospheric soot injections when the growth of feed crops and pastures would be severely impaired by the resulting climate perturbation. Reducing household food waste could help in the small nuclear war cases but not in the larger nuclear wars due to the large climate-driven reduction in overall production.”

The scientists found “particularly severe crop declines in major exporting countries such as Russia and the US, which could easily trigger export restrictions and cause severe disruptions in import-dependent countries.” Their “no-trade response illustrates this risk — African and Middle Eastern countries would be severely affected.”

“New Zealand”, according to the study report, “would also experience smaller impacts than other countries”, and “Australia and New Zealand would probably see an influx of refugees from Asia and other countries experiencing food insecurity.”

The study report said:

“Cooling from nuclear wars causes temperature limitations for crops, leading to delayed physiological maturity and additional cold stress. Calorie reduction from agriculture and marine fisheries shows regional differences, with the strongest percentage reductions over high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Even for the India–Pakistan case, many regions become unsuitable for agriculture for multiple years. [….] The nuclear-armed nations in mid- to high latitude regions (China, Russia, United States, France, North Korea and United Kingdom) show calorie reductions from 30% to 86%, and in lower latitudes (India, Pakistan and Israel), the reduction is less than 10%. Impacts in warring nations are likely to be dominated by local problems, such as infrastructure destruction, radioactive contamination and supply chain disruptions, so the results here apply only to indirect effects from soot injection in remote locations.”

“The climatic impacts”, the study found, “would last for about a decade but would peak in the first few years”.

Since many years, scientists are warning about nuclear war/arms. With this latest warning from the scientists, sources creating/engaged with nuclear armaments business, creating conditions for nuclear arms manufacturing and competitions need to be identified; and the information should be disseminated among peoples, so that people raise voices, and oppose these sources of/interests leading to nuclear weapons and threats of nuclear war. This is not a task of only the working classes. It’s a task of all the classes that find its survival threatened with nuclear arms/war, that find no interest in nuclear armaments. It shouldn’t be missed that interests of only a very small coterie is involved with and benefits from nuclear armaments/nuclear war business.

The following figures are from the study report, which help further comprehend the issue the scientists searched.

Fig. 1: Climatic impacts by year after different nuclear war soot injections.

fig1

af, Changes in surface temperature (a), solar radiation (c) and precipitation (e) averaged over global crop regions of 2000 and sea surface temperature (b), solar radiation (d) and net primary productivity (f) over the oceans following the six stratospheric soot-loading scenarios studied here for 15 years following a nuclear war […]. These variables are the direct climate forcing for the crop and fishery models. The left y axes are the anomalies of monthly climate variables from simulated nuclear war minus the climatology of the control simulation, which is the average of 45 years of simulation. The right y axes are the percentage change relative to the control simulation. The wars take place on 15 May of Year 1, and the year labels are on 1 January of each year. For comparison, during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, global average surface temperatures were about 5 °C cooler than present. Ocean temperatures decline less than for crops because of the ocean’s large heat capacity. Ocean solar radiation loss is less than for crops because most oceans are in the Southern Hemisphere, where slightly less smoke is present.

Fig. 2: Calorie production changes for crops and fish, and accumulated carbon change for grasses following different nuclear war soot injections.

fig2

ac, Global average annual crop calorie production changes (%; maize, wheat, rice and soybeans, weighted by their observed production (2010) and calorie content; a), marine fish production changes (%; b) and combined crop and fish calorie production changes (%; c) after nuclear war for the different soot-injection scenarios. d, Grass leaf carbon is a combination of C3 and C4 grasses, and the change is calculated as annual accumulated carbon. For context, the grey line (and shaded area) in a are the average (and standard deviation) of six crop models from the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI […]) under the 5 Tg scenario. CLM5crop shows a conservative response to nuclear war compared with the multi-model GGCMI response.

Fig. 3: Global average human diet and protein composition and usage of crop-based products.

fig3

a, Global average human diet composition. Percentages are % of available calories. Veg. is vegetables. b, Global average human protein diet composition. Marine wild capture contributes 75% of marine fish. Percentages are % of dry matter production. c, Distribution of four major cereal crops and marine fish between human food and other uses. Percentages are % of dry matter production. d, Usage of crop-based products in 2010 (% of dry matter crop-based production). The color gradient legend in grey in c illustrates the usage of different crops and fish in colors. While humans consume most of the wheat and rice grown, most maize and soybeans are used for livestock feed.

Fig. 4: Food intake (kcal per capita per day) in Year 2 after different nuclear war soot injections.

fig4

The left map is the calorie intake status in 2010 with no international trade; the left column is the Livestock case; the middle column is the Partial Livestock case, with 50% of livestock feed used for human food and the other 50% still used to feed livestock; and the right column is the No Livestock case, with 50% of livestock feed used for human food. All maps assume no international trade and that the total calories are evenly distributed within each nation. Regions in green mean food consumption can support the current physical activity in that country; regions in yellow are calorie intake that would cause people to lose weight, and only sedentary physical activity would be supported; and regions in red indicate that daily calorie intake would be less than needed to maintain a basal metabolic rate (also called resting energy expenditure) and thus would lead to death after an individual exhausted their body energy reserves in stored fat and expendable muscle. 150 Tg + 50% waste is half of the household waste added to food consumption, and 150 Tg + 100% waste is all household waste added to food consumption.

Fig. 5: Overview of global calorie intake and sensitivity to livestock and food waste assumptions.

fig5

a, Global average change in calorie intake per person per day in Year 2 post-war under the Livestock case (yellow bars) and for the Partial Livestock case (red bars), assuming that all food and waste is evenly distributed. For the Partial Livestock case, additional calories potentially available by human consumption of animal feed, mainly maize and soybeans, are plotted for various portions of converted animal feed (pink tick marks), and the remaining livestock crop feed is used for raising livestock. Critical food intake levels are marked in the right margin. b, Without international trade, the global population (%) that could be supported, although underweight, by domestic food production at the end of Year 2 after a nuclear war if they receive the calories supporting their regular physical activity and the rest of the population would receive no food, under the Livestock and Partial Livestock cases. The blue line in b shows the percentage of population that can be supported by current food production when food production does not change but international trade is stopped. National data are calculated first and then aggregated to global data.

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Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Note: All quotes, direct/indirect, are from the study report cited in the article.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

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In den siebziger und achtziger Jahren des vergangenen Jahrhunderts, in einer Zeit materiellen Wohlstands und vielfältiger Zukunftsperspektiven, hat der Autor die Werke des Literaturnobelpreisträgers Albert Camus zwar eifrig gelesen, jedoch ihre historische, philosophische und psychologische Tiefe nicht wirklich erfasst und empfunden.

Ein viertel Jahrhundert später, nach einem „gelebten Leben“ und inmitten finsterer Zeiten (Brecht), möchte er dazu anregen, Camus‘ Dramen, Romane und philosophische Essays wieder zu lesen: Zum einen bieten sie bei der individuellen Bewältigung der absurden Welt Orientierung und Unterstützung, zum anderen – und das ist ebenso wichtig wie das eigene „Überleben“ – bedeuten sie eine Schulung im Geiste der Revolte, jener Geisteshaltung, die die Gerechtigkeit bereits auf dieser Erde, und nicht erst im Himmel verwirklichen will. Es ist schmerzlich, zu erleben, dass sich die Mitmenschen nur sehr schwer dafür gewinnen lassen.

Trotz aller Absurdität des Weltenlaufs und der Dämonie der Menschheitsgeschichte werden Camus‘ düstere Schilderungen von einer großen Liebe zur Welt und zum Mitmenschen überstrahlt. So lautet seine letzte (schriftlich überlieferte) Nachricht: „Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“ (1)

Die Absurdität der Welt – und der Sinn des Lebens

Das Problem der menschlichen Existenz ist das Grundmotiv des existentialistischen Philosophierens. Die entscheidende Frage, die sich nach Camus jedem Menschen stellen muss, ist die Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens. Zuerst müssen die Menschen jedoch wissen, ob sie dieses Dasein rückhaltlos bejahen können. Erst danach können sie sich dazu entschließen, wie sie ihr Leben gestalten wollen.

In der Regel wollen die meisten Menschen diesem wichtigen Problem ausweichen, doch Ausflüchte nützen nichts: man muss ja oder nein sagen. Würde es sich nicht mehr lohnen zu existieren, weil alles als absurd erkannt wurde, scheint es keine andere Lösung mehr zu geben als den Selbstmord. Dem Selbstmord geht eine Verzweiflung voraus: die Überzeugung, dass es keinen Ausweg mehr gibt, keine Zuversicht. Der Entschluss, der in der Stille einer verzweifelten Seele heranreift, ist der absurdeste aller Entschlüsse und daher auch derjenige, der am schwersten zu fassen ist.

Man sollte nicht glauben, dass das Problem des Selbstmordes nur in die „Pathologie“ gehört, in die Lehre von den abnormalen und krankhaften Vorgängen und Zuständen im Körper und deren Ursachen. Auch der „normale“ Mensch kennt – vor allem in finsteren Zeiten – Lebenssituationen, in denen im Menschenherzen der Wunsch aufsteigt, Mühseligkeit und Qual dieses Daseins von sich zu werfen. So nahmen im ersten Corona-Jahr 2020 auch die Selbstmorde unter Jugendlichen stark zu (2).

Nach Camus ist der Selbstmörder jedoch ein Philosoph, dessen Erkenntnishaltung in einem Fehlschlag endet. Der Selbstmörder hält die von ihm erfasste Absurdität der Welt nicht aus und entflieht ihr. Der Einsicht in die Absurdität der Welt vermögen eben nur wenige standzuhalten; die Flucht davon ist die Regel, sowohl im Alltagsleben wie auch in Philosophie, Religion und Wissenschaft. Der religiöse Mensch klammert die Absurdität der Welt durch die Hoffnung aus, dass eine göttliche Instanz einen höheren Sinn verbürge.

Der Mythos von Sisyphos – einem glücklichen Menschen

Der Selbstmord – faktisch oder im philosophischen Sinn – ist nicht die einzig mögliche Haltung des Menschen gegenüber dem Absurden. Wenn das Leben tatsächlich keinen Sinn mehr hat, so bedeutet das noch keine Nötigung, sich umzubringen. Auch die Flucht in irdische oder überirdische Hoffnungen kann vermieden werden. Die Erkenntnis des Absurden enthält in sich die Aufforderung, der Absurdität Herr zu werden.

In der Sage „Der Mythos von Sisyphos“ schildert Camus einen Menschen, der die Absurdität erkannt hat und sich lächelnd in einem illusionslosen Universum zu behaupten versucht. Wie alle Gespenster, so entweicht auch das Gespenst der Absurdität, wenn man nur den Mut aufbringt, es zu stellen. Dies ist nur möglich, wenn die Menschen nicht zu ihren Göttern flüchten, sondern sich daran gewöhnen, einen gleichgültigen Himmel über sich zu sehen, und eine Sonne, die sowohl auf seine Freuden als auch auf seine Leiden unbeteiligt herabscheint. Der Verzicht auf die Götter lehrt die Menschen, den lebenslänglichen Kampf gegen die Absurdität aufzunehmen. Und dies in der Absicht, dieser sinnlosen Welt doch noch ein Maß von Sinn aufzuzwingen.

Die Sage erzählt, dass die Götter Sisyphos verurteilt hätten, in der Unterwelt einen Stein auf einen Hügel zu wälzen, und dies bis in alle Ewigkeit, da der Stein jedes Mal, wenn der Gipfel erreicht wird, den Abhang hinunterrollt. Mit einem Wort: Sisyphos, der Held des Absurden, ist zu ewiger Qual verdammt. Seine Anstrengungen haben keinen Sinn, denn er weiß, dass der Stein immer aufs Neue rollen wird. Die unaufhörliche Mühsal führt zu keinem Erfolg, und die Flucht in die Hoffnung ist Sisyphos versagt. Dennoch wälzt er seinen Stein.

Man kann Sisyphos nur verstehen, wenn man ihn auf dem Weg nach unten zu seinem Stein betrachtet. Der Abstieg ist die Zeit des Bewusstseins. Sisyphos überblickt den nutzlosen Kraftaufwand, an dem er sich verschwendet hat, und er denkt an die vergebliche Bemühung, die wieder auf ihn wartet. Trotzdem ist er weit davon entfernt, den Kampf aufzugeben. Er erkennt, dass das Schicksal vom Menschen abhängt und dass das Leben nur Sinn hat, wenn man die Steine wälzt.

Die schmerzliche Qual, die so lange dauert, wie das Menschenleben selbst, bezieht Sisyphos in sein Dasein ein, ohne dass er gewillt ist, Trost zu suchen. Er bekennt sich zur Erde und verleugnet den Himmel. Er geht seinen Weg durch das Land der Hoffnungslosigkeit, ohne zu fragen, wie weit er sich seinem Ziel genähert habe.

Sisyphos gebührt Ruhm dafür, dass er bereit ist, seine Last bis zum Tode zu tragen. Er jammert auch nicht, weil er weiß, dass das Jammern die Steine nicht bewegt. In seinem frohgemuten Herzen, das sich keinem Gott unterwirft, wächst kein Groll gegen diese Welt, in der das Abenteuer eines Menschenlebens abläuft. Da es nur diese eine Welt gibt, wäre es widersinnig, sie nicht zu bejahen, selbst dann, wenn sie für den Menschen nur die zu wälzenden Steine bereithält. Die Auflehnung und der endlose Kampf von Sisyphos enthalten keine Bitterkeit. Camus sagt: „Man muss sich Sisyphos als einen glücklichen Menschen vorstellen.“

Sisyphos ist nicht nur ein Held der Sage – er ist eine Wirklichkeit des Alltags, sichtbar werdend in ebenso vielen Variationen wie die Absurdität der Welt. In seinem Roman „Die Pest“ hat Camus das Drama von Sisyphos auf die Gegenwart übertragen. Sowohl die Figuren als auch die Szenerie dieses Schauspiels weisen über sich selbst hinaus. Der eigentliche Schauplatz des Dramas ist nicht die Stadt Oran, sondern die Welt – und in verschiedenen Personen, die Camus in ihrem Leben, Lieben und Sterben schildert, erblickt man den lebenden, liebenden und sterbenden Menschen, der im Grunde den Zeitenlauf überdauert.

„Der erste Mensch“: Schreiben für die Mutter und das Mutterland Algerien

Der autobiographische Text „Le premier homme“, an dem Albert Camus nach Verleihung des Nobelpreises im Jahr 1957 bis zu seinem Unfall-Tod 1960 arbeitete, beginnt mit einer Widmung an seine Mutter, die Witwe Camus: „Dir, die Du dieses Buch nie wirst lesen können“. (3) 

Im Roman „Der erste Mensch“ schildet Camus in der dritten Person und unter einem fiktiven Namen die Kindheit eines armen Algerienfranzosen in der kolonialen Stadt Algier und wie die analphabetische Großmutter und die analphabetische Mutter die Familie, deren Vater im Ersten Weltkrieg gefallen war, durchbrachten. Er schreibt von den Leiden und Freuden einer armen Kindheit unter der Sonne Algeriens und der prägenden Rolle, die der verantwortungsvolle Elementarschullehrer Louis Germain im Leben des begabten Kindes spielte.

Camus erzählt von der hart arbeitenden, schweigsamen, schwerhörigen und leicht sprachbehinderten Mutter, deren stiller und rätselhafter Existenz die ganze Liebe des Knaben galt. Als erwachsener und erfolgreicher Schriftsteller sprach und schrieb er für sie, um ihr Schweigen wettzumachen. In der Überlieferung heißt es:

„Was er am meisten auf der Welt ersehnte, dass seine Mutter das, was sein Leben und sein Ureigenstes war, lesen würde, genau das war unmöglich. Seine Liebe, seine einzige Liebe würde auf ewig stumm bleiben.“ (4)

Doch Camus schrieb nicht nur für seine Mutter, sondern auch für sein Mutterland Algerien. Die Verleihung des Nobelpreises und sein Tod fallen in die Jahre, in denen in der französischen Kolonie Algerien, dem Land, in dem Camus geboren wurde und aufgewachsen ist, ein Unabhängigkeitskrieg gegen Frankreich geführt wurde, den das offizielle Frankreich lange nicht als Kriegshandlung des kolonisierten Volkes anerkennen wollte.

Deshalb schrieb Camus in seiner ihm eigenen Sprache und Leidenschaft gegen das Unrecht:

„Gebt das Land zurück. Gebt alles Land den Armen, denen, die nichts haben und die so arm sind, dass sie sich nicht einmal gewünscht haben, etwas zu haben und zu besitzen, denen, die ihr gleichen (der Mutter), der zahllosen Schar der Armen, die meisten von ihnen Araber, manche auch Franzosen, denen, die hier mit Hartnäckigkeit und Ausdauer leben oder vielmehr überleben, mit der einzigen Ehre, die auf der Welt etwas wert ist, die Ehre der Armen.“ (5)

Brief an den Volksschullehrer Louis Germain nach Verleihung des Literaturnobelpreises

In der editorischen Notiz zu Beginn des Romans „Der erste Mensch“ schreibt die Herausgeberin, Camus‘ Tochter Catherine Camus:

„‘Der erste Mensch‘ ist das Werk, an dem Albert Camus bis zu seinem Tod arbeitete. Das Manuskript wurde bei dem tödlichen Autounfall am 4. Januar 1960 in seiner Mappe gefunden. Es besteht aus 144 mit der Hand in einer eiligen, schwer entzifferbaren Schrift heruntergeschriebenen Seiten, manche ohne Punkt und Komma, die nie überarbeitet wurden.

(…).

Nach der Lektüre von ‚Der erste Mensch‘ wird man verstehen, weshalb wir auch den Brief Albert Camus‘, den er nach der Verleihung des Literaturnobelpreises an seinen Volksschullehrer Louis Germain schickte, und dessen letzten Brief an ihn im Anhang abdrucken.“ (6) 

Camus selbst charakterisiert seinen ersten Lehrer in seinem autobiographischen Roman folgendermaßen:

„In Monsieur Germains Klasse fühlten sie zum erstenmal, dass sie existieren und Gegenstand höchster Achtung waren: Man hielt sie für würdig, die Welt zu entdecken. Und ihr Lehrer ließ es sich sogar nicht nur angelegen sein, ihnen beizubringen, wofür er bezahlt wurde, er eröffnete ihnen sogar sein Privatleben, er lebte es mit ihnen, erzählte ihnen seine Kindheit und die Geschichte von Kindern, die er gekannt hat, legte ihnen seine Ansichten dar und nicht seine Ideen, denn er war zum Beispiel antiklerikal wie viele seiner Kollegen und sagte im Unterricht doch nie ein einziges Wort gegen die Religion oder gegen etwas, was eine Wahl oder Überzeugung betraf, aber er verurteile umso vehementer, was indiskutabel war, nämlich Diebstahl, Denunziation, Taktlosigkeit, Unanständigkeit. Vor allem aber erzählte er ihnen vom noch ganz nahen Krieg, den er vier Jahre mitgemacht hatte, von den Leiden der Soldaten, von ihrer Tapferkeit, ihrer Geduld und vom Glück des Waffenstillstands.“ (7)

Der Brief Camus‘ an diesen Lehrer und dessen Antwort wurden im Anhang des Romans abgeduckt (8):

„19. November 1957

Lieber Monsieur Germain,

Ich habe den Lärm sich etwas legen lassen, der in diesen Tagen um mich war, ehe ich mich ganz herzlich an Sie wende. Man hat mir eine viel zu große Ehre erwiesen, die ich weder erstrebt noch erbeten habe. Doch als ich die Nachricht erhielt, galt mein erster Gedanke, nach meiner Mutter, Ihnen. Ohne Sie, ohne Ihre liebevolle Hand, die Sie dem armen kleinen Kind, das ich war, gereicht haben, ohne Ihre Unterweisung und Ihr Beispiel wäre nichts von alledem geschehen. Ich mache um diese Art Ehrung nicht viel Aufhebens. Aber diese ist zumindest eine Gelegenheit, Ihnen zu sagen, was Sie für mich waren und noch immer sind, und um Ihnen zu versichern, dass Ihre Mühen, die Arbeit und die Großherzigkeit, die Sie eingesetzt haben, immer lebendig sind bei einem Ihrer kleinen Zöglinge, der trotz seines Alters nicht aufgehört hat, Ihr dankbarer Schüler zu sein. Ich umarme Sie von ganzem Herzen.

Albert Camus“

Volksschullehrer Louis Germain antwortete Camus am 30. April 1939: 

„Mein lieber Kleiner,

(…). Ich finde keinen Ausdruck für die Freude, die Du mir mit Deiner reizenden Geste und der Art, Dich zu bedanken, gemacht hast. Wenn es möglich wäre, würde ich den großen Jungen, der Du geworden, und der für mich immer ‚mein kleiner Camus‘ bleiben wird, fest an mich drücken. (…). Der Pädagoge, der seinen Beruf gewissenhaft ausüben will, lässt keine Gelegenheit aus, seine Schüler, seine Kinder kennenzulernen, und sie bietet sich ständig. Eine Antwort, eine Geste, eine Haltung sind äußerst aufschlussreich. Ich glaube also den netten kleinen Kerl, der Du warst, gut zu kennen, und das Kind enthält im Keim oft den Mann, der es werden wird. Deine Freude an der Schule war überall spürbar. Dein Gesicht verriet Optimismus. (…).

Ich glaube, ich habe während all meiner Berufsjahre das Heiligste im Kinde respektiert: das Recht, seine Wahrheit zu suchen. Ich habe euch alle geliebt und glaube, mein Möglichstes getan zu haben, nicht meine Ideen zu äußern und so eure junge Intelligenz zu belasten. Wenn von Gott die Rede war, (er steht auf dem Lehrplan), sagte ich, dass manche an ihn glauben, andere nicht, und dass jeder im Vollbesitz seiner Rechte machte, was er wollte. Ebenso beschränkte ich mich beim Thema Religionen darauf, die anzugeben, die es gab und denen angehörte, wem es gefiel. Ehrlich gesagt fügte ich hinzu, dass es Menschen gab, die keine Religion ausübten. Ich weiß, das missfällt jenen, die aus den Lehrern Handelsvertreter für Religion machen möchten und zwar, um genauer zu sein, für katholische Religion. (…).

Mit herzlichem Gruß Germain Louis“ 

Die letzte Nachricht von Albert Camus: „Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“

In Lou Marins (Hrsg.) Veröffentlichung “Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960)“ wird unter „Abschnitt V. Epilog“ „Die letzte Nachricht von Albert Camus“ veröffentlicht. In der redaktionellen Vorbemerkung der libertären Zeitschrift „Reconstruir“ (Wiederaufbau) (B.P. 320, Buenos Aires) heißt es: „Wir übersetzen hier aus dem Spanischen die Fragen, die ‚Reconstruir‘ gestellt hatte, sowie die geschriebenen Zeilen unseres großen Freundes, dessen Mutter, wie man weiß, selbst Spanierin war. Auf dass diese Nachricht, der aufgrund des Ereignisses ein testamentarischer Wert zukommt, die nachkommende Generation, deren beste geistige Stimme Camus bleibt, inspirieren möge.“ (9)

Die letzte Frage an Camus lautete:

Reconstruir: Wie sehen Sie die Zukunft der Menschheit? Was müsse man tun, um zu einer Welt zu kommen, die weniger von der Notwendigkeit unterdrückt und freier wäre?

Albert Camus: Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“ (10)

In einer unautorisierten Fassung, die dem Autor vorliegt, heißt es ergänzend:

„Soviel Kraft wie möglich wiederfinden, nicht um zu beherrschen, sondern um zu geben.

Sich nicht beklagen. Nicht herausstellen, was man ist oder was man tut.

Wenn man gibt, bedenken, dass man empfangen hat.“  

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych. mit Schwerpunkt: Klinische-, Pädagogische-, Medien- sowie Individual-Psychologie). Viele Jahrzehnte unterrichtete er, bildete bei der BAYER-AG in Leverkusen Hochschulabsolventen fort, gründete in Köln zusammen mit Kollegen eine Modellschule für ehemalige Schulversager und leitete sie. An der Bayerischen Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung und Personalführung war er als Instituts-Rektor für die Ausbildung von Beratungslehrkräften für alle Schularten zuständig. Am Ende seiner Berufslaufbahn war er Staatlicher Schulberater für die Landeshauptstadt München. Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

Noten

(1) Marin, Lou (Hrsg,). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1980). Hamburg, 363

(2) https://www.unzensuriert.at/content/153791-noch-nie-so-viele-jugendliche-wegen-psychischer-erkrankungen-im-spital/?utm_source=Unzensuriert-Infobrief&utm_medium=E-Mail&utm_campaign=Infobrief&pk_campaign=Unzensuriert-Infobrief

(3) Camus, Albert (1995). Der erste Mensch. Reinbek bei Hamburg, S. 11

(4) Bouchentouf-Siagh, Zohra / Kampits, Peter (2001). Zur Aktualität von Albert Camus. Wien, S. 17

(5) A. a. O., S. 17 f.

(6) Camus, Albert (1995). Der erste Mensch. Reinbek bei Hamburg, S.7 f.

(7) A. a. O., S. 168

(8) A. a. O., S. 376 ff.

(9) Marin, Lou (Hrsg,). (2013). Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1980). Hamburg, S. 363

(10) A. a. O., S. 364

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A group of journalists and lawyers, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, sued the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo. They allege that the agency under Pompeo spied on them in violation of their privacy rights.

Undercover Global S.L., a private security company in Spain, and the company’s director David Morales are also named as defendants. UC Global ramped up surveillance against Assange and shared audio and video footage from the embassy with “American intelligence.”

“The United States Constitution shields American citizens from US government overreach even when the activities take place in a foreign embassy in a foreign country. Visitors who are lawyers, journalists and doctors frequently carry confidential information in their devices,” declared Richard Roth, who is the lead attorney representing the plaintiffs.

“They had a reasonable expectation that the security guards at the Ecuadorian embassy in London would not be US government spies charged with delivering copies of their electronics to the CIA,” Roth added.

Two of the plaintiffs are attorneys who have represented Assange—Margaret Rather Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney, and Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer.

The other two plaintiffs are journalists Charles Glass and John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks to publish documents on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The lawsuit comes around two months after United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the US extradition request against Assange. His legal team has submitted two separate appeals in the UK courts, yet it is increasingly evident that Assange could be flown to the US to face Espionage Act charges that civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom organizations around the world have condemned.

According to the complaint [PDF] filed in a US court in the Southern District of New York, Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler, like all visitors, were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to UC Global employees hired by Ecuador to provide security for the embassy. What they did not know is that UC Global “copied the information stored on the devices” and allegedly shared the information with the CIA. Pompeo allegedly authorized and approved the action.

Security required plaintiffs to leave their devices with them, which contained “confidential and privileged information about their sources or clients. This information was copied and allegedly shared with the CIA.

It is estimated that “well over 100 American citizens who visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy” had their privacy rights violated. This includes attorneys who were there to represent Assange, journalists who traveled to interview him, and even doctors who came to the embassy to assess and treat his deteriorating health. Their privileged communications stored on electronic devices were compromised.

The CIA-backed spying operation began around January 2017 and lasted until UC Global’s contract was terminated around April 2018. By that time, the Justice Department under President Donald Trump already had a sealed indictment against Assange.

Pompeo allegedly approved the placement of hidden microphones in new cameras at the embassy. He allegedly approved bugging the embassy with hidden microphones. He allegedly signed off on a plan to allow the CIA to “observe and listen to Assange’s daily activities at the embassy.”

Also, the complaint claims Pompeo approved the copying of visitors’ passports, “including pages with stamps and visas.” He ensured that all “computers, laptops, mobile phones, recording devices, and other electronics brought into the embassy,” were “seized, dismantled, imaged, photographed, and digitized.” This included the collection of IMEI and SIM codes from visitors’ phones.

Morales did not speak very good English, yet as further evidence that UC Global was working for the CIA, the complaint notes that UC Global employees were given “written technology instructions” for live streaming and audio associated with the surveillance” that were in “perfect English.”

There was an “external streaming access point” for “American intelligence” sent from the “Venetian Hotel,” or the Las Vegas Sands, the complaint asserts.

Around January 2017, Morales traveled to the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor (SHOT) convention at Las Vegas Sands. The convention was an expo for the private security industry. Security personnel for Las Vegas Sands spoke with Morales and reportedly recruited Morales to spy on Assange for the CIA. (The Las Vegas Sands was owned by Sheldon Adelson, the late billionaire who bankrolled Trump’s campaign.)

When Morales returned to Spain, at least one whistleblower from UC Global has said Morales told employees the company was now “in the big league,” and they would be working for the “dark side.” He indicated “the Americans” would help UC Global secure major contracts throughout the world.

The complaint says former UC Global employees believe the “deal included selling information obtained through the illegal surveillance of Assange to the CIA.”

Additionally, the complaint claims that CIA handlers in the US were collecting recordings from Morales either through delivery to Las Vegas, Washington, DC, or New York or through transfers on an FTP server at UC Global offices that gave CIA personnel external access to the material.

Reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País previously corroborated many of the claims in the complaint. Their journalism was based upon primary source materials shared with them by whistleblowing UC Global employees.

Some of these revelations were part of Assange’s challenge to the US extradition request, but a UK magistrates’ court dismissed the allegations as irrelevant to the indictment from the US Justice Department.

There is a criminal case in a Spanish court against Morales and UC Global associates. US officials have refused to cooperate with requests from a Spanish judge for information about the CIA’s alleged involvement.

Pompeo was summoned by the Spanish court to provide testimony back in June.

In September 2021, Yahoo! News published a bombshell report on “secret war plans” against Assange that involved proposals for kidnapping and assassinating Assange after Pompeo became obsessed with the WikiLeaks founder following the media organization’s publication of CIA hacking materials that became known as the “Vault 7” materials.

Pompeo labeled the organization a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” and in April 2017, he made it the focus of his first speech as CIA director. “The one thing [current] whistleblowers don’t need is a publisher,” since the internet already enables enough sharing of information.

During the speech, Pompeo called Assange a “coward,” a “fraud,” and a “narcissist.” He pledged to pursue a “long term” campaign to neutralize WikiLeaks.

“Assange remained in the embassy in London for 7 years, believing he would face extradition to the US if he left the building,” stated Deborah Hrbek. “He was pilloried as a paranoid narcissist for this belief. As it turns out, he was right.”

The lawsuit is a Bivens action, which stems from a precedent-setting case that established the ability of US citizens to sue US government officials.

US courts have been historically reluctant to allow plaintiffs to pursue damages, especially if it involves sensitive national security or foreign policy matters.

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Kevin Gosztola is Managing editor of Shadowproof, host of the “Dissenter Weekly,” co-host of the podcast “Unauthorized Disclosure,” and member of Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

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Read the English version:

Digital Identity – Absolute and Total Control via the QR Code: Open Letter to the Swiss Federal Council

By Peter Koenig, August 15, 2022


Am 7. März 2021 hat das Schweizer Stimmvolk ein Gesetz über ein geplantes elektronisches Identitätssystem verworfen. Das Ergebnis war ein Rückschlag für die Pläne von Parlament und Regierung. Es geht um den Datenschutz.

Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass Bern die digitale Kontrolle buchstäblich privatisieren wollte. Als mögliche Verwalter wurden das Schweizer Banken- und/oder Versicherungssystem vorgeschlagen.

Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass der Vorschlag einer Privatisierung über das ohnehin schon Misstrauen weckende Finanzsystem das negative Abstimmungsergebnis noch verstärkt hat.

Das Endergebnis zeigte, dass 64,4 % der Wähler – fast zwei Drittel – sich gegen das geplante Gesetz für eine sogenannte digitale ID, auch bekannt als ID2020, aussprachen.

Die Regierung, vor allem das Justizdepartement des Bundesrates, hatte in einer heruntergespielten Propaganda Campagna die Notwendigkeit eines einzigen Zugangspunkts zur Vereinfachung der Nutzung von Online-Diensten, die von kommerziellen Unternehmen angeboten werden, sowie des Kontakts mit öffentlichen Einrichtungen über E-Government-Kanäle propagiert.

Weshalb dann die Auslagerung und Privatisierung der hochsensiblen Aufgabe des Identitätsmanagements von Personen?

In der heutigen Welt wissen wir, was Identität bedeutet. Sie umfasst alle möglichen Daten und Informationen über jede Bürgerin und jeden Bürger, wie z.B. Gesundheitsdaten, Strafregister, Finanz- und Bankinformationen, Einkaufs- und Reisegewohnheiten, mit wem und wann man sich trifft – und vieles mehr.

Das Markt- und Forschungsinstitut gfs.bern kommentierte nach der Abstimmung pointiert: “Das Misstrauen gegenüber privaten Unternehmen war dominant und hat zum Abstimmungsresultat beigetragen.”

In einer Pressekonferenz nach der Abstimmung räumte Justizministerin Karin Keller-Sutter “ein gewisses Unbehagen” bei den Stimmberechtigten ein. Sie rief das Parlament und die Kritiker der gescheiterten Vorlage auf, nun zusammenzuarbeiten, um einen Stillstand zu vermeiden.

“Wir haben keine Wahl und müssen auf eine neue Lösung hinarbeiten, auch wenn es mehrere Anläufe braucht”, sagte sie an einer Pressekonferenz. “Es ist wichtig, dass die Schweiz bei der Digitalisierung den Anschluss an andere Länder findet.”

Das heißt im Klartext: “Wir werden die digitale ID so oder so durchsetzen, auch wenn es dem demokratisch geäußerten Willen des Volkes widerspricht.”

An dieser Stelle ist es vielleicht angebracht zu erwähnen, dass die Schweiz stolze Gastgeberin ist und ihr finanzielles Paradies solch dubiosen Organisationen wie dem Weltwirtschaftsforum (WEF), der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) und der Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich (BIZ) in Basel zur Verfügung stellt – alles steuerbefreite Organisationen.

Die BIZ ist eine privat geführte Institution. Sie ist als Zentralbank aller Zentralbanken bekannt, die im Wesentlichen den internationalen Geldfluss zwischen den meisten Zentralbanken der Welt kontrolliert und / oder überwacht.

Während des Zweiten Weltkriegs leitete die BIZ US-Gelder von der Federal Reserve an Hitlers Deutsche Bundesbank weiter, um seinen Krieg gegen die damalige Sowjetunion zu finanzieren.

Die Schweiz beherbergt auch ein internationales Bankenkartell, das dem der City of London gleichkommt, oder es sogar übertrifft.

Die “neutrale Schweiz” hat den Glanz ihrer verfassungsmäßigen Neutralität längst verloren, indem sie blind oder unterwürfig dem Diktat, wenn nicht der USA, dann der Europäischen Union, hauptsächlich der nicht-gewählten Europäischen Kommission, folgt.

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Sprung nach vorne – Frühjahr – Sommer 2022.

Es sieht so aus, als ob sich der undemokratische Wille von Frau Karin Keller-Sutter durchgesetzt hätte, und das Schweizer Volk forciert wird, und zwar durch den von den Banken aufgezwungenen QR Code, sich einer totalen digitalen ID-Kontrolle zu untersetzen.

Der QR Code ist ein verheerendes Mittel. Es dient zur Total-Digitalisierung und zur absoluten Kontrolle – jede Bewegung, die Sie machen, jeden Schritt, den Sie tun, jeden Arzt, den Sie konsultieren, jeden Ort, den Sie besuchen; und viel mehr.

Der QR Code hat die Freiheit der Weltbevölkerung immer stärker eingeengt. Aber in der Schweiz wird es jetzt noch schlimmer.

Der QR Code-Zwang, alias digitaler Ausweis, findet über das Bankensystem statt – genau der private Sektor, dem die Schweizer Bevölkerung misstraut und den sie vehement ablehnt.

Hat die Schweizer Regierung, der Bundesrat, mit dem Bankensystem konspiriert, um die digitale ID durch den QR Code – und durch Bankgeschäfte – zu erzwingen?

Geehrte Bundesräte, wollen Sie tatsächlich das letzte bisschen Vertrauen, das Sie noch haben aufs Spiel setzen – nach den Fiaskos mit Covid-Management, mit dem rückgratlosen Befolgung der EU-Sanktionen gegen Russland – und jetzt mit der Abschaffung der Demokratie, indem Sie genau das durchsetzen, was die Schweizer Bevölkerung vor einem Jahr mit einer Zweidrittelmehrheit abgelehnt hat?

Ab dem 1. Oktober 2022 verlangen alle Banken und Finanzinstitute die Verwendung eines QR Codes für jede Bank- oder Postfinanz-Zahlung. Es scheint keinen Ausweg mehr zu geben. Ob der Bürger es will oder nicht, uns wird ein System aufgedrängt, das auf eine absolute Überwachung und Kontrollversklavung abzielt.

Schon heute kann der QR Code mindestens 30.000 Daten von jedem Bürger speichern – und dieses Potenzial kann nach Belieben auf eine praktisch unbegrenzte Kapazität erweitert werden.

Das bedeutet, dass die Banken, die Verwalter des Systems, die jeden einzelnen QR kodifizierten Menschen besser kennen als er sich selbst, können je nach gutem oder schlechtem Verhalten eines Bürgers sein Geld sperren oder die Verwendung seines Geldes einschränken, vorübergehend oder für immer.

Sie erinnern sich vielleicht an den Fichenaffäre-Skandal, der die Schweiz 1989 erschütterte, als bekannt wurde, dass die Schweizer Bundesbehörden und die kantonale Polizei ein illegales System zur Massenüberwachung der Bevölkerung eingerichtet hatten. Damals wurden geheime Dateien von etwa 900.000 Schweizer Bürgern und Ausländern angelegt.

Mit dem QR Code wird der Geheimdatenskandal von 1989 auf die Spitze getrieben – und vom Bundesrat legalisiert.

Oder ist etwa die praktisch klandestine Einführung der digitalen ID, sogar noch über den QR Code – nach dem übermäßigen Nein-Referendum vom 7. März 2021 – legal?

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Sehr geehrte Mitglieder des Bundesrates, ich bitte Sie – im Namen aller meiner Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger – uns eine Alternative zur Erfüllung unserer Zahlungsverpflichtungen anzubieten, die nicht die Verwendung eines QR Codes erfordert.

Und am wichtigsten: Verlassen Sie die Idee einer digitalen ID ein für alle Male. Das Schweizer Volk hat am 7. März 2021 demokratisch, mit fast zwei-drittel Mehrheit dagegen gestimmt.

Der QR Code, der bereits in jeden Winkel unseres Lebens eingedrungen ist, wurde nun für das elektronische Banking vom privaten, alias Bankensektor eingeführt. Es handelt sich also nicht um ein Bundesgesetz.

Daher ist es die Pflicht der Bundesregierung, ihren Bürgern eine alternative Möglichkeit zu bieten, ihren Zahlungsverpflichtungen nachzukommen – eine, die nicht den QR Code verwendet.

Wir danken Ihnen.

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Peter Koenig ist Ökonom und geopolitischer Analyst, vormals bei der Weltbank und WHO.  Peter ist ein Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Er ist auch ein nicht-residenter Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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The Psychological Warfare Apparatus Creates False Beliefs

August 16th, 2022 by Stephen Sefton

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An increasingly large number of people now agree that information of all kinds in the countries of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies is deployed overwhelmingly to serve the interests of Western corporate oligarchs and the politicians who front for them. Outlets including news media and NGOs, academic and scientific journals as well as international institutions have practically all been fully integrated now into the long standing, global psychological warfare offensive of the West’s ruling classes. At home, they work relentlessly to control the perceptions and behavior of their countries’ populations. Overseas, they seek constantly to mobilize international opinion against countries like Russia and China, governments from Syria to Venezuela, political movements like Hezbollah, and even individuals, like Julian Assange, who resist them.

The main purpose of this vast psychological warfare apparatus is to create false beliefs which over time harden into false memories. The process consolidates ruling class control domestically while also facilitating their present and future crimes of aggression around the world. Populations in the West are deliberately misinformed and misled by means of plausible misrepresentation, blatant distortion, systematic omission and downright lies. Categories of information such as journalism, academic and scientific research, investigation by NGOs or briefings from international institutions have all been deformed, distorted and devalued by their abuse so as to further the domestic and global interests of the Western oligarchies.

Since long before 20th Century public relations and psychology, the fundamental way to manipulate mass consciousness, from the Holy Inquisition to the enthronement of Science, has been to encourage submission to authority. The Milgram experiment is a notorious example, although, in one respect, itself a cause for optimism. Other more insidious means sow ruling class messaging among otherwise trusted contrary sources. Concentrated corporate control of information and communications resources has made possible mutual constant universal reinforcement between all varieties of mass media and information outlets. Like magicians, governments and corporations understand very well that suppressing resistance depends on disappearing contrary information by every means possible, including censorship, mass distraction and sensory overload.

An apparently hardly noticed corollary of this systematic perversion of good faith reporting, research and investigation has been a collapse of rationality. In Western public life, it is now effectively forbidden to compare and contrast rival versions of events which contradict the general received wisdom propagated by Western government and corporate approved information outlets. So political and intellectual argument in North America and Europe has become ever more narcissistic, self-serving and ultimately irrational. This applies also to supposedly progressive or even radical outlets which in their coverage of international affairs still depart from essentially neocolonial assumptions of Western superiority.

Over the last fifteen years or so a growing number of independent writers and reporters have sought to challenge the false information spread by well coordinated and concentrated corporate and government controlled networks of mutually reinforcing information outlets. This development has notably sharpened the relation between information and class. More clearly than ever the production and distribution of information has become a vast theater of propaganda operations controlled by a multinational intellectual managerial class with shared imperatives. They promote and enforce a class monopoly of access to information outlets for producers of information and similarly a corresponding monopoly of distribution outlets, both mainstream and ostensibly alternative, for its consumption.

All production and distribution of information involves some variety of reporting which, like any other human activity, can be good or bad. Reporting in general has always been an arena of competing interests and rationalities. But, even so, fundamental components of competent reporting have generally been held to include, among other things, recording first hand accounts of events, clearly sourcing those accounts, presenting trustworthy data and documentary evidence, offering provenance of those sources, acknowledging loyalties and bias while considering competing rival versions, making the reporting accessible and frankly submitting all this material to free and open scrutiny.

It is certainly debatable when contemporary reporting began its categorical collapse into the current gross, unrelenting pyschological warfare offensive by North American and European oligarchies against their own peoples and the majority world. However, the rapidly increasing numbers of independent reporting outlets signal the reality of that collapse and also help reveal its class nature, its class nuances and its irrationality. The currently developing fierce efforts by the West’s ruling oligarchs to repress and censor independent reporting confirm the wholesale abandonment of rationality by Western societies and their leaders. A principal criterion for appraising rationality in an individual or a society is precisely their ability and self-confidence in making a case against rival arguments.

Attempts at outright censorship, or the many other kinds of arbitrary intellectual and cultural repression deployed, represent a failure to be able to reason effectively, to promote consensus or to accommodate legitimate dissent. This collapse of reason and its accompanying deformation of self-confidence into dismissal and exclusion are self-evident in the routine reporting practice and editorial policies of the managers controlling academic and scientific production and the propaganda theater most people still like to call journalism, among the board members and staff of influential non governmental organizations, among the personnel of international institutions and also among the managerial class controlling artistic and cultural production.

Given the intense concentration of political and economic power among the Western oligarchs who have successfully conspired to control all these sectors, the resulting general unanimity of presuppositions among their respective subaltern intellectual and cultural managerial classes is as much to be expected as their complete lack of accountability. Anyone openly challenging or contradicting received wisdom is marginalized and ostracised in what is a truly authentic class warfare waged by North American and European oligarchs against their own peoples and the majority world.

In response, as a class phenomenon, the proliferation of independent reporting outlets reflects not just underlying genuine popular outrage at being permanently misled. It is also a correspondingly authentic, resilient grass roots challenge to the status quo. Conventional liberal or social democrat opinion gauges the authenticity of independent reporting by the criteria of financial and/or editorial independence. But a low budget is no guarantee of integrity and a genuinely independent information outlet may or may not be ideologically aligned with a foreign political movement or government. Under contemporary conditions a more authentic criteria of reporting independence is the degree of legitimate defence of governments and peoples who are victims of the crimes of Western ruling elites.

Truly independent reporting takes this position while at the same time using conventional reporting norms to cover issues and events Western mainstream and alternative media obfuscate or conceal. Doing so necessarily endows genuinely independent reporting outlets, regardless of their political allegiances, with class characteristics by the very nature of their readiness to expose contradictions in accounts of events and issues produced by corporate capitalist information outlets. Paradoxically or not, class solidarity with the victims of imperialist crimes becomes the principal criteria of reporting independence both in terms of what is reported and too how it is reported. For the moment, that means being in solidarity with the world’s peoples defending their basic rights against Western ruling class aggression.

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This text was produced by Stephen Sefton with research by Lauren Smith and comments from others.

This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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I often complain that Washington’s heavily lopsided relationship with Israel is an arrangement that brings absolutely no benefit to the American people, and even less to our national security as it has involved the US in an endless series of completely avoidable conflicts. But there is one exception to that generalization, though one hesitates to call it a benefit, consisting of the White House’s adoption of the Israel practice of referring to opponents as “terrorists.” Israel uses it as a generic cover designation to denigrate and humiliate the Palestinians while also delegitimizing their resistance, permitting them to torture and kill Arabs at will, destroy their homes, and bomb them mercilessly. Washington, which claims to be the font of a “rules based international order” as well as the defender of global “democracy” and “freedom,” has developed since 9/11 an unfortunate tendency to do the same thing as the Israelis to justify its attacks on civilians and its brutal assassination policies.

In fact, the US and Israel are generally speaking the only two countries that openly use “targeted assassination” as a political tool without even bothering to fall back on “plausible denial” to conceal their actions. Israel only last week, initiated a politically motivated bombing attack on Gaza, which killed 45 civilians, including seventeen children and destroyed numerous homes. No Israelis were killed or even injured when the Gazans struck back with their home-made rockets. Both the White House and leaders in the US Congress congratulated the Israelis for “exercising their right to defend themselves.”

The principal targets of the Israeli onslaught were two Islamic Jihad leaders whom both Israel and the international media have described as “terrorists” and “militants.” The Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid described the operation as successful as the two men were reported killed. A retired Israeli general went so far as to describe the massacre as “really clean, very nice” and an “exceptional achievement.”

The Israeli action recalls the recent assassination of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The media coverage described how the Agency relentlessly stalked al-Zawahiri, described as the mastermind of 9/11, eventually learning that the 71-year-old was living in a house in an upscale Kabul neighborhood. It was also determined that he spent most days sitting on a terrace at the top of the house. The hellfire drone that killed him targeted the terrace at the time of day when he was normally sitting outside. Taliban sources report that his body was torn apart and incinerated by the two missiles that apparently struck him.

The White House is, of course, framing the assassination as a great success, a major blow in the war against terror. Joe Biden is hoping that it will improve the administration’s dismal approval ratings in the lead-up to the November elections, but the information given to the media regarding the incident praising the CIA’s tenacity and professional expertise is perhaps a bit over the top. Alternative reports from Afghanistan suggest that al-Zawahiri was living quite openly in Kabul and that he has not been active in any presumably radical activities for many, many years beyond making a number of “conspiracy theory” videos. Both al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden were, at the times when they were assassinated by the US, leading quiet lives with little protection even though they allegedly continued to be nominal leaders of al-Qaeda, an organization that had lost its raison d’etre years before.

Al-Zawahiri’s record as a terrorist comes largely from US and UK intelligence sources as well as media innuendo, which should be automatically considered unreliable. Recall for a moment the lying that the George W. Bush administration engaged in to go to war with Iraq, with folks like Condoleezza Rice speaking of mushroom clouds spewing radiation over the US and a shop in the Pentagon run by a group of neocons producing fabricated intelligence reports. What has been confirmed from independent sources is that al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor, was savagely tortured by the secret police during a crackdown on political dissidents initiated by US puppet President Hosni Mubarak. The torture reportedly radicalized him, and he joined Osama bin Laden’s underground group, later apparently becoming its nominal leader after bin Laden was himself killed in May 2011 by US Navy Seals. Much of the rest of al-Zawahiri’s presumed biography relies on little in the way of actual evidence.

What actually happened on 9/11 and who was behind it remains somewhat a mystery as all the apparent perpetrators of which might have occurred are dead. Consider for a moment that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri never actually admitted that their group al-Qaeda was the perpetrator of the attack. In fact they denied it, sometimes attributing it to other radicalized Saudi Arabian underground groups. Nor is there any actual evidence that they planned the attack. They were accused because they had the claimed track record, resources, motive and possible access to carry out the incident, not because there was any real evidence that they had done the deed. When the US approached the Taliban government of Afghanistan in late 2001 and demanded that bin Laden be turned over to American law enforcement, the Afghans responded that bin Laden was a guest in their country, but they would surrender him if Washington could demonstrate that he had organized and ordered the attacks. George W. Bush’s Pentagon and the CIA apparently could not make that case based on actual evidence, leading to the decision to go to war instead.

Also, of all the hundreds of “terrorist” prisoners that have been recycled through the US military prison at Guantanamo only five have ever been charged with any involvement in 9/11. They are still being held but have never been tried and it is quite possible the case against them can never be made. They might even be completely innocent.

And there is more to the story. Bin Laden could have been arrested and tried but the Barack Obama administration decided to kill him and dump his body at sea, presumably to avoid a courtroom drama that would reveal government malfeasance. And then there are Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, both of whom were American citizens killed by CIA drones in Yemen, where their family originated. The al-Awlakis may or may not have been actual members of al-Qaeda, but the elder al-Awlaki’s sermons and writings certainly inspired groups that opposed US foreign policy’s hostility towards Muslims. It is widely believed that Anwar al-Awlaki could have been captured and tried in the US if an attempt to do so had been pursued, but instead the Obama Administration again decided that he should be killed.

Finally, there is the death by drone of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January 2000 under President Donald Trump. In a recent book, Trump’s Defense Chief Mark Esper claims that Trump lied after the assassination was criticized by saying that Soleimani was actively preparing “terror” attacks on four American Embassies in the Mideast region. Esper confirms that there was no intelligence to back up that claim, but interestingly goes beyond that to make clear that there was no specific intelligence at all suggesting that such an attack was imminent or even being planned. There were only generic regional security threats that many embassies in the world respond to and make preparations to defend against.

The Esper claim is supported by the Iraqi government itself, which declared that Soleimani, widely regarded as the second most powerful official in Iran after the Ayatollah, was in Baghdad to discuss peace arrangements and that the US Embassy had been informed of his planned trip and had raised no objection to it. Instead, the US used the opportunity to launch an armed drone to kill him and nine Iraqi militia members that were accompanying him from the airport. In other words, there was no imminent threat, nor even a plausible threat, and the US went ahead anyway and killed a senior Iranian government official in a targeted assassination.

So, the United States and Israel have a formula down pat whereby they can kill anyone anywhere without any due process or rule of law, even if they don’t know who you are as in the cases of the “signature” or “profile” executions by drone in Afghanistan. And all the presidents and senior officials know that no matter what they do there will be no accountability. All one has to do is call it terrorism prevention, which might include citing terrorist attacks that can in no way be linked by way of actual evidence to the person being killed. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist, repeat as needed, and the public and media will swoon with pleasure at being so well-protected. And, as the Israeli general described it, the end result will be “really clean, very nice” an “exceptional achievement.”

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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.

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US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew into Taiwan ruffling many a Chinese feathers. The Chinese state media called it an “open salvo of war”, and the country has reportedly sent over two dozen fighter jets into Taiwan’s air defence zone. 

The situation is more than just a regular geopolitical escalation in some remote part of the world. For if it escalates, it is highly likely that the prices of all electronic appliances, including the much-sought after Apple products would go up.

TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, has called it a “lose-lose situation” for all. In an interview with CNN, TSMC chairman Mark Liu said, “Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military force or invasion, you will render the TSMC factory inoperable.”

TSMC manufactures Apple’s A- and M-series chips along with the chips of Qualcomm and several other companies. It accounts for over 50% of global semiconductor production.

Since there is a possibility of China attacking Taiwan, it’s natural to wonder how it will impact the world semiconductor industry and whether the prices of devices on which you’re reading this article are going to rise.

According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, the world chip shortage has already affected 169 industries, and we’re not talking about electronics anymore. Industries like steel and concrete production and even soap manufacturing are already affected.

Reports suggest that mobile phones are going to get costlier. In a conversation with The Sun, Dan Ives, a tech analyst, has already warned that Apple might increase the price of the upcoming iPhone 14 by $100! According to him, “Prices have been increasing across the whole supply chain, and Apple needs to pass these costs to the consumer on this release.”

Not just Apple, a report by Counterpoint confirms that almost 90% smartphone brands were affected due to the global chip shortage. In 2021, only 70% of the requested components were made available to mobile phone manufacturers. Counterpoint suggested that companies like Samsung, Oppo and Xiaomi were more affected than Apple.

Previous problems with Taiwan

The meeting with Pelosi and China’s escalation is only an addition to the chain of events Taiwan has faced these past couple of years. The Covid-19 outbreak and the work-from-home culture saw an exponential increase in the demand for semiconductors which started the disruption in the industry.

However, Mark Liu believes otherwise.

In an interview with Time, Liu mentioned that more chips were exported to the factories than were coming out as products. He said, “There were people definitely accumulating chips who-knows-where in the supply chain.”

Apart from that, Taiwan also witnessed the most severe drought in the last 50 years. In 2021, the country received no rainfall and since semiconductor manufacturing requires huge amounts of water, companies had to face difficulties. TSMC had to fetch water via tanks from the water-heavy side of the country to feed its manufacturing plants.

Team T5, a Taiwanese cyber security firm has also observed that apart from the threat of military attacks, China is actively executing cyber-attacks on the semiconductor industry of Taiwan. To tackle this, the Semiconductor Cybersecurity Committee, introduced by SEMI Taiwan, is working to develop a cybersecurity standard for the semiconductor industry of Taiwan.

What’s Next?

The global mobile semiconductor industry alone is expected to reach more than $80 billion by the end of 2027. On the other hand, the market share of the automotive semiconductor industry is expected to reach $115 billion by 2030 from around $43 billion in 2021.

According to data shared by Mckinsey & Company, industries like automotive, computation & data storage and wireless will be driving the 70% growth.

Credit: Mckinsey & Company

However, if TSMC’s threat comes true, we’ll see computers, laptops, mobiles, and automobiles getting costlier and harder to get by. People still can’t seem to get their hands on the PS5 – a product launched in November 2020! A shortage in chips due to Covid-19 resulted in Jaguar-Landrover producing around 1.70 lakh fewer cars than expected. While US-based car automobile company General Motors reported 16% of cars being unsold due to a global chip shortage.

It doesn’t take much to predict what might happen if the country producing 63% of total semiconductors stops producing them. The situation will be grave and it will take us not years, but several decades to recover from it.

What other countries are doing

According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the industry has already announced $80 billion in investment in the US. This includes the upcoming $17 billion Samsung factory and $30 billion Texas Instrument’s investment in Texas.

Recently, the USA introduced the CHIPS Act, which is poised to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to America. The $52-billion package under this act aims to attract companies to manufacture semiconductors in the US. Out of $52 billion, $39 billion are to be directed towards giving financial assistance to companies looking to build a manufacturing plant. Also, $11 billion are supposed to be allocated toward research and development.

Maryam Rofougaran, CEO of 5G startup Movandi said making chips in the US will help companies get them consistently and will create well-paying jobs, which will be good for the economy (as reported by CNN).

The US, India, Australia and Japan already have a QUAD alliance to counter China in the Indo-pacific region. Recently, at an annual meet, the countries signed a pact to work together to make the semiconductor supply chain more diverse. Since Japan has previous experience in semiconductor manufacturing, Australia is enriched with minerals required for the production and India has a skilled workforce required for the semiconductor industry, they all can come together with the USA, which has capital and research facilities to make this alliance a success.

According to ISAS, “Each QUAD member enjoys a comparative advantage in a specific sub-domain of the semiconductor supply chain” and hence “should make semiconductors a focus area”.

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Lokesh is an avid reader and considers himself an armchair Technology Journalist. He loves telling stories around the tech world. The linguistic background as a field of study did not restrict him from exploring the AI and Data Science fields.