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Facebook and Instagram users in some countries will be allowed to call for violence against Russians and the death of Vladimir Putin, according to leaked emails.

Meta, the social media platforms’ parent company, will temporarily change its hate speech policy for posts regarding the war in Ukraine for the countries involved and most neighbouring European countries.

Posts calling for the death of Mr Putin or Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko will be allowed in a change to the company’s rules on violence and incitement, according to a series of internal emails to its content moderators.

Such posts will not be allowed if they include two suggestions that the threat is credible – such as the location and method – or other targets, one email said.

The emails said calls for violence against Russians were acceptable when the post is clearly talking about the invasion of Ukraine.

And calls for violence against Russian soldiers would be considered a proxy for the Russian military – though this would not extend to prisoners of war.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

The temporary policy changes apply to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.

Many major social media platforms have announced new content restrictions around the conflict and have made exceptions to policies during the war.

Meta has allowed praise of the right-wing Azov battalion, which is normally prohibited.

To read complete article on The Independent click here

Our thanks to the Independent for having brought this article to our attention

 

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Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

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Senior Canadian officials are working with an Alberta company to open up new markets for natural gas in Germany, according to documents seen by DeSmog, contradicting a federal minister who says the Ukraine crisis can’t be solved by exporting more fossil fuels.

Alfred Sorensen, the President and CEO of Calgary-based Pieridae Energy, pitched the idea of exporting gas from Canada’s east coast to Europe during a recent meeting whose participants included officials in Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

The two-hour virtual meeting, which took place on January 26 as tensions between Russia and Ukraine were quickly rising, included senior officials in Natural Resources Canada as well as provincial government officials from Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador. The meeting was organized under the banner of the Canada – Germany Energy Partnership, established in March 2021 during the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue to foster “clean energy” trade opportunities focused on “hydrogen, critical minerals and liquefied natural gas.” While the launch of the energy partnership garnered plenty of media coverage, this late-January 2022 meeting was held quietly.

Sorensen’s pitch came during a section of the meeting entitled “Canadian LNG – value proposition, projects and potential trade with Germany.” He was joined by representatives from the industry group LNG Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as a pro-gas organization known as the First Nations Major Projects Coalition.

Natural Resources Canada didn’t respond to a media request from DeSmog about the meeting.

The federal department recently told iPolitics that the “natural energy allies” of Canada and Germany are working together “building a low-emissions energy future with a view to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.”

Image on the right: Screenshot of the logo of the Canada-Germany Energy Partnership from the Jan. 26, 2022 meeting agenda.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in late February that

“we know that Russia is a significant source of natural gas and oil for European partners. And one of the things that we’ve been doing over the past number of weeks is ensuring that there are alternatives to Russia.”

But efforts to accelerate Canada’s gas exports undermine other statements being made by top federal policymakers.

“The solution to global energy problems is not to increase our dependency on fossil fuels,” Canada’s environmental minister Steve Guilbeault told the National Observer.

“Climate change will not go away, and if we’re thinking we can solve the [Ukraine] crisis by exacerbating another one, those people who think that are clearly mistaken,” he said.

Pieridae Energy walked away last summer from plans to build a $13 billion liquefied natural gas facility in Goldboro, Nova Scotia, due to financing problems which the company said made the project “impractical”.

The Halifax Examiner reported at the time that “the Goldboro LNG scheme has collapsed.”

But as tensions and rumors gave way to a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pieridae’s CEO claimed that he was receiving inquiries from the federal government about how to revive the project.

“We certainly have been speaking with different departments in how we might be able to find a near-term solution versus a much longer-term solution,” Sorensen told BNN Bloomberg in a story that appeared the day after the invasion began. “I do believe that the project still has substantial merit in reducing the amount of dependence on Russian gas and this is one of the principal reasons I think we’ve seen a revived interest.”

Pieridae didn’t respond to queries from DeSmog.

“Frankly, I’m horrified that the response to this moment is to produce more fossil fuels,” Robin Tress, a climate campaigner with the Atlantic office of the advocacy group Council of Canadians, told DeSmog.

The Goldboro project as originally proposed would have added nearly four million tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere each year, according to calculations from Dalhousie University professor Larry Hughes. That would have made Nova Scotia’s climate targets unachievable.

Pieridae says it is now proposing a scaled-back version of the facility that would cost $2 billion and produce roughly 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually. It says that the project is consistent with “a net-zero emissions pathway forward,” referring to the goal supported by most countries of eliminating or neutralizing all global emissions by 2050.

But a report last year from the International Energy Agency said that in order to achieve the climate-stabilizing goal of net-zero there must be “no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects.”

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that without drastic cuts to global emissions more than three billion people could face catastrophic threats. However, the IPCC report was largely drowned out by media coverage of Russia invading Ukraine.

“The answer to this crisis [in Europe] is not more gas,” Jim Emberger, spokesperson for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance, told DeSmog. “It’s to go to renewables as soon as possible in a much bigger way than we’ve done before. In the end, more gas means more dependency on somebody.”

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Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate journalist based in New York City. He is author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed?

Featured image: A natural gas pipeline sign near Toronto. Credit: Raysonho (CC0 1.0)

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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What was the need for all that happened in the period since mid-December when Russia transmitted to Washington its demands for security guarantee? This question will haunt US president Joe Biden long after he retires from public life. The foreign policy legacy of his presidency and the reputation of this much-vaunted 80-year old politician with a half-century’s record in public life, much of it supposedly in the domain of American foreign policy are in tatters — irreparable. 

News has appeared that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has conceded that he willing to concede to the Russian demand that his country will not seek to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation! The announcement came in an interview with the ABC News where he revealed that he is no longer pressing for Ukraine’s Nato membership! 

In fact, Zelensky lets the cat out of the bag by casually adding, “I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago after we understood that… Nato is not prepared to accept Ukraine.”  

Zelensky explains why: “The alliance is afraid of controversial things, and confrontation with Russia.” 

This comes after his earlier revelation that he is “open to compromise” on the sovereignty of the two breakaway republics of  Lugansk and Donetsk in the eastern Donbass region and on the status of Crimea. 

The ABC News reportedly telecast the interview on Monday night Eastern Time. Since then, the duo in the Biden team who piloted the Ukraine strategy, those apocalyptic “sanctions from hell” and the demonisation of Vladimir Putin through the recent months — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — are nowhere to be seen. 

That duo of East European descent in the driving seat — Blinken driving and Nuland by his side navigating him — ought to offer and explanation for all this charade playing out, which is virtually demolishing the American prestige as a superpower. 

Questions are galore. Principally, if it is so easy to work out a compromise over Russia’s legitimate security demands, especially regarding Ukraine’s Nato membership and the alliance’s further expansion, why was Biden so very stubborn in his refusal to even discuss it, given the urgency of the matter? 

Can it be that Biden was acting smart to create a fait accompli for Moscow by formalising Ukraine’s membership at the forthcoming Nato summit on June 29-30 in Madrid?

What’s the need to destabilise the European economies and rock the world oil market at a  juncture when most economies are entering on a path of post-pandemic economic recovery? 

What explains this unnatural obsession on the part of Biden over Ukraine’s regime? 

Why such visceral hatred on Biden’s part toward Russia, something unworthy of an 80-year old world statesman?

Why is it that the economic war against Russia has become such a very personal affair for Biden, as his White House speech in Tuesday shows? 

But such an ignominious end to this entire episode over Ukraine’s Nato membership was entirely to be anticipated. Fundamentally, this is an existential issue for Russia. Whereas, Biden, Blinken and Nuland are dilettantes sitting 10000 kms away indulging in old neocon pastimes of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, threatening them, disciplining them or punishing them for defying America’s diktat. 

Even after Zelensky spoke, what has been Biden’s reaction? He scheduled a speech to announce that the US shall no longer import oil from Russia. Shouldn’t he have heaved a sigh of relief that this war in Ukraine is petering out?

Instead, he resorted to this strange toothless measure to impress the  American audience that he is still on a winning streak promoting democracy in faraway lands. Isn’t such gimmick an insult to the gullible American public? 

Biden took this new step after Europeans told him plainly that they are not interested in such a move against Russia, given their heavy reliance on Russian oil. 

Second, Biden doesn’t seem to know or has pretended otherwise that America is actually shooting at its own feet. For, Russian prices are highly competitive and American companies will now have to pay much more to source heavy grade oil suitable for their refineries. 

Biden already swallowed his pride and sent a team of officials to Venezuela, a country under crippling US sanctions, to beg for oil from President Nicolas Maduro (who was on CIA hit list not too long ago for being a socialist) to replace Russian oil. 

Maduro sent them back suggesting a broader mutually beneficial relationship between Venezuela and America. All this drama took place in broad daylight witnessed by the entire Western Hemisphere. Wouldn’t they be laughing that America’s president is a man of straw? 

Biden claims he is making sure that Putin won’t have money for his “war machine” if America stops buying oil from Russia. This is laughable, bordering on a lie. 

The US was purchasing about 12% of Russia’s total oil exports. Alright, that’s a decent figure. But, it isn’t as if Russia won’t have any other buyers in a world market where oil price has soared to $130 per barrel (thanks to Biden’s “sanctions from hell” against Russia)? 

Surely, any number of potential buyers would queue up if Russia were to offer competitive prices (as it had been doing for the US companies) to divert the extra stocks due to Biden’s boycott. 

At any rate, Biden can’t be unaware that Russia’s current budget is balanced on the belief that oil prices would be around $40-45 per barrel. With the current level of oil price, Russia is actually making a fortune! And the funny part is, it is a gift from Biden’s sanctions! 

Fundamentally, the problem today is that the American elite are delusional. While the rest of the world knows that in a multipolar world, the US’ capacity to force its will on other countries is inexorably in decline, the American elite shut their eyes to that reality. The present ridiculous situation happened only due to this arrogance and self-deception.   

The strategic defeat that Washington has suffered will dent the US prestige worldwide, weaken its transatlantic leadership, unravel its Indo-Pacific strategy and accelerate the drain of American influence in the 21st century. Biden presidency will carry this heavy cross. 

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Featured image is from the public domain

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Nobody is talking about the blame that must be shouldered by the German government for the crisis and humanitarian disaster in Ukraine.

Sure Russia is guilty of a huge war crime in invading Ukraine,  Surely too, the US must  be blamed for creating the situation which led Russia and its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin to decide it had to invade to prevent Ukraine from being pulled into the US orbit with the goal that it would ultimately become a base for US offensive weapons — even nuclear weapons — on Russia’s border — something the US would never allow to happen anywhere in its  self-proclaimed “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Germany, the largest country in NATO after the US, is almost as guilty for this current war in Europe as is the United States.

Germany was only reunified without any difficulty after 45 years of being split in two following World War II, because of a deal struck by the US with Russia  in 1990 at which US Secretary of State James Baker stated that NATO would not be expanded “one inch ” eastward past the reunified German border.

Now it is widely known that despite having a powerful economy, Germany remains something of a lackey of the US in its foreign policy. Nonetheless, on this key important issue of expanding NATO, the country has always had considerable potential power. This is because  NATO’s own rules require that any new member of the alliance must be approved by all existing members of the organization. That is, to put it bluntly, if Germany were to have said, at some point, that no new members would be  given Germany’s approval for admission to NATO, then no new members could have joined, or even entertained the idea of joining.

That would have included — and could still include — Ukraine, which the US since at least the Obama administration’s second term, has been encouraged to think that it might someday be able to come under the protection of NATO, with its Article 5 provision requiring all members to come to the aid militarily of any member attacked by a non-member state.

It is precisely that desire by Ukraine,  together with US insistence on the false “right” of Ukraine to determine its own international relationships, that led to Russia’s launching this war.  Sure Ukraine can pursue its own foreign policies, but it has no “right” to join NATO. That organization’s member states must as one agree to admit another member. NATO is an exclusive club, not a anyone-can-join  book club.

Of all the NATO member states, Germany is the one that should be standing firmly behind that solemn promise by Secretary Baker and then-President George H. W. Bush not to move NATO’s boundary any closer (his actual words were “Not one inch closer”) ,to Russia than the eastern border of the country.

It was a kind of founding promise of the birth of a reunified Germany.

Instead Germany is supinely responding to the bloody war in Ukraine that its own cowardly  acquiessence to US anti-Russia actions has allowed to happen by announcing plans to significantly boost its arms spending (mostly by buying advanced military weapons from US arms makers).

German behavior towards the violation of US  promises made to Russia regarding NATO following German reunification is particularly ironic and tragic given that at the time of German reunification in 1991, when the issue of whether the newly unified Germany should be a part of NATO, either by simply adding East Germany to NATO under the existing German Federal Republic (West German) membership, or with a new membership for the new nation of Germany, a poll showed only 20 percent of Germans wanted the country to be in NATO at all.

Indeed, the very existence of NATO after the 1991 deal was being widely questioned even by some mainstream foreign affairs experts in United States. An artifact of the Cold War that began in the late 1940s, NATO was founded on April 4, 1949 (the day I was born!)) as a bulwark against Communist expansion in Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90, and the liberation of formerly captive nations of the Warsaw Bloc in those years, plus the friendly relations that quickly developed in the early 1990s between the US and Russia, NATO should have been dissolved.

Instead, President Clinton, elected in 1992, chose quickly after assuming office to begin encouraging its expansion, as well as using the alliance outside of its own boundaries as an extension of US empire, as in the bombings of Serbia and Kosovo, and intervention in the Bosnian civil war. By the time of the Bush Administration in 2001, NATO was operating as a multinational military force outside of the UN in Afghanistan, which is about as far from the North Atlantic as on can get, at least in the northern hemisphere.

And so here we are, with Russia defending what it considers its own regional security with a military assault on Ukraine, and the US being urged to make things worse by shipping lethal weapons to Ukraine’s military and even more insanely, to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine or parts of Ukraine — an action that could quickly lead to US and Russian planes shooting each other down, and potentially very rapidly to a nuclear war between the two nations with that have most of the world’s nuclear arsenal between them. Fortunately the Biden administration has resisted such nuclear brinksmanship.

The US could end this conflict quickly by simply announcing that it will honor the promise made to General Secretary Gorbachev 32 years ago, and will not ever  admit Ukraine  into NATO, nor seek to put US troops, weapons or nuclear arms in Ukraine.

But if the US won’t do the right thing to stop the bloodshed, Germany should have the integrity and self-confidence to do it: Just announce that the German government wants to honor the promise made that allowed for the smooth reunification of the country that a half century earlier created such death and  destruction across the whole European continent, and that it vows never to approve another NATO member state.

If the German government won’t make this promise, the German people should demand it.

As someone whose paternal grandfather was brought as a child by his parents to the US from Germany to escape war and ended up earning a Silver Star while driving an ambulance on the French front for the US Army during WWI, and who myself spent a year as a Schuler in a Gymnasium in Darmstadt, a German city that was destroyed by a British firebombing attack in World War II and saw vuvidly the kind of destruction and slaughter that war causes, I say to the German people:

Komm meine deutschen Freunde, gib dem Frieden eine Chance!  Die Zeit ist jetzt!

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Today, Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for unlawfully withholding records regarding FDA’s environmental assessment of genetically engineered (GE) salmon and a planned Ohio-based production facility—a major expansion from current capacity. The FOIA lawsuit comes on the heels of CFS and allies’ successful lawsuit holding FDA’s approval of GE salmon unlawful. FDA’s approval marked the first time any government in the world had approved a GE animal as food.

“Despite the 2020 court decision holding FDA’s first-ever approval of a genetically engineered food animal unlawful, FDA claims it needs nearly two years to produce records,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney at Center for Food Safety. “But our request is narrow and straightforward: it’s time for FDA to tell the public about the possible environmental and ecological effects of genetically engineered salmon, including any effects to endangered wild salmon species.”

AquaBounty’s AquAdvantage GE salmon is produced with DNA from Atlantic salmon, Pacific king salmon, and Arctic Ocean eelpout. In 2016, CFS and Earthjustice—representing a broad client coalition of environmental, consumer, commercial and recreational fishing organizations and the Quinault Indian Nation—sued FDA over the agency’s approval of GE salmon, citing inadequate environmental assessments and broad risks to ecosystems.

In 2020, in a victory for CFS and allies, a California district court ruled the FDA violated core federal environmental laws in approving GE salmon, including failing to fully assess the serious environmental consequences of approving a GE salmon and the full extent of plans to grow and commercialize the salmon in the U.S. and around the world. The court sent the approval back to FDA to undertake more thorough environmental analyses to inform the public about the potential risks.

After that ruling, AquaBounty announced plans to build a $200 million facility, expanding its production of GE salmon by 10,000 metric tons. This operation will be eight times larger than its existing Indiana facility. With action in play to produce GE salmon on an even larger scale, it is even more important to understand the environmental and ecological risks of producing and marketing GE salmon for human consumption.

In October 2021, CFS submitted a FOIA request to FDA, seeking all documents related to FDA’s environmental assessments of AquaBounty’s AquAdvantage salmon and the planned Ohio facility, pursuant to the district court’s ruling. FDA is yet to produce the records, prompting CFS to now sue FDA under FOIA.

“We are concerned that FDA is not paying careful attention to AquaBounty’s planned expansion in Ohio,” said Jaydee Hanson, policy director at Center for Food Safety. “After years of touting that it will grow its fish in tanks that recycle the water, the company now plans to pump water from the aquifer that supplies community drinking water and dump wastewater back into a nearby stream. Without the requested documents, we have no way to know if FDA has fully considered the effects this facility will have on the local environment.”

CFS is committed to ensuring the public has access to information concerning government regulation of food production and labeling. CFS’s FOIA program is committed to upholding the principles embodied in FOIA, such as maintaining an open and transparent government.

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In the first study of its kind, Swedish researchers found 5G radiation causes typical symptoms indicative of “microwave syndrome.” The study, published in the journal Medicinsk Access, also confirmed that non-ionizing radiation — well below levels allowed by authorities — can cause health problems.

In the first study of its kind, Swedish researchers found 5G radiation causes typical symptoms indicative of “microwave syndrome.”

The study, published in the journal Medicinsk Access, also confirmed that non-ionizing radiation— well below levels allowed by authorities — can cause health problems.

According to the study, a 5G base station installed on the roof of an apartment building caused extremely high levels of non-ionizing radiation in the apartment of the two persons living just below the station.

Within a few days of exposure, the residents of the apartment developed symptoms of microwave syndrome. After moving to a place with lower radiation, the symptoms quickly decreased or disappeared.

Measurements before and after the installation of the 5G installation showed that switching to 5G led to an increase in radiation from 9 milliWatts/m2 to a maximum of 1,690 milliWatts/m2 — high enough for both acute and long-term health effects.

Measurements were taken both before 5G deployment and on several occasions afterward.

Before 5G was installed there were already base stations for 3G or 4G in the same location directly above the apartment. So even though the radiation level before switching to 5G was high, after switching on 5G, the levels increased 188 times.

This shows that non-ionizing radiation from a 5G base station placed on a roof close to a living space can be exceedingly high.

The highest radiation level was detected in the bedroom, located just 5 meters below the base station, prompting the authors of the study to call for further investigation into the effects on people exposed to 5G radiation levels.

“It is shocking that this is the first study performed on 5G health effects, three years after the roll-out of this technology started and after having already exposed the population to 5G high-intensity pulsed microwave radiation for several years,” Mona Nilsson, managing director of the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation and co-author of the study, told The Defender.

Nilsson added:

“There are no studies that show that this technology and the increasing and common exposure to 5G and 4G base stations at levels allowed by the government is safe. On the contrary, studies have repeatedly and convincingly showed increased risk of the microwave syndrome and cancer, at levels that are far below the levels that the government and the telecom companies falsely claim are safe.”

Oncologist and researcher Dr. Lennart Hardell from the Environment and Cancer Research Foundation, co-authored the study with Nilsson.

Tracking the subjects’ symptoms

In the study, a man and a woman, ages 63 and 62 years old, were exposed to 5G from the roof of their apartment building, beginning in November 2021. The individuals recorded their symptoms both before and after the exposure began.

Table 1 below, column 1, lists typical symptoms of microwave syndrome.

The second column (Before 5G) displays the self-assessed symptoms before 5G was deployed in the apartment, the third column (With 5G) shows the self-assessment after 5G was installed, and the fourth column (After 5G) indicates the perceived symptoms after moving to the new apartment, which had much lower non-ionizing radiation levels.

Table 1. Clinical symptoms graded 0-10, where: 0 = No symptoms, 1 = Mild symptoms, 10 = Unbearable pain and/or discomfort. Previously healthy man and woman, ages 63 and 62, respectively.

The man and the woman experienced fatigue, sleeping problems, dizziness, emotional effects such as irritability and depression, nose bleeds, tinnitus, heart symptoms, memory problems and skin issues, all typically associated with microwave syndrome.

All symptoms ceased or decreased within 24 hours (for the man) and 1-3 days (for the woman) of moving to the new apartment with low radiation levels.

Microwave syndrome — a brief history

Microwave syndrome was described in the 1970s by scientists in the former Soviet Union who were researching occupational risks due to exposure to non-ionizing radiation.

The Soviet researchers described multiple symptoms of the syndrome, including fatigue, dizziness, headaches, difficulty sleeping, concentration problems, mood swings, tinnitus, heart palpitations and memory loss.

The researchers noted the symptoms subsided when exposure to non-ionizing radiation ceased or decreased.

The most common cause of microwave syndrome symptoms is non-ionizing radiation exposure from cell phones, base stations for wireless communication, WiFi and smart meters.

The exposed person usually experiences symptoms in several bodily organs, although most often the symptoms are related to the central nervous system and the heart.

The symptoms vary from person to person, as sensitivity to microwave radiation is individual.

Several studies during the last 20 years have shown increased risk of microwave syndrome symptoms among people living near mobile phone base stations.

For example, a study out of India showed increased incidences of sleeping problems, headaches, dizziness, irritability, concentration problems and high blood pressure.

Increased non-ionizing radiation due to 5G

The Swedish study not only showed that 5G causes microwave syndrome almost immediately, but it also found the levels of non-ionizing radiation increased massively.

The values measured ​​in the home of the man and woman in the study (maximum 1,690 milliWatts/m2) are significantly lower than those deemed safe (10,000 milliWatts/m2 as an average value over 6 minutes) ​​by the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM).

Because microwave radiation tends to fluctuate wildly, and SSM’s reference is an average value, this means the maximum value is allowed to be significantly higher than 10,000 milliWatts/m2, and it does not protect against large fluctuations which are in fact more biologically active.

Furthermore, SSM’s reference value ​​does not protect against long-term harmful effects, such as the microwave syndrome or cancer, that come with prolonged exposure from base stations, as is the case with exposure in homes, offices or schools.

The reference value applies only to protection against immediate effects as a result of radiation so intense that it heats up tissues within 30 minutes.

This means the general public is completely unprotected against effects other than acute thermal damage, despite the fact that such effects have been shown to cause nervous system harm, oxidative stress and DNA damage.

Study shows need to revisit ‘safe’ levels of non-ionizing radiation

Prior to their study, the authors noted, there were no scientific studies showing no risk of harmful health effects from chronic exposure to non-ionizing radiation from base stations at levels corresponding to SSM’s reference value, or at the levels measured in this case study.

There are not even any studies of any long-term risks of combining the non-ionizing radiation from 4G and 5G.

Hardell and Nilsson concluded, “To claim that exposure to radiation does not entail risks because the exposure is lower than SSM’s reference value thus has no scientific basis at all.”

In 2016, a group of researchers and doctors recommended maximum exposure during the day should be 0.1 and at night 0.01 milliWatts/m2.

However, despite extensive evidence of health risks, microwave radiation in the environment is increasing sharply. Still, the outdated reference value is used despite the fact it is demonstrably lacking protection against microwave syndrome and many other health risks.

Lennart Hardell and Mona Nilsson called for in-depth investigations of persons complaining of microwave syndrome-related problems who may be exposed to elevated levels of microwave radiation.

“Careful [patient] history must be taken to investigate various sources of microwave radiation,” they wrote. “In addition, the investigation should be supplemented with measurement of the radiation both in the home and at the workplace.”

Such patients must be properly investigated and given a medical diagnosis, with careful consideration taken to eliminate or reduce the disease-causing factor — that is, reduce exposure to non-ionizing radiation, as being the most important. This should be done as early as possible to reduce the risk of irreversible damage or chronic disease.

Furthermore, it has to be emphasized that the measured values in the studied apartment after the installation of 5G make the home uninhabitable from a medical point of view, regardless of the fact that the radiation is below the current reference values.

Nilsson said the telecommunications industry is “trying its hardest” to keep any information about the health hazards of this technology from the public “with the help of their captured organizations, the World Health Organization, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection and other governmental agencies.”

She added: “Major telecom companies know the radiation they force on the public is dangerous. They have known it for decades, but still they do all they can to hide the truth from the public and force the technology on us all.”

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has stopped mandatory hospital reporting of COVID-19 deaths and the CDC is hiding data about the effectiveness of the booster shots in people aged 18 to 64, or those least likely to benefit from the shot

The New York Post notes the FDA overruled an expert advisory committee and the CDC overruled their own experts to promote the booster to all age groups. Scientists must use Israeli data, which show little to no difference in those boosted or not boosted until people are over age 65

The CDC justifies not releasing the data saying it was “not ready for prime time,” as it would be misinterpreted and is based on 10% of the population, or the same sample size that has been used for influenza statistics for years

Data from independent researchers and insurance companies recording all-cause death rates show the number who have died in 2021 after the release of the vaccine far exceeds the all-cause death rate in 2020 during the height of the infection

It is easy to understand why the HHS and CDC want to hide this data from scrutiny as it’s more difficult to ignore with each passing day that the infection didn’t kill the number of people health experts claimed and that the vaccine is killing far more than the virus is

*

Data is the foundation of scientific analysis. Without data, researchers are left unable to draw conclusions, which leaves public health experts unable to accurately make recommendations. But that appears to be exactly what the CDC¹ and Health and Human Services (HHS)² are doing. The CDC is hiding data and the HHS is no longer collecting data, which one U.S. official has called “incomprehensible.”³

Since the World Health Organization announced a pandemic, multiple organizations began tracking data, including the number of people who were sick with COVID-19, in the hospital with or had died from it. As I have written, later the number of “cases” was reported. These were people who had a positive PCR test and did not necessarily have symptoms.

Whistleblowers working with attorney Thomas Renz, who is investigating hospital abuses,⁴ have reported that hospitals are incentivized to admit PCR positive patients, prescribe remdesivir,⁵ place patients on ventilators and include COVID on death certificates. All told, some believe hospitals could receive up to $100,000 for each patient who meets all the incentivized criteria.⁶

Of course, “fact” checkers immediately jumped on that claim in an effort to “debunk” what they call “false” information.^7,8 But they simply contradicted themselves in the “fact” checking by changing the semantics of how COVID deaths are counted and rewording of how hospitals are compensated for COVID patients from “paid more” to receiving a “bump” in payment. So what’s the difference? They’re still getting paid more for COVID patients.

In analyzing this, it’s important to look at how data of all sorts are collected on you and everyone else in the world. For example:

Nearly everything people do is digitally recorded, analyzed and extrapolated for decision making. You leave a digital footprint each time you use your smartphone or computer. One study showed digital cookies may have lifetimes up to 8,000 years.⁹ In 2010, it was estimated there were 2 zettabytes (ZB) of data created.¹⁰

To put this into perspective, it would take 184 million football fields of 1 GB thumb drives laid end to end to contain the information. Data is so important that the organization that appears to be leading The Great Reset — the World Economic Forum — is also interested in data and estimates there would be 44 ZB of data collected in 2020.¹¹

So, with all that in mind, in a world where data is king^12,13,14 the HHS decision to hide COVID-19 data begs the question: What do they want to hide? Are they stopping the flow of data, as opposed to hiding data like the CDC, to reach the same end, where the data are not available for examination and analysis?

HHS Ends Hospital COVID Death Reports

January 6, 2022, the HHS announced¹⁵ changes to the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities. The new guidelines note “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” which include the “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”

However, according to one news report, the guideline did not receive public attention until January 14, 2022, when it was tweeted by Dr. Jorge Caballero,¹⁶ who asked why the government no longer wanted these daily reports beginning February 2, 2022. By January 28, 2022, just like they did with the report on COVID-19 hospital reimbursements, fact-checkers were busy posting viral social media posts claiming Caballero’s conclusions were not correct.

Yet, as I mentioned, the announcement was published on the HHS website — so how could it be false? You can go to the website¹⁷ and read it for yourself. Under the section, “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” it says: “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.” So how could fact-checkers “debunk” that?

To create a fact check that claimed this was “false,” the fact-checkers simply changed the headline. So, while the HHS publicly announced they would no longer require hospitals to report deaths from COVID-19, fact-checkers reported the U.S. government was not ending daily COVID death reporting.

MSN¹⁸ fact-checkers reported that Nancy Foster from the American Hospital Association had suggested the change could “streamline data collection.” Yet, the HHS system used direct reporting from ICD medical diagnosis codes entered into the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.

In an emailed statement, Foster reported that she believes the HHS was no longer collecting data because they were receiving comprehensive data from public health agencies, including death certificates reported to the National Center for Health Statistics and used by the CDC in its death data reporting. Despite supporting the HHS decision, the agency did not respond to a request by MSN on the reason for the change.

HHS had worked with major electronic medical records (EMR) manufacturers, so 85% of hospital reporting was programmed into their computer, and you can’t get more streamlined than that. January 2021, Alex C. Madrigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project,¹⁹ wrote:²⁰

“In a series of analyses that we ran over the past several months, we came to nearly the opposite conclusion of other media outlets. The hospitalization data coming out of HHS are now the best and most granular publicly available data on the pandemic. This information has changed the response to the pandemic for the better.”

An unnamed federal health official spoke with a reporter from WSWS,²¹ calling the move to stop reporting COVID-29 hospital deaths “incomprehensible.” The official added, “It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”

February 20, 2022, The New York Times²² reported that the CDC has not published large parts of the data they collected during the COVID pandemic. In fact, most of the information they collected in the past year on hospitalizations has not been made public.

The CDC published data on the effectiveness of the COVID-19 boosters in people younger than 65 in early February 2022. However, as The New York Times points out, the data did not cover individuals from 18 to 49 years old.²³ This also is the group least likely to benefit from the genetic therapy shot, since CDC data²⁴ demonstrate they have some of the lowest rates of severe disease and death.

The New York Post²⁵ notes that the FDA overruled an expert advisory committee and the CDC overruled their own experts to promote the boosters for all age groups. After ensuring the boosters would be open to all people, the CDC then did not release much of the data despite pleas from scientists.

A look at the published data for those 50 to 65 years shows the booster reduces the risk of death from 4 in 1 million to 1 in 1 million. Further analysis shows that 75% of the additional three people out of 1 million who are helped by the booster shot have at least four comorbidities.²⁶

Unfortunately, since the CDC has not released the raw data, U.S. scientists have had to rely on Israeli data. One study²⁷ published in The New England Journal of Medicine gathered information from 4.6 million people 16 years and older who had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. They then compared severe illness and death between those who had had a booster dose and those who had not.

The data showed the group of individuals from 16 to 29 years had zero deaths whether they were boosted or not boosted. Likewise, the group from 30 to 39 years had one death whether they were boosted or not boosted. In fact, the difference in death rate did not rise until the participants were 60 to 69 years, at which point the non-boosted group had 44 deaths and the boosted group had 32 deaths.

In addition to the number of deaths rising in the boosted and non-boosted groups, the percentage of people in those age categories also declined, much like you would find in the general population where the death rate rises as people age.

CDC Claims Data May Be Misinterpreted

Kristen Nordlund is a spokeswoman for the CDC. In her comments to The New York Times,²⁸ she said the data are being slowly released since, “basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” Another reason she cited was the information may be misinterpreted to mean the vaccines are ineffective.

Nordlund gave a third reason for not releasing the data, saying that the data they have is based on 10% of the U.S. population, which the Times reporter points out is the same sample size used to track influenza each year. Jessica Malaty Rivera is an epidemiologist. She spoke with the Times, saying,²⁹ “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years.”

She went on to say, “We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats.” In an opinion piece, Staten Island Advance’s Tom Wrobleski characterizes the CDC’s decision, writing about what has happened to most people who have been willing to speak out:³⁰

“We’re told to have faith in the CDC, in Dr. Anthony Fauci, in all the experts who are trained to handle public health crises. But we can’t have trust if vital information is withheld from us.

Because then it becomes a case of, “Shut up and do what we say. We’re the experts. You don’t need to know how we come to our decisions. We know what’s best.” And if you question the received wisdom, you’re suddenly a dangerous person. You’re likened to a terrorist. You’re told you want people to die. You get banned from social media.

If you dare protest, you can have your bank account frozen and your vehicle insurance suspended, as we saw during the Freedom Convoy protest in Canada. You can get trampled by police on horseback.

Withholding information only makes people more skeptical. It breeds suspicion. Or mere doubt. The CDC needs to do better if it wants our trust.”

The Jab Is Deadlier Than COVID if You’re Under 80

With the end of the HHS COVID death reporting system, the only means of tracking COVID deaths will now rely on the collection of data from death certificates at the state level. However, as the unnamed official told the WSWS reporter:³¹

“… deaths are reported by the counties/states but the process is very slow and many coroners are actually not wanting to cite COVID as the reason, while hospitals rely on diagnoses.”

This last part of the sentence may refer to the hospital incentives for a COVID diagnosis, which increases the potential it would be listed in the ICD codes that were communicated to the HHS. Although the CDC and HHS would like the data to remain hidden, a cost-benefit analysis³² by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp revealed the jab is deadlier than the infection in anyone under the age of 80.

The analysis looked at publicly available official data from the U.S. and U.K. for all age groups and compared all-cause mortality to the risk of dying from COVID-19. Seneff and Dopp wrote:³³

“As of 6 February 2022, based on publicly available official UK and US data, all age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID-19 inoculation than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID-19 death.

All age groups under 80 years old have virtually no benefit from receiving a COVID-19 inoculation, and the younger ages incur significant risk. This analysis is conservative because it ignores the fact that inoculation-induced adverse events such as thrombosis, myocarditis, Bell’s palsy, and other vaccine-induced injuries can lead to shortened life span.”

Their analysis is upheld by OneAmerica’s announcement³⁴ that the death rate in working-age Americans from 18 to 64 years in the third quarter of 2021 was 40% higher than prepandemic levels. This finding is stunning since one of the most reliable data points we have is all-cause mortality.

It is a very hard statistic to massage since people are either dead or they’re not. Their inclusion in the national death index database is based on one primary criterion — they’ve died — regardless of the cause. As noted in a (not peer-reviewed) study led by scientist Denis Rancourt, who looked at U.S. mortality between March 2020 and October 2021:³⁵

“All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting true catastrophic events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge in deaths from any cause.”

Other Insurance Companies Recording Similar Results

Other insurance companies that are citing higher mortality rates³⁶ include Hartford Insurance Group, which announced mortality increased 32% from 2019 and 20% from 2020 before the shots. Lincoln National also reported death claims have increased 13.7% year over year and 54% in quarter 4 compared to 2019. Funeral homes are posting an increase in burials and cremations in 2021 over 2020.³⁷

Similar numbers are also being reported in other countries. A large German health insurance company reported^38,39 company data were nearly 14 times greater than the number of deaths reported by the German government. The insurance data are gathered directly from doctors applying for payment from a sample of 10.9 million people.

Despite mass injection campaigns, Silicon Valley software engineer Ben M. (@USMortality) revealed that in the 13 weeks before November 28, 2021, about 107,700 seniors died above the normal rate, despite a 98.7% vaccination rate.⁴⁰

He also used data from the CDC, census.gov and his own calculations to show excess deaths rising in Vermont, even as the majority of adults have been injected. “Vermont had 71% of their entire population vaccinated by June 1, 2021,” he tweeted. “That’s 83% of their adult population, yet they are seeing the most excess deaths now since the pandemic!”⁴¹

It is easy to see why the HHS and CDC would like to hide these numbers from scrutiny. It is becoming more difficult to ignore with each passing day that the infection didn’t kill the number of people health experts claimed and the vaccine is killing far more than the virus.

*

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Notes

¹ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York Post, February 27, 2022

^2, 3 World Socialist Website, February 3, 2022

^4, 6 The Desert Review, December 27, 2021

⁵ Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, February 2, 2022, Coding for NCTAP section

⁷ USA Today Fact Check: Hospitals Get Paid More for COVID-19. April 24, 2020

⁸ Medtronic. Fact Check: Hospitals Get Paid More April 27, 2020

⁹ BBN Times, June 25, 2018, para 3

¹⁰ Forbes, March 20, 2020 para 1

¹¹ World Economic Forum, April 17, 2019

¹² IPSOS, June 17, 2020

¹³ Istanbul University Press, Who Runs the World: Data

¹⁴ Western Digital Blog, June 14, 2017

^15, 17 Health Data.gov, January 6, 2022

¹⁶ Twitter, Dr. Jorge Caballero

¹⁸ MSN, January 28, 2022, Headline and What We Found

¹⁹ The COVID Tracking Project, About

²⁰ The Atlantic, January 18, 2021

²¹ WSWS, February 3, 2022

^22, 23 The New York Times, February 20, 2022

²⁴ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 31, 2022

²⁵ The New York Post, February 27, 2022

²⁶ The New York Post, February 27, 2022 para 5

²⁷ NEJM, 2021; 385:2421

²⁸ The New York Times, February 20, 2022 para 7

²⁹ The New York Times, February 20, 2022 para 4 image 2

³⁰ SI Live, February 27, 2022

³¹ WSWS, February 3, 2022, para 8 and last sentence

^32, 33 COVID-19 and All-Cause Mortality Data Analysis by Kathy Dopp and Stephanie Seneff (PDF)

³⁴ The Center Square, January 1, 2022

³⁵ Nature of the COVID-Era Public Health Disaster in the USA, From All-Cause Mortality and Socio-Geo-Economic and Climatic Data

³⁶ Zero Hedge, February 5, 2022

³⁷ Zero Hedge, February 5, 2022, Search “28% increase in September” para

³⁸ Health Impact News, February 23, 2022

³⁹ Greater Mountain Publishing, February 27, 2022

⁴⁰ Twitter, Ben M. November 28, 2021

⁴¹ Twitter, Ben M. November 24, 2021

Featured image is from Mercola

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that the widely used insecticide malathion does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected animal or plant and refused to implement any immediate, enforceable measures to protect species from the chemical poison.

Today’s final biological opinion, which relies on scientifically unfounded assessment methods imposed during the Trump administration, stands in sharp contrast to the agency’s 2017 conclusion that 1,284 species would likely be jeopardized by malathion.

The opinion even backtracked from a draft biological opinion released by the Service just last year, which also used the debunked Trump-era methodology promoted by the pesticide industry to determine that 78 endangered plant and animal species were jeopardized by the pesticide.

“The Biden administration has squandered a historic opportunity to rein in the dangerous use of one of the world’s worst neurotoxic pesticides,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “By ignoring the best available science and choosing to rely on promises of good behavior by the pesticide makers rather than real on-the-ground conservation measures, the Biden administration is condemning wildlife to extinction with a wink and a nod. This decision to cave to powerful special interest groups will do far-reaching harm to our most endangered wildlife.”

One week ago the National Marine Fisheries Service, a sister agency to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, released an updated biological opinion that determined malathion and two other toxic organophosphate pesticides are causing jeopardy to virtually every endangered U.S. salmon, sturgeon and steelhead species, as well as to Puget Sound orcas.

The Fisheries Service opinion debunks the Trump methodology that based harm analyses on historic use data known to be incomplete and unreliable. Specifically, the Fisheries Service found that: “Given the degree of uncertainty and speculation associated with these factors, and usage information generally, we determined that in most cases we cannot rely on them to construct assumptions about the exposure potential and at the same time ensure listed species will not be jeopardized.”

Yet the Fish and Wildlife Service continued to heavily rely on the same historic use data in its analyses to reach conclusions that the pesticide would not harm endangered species into the future.

The widely disparate findings by the two agencies were highlighted in harm assessments for bull trout and salmon, biologically similar species that share habitat in the Pacific Northwest. The Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that malathion won’t harm bull trout in Pacific Northwest streams; meanwhile the Fisheries Service has concluded that the use of the very same chemical in the very same streams is pushing every Pacific salmon to extinction.

“One’s based on sound science, and one’s based on industry-driven politics,” said Burd. “The Fisheries Service is bravely taking a stand to prevent extinctions while the Fish and Wildlife is continuing to cower to an anti-science, anti-endangered species agenda.”

Today’s final biological opinion restricts some uses of malathion, in theory, but contains loopholes that render important restrictions meaningless in the real world. For example, mosquito spraying with malathion is restricted “where feasible.” But what renders the restrictions unfeasible is undefined, allowing continued spraying of the pesticide.

This analysis is the first nationwide biological opinion completed by the Fish and Wildlife Service for any pesticide. But it embraced industry friendly methodologies for species’ harm assessments that were ordered after a direct intervention by President Trump’s secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt.

“Why the Biden administration is hiding behind David Bernhardt’s twisted legal thinking so that it can ignore the heartbreaking extinction crisis is beyond dumbfounding,” said Burd. “President Biden’s conservation promises are meaningless if this administration doesn’t even have the backbone to stand up to the corporations poisoning our planet and our children.”

Around 1 million pounds of malathion are used in the United States each year. The insecticide is a neurotoxin that is part of the dangerous class of old pesticides called organophosphates. Organophosphates have been used as nerve agents in chemical warfare and have been linked to Gulf War syndrome, which causes fatigue, headaches, skin problems and breathing disorders in humans.

Background

In January 2017 the EPA completed its biological evaluation on malathion, determining that 97% of federally protected species are likely harmed by malathion. Following this announcement, Dow AgroSciences officials asked the Trump administration to suspend the assessments.

In May 2017 the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that after nearly four years of work its draft biological opinion assessing the pesticide’s harms was nearly complete and would be ready for public comment within months. As Fish and Wildlife Service career staffers were preparing to make the biological opinion available for public comment, they briefed Trump’s political appointees, including then-acting Interior Secretary Bernhardt, on the results of the agency’s nearly four years of rigorous scientific review.

Following this briefing, top officials at Trump’s Department of the Interior, including Bernhardt, acted to indefinitely suspend the release of the Service’s assessment. The Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to undermine those findings were highlighted in a New York Times investigation.

A document obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through the Freedom of Information Act revealed the assessments were suspended after the top political appointees were briefed on the fact that the Service’s analysis had determined that malathion jeopardized the continued existence of 1,284 protected species.

In the intervening years, the findings have prompted no action by the EPA to limit malathion’s use in areas where species are imperiled by it.

As part of a legal agreement, the Fish and Wildlife Service was required to issue a biological opinion by the end of 2017 identifying ways to safeguard endangered species from malathion, as well as two other organophosphate insecticides, chlorpyrifos and diazinon, as required by the Endangered Species Act. The Trump administration refused to abide by the legal agreement.

In May of 2018 the Center again sued the EPA and Service for failing to comply with its duty to study the impacts of malathion, prompting the agency to release today’s assessment.

Last month the Center sued the Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to complete endangered species consultations on the pesticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon.

*

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If you had told us just four days ago that the Biden administration was funding secret bio labs in Ukraine of all places, we would not have believed you. Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to put that on TV. No thanks. 

Then, if you told us that not only did the administration fund these secret bio labs in Ukraine, but that they then failed to secure the deadly contents of those labs before the Russian invasion—an invasion they knew was coming, an invasion they helped encourage—if you had told us that four days ago, we would have dismissed you as a nut. It was just too preposterous. We will not want anything to do with a story like that. There was no way it could be true. It was too far out. In any case, we already knew for a fact that that story was false. How do we know that? Because we read USA Today, America’s newspaper.

Within hours of the Russian invasion, USA Today published a rebuttal to all those crazies who were yammering on about secret Ukrainian bio labs. Here was the headline: “Fact check: False claim of US biolabs in Ukraine tied to Russian disinformation campaign.”

So, if you look carefully at the story—and we did because we were interested—you notice that this fact check was sourced to Ukrainian government unnamed officials and then Biden State Department officials. These were not exactly objective sources on this subject, but still the story seemed definitive. It was totally emphatic. “Russia has teamed up with China to further amplify the false claim of U.S. labs in Ukraine.” 

OK. USA Today says it’s Russian disinformation. Maybe it is. On to the next story, but the fact checks didn’t stop. That was weird. We kept seeing the same check again and again. It was almost like despite endless official clarification, some people refused to believe the Biden administration. They preferred Russian propaganda instead and we assume they must be QAnon members. We assume that because Foreign Policy Magazine told us that. According to Foreign Policy, QAnon, whatever that is, was frantically disseminating “false claims of U.S. bio warfare labs in Ukraine.” 

Those labs obviously didn’t exist. It was all just another lie from the Russians who lie for a living. Then the European Union… weighed in, throwing its credibility behind the same claim. These are conspiracy theories, the EU told us, they’re lies spread by Putin. An EU spokesmen then reminded us that, “the credibility of information provided by the Kremlin is in general, very doubtful and low.” That was good to know.

“Russian disinformation has a track record of promoting manipulative narratives about biological weapons and alleged secret labs.” 

Yeah. We’re not going to do a segment about secret labs in Ukraine. Last thing we want to do on this show is traffic in Russian disinformation spread by QAnon, so we took a pass on that story. And that’s where things stood until yesterday when we happened to tune in to a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Toria Nuland was testifying so we were interested. Nuland was one of the people who brought us the Iraq War, never apologized for that and kept getting promoted because that’s how DC works. Toria Nuland is now Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of State in charge of Ukraine and she knows a lot about Ukraine.

In 2014, Toria Nuland engineered a coup in Ukraine in the name of democracy, of course. So, she is a highly informed source about Ukraine. So, she was having this colloquy with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during her testimony, and at one point, Rubio took a tack that we were not expecting at all. He asked Nuland if Ukraine had biological weapons.

We never imagined Ukraine would have biological weapons. Why would Ukraine have bioweapons? So, it seemed like a pretty strange question, but it wasn’t half as shocking as the answer he got. Here’s what Toria Nuland said.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?

VICTORIA NULAND: Ukraine has a biological research facilities, which, In fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of. So, we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.

Does Ukraine have biological weapons? Ugh, Ukraine has biological research facilities. What? You mean secret bio labs like the secret bio labs that Ukraine definitely doesn’t have? Ukraine has those? Yes, it does. And not only does Ukraine have secret bio labs, Toria Nuland said, whatever they’re doing in those labs is so dangerous and so scary that she is, “quite concerned” that the so-called research material inside those bio labs might fall into the hands of Russian forces.

Try not to use profanity on the air to describe our reaction. Our jaws dropped, let’s leave it there. Under oath in an open committee hearing, Toria Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe is, in fact, totally and completely true.

Woah, you don’t hear things like that every day in Washington. Talk about a showstopper and a dozen questions instantly jump to mind. What exactly are they doing in these secret Ukrainian bio labs? Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe. It’s hardly a hotbed of biomedical research. We’re assuming these weren’t pharmaceutical labs, probably not developing new Leukemia drugs. From your answer, Toria Nuland, we would assume because you all but said it, that there’s a military application to this research, that they were working on bioweapons. Again, your answer suggests that.

Why would we fund something like that in Ukraine, and why didn’t you secure the contents of these bio labs before the Russians arrived as you knew they would? And then why did you go out of your way to lie to the American public about all of this? If the “research materials” in these labs were to escape somehow and you seem very concerned about that, what would be the effect on Ukraine and then on the rest of the world? How can we prepare for the consequences of that, this thing that you’re worried about? Shouldn’t we be preparing? Because as it turns out, we’ve just spent the last two years living with the pathogen that began in another foreign bio lab funded by the United States government secretly.

Image on the right: Sen. Marco Rubio (Source: rubio.senate.gov)

So, this question is on our mind. It seems fair. Now that’s some of what we would have asked if we were U.S. Senators, which were not. Yes, there’s a time limit. Time limit be damned because this is kind of important, but Rubio did not ask those questions. Instead, he changed the subject and told us once again that Vladimir Putin is bad.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: If there is a biological or chemical weapon incident or… attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100%, it would be the Russians that would be behind it?

VICTORIA NULAND:  There is no doubt in my mind, senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they’re planning to do themselves.

OK, just get a pen. It’s a classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy, what they are planning to do themselves. That’s what Toria Nuland said. We almost laughed out loud. So, what you’re saying, Toria Nuland, if, for example, you were funding secret bio labs in Ukraine, but wanted to hide that fact from the people who are paying for it, in whose name you were doing it, then you might lie about it by claiming the Russians were lying about it. In other words, you might mount a disinformation campaign by claiming the other guy was mounting a disinformation campaign. Is that what you’re saying, Toria Nuland? It’s pretty funny.

What’s not funny is that this is all entirely real. We invited Marco Rubio on the show tonight to tell us what he knows about these bio labs. He declined to come. That invitation remains open. In the meantime, let’s review what little we do know about this. We’re going to start with a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday. Now, we would never do this. We never played anything like this on the show before because of course, we’re Americans and when we want to know what’s going on we ask our own officials, the people we elect and whose salaries we pay, because it’s our country.

We don’t go to foreign sources because we trust our own sources first. But when it turns out the people who represent us and run our government are lying to us and never apologize for it and doing horrific things in our names, then you have to open your mind a little bit and at least assess what other people are saying. So, here was the Russian claim.

IGOR KONASHENKOV: During the course of the special military operation, facts were uncovered of the key regime, mopping up traces of military biological program under development in Ukraine, financed by the U.S. Defense Ministry.

OK. So, that apparently—we hadn’t seen that until this afternoon we started poking around—that may have been the root of the conspiracy theories that the fact checks told us were Russian disinformation. Let’s quote it: “Military biological programs are under development in Ukraine, financed by the U.S. Defense Ministry.” That’s the Russian claim.

Separately, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said the Ukrainians were working on deadly pathogens, including plague and anthrax. Is that true? Now, obviously, we would not take Russia’s word for that ever, but we don’t have to take Russia’s word for that. The U.S. Defense Department has a website that contains this media clip about the opening of a biological research facility in Ukraine in 2010.

“U.S. Senator Dick Lugar applauded the opening of the Interim Central Reference Laboratory in Odessa, Ukraine, this week, announcing that it will be instrumental in researching dangerous pathogens used by bioterrorists. The level-3 bio-safety lab will be used to study anthrax, tularemia and Q Fever, as well as other dangerous pathogens.” 

Oh, OK. Then the National Pulse dug up 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that also explained that the Odessa based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.” So, what we’re doing—this is not the first time you’ve heard this story—we are funding the creation of deadly pathogens so we can study them and prevent people from getting infected with them. Maybe? There are lots of examples of this. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine has a handy web page explaining that American and Ukrainian scientists have worked on a whole bunch of different experiments like this.

Some of the projects include work on African swine fever virus, hemorrhagic fever virus, and various respiratory viruses. The interesting thing, the telling thing, is that the U.S. Embassy’s website also contains links to fact sheets about America’s support for biological research in Ukraine, but all those links are now dead. That’s weird. It’s our government. We pay for it. Again, they’re there in our name, in the name of American citizens, but we can no longer read their web page. How does that work, exactly? They have no right to lie to us.

The web page is archived, thankfully, and the fact sheets show Defense Department funding to laboratories in Ukraine. So that looks like proof. It’s not Russian disinformation. It’s totally real. Sorry USA Today, America’s newspaper, it’s real. You can look it up on the internet if you want. In the face of that evidence, the Pentagon is still lying about and in fact, they’re repeating the same unbelievably stupid and now thoroughly discredited lies the fact checkers have told for weeks now. Here’s the spokesman for the Pentagon, John Kirby, today.

JOHN KIRBY:  The Russian accusations are absurd. They’re laughable and, you know, in the words of my Irish Catholic grandfather, a bunch of malarkey. There’s nothing to it. It’s classic Russian propaganda and I wouldn’t, if I were you,…I wouldn’t give it a drop of ink worth…paying attention to.

REPORTER: Yeah, but can you explain to us what…has there been any relationship between the…?

JOHN KIRBY:  We are not, not, developing biological or chemical weapons inside Ukraine. It’s not happening.

If I were you, I wouldn’t devote a drop of ink to it. First of all, you didn’t get to make that decision, Mr. Bureaucrat. We have a free press in this country. You don’t get to decide, but you’ll notice at the end of that, Kirby refuses to answer the question. Has there been any relationship between the U.S. Pentagon and a bioweapons facility in Ukraine and if so, what is that relationship? That’s Russian disinformation! What’s the answer? We’re not developing WMD in Ukraine right now! OK, got it, but why are we funding this and what exactly are we funding?

We reached out to the State Department separately and they provided us with this very carefully worded statement: “The U.S. Department of Defense does not own or operate biological laboratories in Ukraine.” Not that anyone said they did. Continuing the quote, “Undersecretary Nuland was referring to Ukrainian diagnostic and biodefense laboratories during her testimony, which are not biological weapons facilities.” What’s the difference exactly? Continuing the quote, “These institutions counter biological threats throughout the country.”

So that means nothing. You could describe our nuclear stockpile correctly as defensive. Our nuclear weapons are not designed to preemptively kill anybody. They’re designed to prevent other people from killing us, but they’re still nuclear weapons. So, when you stop lying and telling us what’s going on here and why don’t you more specifically tell us why you didn’t secure these materials? So, yes, we’re funding secret bio labs in Ukraine, but they are diagnostic and biodefense laboratories that counter biological threats.

OK, if these are purely defensive labs, why was Toria Nuland so concerned that Russians would get ahold of the materials from these facilities? Other world powers have come to the obvious conclusion. Again, we hate to do this, but under these circumstances, we asked our own spokespeople, they lied. We’re going to the Foreign Ministry of China, a country we despise. Here’s what they said today. They’re calling on weapons inspectors to take a look at these facilities in Ukraine right away.

ZHAO LIJIAN: Over the past two decades, the United States has been blocking the establishment of a verification regime to the Biological Weapons Convention and refused to accept the inspection of biological facilities within and outside its borders. The move has further aggravated the concern of the international community. We, once again, urge the U.S. to provide full clarification of its bio militarization activities within and outside its borders and accept multilateral verification.

Oh, they’re putting Russian and Chinese propaganda on the screen! Yeah, we did. We also put U.S. government propaganda on the screen and the difference is we expect to be lied to by foreign governments. We’re not globalists. We believe in one country. It’s this country, the United States. We do not expect to be lied to by our government and we won’t accept it. But let’s get to the substance of what the Chinese government just said. We never agree with the Chinese government on anything, but in this case, they make a fair point. We now know that dangerous biological agents, whether you call them weapons or not is completely irrelevant because they can be used as weapons. Is a gun a weapon? Not when you’re quail hunting. When you’re in a gunfight, it is. It’s a ridiculous semantic debate.

Dangerous biological agents remain, thanks to the Biden administration, unsecured in a chaotic war zone. At some point we need to know how that happened, who made those decisions. We have a right to know and let’s hope someone in Congress, probably not Marco Rubio, but someone else, will get to the bottom of it, but in the meantime, we pray that somewhere, in the United States government, there as an adult who cares enough to get this situation under control immediately.

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This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson’s opening commentary on the March 9, 2022 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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The tragedy unfolding in Russia’s war on Ukraine because of the threat of NATO’s expansion to it’s borders was orchestrated by the US war party; therefore, it is of no surprise that calls for Ukraine to join NATO would be of great concern to Russia. 

Although FOX news is a Pro-war channel that backed the war on Iraq in 2003 and almost every other war conducted by the US, Tucker Carlson interviewed former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard who is basically anti war and asked her “but let’s stipulate – agree to agree – that it seems likely we could see some conflict between Russia and Ukraine soon. How should we view that?”

Gabbard said

“First of all, President Biden could end this crisis and prevent a war with Russia by doing something very simple,” she continued “Guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO – because if Ukraine became a member of NATO, that would put U.S. and NATO troops right on the doorstep of Russia, which, as Putin has laid out, would undermine their national security interests.”

Gabbard said that

“it gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people,” she went on to say that the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) controls the Biden administration but, in all fairness, they have controlled every administration since President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1954 warning about the rise of “misplaced powers.”  She said that the MIC will win in this situation because they will benefit from a new cold war, “Warmongers on both sides of Washington have drumming up those tensions. If they get Russia to invade Ukraine, then, again, it locks in this new Cold War.”

Launching a war is never the answer, that should be the very last option even if all else fails. However, Russia had its back against the wall no matter how you look at it because if the same situation presented itself at the doorstep of the US borders with Mexico, it is guaranteed that in a blink of an eye, the US military would respond.

Imagine if Washington’s perceived enemies such as China or Iran were shipping lethal arms to Mexico’s military forces under the leadership of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who happened to be hostile towards Washington.  Of course, it’s a hypothetical scenario, but what do you think would happen?

The US government would probably strike targets in Mexico within 48 hours or less.  Russia has legitimate concerns against the West.  If you don’t believe they do, here are some recent statements from US officials on the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.

Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) who told Neil Cavuto of FOX news “I would not rule out military action. I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table. So, I would hope the president keeps that option on the table”Cavuto asked “What does military action mean, senator?”  Wicker’s comment was based on the use ofnuclear weapons against Russia if all else fails should ring alarm bells around the globe especially when a country like Russia who also has nuclear weapons:

“Well, military action could mean that we standoff with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability,” the senator said. “It could mean that. It could mean that we participate – and I would not rule that out. I would not rule out American troops on the ground.”

Continued “we don’t rule out first-use nuclear action. We don’t think it will happen. But there’s certain things in negotiations – if you’re going to be tough – that you don’t take off the table. And so I think the president should say that everything is on the table”

For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been warning the West that eventually, they will have no choice but to respond to the NATO’s advances.  Putin has said that NATO is a threat to Russia’s security.  NATO is indeed a security threat to many independent nations.  According to Reuters, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi spoke to Putin in a phone call on February 24^th and said that NATO’s expansion eastward was a “serious threat” to the region’s security and stability, the semi-official Nour News reported.”  The report said Raisi expressed his concerns to Putin that “NATO’s expansion eastward creates tension and is a serious threat to the stability and security of independent states in various areas.”

US-NATO Target Libya

Let’s go back to the invasion of Libya by US-backed NATO forces.  It basically started in 2010 when the Arab Spring revolts spread across the Middle East.  “Pro-democracy” uprisings in Muslim countries including Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Morocco, Syria and Libya were supported by the US establishment.

Several Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which was granted $118 million in 2010 by the Department of State (DOS) for a program called Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2010’ which covered North Africa and the Middle East.  On April 14^th, 2011, Ron Nixon of The New York Times published ‘U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings’ said that “a small core of American government-financed organizations were promoting democracy in authoritarian Arab states.”  Nixon’s description of U.S. democracy-building campaigns is nothing new, but it shows you how far they will go to promote “American-style democracy” around the world:

The money spent on these programs was minute compared with efforts led by the Pentagon. But as American officials and others look back at the uprisings of the Arab Spring, they are seeing that the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections

The article is admitting to the public without any remorse that it was a morale duty for Democracy:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The work of these groups often provoked tensions between the United States and many Middle Eastern leaders, who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined, according to the cables.  The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department

The New York Times who has covered up US-backed regime change operations worldwide for years claims that Washington promotes “Democratic values” for the good of the people as Nixon wrote “No one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown, rather than resulting from “foreign influence,” as alleged by some Middle Eastern leaders.”  Those operating in Washington’s halls of power are involved in promoting “democracy” in foreign countries deny their role in creating the chaos that followed:

“We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy and research group. “That training did play a role in what ultimately happened, but it was their revolution. We didn’t start it”

The Destruction of Libya was Planned in Advance

Following the Arab Spring, Libyan rebels whom many are associated with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups began a revolution against Muammar Gaddafi’s government.  The war on Libya began on February 15^th, 2011, protesters demanded legit democratic reforms which led to a confrontation between Gaddafi’s security forces and the Libyan rebels in the city of Benghazi which led to civilian deaths.  Western media networks failed to mention that the Libyan rebels hijacked the peaceful protests and began attacking police stations, army bases and acquired weapons to attack military barricades and checkpoints nationwide.

Hundreds of thousands of rebels were firing AK-47s in the air during nationwide protests.  Pro-Gaddafi forces had responded to rebel strongholds in Western Libya with an attack along the coastline towards the city of Benghazi which was the main center of the uprising.  The town of Zawiya was then attacked by the Libyan air force, then recaptured by government troops.  Weeks later, the US sent more than 8,000 personal and NATO forces with a combination of various warships and aircraft had initiated more than 3,000 targeted areas across Libya.

US-backed Libyan rebels then established the National Transitional Council (NTC) during the chaos.  US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared to the world that Gaddafi initiated a “campaign of violence against his own people” and that he had “defied the world” but what she really meant was that Gaddafi had defied the New World Order.

The Obama regime had called for a US-backed NATO intervention in Libya, but it initially began under the Bush Regime after the September 11^th, attacks when Washington had planned to overthrow Libya and several other Muslim countries.  Washington’s history of overthrowing governments or to conduct “regime change” have used Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a front for CIA-based operations.

The NED recruited several human rights organizations including the ‘International Federation of Human Rights’ (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l’Homme, FIDH), ‘Libyan League for Human Rights’ (LLHR) and other so-called “democracy promotion groups” which had conducted operations in Libya to manage various labor organizations, student movements and even conspired to control news organizations to propagandize the Libyan people to turn on Gaddafi.  In other words, NGO’s operating in Libya had changed the political landscape to benefit the Western powers including the US, France, the UK and the rest of the NATO alliance.

The operation to remove Gaddafi from power was just part of the destabilization process.  Although Gaddafi had originally crushed radical jihadi’s who were spiraling out of control in the 1990s, he had engineered peace deals among these radical groups and that calmed the situation, yet, the West wanted him removed from power.

Adding to the chaos, infighting between the Libyan rebels with many radical elements occurred with the death of General Abdel Fattah Younes who decided to join the protests was a top official in the Libyan government had resigned on February 22^ndand urged members of the Libyan army to voice legitimate concerns but was killed by a radical Islamic faction called ‘Abu Obeida Ibn al-Jarah brigade.’

On February 27^th, 2011, the National Transitional Council (NTC) was established in rebel-held areas of Libya.  France was the first country to recognize the NTC on March 10^th, followed by several members of the NATO alliance, the puppet states of Senegal, Gambia, Qatar and Kuwait and of course, the architect of Libya’s chaos, the U.S. all had recognized the NTC and its representative, Mahmoud Jibril who eventually became the prime minister of Libya while they declared Gaddafi’s government, illegitimate.

By March 19^th, the NATO-led coalition intervened in Libya to impose the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 with a 10-0 vote with abstentions including China, India, Russia, Brazil and Germany (who is a member of NATO) with the intentions that a ceasefire would take place while imposing a no-fly zone with sanctions placed on Gaddafi’s government in order to protect civilians.  However, the U.S. and British forces fired over 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Libya while British and Canadian air power launched sorties killing countless civilians which was followed up by a naval blockade.

Libya’s Golden Dinar

Libya was a nation that was once categorized as a success due to its profits from its oil exports.  On February 21st, 2011 the BBC reported that “During Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, Libya has made great strides socially and economically thanks to its vast oil income, but tribes and clans continue to be part of the demographic landscape.” 

Libya invested in Africa and even attempted to create a pan-African currency called the Libyan golden Dinar that would have allowed Africa to ditch the US dollar and the Cfa franc which was a currency imposed by France on its former colonies in Africa as legal tender, but that was clearly a threat to the Western powers. Wikileaks had released Hillary Clinton’s email which exposed what was the concern of the Western establishment that included the US and France:

On April 2, 2011, sources with access to advisors to Saif al-Islam Qaddafi stated in strictest confidence that while the freezing of Libya’s foreign bank accounts presents Muammar Qaddafi with serious challenges, his ability to equip and maintain his armed forces and intelligence services remains intact. According to sensitive information available to this these individuals, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (southwest in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide, the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05785522 Date: 01/07/2016

The Making of a Failed State

Gaddafi had used the country’s oil wealth to build public schools, hospitals, clinics and infrastructure and offered free healthcare, housing and education for its citizens.  The Libyan government even offered profit-sharing opportunities for every citizen from its major corporations and its oil industry.  Libyan women benefited in obtaining high-level jobs and equal pay.  Students were able to study either at home or anywhere around the world, even Low-income students were offered scholarships all paid for by the Libyan government and the list goes on.    Although Libya was not perfect, it had its share of serious problems, but the point is that Gaddafi tried to do the right thing for his people whether you agree with him or not.

Libya is now considered one of the most dangerous countries on earth where various warring tribes and heavily armed militias who have carved up their own mini states with their own rules.  Now the Libyan rebels and western multinational corporations keep profits from Libya’s oil exports while the standard of living for Libyans has become one of the worst in Africa.  Libya has become a launch pad for terrorists who made their way to war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa including Syria.  Migrants from all over the world who were caught in the civil war were turned into slaves while young women were raped and forced into prostitution, many were literally sold at auctions to the highest bidder.

So, does NATO pose a threat to countries around the world?

Does Vladimir Putin and the Russian people have a point about the dangers of NATO on its borders? Those who are not sure should look at the example of Libya, once a prosperous nation which has been reduced to a third world hellhole.   With that said, how leaders around the world should respond to NATO’s advances on their borders?

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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On Wednesday, while reading stories on the situation in Ukraine, I discovered SouthFront was taken offline. I read both corporate and alternative media to get both sides of a story. But on Wednesday I wasn’t allowed to do this, the web browser wouldn’t pull up the website.

On Thursday, I tried again. Now the site was online. “On March 9, the Germany-based Hetzner webhosting removed SouthFront from its network and suspended our IP,” SouthFront explained in a lead story following the takedown and restoration of the website.

Unfortunately the Hetzner Team was tricked by manipulations of the recently established propagandist structure (like this) that works to instigate international hatred. Structures like this one are not satisfied with our independent position and alternative point of view on the ongoing military developments.

After reading this story, I attempted to retweet it. A dialog box popped up and informed me that SouthFront’s alternative to the biased and selective pro-war propaganda coming out of corporate media will not be tolerated.

Twitter believes reposting dispassionate and straight-forward news reporting on the “war” in Ukraine is “harmful” to those of us that peruse social media.

This is not the first time SouthFront has faced censorship for the crime of relating facts that are not part of narratives cooked up by the state.

In December, 2016 the online payment system PayPal terminated South Front’s account as part of an effort to strangle support for the website. “We know that the pressure is being exerted by forces connected to the US government,” the site related in an Open Letter.

We have so far been able to deal with all efforts to harm our project. In 2015, the project faced hostile acts by the Atlantic Council and a number of European organizations linked to NATO. We have been deprived, without any warning, of the project’s YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and the main site has been subjected to cyberattacks. There have been cases of leaks of false information aimed at discrediting us. Until recently, our team was able to deal effectively and these and other challenges, which are similar to those faced by other entities attempting to bring alternative points of view to light, such as Wikileaks.

SouthFront’s Youtube channel was restored after more than a hundred people contacted the corporation (owned by the crony corporatist leviathan Google) and protested the move.

It is important to note that the 2016 actions were taken after SouthFront had posted an article from Nordic Filmworks LTD over a critical montage of their “Stand with Ukraine” video. I attempted to link to a Fort-Russ article on this incident, but it now appears Fort-Russ is also offline for the crime of relating Russia’s side of the story on Ukraine following the State Department and Victoria Nuland’s successful “color revolution” in 2014, dubbed the “Revolution of Dignity” by the US government and its media.

On that note, a paper presented at the virtual 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies at Concordia University, in Montreal during August, 2021 examined a massacre (49 killed, 157 wounded) during the Nuland and State Department arranged Maidan protests against the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.

The cannonade of propaganda, misinformation, and distortion in the West about the situation in Ukraine has once again resulted in turning the ill-informed into a mob demanding a “no-fly zone” be established in the skies over Ukraine, never mind Russia has declared this to be a firm redline. (See: Alison Durkee, “More Support Military Intervention In Ukraine Than Oppose It, Poll Says—But Financial Aid Still Preferable.”)

The Wall Street Journal posted an article by the former Connecticut neocon senator and outspoken war proponent Joe Lieberman on Wednesday arguing in favor of a no-fly zone the Russians have warned will result in WWIII. “There are moral reasons for the U.S. and NATO to act that are rooted in our Good Samaritan laws and values,” Lieberman writes,

Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut U.S. global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.

Joe Lieberman may actually believe President Putin and the Russians want to recapture western territories of the former Soviet Union, but this is nonsense.

Putin, as should more than obvious to even casual observers, is demanding NATO stop pushing its troops, missiles, and other weapons of mass destruction up against Russia’s western border. Putin understands very well what the US and its clients in Europe want–the destruction of the Russian Federation and capture of its vast territory (and abundant natural resources, including gas and oil) opened up for exploitation by transnational corporations.

Joe Lieberman’s “Good Samaritan laws and values” are in fact a cover for continued suffering in Ukraine under the rule of the Zionist Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former actor and comedian with connections to Russian oligarchs (Zelenskyy appointed Andriy Bohdan as head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine; Bohdan had been the lawyer of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi). Despite this, Zelenskyy initiated a supposed crackdown on the oligarch billionaires.

The former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, widely considered to be an oligarch, is founder of several state-owned confectionery enterprises, owner of a number of car and bus factories, the Kuznia na Rybalskomu shipyard, and the 5 Kanal television channel.

Finally, the endless barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in the West, and especially the US, has apparently taken ahold of the cognitive behavior of millions of Americans.

“A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up ‘no-fly zones’ to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Friday,” the corporate news corporation reported. “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict” and, left unmentioned, the threat of thermonuclear war.

Similar propaganda brought support of George W. Bush’s neocon invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama’s actions in Libya and Syria.

“A key reason seems to be that that powerful, opinion-molding institutions—the mass communications media, government, political parties, and even education—are controlled, more or less, by what President Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’,”  writes Lawrence Wittner. “And, at the outset of a conflict, these institutions are usually capable of getting flags waving, bands playing, and crowds cheering for war.”

However, as a result this latest preplanned war, it is entirely possible the flags, bands, and crowds may be vaporized by nuclear explosions.

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Distract The Media

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***

Several days ago a mainstream policy analyst dropped me a note mentioning that the Russians were claiming to have discovered the existence of a network of biowarfare labs in Ukraine, funded by the American Pentagon and allegedly working with anthrax and plague. Given that much of my focus over the last two years had been on America’s biowarfare program and its possible deployment, he wondered what I thought about the matter.

I’d seen some of the same Russian accusations swirling around the Internet, and hadn’t paid much attention. On the one hand, over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on “biodefense,” the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and we had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat. So allocating a few millions or even tens of millions to labs in Ukraine would hardly be implausible.

But on the other hand, even if we hadn’t, the Russians might certainly say we had, with those charges being almost stereotypical examples of the “black propaganda” used by an invading army to justify its attack to the world. Since I don’t read Ukrainian, the documents the Russians claimed to have found would mean nothing to me, and except for zealous partisans on each side, I doubted whether anyone else would be convinced one way or the other.

However, the situation drastically changed on Tuesday, due to the Congressional testimony of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy. She seemed not only to acknowledge the existence of those Ukrainian biolabs but was also apparently concerned that their dangerous contents might fall into enemy hands, thereby seeming to completely confirm those shocking Russian accusations. I’ve never regarded Neocons as particularly bright, but the game-ending own-goal she scored on an issue of the greatest international importance may have set a new record for total incompetence.

I was hardly the only person to notice the massive implications of Nuland’s apparent disclosure. Glenn Greenwald ranks as one of the world’s highest-profile journalists, and he quickly released a lengthy column yesterday morning laying out the facts, and noting that our official media fact-checkers had spent a couple of weeks denouncing and ridiculing accusations that now seem to have turned out to be true.

• Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them
  The neocon’s confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers
  Glenn Greenwald • Substack • March 9, 2022 • 2,100 Words

Tucker Carlson devoted his top-rated show on cable to the same issue, emphasizing the shame of having to quote official Russian and Chinese government propagandists on the matter because our own American government officials had been lying.

All the facts are not yet in, but at this stage I think we should probably assume that the captured documents provided by the Russians are correct, and our Defense budget was funding the development of deadly biological weapons at Ukrainian labs near the Russian border, including anthrax and plague.

Given that Ukraine ranks as one of Europe’s most corrupt states, word of these projects surely leaked out, and it’s easy to understand why the Russians took a very dim view of it, certainly contributing to their decision to invade. How would America react if a rabidly-hostile Mexican government backed by China were developing deadly bioweapons near the American border?

Naturally, this gigantic story based upon Nuland’s inadvertent disclosure has been totally ignored by America’s mainstream media, but Carlson’s Youtube clip from last night is already approaching a million views, and the facts will continue to spread.

Kevin Barrett quickly arranged an interview with me, and released a short video outlining the story, and setting it in a broader context. In particular, he noted that back in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin had raised serious biowarfare concerns about our collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, certainly a very suspicious project for our government to have undertaken.

In any event, I think it was an extremely reckless and foolish thing for the American government to have funded the creation of biowarfare facilities in Ukraine, a country enormously hostile to its nuclear-armed Russian neighbor.

And governments that do some extremely reckless and foolish things are much more likely to have done other extremely reckless and foolish things, possibly including those that have already had massive adverse consequences, such as a million American deaths over the last two years.

During those same two years, I have published a lengthy series of articles outlining the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), with the articles having been viewed a total of more than 400,000 times and also collected into a freely downloadable eBook.

• Covid/Biowarfare Series
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 80,000 Words

The evidence I have accumulated seems rather massive and the only argument anyone has ever effectively raised on the other side is that even rogue elements of the Trump Administration could not possibly have done anything so reckless and foolish. I think that argument seems far weaker today than it did a week ago.

Moreover, late last month the New York Times reported on a couple of new scientific papers by our top researchers on the original Covid outbreak in Wuhan. Those findings indicate that the first infection probably occurred in late November or early December, somewhat later than had previously been believed. Meanwhile, back in April 2020 ABC News reported and Israeli TV confirmed that our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a secret report “in the second week of November” describing a “potentially cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. This DIA report now appears to have been written before the first Chinese person had even become infected.

I think that previous inadvertent disclosure by our Intelligence officials falls into the same category as Victoria Nuland’s blunder.

All of this was discussed in three of my video interviews last month, which have now passed 170,000 total views. I suggest that people consider revisiting this material given the new disclosure of our anti-Russian biowarfare activities in Ukraine.

*

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Featured image is from TUR

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Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them

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Ukraine Crusade: “No Fly Zone” and Influx of Foreign Mercenaries

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The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup, and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events.  I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war.  I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy.  My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight.  And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable.  In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following (before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter): “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)

Putin is absolutely correct.  It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert.   Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager.  The same feelings return.  Dread.  Anxiety.  Breathlessness.  I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied.  The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated.  As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level.  Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.)  Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct.  He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence.  Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when  JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated.  Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted.  He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said,  “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA.  These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

 

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously.  Today very few do.  It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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On Sunday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a responsible government official heading foreign affairs and representing the United States on the global stage, “casually suggested” that Poland could hand over its entire fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine, desperate for imposing no-fly zone, and, in return, the United States government would “backfill” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s.

“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine, and looking at how we might be able to backfill it should Poland decide to supply those planes,” Speaking alongside Moldovan President Maia Sandu, Blinken told a briefing in Chisinau on Sunday, March 6.

Upon getting wind of the “facetious remark” by the charismatic secretary of state idolized by diplomatic community for wavy salt-and-pepper hair and suave Parisian etiquette, Russian defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov issued a stark warning that any attempt by an outside power to facilitate a no-fly zone over Ukraine, including providing air strips and aircraft to Kyiv, would be considered a belligerent in the war and treated accordingly.

Hours after the Russian warning, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued an emphatic denial, saying providing aircraft to Ukraine was out of question as the MiG-29 fleet constituted the backbone of the Polish Air Force. In a bizarre turn of events overnight, however, Poland announced yesterday, March 8, it was ready to transfer the aircraft to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany at the disposal of the United States which could then hand them over to Ukraine.

But the denouement of the diplomatic fiasco came today, March 9, after the United States, occupying a high moral ground, categorically rejected the preposterous Polish offer, initially made on Warsaw’s behalf by none other than the US secretary of state.

The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon sanctimoniously revealed today. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dignifiedly added.

Only two conclusions could be drawn from the risible gaffe: either the inept secretary of state was unaware of the Pentagon’s “serious concerns” regarding flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone while initially floating the bizarre proposal, or the reluctant Polish offer of transferring its entire fleet of MiG-29s to Ramstein at the disposal of the United States was nothing more than a humbug designed to provide face-saving to its NATO patron while it was already decided behind the scenes that Washington would spurn Poland’s nominal offer.

As for NATO’s “gracious favor” of deciding not attempting to enforce no-fly zone over Ukraine, which is being propagated as a “concession to Russia” and “peaceful intentions” of the transatlantic military alliance by the corporate media, it’s worth pointing out that no-fly zones could only be enforced against Third World countries, such as Gaddafi’s Libya or Saddam’s Iraq, whose air forces only had several dozen creaking old aircraft bought in scrap following the Second World War.

Though it stretches credulity, even if NATO decides to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, who is going to implement the impossible decision of enforcing no-fly zone against one of the top air forces in the world? If anything, Russia is now going to enforce no-fly zone for hostile aircraft in Ukraine’s airspace by deploying S-400 missile defense systems following the impending fall of Kyiv. Taking a backseat in the Ukraine conflict by the NATO powers isn’t a “goodwill gesture” to Russia, rather it’s an issue of lacking military capacity to confront resurgent Russia under Putin’s astute leadership.

How ironic that despite investing trillions of dollars over decades on their lethal military-industrial complex, all the global bullies could do is sow chaos and mayhem across the Third World but are left with no other choice than turning the proverbial other cheek if confronted with equal military powers, such as Russia and China.

Despite covertly mounting proxy war against Russian forces in Ukraine by providing funds, arms and training to myriad heavily armed militias allied with Ukraine’s security forces, NATO hesitating to directly engage with Russian ground and air forces is predicated on the premise that if the conflict spirals into a nuclear war, it would be catastrophic not only for belligerents but also for the whole world.

Even if the likelihood of a nuclear war is excluded for argument’s sake, bratty Zelensky throwing temper tantrums and fervently cajoling macho Uncle Sam to impose a no-fly zone would remain a puerile fantasy. NATO’s fancy albeit outmoded aircraft are simply not a match for venturing into air-to-air dogfights with Russia’s technologically superior Sukhoi fighter jets, globally acclaimed S-400 air defense systems and cutting-edge hypersonic missiles.

Built by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics in the eighties, over a dozen F-16 aircraft have crashed in Pakistan alone. Its flight safety record is worse than the flying funeral hearse Boeing 737 Max. Aviation aficionados have recommended that Pakistan Air Force should only induct JF-17s, co-produced with China, instead of wasting billions of dollars foreign exchange on substandard American junk. As for C-130 transport aircraft and B-52 bombers built in the fifties following the Second World War, those “Hindenburg’s Zeppelins” rightfully belong in vintage aerospace exhibition rather than being inducted in modern air forces.

The Pentagon publicly confessed to over 30 Broken Arrows [1], serious nuclear accidents, including accidentally dropping atom bombs on populated areas in the US and Europe that thankfully didn’t explode, though the real number of such nuclear accidents is calculated to be in thousands, particularly at the height of the Cold War during the sixties when such apocalyptic “accidents” were everyday occurrence. What could be more irrefutable rebuttal of much-touted flight safety record of US strategic bombers, transport aircraft and fighter jets?

Notwithstanding, Volodymyr Zelensky reassured his compatriots [2] last week:

“Ukraine is already welcoming foreign volunteers who are coming to our country. First ones from 16,000. They are coming to defend freedom, defend life. For us, for everyone. And it will be a success, I’m sure.”

Not surprisingly, he did not disclose who those thousands of “daredevil volunteers” willing to sacrifice lives and limbs in a foreign war were.

The Times reported [3] on March 4 that defense contractors were recruiting former military veterans for covert operations in Ukraine for a whopping $2,000 a day:

“The job is not without risk but, at almost $60,000 a month, the pay is good. Applicants must have at least five years of military experience in eastern Europe, be skilled in reconnaissance, be able to conduct rescue operations with little to no support and know their way around Soviet-era weaponry.”

Thus, the Pope’s call to arms to fellow Christians around pious Christendom in defense of the hallowed land of bourgeois democracy and market-oriented values in the face of fierce onslaught by pagan hordes of infidel Ruskies hell bent on desecrating venerable Article 5 of the sanctified transatlantic treaty is more about getting a lion’s share in the war booty rather than defending the Catholic faith as such. Not surprisingly thousands of God-fearing and democracy-loving Christians across Europe and North America have heeded the Pope’s call to arms to mount the epic Crusade in the Kingdom of Kyivan Rus’.

The United States and its allies have reportedly pumped [4] over $3 billion in arms into Ukraine since the 2014 Euromaidan coup, and committed to send over $850 million more in military aid late last month. The Biden administration has already delivered about $240 million of its promised $350 million in additional military equipment to Ukraine, with the rest expected to arrive in the coming days or weeks at the latest. In addition, the European Union promised to commit nearly 500 million euros for its own military aid package.

Most of the last month’s $850 million military assistance package was spent on recruiting mercenaries for Ukraine’s proxy war and providing 2,000 surface-to-air missiles and antitank Javelins and NLAWs to Ukraine’s security forces and allied irregular militias, which are still in the process of being trained for using the sophisticated military equipment.

The Politico reported [5] today, March 9, that the Congress’ proposed $1.5 trillion package to fund the federal government through September would boost national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6 percent increase. On top of the hefty budget increase, the package was set to deliver nearly $14 billion in emergency funding to help Ukraine, nearly twice the assistance package initially proposed, including $3 billion for US forces and $3.5 billion for military equipment to Ukraine, plus more than $4 billion for US humanitarian efforts.

In order to create an “international legion” comprising foreign mercenaries, Kyiv lifted visa requirements for anyone willing to fight.

“Every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country, please come over,” Zelensky pleaded at a recent press conference, adding “We will give you weapons.”

Ukraine has already declared martial law and a general mobilization of its populace. Those policies include conscription for men aged 18-60 and the confiscation of civilian vehicles and structures, while Ukrainian convicts with military experience are being released from prison to back up the war effort.

In a show of solidarity with Ukraine, several European nations recently announced they would not only not criminalize but rather expedite citizens joining the NATO’s war effort in Ukraine, despite being aware of the lamentable fate of a similar botched policy of enlisting volunteers for proxy wars in Libya and Syria, particularly from diaspora community of those countries, who later returned to Europe and carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks.

The wounds of the Manchester Arena bombing at Ariana Grande’s concert in May 2017, claiming 22 innocent lives and hundreds wounded, by a Libyan expat Salman Abedi, whose brother Hashem Abedi was found guilty of 22 counts of murder in March 2020, are still fresh in the minds of families of the victims. Who would be responsible after armed and violent “volunteers” having fought in the brutal proxy war in Ukraine return home to their native countries and commit wanton acts of vandalism and terrorism?

The myopic and reckless Western policy of lending indiscriminate support to militants in order to topple the Arab nationalist government of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and the anti-Zionist government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was directly responsible for the spate of terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

After a lull of almost a decade since the horrific Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, when the Western powers decided to train and arm militant groups in border regions of Turkey and Jordan straddling Syria from 2011 to 2014, the first incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three gruesome terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom in 2017, and after that the militant group carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums, etc.

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Notes

[1] When US Air Force accidentally dropped atomic bomb on South Carolina

[2] 16,000 volunteers coming to Ukraine, Zelensky

[3] Western mercenaries offered $2,000 a day to fight Putin

[4] US provided over $3 billion in arms to Ukraine since the 2014

[5] $14 billion military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

---

Self-anointed “fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeksmocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? — but nonetheless they invoked their characteristically authoritative, above-it-all tone of self-assurance and self-arrogated right to decree the truth, definitively labelling such claims false.

Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: “The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims “disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further “proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio’s clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.”

Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added:

“we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:

Nuland’s bizarre admission that “Ukraine has biological research facilities” that are dangerous enough to warrant concern that they could fall into Russian hands ironically constituted more decisive evidence of the existence of such programs in Ukraine than what was offered in 2002 and 2003 to corroborate U.S. allegations about Saddam’s chemical and biological programs in Iraq. An actual against-interest confession from a top U.S. official under oath is clearly more significant than Colin Powell’s holding up some test tube with an unknown substance inside while he pointed to grainy satellite images that nobody could decipher.

It should go without saying that the existence of a Ukrainian biological “research” program does not justify an invasion by Russia, let alone an attack as comprehensive and devastating as the one unfolding: no more than the existence of a similar biological program under Saddam would have rendered the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq justifiable. But Nuland’s confession does shed critical light on several important issues and raises vital questions that deserve answers.

Any attempt to claim that Ukraine’s biological facilities are just benign and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland’s explicitly grave concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute, “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.”

Russia has its own advanced medical labs. After all, it was one of the first countries to develop a COVID vaccine, one which Lancet, on February 1, 2021, pronounced was “ safe and effective” (even though U.S. officials pressured multiple countries, including Brazil, not to accept any Russian vaccine, while U.S. allies such as Australia refused for a full year to recognize the Russian COVID vaccine for purposes of its vaccine mandate). The only reason to be “quite concerned” about these “biological research facilities” falling into Russian hands is if they contain sophisticated materials that Russian scientists have not yet developed on their own and which could be used for nefarious purposes — i.e., either advanced biological weapons or dual-use “research” that has the potential to be weaponized.

What is in those Ukrainian biological labs that make them so worrisome and dangerous? And has Ukraine, not exactly known for being a great power with advanced biological research, had the assistance of any other countries in developing those dangerous substances? Is American assistance confined to what Nuland described at the hearing — “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces” — or did the U.S. assistance extend to the construction and development of the “biological research facilities” themselves?

PolitiFact, Feb. 25, 2022

For all the dismissive language used over the last two weeks by self-described “fact-checkers,” it is confirmed that the U.S. has worked with Ukraine, as recently as last year, in the “development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures.” The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine publicly boasted of its collaborative work with Ukraine “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”

This joint US/Ukraine biological research is, of course, described by the State Department in the most unthreatening way possible. But that again prompts the question of why the U.S. would be so gravely concerned about benign and common research falling into Russian hands. It also seems very odd, to put it mildly, that Nuland chose to acknowledge and describe the “facilities” in response to a clear, simple question from Sen. Rubio about whether Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons. If these labs are merely designed to find a cure for cancer or create safety measures against pathogens, why, in Nuland’s mind, would it have anything to do with a biological and chemical weapons program in Ukraine?

The indisputable reality is that — despite long-standing international conventions banning development of biological weapons — all large, powerful countries conduct research that, at the very least, has the capacity to be converted into biological weapons. The work conducted under the guise of “defensive research” can, and sometimes is, easily converted into the banned weapons themselves. Recall that, according to the FBI, the 2001 anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation came from a U.S. Army Research scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, working at the U.S. Army’s infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The claim was that the Army was “merely” conducting defensive research to find vaccines and other protections against weaponized anthrax, but to do so, the Army had to create highly weaponized anthrax strains, which Ivins then unleashed as a weapon.

A 2011 PBS Frontline program on those anthrax attacks explained: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” Speaking to Frontline in 2011, Dr. Keim explained why it was so alarming to discover that the U.S. Army had been cultivating such highly lethal and dangerous strains in its lab, on U.S. soil:

We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.

This lesson about the severe dangers of so-called dual-use research into biological weapons was re-learned over the last two years as a result of the COVID pandemic. While the origins of that virus have not yet been proven with dispositive evidence (though remember, fact-checkers declared early on that it was definitively established that it came from species-jumping and that any suggestion of a lab leak was a “conspiracy theory,” only for the Biden White House in mid-2021 to admit they did not know the origins and ordered an investigation to determine whether it came from a lab leak), what is certain is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was manipulating various coronavirus strains to make them more contagious and lethal. The justification was that doing so is necessary to study how vaccines could be developed, but regardless of intent, cultivating dangerous biological strains has the capacity to kill huge numbers of people. All of this illustrates that research that is classified as “defensive” can easily be converted, deliberately or otherwise, into extremely destructive biological weapons.

Foreign Policy, Mar. 2, 2022

At the very least, Nuland’s surprising revelation reveals, yet again, just how heavily involved the U.S. Government is and for years has been in Ukraine, on the part of Russia’s border which U.S. officials and scholars from across the spectrum have spent decades warning is the most sensitive and vulnerable for Moscow. It was Nuland herself, while working for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry’s State Department under President Obama, who was heavily involved in what some call the 2014 revolution and others call the “coup” that resulted in a change of government in Ukraine from a Moscow-friendly regime to one far more favorable to the EU and the West. All of this took place as the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid $50,000 per month not to the son of a Ukrainian official but to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter: a reflection of who wielded real power inside Ukraine.

Nuland not only worked for both the Obama and Biden State Departments to run Ukraine policy (and, in many ways, Ukraine itself), but she also was Vice President Dick Cheney’s deputy national security adviser and then President Bush’s Ambassador to NATO. She comes from one of America’s most prestigious neocon royal families; her husband, Robert Kagan, was a co-founder of the notorious neocon war-mongering group Project for the New American Century, which advocated regime change in Iraq long before 9/11. It was Kagan, along with liberal icon Bill Kristol, who (next to current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg), was most responsible for the lie that Saddam was working hand-in-hand with Al Qaeda, a lie that played a key role in convincing Americans to believe that Saddam was personally involved in the planning of 9/11.

That a neocon like Nuland is admired and empowered regardless of the outcome of elections illustrates how unified and in lockstep the establishment wings of both parties are when it comes to questions of war, militarism and foreign policy. Indeed, Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, was signaling that neocons would likely support Hillary Clinton for president — doing so in 2014, long before anyone imagined Trump as her opponent — based on the recognition that the Democratic Party was now more hospitable to neocon ideology than the GOP, where Ron Paul and then Trump’s neo-isolationism was growing.

You can vote against neocons all you want, but they never go away. The fact that a member of one of the most powerful neocon families in the U.S. has been running Ukraine policy for the U.S. for years — having gone from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton and Obama and now to Biden — underscores how little dissent there is in Washington on such questions. It is Nuland’s extensive experience in wielding power in Washington that makes her confession yesterday so startling: it is the sort of thing people like her lie about and conceal, not admit. But now that she did admit it, it is crucial that this revelation not be buried and forgotten.

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Featured image: Oct. 8, 2014: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service Base in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Tass released on 9 March 2022 a news bulletin (yet to be confirmed) asserting that the Russian Defense Ministry got hold of a Secret Plan concocted and issued by the Commander of the Ukrainian National Guard Colonel General Nikolay Balan, on January 22, 2022.

The order from the Ukrainian commander was to assault the Donbas Peoples Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (PRL), by a combat coordination of the battalion tactical group with the 80th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This brigade was trained since 2016 by US and British instructors in accordance with NATO training programs.

The attack was to take place in March 2022. For full details, see this.

It may well be that this secret document prompted President Putin to carry out the sudden intervention in Ukraine on 24 February, before the planned offensive on Donbas could take place – and thereby disarm the entire Ukrainian military, and especially neutralize the Nazi forces in the Ukrainian government.

Further conditions by Russia to the western powers, NATO / US / EU – that NATO never enters Ukraine, and that NATO withdraws all its bases from the east to the geographic positions before 1997. This may become a long negotiation. It may last as long as the completion of the UN Agenda 2030, when, according to Klaus Schwab, “you’ll own  nothing And You’ll be happy.”

According to Klaus Schwab’s latest slogan in the race to the Great Reset – it’s no longer the big fish eating the small fish, but the fast one swallowing the slow one. Makes me think – is it possible that Mr. Schwab, on behalf of the WEF and of the dark powers driving the WEF, made the Commander of the Ukrainian National Guard “leak” the secret plan of an imminent attack on the Donbas provinces?

It would explain the “coincidence” of Exit Covid and Enter the War in Ukraine. It would buy time by also creating the chaos, havoc and fear needed – as did Covid – to implement the full agenda of WHO’s power over sovereign nations (see this and this).

It would allow digitization of everything, beginning with money; executing the Bill Gates Agenda ID2020, alias QR-coding of everything and every surviving world citizen; putting in place a full surveillance program and control over all monetary resources – possibly creating a digital One World Currency (OWC), and keeping chipped humanoids, or transhumans in check with 5G-fed algorithms and AI.

This is of course pure speculation.

Stay tuned.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image: Russian Defense Ministry (© Sergei Karpukhin/TASS)

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This is not the first time the favorable conclusions of a report ignored the data in a report. The Pfizer documents seem to show they were all just going through the motions, all for show.

When Siri & Glimstad filed their complaint against FDA for failing to produce the documents from Pfizer’s clinical trials on their COVID-19 vaccine, FDA produced a torrent of documents. Among those documents, available via Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, one document stands out. I’ll summarize here some of the report but be sure to get your own copy here. The file you want is “5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf”, and the document is entitled “5.3.6 CUMULATIVE ANALYSIS OF POST-AUTHORIZATION ADVERSE EVENT REPORTS OF PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) RECEIVED THROUGH 28-FEB-2021”.

Take a look at Figure 1, which summarizes the 42,086 case reports containing 158,893 events.

I see over 20,000 SERIOUS general disorders, over 10,000 SERIOUS nervous system events, over 5,000 musculoskeletal and gastrointestinal SERIOUS events each.

Pfizer’s Table 2 lists >93,000 events that occurred in ≥2% of events.

Looking at the Figure 1 and the text (serious and non-serious):

• Nervous system disorders: 25,957.
• Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders:17,283.
• Gastrointestinal disorders:14,096.

There are more categories, you can see them in Figure 1.

In the meantime:

Remember that Pfizer and Moderna promised complete transparency.

Remember that FDA had access to Pfizer’s numbers.

Remember that these data were not peer-reviewed, and vaccine safety studies data for EUA and FDA approval are not, as a matter of practice, subjected to blinded peer-review. Why not?

What Does This Say About Risk?

Unfortunately, we cannot know. The number of doses given to the date the report was generated was redacted, preventing any computation of rates and risks.

John Campbell points out that Janet Woodcock of the FDA reported, reporting the approval of the EUA on August 21, 2021, said the following:

While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated.

— Dr. Janet Woodcock (@DrWoodcockFDA) August 23, 2021

Knowing she had access to these data, John wonders how could she say that at that time?

John is a pro-vaccine health expert (retired nurse, I presume) in the UK who is now calling out US’s Acting FDA Commissioner. He goes on to call our Peter Marks, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, for saying the following in a press release:

“Our scientific and medical experts conducted an incredibly thorough and thoughtful evaluation of this vaccine. We evaluated scientific data and information included in hundreds of thousands of pages, conducted our own analyses of Comirnaty’s safety and effectiveness, and performed a detailed assessment of the manufacturing processes, including inspections of the manufacturing facilities… (w)e have not lost sight that the COVID-19 public health crisis continues in the U.S. and that the public is counting on safe and effective vaccines. The public and medical community (sic) can be confident that although we approved this vaccine expeditiously, it was fully in keeping with our existing high standards for vaccines in the U.S.”

Good for you, John, for calling them out, as we all should. In fact, by redacting the denominator, the FDA may be in contempt of court. They certainly have contempt for public awareness of the risks associated with the Pfizer vaccine.

FDA needs to publish the redacted denominator so we know the rates.

Here you can watch John go step-by-step through the report and conclude that FDA has “destroyed” public trust in the process.

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***

When COVID-19 first came to dominate the news back in March 2020, I wrote an article for the independent media outlet OffGuardian, warning of the grave dangers we might face. I was not referring to COVID-19, and whatever threat that might have been posing, but to the possibility that powerful actors could seek to exploit the crisis in order to further political and economic agendas.

Drawing a comparison with 9/11, I noted that situations in which the public was fearful created conditions ripe for manipulation, in particular through propaganda. In the case of 9/11, public fear of terrorism ushered in a global ‘war on terror’, whilst, as we now know from documents, US president George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated over the initiation of a series of ‘regime change wars’ during the weeks following 9/11.

Blair wrote to Bush: ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour of acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’.

These wars were less to do with fighting ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’ than they were to do with realising geo-political ‘regime-change’ aspirations. In a nutshell, 9/11 and the fear of terrorism were propagandised in order to mobilise support for wider geo-political objectives. Over 20 years later we are still living with the consequences of these ‘regime-change’ wars.

Two years on from the start of COVID-19, it has indeed become apparent to many that it has been an event involving high levels of propaganda and one in which political and economic agendas have been advanced under its cover.

For example, we now know that behavioural scientists were used in the UK to increase fear levels in order to coerce populations to comply with lockdown and other measures.

Many people have been pressured to accept a series of injections in return for elusive freedoms. We also now know that propaganda activities have included smear campaigns against dissident scientists and, at least in one major case, were initiated by high-level officials:

In Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Officer to the US President, and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures.

Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’.

Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed. It is also now becoming clear to many that policies of lockdown and mass injection, precisely those policies promoted off the back of widespread fear of a virus, are deeply problematic. A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective whilst mass injection of populations may also be doing more harm than good.

With respect to the advancement of political and economic agendas, some analysts argue that major economic and political events have run hand-in-hand with COVID-19. These include a drive toward Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the context of a major impending crisis in the financial markets that emerged during autumn 2019, and a political-economic project articulated by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and multiple leaders regarding ‘The Great Reset’.

With respect to the political-economic project, the WEF has played a key role in promoting specific ideas about the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and ‘digitised society’ (e.g. ‘Smart Cities’). The book COVID-19: The Great Reset was published in July 2020 and author Klaus Schwab declared that: ‘The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future’. He also believes that the 4th industrial revolution will lead to a ‘fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities.’ It is apparent that the WEF, as an organising force, has considerable reach. In 2017 Schwab boasted:

“When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been young global leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet  are for our actually young global leaders of the world economic forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a young global leader.”

With respect to economic events, it is now established that a major crisis in the repo markets during the autumn of 2019 was followed by high-level planning aimed at attempting to resolve an impending financial crisis of greater proportions than the 2008 banking crisis. One response appears to have been a drive toward control of currencies via the Central Banks (Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC). For example, the General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Agustín Carstens, stated in October 2020 that:

“We intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there, for example in cash we don’t know who is using a 100 dollar bill today … the key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use regarding that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

A recent and telling example of the kind of power that can be wielded by governments in the financial realm was the Canadian government’s attempt to suppress the trucker protests against mandates via seizure of bank accounts.

These political and economic agendas have major potential consequences for our societies and, arguably, lead to a profound, and highly problematic, concentration of power and curtailment of democracy. One legitimate fear is that we are witnessing a drive toward a Chinese-style social credit system, in which the integration of personal data and money through digital ID allows assets to be stripped by authorities and, more broadly, unprecedented levels of control over the lives of people.

It is certainly clear that liberal democracies are experiencing severe restrictions on civil liberties and free speech – witness recent events in Canada – and persistent economic and political crisis. It is clear and empirically demonstrable that populations have been subjected to coercive and aggressive attempts to limit their autonomy, including restrictions on movement, right to protest, freedom to work and freedom to participate in society. Most notably, increasing numbers of people have been required to take an injection at regular intervals in order to allow their participation in society. These developments have been accompanied by often openly aggressive and discriminatory statements from major political leaders with respect to people resisting the injections. The threat to civil liberties and ‘democracy as usual’ has been, arguably, unprecedented.

Image on the right is from Children’s Health Defense

However, resistance has been substantial. We were, until last week, witnessing a mainstreaming of debate over both the efficacy of lockdowns and the wisdom of mandated injections. US podcast giant Joe Rogan aired discussion of the WEF only two weeks ago, whilst the premier entertainment show Saturday Night Live (SNL) ran a comedy sketch mocking middle class obsessions regarding masks and boosters. Another popular YouTube giant, Russell Brand, has been repeatedly airing talks questioning multiple aspects of the COVID-19 response as well as highlighting deceptions and manipulations people have been subjected to in the last two years. Underlying this kind of mainstreaming of dissent have been persistent and widespread protests against COVID-19 restrictions and a multitude of well-organised groups and movements pushing back against various COVID-19-related policies.

The war in the Ukraine, however, has dramatically and profoundly shifted the focus of mainstream political and media attention. It is well established across the scholarly literature that war situations are accompanied by massive levels of propaganda and censorship, heightened emotions and a relative ease with which authorities can dictate the contours of public and political debate.

This certainly appears to be the case in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular conflict, there is a very real danger that it will be instrumentalised by authorities in order to divert  attention from the multiple issues that had been surfacing with respect to COVID-19. This is extremely worrying for anyone seeking to understand the actions of authorities during the COVID-19 event, the corruption and dangers witnessed in relation to the mRNA injection, and to obtain accountability.

But also, perhaps more importantly, war fever might also serve as a new distraction from the underlying political and economic agendas that some analysts have been warning us about. Indeed, war in the Ukraine has significant potential to serve as a new enabling event facilitating the drive toward restrictions on liberties and the roll-out of agendas that, for example, the WEF has been waxing lyrical about for two years. A distracted and war-terrified public will be easy to manipulate whilst policies such as digital ID, mandated injections and Central Bank Digital Currencies are ushered in. Indeed,  the current drive toward expanding the powers of the World Health Organisation (WHO) is a clear example of the dangers of further centralisation of power: Under the guise of pandemic preparedness, the objective is to allow the WHO to force states to implement the kinds of restrictive measures we have seen over the last two years. The Council of the European Union announced, on 3 March 2022, that negotiations were to commence with respect to this new legislation. The possibility of a global bio-security regime, that radically disempowers local and community-level autonomy, should be of serious concern to all of us.

We simply cannot afford to continue tumbling from one highly propagandised crisis to the next and allowing our emotions to be harnessed by those who wield political and economic power. Many people over the last two years have learned much about issues such as propaganda, mainstream media bias as well as the levels of corruption, or conflicts of interest, that exist in both national and global institutions. It is important those lessons are kept in focus and not clouded by events in the Ukraine. Now is the time for calm and rational assessments of the events we are living through and, more than ever, determined engagement with widening public understanding of the agendas that many now believe to have been underlying COVID-19.

This includes the need to interrogate the propaganda and manipulation populations  have been subjected to over the last two years and the increasingly discredited policy responses involving lockdowns and mass injections. Even more importantly, critical examination and awareness of the concentration of power and loss of democracy inherent in  developments such as digital ID and CBDC digital currencies, and their interconnection with political visions regarding 4IR and digitised society, is more vital than ever. It is these processes that present the most serious and substantive threat to people, potentially ushering in an era of what some describe as global totalitarianism. Finally, a weather eye must be kept on how the Ukraine crisis might be feeding into and enabling the political and economic processes already advanced during COVID-19.

More than ever before, we must have the confidence to challenge those in positions of political and economic power. We are, without doubt, at a pivotal moment in our histories. People must stay focused on the big picture.

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Facebook has admitted in a court of law that its fact checkers are not asserting facts but, rather, First Amendment-protected opinions

Steve Kirsch, founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, recorded a phone call with a fact checker from PolitiFact, showing just how ignorant the fact checker is about the facts, and how unwilling she is to look at the data

There are three sources for vaccine injury data: The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wonder site; OpenVAERS; and MedAlerts, created by the National Vaccine Information Center. Of these, MedAlerts has the easiest-to-use interface if you want to search and collate data

What makes VAERS so valuable is the fact that you can find important safety signals that would otherwise be missed. This is its intended function, and it works quite well for that

Fact checkers are now trying to dismiss VAERS data as unreliable at best and useless at worst. But they have a serious problem. The U.S. government had a clear duty, enshrined in law, to create a system to detect potential vaccine injuries. If VAERS is useless, then government broke the law. In their zeal to protect Big Pharma, fact checkers may be inadvertently throwing government agencies under the bus

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If you thought fact checkers were a source of unbiased facts, think again. Earlier this year, Facebook admitted, in a court of law, that its fact checkers are not asserting facts but rather “First Amendment-protected opinions.”^1,2

A recent telephone recording by Steve Kirsch, founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, in which he responds to a fact checker from PolitiFact, is equally revealing. The young woman clearly has no idea what she’s talking about, yet she’s been put into a position where she gets to be the sole and final arbiter of truth.

Why Use MedAlerts?

The PolitiFact fact checker, Gabrielle Settles, contacted Kirsch with a number of questions. First, she wanted to know why he uses MedAlerts³ as a source rather than the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wonder site.

VAERS was an outgrowth of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a law that Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), helped fight for. As you likely know, this site and many of you have supported NVIC with donations, which allows them to carry on their terrific work, including their MedAlerts VAERS database query tool.

Between 1990 and 2001, VAERS data were accessible only by filing a Freedom of Information Act request. In 2001, a VAERS website was created,⁴ and in 2006 the database was moved to CDC Wonder. The MedAlerts VAERS interface was created by the NVIC, which is the reason why fact checkers attack it. It went online April 9, 2003.

In response to Settles’ question, Kirsch explained that MedAlerts simply has a more user-friendly interface, while providing the same exact data as VAERS and OpenVAERS.

Are VAERS Data Valid?

Settles then moved on to question the validity of VAERS data in general. She pointed out that raw VAERS reports are not vetted and verified for accuracy, and that they cannot be used to prove causation. In other words, the fact that there are more than 24,400 deaths⁵ reported post-jab does not automatically mean that the shot was the cause of all those deaths.

Kirsch countered by pointing out that what makes VAERS so valuable is the fact that you can find important safety signals that would otherwise be missed. This is its intended function, and it works quite well for that.

For example, looking at the dosing data for myocarditis, you find that after the first dose, there are relatively few myocarditis cases reported, but after the second dose, reports explode. This kind of consistency in the data is very telling and not easily dismissed.

Fact checkers are now trying to dismiss VAERS data as unreliable at best and useless at worst. But they have a serious problem because the U.S. government had a clear duty, enshrined in law, to create a system to detect potential vaccine injuries.

If they now want to throw VAERS out, then the government is in a real pickle, because that means they did not create a functional and useful system. If VAERS is so seriously flawed as to be useless, then government has broken the law, and are duty bound to replace it with something that actually works. It’s a real Catch-22. In their zeal to protect Big Pharma, fact checkers may be inadvertently throwing government agencies under the bus.

Weak Hit Piece Tries to Salvage the Narrative

PolitiFact published its NVIC/MedAlerts article February 28, 2022, under the title, “How an Alternative Gateway to VAERS Data Helps Fuel Vaccine Misinformation.”⁶ While clearly meant as a hit piece, it actually provides NVIC some much-needed publicity, even giving links to both its About Us and Reporting Options pages.

The main point of contention, however, is so weak it smacks of desperation. According to Settles, the government’s disclaimer — which states that VAERS reports can include information that is incomplete or inaccurate and doesn’t provide enough information to determine causation — isn’t prominent enough on the MedAlert’s website.

“Users who go to MedAlerts can search through VAERS reports without ever reading a government disclaimer,” Settles contends, adding that “unlike the CDC’s Wonder database, users on MedAlerts who don’t notice or click on the links won’t see the warnings about what they read.”

Without a clear understanding of the limitations of VAERS, MedAlert’s search results are “vulnerable … to misinterpretation by members of the public who are not trained to evaluate the information,” Settles insists. She goes on, “When government researchers use and interpret VAERS reports, they are not drawing conclusions based on the numbers alone but, rather, looking for patterns that warrant further study.”

The irony is that this is precisely what Kirsch and many others have been doing. VAERS is a tool that can help identify potential safety issues by looking at patterns and trends, but the total number of reports of a specific problem cannot be discounted because it’s part of the signal.

The fact of the matter is that there are many safety signals in the VAERS data, but those tasked with investigating them are refusing to do it. At this point, one wonders whether any U.S. agency can actually be trusted to conduct an unbiased investigation even if they decided to do one.

Settles also attacks Kirsch personally, dismissing his safety concerns by stating that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has chalked his claims up as being “not based in science.” Essentially, Settles’ article can be summed up as a desperate attempt to redirect people back to the CDC and FDA propaganda, which dismisses the now outlandishly large number of post-jab VAERS reports as being of no consequence.

Post-Jab Neurological Issues Were Under Investigation in 2021

Meanwhile, The Epoch Times recently reported⁷ that “Two U.S. agencies have been quietly studying neurological problems that have appeared in people who have had COVID-19 vaccines.”

According to emails reviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Janet Woodcock, principal deputy director of the FDA, “has been personally evaluating neurologic side effects from the COVID-19 vaccines since at least Sept. 13, 2021.” In a November 16, 2021, email, Woodcock wrote:⁸

“We are having difficulty pinning down these nervous system-related events that have been brought to our attention. I’ve asked for specific searches of the reports we get both from here and ex-U.S. (as these vaccines have been used in many countries) as well as from trials, where oversight of participants is greater.”

Emails from Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which is in charge of the regulation of vaccines, suggest other FDA epidemiologists were also looking into it, as were a team at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which belongs to the National Institutes of Health. The NINDS supposedly started seeing vaccine injured patients in early 2021. According to The Epoch Times:⁹

“Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the NIH’s NINDS, headed a team that examined patients who experienced serious neurological issues … Nath and Dr. Farinaz Safavi, one of Nath’s top deputies, have said they believe the issues are linked to the vaccines.

‘We started an effort at NIH to look at neurological side effects of COVID-19 vaccines,’ Safavi said in an email to one of the patients on March 3, 2021. ‘We believe the symptoms to be real. That is the reason we have been treating patients,’ Nath said in a different message on July 27, 2021.”

Were Patients Abandoned to Protect Big Pharma Profits?

While it’s tempting to see this as good news, there’s something really strange going on. For starters, none of these investigations was ever publicly announced. Why not?

What’s worse, as 2021 wore on, the research appears to have stalled and then been abandoned altogether. It’s hard to find another explanation for this other than they don’t want to do anything that might force them to take the COVID jab off the market.

“Even among those examined, the excitement of connecting with top researchers and government officials turned to disappointment and frustration when repeated queries yielded few signs of progress on research into post-vaccination problems,” The Epoch Times writes.¹⁰

“Woodcock and Marks would often only provide updates after being prodded … Nath and Safavi also grew distant as 2021 wore on. They eventually stopped examining patients.”

Brianne Dressen, who had been examined by Nath and given a diagnosis of “post-vaccine neuropathy,” suddenly hit a dead end as 2021 drew to a close. Nath would do no more for her, and also told her to stop referring patients to him, saying they did “not have any clinical trial for vaccine-related complications.” Epoch Times writes:

“Dressen responded in January that she will ‘always be indebted to you and what you did for me,’ crediting Nath … with keeping her alive. However, she added, her ‘heart is shattered.’

‘I am more confused now than ever about what my active and willing engagement in the scientific process actually meant, or has led to,’ she wrote … ‘Looking back on this, I can see how unethical it was even when they were helping us,’ Dressen told The Epoch Times.”

Another vaccine injured patient, Dr. Danice Hertz, who was seen virtually by NIH experts in early 2021, expressed similar feelings to The Epoch Times.

“Hertz described being shocked about the lack of public acknowledgement of the post-vaccination issues by the FDA … ‘They refuse to acknowledge what’s happening to so many thousands of people,’ Hertz told The Epoch Times. ‘We’ve been completely abandoned. And we’re despondent over it.’”¹¹

Who Is Responsible to Investigate and Treat Side Effects?

People who have been injured by the COVID jab are now in an incredibly tough situation, as doctors, government agencies and the vaccine makers are all refusing responsibility. In a September 16, 2021, email to Dressen, Nath wrote:¹²

“Ordinarily when any drug is released, it is the manufacturers responsibility to investigate and treat the side effects. Where are the vaccine manufacturers in all of this? Have you tried contacting them? It cannot be the government’s responsibility to pick up after them. They are a [for] profit company and they should be the ones taking change [sic]. Don’t you think?”

But vaccine makers are not investigating or treating side effects either. Why would they? They’ve been granted total immunity against liability. The only way they can be held responsible for damages is if they’re found guilty of willful misconduct or fraud.

Unfortunately, the FDA, CDC and NIH aren’t looking for misconduct or fraud. They’re covering it up. And mainstream media, including so-called “fact” checkers, have been bought wholesale by an industry that has every intention of obfuscating and hiding the truth about their products.

Why Media Have Embraced Censorship

As noted by independent journalist Paul Thacker,¹³ mainstream media are refusing to call big tech censorship for what it is, in large part because they support, and indeed need, fake fact checks:

“Disinformation doesn’t have to be sophisticated when people believe what they read. Once this belief is established, censors ensure that disinformation remains strong, followed by denial that there is censoring. That way inconvenient facts do not mar the chosen story.”

In the COVID era, the chosen story includes the fantasy that the COVID jabs are safe and effective and have harmed no one, and there’s simply no way to prop up that story without fake fact checks.

Who Funds the Fake Fact Checkers?

It should come as no surprise then that fact checking organizations are funded by Big Pharma and Big Pharma PR companies like the Publicis Groupe, which also happens to be a partner of both Google^14,15 and the World Economic Forum (WEF).¹⁶

Pfizer, for example, funds Facebook’s fact checking operation.¹⁷ Is it any wonder then that Facebook rejects anything that criticizes the COVID jabs? Pfizer also has significant conflicts of interest with Reuters. Reuters chairman (and former CEO) James Smith is both a top investor and board member of Pfizer.¹⁸ Might he have a vested interest in keeping Pfizer’s media record clear of incriminating details?

Many fact checking organizations also belong to the International Fact-Checking Network,¹⁹ which is financed by George Soros (through his Open Society Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy), Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation²⁰ — all of whom are part of the WEF’s technocratic cabal that is pushing for a Great Reset.

Truth Tellers Have Data, Liars Have None

To end where we began, with the fact check on Kirsch and the NVIC’s MedAlert, a few days after posting his conversation with Settles, he received an email from PolitiFact’s editor-in-chief, Angie Holan, asking him to remove the recording. He refused. In a February 25, 2022, Substack post, Kirsch wrote:²¹

“Gabrielle asked if she could record the call and I consented, so that entitles all parties to record the call. PolitiFact did not deny that we both consented. She wrote, ‘I am not in the least embarrassed by how she conducted the interview. I’m asking that you remove the video as a professional courtesy because the reporter did not consent to be recorded.’

First of all, she should be embarrassed by the interview. The interviewer was clearly focused on proving an agenda and showed no interest in exploring evidence that was counter her agenda. I gave her the story of the century if she would just follow up on what I suggested she do.

Secondly with respect to permission, by asking me if it was OK to record the call, she is giving implied consent for the call to be recorded since she is doing the asking. All parties on the call consented to being recorded meaning the conversation is no longer private and all parties can record the call.

I then raised the stakes: I challenged PolitiFact to a debate to settle the matter once and for all in front of a live Internet audience as to who are the liars and who are the truth tellers …

Of course, the problem with a debate is that usually one side wins. If it is the misinformation spreaders, the narrative is crushed. This is why nobody wants a debate: they can’t take the risk.

PolitiFact can’t win a fair debate. There is way too much information out now on how dangerous the vaccines are that is impossible for them to explain. This is why I don’t think that there is a snowball’s chance in hell they will accept.”

Indeed, the chances of PolitiFact accepting an invitation to debate someone like Kirsch, who has all of his ducks in a row, is slim to none. In fact, it’s probably because of the excellent data analysis of Kirsch and others that the CDC has started withholding certain data on COVID jab injuries and hospitalizations. The reason given is that “they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” But as noted by Kirsch:²²

“The only way the vaccine data could be interpreted as ineffective by us ‘misinformation spreaders’ is if the data shows the vaccines don’t work … The CDC long-standing policy is that no information can be released that may threaten the national vaccination initiative.

This isn’t about public safety. This is about not letting the public know the vaccines are killing them … Let’s be clear. The CDC hid the data because the data proves they were lying to us. That’s the real reason.”

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Notes

¹ wattsupwiththat.com John Stossel Lawsuit against Meta Platforms (PDF)

² WND December 10, 2021

³ MedAlerts

⁴ VAERS.HHS.gov

⁵ OpenVAERS Data as of February 18, 2022

⁶ PolitiFact February 28, 2022

^{7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12} The Epoch Times February 20, 2022 (Archived)

¹³ Jospi.org February 22, 2022

¹⁴ Ad Week September 22, 2008

¹⁵ Google Marketing Platform Partners, Publicis Sapient

¹⁶ World Economic Forum, Publicis Groupe

¹⁷ The National Pulse February 25, 2022

¹⁸ The National Pulse December 1, 2021

¹⁹ Poynter IFCN

²⁰ Poynter.org About the IFCN

²¹ Steve Kirsch Substack February 25, 2022

²² Steve Kirsch Substack February 21, 2022

Featured image is from The Corbett Report

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Russia relations, Ukraine, Humanitarian Aid, Taiwan, China-EU relations, China-Central Asia relations, sanctions, differing views of democracy, and European security. 

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has been busy with statements concerning the Ukraine conflict and China’s position in the extent of its support for Russia. These are important as they affect the geopolitical position in Eurasia, Beijing’s relations with Moscow as an ally, and the continuing of multilateral trade within the region.

Wang expressly stated that “China and Russia will maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era” suggesting there is no change in its support for Russia. While opinions over the handling of the Ukraine situation may differ, the on-going China-Russia axis in terms of a strategic partnership looks set to continue. Beijing has long been wary of Washington’s intentions and has already been subjected to sanctions itself, including quasi sanctions in the form of the 2018-2021 China-US Tariff wars. Beijing’s policy makers will be studying weaknesses in the Russian system in addition to US tactics in terms of engaging its allies, including important Asian economies such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to move in such radical terms against Moscow. To some degree, Beijing will want to learn from the US how it has been able to place Moscow in such a position and to create defensive barriers from the same type of tactics.

At the same time, Beijing needs Moscow’s support in energy and other trade needs, in addition to vital assistance in bringing peace and security to Central Asia in the wake of the US exit from Afghanistan and recent unrest in Kazakhstan. The energy and security issues are of profound importance to Beijing, which is why its relationship with Moscow can be expected to continue.

Wang held a press conference to discuss these issues. We provide details as follows:

Reuters: “Russia’s military action in Ukraine has expanded to non-military targets. Will China do more to help resolve the conflict?”

Wang: “On the Ukraine issue, China has adopted an objective and impartial attitude. We independently assess the situation and make our position clear on the basis of the merits of the issue.

As a Chinese proverb puts it, it takes more than one cold day to freeze three feet of ice. The situation in Ukraine has become what it is today for a variety of complex reasons. What is needed to solve complex issues is a cool head and a rational mind, not adding fuel to the fire which only intensifies the situation. China believes that to resolve the current crisis, we must uphold the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations (UN) and respect and protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. We must adhere to the principle of indivisible security and accommodate the legitimate security concerns of the parties involved. We must settle disputes by peaceful means through dialogue and negotiation. And we must keep in mind the long-term peace and stability of the region and put in place a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture.

As things stand, the international community must make continuous efforts on two priorities.

One priority is to facilitate dialogue for peace. China has made some efforts in this regard and had close communications with the relevant parties. On the second day of the conflict, President Xi Jinping spoke to President Vladimir Putin on the phone and expressed China’s desire to see Russia and Ukraine hold peace talks as early as possible. President Putin responded positively, and Russia and Ukraine have since had two rounds of talks. We hope that the upcoming third round will make further progress. China believes that the more tense the situation, the more important that the talks continue. The wider the disagreement, the greater the need to sit down and have negotiation. China is prepared to continue playing a constructive role to facilitate dialogue for peace and work alongside the international community when needed to carry out necessary mediation.

The other priority is to prevent a massive humanitarian crisis. To this end, China wishes to propose a six-point initiative:

First, make sure that humanitarian operations abide by the principles of neutrality and impartiality, and avoid politicizing humanitarian issues;

Second, give full attention to the displaced persons in and from Ukraine, and provide them with proper shelter; 

Third, ensure the protection of civilians, and prevent secondary humanitarian disasters in Ukraine;

Fourth, provide for safe and smooth humanitarian aid activities, including providing rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian access;

Fifth, provide for the safety of foreign nationals in Ukraine, allow them safe departure and help them return to their home countries; and Sixth, support the UN’s coordinating role in channeling humanitarian aid and the work of the UN Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine.

China will continue its efforts to stem the humanitarian crisis. The Red Cross Society of China will provide Ukraine with a tranche of emergency humanitarian supplies as soon as possible.”

International Media Group Rossiya Segodnya (RT): 

“The West is ratcheting up sanctions on Russia. How will this affect Russia-China relations?” (Note: Rolling news on Western sanctions being imposed on Russia here)

Wang: “China and Russia are both permanent members of the UN Security Council, and each other’s most important close neighbors and strategic partners. Our relationship is one of the most crucial bilateral relations in the world. Our cooperation not only advances the interests of both peoples, but also contributes to peace, stability, and development in the world. 

Last year, the two sides commemorated the 20th anniversary of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. Given the increasingly complex international strategic landscape, our shared commitment to ever-lasting friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation, as enshrined in the Treaty, is highly relevant and important not only to both sides but also to countries across the world.

I wish to stress that the China-Russia relationship is valued for its independence. It is based on non-alliance, non-confrontation and non-targeting of any third party. It is free from interference or discord sown by third parties. This is both what historical experience has taught us and an innovation in international relations. Not long ago, the two sides issued a joint statement on international relations entering a new era and global sustainable development. It sends an unequivocal message to the world that China and Russia jointly oppose attempts to revive the Cold War mindset or provoke ideology-based confrontation, and stand for greater democracy in international relations as well as the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

The China-Russia relationship is grounded in a clear logic of history and driven by strong internal dynamics. and the friendship between the Chinese and Russian peoples is rock-solid. There is a bright prospect for cooperation between the two sides. No matter how precarious and challenging the international situation may be, China and Russia will maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era.”

Xinhua: “China has been evacuating many of its nationals from Ukraine. Can you share more information on this?”

Wang: “With tensions escalating in Ukraine, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council are highly concerned about the safety of every Chinese national in Ukraine. General Secretary Xi Jinping has taken a personal interest, repeatedly asked about the situation, and demanded all-out efforts to ensure the safety of Chinese nationals. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has activated its consular emergency response mechanism, both maintaining diplomatic communications with Ukraine, Russia, and countries in the neighborhood, and issuing safety alerts and reminders for Chinese compatriots in Ukraine.”

Agencia EFE: “Does China believe that its ever-closer relations with Russia and the conflict in Ukraine may affect its relations with Europe and the European Union?”

Wang: “China and Europe are two major forces for world peace, two big markets for common development and two great civilizations for human progress. The China-Europe relationship is not targeted at any third party, nor is it subjugated to or controlled by any third party. Dialogue and cooperation between the two sides on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit will add more stabilizing factors to an unstable world.

China and Europe had fruitful cooperation in 2021. Let me give you two examples. China-EU trade exceeded US$800 billion last year for the first time, underscoring the high complementarity of the economic and trade ties. The China-Europe Railway Express ran more than 15,000 cargo trips, up by 29 percent year on year, and played an active role in promoting international cooperation against COVID-19, ensuring the stability of industrial and supply chains, and facilitating global economic recovery.

That said, some forces are unhappy to see the steady growth of China-Europe relations. They fabricate the narrative of “China threat”, play up competition with China, clamor for seeing China as a “systemic rival”, and even impose sanctions and provoke confrontation with China. Both China and Europe must be on high alert against these developments. China-Europe cooperation, going through decades of ups and downs, is deeply rooted in solid public support, extensive common interests, and similar strategic needs. Such cooperation enjoys great resilience and potential. It cannot be reversed by any force.

China views its relations with Europe from a strategic, long-term perspective. China’s policy toward Europe is firm and consistent. It will not be affected by any turn of events. We will continue to support the independence of Europe and a united and prosperous EU. In the meantime, we hope that Europe will develop a more independent and objective perception of China, adopt a more pragmatic and rational China policy, and work with China to oppose a new Cold War and uphold and act on true multilateralism.

Going forward, the two sides need to work together for the success of the China-EU Summit and other important events on the political agenda. We will seek greater strategic synergy, expand practical cooperation, advance multilateral coordination, deepen people-to-people exchange, and properly manage differences, so as to jointly deliver more concrete benefits to the world.”

Khabar 24 News Channel (Kazakh): “This year marks the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and the five Central Asian countries. What will China do to meet the goals set at the virtual summit held early this year to commemorate the anniversary?”

Wang: “China always believes that a growing, prosperous, stable and dynamic Central Asia is in the common interest of China and other countries in the region. We will continue to follow the principles of mutual respect, good-neighborly friendship, solidarity in trying times and mutual benefit, as it works with Central Asian countries to forge a strategic partnership featuring rich substance, fruitful results and enduring friendship, and build a China-Central Asia community with a shared future.” (Note: China and the five Central Asian countries held a recent regional summit in January. More on that here).

Global Times (China): “Having hosted a “Summit for Democracy” last year that was widely deemed unsuccessful, the US plans to hold another one this year. How will China respond?”

Wang: “Last year, the US held a summit in the name of promoting democracy. Yet the so-called “Summit for Democracy” excluded nearly half of all countries on the planet, blatantly drew an ideological line between countries and created division in the world. The act violated the spirit of democracy. To hold another such summit would receive even less support around the world.

China practices whole-process people’s democracy. It is broad-based, genuine, and effective democracy which enjoys the wholehearted endorsement and support of the Chinese people. This January, the world’s largest public relations consultancy firm Edelman released a survey. In 2021, trust among Chinese citizens in their government was a record 91 percent, again topping the world and reaching the highest level in a decade. Polls conducted by Harvard University for many years also produced similar results. The world recognizes China’s democracy, and we have full confidence in our path.

Human civilization, if compared to a garden, should be a diverse place in which democracy in different countries blooms like a hundred flowers. Setting a standard for democracy after the US system is undemocratic. Meddling in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of democracy would only hurt the people in those countries. Putting one’s own system on a pedestal is not just against the spirit of democracy, but also spells disaster for democracy.

We look forward to exchanges and mutual learning with other countries on the basis of equality. Let us promote the true spirit of democracy, strip pseudo-democracy of its various types of charade, and make international relations more democratic so as to inject forward momentum to human progress.” (Note: More on the United States ‘Summit for Democracy’ perceptions here)

Bloomberg (US): “What similarities are there between the current situation in Ukraine and the question of Taiwan? How likely would you say conflict in the Taiwan Strait is at the moment?”

Wang: “Let me first make it clear that the Taiwan question and the Ukraine issue are different in nature and are not comparable at all. Most fundamentally, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory, and the Taiwan question is entirely China’s internal affair. The Ukraine issue arose from contention between two countries, namely Russia and Ukraine. Some people, while being vocal about the principle of sovereignty on the Ukraine issue, have kept undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on the Taiwan question. This is a blatant act of double standards.

Tension exists in the Taiwan Strait. Its root cause is that the DPP authorities refuse to recognize the one-China principle and attempt to change the status quo that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. The DPP authorities have sought to create “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” to misrepresent Taiwan’s history and sever Taiwan’s roots. This, in the end, will only ruin Taiwan’s future. Some forces in the US, in a bid to hold back China’s rejuvenation, have condoned and abetted the growth of separatist forces for “Taiwan independence” and tried to challenge and hollow out the one-China principle. This gravely violates the basic norms of international relations and puts the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait in serious jeopardy. This would not only push Taiwan into a precarious situation, but also bring unbearable consequences for the US side.  

I must stress that the two sides across the Taiwan Strait share the same historical and cultural roots and belong to one and the same China. Taiwan’s future and hope lies in the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and reunification with the mainland, not in counting on the empty promises of external forces. Seeking foreign support to gain independence is a dead end. The scheme to use Taiwan to contain China is doomed to fail. Taiwan will eventually return to the embrace of the motherland.”

Wang / Borrell Discussions

Wang also held telephone discussions with Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. These talks are of interest as Borrell is not trusted by Moscow due to his support for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and his position in appointing a German Christian to negotiate peace in Serbia, which has Christian/Muslim conflicts.

Chinese media have reported the discussion as follows:

“Wang Yi expressed that China deplores the fact that the situation in Ukraine has come to this point. Sanctions will not solve the problem, and escalating sanctions will only make the situation more complicated and aggravated. The immediate priority is to avoid a humanitarian crisis. The Chinese side has publicly put forward a six-point initiative to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. The main purpose is to promote the formation of a joint force of the international community and prevent the humanitarian situation in Ukraine from further deteriorating.

Wang Yi said that we should also encourage Russia and Ukraine to hold peace talks. China has advocated dialogue from the very beginning. It is hoped that the international community will support Russia and Ukraine in conducting serious negotiations, not only to continue the negotiations, but also to negotiate a ceasefire, a cessation of war and peace. China is willing to continue to play a constructive role in de-escalating the situation to the best of its ability. It is also hoped that the European side will have a comprehensive and serious dialogue with the Russian side on European security issues in the future, and will form a balanced, effective and sustainable European security framework based on the principle of indivisibility of security.

Wang Yi said that under the current situation, China and the EU, as two major forces in the world, should make joint efforts to well prepare for the China-EU leaders’ meeting and send a positive and positive signal to the world.”

Summary by Chris Devonshire-Ellis

It is notable in terms of the Ukraine conflict that Wang suggested that Beijing and Brussels should work together to discuss European security issues and specifically omitted mention of the United States in this regard, an indication that Beijing views Washington as the protagonist in developing the Ukraine situation. This comes after the West became convinced to impose sanctions on China late last year over issues concerning the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, rhetoric that only increased after the US ignominious exit from Afghanistan. Products made in Xinjiang, China’s largest province by geographical size, have been sanctioned by Washington and the European Union. China has denied claims of ‘genocide’ and has stated the Uyghur clampdown is a security matter – partially caused by regional instability in the wake of the US withdrawal. Certainly, the extent and regularity of sanctions imposition in contemporary times is completely unprecedented, to the position that to the West, Russia and Belarus are being effectively removed from the map.

US senators are also now publicly calling for assassinations, an extraordinary – and dangerously antagonistic political development.

It remains to be seen how Russia especially will recover from having its economy effectively thrown up into the air, however it now relies on China more than ever as a reliable trade partner. China will be propping Russia up, however this will also come with geopolitical strings attached, especially in the Russian Far East, where discontent over Russia’s ownership of Vladivostok has been simmering with certain Chinese factions refering to it as Haishanwai, as well as influence within Central Asia.

China is conducting a balancing act here and will be seeking to support Russia (and take some advantage) while pushing the EU to talk more with it as a counter-balance to US influence – especially now as Russia appears to have lost that capability, at least for the immediate future. Brussels will be wary, but some EU politicians remain both friendly towards China especially, and support for Russia still remains in certain circles, especially among those who view the American influence and gains made from the Ukraine confrontation as a little too convenient. The consequence will be continuing support for Russia, an examination of where the fault lines lie, as well as a considerable upcoming China push to have more of a say in Eurasian, and European security.

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***

They confess: they had no virus when they concocted the test for the virus; they “contrived” a model by pretending to find what they wanted to find; it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy

This is the con and the crime that drove millions of lives, and economies, into ruin

Quiz: If an agency of the federal government revealed they had no basis for constructing a diagnostic test that was used on millions of people; but the test was the cornerstone of a national lockdown; and the lockdown drove the economy off a cliff; and destroyed millions of lives; however, NOW, that agency says, they DO have a basis for the test; would you buy what they’re selling?

If your answer is yes, you’re in good company; the company I call Blind, Ignorant, Denialist, Hoaxing Journalists.

The CDC issued a document that bulges with devastating admissions.

The release is titled, “07/21/2021: Lab Alert: Changes to CDC RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 Testing.” It begins explosively:

“After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.”

Many people believe this means the CDC is giving up on the PCR test as a means of “detecting the virus.” The CDC isn’t saying that at all.

They’re saying the PCR technology will continue to be used, but they’re replacing what the test is looking FOR with a better “reference sample.” A better marker. A better target. A better piece of RNA supposedly derived from SARS-CoV-2.

CDC/FDA are confessing there has been a PROBLEM with the PCR test which has been used to detect the virus, starting in February of 2020—right up to this minute.

In other words, the millions and millions of “COVID cases” based on the PCR test in use are all suspect. Actually, that statement is too generous. Every test result of every PCR test should be thrown out.

To confirm this, the CDC document links to an FDA release titled, “SARS-CoV-2 Reference Panel Comparative Data.” Here is a killer quote:

“During the early months of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, clinical specimens [of the virus] were not readily available to developers of IVDs [in vitro diagnostics] to detect SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, the FDA authorized IVDs based on available data from contrived samples generated from a range of SARS-CoV-2 material sources (for example, gene specific RNA, synthetic RNA, or whole genome viral RNA) for analytical and clinical performance evaluation. While validation using these contrived specimens provided a measure of confidence in test performance at the beginning of the pandemic, it is not feasible to precisely compare the performance of various tests that used contrived specimens because each test validated performance using samples derived from different gene specific, synthetic, or genomic nucleic acid sources.”

Translation: We, at the CDC, did not have a specimen of the SARS-CoV-2 virus when we concocted the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2. Yes, it’s unbelievable, right? And that’s the test we’ve been using all along. So we CONTRIVED samples of the virus. We fabricated. We lied. We made up (invented) synthetic gene sequences and we SAID these sequences HAD TO BE close to the sequence of SARS-CoV-2, without having the faintest idea of what we were doing, because, again, we didn’t have an actual specimen of the virus. We had no proof THERE WAS something called SARS-CoV-2.

This amazing FDA document goes to say the Agency has granted emergency approval to 59 different PCR tests since the beginning of the (fake) pandemic. 59. And, “…it is not feasible to precisely compare the performance of various tests that used contrived specimens because each test validated performance using samples derived from different gene specific, synthetic, or genomic nucleic acid sources.”

Translation: Each of the 59 different PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 told different lies and concocted different fabrications about the genetic makeup of the virus—the virus we didn’t have. Obviously, then, these tests would give unreliable results. THE PCR TESTS USED CONTRIVED SPECIMENS OF THE VIRUS WE DIDN’T HAVE.

BUT, don’t worry, be happy, because NOW, the CDC and the FDA say, they really do have actual virus samples of SARS-CoV-2 from patients; they have better targets for the PCR test, and labs should start gearing up for the new and improved tests.

In other words, they were lying THEN, but they’re not lying NOW. They were “contriving,” but now they’re telling the truth.

If you believe that, I have Fountain of Youth water for sale, extracted from the lead-contaminated system of Flint, Michigan.

Here, once again, I report virology’s version of “we isolated the virus”:

They have a soup they make in their labs.

This soup contains human and monkey cells, toxic chemicals and drugs, and all sorts of other random genetic material. Because the cells start to die, the researchers ASSUME a bit of mucus from a patient they dropped in the soup is doing the killing, and THE VIRUS must be the killer agent in the mucus.

This assumption is entirely unwarranted. The drugs and chemicals could be doing the cell-killing, and the researchers are also starving the cells of vital nutrients, and that starvation could kill the cells.

There is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 is in the soup, or that it is doing the cell-killing, or that it exists.

Yet the researchers call cell-death “isolation of the virus.”

To say this is a non-sequitur is a vast understatement. In their universe, “We assume, without proof, we have the virus buried in a soup in a dish in the lab” equals, “We’ve separated the virus from all surrounding material.”

Virology equals “how to spread bullshit for a living and scare the world.” Other than that, it’s perfect.

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The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Featured image is from NaturalNews.com

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Austria is suspending a law that made COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for all adults in the country. The move comes as multiple European nations have dropped COVID-related restrictions and mandates in recent weeks. Austria was one of the only countries in the world to make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory.

The law took effect in February and called for fines up to €3,600 from mid-March for those who did not comply. Under the government’s plan, police officers would have checked for vaccination status at traffic stops. Citizens would have been required to produce proof of vaccination in writing or be subjected to fines.

Enforcement never ramped up for the law, however. Minister Karoline Edtstadler ultimately announced an end to the legislation on Wednesday, just a little over a month after it took effect. Edstadler said the law’s “encroachment of fundamental rights” could no longer be justified by the pandemic. After consultations with the health minister, we have decided that we will of course follow what the (expert) commission has said,” Edtstadler told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.

The Austrian government may reinstate the law if cases and hospitalizations trend back up, officials said. Health Minister Johannes Rauch said a commission of health experts will deliver another report within three months, at which point the government will review the situation again. “I don’t think I need a crystal ball to tell you that today isn’t the last chapter we will write regarding the vaccination mandate,” Edstadler said.

Austria, along with most of Europe and the U.S., has reported a dramatic drop in both COVID cases and hospitalizations in recent weeks. The alpine nation had already dropped most of its COVID-related restrictions effective last Saturday. Proof of vaccination is no longer required for entry to several venues in the nation, though a handful of mask requirements remain. Calls for the vaccination law to be suspended increased after the general COVID restrictions were dropped.

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Cullen McCue is a 24-years-old conservative who was born in Havertown, PA and now live in Philadelphia. He started Reality Circuit in August, 2017, which provides an alternative to left-wing sports outlets.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

 

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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More than two million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded that country. The majority have been women and children since men between 18-60 are not allowed to leave and are conscripted into the armed forces. Most refugees have fled to Poland, Moldova, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary where Ukrainians, but not Arabs, Asians and Africans, have been warmly welcomed. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warned that the outflow of refugees could swell to five million.

At the end of the first week of warfare, when the number of refugees was estimated to be ONE million, UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said half were children. This percentage is likely to be maintained as long as the outward flow continues.

Ukrainian children, experts argue, are particularly vulnerable to psychological distress and long-term mental health problems due to the trauma of sheltering from bombs in underground train stations and basements and being torn from their fathers and other family members, friends and schools, and home environment. Children may also be affected by long, cold and perilous journeys to borders where they have to wait in line for hours before being allowed to cross into a safe country. They could be distressed by uncertainty over where they will be accommodated and fed when they arrive in a strange country and worry over where they will eventually find refuge.

The situation is particularly difficult and, even, alarming for children who travelled on their own, leaving behind parents whose presence could provide a measure of stability and comfort.

The Western media cites mental health experts on the impacts of past war situations on children without speculating how the Ukraine war may affect the young. Children can be shaken, depressed, withdrawn, undemanding, liable to cry without cause and wet their beds. How children handle warfare depends on parental and other support systems. These change when families become refugees and could deepen trauma and alienation.

The refugee children of Ukraine are fortunate because their mental health is already being discussed and, in some cases, addressed even though the Russian war on Ukraine is 15 days old.

By contrast, the children of Gaza are forgotten victims of Israel’s 15-year war on the Palestinian coastal strip.  Sixty-four per cent of these children come from refugee stock and the majority depend on the UN agency looking after refugees for the necessities of life. Gaza’s children cannot flee from the strip and find sanctuary in a safe country. They are trapped by Israel’s siege and blockade. Seriously ill children cannot get Israeli permits to travel to West Bank or Israeli hospitals for treatment not available in Gaza. Many youths who gain admission to foreign universities cannot leave Gaza in order to secure degrees and claim a future outside the strip’s narrow confines.

Israeli drones fly overhead constantly and, occasionally, strike targets claimed to be military sites. When, between 2018-2020, Palestinian youths and minor children resisted the Israeli occupation by protesting at the Israel fence which surrounds the Gaza strip, Israeli troops fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and live rounds at them. Between 2018-2020 214 Palestinians, 46 of them children, were killed and 36,100 Palestinians were injured, including 8,800 children. Resistance of any type is branded “terrorism” by Israel and its friends.

Every few years Palestinian children are subjected to full-scale Israeli attacks which can last a week or weeks. Unlike Ukrainian children, Gaza’s children do not have underground train stations and tunnels and bunkers where they can shelter from bombs, bullets and shells. Israel’s current practice is to warn Palestinians to leave homes and other buildings about to be levelled.

While this saves lives where warnings are given, families are rendered homeless and without most of their possessions. Children search rubble for teddy bears, toys and schoolbooks and bags. Children who survive destroyed unoccupied households help dig survivors and bodies of unwarned famililes from the ruins.

Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme, founded in 1990 by the late Eyad Al Sarraj is the leading Palestinian non-governmental organisation providing counselling and other help to men, women and children suffering from war and privation. The latter caused, at least in part, by Israel’s blockade. Research has shown Palestinian children develop feelings of fear, anger, hostility, resentment and frustration which can turn to violence in schools. In response, the programme has carried out programmes in schools to train teachers how to deal with affected children and encourage children to resolve differences peacefully. Summer camps and recreational trips are also organised for children.

During a trip to Gaza with a BBC television correspondent some years ago, she and I interviewed the deputy director of the Mental Health Programme. Since the weather was clear although the wind was gusty, we did the interview on the beach where children were playing football. They gathered round and aggressively asked who we were and what we were doing. They exemplified the trauma that Gaza’s children face on a daily basis.

Before his death from cancer in 2013, I used to call on Eyad whenever I visited Gaza. Following Israel’s 2008-09 onslaught on Gaza, I found him at home with his six-year-old son, Ali, who sat firmly on Eyad’s lap. He had kept Ali by his side throughout the Israeli attack. Eyed told me that as a result of that campaign, 99 per cent of Gazans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When I checked with people I met, they agreed. People react in different ways to PTSD. A foreign resident told me his son had nightmares and wet his bed while a UN official spoke in a rapid stream of words during an interview, signalling that he was suffering from PTSD.

This heightened bout of PTSD was piled on top of years of traumatic stress caused by Israel’s siege and constant malignant presence on the borders, in the sea, and in the sky over Gaza.

While the world focuses on the tragic and terrible plight of Ukraine’s children, the endless trauma of Gaza’s children should not be ignored.

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Featured image: A Palestinian child, Omar Alhadeede, the sole survivor of his family, looks at a photo of his brothers, killed by the recent Israeli bombing on Gaza. (Image tweeted by Aya Isleem)

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Last week, a bitterly divided Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by a detainee at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba against the Department of Justice because the government claimed the information sought in the case was a state secret, the revelation of which will impair national security.

The plaintiff in the case has already testified publicly at Gitmo about his torture by Polish intelligence agents in Poland at the request of their American counterparts, and he sought an acknowledgement by U.S. officials that the torture did take place.
The American psychologists who crafted and managed the torture wrote a book about it and have discussed it publicly. The European Court of Human Rights has found that the torture occurred as the detainee in Gitmo described. And Polish prosecutors have indicted the Polish intelligence agents for violating the human rights of this detainee.

Still, the government wants to keep secret its torture from nearly 20 years ago. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed.

Here is the backstory.

In 2002, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan and handed over to the CIA, which brought him to Poland where, under the supervision of CIA agents and two American psychologists, he was brutally tortured until his removal to Gitmo in 2006.

The Bush administration claimed that Zubaydah was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida who possessed information needed to fight the war on terror. After his torture produced no actionable information, the CIA told the Department of Justice and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaida, and it had no evidence of wrongdoing by him. He remains in his 20th year of captivity, uncharged with any crime.

His lawyers filed a criminal complaint with the European Court of Human Rights against the CIA and the Polish intelligence agents who tortured him.

That court concluded that the torture did occur, and it referred the matter to Polish prosecutors to proceed criminally against the Polish defendants. During that criminal proceeding, Polish prosecutors asked the DOJ for the names of those who tortured Zubaydah and documentation of what they did to him.

When the DOJ declined that request, Zubaydah sued the DOJ and asked a court to compel the DOJ to honor the request.

In the Supreme Court oral argument last year, the government’s lawyer conceded that the names of the torturers and the nature of their grisly deeds are already known — from the book the psychologists wrote about it and from the detainee’s testimony — but the government will not confirm any of it because it constitutes state secrets.

If these so-called state secrets are now publicly known, why does the government refuse to confirm them? To shield itself from embarrassment.

The government has a long and sordid history of shielding itself from embarrassment.

On Oct. 6, 1948, a U.S. government plane was leaving Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins, Georgia, for a round-trip flight to Orlando, Florida, when it crashed, killing its crew. When surviving family members sued the government to determine who manufactured the plane and why it crashed, the feds declined to provide any information asserting that what was sought constituted state secrets.

In 1953, when the Supreme Court upheld this novel argument, it effectively changed the rules of evidence by permitting the federal government — without disclosing to a judge what the secrets are — to withhold evidence merely by making this state secrets claim.

Since 1953, the government has successfully asserted the state secrets claim dozens of times, claiming that the revelation of the so-called secrets will adversely affect national security.

In 2001, after the statute of limitations had long expired for any litigation over the 1948 crash, and reporters filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the alleged state secrets, a judge ordered the government to reveal them.

There were none.

The entire state secrets doctrine was based on covering up government embarrassment and wrongdoing and shielding the plane’s manufacturer from litigation, not the protection of legitimate secrets.

Now, back to the Zubaydah case. When it was argued in the Supreme Court last year, everyone involved in the oral argument knew that the state secrets doctrine was based on material misrepresentations the feds made to at least a dozen federal judges and justices, yet the government treated it as if it were legitimate and compelling.

The government argued that, in wartime, its powers to keep its behavior secret are enhanced — even 20 years later, even after the war ended, even if the secrets are already out.

The Supreme Court agreed. It upheld the state secrets doctrine and dismissed Zubaydah’s complaint. In so doing, the court attempted to rewrite history by legitimizing a doctrine created by deception and by pretending that matters already publicly known are somehow still secret.

Add to this the fact that all torture is criminal and unconstitutional, and you have a court becoming the apprentice of deep state bureaucrats and torturers who believe that, in matters of so-called national security, the feds can do no wrong.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a blistering dissent taking the majority to task for pretending that the state secrets doctrine is valid and can be invoked without even first showing the secrets to a federal judge in secret. He also ripped into the majority by asking: What conceivable national security purpose is served by hiding that which is already in plain sight?

The court’s torture jurisprudence is sickening, unconstitutional and haunting.

It is sickening because it consists of judges with blinders on, ruling as if the government-induced blood and pain of innocents were of no moment. It is unconstitutional because it rejects the Ninth Amendment’s textual protection of natural rights, which shields the human body from unwanted government intrusion. It is haunting because the Supreme Court shielding torturers will unleash the government to engage in more torture.

This is what has become of the Constitution’s guardians.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”

In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.

The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup, and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in Eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for.

Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy played leading roles in the U.S-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with on their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.

As formerly peaceful protests in Kyiv gave way to pitched battles with police and violent, armed marches to try to break through police barricades and reach the Parliament building, Svoboda members and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled police, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan movement.

We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone would have led to in Ukraine or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful political process had been allowed to take its course, without interference by the United States or violent right-wing extremists.

A pro-EU rally in Kyiv on 24 November when people marching towards the rally on European square (2013) (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)

But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the February 21, 2014 agreement negotiated by the French, German and Polish foreign ministers, under which Yanukovich and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.

Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like President Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like President Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the “Orange Revolution” that followed a disputed election. Ukraine’s endemic corruption tainted every government, and rapid public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a see-saw between Western- and Russian-aligned factions.

In 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as Prime Minister of the post-coup government. He lasted two years, until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the post-coup President, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.

When Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as Deputy Prime Minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy was appointed Chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next 5 years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but only got 1.2% of the votes, and was not re-elected to Parliament.

Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme-right in the 2014 post-coup elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.

After the coup, Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what their leader Yarosh described to Newsweek as a “war” to “cleanse the country” of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2nd with the massacre of 42 anti-coup protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.

After anti-coup protests evolved into declarations of independence in Donetsk and Luhansk, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so.

Right Sector formed a battalion, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government’s assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.

The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Congressman Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end U.S. military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly continued to receive U.S. arms and training despite the ban.

In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned,

“The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… (Its) aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”

The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.

Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov have included Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the U.S. Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and other countries.

Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in Western Ukraine.

After President Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky had run for election as a “peace candidate,” but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

During Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force.

The civil war has combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion IMF bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized healthcare, and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.

Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.

As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of Al Qaeda and ISIS. U.S. and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria ten years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.

Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, but we should not be surprised when the U.S. alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

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

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.    

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image: Flag of Svoboda (political party) (Licensed under CC0)

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

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Grand foreign policy speeches are not usually the specialty of Australian Prime Ministers.  Little insight can be gleaned from them.  A more profitable exercise would be consulting the US State Department’s briefings, which give more accurate barometric readings of policy in Canberra.  The same goes for the selected adversary of the day.  Washington’s adversaries must be those of Canberra’s.  To challenge such assumptions would be heretical.  To act upon them would be apostasy.

The speech by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on March 7 to the Lowy Institute lived down to expectations.  Where it did serve some value was to highlight a mirror portrait of the man himself, describing an amoral world of power he inhabits.  “We face,” he solemnly stated, “the spectre of a transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency, where state sovereignty, territorial integrity and liberty are surrendered for respite from coercion and intimidation, or economic entrapment dressed up as economic reward.”

In other respects, this speech was derivative of previous efforts to simplify the world into camps of wearying darkness and sublime light.  In his 2002 State of the Union Address, US President George W. Bush did precisely that.  Before losing our intellectual integrity in examining Morrison’s efforts of profound shallowness, let us go back to that original, dunce-crafted address, amply aided by David Frum, the Iraq War’s polished and persistent apologist.

When Bush delivered his address, the moment was certainly strained.  The September 11, 2001 attacks still searingly fresh; the administration trying to come up with a doctrine to cope with the scourge of international Islamist terrorism.  In such instances, a subtle analysis of the global scene, a mapping of sensible policy, might have been too much to ask.

What the world got was an adolescent morality sketch based on angry pre-emption in a rotten world.  The US, Bush promised, would pursue “two great objectives.”  The first involved shutting down terrorist camps, disrupting the plans of terrorists, and bringing “terrorists to justice.”  The second: “to prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world.”

With the objectives stated, the heavy padding was introduced into the speech.  North Korea, Iran and Iraq were singled out for special mention.  “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”  The sequence of catastrophic, and bloody blunders that would culminate in the destruction of the ancient lands of Mesopotamia, was being floated.  Evidence would be secondary to assumption and ideology.

Morrison’s own assessment is not much better.  “A new arc of autocracy is instinctively aligning itself to challenge and reset the world order in their own image.” At best, this silly formulation is dated, one straight out of musty history books depicting Beijing and Moscow as joined at the hip, keen on world revolution.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine is taken to be an attack on the “rules-based international order, built upon the principles and values that guide our own nation”.  This order “supported peace and stability, and allowed sovereign nations to pursue their interests free from coercion.”

This same order was grossly, and willingly violated by the US-led coalition that marched into a sovereign state in 2003, unleashing tides of sectarianism that continue in their fury.  The grounds for attacking Iraq were specious, and there was no interest in allowing it to pursue its “interests free from coercion.”  Instead, a sanguinary, ramshackle protectorate was created, crudely supervised by international forces that aided in driving jihadi tourism.

The same order Morrison blithely describes was violated by NATO in its bombing of vital civilian infrastructure in Serbia in 1999, ostensibly to halt a genocide of Kosovars.  In 2011, the same rules-based-order became something of a joke with the aerial intervention by French, UK and US forces in backing a revolt against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.  Unceremoniously butchered by an ecstatic mob, Gaddafi did not live to see his country virtually partitioned by rival militias.

The adversaries of the US are on very solid ground to point these misdeeds out, and Russian President Vladimir Putin does not shy away from reminding the West of this fact in his February 24 speech.  Western colleagues, Putin remarked, “do not like to remember those events, and when we talk about it, they prefer to point not to the norms of international law, but to the circumstances that they interpret as they see fit.”  This hardly adds weight to his own self-interpreted claims, but they serve to draw a thick line under hypocrisy masquerading as virtue.

Morrison hits a sinister register in describing the effects of the principle-free, transactional world.  “The well-motivated altruistic ambition of our international institutions has opened the door to this threat.  Just as our open markets and liberal democracies have enabled hostile influence and interference to penetrate not our own societies and economies.”  What is he suggesting?  A violent retaliation, a forced reversal?

Much impatience was expressed with how these naughty regimes of the autocratic arc have managed to get away with it.  It might be “right to aspire” to “inclusion and accommodation”, but Australia and its allies had been left “disappointed”.  But not his government – not the Liberal-Nationals, who had been “clear eyed”, having “taken strong, brave and world-leading action in response.”

To show how clear of eye Morrison has been, he has successfully made Australia the subservient partner in the AUKUS security pact with the United States and the UK.  What was left of Australian sovereignty has been brazenly outsourced.  The prime minister barely acknowledges the rationale of the agreement in the Lowy address, which has little to do with Australia eventually having its own questionable submarines with nuclear propulsion.  The central point is granting greater access to US armed forces for easier deployment in the Indo-Pacific, a logistical benefit that is bound to make any war more, rather than less likely.  Some freedom; some sovereignty.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

---

Most commentary on Western progressive and radical media on events in Ukraine has failed to acknowledge the right to self-defense of the Russian Federation and its allies the Donetsk and Lugansk Popular Republics. This is one more example of the way North American and European progressive and radical movements collaborate with their ruling classes, just as they generally did over their governments’ repressive economic and social measures addressing Covid-19. The very Western movements claiming to be morally superior to both sides in the Ukraine war, by doing so, aid and abet the US government, its NATO allies and their Nazi sympathizer protegés in Ukraine.

The double standard could hardly be more clear. As distinguished international war crimes specialist Christopher Black notes:

“When one takes account of all the factors that governed the Russian decision to send its forces into Ukraine it is clear that in law they had the legal right to do so whereas the United States continues its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and Syria to this day and the NATO media powers and governments say nothing, because they are all complicit in those invasions.”

Now, Ukrainian military documents retrieved by the Russian authorities have demonstrated conclusively that their intervention preempted a large scale assault by Ukrainian armed forces against Donetsk and Lugansk, planned for early March this year.

So President Vladimir Putin was right to argue his government was acting in self defense in Ukraine after eight years of Ukrainian attacks on Donestk and Lugansk, since, as Christopher Black argues, Article 51 of the UN Charter applies, namely

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Which renders entirely specious the argument of many widely respected left wing commentators like, for example, Ignacio Ramonet that Russia’s action in self defense “is barely even a fig leaf, a barebones legal skeleton to explain away an unjustifiable attack on Ukraine”.

The role of Ramonet, like so many similar commentators, is to cover the Left flank of their social democrat and liberal support networks in the European Union and the United States, giving cover for otherwise inexcusable EU and US policies. Such commentators played a practically identical role in 2011 making excuses for Nato countries’ destructive aggression against Libya, Syria and Ivory Coast.

This explains why Ramonet’s claim that it is “difficult to understand why the United States did not do more to avoid this conflict in Ukraine” is fundamentally dishonest and false.

Self-evidently the Western corporate elites have used the governments they own in North America and Europe to weaken and, if possible, destroy not just the independence and autonomy of the Russian Federation, but that of the European Union too. Western corporate elites will make enormous profits rearming Germany and the rest of Europe, and also Japan, and ensuring that Europe depends on US and allied country energy and food supplies. Turning Europe into a heavily militarized US vassal region prevents the US from losing the extremely lucrative, for now, European markets to Russia and China.

Also self-evident is the fact that commentators like Ignacio Ramonet and others assign completely disproportionate meaning to the recent UN General Assembly vote on the war in Ukraine which was so symbolic as to be practically meaningless. Countries representing an enormous majority of the world’s peoples chose to abstain or simply not take part in the vote. Here is the list of abstentions: Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, India, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikstan, Uganda, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Not taking part in the vote were: Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.

So it is completely false to claim that the UN vote in any way at all represented a global condemnation of Russia by the majority of the world’s peoples. This is even more the case because, subsequently, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico have all made clear they are unwilling to apply illegal coercive economic and other measures against Russia. Nor is it likely that countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will act to damage their countries’s already fragile economies in the context of global efforts to recover from the effects of measures supposedly addressing Covid-19. These are incontrovertible realities that most Western progressives and radicals seem unwilling to acknowledge.

In turn, this means that what they think is practically irrelevant for the majority world. Very serious and committed anti-imperialist, class conscious writers openly discuss whether any kind of Left worth wanting exists any more in North America and Europe, for example Max Blumenthal and Cory Morningstar or the Black Agenda Report collective. These discussions may well be useful eventually for the cultural, social and political well being of Western countries, but in any case the majority world, despite the evil policies of the US and European ruling elites, will continue working successfully to realize their peoples’ right to a decent life, to their human development and to the sovereign independence of their nations.

*

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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).

Featured image is from epthinktank.eu

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Does Your At-Home COVID-19 Test Contain this Poison?

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

***

It has become apparent that New Zealand is getting more entangled in the U.S. Empire than ever before. Don’t be fooled that New Zealand and America’s longest war—Afghanistan—is over and ended in abject withdrawal and defeat by the Taliban in August 2021.

Or that New Zealand was not invited to join the new AUKUS pact between the U.S., UK and Australia, to provide the latter with nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines. New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy might rule out any such subs using our waters but New Zealand, under this Labour government, has expressed keenness to be involved with other aspects of AUKUS.

The Waihopai spy base has been New Zealand’s most important service for the U.S. Empire for decades. In 2021 the Government announced that it will be dismantling and decommissioning Waihopai’s two most unmissable features, namely the giant white domes that cover the satellite-interception dishes within.

Both dishes and domes have been declared obsolete 20^th century relics that are no longer fit for 21^st century spying. They will be removed in 2022. But the Government has no intention of dismantling the spy base itself; instead, it will be modernized to use more efficient (and less glaringly conspicuous) methods of spying.

Source: stuff.co.nz

All of this, from New Zealand’s involvement in Afghanistan to operating Waihopai on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency, is governed by New Zealand’s decades-long membership in Five Eyes, the electronic spying agreement between the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (originally it was referred to by its formal title, the UKUSA Agreement; Five Eyes is a more recent name). But it is much more than that—Five Eyes is a de facto geopolitical bloc.

“The Price of the Club”

John Key explicitly cited the Five Eyes as the justification for New Zealand’s involvement in the the Iraq War: The New Zealand Herald reported: “Prime Minister John Key says New Zealand’s likely military contribution to the fight against Islamic State ‘is the price of the club’ that New Zealand belongs to with the likes of the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada in the intelligence alliance known as Five Eyes.”^[1]

More recently, New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners have tried to make it an actual geopolitical bloc, issuing statements about China’s various misdeeds, e.g., in Hong Kong, and pressured New Zealand to sign on. In some cases, the Government has done so; in others it has asserted the increasingly threadbare claim that New Zealand has an independent foreign policy.

“’We are uncomfortable with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes,’ [Foreign Affairs Minister] Nanaia Mahuta said to reporters. ‘New Zealand has been very clear, certainly in this term and since we’ve held the portfolio, not to invoke the Five Eyes as the first point of contact of messaging out on a range of issues that really exist out of the remit of the Five Eyes.’”^[2]

But that sort of thing is merely a skirmish, a question of emphasis. New Zealand is in Five Eyes, boots and all.

And the U.S., under Joe Biden, is keen to use blocs like Five Eyes as part of his “Indo-Pacific” strategy, the central policy plank of which is to contain China (whilst simultaneously confronting Russia on the other side of the world). When he took office Biden said “America’s back!” Yes, it is—back to saber-rattling and warmongering. And it wants its traditional allies (or satellites, as the West used to disparagingly call the Soviet Union’s allies during the Cold War) all on board and on message.

U.S. Grants Perks to New Zealand Capitalists Because of Five Eyes

To sweeten the deal, the U.S. is prepared to make Five Eyes membership an attractive proposition. So, Five Eyes has been expanded from intelligence and political ties to also now being explicitly about money and access to markets. The message from Washington is clear: Be in our “club” and we’ll make it worth your while.

This was spelled out in a fascinating article entitled “New Zealand Investors Won Carve-Out From U.S. Foreign Financing Rules.”^[3]

“New Zealanders will now jump through fewer hoops to invest in American businesses and real estate, after the Government secured a temporary exemption to the country’s foreign investment screening rules. The U.S. decision represents another step towards more tightly binding together Five Eyes nations, with New Zealand’s intelligence-sharing relationship and defence cooperation cited as key factors for the decision…”

“The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency organisation which scrutinises the national security implications of investments into the country, announced earlier this month (January) that New Zealand had been added to its list of ‘excepted foreign states.’”

“In 2020, the Committee’s remit expanded beyond ‘control’ transactions, where a foreign investor would take controlling interest in a U.S. business, to cover investments in more sensitive companies, as well as the purchase of real estate near sensitive U.S. government facilities…While Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom secured exceptions from those expanded controls at the time, as well as a new requirement for mandatory filing, New Zealand did not, placing an extra burden on Kiwi investors….”

“In a fact sheet outlining the rationale for the change of heart, the U.S. Treasury Department cited New Zealand’s ‘intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and its collective defense arrangement and cooperation with the United States’ as among the factors which earned it an exemption…. While the addition of New Zealand showed some willingness to expand the benefits of the carve-outs to new investors, the fact the group remained restricted to Five Eyes members did not provide any clear sense of whether it would offer an exemption to countries outside of the intelligence pact.”

So, there you have it. If fighting American wars in other people’s countries is the price of belonging to the Five Eyes club, then the U.S. is prepared to extend exclusive economic benefits to its junior Five Eyes allies to make it more palatable. Older New Zealanders will remember the infamous “guns for butter” phrase of Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister during New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. It means sending our soldiers to fight in U.S. wars in order to, theoretically, gain trade access.

New Zealand never has succeeded in getting a free trade agreement with the U.S.—Donald Trump scuppered the former Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) as soon as he took office and that was the closest New Zealand has ever got to the “holy grail.” The Biden administration is prepared to offer an economic sweetener to New Zealand as reward for being the most loyal, albeit most junior, of the Five Eyes.

Rocket Lab and Five Eyes

Of course, the newest U.S. base in New Zealand is that of Rocket Lab (which operates out of both Auckland and the Mahia Peninsula). I have written several Watchdogarticles in recent years about Rocket Lab (most recently in issue 157, August 2021, “Rocket Lab. Campaign Against It Blasts Off,” see this).

We (both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign) have consistently made the point that it is a U.S. facility for a privately owned American company, operating for the U.S. military and spies on New Zealand soil.

Illustration of Rocket Lab’s launch complex. [Source: spacenews.com]

Despite the best (worst?) efforts by Rocket Lab’s New Zealand political and media apologists to polish this turd, Rocket Lab itself makes no secret about what it is, what it does and who it serves. Nor is it shy to play the Five Eyes card. “In a 2008 profile published in Metro magazine, [Chief Executive Officer and founder] Peter Beck ruled out military work when discussing if there were payloads Rocket Lab wouldn’t carry.”

Beck is quoted as saying:

‘Of course, … we said right from the beginning if it’s involved in the military, we don’t want anything to do with it. The military can be quite a tempting cherry because a lot of money gets poured into it, but we’re about science, we’re not about killing people…’

His views have evolved, and he now believes military intelligence helps keep Kiwis safe.

“Beck had a very different reply from 2008 when asked if he had any qualms about sending U.S. spy satellites into space, given the intelligence they collect can be used in military operations. ‘You also have to remember that intelligence keeps us safe. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad actors in the world. I am a New Zealander, but you also have to understand that national security is a global thing.’”

“‘It’s not a singular country’s responsibility. New Zealand is part of the Five Eyes… it’s all very well to criticise national security until the very day that you need it.’”^[4]

Rocket Lab and “Classified Defense and Intelligence Business”

Since I last wrote about Rocket Lab (August 2021), there has been no shortage of new developments. That same month it debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, valued at US$ 5.2 billion. In September 2021 it was reported that “Rocket Lab shares jumped nearly 9% to US$ 15.29 (for a $US 6.5 billion market cap) in early trading on the Nasdaq after the company finally confirmed a major tranche of funding from the U.S. military and entry into an inner-circle of companies approved for security and defence missions…The Kiwi-American firm secured US$ 24.35 million (NZ$ 34m) from the U.S. Air Force’s new Space Force division to develop the upper stage of its Neutron rocket.”

“Rocket Lab said in a statement:

‘The agreement signifies Rocket Lab’s commitment to becoming a launch provider for the National Security Space Launch programme, which launches the United States’ most critical missions’… Founder and CEO Peter Beck said: ‘We’re dedicated to building a next-generation rocket that will transform space access for constellations through to the most critical missions in support of national security, and it’s an honour to be partnering with the U.S. Space Force to develop Neutron.’”

“Rocket Lab, which won a key R&D [research and development] contract with U.S. Department of Defense agency DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] at a key time in its young life, has long had close ties to the U.S. military which, along with NASA, has been one of its two biggest customers. And in an investor presentation before its Nasdaq listing, Rocket Lab said Department of Defense space systems spending represented a ‘[US]$968 million opportunity over ten years.’”

“In a reference to Rocket Lab’s new Launch Complex II within NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia, it said ‘a secure facility will be completed this year (2021) to support classified Department of Defense and Intelligence Community business.’”^[5]

NASA Wallops Island facility in Virginia. [Source: nasa.gov]

And the fact that Rocket Lab is an American company becomes more and more apparent. “Rocket Lab’s centre of gravity has shifted further away from New Zealand and towards North America after it announced it would buy United States space solar tech company SolAero for $US80 million ($NZ118 million). Rocket Lab will take on 425 staff as a result of the acquisition, which is expected to be complete by the end of March [2022].”

“That will take Rocket Lab’s total number of staff to more than 1100, of whom spokeswoman Morgan Bailey confirmed 525 were currently based in New Zealand. Rocket Lab, which is already headquartered in the U.S. and listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, will manufacture and launch its next line of larger Neutron rockets in the U.S.”^[6]

In February 2022 Rocket Lab announced that it will build a giant production and mission control complex in Colorado. This will be its fourth major facility in the U.S.—the others are in California, New Mexico and Virginia (from where it will exclusively launch its larger Neutron rockets). It has also expanded its facilities in both Auckland and Mahia.

New Zealand Government and Rocket Lab Join U.S. Drive to Mine Moon

The Government’s infatuation with Rocket Lab is taking New Zealand into some literally unearthly and legally dubious places. In mid-2021, New Zealand signed the Artemis Accords, which promotes the exploitation of the Moon and other space resources. “The legal status of space resources is contested. The world’s main space agreement, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, prohibits the ‘national appropriation’ of the Moon and other celestial bodies by any means. Some academics argue this rules out Moon mining for private profit. Others say it only precludes claims to land, not its resources.”

“This uncertainty aside, in 2015 the U.S. Congress passed a law allowing American companies to own and sell natural resources mined from space. In April 2020, the Trump administration declared that the U.S. doesn’t view space as a ‘global commons,’ denouncing the 1979 Moon Agreement, which sought to protect the moon’s resources as ‘the common heritage’ of mankind (although few states have signed up to it).”

“Announced shortly after Trump’s declaration, the Artemis Accords—which are advanced directly with ‘like-minded’ nations, rather than through the UN—seek to shape international law in line with this worldview, asserting that the extraction of space resources is not ‘inherently’ national appropriation under the Outer Space Treaty.”^[7]

Bypassing the UN

“The New Zealand Space Agency believes its participation in the Artemis Accords—an international agreement to send people back to the Moon—will significantly boost the space sector. The Government signed up to the NASA accords in 2021, and New Zealand will play an important role in the project when Rocket Lab launches the CAPSTONE satellite to lunar orbit from Mahia Peninsula, likely in March [2022].”

“NASA’s CAPSTONE, or Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment satellite, will test the orbit planned to be used by a small space station that would act as a lunar gateway. The Space Agency noted that signing the Accords presented some risk to international relationships.”

“‘The Accords may be viewed by some nations as an attempt to bypass the UN Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space process and the UN treaty-making process,’” the Agency said.”^[8]

Source: nasa.gov

The reference to “some countries” is telling—neither Russia nor China has signed the Artemis Accords. But little old New Zealand has, jumping on board a Trumpian U.S. outer space resource grab (one which has not been reversed by the Biden administration), with a U.S. company standing to financially benefit from its involvement using its NZ launch site.

“There are some obvious reasons that New Zealand might want to side with the United States in this debate. Our relationship with the superpower is critical for our space sector, particularly Rocket Lab, which has numerous U.S. government contracts.”^[9] So, there you have it. And the answer to the question posed in the subtitle of that North & South article is: “Yes.”

ABC Webinar on Rocket Lab and Five Eyes

As I detailed in my August 2021 Watchdog article on Rocket Lab, there is now a campaign against it. As part of the January 2021 Waihopai spy base protest, Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) hosted a well-attended Blenheim public meeting. The three speakers were Ollie Neas, the journalist who has been writing critical analyses on Rocket Lab for years, Nicky Hager on Five Eyes and Green MP Teanau Tuiono.

About 30 protesters gathered in January 2020, 20 km outside Blenheim, in the annual demonstration to close down Waihopai spy base. [Source: stuff.co.nz]

This meeting was so successful and so well received by the good number of people present that ABC decided to host a Christchurch public meeting in September 2021 featuring those same three speakers, plus Sonya Smith from Rocket Lab Monitor in Mahia.^[10]

Alas, the ever-changing Covid situation ruled out a physical meeting but ABC replaced it with a webinar, featuring all four speakers, plus me, which drew many more attendees—including from overseas—than we would have had at an in-person Christchurch public meeting. Sadly, it is not available online, as the speakers felt that they could speak more freely if it was not recorded.

ABC looked to take that further with Sonya Smith and Teanau Tuiono among the speakers at the Blenheim public meeting, which was part of the scheduled January 2022 Waihopai spy base protest. But Covid buggered things up again, and the whole event had to be cancelled, for the first time since 1988, with just a few days’ notice.

NSO Spyware and Five Eyes

There is more to Five Eyes than Waihopai and Rocket Lab. Its tentacles reach into all sorts of areas: for example, the notorious Israeli Pegasus spyware sold to governments by the company NSO. It has been used by some of the worst abusers of human rights to spy on journalists, dissidents and political opponents, with all sorts of dire consequences, including murder. NSO is such an outrageous outfit (most recently, it has been caught spying on its own Jewish citizens within Israel) that the Biden administration put it on a blacklist in 2022—a very rare U.S. move against any Israeli entity. Moves were announced to sell it to a U.S. venture capital firm.

The plan outlines cancelling or restricting most of the company’s former clients, effectively bringing the company’s revenues to zero. Instead of the current 37 clients, the company will reduce its sales to only five clients: the Five Eyes Anglosphere intelligence alliance of New Zealand, the United States, Australia, Great Britain and Canada.

“The company would initially focus on defensive cyber products as part of its rebranding effort.”^[11]

New Zealand Has to Get Out of Five Eyes If It Is to Have an Independent Foreign Policy

Five Eyes will only continue to get more important in the geopolitical game playing—indeed, there is talk of it being expanded to include Japan and Israel. What is New Zealand doing in it?

If you are judged by the company you keep, then it does not reflect well on us. More and more, New Zealand is being sucked into the vortex that is the U.S. Empire, an empire that is increasingly using Five Eyes as yet another weapon in its quest to retain global domination. It is well beyond time for New Zealand to get out of it. There is no possibility of us having an “independent foreign policy” until that happens.

What’s More, Five Eyes Doesn’t Even Do What It’s Supposed to Do

Helen Clark was the Labour Prime Minister who ordered the New Zealand military into Afghanistan. Her reaction to the Taliban victory in 2021 was to call it “a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy.”

Prime Minister Helen Clark during a visit to New Zealand Defence Force’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamyan province, west of Kabul in 2003. [Source: stuff.co.nz]

Yet, New Zealand is in the Western world’s self-proclaimed elite intelligence club, namely Five Eyes. Which proved to be absolutely useless in seeing what was going on in Afghanistan, a country which had been an adventure playground for Western spies for twenty years. So, why is New Zealand in Five Eyes, what use is it to us (or anyone else, for that matter)? Time for New Zealand to get out, time for Five Eyes to become four eyes. Or less if the other countries follow suit.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums, etc.

Murray Horton is organizer of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) and an advocate of a range of progressive causes for the past four decades. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Audrey Young, “Military Protection ’Price We Pay’ For Five Eyes Protection,” January 21, 2015, New Zealand Herald, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/prime-minister-john-key-isis-fight-price-of-the-club/BVF6YYQPFVFGQFGLP5NZNWC4NA/ 

2. Henry Cooke, “Jacinda Ardern Says New Zealand’s New Stance On Five Eyes Isn’t Backdown To China,” Stuff, April 20, 2021, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300281578/jacinda-ardern-says-new-zealands-new-stance-on-five-eyes-isnt-a–backdown-to-china). 
3. Sam Sachdeva, “NZ investors win carve-out from US foreign financing rules,” Newsroom, January 25, 2022, https://www.newsroom.co.nz/nz-investors-win-carve-out-from-us-foreign-financing-rules. 
4. George Block, “Rocket Lab Defends Spy Role,” Press, July 28, 2020, https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/300063842/rocket-lab-peter-beck-defends-spy-satellite-work-exdirector-speaks-of-leaving. 
5. Chris Keall, “Rocket Lab Shares Jump as U.S. Military Funding Confirmed,” NZ Herald, September 28, 2021, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/rocket-lab-shares-jump-as-us-military-funding-confirmed/H7IBEHJ4HMNE734JKWVC74NJ6E/. 
6. Tom Pullar-Strecker, “Most Rocket Lab Staff Set To Be Based Outside NZ By Early Next Year,” Stuff, December 14, 2021, https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/127276549/most-rocket-lab-staff-set-to-be-based-outside-nz-by-early-next-year. 
7. Ollie Neas, “How NZ’s New Deal With NASA Could Pave The Way For Moon Mining,” Spinoff, June 3, 2021, https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/03-06-2021/how-nzs-new-deal-with-nasa-could-pave-the-way-for-moon-mining. 
8. Ben Strang, “Government Officials Expect NZ Moon Launch To Create Huge Opportunities In Space Sector,” Stuff January 6, 2022, https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/innovation/127435183/government-officials-expect-nz-moon-launch-to-create-huge-opportunities-in-space-sector. 
9. Kate Evans, “The Dark Side Of The Moon: Is New Zealand Lending Support To An Aggressive American Push To Commercialise Outer Space?”,North & South, December 2021 https://northandsouth.co.nz/2022/01/26/new-zealand-moon-artemis-accords/. 
10. https://rocketlabmonitor.com/. 

11. Sagi Cohen, “U.S. Venture Capital Firm in Talks to Buy Israel’s Infamous Spyware Maker NSO,” Haaretz, January 25, 2022, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-u-s-venture-capital-firm-in-talks-to-buy-israel-s-infamous-spyware-maker-nso-1.10565909. 

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On February 28th, Human Rights Watch (HRW) headlined “With War, Censorship Reaches New Heights”, and reported only against this censorship as practiced in Russia, as-if it were not also being done in America. The only even mention of its being practiced in America was in the second — the subordinate — clause of their sentence “Roskomnadzor announced that it would partially restrict access to Facebook in Russia, in retaliation for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, blocking four Russian state media accounts.”

In other words: only implicitly — not at all explicitly — did HRW so much as even acknowledge — in that thousand-word-long article — that Russia’s Government was acting in response to the (CIA-affiliated) U.S. company Meta’s “blocking four Russian state media accounts,” or to any of the many other U.S.-Government anti-Russia censorship operations.

Furthermore, any keen reader of that lone sentence would also immediately recognize that for (the CIA-front firm) Meta to have been “blocking four Russian state media accounts” was more severe censorship than was for the Russian Government to have been “partially restrict[ing] access to Facebook in Russia” — in other words: Russia’s response was actually milder than was the censorship that it was responding to. However, any regular fool who would be reading HRW’s propaganda-piece would come away from it thinking that Russia is a dictatorship, and that America is not. (America certainly IS.)

Actually, the U.S. Government routinely does censor out the most of the important facts — eliminates such facts virtually altogether, from its media’s international ‘news’-reporting, as it did, for example, regarding “Saddam’s WMD” in preparation for the subsequent American invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq; and such as it did regarding America’s bloody coup, conquest, and continuing control over Ukraine, by means of the coup-operation that U.S. President Barack Obama started planning in 2011, and successfully carried-out during February 2014 in Kiev Ukraine — and which bloody coup all of America’s CIA-controlled ‘news’-media reported as-if it had been instead a “democratic revolution” there. (It was anything but  that.)

HRW itself had been started in 1978, with backing from mainly American billionaires, and was founded by Robert L. Bernstein and Aryeh Neier in New York City. Its real mission was to condemn the Soviet Union’s violations of human rights, but when the Soviet Union dissolved and ended its communism in 1991, HRW continued on as being a propaganda-organization against Russia and countries that aren’t hostile to Russia. It became especially heavily financed by U.S. billionaire George Soros and by many other neoconservative Democratic Party financial backers and their ‘charitable’ foundations.

Julian Assange’s article, “Google Is Not What It Seems” includes an extensive passage about HRW, working in 2011, helping Google, in conjunction with Hillary Clinton’s U.S. State Department, to prepare the overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, so as to put into place on Russia’s doorstep, a rabidly anti-Russian regime there, which would then be followed by that new Ukrainian regime’s ethnically cleansing its Donbass region, which had voted 90% for that President whom Obama had overthrown, so as to get rid of those voters, in order to enable Ukraine in the future to elect rabidly anti-Russian leaders, and thereby to be a ‘democratic’ country that hates Russians and that just happens to be under a 7-minute flight-time for U.S. missiles which would be launched from there to hit Moscow.

For some reason, many people have noticed recently that whenever they are trying to obtain news from any of the relatively few sites that report favorably about Russia’s international policies, they get a supposed warning such as:

“Checking your browser before accessing [the given site]. This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly. Please allow up to 5 seconds…”

and that wait turns out to be interminable.

Another con that they use is

“This page is not available on the web because of server error.”

Another is

“This web property is not accessible via this address.”

Always, the message is coming from some private contractor, not from the U.S. Government directly, and the contractor is a provider of “DDoS protection” — it “secures websites, applications, and entire networks while ensuring the performance of legitimate traffic is not compromised.”

But, actually, these denial-of-service messages have skyrocketed just now after the U.S. regime responded to the Russian Government’s response to the U.S. Government’s having finally decided to do a blitz-invasion of its former Donbass region. Russia’s Government finally decided that if it wouldn’t immediately invade Ukraine, but would instead wait for Ukraine’s blitz-invasion of Donbass, then tens of thousands of Donbass residents would be slaughtered before Russia would be able to overcome and to halt that invasion; so, Russia suddenly reversed its Plan A, and immediately proceeded into its Plan B — an invasion of Ukraine itself. And that’s why the U.S. regime has stepped up from what it had been doing, such as this and this, to a broadscale close-down of sites that contradict U.S. propaganda.

Human Rights Watch (like so many others of its type) is a U.S.-and-allied-billionaires-funded propaganda organization to ‘justify’ U.S.-and-allied wars against their targeted countries.

Though this article is entirely history, it is also news in the U.S.-and-allied countries, because none of this history has been widely reported here. Consequently, this article includes links in order for readers who haven’t known any of this, to be able to see what the source-documents, and sources-videos, the evidence, for it are. This article is being submitted to all U.S.-and-allied media, in order finally to enable the residents in America and allied countries to learn this history, so as never to repeat it yet again.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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The Biden administration paid nearly the entire corporate media, including so-called “conservative” media outlets, with taxpayer dollars to engage in a massive campaign to push only positive coverage about COVID shots while censoring any negative information, without disclosing it to their audiences. This is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. 

Congress appropriated $1 billion in fiscal year 2021 for the secretary of health to spend on activities to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States.” Then hundreds of news organizations were paid by the federal government to advertise for the shots as part of a comprehensive media campaign by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The “COVID-19 Public Education Campaign,”  a “national initiative to increase public confidence in and uptake of COVID-19 vaccines,” was created with the goal of having “trusted messengers and influencers” speak to news organizations to “provide factual, timely information and steps people can take to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.”

This information was revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Blaze Media. This request uncovered that the HHS purchased advertising on TV, radio, in print, and on social media to build “vaccine confidence.” Media networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Newsmax, MSNBC, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments promoting the COVID shots as effective and safe.

Emerald Robinson, an independent journalist who previously served as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax (2020-2022) and for One America News (2017-2020), said she was contacted by a whistleblower inside Newsmax who confirmed that Newsmax executives agreed to take the money from Biden’s HHS to push only positive coverage of the new COVID shots. Robinson was also contacted by top Newsmax executives in 2021 and told to stop any negative coverage of the COVID shots. Newsmax told her “it was problematic” and she was warned many times by multiple executives. She was also contacted by PR experts who worked with Newsmax and was told that medical experts and doctors who might say negative things about the injections would not be booked as guests.

Some examples of the media propaganda include Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy who wrote an op-ed about “applauding Biden for his vaccine efforts.” Ruddy wrote,

“At Newsmax, we have strongly advocated for the public to be vaccinated. The many medical experts who have appeared on our network have been near unanimous in support of the vaccine. I myself have gotten the Pfizer vaccine. There’s no question in my mind, countless lives would have been saved if the vaccine was available earlier.”

HHS posted ads and commercials to YouTube featuring celebrities. CNN shared “fear-based vaccine ads” from HHS featuring “survivor” stories from Coronavirus patients who were hospitalized in intensive care units and these ads were discussed on ABC’s “The View.” Facebook also announced a social media plan to “help get people vaccinated.”  BuzzFeed News advised everyone age 65 or older, people with health conditions, etc., to get vaccinated. Other publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, featured advice from experts on how readers could convince vaccine-hesitant people in their lives to change their minds. The Washington Post presented “the pro-vaccine messages people want to hear.” Newsmax also has reported how the COVID shots have “been demonstrated to be safe and effective” and “encouraged citizens, especially those at risk, to get immunized.”

However, the evidence continues to reveal that the COVID shots are definitely not safe and effective.

Last January, a Texas federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to accelerate the release of the data it relied on to license the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 two-dose injection, marketed as Comirnaty. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ordered the FDA to produce more than 12,000 pages on or before Jan. 31 and to “produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.”

In the first 55,000-page set of documents released last week, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research allowed the public to access data for the first time that Pfizer submitted to the FDA from its clinical trials in support of a COVID-19 “vaccine” license. Hidden in one appendix is a 38-page report of clinical data for Pfizer’s “vaccine” which lists 1,291 adverse side effects of the shot in alphabetical order. 

The list includes

acute kidney injury, acute flaccid myelitis, anti-sperm antibody positive, brain stem embolism, brain stem thrombosis, cardiac arrest, cardiac failure, cardiac ventricular thrombosis, cardiogenic shock, central nervous system vasculitis, death neonatal, deep vein thrombosis, encephalitis brain stem, encephalitis hemorrhagic, frontal lobe epilepsy, foaming at mouth, epileptic psychosis, facial paralysis, fetal distress syndrome, gastrointestinal amyloidosis, generalized tonic-clonic seizure, Hashimoto’s encephalopathy, hepatic vascular thrombosis, herpes zoster reactivation, immune-mediated hepatitis, interstitial lung disease, jugular vein embolism, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, liver injury, low birth weight, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, myocarditis, neonatal seizure, pancreatitis, pneumonia, stillbirth, tachycardia, temporal lobe epilepsy, testicular autoimmunity, thrombotic cerebral infarction, Type 1 diabetes mellitus, venous thrombosis neonatal, and vertebral artery thrombosis among 1,246 other medical conditions following vaccination.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also recently admitted that it withheld critical COVID-19 data from the public because the agency thought it would be “misinterpreted” and cause “vaccine hesitancy” since it weakens the case for booster shots in certain demographics. Apparently, the CDC has been collecting detailed data on COVID-19 infections in the United States and organized it by age, race and vaccination status. However, the agency withheld detailed information to the public about breakthrough cases, hospitalizations and deaths, which it has been collecting since the beginning of the COVID shot rollout in 2021.

Led by director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC only recently published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65. However, it did not share the information on those aged 18-49, which is the least likely group to benefit from a booster injection. It has also failed to provide information on child hospitalizations. In a recent New York Times article, Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable. Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted,” Nordlund said.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said,

“People have been injured and died as a result of the most extensive propaganda campaign in U.S. history and it was paid for with our taxpayer dollars. These COVID shots are neither safe nor effective. However, the American public has been given propaganda instead of truth from the news media. Sadly, most of the American corporate media has been paid off by the Biden administration to publish propaganda. The consequence is that many people have needlessly suffered as a result of the censorship and propaganda.”

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law. But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.”

It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.”

The “unprovoked” descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we got here, and what degree of responsibility the US bears for the current attack on Ukraine.

Ignoring expert advice

The story starts at the end of the Cold War, when the US was the only global hegemon. As part of the deal that finalized the reunification of Germany, the US promised Russia that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”  Despite this, it wasn’t long before talk of expansion began to circulate among policy makers.

In 1997, dozens of foreign policy veterans (including former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and former CIA Director Stansfield Turner) sent a joint letter to then-President Bill Clinton calling “the current US-led effort to expand NATO…a policy error of historic proportions.” They predicted:

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (5/2/98) in 1998 asked famed diplomat George Kennan—architect of the US Cold War strategy of containment—about NATO expansion. Kennan’s response:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.

Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.

Despite these warnings, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were added to NATO in 1999, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia following in 2004.

US planners were warned again in 2008 by US Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (now director of the CIA under Joe Biden). WikiLeaks leaked a cable from Burns titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines” that included another prophetic warning worth quoting in full (emphasis added):

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.  Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.  In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

A de facto NATO ally

But the US has pushed Russia to make such a decision. Though European countries are divided about whether or not Ukraine should join, many in the NATO camp have been adamant about maintaining the alliance’s “open door policy.” Even as US planners were warning of a Russian invasion, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated NATO’s 2008 plans to integrate Ukraine into the alliance (New York Times, 12/16/21). The Biden administration has taken a more roundabout approach, supporting in the abstract “Kyiv’s right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances.” But the implication is obvious.

Even without officially being in NATO, Ukraine has become a de facto NATO ally—and Russia has paid close attention to these developments. In a December 2021 speech to his top military officials, Putin expressed his concerns:

Over the past few years, military contingents of NATO countries have been almost constantly present on Ukrainian territory under the pretext of exercises. The Ukrainian troop control system has already been integrated into NATO. This means that NATO headquarters can issue direct commands to the Ukrainian armed forces, even to their separate units and squads….

Kiev has long proclaimed a strategic course on joining NATO. Indeed, each country is entitled to pick its own security system and enter into military alliances. There would be no problem with that, if it were not for one “but.” International documents expressly stipulate the principle of equal and indivisible security, which includes obligations not to strengthen one’s own security at the expense of the security of other states….

In other words, the choice of pathways towards ensuring security should not pose a threat to other states, whereas Ukraine joining NATO is a direct threat to Russia’s security.

In an explainer piece, the New York Times (2/24/22) centered NATO expansion as a root cause of the war. Unfortunately, the Times omitted the critical context of NATO’s pledge not to expand, and the subsequent abandonment of that promise. This is an important context to understand the Russian view of US policies, especially so given the ample warnings from US diplomats and foreign policy experts.

The Maidan Coup of 2014

A major turning point in the US/Ukraine/Russia relationship was the 2014 violent and unconstitutional ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010 in a vote heavily splitbetween eastern and western Ukraine. His ouster came after months of protests led in part by far-right extremists (FAIR.org, 3/7/14). Weeks before his ouster, an unknown party leaked a phone call between US officials discussing who should and shouldn’t be part of the new government, and finding ways to “seal the deal.” After the ouster, a politician the officials designated as “the guy” even became prime minister.

The US involvement was part of a campaign aimed at exploiting the divisions in Ukrainian society to push the country into the US sphere of influence, pulling it out of the Russian sphere (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). In the aftermath of the overthrow, Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, in part to secure a major naval base from the new Ukrainian government.

The New York Times (2/24/22) and Washington Post (2/28/22) both omitted the role the US played in these events. In US media, this critical moment in history is completely cleansed of US influence, erasing a critical step on the road to the current war.

Keeping civil war alive

In another response to the overthrow, an uprising in Ukraine’s Donbas region grew into a rebel movement that declared independence from Ukraine and announced the formation of their own republics. The resulting civil war claimed thousands of lives, but was largely paused  in 2015 with a ceasefire agreement known as the Minsk II accords.

The deal, agreed to by Ukraine, Russia and other European countries, was designed to grant some form of autonomy to the breakaway regions in exchange for reintegrating them into the Ukrainian state. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government refused to implement the autonomy provision of the accords. Anatol Lieven, a researcher with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in The Nation (11/15/21): 

The main reason for this refusal, apart from a general commitment to retain centralized power in Kiev, has been the belief that permanent autonomy for the Donbas would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union, as the region could use its constitutional position within Ukraine to block membership.

Ukraine opted instead to prolong the Donbas conflict, and there was never significant pressure from the West to alter course. Though there were brief reports of the accords’ revival as recently as late January, Ukrainian security chief Oleksiy Danilov warned the West not to pressure Ukraine to implement the peace deal. “The fulfillment of the Minsk agreement means the country’s destruction,” he said (AP, 1/31/22). Danilov claimed that even when the agreement was signed eight years ago,  “it was already clear for all rational people that it’s impossible to implement.”

Lieven notes that the depth of Russian commitment has yet to be fully tested, but Putin has supported the Minsk accords, refraining from officially recognizing the Donbas republics until last week.

The New York Times (2/8/22) explainer on the Minsk accords blamed their failure on a disagreement between Ukraine and Russia over their implementation. This is inadequate to explain the failure of the agreements, however, given that Russia cannot affect Ukrainian parliamentary procedure. The Times quietly acknowledged that the law meant to define special status in the Donbas had been “shelved” by the Ukranians,  indicating that the country had stopped trying to solve the issue in favor of a stalemate.

There was no mention of the comments from a top Ukrainian official openly denouncing the peace accords. Nor was it acknowledged that the US could have used its influence to push Ukraine to solve the issue, but refrained from doing so.

Ukrainian missile crisis

One under-discussed aspect of this crisis is the role of US missiles stationed in NATO countries. Many media outlets have claimed that Putin is Hitler-like (Washington Post, 2/24/22; Boston Globe, 2/24/22), hellbent on reconquering old Soviet states to “recreat[e] the Russian empire with himself as the Tsar,” as Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbot told Politico (2/25/22).

Pundits try to psychoanalyze Putin, asking “What is motivating him?” and answering by citing his televised speech on February 21 that recounted the history of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.

This speech has been widely characterized as a call to reestablish the Soviet empire and a challenge to Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation. Corporate media ignore other public statements Putin has made in recent months. For example, at an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Putin elaborated on what he considered to be the main military threat from US/NATO expansion to Ukraine:

It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.

The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have it…. They will supply hypersonic weapons to Ukraine and then use them as cover…to arm extremists from a neighbouring state and incite them against certain regions of the Russian Federation, such as Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable.

Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge? This is the problem: We simply have no room to retreat.

Having these missiles so close to Russia—weapons that Russia (and China) see as part of a plan to give the United States the capacity to launch a nuclear first-strike without retaliation—seriously challenges the cold war deterrent of Mutually Assured Destruction, and more closely resembles a gun pointed at the Russian head for the remainder of the nuclear age. Would this be acceptable to any country?

Media refuse to present this crucial question to their audiences, instead couching Putin’s motives in purely aggressive terms.

Refusal to de-escalate

By December 2021, US intelligence agencies were sounding the alarm that Russia was amassing troops at the Ukrainian border and planning to attack. Yet Putin was very clear about a path to deescalation: He called on the West to halt NATO expansion, negotiate Ukrainian neutrality in the East/West rivalry, remove US nuclear weapons from non proliferating countries, and remove missiles, troops and bases near Russia. These are demands the US would surely have made were it in Russia’s position.

Unfortunately, the US refused to negotiate on Russia’s core concerns. The US offered some serious steps towards a larger arms control arrangement (Antiwar.com, 2/2/22)—something the Russians acknowledged and appreciated—but ignored issues of NATO’s military activity in Ukraine, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe (Antiwar.com, 2/17/22).

On NATO expansion, the State Department continued to insist that they would not compromise NATO’s open door policy—in other words, it asserted the right to expand NATO and to ignore Russia’s red line.

While the US has signaled that it would approve of an informal agreement to keep Ukraine from joining the alliance for a period of time, this clearly was not going to be enough for Russia, which still remembers the last broken agreement.

Instead of addressing Russian concerns about Ukraine’s NATO relationship, the US instead chose to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, exacerbating Putin’s expressed concerns. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t help matters by suggesting that Ukraine might begin a nuclear weapons program at the height of the tensions.

After Putin announced his recognition of the breakaway republics, Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled talks with Putin, and began the process of implementing sanctions on Russia—all before Russian soldiers had set foot into Ukraine.

Had the US been genuinely interested in avoiding war, it would have taken every opportunity to de-escalate the situation. Instead, it did the opposite nearly every step of the way.

In its explainer piece, the Washington Post (2/28/22) downplayed the significance of the US’s rejection of Russia’s core concerns, writing: “Russia has said that it wants guarantees Ukraine will be barred from joining NATO—a non-starter for the Western alliance, which maintains an open-door policy.” NATO’s open door policy is simply accepted as an immutable policy that Putin just needs to deal with. This very assumption, so key to the Ukraine crisis, goes unchallenged in the US media ecosystem.

‘The strategic case for risking war’

It’s impossible to say for sure why the Biden administration took an approach that increased the likelihood of war, but one Wall Street Journal piece from last month may offer some insight.

The Journal (12/22/21) published an op-ed from John Deni, a researcher at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US and allied governments that serves as NATO’s de facto brain trust. The piece was provocatively headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine.” Deni’s argument was that the West should refuse to negotiate with Russia, because either potential outcome would be beneficial to US interests.

If Putin backed down without a deal, it would be a major embarrassment. He would lose face and stature, domestically and on the world stage.

But Putin going to war would also be good for the US, the Journal op-ed argued. Firstly,  it would give NATO more legitimacy by “forg[ing] an even stronger anti-Russian consensus across Europe.” Secondly, a major attack would trigger “another round of more debilitating economic sanctions,” weakening the Russian economy and its ability to compete with the US for global influence. Thirdly, an invasion is “likely to spawn a guerrilla war” that would “sap the strength and morale of Russia’s military while undercutting Mr. Putin’s domestic popularity and reducing Russia’s soft power globally.”

In short, we have part of the NATO brain trust advocating risking Ukrainian civilians as pawns in the US’s quest to strengthen its position around the world.

‘Something even worse than war’

A New York Times op-ed (2/3/22) by Ivan Krastev of Vienna’s Institute of Human Sciences likewise suggested that a Russian invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t be the worst outcome:

A Russian incursion into Ukraine could, in a perverse way, save the current European order. NATO would have no choice but to respond assertively, bringing in stiff sanctions and acting in decisive unity. By hardening the conflict, Mr. Putin could cohere his opponents.

The op-ed was headlined “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War”—that something being “a new European security architecture that recognizes Russia’s sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.”

It is impossible to know for sure whether the Biden administration shared this sense that there would be an upside to a Russian invasion, but the incentives are clear, and much of what these op-eds predicted is coming to pass.

None of this is to say that Putin’s invasion is justified—FAIR resolutely condemns the invasion as illegal and ruinous—but calling it “unprovoked” distracts attention from the US’s own contribution to this disastrous outcome. The US ignored warnings from both Russian and US officials that a major conflagration could erupt if the US continued its path, and it shouldn’t be surprising that one eventually did.

Now, as the world once again inches toward the brink of nuclear omnicide, it is more important than ever for Western audiences to understand and challenge their own government’s role in dragging us all to this point.

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As the price of oil, gasoline and natural gas skyrockets around the world, we have come to a major crossroads in history that has the potential to usher in a massive economic collapse of Europe, the United States, and the world.

The additional economic hardships that will befall our communities due to the rising costs of energy, will most likely be blamed on Russia by a cartel of western nations, just as they blamed the self-inflicted economic hardships the world suffered over the last two years, on an orchestrated pandemic [01].

The energy crisis was triggered long ago by a series of violent events created by the United States and its allies for control of the declining energy supplies and resources around the world. Two Decades of War crimes that continue on oil producing nations such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, plus their crippling economic sanctions on major independent oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Iran and Russia, have brought the world to the brink of economic collapse.

All of these criminal actions can only be seen as resource wars, due to declining energy supply under the western nations control.

Ukraine

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is a climactic moment, which culminated through a series of violent events in Ukraine that began by a western backed color revolution which then led to a coup and overthrew of the elected Yanukovich government in 2014. (See Two documentaries here [04] and here [05])

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India, and especially Israel, are very close American military-strategic partners in their own way just like Japan is but only the last-mentioned surrendered its strategic autonomy, not to mention without even getting anything in exchange. This shows that only the first two are truly independent in formulating their grand strategies while Japan is doomed to remain an object of International Relations instead of ever becoming an independent subject therein.

Observers were cautiously optimistic a few years ago that Japan and Russia would finally sign a peace treaty for ending World War II following former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s active efforts to resolve what Tokyo considers to be the so-called “Northern Territories Dispute” but which Moscow regards as a non-issue related to its legal incorporation of the Southern Kurils after that global conflict. Those hopes are now forever dashed after Japan jumped on the US-led West’s anti-Russian sanctions bandwagon by imposing economic, financial, and personal restrictions against that targeted country.

Japan’s dutiful compliance with its American patron’s demands means that it’ll likely forever remain the latter’s so-called “unsinkable aircraft carrier” without any hope of ever flexing any genuine strategic autonomy like many wished would eventually happen. This is regrettable because Japan could have balanced between Great Powers in the New Cold War exactly like its fellow Quad partner India is doing by impressively remaining neutral. Instead, Tokyo opted to surrender its strategic autonomy to Washington without even getting anything in exchange.

What’s happening is that the US-led West is institutionalizing its “sphere of influence” across the world that stretches across North America, most of the Caribbean and Latin America, the entirety of the EU, and several Asia-Pacific countries like Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore. These polities were recently designed by Russia as unfriendly countries and territories, which confirms that Moscow regards them as being within its Washington rivals’ “sphere of influence”. This development conforms to the trend that the author earlier described here of the world becoming increasingly divided.

Just like the US succeeded in transforming the UK into its “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in Europe, so too has it succeeded in doing the same vis-à-vis Japan in Asia. Furthermore, while the Anglo-American Axis (AAA) actively attempts to divide and rule Western Eurasia by deepening the many wedges that they’ve inserted into Russian-EU relations, the emerging American-Japanese Axis (AJA) is trying to do the same in Asia by dividing Russia and China from the region’s geo-economically significant countries. This grand strategy can eventually see the US merge its two Eurasian axes into a singular one in the coming future.

Japan is essentially functioning as the de facto fourth member of the AUKUS anti-Chinese military-nuclear alliance that was unexpectedly announced last September. Tokyo was upset that this newly formed structure threatened to take away the Quad’s military-strategic potential in “containing” China, a decision that Washington presumably made due to India’s refusal to actively participate in this plot following the sequence of complications in their bilateral relations since summer 2020. By voluntarily surrendering its strategic autonomy to the US, Japan hopes to make itself globally relevant.

That’s a mistaken expectation though since all that Tokyo did was submit to becoming Washington’s “junior partner” as it’ll never be regarded as an equal one the same as London won’t either in spite of playing a prominent role dividing and ruling the other half of Eurasia. Japan also loses out on the previously promising but presently irrelevant possibility of facilitating Russia’s pre-Ukrainian geostrategic balancing act vis-à-vis China by investing more in its resource-rich Far Eastern region together with India.

That scenario is no longer feasible since the US-led West’s unilateral acts of unconventional aggression against Russia following the onset of its special military operation in Ukraine completely changed the grand strategic calculations at play by compelling Moscow to unprecedentedly depend on Beijing as its most important pressure valve under these new circumstances. Russia will still attempt to preemptively avert any future disproportionate dependence on China, but only with proven reliable partners like India, Iran, and Pakistan, not those that are now officially designed as unfriendly like Japan.

Had Japan practiced the de facto neutral policy that Israel does whereby it votes against Russia at the symbolic but legally meaningless UN General Assembly but nevertheless refuses to sanction the Eurasian Great Power, it too might have been able to position itself as a potential mediator in the conflict exactly as Prime Minister Bennett has actively sought to do over the past week. That would have been the most impressive flex of Japan’s strategic autonomy and could have earned its companies a privileged position for investing in Russia’s resource-rich Far Eastern region exactly as India is expected to soon receive.

India, and especially Israel, are very close American military-strategic partners in their own way just like Japan is but only the last-mentioned surrendered its strategic autonomy, not to mention without even getting anything in exchange. This shows that only the first two are truly independent in formulating their grand strategies while Japan is doomed to remain an object of International Relations instead of ever becoming an independent subject therein. By continuing to function as the US’ “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, Japan literally objectifies itself and forever holds back its grand strategic potential.

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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 regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Over the past two weeks, media headlines worldwide have been dominated by the Russian military intervention in Ukraine – launched in response to almost nine years of Western provocations, beginning with the CIA and MI6 orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution in November 2013, following then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of closer ties with Russia, which in turn would to lead the predominantly ethnic Russian Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the eastern Donbass region breaking away from Kiev’s control in April 2014, the catalyst for this secession being the anti-Russian far-right sympathisers that would make up the Western-backed post-Maidan government of Petro Poroshenko.

A near eight-year long war on both Republics would follow, involving Kiev-supported neo-Nazi factions such as Azov Battalion and Right Sector, leading to an estimated 14,000 deaths, a conflict that Moscow would seek to resolve through diplomatic means via the Minsk Agreements, which would see a federalisation solution in which Donetsk and Luhansk would be granted a degree of autonomy whilst still remaining under Ukrainian rule – the failure by Kiev to implement their side of the agreements however, as well as the ongoing attacks on the ethnic Russians in the Donbass and the inevitability that Ukraine would ultimately go on become a NATO member and host weapons and troops intended to attack Russia, would ultimately force Moscow into launching a military intervention into its Western neighbour in order to demilitarise and de-Nazify the country.

Two weeks into the conflict, it has become apparent from the corporate media narrative of the ‘Ukrainian resistance’ that the goal of the US and its allies, with little regard for the Ukrainian civilians they claim to care about, is to drag Moscow into a military quagmire in the second largest country in Europe – a tactic with historical usage against the Kremlin, when in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA and MI6 would begin a covert operation of arming and training Islamist fundamentalists, including Osama Bin Laden, known as the Mujahideen, who would go on to wage war on the then-Socialist government of Afghanistan – leading to a ten-year long Soviet military intervention, something which many commentators have seen as a contributing factor to the subsequent break-up of the bloc in 1991; indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter when Operation Cyclone was launched in 1979, would later recount in a 1998 interview about how drawing the USSR into a costly military intervention was a motivating factor in its inception.

Despite the intention of the Neocons and the war lobby to being to seemingly draw the Russian Federation into an Iraq war-style quagmire however, there also appears to be an element who favour an approach which would lead to far more grave consequences – a Libya-style no fly zone over Ukraine, involving the shooting down of Russian aircraft by NATO, which would undoubtedly trigger a catastrophic third world war involving the use of nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a newfound darling of the Western media since their coverage of the Russian intervention began, has repeatedly called for the implementation of a no fly zone over his country’s skies, World Economic Forum-linked Ukrainian activist Daria Kaleniuk went viral with her plea for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to intervene militarily against Russian forces, and a recent poll by corporate media outlet Reuters found that 74% of Americans supported a no fly zone over Ukraine – with it remaining unclear on whether those polled were aware of the nuclear apocalypse that such a measure would entail.

Despite this push for a Western military intervention in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have made it clear that such a measure is off the table, each citing the global nuclear conflict that would undoubtedly follow as the reason – though this may seem a reason to be optimistic that the current Ukraine crisis won’t develop into World War III however, it does not rule out the far more hawkish members of the regime change lobby seeking to carry out a false flag operation in Ukraine, one with the intention of implicating Moscow, and to push public and political opinion even more towards support for a NATO intervention, a tactic with very recent usage.

In 2017, the Syrian Arab Republic had been in the six-year long grip of a Western-backed regime change operation launched in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s 2009 refusal to allow US-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country, one that would have undermined his relationship with key-ally Russia. Like the aforementioned Operation Cyclone, Timber Sycamore would see the arming, funding and training of Wahhabi terrorists groups by the West and its allies, with the intention of removing Assad’s secular government and replacing it with a Western-friendly leadership.

In June 2013, Iran and Hezbollah would intervene in the ensuing proxy war at the request of the Syrian government, providing a key role in assisting Damascus in repelling the Western-backed terrorist campaign; what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the tide of the conflict in the Arab Republic’s favour however, would come in September 2015 – a Russian air campaign, again at the request of the Syrian government, targeting the terrorist groups, and which allowed Damascus to retake the vast swathes of Syrian territory which had come under their control, such as the key city of Aleppo.

With the Syrian regime change operation not going as planned, Washington’s Neocons would soon resort to desperate – and reckless – measures.

Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, allegedly inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed. Source: Consortiumnews

On the 4^th of April 2017, a false flag chemical attack took place in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, the blame immediately being placed on Damascus and resulting in the then-US administration of Donald Trump launching cruise missiles strikes on a Syrian government airbase three days later, a highly provocative action though one that just stopped short of the full-scale military intervention that the regime-change lobby had clamoured for – undeterred, the same tactic would be carried out a year later in the city of Douma, which again would result in the US, Britain and France launching air strikes against Syrian government targets, also just stopping short of a full-scale intervention.

This is not to discount the grave seriousness of NATO launching a military strike against a Russian ally and the potential consequences that that action could have entailed however, and should a similar false flag operation take place in Ukraine, perhaps also involving chemical weapons or a nuclear reactor as Moscow itself has warned of in recent days, even a ‘limited’ strike against Russian military infrastructure would immediately place the world on an irreversible path to the most grave consequence of all – nuclear war.

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Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @globalresearch_crg and Twitter at @crglobalization.

 

 

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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The illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine has shocked the West and many ordinary Russians. But for those who understand the Russian establishment and its view of Russia’s vital interests, it should not have come as a complete surprise.

Since NATO expansion first began in the mid-1990s, Russian officials and other establishment figures have been warning that if the West tried to turn Ukraine into an ally against Russia, this would lead to confrontation and quite possibly war. As the great international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau taught, to craft a viable U.S. policy towards other major states, it is essential to understand from within how they see the world and their country’s place in it. Today, we need to do this if we are to craft a policy towards Russia that will bring about an end to this war, a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, and a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty.

The foreign and security establishments of all major states operate on the basis of what might be called doctrines concerning their countries’ vital interests and place in the world. The Russian establishment believes that Moscow must be one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you do not belong to the Russian establishment, just as if you do not believe in U.S. global primacy, you do not belong to the U.S. establishment.

Ukraine is critical to that vision. A Ukraine hostile to Russia and strongly linked to the West negates any possibility of Russia leading a reasonably strong regional bloc of states. From this point of view, most Western observers have not understood just how severe was the defeat suffered by Russia when Ukraine experienced the revolution of 2014 and rejected membership of the Eurasian Union. Seizing part of the Donbas, and even annexing Crimea, were very miserable consolation prizes by comparison.

Ukraine is by far the biggest former Soviet republic apart from Russia, with 44 million people to Kazakhstan’s 18 million and Belarus’ nine million. Ukraine has by far the largest Russian ethnic minority outside Russia. Without a largely Russian-speaking Ukraine, Russia loses most of its status as an international language. Without Ukrainian membership, the Eurasian Union is a pathetic shadow. At the very least, the Russian establishment — going back to Boris Yeltsin’s administration in the 1990s — has been absolutely determined that Ukraine should not join an anti-Russian alliance.

Russia’s interest in Ukraine however goes far beyond the economic and strategic. As emphasized in Putin’s articles and speeches, Russians see their own cultural and historical identity as closely bound up with that of Ukraine. This owes something to the origins of the Russian state and Orthodox religion in Kievan Rus, and something to the role of Ukrainians in modern Russian culture, as symbolized by Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian), a great Ukrainian writer who identified with the Russian Empire and wrote in Russian.

This factor imparts a strong element of historically-based nationalism to the Russian and Putin attitude towards Ukraine. There is some understanding in Russia of why Ukrainians would want their own state, but almost none of why Ukrainians would want to define that state against Russia. Hence the Russian demonology of “Nazism” and “U.S. manipulation.” In other words, while Russian officials use the term “Monroe Doctrine” to explain and justify their desire to prevent Ukraine joining a hostile alliance, their interest in that country has an emotional force wholly absent from U.S. attitudes to Mexico.

Whether Russia would have accepted a Western offer of compromise (if one had been made) involving a moratorium on NATO expansion and mutual arms limitation, we will probably never know, and this question is now academic. L’appetit vient en manger (“appetite grows with eating”) as the French say, and the more of Ukraine Russia now occupies, the more ambitious its goals in Ukraine are likely to be.

The point is, however, that these goals are now overwhelmingly focused on Ukraine. Nobody in Moscow now appears to believe that there is any possibility of an agreement with NATO on conventional arms limitation, or on some form of new European security architecture. The most that can be hoped for by Moscow is a Cold War-style treaty on nuclear arms reductions, and perhaps some agreement on cybersecurity. When the Russian government decided to invade Ukraine, it chose to accept that relations with the West would be basically hostile for a long time to come.

The Russian government aims to establish a Russian sphere of influence, not a new version of the Soviet Union. Putin has stated that “whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, but whoever wants it back has no brain.” The Eurasian Union falls vastly far short of the USSR. Kazakhstan for example is a member, and has always sought good relations with Russia. But Kazakh officials have stated publicly and repeatedly that it is not some form of super-state; and Kazakhstan has repeatedly refused to follow Russia’s lead in international affairs — including most recently by refusing to recognize the independence of the Donbas republics. The Eurasian Union and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) are loose partnerships.

As for Russian domination of Eastern Europe beyond the borders of the former USSR, this is vastly beyond Russia’s ambitions and capability. Not merely would it involve Russia in an attack on NATO, with all the hideous risks that this would entail (whereas the United States and NATO have declared explicitly that they will not fight to defend Ukraine); but it would require Russia to subjugate and hold down Poland. Russian officials and commentators with whom I have raised this possibility have simply burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea.

Concerning Ukraine, there are two possible paths for Russia to take. Which one will be chosen will become apparent in the next days, or possibly hours. The first would be an agreement with the existing Ukrainian government (as publicly demanded by Russia immediately after the invasion) that would guarantee Ukrainian neutrality and the exclusion of Western armaments. Moscow will almost certainly also demand that the Donbas republics, and any other Russian-speaking areas occupied by the Russian army, receive fully autonomous status within a federal Ukraine. Moscow would likely present this to the West as an expanded version of the Minsk II agreement of 2015 on autonomy for the Donbas within Ukraine.

The second path would be for Russia to occupy Kiev itself, replace the Ukrainian government with Russian puppets, and draw up a new Ukrainian federal constitution by Russian diktat. At this point, Moscow might also try to force its Ukrainian client state to join the Eurasian Union and CSTO. This would be a vastly more dangerous project for Russia.

Unlike local governments in the Russian-speaking areas, which Moscow at least hopes could gain a measure of local legitimacy, a puppet government in Kiev and the Ukrainian ethnic heartland would only survive with the permanent presence of a Russian army. The government and army would face permanent mass unrest and violent resistance,which it only could quell through savage repression.

This would be atrocious for the people of Ukraine, and very dangerous for NATO. If the United States decided to arm a guerrilla war in Ukraine, such a force could only be supplied through Poland — which Russia then might directly target, which likely would expand and escalate the conflict dramatically. Furthermore, this guerrilla war would inevitably turn into an ethnic conflict of Ukrainian nationalists against the local Russian population, making any long-term unity of Ukraine next to impossible and probably lead to the eventual Russian annexation of the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine.

The purpose of Western sanctions against Russia should be to press Russia to withdraw its army from Ukraine and restore Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity (minus Crimea). This however will inevitably now require some form of compromise with Russia on Ukrainian neutrality (but not membership of the Eurasian Union) and federalism. Short of the military defeat of the Russian army or the collapse of the Russian state, it appears impossible now to achieve unconditional Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The alternative is for the United States to use sanctions not to change Russian policy in Ukraine, but to overthrow the regime in Russia itself by crippling the Russian state and economy. This would be a vastly more ambitious and dangerous project, and probably futile. The U.S. use of sanctions to bring about regime change has been a universal and unmitigated failure – in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Russia is much stronger than those states, and will probably receive much greater help from China, whose economy has now overtaken that of the United States. Such a strategy would sooner or later also open up a gulf between the United States and its European allies, involving as it would the indefinite sponsorship of an armed struggle in Ukraine, with all the consequences of that for Europe.

Above all, Western sanctions should be intended to help the Ukrainian people. The latter strategy of guerilla warfare would instead instrumentalize Ukrainians as a weapon to weaken Russia and recall some of the worst U.S. actions of the Cold War, when Washington supported local insurgencies (sometimes led by evil figures like Jonas Savimbi and extremist ideologies like that of the Afghan Mujahedin), with no regard whatsoever for the interests of local peoples.

Outside Europe, the Cold War was waged over the corpses of innumerable Africans, Asians and Central Americans, and there was often no moral difference at all between the “pro-Western” and “pro-Soviet forces.” For America to go down this path would be a betrayal of those very Ukrainians whom the U.S. administration says that it wants to help.

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Featured image is from South Front

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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Russian-Turkish diplomatic relations are quite complex, while some collaboration exists in several sectors, competition is dominant in other sectors and domains, particularly the security sector.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 27 urged foreigners to head to Ukrainian embassies worldwide in order to sign up to volunteer to fight Russia in Ukraine.  Now, Zelensky says that 16,000 foreign volunteers have arrived in Ukraine to assist in their fight against Russia.

The pro-Serb Democratic Front, the largest bloc in Montenegro’s governing coalition, called on the authorities to prevent the recruitment of Montenegrin fighters for Ukraine’s armed militia. “Such a call from the Ukrainian embassy is an obvious attempt to destabilize our country and the authorities must react. They must prevent Montenegrin citizens from fighting in foreign wars as this is also prohibited by law”, the Democratic Front said in a press release.  According to Interior Ministry data, some 31 Montenegrin citizens have fought in foreign wars since 2012, with 26 having fought alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

The majority in Montenegro have strong sympathies for their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians, who have been targeted by Nazi militias such as the Azov Battalion in the Donbas.  Montenegro criminalized participation in foreign conflicts in March 2015, and those convicted face prison sentences of up to ten years. Montenegro joined NATO in June 2017.

Radical Islamic terrorists in Idlib/ Syria are among those foreigners seeking to reach Ukraine to fight the Russians.  Radical Islam is a political ideology that has been called Islamo-fascist, and shares commonalities with the Nazi militias in Ukraine.  Both the Nazis in Ukraine and the terrorists in Idlib are fighting the Russians.  The terrorists in Idlib have devised a plan to send fighters to Ukraine, while also fighting the Russians in Idlib, thus hitting Russia on two battlefronts.

Suhail Hamoud, a famed terrorist in Idlib, who is nicknamed Abu TOW for his skill in operating the American anti-tank missile BGM-71 TOW, recently offered assistance to Ukraine.  Hamoud said on Twitter, “There is a strong will I am in Idlib now and ready to go to support the Ukrainian army. I want to help someone”.  He is said to have more than 100 confirmed hits of Russian-made tanks in Syria during the battles against the Syrian Arab Army. Former President Obama had sent the TOW anti-tank missiles to Idlib.

Iraqi terrorist leader Maysara bin Ali, also known by Abu Maria al-Qahtani, said on Telegram that if a Muslim in Ukraine fights and defeats the Russians, he would be rewarded in heaven, and if he gets killed he would be a martyr, having died in a Holy War.

The most powerful terrorist force in Idlib is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition of Islamist groups made up of Syrian and foreign fighters, and dominated by Al Qaeda affiliate known as Jibhat al Nusra.

“The main problem is the foreign fighters, they have nowhere to go,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and analyst with Carnegie Europe. Sending the terrorists to Ukraine is one solution that the US and NATO are using. Just as the Obama administration used the Al Qaeda terrorists to fight the Syrian government for regime change, those same terrorists can be utilized to fight the Russians in Ukraine and Idlib.

The UN envoy to Syria has said there are around 10,000 HTS terrorists in Idlib. Other terrorists are fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner. However, once President Erdogan of Turkey began sponsoring them, he changed their name to the “National Front for Liberation”. The US-NATO war on Syria for regime change used the Muslim Brotherhood partisans as boots on the ground in Syria.  The terrorists were originally named Free Syrian Army but were taken over by Al Qaeda, and finally morphed into ISIS.

Ankara considers the Kurdish militia in northeast Syria as terrorists but supports the Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Idlib. Turkey invaded Syria in several places, and Idlib was one of their occupation points. The Turkish military convoys pass freely amidst the terrorists in Idlib.

Ankara depends on its good relationship with Russia to control Idlib.  Russia controls the air space and performs military patrols near Idlib which holds together a fragile ceasefire between the terrorists, Russia, Turkey, and the Syrian government in Damascus.

In 2018, Russia and Turkey entered into an agreement in Sochi concerning Idlib. Turkey was to separate the terrorists from the innocent civilians and guarantee the safety of the M4 highway linking Latakia with the industrial capital of Syria, Aleppo. This plan was to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from attacking Idlib and clearing out all the terrorists. Turkey was desperate to sign the deal to prevent refugees in Idlib from fleeing to Turkey should an attack begin.  Idlib is thought to have about 3 million civilians and tens of thousands of terrorists.

Turkey has a dozen military posts in Idlib and said that it would isolate terrorists, but after almost four years Turkey has not lived up to its agreement. Idlib has remained a tense status quo, with no political settlement in sight or even discussed.

On February 27, Turkey declared the conflict in Ukraine a war. This invoked the 1936 convention concerning the waterway at Istanbul, the Bosphorus, and Turkey has now locked out Russian warships from the Black Sea, which include destroyers, a frigate, and one of Russia’s most advanced warship that carries cruise missiles.  These ships were to join a fleet of warships already assed outside of Odessa.

In 2017, Turkey signed a deal to buy the Russian-made S-400 air defense system against strong US objections. In 2019, the system was installed. Given the current fragile relationship between Russia and Turkey over Ukraine, Russia could turn off the system, like what the US did to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. In this process, the codes are known by the manufacturer of the air defense system and can make the S-400 worthless.

Russia is building Turkey’s first nuclear reactor, it has recently constructed a pipeline underneath the Black Sea to Turkey, and it is supplying the bulk of Turkey’s natural gas to stay warm. Turkey imports more than 90% of its energy and Russia is one of its main suppliers.

Turkey has been selling armed drones to Kyiv, and the Ukrainian military has already used them in Donbas against pro-Russian targets. Turkey is also a close ally of Russia, and a key trading partner, and Ankara have been careful not to step on Moscow’s toes in Syria. On March 2, Ukraine said it is getting more Turkish drones, despite warnings from Moscow.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has posted videos of Turkish-made drones targeting Russian forces. Last week, Moscow warned countries supplying Ukraine with weapons they would be held responsible for losses. Turkish-Russian ties are facing a critical test.

Erdogan has domestic problems as well as those with Russia.  His opposition is united against him and opinion polls show an anti-Erdogan majority. Turkey would pay a huge price in Syria if Russia turned against it over its stance on Ukraine.

Russia could retaliate against Turkey in Idlib. If the Syrian Arab Army were to begin an attack of Idlib against the Turkish-protected terrorists, it could create a panic among the civilians and unleash millions to cross the border into Turkey, which would further destabilize Turkey amid an economic downturn and growing anti-Syrian sentiment among the public.

Conversely, should Turkey perceive Russia weakening from the US-NATO position against it in Ukraine, Turkey may choose to step-up attacks against Russian and Syrian positions and assets in Idlib, and take even more territory in northwest Syria on the Turkish border. All eyes are on Ukraine now, but keep one eye on Idlib as well.

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This article was originally published on Al Mayadeen.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist, and Chief editor of MidEastDiscourse News. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Al Mayadeen

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

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As some face discharge for their choice to not get vaccinated against COVID-19, 36 airmen have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration.

On Tuesday, March 8, Alliance for Free Citizens says 36 airmen currently on active duty in the Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Omaha, Neb.

The suit challenges the legality of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on service members. Alliance For Free Citizens said this is the largest lawsuit filed to date against the proposed mandates.

Court documents indicate all 36 airmen applied for a religious exemption to the mandate due to the vaccine violating their sincerely held religious beliefs. Currently, most have had their request rejected while several are on the verge of discharge.

Click here to read the full article.

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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)

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

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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“I have spoken with my Western colleagues about denazification. They say:” What’s the problem? You also have radical nationalists, don’t you?” Yes, we do, but we don’t have them in our government like Ukraine. And we don’t have thousands of people marching in the streets with torches and swastikas like Nazi Germany in the 1930s? And we don’t praise the men who killed Russians, Jews, and Poles during the war. But in Ukraine, they do.”Vladimir Putin, Russian President

The United States has been arming and training far-right militants that are the ideological descendants of Nazi war criminals that were directly involved in the mass-extermination of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies during the Second World War. These Ukrainian storm troopers are among the most vicious and malignant combatants Washington has ever employed to implement its foreign policy agenda.

Naturally, Washington sees these fascist-zealots as mere pawns in its proxy war on Russia. Even so, the ‘alliance of convenience’ does not diminish the fact that Uncle Sam is now in bed with right-wing militants whose spiritual leader, Adolph Hitler, was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people as well as the destruction of large parts of Europe and Russia. Check out this clip from an article titled “Can Ukraine have a ‘Nazi problem’ with a Jewish president?:

“Ukraine really does have a far-right problem, and it’s not a fiction of Kremlin propaganda. And it’s well past time to talk about it,” explained journalist and expert on the Ukrainian far right, Michael Colborne.

The most known neo-Nazi group on Ukraine’s far right is the Azov movement. The movement grew out of the Azov Regiment (originally a Battalion), formed in the chaos of war in early 2014.

It was formed by a “ragtag group of far-right thugs, football hooligans and international hangers-on, including dozens of Russian citizens,” said Colborne, who wrote a book on the movement.”(“Can Ukraine have a ‘Nazi problem’ with a Jewish president?”, Jewish Unpacked)

While Russian President Vladimir Putin is committed to removing Ukraine’s Nazis from power, it is uncertain how he will do so. Self-identified fascists now hold positions of authority in the military, the government and the Security Services. They have also been the driving force behind the 8 year-long siege of the Donbass region in east Ukraine that is mainly inhabited by ethnic Russians. The militants’ hatred for their Slavic brothers suggests that Hitler’s racial theories are being ruthlessly applied in 21st Century Europe. Here’s an excerpt from an article at The Saker Blog:

“Since the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, political organizations associated with neo-Nazis infiltrated Ukrainian mainstream politics as the Ukrainian government sent troops to try to crush the Donbass uprisings by force.

As Ukraine waged war against breakaway forces in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, the Neo-Nazi Groups in Ukraine gained notoriety for their belligerent rhetoric towards the population of the country’s east, as well as for eagerly participating in the civil war….

The (Azov Battalion’s) first commander was right-wing nationalist Andriy Biletsky, who led the paramilitary national socialist group called “Patriot of Ukraine” and was the founder of a neo-Nazi group, the Social-National Assembly (SNA) in 2008. In 2010, Biletsky, a former parliamentarian, apparently said that Ukraine was meant to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen (subhumans) ”by reports in a spate of Western mainstream outlets.” (“Ukrainian bad guys and a fair Russian response“, Batko Milacic for the Saker Blog)

Readers should take a minute to savor Washington’s duplicity on this matter, after all, while the Biden administration and the entire MSM was denouncing the January 6 protestors as “racists” and “white supremacists”, the US government was busy arming and training “white crusader” Nazis to carry out its war on Russia. What’s that all about? If there was an Academy Award for hypocrisy, Uncle Sam would be the hands-down favorite. Here’s more from the same piece:

“Azov took part in subsequent hostilities in Donbass and was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine in November 2014, although its members continued to wear neo-Nazi and SS-like symbols and regalia and openly express neo-Nazi views. Their logo echoes the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. Representatives of the Azov Battalion, however, have claimed their symbol is an abbreviation for the slogan “National Idea” in Ukrainian.

Ukrainian authorities did not bother to conceal the fact that in 2014, Azov comprised neo-Nazi-leaning volunteers from countries such as Sweden, Italy, France, Belarus, Canada, and Slovenia.

Despite the adoption of the 2015 Minsk Accords that were aimed at ending the civil war by reintegrating the Donbass into Ukraine in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy, Kiev refused to implement a peace deal. Azov members took an active part in Donbass hostilities.

In 2016, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) accused the Azov Battalion, officially upgraded to a regiment in January 2015, of committing war crimes such as mass looting, unlawful detention, and torture. Currently, the Azov “Special Operations Detachment” is engaged in the Ukrainian army’s counter-reconnaissance and special weapons operations.

The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against a number of fighters from Azov units for crimes such as kidnapping, torture, use of prohibited means, and methods of warfare.” (“Ukrainian bad guys and a fair Russian response”, Batko Milacic for the Saker Blog)

Again, these are not your garden-variety, right-wing militants. These are full-fledged, battle-hardened Nazi storm troopers that have engaged in all-manner of illegal and sadistic activities including “the mass killing of prisoners, the concealment of corpses in mass graves and the systematic use of physical and psychological torture techniques.”

And while they are lavishly supported by the United States, they oppose everything that America claims to stand for. They are universally opposed to liberal democracy, parliamentary government and racial equality. Instead, they advocate social regimentation, autocratic rule and glorification of the state. Race is very much at the core of Nazi Doctrine.(which may explain the animus these fascist groups have for the ethnic Russians in the east.) A few quotes from Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf help to illustrate this point:

“A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so-called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.”

“Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin of this world and the end of a humanity that surrenders to it.”(“Adolf Hitler, Quotes on Race”, quotetab)

The above quotes provide a window into the ideology that was used to justify a world war against “inferior people” who were seen as expendable in the eyes of their Aryan overlords. Why– you may ask– is the US supporting the adherents of this same fiendish dogma in Ukraine today?

We can’t answer that, but here’s more background from an article by Monseigneur Carlo Maria Vigano:

“Neo-Nazi movements engaged in military and paramilitary actions operate freely in Ukraine, often with the official support of public institutions. These include the following: Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a movement with a Nazi, anti-Semitic and racist matrix already active in Chechnya and which is part of the Right Sector, an association of far-right movements formed at the time of the Euromaidan coup in 2013/2014; the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); the UNA/UNSO, paramilitary wing of the far-right political party Ukraine National Assembly; the Korchinsky Brotherhood, which offered protection in Kiev to ISIS members; Misanthropic Vision (MD), a neo-Nazi network spread across 19 countries that publicly incites terrorism, extremism and hatred against Christians, Muslims, Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Americans and people of color.

It should be remembered that the government has given explicit support to these extremist organizations both by sending the presidential guard to the funerals of their representatives, as well as by supporting the Azov Battalion,a paramilitary organization that is officially part of the Ukrainian Army under the new name of Azov Special Operations Regiment and organized into the National Guard. ..

In March 2015, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Battalion would be one of the first units to be trained by US Army troops, as part of their Operation Fearless Guard training mission. … “We have been training these guys for eight years now. They are really good fighters. That’s where the Agency’s program could have a serious impact.” (“Declaration of Msgr. Carlo Maria Viganò on the Russia-Ukraine Crisis”, marcotosatti.com)

Vigano is right, the US has been providing combat training to Ukrainian Nazis and other far-right groups in secret camps since 2015. These ultra nationalist militias will now pass along these same skills to tens of thousands of other like-minded militants increasing the global spread of fascism by many orders of magnitude. Here’s more from an article at Jacobin Magazine:

“Not just the Ukrainian far right, but neo-fascist forces from all over the world, including the US and Europe, will now receive combat experience with the most advanced weapons in the world. They will also be able to continue developing their international networks, to which the Ukrainian far right, and especially the Azov Battalion, have long been central…

… since 2015, the CIA has been secretly training forces in Ukraine to serve as “insurgent leaders,” in the words of one former intelligence official, in case Russia ends up invading the country. Current officials are claiming the training is purely for intelligence collection, but the former officials Yahoo! spoke to said the program involved training in firearms, “cover and move,” and camouflage, among other things.

Given the facts, there’s a good chance that the CIA is training actual, literal Nazis as part of this effort. The year the program started, 2015, also happened to be the same year that Congress passed a spending bill that featured hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of economic and military support for Ukraine… (“The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine”, Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine)

But why has the United States gone to so much trouble to arm and train these combatants when it appears that the Russian army is clearly going to win the war?

The plan to defeat Russia was never intended to succeed in the initial phase of the conflict, but to lay the groundwork for a bloody and protracted insurgency fought by these same CIA-trained paramilitaries who now act as Uncle Sam’s Nazi warriors. Here’s the story from Yahoo News:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials….

The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official. One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”

Though the agency’s paramilitary resources have been otherwise stretched thin in Afghanistan and on other counterterrorism missions, the U.S.-based training program has been a “high priority” for the CIA since its Obama-era inception, said the former senior intelligence official…. The Biden administration has reportedly assembled a task force to determine how the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion.

“If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” said the former senior intelligence official. “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”

Both U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe that Ukrainian forces will not be able to withstand a large-scale Russian incursion, according to former U.S. officials. But representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.

If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official. The CIA-trained paramilitaries “will organize the resistance” using the specialized training they’ve received.

“All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.” (“CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades”, Yahoo News)

Let’s summarize:

1. The United States has been arming and training Ukrainian fascist combatants in secret locations.
2. The CIA training program began in 2015 which suggests there must have been a plan for goading Russia into invading. Nothing would have been left to chance. Strategic planners must have settled on what provocations they would use. (like the threat of NATO membership)
3. Official Washington never thought the Ukrainian army could prevail against a conflict with the Russian Army, which suggests that the media’s stories about “the brave Ukrainian resistance” are reckless propaganda designed to garner greater public support.
4. The country of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are of no interest to the United States. Ukraine is only valuable in as much as it provides a staging ground (and the manpower) for Washington to prosecute a war against Russia.
5. The clear strategic objective of the CIA program is to create an “Afghanistan-type” quagmire for Russia that will deplete its resources, inflict massive reputational damage, and kill as many Russian servicemen as possible.
6. The ultimate goal of the CIA-generated insurgency is to destroy the Russian economy, isolate the Russian leadership, and send home as many Russian boys in body-bags as possible in order to affect a regime change that will replace arch-rival Putin with a compliant stooge like Ukrainian Puppet Zelensky.
7. All the evidence suggests that the developments on the ground– including the luring of Russian troops into Ukraine– is part of a long-standing strategic plan to prevent the economic integration of Russia and Europe in order to control China’s development and preserve US hegemony into the next century. Thus, current US foreign policy can be summarized in just 10 words:

We’ll deal with Russia first, then move on to China.

Important Notes:

1– Must watch– Tucker Carlson, America’s best essayist, “We are at war with Russia”

2– Must watch –

Prof. John Mearsheimer explains the crisis in Ukraine the crisis in Ukraine (with Ray McGovern), Consortium News

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney, renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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China has proven with Iran that it has much practice and great skill in working around sanctions, and the U.S. has made it even easier to do so in the case of Russia in several ways, including leaving gaping loopholes in its sanctions that China and Russia can exploit.

The current ambiguity surrounding these mechanisms suits China perfectly, as until it believes that it is militarily, technologically, and economically able to directly challenge the U.S. as the world’s number one superpower its strategy will remain to gradually build up its economic power through the multi-generational power-grab project, ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR), as analysed in depth in in my new book on the global oil markets. This project contains within it a corollary colonialist element by dint of its land and sea routes secured through chequebook diplomacy. Given this, China cannot afford at this stage of its strategy to be seen to back Russia fully in President Vladimir Putin’s apparently ill-considered invasion of Ukraine and this was clearly evidenced in China’s abstentions – unwanted and unexpected by the Kremlin – in the United Nations Security Council’s votes last Friday firstly to condemn the war and secondly on whether to open the special emergency session of the General Assembly the next day.

One basic factor that has worked in China’s favour in circumventing sanctions on continuing to do business, especially oil and gas business, with Iran – and will equally apply to its doing the same with Russia – is the lack of exposure of China’s firms to the U.S. financial infrastructure – particularly to the U.S. dollar – and the ease with which companies can set up new special purpose vehicles to handle ring-fenced areas of their businesses to allow for special situations, such as sanctions.

As a corollary of this operational independence, China made no secret at the time of the pre-2016 sanctions against Iran or the post-2018 sanctions against it that it was going to use its Bank of Kunlun as the main funding and clearing vehicle for its dealings with Iran. The Bank of Kunlun has considerable operational experience in this regard, as it was used to settle tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil imports during the U.N. sanctions against Tehran between 2012 and 2015. Most of the bank’s settlements during that time were in Euros and Chinese renminbi and in 2012 it was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for conducting business with Iran. Rather like Iran – whose Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, infamously stated back in December 2018 at the Doha Forum, that: ‘If there is an art that we have perfected in Iran, [that] we can teach to others for a price, it is the art of evading sanctions’ – China has always regarded any U.S. sanctions as a fun puzzle to solve.

Washington learned early on – when it sanctioned Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp, the massive state-owned oil trading firm founded by the man who started oil trading between Beijing and Tehran in 1995 as a means by which Iran could pay for arms supplied by China to be used in the Iran-Iraq War – that Beijing would not be playing the sanctions game according to anyone’s rules but its own. Indeed, at a time when according to the U.S. ‘there is clear evidence that China did not import any crude oil from Iran in June [2020] for the first time since January 2007’, OilPrice.com showed that over a period of only 51 days just before the U.S. statement, China imported at least 8.1 million barrels of crude oil (158,823 barrels per day) from Iran.

In the case of Russian oil and gas exports, though, there is no need for China to go through all the trouble it took to circumvent the sanctions on Iran, for three key reasons. Firstly, there are currently no direct sanctions in place from either the U.S. or the E.U. on Russian oil or gas energy exports. A statement was released over the weekend that both are discussing a ban on Russian oil imports but this has not been approved yet and can still be worked around by China in the same way it did for Iran. In fact, despite several announcements last week of various types of sanctions being placed on a slew of Russian banks, one bank that was notably absent from all of the U.S.’s lists was Russia’s third biggest lender, Gazprombank, which serves Russian state gas giant (with huge oil interests as well) Gazprom. Indeed, Gazprombank and Russian state-owned banking giant, Sberbank, are also not on the list of the seven institutions that the E.U. wants banned from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) messaging and payments system.

The second reason why Russia and China are untroubled that their oil and gas trade will be affected is that, in addition to the de facto exemptions so far granted to the aforementioned institutions, the U.S. issued on 24 February the ‘General License 8A’ waiver. Although this sounds as sexy to many as a cold haddock, to would-be sanctions evaders it is the waiver equivalent of Scarlett Johansson or Brad Pitt. Just in case any potential sanctions evaders may have missed the signal being given by the U.S., the U.S. Treasury Department went to great trouble to explain the nub of the point: “Treasury is reiterating … that energy payments can and should continue.” In its further detailed guidance, just in case any would-be sanctions evader thought that they would have to engage in any tricky manoeuvring to circumvent the wrath of the U.S., the Treasury explained how to use the waiver to continue to deal with a Russian oil or gas company: “For example, a company purchasing oil from a Russian company would be able to route the payment through a non-sanctioned third-country financial institution as an intermediary for credit to a sanctioned financial institution’s customer in settlement of the transaction.” The Treasury concluded: “Treasury remains committed to permitting energy-related payments – ranging from production to consumption for a wide array of energy sources – involving specified sanctioned Russian banks.”

Even in the unlikely event that this extraordinary free-for-all waiver is stopped, the third reason why China and Russia will continue to go about their oil and gas trade – and all other trades – relatively unhindered is that over the past few years they have been securing their own bilateral infrastructural and financial structures for years, as also analysed in-depth in my new book on the global oil markets. China has long seen increased internationalisation of its renminbi currency as a fitting reflection of its growing status in the world and the chief executive officer of Russia’s Novatek, Leonid Mikhelson, said in September 2018 that Russia had been discussing switching way from US$-centric trading with its largest trading partners such as India and China, and that even Arab countries were thinking about it. “If they [the U.S.] do create difficulties for our Russian banks then all we have to do is replace dollars,” he added. At around the same time, China launched its now extremely successful Shanghai Futures Exchange with oil contracts denominated in yuan (the trading unit of the renminbi currency). Such a strategy was tested initially at scale in 2014 when Gazpromneft tried trading cargoes of crude oil in Chinese yuan and roubles with China and Europe.

Infrastructural development for oil and gas trading between China and Russia has also been extremely extensive in recent years, as examined several times in depth by OilPrice.com. The most recent examples of this was, in the oil sector, Rosneft signing an US$80 billion 10-year deal to supply the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 100 million metric tonnes of oil over the period (slightly over 200,000 barrels per day). In the gas sector, at almost exactly the same time, Gazprom signed a 10 billion cubic metres per year (bcm/y)  deal to supply gas to CNPC, adding to another supply contract between the two companies signed in 2014 – a 30-year deal for 38 bcm/y to go from Russia to China. This, in turn, is part of, and augments, the ‘Power of Siberia’ pipeline project – managed on the Russian side by Gazprom and on the China side by CNPC – that was launched in December 2019. And just in case there were any doubts on where China stands – in practical terms – on Russia in light of its invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, said in a press conference on 28 February: “China and Russia will continue to conduct normal trade cooperation in the spirit of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.” For good measure, over the weekend China warned the U.S. against any moves that “adds fuel to the flames” in Ukraine and its Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, called on the West to take account of Moscow’s concerns about NATO expansion.

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Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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For some Westerners, anything could be weaponized, including cats. Yes, CATS.

Amid the spiraling crisis in Ukraine, a ludicrous news story hit the headlines: Russian cats are sanctioned.

The Fédération Internationale Féline, an NGO of cat registries founded in Belgium, announced on Tuesday a ban on Russian-bred cats from its shows, and cat owners who live in Russia are also banned from the organization.

This is the tip of the iceberg among a growing number of drama queens in Western countries who have jumped into a so-called anti-war campaign, with their moves going far beyond people’s understanding, even imagination. Cats are only one target on the very long list.

FIFA and its European counterpart UEFA decided that all Russian teams shall be suspended from participating in both FIFA and UEFA competitions until further notice. Performances of Russian ballets have been canceled across the UK. University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy decided to remove courses on Fyodor Dostoevsky, a notable Russian author, from its program. Valery Gergiev, a star Russian maestro, was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.

Turns out sports, arts, and science aren’t apolitical; they all have crystal clear borders in the eyes of some Western forces. Dostoevsky died over 140 years ago, but his legacy couldn’t survive the wave of the West’s anti-Russia sentiment. If the trend goes on, Tetris, a puzzle video game created by a Soviet software engineer, should shiver for possibly being aimed at next. And young Western generations may have to bid adieu to the periodic table, the tabular display of the chemical elements invented by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.

Click here to read the full article.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the experimental use of genetically engineered mosquitoes in California and Florida to reduce the populations of invasive mosquitoes that carry a host of infectious diseases like Zika and dengue fever. 

“With mosquito and vector-borne diseases a growing concern in California, we see Oxitec’s technology as an important additional option to control the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito,” said Dr. Mustapha Debboun, general manager of the Delta Mosquito and Vector Control District, a government agency in the Central Valley. “We look forward to working in partnership with Oxitec and have been impressed with results from their previous projects in Brazil and the Florida Keys.”

The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were historically relegated to tropical and subtropical zones but have since invaded every continent on Earth except Antarctica. They are capable of bringing the diseases that plague tropical regions with them.

So U.K.-based agrotech company Oxitec engineered male mosquitoes with a gene that can kill Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. When the engineered males mate with females — the only gender that bites — their offspring die before reaching maturity.

“We just surpassed more than 1 billion mosquitoes produced for release globally, making our technology the most widely-deployed mosquito-based vector control technology in the world,” the company said in a recent release.

The EPA granted an experimental use permit on Monday that will allow the company to deploy more mosquitoes throughout four California counties located in the Central Valley — Fresno, Tulare, Stanislaus and San Bernardino. The permit also allows for a pilot project to be located Monroe County, Florida.

The upcoming release will be the largest release of genetically engineered insects in world history. But not everyone is happy about it.

Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy organization, said the organization is becoming increasingly alarmed by Oxitec’s approach to disease eradication and pest control, saying there is a lack of information regarding how the introduction of altered mosquitoes would affect wildlife and human health.

“Scientists have found genetic material from GE mosquitoes in wild populations at significant levels, which means GE mosquitoes are not sterile,” said Dana Perls of Friends of the Earth. “The mosquitoes could result in far more health and environmental problems than they would solve.”

Other critics point to the lack of prominent tropical diseases in California.

“This experiment is unnecessary and even dangerous, as there are no locally acquired cases of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya or Zika in California,” said Jaydee Hanson, policy director with the Center for Food Safety. ”Releasing billions of GE mosquitoes makes it likely that female GE mosquitoes will get out and create hybrid mosquitoes that are more virulent and aggressive.”

Oxitec pushed back on these characterizations saying the identification of genetic material indicating altered mosquitoes are not sterile has only been speculation and lacks scientific evidence. The company also says the presence of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in California significantly increases the risk of tropical diseases like Zika and dengue fever.

But critics fear allowing the new genetically altered mosquitoes to mate with existing species will have unintended consequences that could impact the food web, the agricultural process and human health.

“Once released into the environment, genetically engineered mosquitoes cannot be recalled,” said Dr. Robert Gould, president of San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Rather than forge ahead with an unregulated open-air genetic experiment, we need precautionary action, transparent data and appropriate risk assessments.”

Similar experiments have been conducted in Florida and Brazil to date without immediately observable harm, but critics want the agency to proceed more care and caution. Those releases have also been studied and so far mixed results have been reported.

A recent study conducted by Yale scientists concluded that two years of releases in Brazil failed to reduce the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitos. But Oxitec says its methods have proven more promising than mass spraying of insecticides and other similar methods of control and said it will continue to learn from trials in Florida, California and other countries.

The mosquitoes are scheduled to be released in California for the first time this coming summer.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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In part one of our recap on the recent history of Ukraine, we looked at the chain of events that lead to the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych from power.

You can read that here.

In this second part, we will be focusing on Crimea, how the peninsula came to be a part of the nation of Ukraine, whether or not this was ever popular with the public, and how the transition back to being a part of Russia was handled.

1954

Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev signs a decree transferring Crimea from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR. His motivation for doing so is a matter of historical debate, as is the constitutionality of the decision. However, as they were all one nation at that time, the administrative decision is more of a “symbolic gesture” than anything else.

Prior to this, Crimea had been a part of Russia since 1783 when the Russian Empire took control of the Crimean Khanate following the decline in power of the Ottoman Empire.

1965

Sevastopol, Crimea’s major port city, is officially named a “Hero City” of the USSR, an honour given to 12 cities across the country to mark the 20th Victory Day. Sevastopol held against major assaults from the Axis powers in October and December of 1941, before holding out for a six month siege and finally falling to the Nazis in June of 1942.

1990

As the USSR begins to crumble, Ukraine declares itself an independent republic, beginning the process of leaving the union and taking Crimea with it.

1991

January: The Crimean government hold a referendum asking if Crimea should declare its independence from Ukraine, reform itself as the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic (as it had been prior to 1945), and rejoin the USSR. The vote passes with 94% support, and Crimea declares independence.

February: The Ukrainian parliament recognises this independence, passing the “Law On Restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialistic Republic as part of USSR”.

September: Ukrainian parliament reverses their February decision and declares Crimea a part of Ukraine once again. There is historical debate over the legality of this decision.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and official Ukrainian independence, Crimea is no longer politically unified with Russia for the first time in over 200 years.

1992

Crimean parliament again declares itself independent as “The Republic of Crimea”, they draft their own constitution and plan a referendum on secession from Ukraine. The Ukrainian parliament refuses to acknowledge the declaration and forces the cancellation of the referendum.

As a compromise, Crimea is granted special status as an “Autonomous Republic”, and given control over its own budget and other devolved powers, as long as they add a line to their constitution designating Crimea a part of Ukraine.

1994

Newly-elected President Yuriy Meshkov of Crimea holds a referendum, asking the population of Crimea three questions, most notably:

1. Do you support a return to the May 1992 constitution that didn’t guarantee Crimea was part of Ukraine?
2. Do you support establishing that all Crimean citizens were entitled to dual citizenship with Russia?

All three parts of the referendum pass with at least 77% of the vote, and President Meshkov restores the old constitution. The Ukrainian government declares the referendum illegal and refuses to recognise either the results or the new constitution.

1995

Ukrainian government abolishes the post of President of Crimea, and cuts the powers of their parliament. For the rest of the year the President of Ukraine governs the peninsula by decree.

2001

The 2001 Ukrainian census records that over 60% of the population of Crimea describe themselves as ethnically Russian. In total 77% of Crimeans, and over 94% of the people of Sevastopol, reported being native Russian speakers.

2004

Following the “Orange Revolution”, and over-turning of Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in the Presidential election, leaders of Eastern Ukrainian oblasts – including Crimea – raise the issue of increased autonomy and even secession from the country. A conference of politicians from the Donbas region call for a referendum on federalization, but are ignored.

2006

A US Navy ship docks at the Crimean port of Feodosiya, leading to mass protests on the peninsula and a peaceful blockade of the port. Then-leader of the opposition Viktor Yanukovych claims that allowing foreign military units onto Crimea’s soil without consulting the regional parliament is a violation of both the Ukrainian and Crimean constitutions. A contemporary Radio Free Europe article notes that 55-60% of all Ukrainians oppose joining NATO.

2008

Following the Russo-Georgian war, and on the back of increased calls for Ukraine to join NATO, the BBC sends a reporter to Crimea. Their article details the strong pro-Russian feeling on the peninsula, the key part Sevastopol has played in Russia’s history, and warnings from Crimeans that “nationalists in Kiev” are trying to “force Russians out”.

A 2008 poll by the Ukrainian Centre for Economic and Political Studies found 64% of Crimeans favored secession from from Ukraine to rejoin Russia, and 55% favored increased autonomy from Kiev.

2009-2011

Between 2009 and 2011 the United Nations Development Program conducts a series of polls in Crimea on the question of Russian reunification. Every single poll returns 65-70% positive response, with another 16-25% undecided and only 9-14% favoring staying with Ukraine.

2013

A poll done by the US-based Gallup agency finds 82% of Crimeans speak only Russsian at home, and further 6% speak Russian and one other language. Only 2% report speaking only Ukrainian.

The pro-EU/pro-NATO Maidan protests begin, violence erupts in Kiev.

2014

January

27/1 – As protests intensify in Kiev and Ukraine becomes increasingly unstable, local officials in Simferopol and Sevastopol propose Crimea become a federal state, and prepare legal groundwork:

to use its right to self-determination and to exit Ukraine’s legal space in the event of a state coup, or seizure of power by force.”

28/1 – An open letter from the Sevastopol city council calls on President Yanukovych to outlaw the “extremist group” Svoboda, and invites the people of the city to form “People’s Squads” as described under Ukrainian law, and defend the border of Crimea:

It is impossible to allow specially trained and armed militants of the “Right Sector” and other pro-fascist and extremist organizations to penetrate our city and dictate their terms. We will provide reliable defense of Sevastopol. Extremism, lawlessness, banditry will not pass in the hero city.

February

14/2 – Yahoo News reports “Ukraine’s autonomous Crimea region leans towards Moscow “. The article notes that the Crimean parliament amended the constitution to describe Russia as a “guarantor of Crimea’s safety”, and that elected officials have asked Russia for help if the Maidan protesters should attempt to move into Crimea.

18/2 – Radio Free Europe reports on the “rise of pro-Russian separatism in Crimea”. They interview Crimean MP Sergei Shuvainikov, who claims the Ukrainian nationalists want to ban the Russian language and kill Russian culture in Ukraine.

20/2 – Crimean MP and Speaker of Parliament tells an international meeting in Moscow that Crimea “may secede form Ukraine, if the country splits”.

22/2 – Less than 24 hours after signing a peace deal, Maidan protesters storm government buildings in Kiev and take control of the country. President Yanukovych flees to Kharkiv.

In a vote that violates the consitution of Ukraine, the Rada removes Yanukovych from office for being “unable to carry out his duties”.

The same day, The Washington Post publishes this article:

“The battle for Kiev is over, is the battle for Crimea about to begin?”

23/2 – One of the first bills passed by the new government repeals the law making Russian an official state language. Neo-Naziprit leaders Oleh Tyanobohk and Dimitri Yarosh propose going further and banning both the Party of the Regions and the Ukrainian Communist Party, both traditionally political parties representing Eastern Ukraine, including Crimea.

The same day, thousands of Crimeans attend a protest in Sevastopol, chanting about re-uniting with Russia. The Guardian headlines “Ukraine crisis fuels secession calls in pro-Russian south”, reporting that when the Crimean Prime Minister ruled out secession in his speech he was booed by the crowd.

26/2 – Crimean parliament meets in a special session to discuss the crisis and situation in Kiev. Thousands rally outside the building as the meeting is taking place, chanting “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and “Crimea Rise Up!”

The Parliamentary speaker emerges from the session to address the crowd, saying:

I share your alarm and worry over Crimea’s fate…We will fight for our autonomous republic to the end…Today Kiev doesn’t want to solve our problems, therefore we must unite and act decisively. The people of Crimea have enough strength. Neo-Nazism will not work in Crimea. We will not betray Crimea.”

The Irish Times reports “Many Russian-speakers worry that Ukraine’s new government will be pulled to the right by ultra-nationalist groups that played a major role in the protests”.

28/2 – In the early hours of Friday 28th February, men in fatigues bearing no insignia take control of every airport, seaport, train station and border crossing on the Crimean peninsula. They also secure all government buildings in Simferopol. These men are later revealed to be Russian troops from the bases at Sevastopol.

Kiev and their NATO backers call the troops’ presence an invasion, but Russia defends their deployment, claiming the troops are there at the invitation of both the local Crimean authorities and Viktor Yanukovych, whom they still recognise as the legitimate President of Ukraine.

Further, the Russians claim their lease agreement allowed up to 25,000 Russian military personnel to be stationed in Crimea, and they did not exceed that number.

With the peninsula effectively cut off from mainland Ukraine, a second special session of Parliament is held, during which they vote to terminate the current government and choose a new Prime Minister. They also established plans for an independence referendum to be held in May.

March

11/3 – Crimean parliament, along with the Sevastopol city council, issue a decree declaring Crimea independent.

The new Autonomous Republic of Crimea brings forward the planned referendum from May to March 16th, changing the question from one of independence to a choice between re-joining Russia or re-joining Ukraine.

12/3 – The Crimean government formally invite members from the OSCE to observe the referendum and make sure its fair. The OSCE describes the vote as “illegal”, and refuses to attend.

16/3 – The referendum goes ahead, with the ballot papers asking:

• Do you support the reunification of Crimea with Russia with all the rights of the federal subject of the Russian Federation?
• Do you support the restoration of the Constitution of the Republic of Crimea in 1992 and the status of the Crimea as part of Ukraine?

Though official observers from both the OSCE and UN refused to take part, the Crimean authorities claimed to have invited 190 independent observers from 23 different countries, including the majority of the nations of th EU.

Kiev, along with most western governments, claim the vote is illegitimate because it took place “at the barrel of a gun”.

The reported results are massively in favour of joining Russia, 97% vs 3% against, on an estimated turnout of 83%.

21/3 – President Vladimir Putin of Russia officially signs the law recognising Crimea as part of the Russian Federation. Street parties are held in Sevastopol and Simferopol, and all across Russia.

April

Claiming they are owed money, the Ukrainian government closes dam on North Crimea Canal, reducing flow of fresh water to the peninsula. Access to water is protected by article 29 of the Geneva convention, and its use to punish a civilian population could be a warcrime.

2015

Forbes publishes this article, headlined “One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow”, it details all the polling done by Western polling agencies since the referendum:

• A Gallup study from June 2014 found 83% Crimeans agreed with the result of the referendum, including 94% of ethnic Russians. 74% said being part of Russia would make life better for them and their families.
• In January 2015, a joint German-Canadian study done by GfK for “Free Crimea”, found 82% of Crimeans fully supported the referendum and thought Crimea had made the right choice, with another 11% partially supporting it and only 4% opposing it.
• A Pew Research study from 2014 found 91% of Crimeans thought the vote was free and fair, and 88% thought Kiev should recognise the results.
• A US government-funded study published on the Soros-backed OpenDemocracy website found 84% of Crimeans “absolutely” supported the Crimean referendum, and 88% thought Crimea was moving in the right direction.

So, there it is, a timeline of the key events leading to Crimea’s separation from, and eventual reunification with, Russia. Military occupation and annexation, or a referendum supported by the majority of the population? You decide.

We previously catalogued Ukraine’s Maidan revolution and eventual fall of Viktor Yanukovych in part 1 of this series here. In part three we will be going into Kiev’s “anti-terror” operations in Donetsk and Luhansk and the collapse into chaos and civil war.

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Legislation proposed in the Maryland Senate would allow babies to be left to die for as long as the first 28 days after birth, according to analysis from a pro-life attorney. 

Senate Bill 669 is also known as the Pregnant Person’s Freedom Act of 2022, but the problems go beyond the use of “person” in place of accurate references to women having babies. Senator William Smith, a Democrat, sponsored the legislation, which will have a hearing on March 15. 

“[T]he bill also proposes a revision of the fetal murder/manslaughter statute that would serve to handcuff the investigation of infant deaths unrelated to abortion,” American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) attorney Olivia Summers wrote in her analysis. 

This is because the legislation prohibits investigations and criminal prosecutions for women and medical professionals for a “failure to act” in relation to a “perinatal death.” 

“In other words, a baby born alive and well could be abandoned and left to starve or freeze to death,” Summers wrote, “and nothing could be done to punish those who participated in that cruel death.” 

She said that the language used is unclear, so the law could be interpreted to “prevent investigations into the death of infants at least seven days AFTER their birth, and may extend to infants as old as four weeks!” 

The Maryland Code does not define “perinatal,” Summers said. A 2020 law does define “perinatal care” as the “provision of care during pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum and neonatal periods.” 

A definition on MedicineNet, a website owned by WebMD, defines it as “the 20th to 28th week of gestation” to “1 to 4 weeks after birth.”  

Summers, with the ACLJ, noted in her analysis that the state already has a safe haven law that allows parents to leave a newborn baby with a responsible adult without fear of prosecution. 

“Under the Safe Haven law, a distressed parent who is unable or unwilling to care for their infant can safely give up custody of their baby, no questions asked,” the Maryland Department of Human Services explains. “Newborns can be left at hospitals or law enforcement stations.” 

“There is absolutely no reason for Maryland Senate Bill 669’s attempt to prevent someone who lets their baby die from being investigated,” Summers said. ”This bill just further exposes the complete lack of regard abortion advocates have for innocent human life.”

“If they truly want to protect life and women, then legislators could simply extend the length of the safe harbor provision already in place,” she said. 

Senator Smith, the bill’s sponsor, did not provide a comment on the ACLJ’s analysis of the legislation. The office responded to the initial email but did not comment any further.

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

---

The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Ukrainian intelligence conspired with anti-Russian extremist militants to stage a false flag attack on a nuclear reactor in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.

Russia claims that fighters with the Ukrainian nationalist Azov Battalion movement worked with Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, in rigging explosives to the small reactor at the Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) in Kharkov.

The Russian Ministry issued a statement charging that

“The SBU and the militants of the Azov Battalion are planning to blow up the reactor and accuse the Russian Armed Forces of allegedly launching a missile attack on the experimental nuclear facility.”

The Ministry further warned that such an attack would result in significant radioactive contamination of the area.

The accusation comes after Ukrainian government accused Russia of bombarding the city, and claiming that at least one projectile struck the nuclear facility.

Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Emine Dzheppar, wrote a warning in social media posts that the bombing could cause a nuclear catastrophe:

2/2 The destruction of the Nuclear Installation and storage facilities for nuclear materials could lead to a large-scale environmental catastrophe.
🇺🇦 continues to collect evidence of 🇷🇺war crimes for The Hague!

— Emine Dzheppar (@EmineDzheppar) March 6, 2022

Following charges that Russian forces attacked a nuclear facility in Zaporozhskaya, Vladimir Putin asserted Sunday that “Attempts to blame the Russian military for this incident are part of a cynical propaganda campaign.”

Putin further claims that the “physical and nuclear safety” of the Zaporozhskaya plant is under the control of Russian troops working in cooperation with Ukrainian personnel.

The Russian President also stated that Russian forces are now managing the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The statement issued by the Kremlin added that “All this is being done in order to exclude the possibility of provocations fraught with catastrophic consequences by Ukrainian neo-Nazis or terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden expressed outrage that Putin has ‘invaded Russia’.

“How do we get to the place where, you know Putin decides he’s gonna invade Russia?” Biden proclaimed, adding “Nothing like this has happened since World War II.”

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Since November 2021, two poison centers have received an uptick in reports of accidental exposure to sodium azide, a chemical with the potential to lower your blood pressure or cause seizures

Health Canada reports the test kits are not properly labeled to indicate the contents may contain chemicals that can cause unintended effects if it’s accidentally ingested or spilled

Data demonstrated antigen testing is sensitive and specific when administered in the first five to seven days of illness, which is when the viral load is heaviest. Yet, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky advises people who are symptomatic of a viral illness, but have a negative antigen test, to retest with PCR, known to have a high false-positive reading

Since 2020, testing has been used to create fear and manipulate behavior, likely resulting in many Americans spending unnecessary time in self-isolation, which resulted in a negative impact on the financial structure and health of communities

*

The Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center¹ recently reported an uptick in accidental exposure to a substance in an at-home antigen test kit for COVID-19 that has the potential to lower blood pressure and cause seizures. The reagent in question is sodium azide.

Testing and cases have been at the heart of fearmongering designed to change people’s behavior since the early months of 2020. When the news broke from China that a novel coronavirus had been detected, many of the world’s health organizations went into overdrive, ostensibly to protect public health and reduce the number of potential deaths.

But, with the passage of time, it’s become glaringly apparent that the public health efforts were ineffective and public health officials were ignoring the science about those efforts. To continue to drive fear, it must be demonstrated that many people are infected with the novel virus, whether they are sick or not.

In fact, through the latter months of 2020 and into 2021, it didn’t appear to matter whether there were symptoms, only if there was a positive “test” — and a positive test meant there was a “case” of COVID-19. The greater the number of cases, the greater the fear.

Initially, public health officials used a PCR test to show a positive case of COVID. Later came antigen testing and now there are at-home antigen test kits that are causing a whole new problem.²

What Is Sodium Azide?

Sodium azide is used as a preservative agent in the rapid antigen kits sold for at-home use by several companies, including BD Veritor, BinaxNow, Celltrion DiaTrust, and Flowflex.³ According to the CDC,⁴ the chemical acts rapidly and is potentially deadly. In its pure form, it’s an odorless white solid.

The chemical is used in automobile airbags since it converts to nitrogen gas inside the airbag when an electrical charge during impact causes it to explode. It’s also used as a chemical preservative in laboratories and hospitals, for pest control on farms and as a detonator in an explosive. If you ingest this chemical, how serious the poisoning may be depends on how much chemical is in the exposure and the length of time a person is exposed.

Some of the immediate signs and symptoms include coughing, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, rapid breathing and heart rate, restlessness and skin burns.⁵ Exposure can lead to lung injury, seizures and low blood pressure. Those who have survived large doses may suffer from heart and brain damage.⁶

Poison Center Records Uptick in Accidental Exposure

Exposure to sodium azide can be harmful to children and adults. The most common calls to the Cincinnati Poison Center have been about children finding the reagent liquid and either exposing their skin or putting it in their mouth.⁷ In other cases, adults have reported “container confusion,” in which the reagent vial was mistaken for another medication.

Some hospitals have also reported receiving phone calls about exposure, including Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. The pharmacist and clinical toxicologist for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital reported that the first phone call came in early November from children and adults.

The National Poison Control Center⁸ has also issued a warning about sodium azide found in the at-home antigen COVID-19 test kits. They are receiving reports about accidental exposure in children and adults, posting several case reports on their advisory page. One adult couple misunderstood the directions and used the extraction solution directly in their nose with the swab.

In a second case, a woman mistook the vial for her antibiotic eye drops and in a third case, an adult was exposed to a small amount of the fluid on her hand after using the rapid antigen test at home. Just that small amount caused her thumb to tingle, flush and become mildly swollen. An adviser from Health Canada spoke with The Epoch Times, saying:⁹

“Small doses of sodium azide can lower blood pressure, and larger doses may cause more serious health effects. ProClin is also found in many kits. It contains chemicals that can cause skin and eye irritation, as well as allergic reactions.”

The ProClin preservative is a water-soluble chemical used to extend the shelf life¹⁰ of in vitro diagnostic devices by inhibiting microbial growth. The Poison Control Center in Canada has now recorded at least 50 phone calls due to accidental exposure from the rapid test kits, including ProClin preservatives and sodium azide. February 24, 2022, they posted an advisory, warning:¹¹

“… the product labelling and instructions may not describe or disclose the risks associated with misuse or accidental ingestion. This advisory is intended to help fill that labelling gap, and warn Canadians about the risks associated with misuse, accidental ingestion or spillage of rapid antigen test kit solutions.”

In other words, the test kits being distributed in Canada are not labeled to indicate the contents may contain chemicals that can cause unintended effects if it is accidentally ingested or spilled.

In 2020, the standard test used for COVID-19 was a PCR test. Currently, there are two tests used to diagnose an infection with SARS-CoV-2, and the second is the antigen test. One study¹² published in August 2021 looked at the accuracy of the rapid antigen test for COVID-19 using a review of publications through April 30, 2021.

They included 133 studies with a total of 112,323 samples, finding the antigen testing was 71.2% sensitive and 98.9% specific. When the antigen tests were compared against a PCR test from the same participant, the researchers found the sensitivity of the test was “markedly better on samples with lower RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) values, i.e., <20 (96.5%) and <25 (95.8%), in comparison to those with Ct ≥ 25 (50.7%) and ≥30 (20.9%).”¹³

This meant when the cycle threshold was 25 or lower on the PCR test and identified a SARS-CoV-2 virus, the sensitivity of the antigen test was also higher. But when the cycle threshold was higher, and likely returning a false positive, the antigen test did not recognize the virus.

Additionally, the antigen testing was more sensitive in the first week after symptoms had occurred than it was later in the illness when the viral load had started to decline. From this data, the researchers concluded that a vast majority of infected people were detected using the test and the antigen rapid tests “have a high utility for diagnostic purposes in the early phase of disease.”¹⁴

A second meta-analysis¹⁵ of 8,624 participants published in November 2021, found rapid antigen testing had a pooled sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 100%. If the antigen test was administered within the first seven days of symptoms when the viral load was highest, the sensitivity rose dramatically to 95% and the specificity remained at 100%.

COVID-19 Has Been a Pandemic of Positive Tests

As NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci described in December 2021,¹⁶ the PCR test identifies genetic material from the virus, whether that material is “replication competent” or not. In other words, the PCR test will identify fragments of the viral genetic material even when a whole virus is not present.

While CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky says that the PCR test is “the most sensitive test that we can do,”¹⁷ Fauci said that the PCR measures viral particles that may not be replicating. Additionally, he called this being “infected,” saying:¹⁸

“So although the PCR is good to tell you if you [are infected], but the very fact that it’s positive for, as the CDC director said, several days and even weeks later, it doesn’t give you any indication of whether or not you are transmissible.

And I think that’s the understandable confusion that people have about testing, saying whether you’re infected or not versus are you infected plus transmissible. The only way you could tell if it’s transmissible [is] if you can show that there really is live replication virus in you.”

It appears that Fauci is saying that dead viral particles found by the PCR test do not mean that you were once infected, but in fact that you are infected. Even though Fauci makes the differentiation between inactive and reproductive viruses, the concepts are not interchangeable in terms of infectivity and transmissibility.

You can have a nonreproductive virus in your body, but you will not get sick from it, and you cannot spread it to others. It is not replicating. During a separate interview with ABC News in December 2021, Walensky indicated that people who have symptoms and a negative antigen test should get a PCR test to determine if the symptoms are related to COVID.

However, since the PCR test measures minute viral particles that are possibly not replicating and the antigen tests are sensitive and specific in the first week an individual is symptomatic, it’s difficult to imagine that a secondary PCR test is an accurate measure of a current infection.

Testing Used to Create Fear

These data indicate that antigen tests, when administered within the first five to seven days of symptoms, can identify a SARS-CoV-2 infection. It appears to be more reasonable to identify individuals who are highly infectious, whether with COVID-19 or flu, to help reduce transmission to a vulnerable part of the population.

However, the CDC has not used testing in this manner. As they have revealed with the December 27, 2021, illogical change to protocol,¹⁹ this public health agency wants you to believe it took nearly two years to realize that the PCR test was identifying dead viral debris and could not identify an active infection.

Unfortunately, this two-year debacle has meant that Americans have spent an unnecessary amount of time in self-isolation, which had implications for the financial structure and health of communities.

It is also important to remember that the PCR test only looks for a specific sequence of the RNA virus after the sample has been amplified. The test will give a positive result if it finds a small fragment, even if it was there weeks ago and you have no infection. This has allowed the CDC and NIAID to amplify the number of cases, even when those individuals were not sick or transmitting the virus to others.

The increasing number of “cases” may have been one strategy used to convince an unwilling public of the necessity to vaccinate with an unproven genetic therapy shot. According to US News & World Reports, the states with the greatest number of fully vaccinated individuals are on the upper east coast, with Vermont and Rhode Island topping 80%. On the low end of the scale, Wyoming and Alabama record just over 50% fully vaccinated.²⁰

Accidental exposure to sodium azide or ProClin stabilizer in the at-home antigen testing kits is another hurdle in what has become a never-ending series of events designed to divide the world so the technocratic elite can attempt to conquer, wiping out any vestige of freedom and free thought from society.

Why such a caustic and dangerous chemical is needed in test kits sent into homes where children and pets are the norm, is anyone’s question. It is yet one more way of using testing to support the narrative that SARS-CoV-2 is to be feared and dreaded.

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Notes

¹ Cincinnati Children’s, February 16, 2022

^2, 3, 8 Poison Control, I Swallowed Liquid from a COVID-19 Test Kit

^4, 6 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Facts About Sodium Azide

⁵ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sodium Azide Poisoning

⁷ Cincinnati Children’s, February 16, 2022, Sect 2

⁹ The Epoch Times, February 27, 2022

¹⁰ SigmaAldrich, ProClin Preservatives 1

¹¹ Government of Canada, February 24, 2022, Issue para 2, 3

^12, 13, 14 PLOS|One, 2021; doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003735

¹⁵ Journal of Chinese Medical Association, 2021;84(11)

¹⁶ YouTube, December 30, 2021, Minute 6:30

¹⁷ YouTube, December 29, 2021, Minute 00:22

¹⁸ YouTube, December 30, 2021, Minute 6:56

¹⁹ CDC.gov Media Statement December 27, 2021

²⁰ US News Percentage of Population Fully Vaccinated

Featured image is from Mercola

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

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---

Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

---

First, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro declined to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then, India followed suit – as the Modi government attempted to balance its historic ties with Moscow and its strategic partnership with Washington.

Now, Saudi and UAE leaders are refusing to take Biden’s calls as the US president tries to contain surging oil prices, according to the Wall Street Journal, which adds that the Persian Gulf monarchies have signaled “they won’t help ease surging oil prices unless Washington supports them in Yemen, elsewhere.”

“There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,” said one US official of a planned discussion between Biden and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].”

The U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan also ghosted Biden in recent weeks according to Middle East and US officials.

Yet, both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin after declining to speak with Biden, according to the WSJ. They also spoke with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Biden was able to get through to Prince Mohammed’s 86-year-old father on Feb. 9, however the U.A.E.’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the call between Mr. Biden and Sheikh Mohammed would need to be rescheduled, according to the report.

What do they get out of it?

As the Journal notes,

“The Saudis have signaled that their relationship with Washington has deteriorated under the Biden administration, and they want more support for their intervention in Yemen’s civil war, help with their own civilian nuclear program as Iran moves ahead, and legal immunity for Prince Mohammed in the U.S., Saudi officials said. The crown prince faces multiple lawsuits in the U.S., including over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.”

There’s the ask.

Meanwhile, the Emiratis share Saudi concerns about the less-than-adequate level of engagement by the US regarding recent missile strikes by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen against both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The two kingdoms are also concerned about the revival of the Iran nuclear deal – which is in its ‘final stages of negotiations,’ yet does zero to address their security concerns.

So for those keeping track, while the west has continued to insist that Russia is isolated – and make no mistake, these sanctions will be immediately crippling – if one considers the population and resources which originate in China, India, Brazil and the Middle East kingdoms – basically half the world’s population and those who control most of the world’s commodities aren’t on board with punishing Putin or easing the situation to the west’s benefit.

And as the Journal points out,

“Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are the only two major oil producers that can pump millions of more barrels of more oil—a capacity that, if used, could help calm the crude market at a time when American gasoline prices are at high levels.”

Too little, too late?

Late last month, Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s Middle East coordinator, and Amos Hochstein, the State Department’s energy envoy, flew to Riyadh to try and smooth relations – while McGurk also met with Sheikh Mohammed in Abu Dhabi to hear out their frustrations with America’s response to Houthi attacks.

Obviously, diplomacy didn’t go well.

To date, the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to increase oil production – and are instead holding to the previously agreed OPEC production roadmap. What’s more, their energy alliance with Russia, another top oil producer, has boosted OPECs global reach while bringing the Kingdoms closer to Moscow.

Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. forged deep ties with former President Donald Trump, who sided with them in a regional dispute with Qatar, pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that they had opposed, made his first trip abroad to Riyadh in 2017 and stood by Prince Mohammed after the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. But Mr. Trump’s decision not to respond to an Iranian drone and missile attack on major Saudi oil sites in 2019 rattled Gulf partners who have relied for decades on the promise of U.S. security protection. Iran denied involvement in the oil facility attacks.

The rift between Mr. Biden and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince stretches back to the 2020 presidential election, when the Democratic candidate vowed to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” state after a Saudi hit team killed Mr. Khashoggi in 2018 in Istanbul. -WSJ

Biden also released an intelligence report shortly after taking office which concluded that the 2018 Istanbul murder of WaPo journalist Jamal Khashoggi was approved by Prince Mohammed – who has denied knowledge of the plot despite close associates having been convicted in Saudi court over the the journalist’s death.

The US president also slammed Saudi Arabia over its long war in Yemen, and cut off weapons that the Saudis were using to target Houthis. Biden also removed Houthis from a list of global terrorist groups, after former President Trump added them.

And on Monday (after Biden was ghosted), White House spox Jen Psaki confirmed that Biden stood by his view that the Saudis should be treated like a “pariah,” and that their leadership has ‘little redeeming social value.’

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine published last week, Prince Mohammed said when asked if Biden misunderstood him: “Simply, I do not care,” adding that the US president shouldn’t have alienated Saudi leaders. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America,” he said, adding “Go for it.”

So, perhaps don’t call the country that could bail you out of an oil crunch a “pariah” if you might require their assistance.

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US President Joe Biden announced on March 8 the suspension of oil imports from Russia. The measure is one of the most radical taken by Washington so far, considering that about 10% of the oil consumed by the US is of Russian origin. Considering that the American society is heavily dependent on oil (with most families owning more than one car), the move could directly affect Biden’s popularity.

These were some of Biden’s words in his speech announcing the new measure:

“Today I’m announcing the United States is targeting the main artery of Russia’s economy. We’re banning all imports of Russian oil and gas and energy. That means Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at US ports and the American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine (…) This is a move that has strong bipartisan support in Congress and I believe in the country. Americans have rallied to support the Ukrainian people and made it clear we will not be part of subsidizing Putin’s war (…) This is a step that we’re taking to inflict further pain on Putin, but there will be costs as well here in the United States”.

Biden makes it clear that his measure will harm American society but decides to take this risk simply to attack the Russian economy, which he considers essential to neutralize Russian military power. Although Russian oil represents a small percentage of American consumption, any loss of oil source can negatively affect a country as dependent on this resource as the US, whose social structure is based on individual road transport, with a very wide distribution of vehicles. Any increase in the price of oil negatively impacts the image of an American president.

The barrel of oil has been increasing its price exponentially recently, having reached the incredible mark of 129,00 dollars on the day Biden announced the ban. With that, the American people will pay directly for the material consequences of Biden’s political plans, whose focus, rather than improving Americans’ lives, seems to be simply trying to harm Russia in some way.

In Parliament, politicians seem to agree with Biden’s measure, considering the US government’s priority to “contain” Russia in every way possible. House Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised Biden’s decision and promised to pass rigid laws against Russian energy over the next few days. In the same vein, state departments seem to be committed to the government’s plans, promising to increase US energy production in order to fill the gap left by the banned oil and gas imports. For example, the Department of Energy raised its forecast for oil production in 2023 by 390,000 barrels per day, for a total of 12.99 million barrels per day. This year alone, US oil production is expected to increase by 60,000 barrels a day.

It is difficult, however, for this anti-Russian enthusiasm to be shared by the American people, who is not interested in plans to “punish” Moscow. No American citizen wants to pay more in fuel just to “contain Russia”. Despite Parliament and state departments showing support for Biden, it is virtually inevitable that his popularity will continue to drop sharply in the coming months due to such measures.

To avoid aggravating the problems, Washington is already taking several emergency initiatives. In addition to increasing domestic production, the American government is advancing in negotiations for the recognition of the Maduro government in Venezuela, with the possibility of an end to the economic embargo in the coming months. The objective is simple: expand energy sources and reduce the responsibility of domestic production – and, to achieve its goals, Washington overcomes any political or ideological barriers.

So, being the world’s largest oil producer and re-establishing ties with Venezuela, it is possible that the US will reduce the damage of its ban on Russian oil, but the same cannot be said about the Europeans, who heavily depend on Russian energy sources for the supply of the entire continent. Biden himself seems to admit this problem: “We’re moving forward with this ban understanding that many of our European partners and allies may not be in a position to join us (…) But we’re working closely with Europe and our partners to develop a long-term strategy to reduce their dependance on Russian energy as well”.

Indeed, if Biden and his team were really concerned about EU’s interests, it would be simpler to say that European states can freely trade energy with Russia despite ideological barriers – as is currently happening between Washington and Caracas. But, on the contrary, the Democrat insists on an unrealistic speech about alternative sources ‘to reduce dependance”, maintaining the position that the ban on Russia is an elementary measure to be followed.

Biden tries to show some “optimism” towards the European energy supply but fails. It is impossible for any alternative project to bring energy to the Europeans to be completed in time to avoid damage from a possible ban on the cooperation with Russia. Although the American president admits that some European states cannot follow the American attitude at the moment, it is inevitable that international pressure will arise for such a ban to occur, considering the influence of the American government’s decisions within the European political space. So, the most likely for the near future is that European countries will start banning Russian energy on a large scale, even if it harms their internal social scenarios.

The American message in this regard is clear: Washington can do anything to guarantee its interests, even negotiating with Venezuela, but its partners are not allowed to follow this same sovereign path. It is up to the Europeans only to follow American decisions, with no real sovereignty in the EU States. The US government says that punishing Russia is more important than securing national social and economic interests in the energy sector, and the entire West simply accepts this passively.

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

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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There are many sidebar issues of Russia’s assault on Ukraine.   These may seem irrelevant, insignificant, even anodyne, as we watch in horror the suffering of Ukrainian civilians, but they have at least a secondary impact on the longer-term relations between Russia and the West and, one hopes, a Ukraine with healthy relations with both.

I serve on the board of a chamber music organization in Charlottesville, Virginia that hosts performers of the highest international order in a concert series.  The opening concert of the 2022-23 season is scheduled to be the brilliant 20 year old Russian pianist, Alexander Malofeev.  Yet we have just heard from a fellow presenter in Canada that a concert by Malofeev has been canceled, due to the fact that he has not publicly spoken out in opposition to his country’s aggression in Ukraine.

The retribution being carried out against individual Russians—sports figures, business leaders and artists, includes the peripatetic St. Petersburg-based conductor, Valery Gergiev, whose various European appointments are being revoked, as well as the celebrated diva, Anna Netrebko, recently removed from the roster of the Metropolitan Opera.  These punitive moves are being attributed to the friendship of the two international stars with President Putin.  This notwithstanding, a blanket policy of shunning Russian artists begs a number of questions, namely:

It has repeatedly been emphasized by the Biden administration and European allies throughout the current crisis that blame for the crime of invading Ukraine belongs to the Russian government, not the Russian people – therefore the punishment should be directed accordingly.
With regard to the matter of public condemnation of the attack on Ukraine, let us reflect—given the current mood in Moscow—on the possible ramifications of such statements by prominent Russians, both for themselves and for their families.  Moreover, consider that Mr. Malofeev is the age of a typical college junior, and, further, that his meteoric rise as a musician (he won the Tchaikovsky International Prize for Young Musicians in 2014 at age 12) and his entire waking life to date has undoubtedly been spent with music scores, not TASS or RT.

Another consequence of Ukraine—not only in the tragic outcome, but in the prolonged buildup—has been the erosion of diplomatic ties between the United States and Russia.  If it is more than mere platitude to say that diplomatic engagement is all the more important in times of crisis and grave danger, as now, then surely the same is true of cultural exchanges.  Ars longa, vita brevis.

All this notwithstanding, there is surely the temptation to employ the bluntest of instruments, on the basis that Russians deserve no less.  But, having visited Russia nine times, with the opportunity to meet with all manner of its people, I can unequivocally vouch for the spirit of goodwill toward the United States and its people.  All the sadder, therefore, to read some recent dispatches from Russia indicating that the Kremlin’s message of U.S./NATO disregard of Russia’s security concerns (which, by the way, many of us have argued are valid) has hardened public opinion against the West and its motives.

I stress that none of this is in any way intended to question legitimate outrage at Russia’s brutal attack.

Rather, it is to say that there will be other business to do with Russia after peace is achieved  – one can only hope that it is soon and lasting – in Ukraine.   To this end, keeping cultural, diplomatic and, to the extent possible, citizen engagement channels open is vital, and the price we may pay for permanent closure of these—not to mention a continuing game of chicken between the U.S/NATO and Russia, from the Baltic to Black Seas—is almost unimaginably high.

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Featured image: Alexander Malofeev (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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A senior epidemiologist has publicly apologized to his daughter’s generation for failing to more strenuously oppose “morally wrong” COVID lockdown measures such as school closures that caused massive damage to children.

The stunning admission was made by Professor Mark Woolhouse, who revealed to Sky News that he was told to “correct” his views after he criticized doomsday COVID models.

The Edinburgh University academic said “plain common sense” was a “casualty” of lockdown and that his daughter’s generation “has been so badly served by mine.”

Decrying harmful lockdown measures such as closing schools as “morally wrong,” Woolhouse said he was told to stay silent when he questioned “implausible” graphs presented by Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) Sir Patrick Vallance that said COVID cases would exponentially double.

“If this projection had been extended for another week we would be talking about one hundred thousand cases per day. Another month would have given us close to half a million. Per day. An exponential projection will give you any number you like if you run it for long enough,” said Woolhouse.

When Woolhouse, author of a new book called The Year the World Went Mad, officially lodged skepticism about the figures, he said his “objections did not go down well”.

“After a flurry of emails I was invited to ‘correct’ my comments,” he says.

Professor of Epidemiology Mark Woolhouse claims the UK "rushed" into lockdown in March 2020 "because basically that's what they did with China".#KayBurley https://t.co/3xvxkPE8OF

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/WPT8BwJagB

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 21, 2022

Suggesting someone high in government was behind the demand, Woolhouse asserted, “it wasn’t my views that needed correcting, it was the projections.”

However, the situation played out for a second time when a new model in October 2020 predicted 4,000 deaths a day in the UK despite the “fact that the second wave was already beginning to slow.”

“The model that generated the 4,000 deaths a day figure was an outlier – all the other model projections gave much lower numbers,” writes Woolhouse, noting how the graph was broadcast to millions of TV viewers anyway.

Woolhouse also revealed how the government knew “people over 70 were 10,000 times more likely to die from COVID than those under 15,” but deliberately pursued policies that didn’t take this into account and harmed children.

Woolhouse’s comments would have normally made for a banner headline news story.

However, they serve as another reminder that the war in Ukraine has completely obliterated the harm caused by lockdown from the news, and with it the culpability of countless top technocrats who imposed it on the rest of us.

Whether anyone will face any kind of responsibility for the devastation wrought on the population, particularly children, appears to a diminishing possibility.

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Four examples show that scientific integrity is pretty much dead worldwide. There are only a few people left who support these principles and they’ve been marginalized by all mainstream leaders.

In this article, I am going to show two simple, but very important, examples that I believe prove, without any doubt, that scientific integrity is dead. I cannot explain the lack of outrage from the mainstream scientific community any other way.

Example 1: mRNA COVID-19 Injections Are Killing Teenagers

The Journal of the College of American Pathologists published a shocking new report on Monday, Feb. 14, 2022 about the cases of two teenage boys who died following mRNA COVID-19 injections.

The report’s lead author is Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner for the state of Connecticut and the 2021 President of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

Both boys died in their sleep less than a week after the second dose, and neither had any known health conditions prior to death. In these cases, autopsies of the two teenagers found evidence of myocarditis.

“The myocardial injury seen in these post-vaccine hearts is different from typical myocarditis and has an appearance most closely resembling a catecholamine-mediated stress (toxic) cardiomyopathy. Understanding that these instances are different from typical myocarditis and that cytokine storm has a known feedback loop with catecholamines may help guide screening and therapy,” the report concludes.

This observation is confirmed in another recently published paper by Flavio Cadegiani, “Catecholamines are the key trigger of mRNA SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis and sudden deaths: a compelling hypothesis supported by epidemiological, anatomopathological, molecular and physiological findings.” Dr. Peter McCullough is familiar with Flavio’s work and told me he thought it was brilliant.

So the vaccine killed two kids in Connecticut which has around 1% of the population of the US.

Isn’t it odd that we are seeing multiple reports from one small state and complete silence from everywhere else?

Did Connecticut just get unlucky? It appears not.

Let’s extrapolate this to the US and estimate around 200 kids in the US have been killed by the vaccine.

Some people may say that that isn’t a valid extrapolation.

OK, then try this one for size:

VAERS is underreported by a factor of 41 based on my calculations. This number was recently confirmed by Joel Smalley who analyzed the Massachusetts death data. He got 40.9 (from 1759 actual deaths/43 VAERS reported deaths) which I think is close enough to my estimate.

So 41*64 reported deaths = 2.624 actual excess deaths caused by the COVID vaccines.

Even if you take a very low-ball estimate of the underreporting factor (URF) of 20, you still end up with 1,280 child deaths, a very troubling figure.

So our simplistic 200 estimate just from linearly extrapolating the known myocarditis deaths in CT was an underestimate (as we expected).

Let’s be clear. Dr. Paul Offit has said that 1 death per million vaccinated is unacceptable for a vaccine. Here, we have more than 1 child death per million vaccinated which is even worse than just 1 death.

Is anyone publicly calling for a halt to these vaccines for kids? No way. Not a chance. They are nearly all pushing for giving it to even younger kids.

Is anyone calling for amending the label on the vaccine to note this new information? Are you kidding? No way. AFAIK, the label hasn’t been amended in over a year.

Example #2: The CDC has been withholding unfavorable vaccine data because it might be misinterpreted

On February 20, 2022, The New York Times confirmed that the CDC was withholding data that is unfavorable to the safe and effective vaccine narrative.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

Watch this CBS news video at 7:39 where the New York Times reporter says clearly: “One of the big problems I’ve been hearing about here is that the CDC didn’t want to get some of these data out because they were worried it would be misinterpreted. And all the experts I spoke to said that this is a terrible reason because when you hide data or when you keep data from being released it actually breeds more mistrust.”

Where is the outrage?

Apparently only from misinformation spreaders like Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Paul Alexander.

I can’t recall seeing Robert so upset (you can tell he’s upset because he repeats himself over and over at how upset he is). Watch this video which has been viewed fewer than 100,000 times:

Example #3: The silencing of Dr. Peter Schirmacher

I’ve written earlier about the unethical silencing of one of the world’s top pathologists, Dr. Peter Schirmacher.

Nobody in the scientific community spoke out how Schirmacher’s family was threatened which caused him to be silenced about his stunning results.

Let’s be clear: the lack of outrage from the scientific community is a tacit endorsement that physical threats are acceptable for silencing scientists who have evidence that is counter-narrative.

Example #4: The rejection of technical papers that don’t support the narrative

Jessica Rose had her paper on myocarditis retracted by the publisher (Elsevier) for no valid reason. Others have had their papers accepted, passed peer review, and then never get published.

Nobody is speaking out about these injustices. They just let them happen.

The CDC responds by doubling down on the deception

The CDC just published a study in The Lancet Infectious Disease saying that there is no link between the vaccines and death.

I’m serious.

Check out the BBC story that just came out, “Covid vaccines not linked to deaths, major US study finds.” The article goes on saying, “A major study of vaccine side-effects in the US found no link between two Covid jabs and the number of deaths recorded after vaccination.”

No link?!?!

OK, then how do they explain:

1. The huge increase in deaths reported by multiple insurance companies
2. Up to a 93% incidence of telltale blood clots noticed by an embalmer.
3. The deaths in Connecticut (noted above) which were determined to be caused by the vaccine. These kids died in their sleep. If it wasn’t the vaccine, what caused these deaths?
4. The highly unusual causes of deaths in the kids the CDC analyzed. Those kids did not die from normal causes. But the CDC never mentioned that in their analysis that the causes of death didn’t line up statistically. They just said nothing, nothing! (reminding me of the famous line uttered by Sgt. Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes fame).
5. Dr. Peter Schirmacher’s study which found the vaccine caused the death in at least 30% of the cases examined (deaths within 2 weeks after being vaccinated).
6. Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi’s study which found that the vaccine caused the death in over 90% of the cases examined
7. If it wasn’t the vaccine, what killed Jacob Clynick?
8. If it wasn’t the vaccine, what killed Ernest Ramierez Jr? The autopsy revealed it was clearly the vaccine. Obviously, the CDC disagrees. What was the cause?

The answer is they don’t explain any of these things because they can’t. And nobody is going to hold them accountable, especially the mainstream media. The mainstream press will not ask any of those questions. It is never going to happen.

One unusual side note is the choice of journal for their paper. In February 2021, the pro-vax editor of that journal, John McConnell wrote an op-ed praising the safety of the COVID vaccines. Exactly one year later, the journal announced on February 25, 2022 that he’s dead. Did he die after the booster? What did the autopsy show was his cause of death? We are not allowed to know that. Nobody is talking. You gotta love the transparency.

The silence is deafening

The silence on these issues and other evidence that is counter-narrative is deafening.

This just shows you how corrupt the systems are that so few people are speaking out publicly and showing their outrage like Malone did in the video above.

What Malone did is speak up for scientific integrity.

What others did is remain silent.

All of these institutions and individuals are keeping their mouths shut:

1. All members of the CDC and FDA outside committees; they don’t want to get kicked off the committees.
2. Top universities that are supposed to be supporting scientific integrity like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCSF, … There is nothing from the leaders of these institutions or any of the faculty members.
3. Top medical societies like the AMA and IDSA and all others
4. Top medical journals: not a single one spoke out about this.
5. Top medical thought leaders like Eric Topol, Monica Gandhi, …
6. Congress
7. The mainstream news media
8. Even so-called “truth seekers” like Debunk The Funk, ZdoggMD, and Your Local Epidemiologist (Dr. Katelyn Jetelina) were silent on the matter. Amazing!

I don’t think any of these institutions or individuals are going to object anytime in the near future due to fear of retribution.

So the CDC can continue to withhold all unfavorable data, continue to “study” any deaths that were clearly caused by the vaccine, and everyone will continue to ignore all the safety data that is released that is in plain sight (like the Connecticut study) that is contrary to the narrative.

When will this end?

For scientific integrity to be restored, we need to have more than just Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Paul Alexander, and several others who are outraged and not afraid to speak out.

We need people who have the courage to be on the right side of history.

I don’t know when that will happen.

The pace of adoption seems pretty slow.

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Featured image:  A hand holding an mRNA vaccine vial. (Spencer Davis / Unsplash)

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Today, the dangers of military escalation are beyond description.

What is now happening in Ukraine has serious geopolitical implications. It could lead us into a World War III scenario.

It is important that a peace process be initiated with a view to preventing escalation. 

Global Research condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Bilateral Peace Agreement is required.

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“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

— “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot

Barely three years into the 2020s, and we seem to be living out the prophesies of the Book of Revelation with its dire warnings about plague, poverty, hatred and war.

Just as the government hysteria over the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be dying down, new threats have arisen to occupy our attention and fuel our fears: food shortages, spiking inflation, rocketing gas prices, and a Ukraine-Russia conflict that threatens to bring about a world war.

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Or is this the beginning of the end of the world?

Will the world end with a bang or will it end, as T.S. Eliot concludes, with a whimper?

Robert Frost, torn between a vision of the world ending in fire (the hot flame of violence, anger and greed) or ice (the cold burn of hatred), suggests that either would suffice to do the job.

And then there’s the Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz, who envisioned the day the world ends as a day like any other: “Those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, as long as the bumblebee visits a rose, as long as rosy infants are born, no one believes it is happening now… There will be no other end of the world.”

In Milosz’ words can be found a distant echo of a warning issued by Bertram Gross in his book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America:

“Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. In any First World country of advanced capitalism, the new fascism will be colored by national and cultural heritage, ethnic and religious composition, formal political structure, and geopolitical environment… In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic-as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic facade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal. I am worried by those who fail to remember-or have never learned -that Big Business-Big Government partnerships, backed up by other elements, were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler, and the Japanese empire builders.”

Look beyond the drum-pounding distractions of war and the fear-inducing tactics of the Deep State, and consider the long-term ramifications of the so-called sanctions being levied against Russia right now: not just the governmental sanctions, but the corporate lockdowns.

As CBS News reports, “Car shipments were paused. Beer stopped flowing. McDonald’s shut down sales of Big Macs. Cargo ships dropped port calls and oil companies cut their pipelines. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is leading some of the world’s best known brands—from Apple to Disney and Ikea—to abruptly exit a country that’s become a global outcast.”

This is shunning on a global scale.

Some companies, as Fortune reports, have gone above and beyond what was required by government sanctions. For instance, “major oil companies, including Exxon, BP, and Shell, ended joint investment projects with Russian oil companies.

Major retailers, including H&M, Nike, Ikea, and TJX, have shut down Russian sales and closed stores. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express shut down global services in Russia…

Boeing cut off support for Russian airlines and closed its offices in Moscow, while Delta ended its Russian code-sharing arrangement… FedEx and UPS shut services to Russia. Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft all have taken significant action to combat Russian aggression and disinformation.”

“You basically have Russia becoming a commercial pariah,” confirmed economist Mary Lovely. “Pretty much no company, no multinational, wants to be caught on the wrong side of U.S. and Western sanctions.”

Russia’s military aggression has paved the way for a show of force by a punitive Big Business-Big Government power alliance that, until recently, had been exerting itself on a smaller scale to sanction individuals whose behavior was deemed to be hateful, discriminatory, conspiratorial or anti-government.

There’s no going back from here.

This may well be the end of the world as we know it.

This particular apocalypse is the fallout from a silent coup that has given the Corporate State a taste for punitive power and an understanding of the ease with which it can use that power to manipulate, control and direct the world governments.

For good or bad, it will change the way we navigate the world, redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear.

Now, in the face of Russia’s aggression, fascism is about to become a global menace.

Given all that we know about the U.S. government—that it treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; that it repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; and that it wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad—it is not a stretch to suggest that the government has been overtaken by a power elite that do not have our best interests at heart.

Indeed, to anyone who’s been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we’re already under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

In its place is a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and is not only running the country but is about to take over the world.

Given the trajectory and dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country (or the rest of the world) 20 years from now.

It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the Global Deep State’s structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.

Yet mark my words: the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State.

The current or future occupant of the White House will not save us.

For that matter, anarchy, violence and incivility will not save us.

Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm.

Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences.

The real and manufactured events of recent years—the pandemic, invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other.

What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same.

When the government and its Global-Industrial Deep State partners in the New World Order crack down, we’ll all suffer.

If there is to be any hope of freeing ourselves, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with you and your fellow citizens taking part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level.

One of the most important contributions an individual citizen can make is to become actively involved in local community affairs, politics and legal battles. As the adage goes, “Think globally, act locally.”

America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.

Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.

And then, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of communities and local governments to invalidate governmental and corporate laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He 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.

The Global Digital ID Surveillance Plan Accelerates – Urgent Resistance Needed

By Jesse Smith, March 08, 2022

The COVID-19 plandemic provided the perfect cover for all manner of “New Normal” changes that were always intended to become permanent. One change in particular has continued to go mostly under the radar – the increasing use of all-pervasive surveillance.

Who Wants War with Russia?

By Philip Giraldi, March 08, 2022

Former GOP Vice President Mike Pence has called for anyone supporting Russia to be kicked out of the party which will no doubt produce a purge of members who are reluctant to go to war on behalf of foreign country and no ally Ukraine.

The Great Reset’s 5G Cyborg Ecosystem

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, March 08, 2022

The Great Reset is a globalist plan that is moving forward at lighting speed. The COVID-19 pandemic was part and parcel of that plan, as detailed in Klaus Schwab’s book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” but to really fulfill the technocrats’ ambitions, a war of some kind is likely needed.

NATO’s Key Role in the UK

By Matt Kennard, March 08, 2022

As tensions grow between NATO and Russia over Ukraine, Declassified takes a look at the UK’s role in the organisation that Vladimir Putin has blamed for his illegal war. Some 574 foreign personnel from 29 countries are deployed with NATO across three sites in Britain.

National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, March 08, 2022

The archived webpage captured February 25, 2022 from 14:53 shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows “No results found” for Ukraine. As of right now, there are still “No results found” for Ukraine.

Dr. Robert Malone: The CDC Hid COVID Data and Committed Massive Scientific Fraud

By Ethan Huff, March 08, 2022

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has admitted that large portions of data about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) are not being published because the world might “misinterpret” them. And Dr. Robert Malone is warning that this amounts to fraud.

Navigating Our Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from Ukraine

By Ilan Pappe, March 08, 2022

The unprecedented collective EU decision to open up its borders to the Ukrainian refugees, followed by a more guarded policy by Britain, cannot go unnoticed in comparison to the closure of most of the European gates to the refugees coming from the Arab world and Africa since 2015.

The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy. Prof. Peter Dale Scott

By Prof Peter Dale Scott, March 08, 2022

The egalitarian mindset is widely shared among Americans. But Washington today is securely in the hands of the global repressive dominance mindset, and a deepening of the military-industrial complex into what in my most recent book I call the American war machine.

Cutting Scholarly Ties: The West, Ukraine, and the Russian Academy

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 08, 2022

The times have tilted, and now universities, notably in Western states, find themselves rushing with virtuous glee to divesting and banning contacts and links with the Russian academy. Russian President Vladimir Putin is deemed a monster of unsurpassed dimension; the Russian attack on Ukraine emptied of historical rationale or basis. There is simply no room for academic debate, in of itself a risible irony.

Women’s Day 2022: Women’s Rights in Afghanistan, “A Justification for War”

By Felicity Arbuthnot, March 08, 2022

Remember the deluge of political concern over the subjugation of Afghan women at the time of the October 2001 invasion? The tsunami of documentaries, articles, books on their plight, contributing to the justification of another invasion – actually for $trillions of minerals, a geographically strategic country and a pipeline.

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As the world’s eyes are on Ukraine on this International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022, we are reminded of the disproportionate impact that war and militarism have on women. This is a reality that the women of the global South are acutely aware of because of the steady assaults on the humanity of peoples in the South executed by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination. The militarized terror of the Axis of Domination in the service of their economic elites have been even more intensely felt by the women of Africa and the African Diaspora. 

The socialist groundings of the day were expressed in its early unfolding. Indeed, the earliest militants for International Working Women’s Day, lifted up the violence of capitalism as labor exploitation. On March 8, 1908 in New York, 15,000, largely immigrant women marched for labor, voting rights and challenged class exploitation. Thus the seeds were planted for International Women’s Day as imperialism, colonialism, and white world supremacy were in full effect.

Black women’s labor complicated this fight given racialized apartheid into domestic work in the U.S., colonized globally. In the U.S. there were more than a million African American domestic workers before the start of the second European world war. Black anti-imperialist revolutionary, Claudia Jones captures this dialectic of gender, race and class exploitation in her powerful article, “An End to the Neglect of the Problem of the Negro Woman.” She gave voice to the women of the Black/African world locked in and struggling against the Pan-European white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial, imperialist project. These are the women in the crossfire of extractivist capitalism, war and militarism across the African world today, struggling to dismantle these systems. We lift them up today with a focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, noting other parts of the African world.

As the world is captivated by the war in Europe, BAP cannot help but reflect on the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the little purchase it has had on the world’s conscience (while commentators point to the war in Ukraine being the most devastating war in Europe since the second imperialist war ended in 1945, the general public knows almost nothing about the most lethal, ongoing conflict in the word taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The United Nations says it is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II and the greatest humanitarian crisis at the dawn of the 21st century. An estimated 6 million Congolese have perished in the Congo conflict since 1996, half of the victims five years old or younger. It is a conflict triggered by two invasions (1996 & 1998) by Rwanda, led by Paul Kagame and Uganda, led by Yoweri Museveni, both of whom are backed by the U.S. and UK. When international bodies attempt to hold them to account for their crimes in the Congo, the U.S. or the UK run diplomatic interference or provide political cover, especially for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. The Biden administration has continued this policy which dates from the Clinton administration – a policy of protecting the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Central Africa.

On this International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022, this ongoing conflict is particularly noteworthy because of a series of wars where the atrocities against women are a key strategy of the perpetrators. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, disfigured and mutilated as a weapon of war in order to displace entire villages from resource rich lands. Yet, the U.S. continues to cover for the architects of the crimes in the Congo, especially Paul Kagame, whose army, the UN said in a 2010 report, that if brought in front of a competent court could be charged for committing genocide in the Congo.

Beyond Congo and the African continent, African and other colonized women continually face the brutalities of capitalism and imperialism. In Haiti, the occupation by the United Nations “peacekeeping” troops resulted in massive sexual and physical violence against women and young girls. So has the current Core Group control of the country, which has intensified gang violence. And, currently, the mostly women Haitian garment industry workers, are striking for a living wage and against workplace harassment. We must also point to the continuing assaults on Haiti, assaults on Black women leaders in Colombia, the deaths at the hands of the domestic army in the U.S. referred to as the police, Garifuna women in Honduras murdered by the U.S. coup backed government, the bombardment of women and children in the Gaza strip, death and displacement in Syria and Iraq, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. Indeed, African and other colonized women know the horrors of war, militarism and all forms of hybrid wars carried out by Western powers, intimately.

On this International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022, BAP lifts up the ongoing fight against white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy in the DRC and across the African and colonized world. African and colonized women are at the center of the struggle to dismantle this system.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

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Featured image: Claudia Jones (Licensed under Public Domain)

 

Il piano strategico degli Stati uniti contro la Russia è stato elaborato tre anni fa dalla Rand Corporation (il manifesto, Rand Corp: come abbattere la Russia, 21 maggio 2019). La Rand Corporation, il cui quartier generale ha sede a Washington, è «una organizzazione globale di ricerca che sviluppa soluzioni per le sfide politiche»: ha un esercito di 1.800 ricercatori e altri specialisti reclutati da 50 paesi, che parlano 75 lingue, distribuiti in uffici e altre sedi in Nord America, Europa, Australia e Golfo Persico. Personale statunitense della Rand vive e lavora in oltre 25 paesi. La Rand Corporation, che si autodefinisce «organizzazione nonprofit e nonpartisan», è ufficialmente finanziata dal Pentagono, dall’Esercito e l’Aeronautica Usa, dalle Agenzie di sicurezza nazionale (Cia e altre), da agenzie di altri paesi e potenti organizzazioni non-governative. 

La Rand Corp. si vanta di aver contribuito a elaborare la strategia che permise agli Stati uniti di uscire vincitori dalla guerra fredda, costringendo l’Unione Sovietica a consumare le proprie risorse nell’estenuante confronto militare. A questo modello si è ispirato il nuovo piano elaborato nel 2019: «Overextending and Unbalancing Russia», ossia costringere l’avversario a estendersi eccessivamente per sbilanciarlo e abbatterlo. Queste sono le principali direttrici di attacco tracciate nel piano della Rand, su cui gli Stati Uniti si sono effettivamente mossi negli ultimi anni.

Anzitutto – stabilisce il piano – si deve attaccare la Russia sul lato più vulnerabile, quello della sua economia fortemente dipendente dall’export di gas e petrolio: a tale scopo vanno usate le sanzioni commerciali e finanziarie e, allo stesso tempo, si deve far sì che l’Europa diminuisca l’importazione di gas naturale russo, sostituendolo con gas naturale liquefatto statunitense. In campo ideologico e informativo, occorre incoraggiare le proteste interne e allo stesso tempo minare l’immagine della Russia all’esterno. In campo militare si deve operare perché i paesi europei della Nato accrescano le proprie forze in funzione anti-Russia. Gli Usa possono avere alte probabilità di successo e alti benefici, con rischi moderati, investendo maggiormente in bombardieri strategici e missili da attacco a lungo raggio diretti contro la Russia. Schierare in Europa nuovi missili nucleari a raggio intermedio puntati sulla Russia assicura loro alte probabilità di successo, ma comporta anche alti rischi. Calibrando ogni opzione per ottenere l’effetto desiderato – conclude la Rand – la Russia finirà col pagare il prezzo più alto nel confronto con gli Usa, ma questi e i loro alleati dovranno investire grosse risorse sottraendole ad altri scopi.

Nel quadro di tale strategia – prevedeva nel 2019 il piano della Rand Corporation – «fornire aiuti letali all’Ucraina sfrutterebbe il maggiore punto di vulnerabilità esterna della Russia, ma qualsiasi aumento delle armi e della consulenza militare fornite dagli Usa all’Ucraina dovrebbe essere attentamente calibrato per aumentare i costi per la Russia senza provocare un conflitto molto più ampio in cui la Russia, a causa della vicinanza, avrebbe vantaggi significativi». È proprio qui – in quello che la Rand Corporation definiva «il maggiore punto di vulnerabilità esterna della Russia», sfruttabile armando l’Ucraina in modo «calibrato per aumentare i costi per la Russia senza provocare un conflitto molto più ampio» – che è avvenuta la rottura. Stretta nella morsa politica, economica e militare che Usa e Nato serravano sempre più, ignorando i ripetuti avvertimenti e le proposte di trattativa da parte di Mosca, la Russia ha reagito con l’operazione militare che ha distrutto in Ucraina oltre 2.000 strutture militari realizzate e controllate in realtà non dai governanti di Kiev ma dai comandi Usa.Nato. L’articolo che tre anni fa riportava il piano  della Rand Corporation terminava con queste parole: «Le opzioni previste dal piano sono in realtà solo varianti della stessa strategia di guerra, il cui prezzo in termini di sacrifici e rischi viene pagato da tutti noi». Lo stiamo pagando ora noi popoli europei, e lo pagheremo sempre più caro, se continueremo ad essere pedine sacrificabili nella strategia Usa-Nato.

Manlio Dinucci