Introductory Text by Paul Larudee. “Please Don’t Say Genocide”
Tsk, tsk. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, more than half children, have died in Gaza, but only 41,000 are counted by name as having been killed. That is because the rest have died of passive causes: starvation, disease, thirst, as well as killed without having been counted. Never mind that the infants, pregnant mothers, school children, and all who died passively did so as a matter of deliberate Israeli policy to make them die (sometimes also called killing or murder).
But don’t call it genocide. That would be antisemitic. That’s why it’s never mentioned by Democratic or Republican candidates for election. It’s not an issue. It won’t get you elected. Only the indomitable and courageous Jill Stein uses it. It’s why you will never hear the word in the mainstream media.
Genocide, genocide, genocide, genocide. There, I said it. And yes, it’s Israel committing genocide, and the Israeli public supporting genocide. And the US government participating as a full partner in genocide. But you can’t say genocide. It’s antisemitic. Saying genocide can get you banned by the social media censorship police. And beaten by municipal police at campus demonstrations against…what? Genocide, of course.
Actually, Jonathan Cook says it better than I do.
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How the War on Gaza Exposed Israeli and Western Fascism
By Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, September 13, 2024
Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.
The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – and the less coverage Gaza receives.
The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.
This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.
We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.
After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.
And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.
No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.
The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.
Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.
In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.
Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politicianTony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”
According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.
A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does,but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.
Pulling Punches
The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.
Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.
Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.
Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.
Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.
But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.
What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.
Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.
Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.
What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.
Campaign of Intimidation
The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.
The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.
Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.
What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.
The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.
Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.
This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.
No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.
The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.
Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuouslyover the past year.
Allowable Thought
The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.
The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.
The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.
Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.
That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.
Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.
Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.
The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.
Pressing the Button
What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.
It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.
The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court. Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahudenounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.
Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.
Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.
One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.
In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.
Another clip from the Israeli English podcast named ‘Two Nice Jewish Boys’ speaking about the Rape in Sde Teiman.
“Let's say some prisoner guards, soldiers, took a big, sharp, you know, like…
They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people:
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”
Relentless Depravity
It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.
The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.
It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.
After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.
In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.
One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.
Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.
None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.
After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.
The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.
Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”
‘Heroic Soldiers’
This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.
What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.
In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.
Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.
He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.
Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.
Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.
In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.
There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.
Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.
Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguing that those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.
It was hard not to conclude that he meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.
Inner Fascist
Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.
His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.
Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.
Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.
Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.
His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.
The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.
The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.
Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.
Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.
The Genocide Party
That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.
On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.
7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.
Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.
The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.
The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.
Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.
All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.
All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.
7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.
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Featured image: Palestinian families walk through destroyed neighbourhoods in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 as the temporary truce between Hamas and the Israeli army takes effect (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)
No major western leader is ever again going to be able to speak about human rights or ethical values, without attracting howls of derision. They are turning on their own people in order to prevent protest at a genocide they actively support.
Keir Starmer stepped up the pressure on opponents of Zionist genocide on Thursday with the arrest of journalist Sarah Wilkinson and the charging of activist Richard Barnard, both under the draconian Section 12 of the Terrorism Act which carries a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.
The UK MSM has of course ignored these, but is universally carrying outrage at the conviction of two Hong Kong activists for sedition, which carries a maximum sentence of … 2 years.
But they tell us it is China and not the UK which is the authoritarian dictatorship.
(To be plain, I do view the Hong Kong convictions as also an unwarranted interference with free speech. I merely point out the incredible hypocrisy of the British Establishment and far worse laws here).
Richard Barnard has been charged and will face trial, apparently related to public speeches supporting the Palestinian right to armed resistance.
Sarah Wilkinson was released on bail after about 14 hours. Like the recent arrest and bailing of Richard Medhurst, the arrest and bailing is a device to chill her reporting and activism.
The harassment of dissident journalists at ports, using the extensive powers of the Terrorism Act for questioning and confiscation of communications equipment, has become routine. I myself suffered detention, interrogation and confiscation of equipment for “terrorism” last October.
But the Sarah Wilkinson case is an escalation, in that this is a raid on a journalist whose home was invaded by 16 policemen at 7.30am, while she was arrested and taken to the police station as her home was comprehensively turned over, presumably looking for gunmen under the bed.
More details of the raid have come out which are scarcely believable. Armed counter-terrorism police wearing balaclavas were used against a peaceful, female journalist. She was manhandled and physically hurt. The ashes in her mother’s funerary urn were desecrated in a “search”. And Sarah’s bail conditions include that she may not use a computer or mobile telephone.
It is a fascist government that sends 16 police to bust a peaceful journalist at home at 7.30am.
Like the stopping of Richard Medhurst’s plane on the tarmac by police vehicles and his being dragged from the plane (which had just landed and was en route to the gate anyway) this is an authoritarian theatre of intimidation, a Nazi stamping of the violence of the state.
Richard Barnard is a co-founder of the brilliant Palestine Action, which has done so much to disrupt the Israeli arms industry in the UK as it continues to send vital equipment to carry out the mass destruction of civilians in Gaza.
BREAKING: After a targeted campaign by the zionist lobby, Palestine Action's co-founder Richard Barnard is facing three charges for two speeches.
He is accused of supporting a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act and encouraging 'criminal activity'. pic.twitter.com/cWq0qwk15v
Richard has been charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act over two speeches he made supporting the Palestinian resistance.
I have of course said this before, but it bears repeating:
Palestine has the legitimate right of self-defence against the illegal occupation.
The occupying power Israel has no right of self-defence. That is the plain position in international law.
Yet in the UK, it is legal to offer full-throated support to Israel’s genocide and to wish that all Palestinians are exterminated.
IDF participants in genocide happily move between Israel and the UK with no legal consequences.
Yet it is illegal to support certain Palestinian organisations when engaged in legal acts of armed resistance.
The state’s actions against activists have been ramped up – as I predicted – since Starmer came to power.
Five young activists in Glasgow were ten days ago given sentences ranging from 12 months to 24 months in prison for direct action against Thales weapons plant in Govan, which makes parts for Israel’s Watchkeeper drones, widely used against civilians in Gaza.
The sentences from Sheriff Judge McCormick were savage – far higher than would normally be given on the specified charges, which were of breach of the peace, vandalism, disorderly conduct and acting in an abusive manner.
These normally would attract at most a suspended sentence on a first offence. McCormick also ignored the Scottish government guidelines not to give custodial sentences of 24 months or less but to seek alternatives.
More tellingly, McCormick completely ignored the elephant in the room: the genocide in Gaza, which Thales are supplying.
(The fact the action occurred before the genocide should be properly viewed as a commendable act of prescience.)
The Zionist Starmerite Establishment were quick to crow over the jailing – notably Luke Akehurst and John Woodcock (who is laughably called Lord Walney nowadays and is the Government Adviser on political violence) who said “Activists considering breaking the law to get their way need to see there will be consequences”.
This follows similarly harsh sentencing of climate change activists, including those who merely took part in Zoom calls discussing direct action.
The authoritarian reaction of the threatened Zionist ruling class is a worldwide phenomenon. Redoubtable Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis has been ludicrously charged under hate speech laws for retweeting mainstream pro-Palestinian tweets.
American activist Professor Danny Shaw was turned over by the FBI on return to the USA following a trip which included speaking on a panel alongside me at the Palestine International Film Festival.
Also in the United States my friend Scott Ritter has been raided by the FBI and all his electronics and other materials confiscated.
I have spoken to Danny Shaw and to Richard Medhurst. In all of these arrests and detentions, including my own, the emphasis has been on confiscating electronics and on questioning focusing very strongly on contacts, meetings and sources of finance.
The Five Eyes intelligence services are plainly building up Venn diagrams of the democratic opposition to Zionism and the neoliberal project. It is notable that many of those recently arrested over Palestine – including Mary Kostakidis, Richard Medhurst, Scott Ritter and myself – were active in the campaign to free Julian Assange.
I have always maintained that Keir Starmer’s record shows that he will be an even bigger danger to civil liberties than the Tories. It is worth noting that all of the Tory recent draconian legislation – The Public Order Act, The National Security Act and even the Rwanda Act – was not opposed or was supported by Starmer as the pretend “Leader of the Opposition”.
Starmer and Cooper are continuing the Tory policy of challenging a High Court ruling won by Liberty, that Suella Braverman acted illegally in tabling secondary legislation lowering the threshold to ban a demonstration on grounds of inconvenience to the public.
The forthcoming Online Safety Act will be truly chilling, including making it illegal to publish what the government deems misinformation.
Starmer has always been MI5-controlled. The fact that, while a Tory government was in power, the Crown Prosecution Service destroyed all the key documentation revealing Starmer’s involvement in the Assange, Savile and Janner cases (the last being far more important than generally appreciated), shows the extent to which Starmer is a protected Deep State asset.
If we are to survive this descent onto fascism as a society, we need to be prepared to dissent now, and each of us needs to be prepared to go to jail if necessary.
A last word to Craig Mokhiber, the senior UN international lawyer who resigned in protest at UN pusillanimity in face of genocide:
A dark evil has descended over the West. As the genocide in Palestine continues, the US, UK, Germany & other Western governments, instead of cracking down on those committing, aiding and inciting the genocide, are cracking down on those opposing the genocide. Human rights…
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Featured image: U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer upon his official appointment by the king in May. (Simon Dawson/ No 10 Downing Street, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He hosts the podcast ‘Active Measures’ with Alex Rubinstein. He has contributed to the GrayZone and Mint Press News and he also has a substack at kitklarenberg.com. His work exposing state crimes against democracy has made him an honoree for the 2022 Indy Media Awards.
In the September 13th edition of Global Research News Hour, Klarenberg describes to host Michael Welch the incredible violation of his rights directed to him by Anti-terrorism officers at Luton airport in London, England in May of 2023.
Global Research: A year ago, they took you off the plane and really fielded you aggressively. I wonder if you could talk about or introduce our listeners to that subject of being a target of this collective, and what happened to you.
Kit Klarenberg: Well, yeah, that was May 2023. So I mean, just, I mean, there’s a bit of background. I mean, I’ve lived in Serbia for a number of years.
I got trapped here during the pandemic, and it was a good place to get trapped because they didn’t lock down and they didn’t have all these insane mandates. But anyway, the point is, yes, I’ve called Serbia home for a number of years. I flew back to the UK to visit a relative who was, from my perspective, at least, like at that time, on their deathbed, and I thought that I would never see them again.
I had reservations about going because the previous summer, due to my reporting on Paul Mason’s leaked emails, I had a British detective email me inviting me to an interview in London to discuss charges under the, quote unquote, computer misuse act, i.e. reporting on leaked information in the public interest. And so I was, to say the least, ever so slightly worried. Now, when I landed in Luton, one of the world’s worst airports by some considerable margin, there was a team of armed counter-terror officers waiting for me on the tarmac.
They escorted me into the airport, and I was given the option of submitting to a six-hour long interview in which I would not have the right to silence. I would have to answer every question put to me, and I would have to hand over the PINs and passcodes to my digital devices, or face arrest and a prison sentence of up to six months for non-compliance.
GR: How many were there?
KK: There were six of them waiting for me, and there were more in the terminal waiting for me.
They’d done their homework in terms of digging into my background and my reporting. I proceeded to be interrogated very intensively for six solid hours as someone who has ADHD, being stuck in a windowless, airless, extremely hot room without access to any form of contact with the outside world, without food, without water.
GR: Without access to a lawyer.
KK: Yeah, that was about as much fun as you can imagine. Now, I was asked a wide variety of questions about my political beliefs, why I write, think, and say the things that I do, but also, yes, specific questions about my reporting, and also just completely insane queries about my relationship, or indeed Grayzone’s relationship, with the FSB, which is to say Russia’s federal security service. Of course, these were ludicrous, and I almost laughingly dismissed them, I mean, as the rubbish that they were, and then I’m asked, well, why are you responding so strongly? Look, it never, it just went on, it went on forever, and I think that what’s really interesting, and this is a point I’ve made on Twitter and it does bear endlessly repeating, that my, me getting stopped like this, it created an enormous amount of bad publicity for the British state.
There were mainstream figures, including people, to their credit, with whom I’d had crossed words with in the past, who were speaking up about this and condemning it and saying it was wrong. I, there, I was invited onto mainstream news networks in the US to, and other countries, to talk about what happened to me. There was, there were celebrities tweeting about, about what, about my detention.
This, I thought that this might be some deterrent to the British state doing this to other independent journalists. Since me, they’ve gone after Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who blew the whistle on CIA and MI6 complicity and torture in that country. They’ve gone after Richie Medhurst, who is an independent journalist, mainly reporting on Gaza.
He was, like myself, had a team of officers waiting for him when he flew into Heathrow. He was, he was, he was outright arrested and thrown in a cell for 24 hours as a result of this, and he remains on bail and must present himself back in the UK in three months time. They’ve gone after Sarah Wilkinson, another independent journalist covering Palestine.
This is like some, some meek, mild, I mean, well, maybe not meek and mild in terms of her reporting, but like, she is just a very sweet middle-aged woman who had a team of a dozen balaclavid counter-terror officials kick in her door, arrest her, and she was initially released from this with bail conditions that stated that she couldn’t use a laptop, a phone, or the internet. I mean, quite how she was expected to do any work or function as a human being with these restrictions isn’t clear. Thankfully, by the grace of God, they have been undone, and she’s back covering the genocide in Gaza.
You know, the British authorities, it seems at this point, are drunk with power and completely unconcerned about the negative publicity arising from their heavy-handed treatment. To say the least, I am unenthused about returning to the UK ever again. You know, if needs must, I might consider it, but for the time being, I’m very happy in Serbia, where I might add as well, for all of the the brickbats which are hurled at this country, and it’s people who I consider to be, you know, fundamentally decent, to put it mildly, there was national outcry here when I got stopped.
There was a very prominent TV show run, which is, I think it’s the most watched news show in the country, and when the host, who’s regarded as a bit of a national treasure, his name is Marij, found out about this, he was like, this is an absolute disgrace, and the world must know about it, and he like pretty much demanded that I come on to talk about what had happened to me, and so it’s like, and I had political parties and press organizations here talk up in my favour. Now, I think that’s a very, it is a huge disparity with the British response, where the National Union of Journalists initially issued a statement in solidarity with me, but then deleted it due to backlash. There were a number of mainstream figures who did justify what happened to me, and claimed that it was, yes, legitimate and right that it was done.
And so, yeah, it’s the Britain I grew up in, what prided itself on being, you know, a land of freedom, and in the birthplace of liberal democracy. We are very far from that right now.
GR: Is there in some sense, is it deliberate to get the media on board so that anybody who’s thinking about putting out, you know, inconvenient messaging or whatever, this is what you’re up against, okay? And also, the fact that maybe they’re trying to change the way media is reporting on this stuff. Well, what do you think about that?
KK: Yeah, sure.
I mean, I do think that the British media in general is extraordinarily bad, and co-opted. But yeah, I do think that there is a sense of intimidation. There is a belief that this will create a chilling effect.
I would like to think that this is wrongheaded and erroneous, because I think a large number of people, including people who would otherwise be very quiet, passive, complacent liberals, have had enough of all of this. You know, I mean, Europe is collapsing economically. Its political system is producing parties and candidates who are completely indistinguishable from one another.
People want something different, and they also can see very plainly the repression and abuse and brutality that’s being meted out to anyone who dares deviate from the state line. I mean, you know, you look at Germany, where there are videos of armoured riot police beating young girls because they are walking around with Palestine flags. People are being prosecuted in that country and others for Palestine solidarity, for exercising their basic free speech, freedom of assembly rights, you know, the very hard-fought and hard-won freedoms.
And so I think that actually, rather than deterring people, it is radicalizing people further, because they can actually see the systems in which they’ve been living and not what they’ve been told they are. They are considerably more repressive than they’ve been led to believe. And yeah, people are looking for alternatives.
A feel-good story out of the last UK election in July was the fact that several completely independent candidates, who didn’t have any real presence in the mainstream and had no money, got elected to parliament on explicit Palestine solidarity platforms. So, you know, it’s usually right when repressive power structures are on the brink of collapse that they become their most repressive. It is a shame.
We have to live through that period of it. But the long-term view is a lot brighter than it might seem now, I like to think anyway.
Former US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland confirmed that the US, UK, and other Western allies advised Ukraine to reject the 2022 Istanbul peace talks deal with Russia.
The agreement would have limited Ukraine’s military capabilities while leaving Russia unrestrained.
The deal collapsed after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv, encouraging President Zelensky to continue fighting.
Russian President Putin recently reiterated that the failure of the talks was due to Western elites’ desire to inflict a strategic defeat.
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Sixty percent of young people who were hospitalized with myocarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine still showed signs of myocardial injury roughly six months after getting the shot, according to a new peer-reviewed study funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Critics said the study authors — who published their report in The Lancet on Sept. 6 — downplayed the seriousness of the study’s findings. They also noted that some authors had ties to the government and Big Pharma that may have influenced the research.
The study authors, led by Dr. Supriya S. Jain, a pediatric cardiologist and researcher at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, New York, analyzed health outcome data and biomarkers from 333 patients ages 5-30, from 38 U.S. hospitals, who were diagnosed with COVID-19 mRNA vaccine-induced myocarditis.
Gadolinium is a metal used to help doctors see abnormal tissues in MRI scans with more detail, according to Drugwatch. The presence of LGE is often associated with worse outcomes, such as a higher risk of heart failure or arrhythmias, according to Trial Site News in its coverage of the study.
The authors followed up with 307 of the 333 patients by analyzing their health data collected from April 2021 to November 2022. The time between vaccination and follow-up varied, with a median of 178 days.
The results revealed that LGE persisted in the cardiac MRIs of 60% of the patients at the follow-up. Jain and her co-authors called these results “reassuring,” noting that there had not been any reported cardiac-related deaths or heart transplants at the time of writing their report. They recommended “continued clinical surveillance and long-term studies.”
Daniel O’Conner of Trial Site News criticized the FDA as the study’s funder. “The FDA is not keeping up with its tradition of ‘patient safety first,’” he told The Defender, adding:
“The procedures that were used and the outcomes that were identified are associated with a higher probability of more severe conditions.
“The FDA [study authors] rightly called for ongoing surveillance — but they don’t have the urgency they should, given the vulnerabilities of the population.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker agreed, telling The Defender he was “disgusted” by the study authors’ downplaying of cardiac harm caused by the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
“It’s telling that 60% of the myocarditis patients were still showing significant inflammation and damage,” he said. “You get vaccinated, get myocarditis and then have a ticking time bomb in your chest for the rest of your life.”
Trial Site News — which aims to “drive more interest and awareness in clinical research” — made a similar point. “We here at TrialSite have concerns about the incidence, commonality of LGE and its association with propensity for more severe conditions if not now into the future.”
Trial Site News also said it was concerned about the many vaccine-induced myocarditis cases that aren’t presenting in the hospital and which thus weren’t included in the study. “What happens as they age?”
“I don’t feel that any incidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis is reassuring,” Ray told The Defender. “Additionally, we have all witnessed several anecdotal or personal reports of individuals who died from vaccine-induced cardiac issues over the past four years.”
Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that as a cardiologist, he was “greatly concerned” that COVID-19 vaccine heart damage in the majority of young people studied hadn’t resolved at the time of follow-up.
“The investigators should extend their efforts and measure spike protein or its antibodies in the blood and study strategies to eliminate mRNA and spike protein from the body,” McCullough said. “This is the best hope of reducing the damage done by COVID-19 vaccination.”
Is Vaccine-induced Myocarditis Less Serious Than Myocarditis Caused by COVID Virus?
In their study, Jain and her co-authors also compared the results from the vaccine-inducted myocarditis patients with health data from 100 children with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), a “rare but serious condition associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in which different body parts become inflamed, including the heart,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The authors explained:
“To gain a better perspective of the severity of cardiac involvement and myocardial injury in myocarditis associated with the COVID-19 vaccine in the pediatric population, we compared it with MIS-C, a serious complication of COVID-19 with common cardiac dysfunction.”
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., a senior research scientist with CHD, told The Defender the authors’ choice was “scientifically perplexing.”
“Why compare C-VAM [COVID-19 vaccine-associated myocarditis] to MIS-C?” he asked. “Wouldn’t comparing vaccine-induced myocarditis to virus-induced myocarditis be an even better perspective?”
The health data reported in the study show what a bad comparison the two make, he said:
“Table 1’s C-VAM vs. MIS-C p-value shows the children and adults who make up the two cohorts are radically different in age, weight, sex and race.
“And because they are different diseases, 5 of 8 presenting symptoms are different, 7 of 11 biomarkers are different, 9 of 10 hospital course metrics are different, both echocardiography metrics are different, 3 of the 5 left ventricular dysfunction metrics are different, and 5 of the 14 cardiac magnetic resonance metrics are different.”
Jablonowski speculated that the authors chose MIS-C as a comparator so they could compare vaccine-inducted myocarditis to “something worse.”
The authors concluded that cardiac dysfunction was “less common” in patients with vaccine-induced myocarditis than in patients with MIS-C.
They also said that the “initial clinical course” of myocarditis among those with vaccine-induced myocarditis was “more likely to be mild.”
Researchers Use Dismissive Words for Vaccine-induced Myocarditis
Jablonowski said the study authors used language to do “a lot of narrative-building” around vaccine-induced myocarditis and its symptoms, “namely that it’s ‘mild,’ ‘rare,’ ‘transient’ and ‘worth the risk.’”
They used the word “mild” no less than 24 times, almost always when describing vaccine-induced myocarditis, while the word “serious” appeared only once — and as a descriptor of MIS-C.
McCullough said, “I disagree with the authors that this is a ‘mild condition,’ as Takada et al. recently reported a 9.6% mortality rate in young persons with vaccine myopericarditis. Even small areas of damage invisible to cardiac MRI could put vaccine recipients at risk for a future cardiac arrest.”
Hooker said, “The use of the terms ‘mild’ and ‘rare’ have no place in this type of discourse. However, these researchers ‘pepper’ that type of wrong-headed and dismissive verbiage throughout the paper while genuflecting to the vaccine gods about how the clot shot is a ‘cornerstone in the mitigation of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.’”
Critics Call Out Conflicts of Interest
More than 60 researchers are listed as co-authors with Jain.
Ray noted that some of the co-authors came from the same universities or research labs involved with Pfizer-BioNTech’s clinical trials for its COVID-19 vaccine in children.
“For instance,” she said, “the report states that co-author Alexandra B. Yonts’ institution received funds for conducting Phase 3 clinical trials for the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
The study numbers listed — C4591007 and C4591048 — were the clinical trials for emergency use authorization for subsequent doses (four doses total) of the COVID-19 shot for children 6 months to 4 years old, Ray said.
Jablonowski pointed out that the study’s second author, Steven A. Anderson, Ph.D., directs the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance yet declared “no competing interests.”
“It is nonsensical,” he said, “to declare no competing interests while studying adverse reactions to a product that your employing agency approves for everyone 6 months and older, including during pregnancy.”
The Defender reached out to Jain for comment but did not receive a response by our deadline.
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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
Featured image is from CHD
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Alcohol consumption, even at low levels, can negatively impact brain structure, reducing overall brain volume and affecting gray and white matter integrity
Ethanol in alcoholic drinks is converted to acetaldehyde, a toxic substance that damages cells indiscriminately, leading to various health issues including increased cancer risk
Alcohol disrupts gut health by killing beneficial bacteria, potentially causing leaky gut syndrome and triggering inflammatory responses that affect your liver and brain
Regular alcohol consumption can alter hormonal balance, increasing estrogen levels and potentially raising cancer risk, especially for breast cancer
While N-acetylcysteine (NAC) supplementation may help mitigate some harmful effects of alcohol, abstaining completely is the safest option for optimal health
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In the Everyday Wellness podcast above, Brooke Scheller, a doctor of Clinical Nutrition, founder of Functional Sobriety (a nutrition-based program for alcohol reduction) and author of “How to Eat to Change How You Drink,” discusses the impact of alcohol on your brain and body. I recently interviewed Brooke and will have her interview up in the next few weeks.
While I don’t recommend drinking alcohol, historically humans have been consuming it for thousands of years, including for recreational and medicinal purposes. The first instance of alcohol distillation can be traced back to China in the 1st century,1 while alcohol has served various purposes throughout history:
1. Nutritional — Some cultures believed, and some still do, that alcohol provides valuable calories, though they’re actually “empty calories.”
2. Medicinal — Alcohol’s ability to kill bacteria made it useful for medical purposes. However, it also destroys beneficial gut bacteria, potentially leading to issues like leaky gut syndrome.
2. Recreational — The primary reason for alcohol consumption has been to alter one’s mental state. Many people seek the feeling of intoxication, despite the subsequent negative effects such as decreased happiness, motivation and increased stress.
Are Small Amounts of Alcohol Bad for Your Brain?
It’s often suggested that while heavy alcohol consumption is harmful, small or moderate amounts may provide some benefits. However, evidence suggests that alcohol consumption, even at low levels, may carry more risks than benefits for overall health.
According to a study from the UK Biobank that examined brain scans of 36,678 middle-aged and older adults,2 even just one to two alcoholic drinks per day is associated with negative changes in brain structure, including reductions in overall brain volume, gray matter and white matter integrity.
The brain consists of two main types of tissue: gray matter and white matter. Gray matter comprises neuron cell bodies, which contain the cells’ genetic material. White matter, on the other hand, is made up of axons – long fibers extending from neurons. These axons are coated with a fatty substance called myelin, giving white matter its characteristic appearance.
This myelin sheath enables rapid communication between nerve cells, facilitating efficient information transfer throughout the brain.
The study demonstrates that the negative effects on brain structure are not limited to heavy drinkers but are observable even at low levels of alcohol intake. As consumption increases, so does the severity of these structural changes. This research provides compelling evidence that there may be no “safe” level of alcohol consumption when it comes to brain health.
A review published in Frontiers in Neuroscience also addressed the complex interplay between alcohol consumption and cognitive decline, noting that chronic alcohol abuse leads to “changes in neuronal structure caused by complex neuroadaptations in the brain.”3
Alcohol Is Converted Into the Poison Acetaldehyde
Ethanol, the type of alcohol in drinks, is both water-soluble and fat-soluble. This allows it to easily pass into all cells and tissues of your body. When ingested, ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde, which is a well-known poison that indiscriminately damages and kills cells. Your body then converts acetaldehyde to acetate, which can be used as fuel. However, this process is metabolically costly and provides no real nutritive value.
When you consume alcohol, it enters your stomach, then your liver starts converting the ethanol to acetaldehyde and then to acetate. Some of these byproducts reach your brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier (BBB).
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a protective mechanism that prevents most substances from entering the brain. However, alcohol is an exception due to its unique property of being both water- and fat-soluble. This characteristic allows alcohol to easily penetrate the BBB and enter the brain tissue.
Once inside, alcohol interacts with and affects the brain’s internal environment, which is primarily composed of two major cell types: neurons (nerve cells) and glial cells (found between neurons). The presence of alcohol in the brain disrupts normal neural circuit function, leading to the various effects associated with intoxication.
Among alcohol’s effects is suppression of activity in the prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in impulse control and decision-making. As alcohol suppresses prefrontal cortex activity, people become more impulsive and less inhibited.
What’s less known, however, is that alcohol-induced changes in neural circuits can persist long term, even if you don’t drink heavily. Drinking patterns like having one or two drinks per night or drinking only on weekends, for instance, can lead to changes in the brain’s circuitry for habitual and impulsive behavior. These changes can continue even when not drinking, potentially making people more impulsive in their daily lives.
Fortunately, these changes are not permanent in most cases. A period of abstinence, typically ranging from two to six months, can allow these neural circuits to return to their normal state. The exception is in cases of chronic, heavy alcohol consumption over many years, where the changes may be more persistent.
It’s also important to distinguish between being “blackout drunk” and passing out. During a blackout, an individual may still be active and conscious, but their hippocampus — a brain region crucial for memory formation — is temporarily impaired. This results in an inability to form new memories, leading to no recollection of events the following day, despite the person having been awake and functional during that time.
Alcohol Damages Your Gut Health
Alcohol negatively affects your gut microbiome and gut-liver-brain axis, a bidirectional communication network that links these three crucial systems in your body. Alcohol’s antimicrobial properties, which make it effective for sterilization, also indiscriminately kill beneficial gut bacteria.
For instance, alcohol consumption may decrease Akkermansia muciniphila, a beneficial bacterial species naturally found in the human gut.4 This, in turn, is associated with “dysregulation of microbial metabolite production, impaired intestinal permeability, induction of chronic inflammation, and production of cytokines.”5
The metabolism of alcohol in your liver also triggers a proinflammatory response, releasing cytokines such as IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha. This inflammatory reaction, combined with the disruption of gut bacteria, can lead to a condition known as “leaky gut.” In this state, harmful bacteria from partially digested food can escape your gut and enter your bloodstream.
The simultaneous occurrence of good bacteria die-off and bad bacteria infiltration creates a “two-hit” model, where the combined effects are more severe than each issue individually. These gut and liver disturbances have far-reaching consequences, Huberman explains, particularly on your brain.
Through neuroimmune signaling, inflammatory molecules can cross your blood-brain barrier, disrupting neural circuits that regulate alcohol consumption. Paradoxically, this disruption often results in increased alcohol intake, creating a vicious cycle of gut microbiome disruption, liver inflammation and altered brain function.
This self-perpetuating process explains why regular drinkers, even those who don’t consume large quantities, may find themselves caught in a pattern of increasing alcohol consumption and worsening systemic inflammation.6
Meanwhile, pathogenic oxygen-tolerant bacteria secrete a very virulent form of endotoxin, also known as lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which can cause inflammation if they translocate across the compromised gut barrier into the systemic circulation.
Even one episode of binge drinking results in increased endotoxin levels, “likely due to translocation of gut bacterial products and disturbs innate immune responses that can contribute to the deleterious effects of binge drinking,” researchers wrote in PLOS One.7
A study published in Scientific Reports also found that excessive drinkers had an increase in levels of LPS,8 while, among alcohol-dependent adults, avoiding alcohol for 19 days led to significant reductions in gut permeability.9
Even Light Drinkers May be at Risk of Premature Death
A systematic review and meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies involving more than 4.8 million people revealed that drinking less than two drinks a day is not associated with reductions in risk of all-cause mortality.10 Further, drinking more than this may significantly shorten life expectancy.
The study’s lead author, Tim Stockwell, a scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, told the Daily Mail that drinking about two drinks per week over your lifetime may cut your life short by three to six days. Drinking seven drinks a week may shave 2.5 months off life expectancy, while consuming about 35 drinks per week may reduce lifespan by about two years.11
One reason for this detrimental effect could be alcohol’s link to cortisol. Regular alcohol consumption, even at moderate levels, can lead to changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
This alteration in the HPA axis can result in higher baseline cortisol levels when not drinking. In other words, individuals who drink regularly may experience elevated levels of cortisol, often referred to as the “stress hormone,” even during periods when they are not consuming alcohol. This persistent increase in baseline cortisol can have various negative impacts on overall health and well-being.
This means that regular drinkers may actually feel more stressed and anxious when they’re not consuming alcohol. Further, while cortisol plays a vital role in your health, it can lead to severe health issues like muscle breakdown, inflammation and impaired immune function when chronically elevated, which is why keeping your levels in check is so important.
Alcohol Increases Estrogen Levels and Cancer Risk
Drinking alcohol affects your hormones, particularly the balance between testosterone and estrogen. Alcohol tends to increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen,12 which can have various negative effects in both men and women. Estrogens are one of the primary factors contributing to increasing your cancer risk.
Alcohol also increases cancer risk via acetaldehyde toxicity, which can cause DNA damage, inflammation, leaky gut and weakened immune function. Drinking alcohol also disrupts sleep, which means you’re not getting a restorative night’s sleep when you drink. Further, acetaldehyde toxicity can alter DNA methylation and gene expression, which raises your cancer risk as well.
How to Mitigate Some of Alcohol’s Harmful Effects
I don’t recommend drinking alcohol, and the best way to avoid its harmful effects is to simply not drink it. If you do plan to have an alcoholic beverage, however, N-acetylcysteine (NAC) supplementation can be used as a preventive measure when taken beforehand. NAC is a derivative of the amino acid cysteine, which not only boosts glutathione levels but also helps mitigate acetaldehyde toxicity, a primary cause of hangover symptoms.
Taking at least 200 milligrams of NAC about 30 minutes before drinking may help reduce alcohol’s toxic effects. The efficacy of NAC is thought to be enhanced when combined with vitamin B1 (thiamine). Additionally, vitamin B6 may help alleviate hangover symptoms.
Since alcohol consumption depletes B vitamins, which are necessary for alcohol elimination from your body, taking a B vitamin supplement before and after drinking can be beneficial. However, it’s crucial to note that this approach does not protect against alcohol poisoning or other serious risks associated with excessive drinking.
Therefore, it’s essential to consume alcohol responsibly and in moderation, regardless of any preventive measures taken. For optimal health, however, consider avoiding alcohol completely and instead exploring alternative methods for stress reduction and social interaction that don’t involve drinking.
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Former US State Department official Victoria Nuland has acknowledged that the US discouraged Ukraine from signing a peace deal with Russia during the early days of the Russian invasion.
Zygar also mentioned that David Arakhamia, a Ukrainian official who led negotiations with Russia at a meeting in Istanbul in March 2022, acknowledged last year that a deal was on the table at the time and that Russia’s main demand was for Ukrainian neutrality.
Wow! Nuland basically admits that Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which was close to being finalized in spring 2022, “fell apart” because US, UK & other Western governments “advised” Zelensky government that it was not “good deal” even though even members of Ukrainian delegation… pic.twitter.com/HPsrpOzQNf
Nuland claimed the US took a hands-off approach to the negotiations when they first started and said it wasn’t until “relatively late in the game” that the Ukrainians started seeking the advice of the US and its allies.
“The Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going, and it became clear to us, clear to us and the Brits, clear to others, that Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on. And it included limits on the precise kinds of weapons systems that Ukraine could have after the deal,” Nuland said.
She said the deal would make Ukraine “neutered” as a military force and said there were no similar constraints on the Russian military.
“People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal, and it was at that point that it fell apart,” Nuland said.
Boris Johnson traveled to Ukraine on April 9, 2022, and, according to Ukrainska Pravda, told Zelensky that even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, the “collective West” was not. Arakhamia confirmed this account in November 2023, saying that when the negotiators returned from Istanbul, Johnson visited Ukraine and “said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.”
On April 20, 2022, around the time the talks broke down, then-Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey thought a deal could be reached following the Istanbul talks, but then it got the impression that some NATO members wanted to prolong the war to weaken Russia.
“After the talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long … But, following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that… there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine,” Cavusoglu said.
On April 25, 2022, after visiting Kyiv, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared that one of the US’s goals in the war was to see a “weakened” Russia.
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BlackRock is one of the most well-known investment and asset management companies in the world, based in New York City. Founded in 1988, it has quickly expanded worldwide, with a strong presence in the U.S., Asia, Brazil, and the Middle East.
Along with State Street and Vanguard, it is believed to control most global corporations through various investments.
So, what does BlackRock’s ownership structure look like? In this article, we examine BlackRock’s major stakeholders and the number of BLK shares they own.
Let’s explore who owns the most BlackRock stock in 2024.
BlackRock Shares Analysis: Unique Investment Approach and Shareholder Dynamics
As of April 30, 2024, the company had 148,599,981 shares outstanding, considerably less than its competitors, such as Bank of America, Invesco, or UBS.
At the time of writing, its stock was trading at $718.13 per share. The company had a market capitalization of about $116.07 billion.
On May 15, Blackrock declared a quarterly cash dividend of $5.10 per share of common stock, payable on June 24, 2024, to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 7, 2024.
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As of June 28, 2024, BlackRock (BLK) stock appreciated by 5,022.16%, according to data from TradingView.
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Note that past performance is not indicative of future results.
But who are the stakeholders of BlackRock?
The shareholders are divided into Investor A, Investor B, Investor C, Institutional, and Class R shares. The type of ownership, sales charge, management fees, and other operating expenses can vary depending on the type of share purchased.
BlackRock shareholders are also classified into individual and institutional shareholders.
BlackRock has 2,824 institutional owners and shareholders that have filed 13D/G or 13F forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). These institutions hold a total of 136,830,864 shares, according to the data compiled by Fintel.io as of June 28, 2024.
Who Owns BlackRock?
Top 5 Largest Institutional BlackRock Shareholders
Institutional investors are the largest owners of Blackrock shares. Amongst BlackRock’s major shareholders are investment and asset management companies like Vanguard Group and State Street Global Advisors, which have some of the largest stakes.
BlackRock has a higher percentage of institutional shareholders than other similar investment companies. Currently, institutional investors hold 51.78% of the company’s stock.
Temasek Holdings, owned by the Government of Singapore, possesses a 3.44% stake in BlackRock. This equates to approximately 5,115,491 shares, valued at around $4.26 billion.
In 2023, Temasek Holdings led a $140 million funding round for Ola Electric.
According to the latest news, Temasek Holdings has recently backed a new $250 million tech fund, Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), which invests in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI.
4. Bank of America – 5,196,941 – 3.49%
Bank of America is one of the biggest BlackRock shareholders, with a 3.49% stake in Blackrock, which amounts to 5,196,941 shares valued at approximately $4.33 billion.
In contrast to other Wall Street banks, Bank of America has been avoiding job cuts until recently.
However, as the layoff trend continues, Bank of America has started a round of job cuts, following its rivals Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, which collectively cut over 10,000 roles last year.
3. State Street Global Advisors – 5,928,745 – 3.98%
State Street Global Advisors holds a 3.98% stake in BlackRock, equivalent to about 5,928,745 shares valued at approximately $4.94 billion. This stake makes State Street the third-largest BlackRock owner among institutional shareholders.
The company offers exchange-traded funds (ETFs) such as the SPDR S&P 500 Ucits ETF and the SPDR S&P 500 ESG Leaders Ucits ETF. Recently, State Street Global Advisors reduced the fees for these two funds, positioning them among the most cost-effective options for tracking the S&P 500 Index.
This decision is seen as a strategic and forward-thinking move, particularly in a market where investors are increasingly well-informed about the variety of funds and fee structures available.
2. BlackRock – 9,604,250 – 6.46%
BlackRock owns a 6.46% stake in BlackRock, totaling approximately 9,604,250 BLK shares with an estimated value of $8 billion. This amount makes BlackRock the second-largest institutional shareholder of its own company.
But what does BlackRock own besides BLK stock?
Blackrock’s investment in its BLK shares represents only a tiny fraction (0.2%) of the company’s holdings. As of Q1 2024, the top five Blackrock holdings included Microsoft (5.3%), Apple (4.2%), Nvidia (3.8%), Amazon (2.7%), and Meta Platforms (1.8%).
1. Vanguard Group – 13,182,262 – 8.87%
The Vanguard Group holds an 8.87% stake in BlackRock, equivalent to around 13,182,262 shares valued at approximately $10.9 billion.
These shares are distributed across various mutual funds and ETFs managed by Vanguard, including the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, and the Vanguard Value ETF.
Top 5 Largest Individual BlackRock Shareholders
Amongst the individual shareholders of BlackRock, the founders and long-time employees of the company hold the most shares. This was because BlackRock famously implemented a strategy of offering equity options to new employees it hired.
Although this caused friction amongst the early management, it is a practice that still holds true and attracts some of the best talent in the world.
Below, we highlight the key individuals who not only hold substantial shares in the company but have also played pivotal roles in its growth and operations.
5. Murry S. Gerber – 42,648 – 0.02%
Murry S. Gerber has been serving as BlackRock’s Lead Independent Director since 2017.
BlackRock has recently announced that Murry S. Gerber decided to not stand for re-election at the conclusion of his term in May 2024 and retire after 23 years of service to the firm and its shareholders.
Before BlackRock, Gerber held prominent positions at EQT Corporation, including Chairman, Executive Chairman, President, and CEO. His extensive leadership experience also includes a tenure as CEO of Coral Energy.
Additionally, Gerber contributes to the cultural sector as a member of the board of trustees of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
According to his latest SEC filing, Murry S. Gerber owned 42,648 shares of BlackRock as of January 16, 2024.
4. Richard Kushel – 67,107 – 0.04%
Richard Kushel holds the position of Senior Managing Director at BlackRock, where he also oversees the Portfolio Management Group.
His expansive role at BlackRock includes past leadership as the Head of Multi-Asset Strategies and Global Fixed Income. Additionally, Kushel has significantly contributed to the company’s growth in his former capacities as Chief Product Officer and head of the Strategic Product Management Group, BlackRock Investment Stewardship, and the BlackRock Investment Institute.
As of May 02, 2024, Richard Kushel owned 67,107 shares in the company.
3. Robert S. Kapito – 217,127 – 0.14%
Robert Kapito is the President and director of BlackRock. He is distinguished as one of the eight founders of the company. In his extensive leadership roles, he chairs the Global Operating Committee and is a member of the Global Executive Committee. Additionally, Kapito holds a director position at iShares.
His key responsibilities include overseeing Risk and Quality Analysis, Investment Strategies, Technology and Operations, as well as Client Business.
Robert Kapito owned 217,127 shares as of January 31, 2023. This stake makes him the third-largest individual BlackRock owner.
2. Larry Fink – 414,146 – 0.27%
Larry Fink, one of the original eight Blackrock owners and founders, currently holds the positions of CEO and Chairman and is the second-largest individual shareholder of the company.
As of February 28, 2024, he held 414,146 shares of the asset management firm.
In his 2024 annual letter to shareholders, Larry Fink shared a very personal story of his parents’ successful investments and how they “could have lived beyond 100 and comfortably afforded it.”
Their experience reminded Fink why he founded BlackRock in the first place. He said:
“Obviously, we were ambitious entrepreneurs, and we wanted to build a big, successful company. But we also wanted to help people retire like my parents did. That’s why we started an asset manager — a company that helps people invest in the capital markets — because we believed participating in those markets was going to be crucial for people who wanted to retire comfortably and financially secure.”
In an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he’s hopeful about the younger generation despite a looming retirement crisis.
1. Susan L. Wagner – 427,887 – 0.28%
Susan Wagner, celebrated as one of the original founders of BlackRock, has served in various significant roles within the company, including Head of Corporate Strategy, Chief Operating Officer, and Vice Chairwoman.
Wagner played a crucial role in expanding BlackRock’s reach into international markets such as Brazil, Asia, and the Middle East. Even after retiring, she continues to serve on BlackRock’s board.
In addition to her contributions at BlackRock, Wagner is a member of the board of trustees at Hackley School and holds positions on the boards of both Swiss Re and Apple.
As of February 22, 2024, she held 427,887 shares in BlackRock, which makes Wagner the largest individual BlackRock owner at the time of writing.
The Bottom Line
BlackRock is a highly regarded and prestigious asset management company that has made a name for itself in a relatively short time. Founded by eight people, it now has about 2,824 institutional shareholders and about $10.5 trillion in AUM.
Among those who own BlackRock shares are very large institutional shareholders, such as Vanguard Group and State Street Global Advisors, as well as the original founders and other employees.
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Rolling out of my crib before dawn today (I was in it long before the charlatans Harris and Trump began their theatrical “debate”), it being another September 11th, I wondered where Dick Cheney was.
And I was still wondering where Elmer Gantry was, having received the previous day a form message from RFK, Jr.’s faith-based engagement team leader, Rev. Wendy Silvers, that she was conducting a “pop-up” prayer service for the great Ciceronians’ debate, with Bobby Kennedy in the press room, rooting for his boy Donald. Cheney and Harris vs. Kennedy and Trump. A tag-team match perfect for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF).
I had just dreamed, or so I thought, that Cheney was out night-riding his white stallion across the Wyoming hills, long gun tight aside his saddle, cowboy hat slung back with a full moon shining on his melonic noggin, sea-shells in his ears as he grooved from side-to-side to the music of that other Kamala Harris endorser, Taylor Swift. It’s always wonderful, wonderful, oh so wonderful to get political advice from a fully-clothed warmonger and a scantily-clad diva.
In my dream I heard another voice as night rider Dick ripped off his earphones and pulled back on the reins. “Dick, Dick,” an eerie voice rang out:
‘If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range, Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride -try’ng to catch the devil’s herd Across these endless skies’ Yippee-yi-ay, yippee-yi-o, The ghost herd in the sky.
That was it, I threw my old clothes on and headed up the hill to the lake to clear my mind of such a nasty flic. Dick hadn’t changed his ways since 2001, except to embrace Democratic war making instead of Republican. Actually, that’s wrong, for as Mr. Neocon, a signer of the bloodthirsty neo-conservative document the Project for the New American Century, he always welcomed and got bipartisan support to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
There was no need for these neocons to mention the Palestinians, of course, for their slaughter was guaranteed, not only because so many neocons held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, but because of all the Israel Lobby money flowing into the pockets of Congress. As for the Russians, attacking them was as American as cherry pie, for they were always coming to get us, just as those sneaky Chinese had their eyes on seizing California.
It was still semi-dark as I walked, with just the fingertips of a rosy-fingered dawn raising its hand over East Mountain. At the lake’s edge, two men in woolen caps and parkas sat meditating facing the mist-rising lake. I wondered why. Were they seeking personal peace of mind or illumination about the ruthless ways of their government? As I walked, I talked to myself and my own ghosts, watching as I went the disappearing vapor and the sky slowly turning blue.
I remembered that September 11, 2001 was also a very blue day until the black clouds flew in and that sparkling morning turned to smoke and dust as the three World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, not airplanes.
But where was Dick Cheney that morning? Not out on the range, no siree. He was riding herd on another roundup. He had taken control of the U.S. government under a Continuity of Government (COG) declaration, as Peter Dale Scott has documented:
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government.
Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years.
James Mann has argued that COG implementation was the “hidden backdrop” to Cheney’s actions on 9/11, when he “urged President Bush to stay out of Washington,” and later removed himself to more than one “’undisclosed location’”.
Scott and authors James Mann and James Bamford further show how Cheney and his buddy Donald Rumsfeld of “unknown unknowns” fame were for a long time part of the permanent hidden national security apparatus that runs the country as presidents like Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden enter and exit the White House and are falsely held up as leading the nation. “Cheney and Rumsfeld had previously been preparing for almost two decades, as central figures in the secret agency planning for so-called Continuity of Government (COG),” writes Scott. “It was revealed in the 1980s that these plans aimed at granting a president emergency powers, uncurbed by congressional restraints, to intervene abroad, and also to detain large numbers of those who might protest such actions.”
Unlike this morning when I saw Cheney riding the range, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House.
What exactly he was doing there I will leave to the reader’s research initiative. The great researcher David Ray Griffin’s many books about the attacks of that day would be a good place to start. Let’s just say he wasn’t listening to pop music, not presidential recommender Taylor Swift anyway, for she was just eleven years old that day. She was probably dreaming of writing her political music, Phil Ochs style.
Have you ever noticed how in all the presidential debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never discussed?
It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true. It is a third rail of American politics; mention it and your goose is cooked.
Just this morning at the 23rd anniversary memorial service of September 11th in NYC, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris shook hands. (Anthony Fauci would be outraged, having said that “I don’t think people should ever shake hands again.”)
Was that handshake some sort of tacit agreement never to broach the subject of September 11th during the campaign? To suggest that both the attacks of that day and the subsequent anthrax attacks were linked inside jobs sounds so conspiratorial. That’s a voter turnoff.
Even I find accusing the U.S. government of a false flag attack conspiratorial, since that’s exactly what it is, as I wrote years ago about the linguistic mind-control used to convince Americans that they are ruled by a secret cabal of ghost writers in the sky. My words:
In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Coincidentally or not, the film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the air despite the fact that the 60th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor comparison was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used innumerable times, beginning immediately. Even George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night to allegedly use it in his diary. The examples of this comparison are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this.
Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order.
Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the good war”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of the very important The 2001Anthrax Deception. He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.” He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.” This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.” PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.” I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.” Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.” The unthinkable is unthinkable.
9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number. Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced this connection the following morning in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.” The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’” By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.
It’s getting dark now, the sun is setting and shimmering across the lake. Shadows are falling, but to quote Dylan, “it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.” I hope to dream again tonight as I rock in my crib, not about Cheney and his ilk, not about Trump or Harris and the Spectacle, but maybe just about the lovely lapping lake I listened to today, thinking of Yeats’ poem, “The Lake of Innisfree,” set in the land of my ancestors, hearing its cadence that flows like a prayer.
It is always the poets who remind us that words can be used to traumatize or transport one into a beautiful dreamer.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
But as the Elite’s global technocracy advances, with each project within it putting another technological bar in the prison cell of those it doesn’t kill, it almost invariably draws little more than powerless complaints and virtually no resistance even among those who claim to be ‘aware’.
After all, what does it matter if you do one or two things – shop at your favourite supermarket perhaps where your biometric and other personal data will be collected – because it is more convenient and cheaper, for example?
But the problem is that the prison – or, more accurately, slave camp – is being incrementally built around each one of us personally and if you are not willing to pay the price of resistance (whether this involves making a clear commitment, putting in more personal effort, more money, some inconvenience, something else or even prison time) and to work cooperatively with others to solve at least some of the personal challenges you face, then you will end up in the technocratic ‘smart city’ prison the Elite plans to have built for you by 2030. If you want a sense of the horrors that this will entail, this sanitized ‘promotional’ article unashamedly offers it: ‘Testing Tech in Paradise: Queensland’s Sunshine Coast’.
And that means that every time you merely complain (including to a politician) or opt for convenience, a cheaper price or to ‘save time’ by not doing something to prevent your data being harvested to be used against you, then you are cooperating with the Elite’s intention to kill you or imprison you permanently.
Of course, officially, there is nothing to see here, as Elite agents in governments, corporations and elsewhere go about imposing the Elite program on us while concealing it behind a barrage of propaganda.
But if you read the primary literature on this subject, issued by key program-setting organizations such as the World Economic Forum, most of the ‘absolute nonsense’ that is being uttered comes from the plethora of organizations tasked with imposing the Elite program.
Within this comprehensive program that details extensive changes to 200 areas of human life designed to culminate in those still alive ‘owning nothing and being happy’ by 2030, just one challenge we face in defending a life worth living is making our cars private and secure. This is a significant challenge if your car was built this century and it will take considerable effort to remove all of the invasive surveillance and control tech built into it which has increased enormously in recent years.
Needless to say, you do not have to remove this tech. But, if you do not, there will come a point in time when the car will respond to directives issued from outside the vehicle even while you are driving. And you will be powerless to stop it.
So, assuming that you are already resisting key components of the Elite’s technocratic program – there is little point bothering to secure your car if you aren’t doing a swag of other things as well – here is a summary of some key ways in which your car will need to be modified so that it cannot spy on you and control your movements.
At its simplest, the invasive tech in any car made this century is likely to collect identifiers such as your name, residential address and email address as well as biometrics such as your geolocation, driver’s license and financial information, which it then also sells or gives to governments on request. Some of this can be disabled by using your phone or computer to access particular websites where you can ‘deny permission’ for various ‘permissions’ assumed when you bought the vehicle. As an absolute minimum, you are certainly encouraged to do this, as illustrated by the woman in the 80-second video immediately below.
You can read more about this invasive technology and learn how many of these features can be deactivated in articles such as these:
Nevertheless, it is important to understand that there is surveillance tech in your car that cannot be ‘turned off’ by removing ‘permission’ and that the invasive tech is outside your car as well as inside it.
These ‘inside vehicle’ technologies – including an array of cameras, microphones and sensors – must be physically removed from your car and that requires someone aware of the threats and technically competent to identify and remove all offending components from your particular make and model of car. In some cases, it might be possible to disable the tech but, if this is done, it is also necessary to ensure that it cannot then be remotely reactivated.
It is like your computer, mobile phone, television, refrigerator and many other devices: If you are using an ‘ordinary one’ made this century and purchased from a standard retail outlet then it is so full of tech designed to end your freedom and invade your privacy that there is little about your life (genetic info, sex life, political beliefs, trade union membership…) the relevant Elite agents do not know and the data is stored in one or more of the vast data banks (the ‘cloud’ as they like to call it) around the world.
For two more examples of how our cars are being weaponized to spy on us and those around us (gathering enormous data which is often sold or otherwise shared) while tracking every movement we make and, in time, also limiting our range of movement, check out these articles:
And, according to Christine Anderson, a Member of the European Parliament: ‘A committee of the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) dominated by police and intelligence services is currently working unnoticed on the future mass surveillance of vehicles in real time. Position data from the [car’s] navigation system will then provide a permanent movement profile. Speed, fuel level, open windows and doors will be transmitted, as well as the number of people currently sitting in the vehicle and the IDs of all smartphones connected to the infotainment system. By linking the vehicle identification number (VIN) with the smartphone IMEI, remote access to certain functions of the on-board electronics will also be possible from the outside.’
The ‘outside car’ technologies include Automatic Licence Plate Readers positioned along roads and elsewhere while connected to registration authorities to, among other functions, confirm your car is registered before you can buy fuel.
But this technology does more than just detect mobile phone use as the article makes clear.
And there are plenty more ‘outside car’ technologies performing a range of functions that will ultimately limit your movement. For example, technology might be used to lock you out of your car or disable your car if you attempt to go beyond the limit of your geofenced confinement in your ‘15-minute city’.
Even car parks are not secure. Car parks are being electronically monitored so tightly that the minute your allowed time is up, the ‘parking inspector’ will be notified to head to your car to issue a parking fine. Of course, how long the ‘parking inspector’ remains human, as distinct from transhuman, robot or drone, is undoubtedly only a short time away. In any case, given that they will have the number plate of your vehicle already, the fine might simply be automatically deducted directly from your bank account given your personal details, including vehicle registration number, will be linked to your digital identity (and thus bank account) and adversely impact your social credit score as well. Mind you, in some contexts such as where your car has self-driving features, the ‘parking inspector’ can just order your car to drive itself to any location for impounded vehicles.
So if you use a 21st century car (and other tech products) and want freedom, privacy and to resist the rapidly advancing technocracy’s control over you, you will need to do the work yourself to identify and remove all invasive tech from your car, computer, phone, television, fridge… or pay someone you trust and who is competent to do it for you.
Whatever it costs financially, it is worth it (unless you put little value on your freedom and privacy which are rapidly vanishing and will be gone by 2030 without a monumental expansion of the number of people resisting strategically).
Another option to ensure your car is private and free of high tech restrictions is illustrated in the 30-second Tucker Carlson video immediately below.
Of course, you might hope that using some form of public transport – a bus, train, tram or even taxi or rented car – might solve your problem but the invasive tech is already virtually everywhere with surveillance (and, increasingly, facial recognition) cameras becoming ubiquitous while these and a variety of other technologies, such as geofencing, will ultimately restrict your movement, however you travel. Even where you can walk will be limited.
Defending Our Freedom, Privacy and a Life Worth Living
Of course we must do much more than make our vehicles secure. And we need vastly more people aware and taking action to resist as well. Otherwise those of us resisting will still be swept up by the transhuman and technocratic police – no matter how organized we are in our self-reliant communities – and relocated to a ‘smart city’ prison.
The ‘We Are Human We Are Free’ campaign identifies the foundational components of the Elite’s technocratic program that must be resisted if we are to defeat the advancing technocracy. At an absolute minimum, the One-page Flyer in 23 languages identifies the critical basics for action.
Conclusion
The Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and technologically enslave those left alive now advances rapidly.
Most of the technologies for achieving these two ends have either been deployed already or are being rapidly deployed now.
You can do nothing or, perhaps, complain about what is happening.
But unless you take the precise personal action necessary to defend yourself and your family, you cannot escape the outcome that the Elite is imposing on you.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a regular contributor to ‘Global Research’.
Featured image: Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay
As the US government works overtime to stigmatize any journalism possessing connectivity with Russia, the world slides dangerously down a path defined by a Russophobic US-driven agenda that leads toward the inevitability of conflict, and the probability of nuclear war.
When the FBI executed a search warrant on my residence on August 7, they were singularly focused on my professional relationship (I am a self-employed journalist) with the Russian government, and in particular, RT, the widely recognized brand name of Russia Today, a media company founded by the autonomous non-profit organization TV-Novosti in April 2005.
According to the FBI, the US government was concerned that my activities fell under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
The FBI has also searched the Virginia home of Dmitry Simes, a veteran Russian-American journalist who currently resides in Moscow where he helps moderate a popular political program, The Big Game, on Channel 1.
While the FBI has not publicly commented on the raid on Simes’ home, it is most likely due to similar concerns over FARA compliance.
I have been an external contributor (i.e., contactor) to RT since April 2020. Since the initial contract was signed, I have written numerous articles and produced hundreds of videos for which I have been compensated financially in accordance with the terms set forth in the agreements between myself and RT. As stipulated in the signed agreements, I am solely responsible for the content of the work provided.
At no time have I entered into any agreement, written or oral, or have reached any understanding, formal or informal, that I am responsive to the direction or control of either RT/TV-Novosti or the Russian government.
Indeed, the agreement between myself and RT stipulates that I am responsible for determining the topics that will be covered in the content I produce, although as is the case in any editorial/producer relationship with “talent,” I have been asked to provide content that is responsive to breaking news.
I am a freelance journalist. This is the life of a freelance journalist.
Nothing more, nothing less.
This relationship is like that which I have as an outside contributor to other journalistic outlets, including TruthDig, The American Conservative, Consortium News, The Washington Spectator, and Energy Intelligence, all of which have published my work on a regular basis during the same period in which I produced content for RT.
In all cases, I am solely responsible for the content I produce. There is, of course, a collaborative relationship with the editors of all these publishing outlets, some more intense/heavy than others. This is the normal reality faced by every journalist in the world.
I can say without fear of contradiction that the editorial ‘touch’ of RT is the lightest of any publisher I have dealt with – there is the standard follow-up questioning on sourcing of information, and some massaging of language for clarity. On a few occasions (I can count them on one hand), RT has turned down articles I have submitted for publication. In every instance, the topics dealt with US domestic issues, and the editors were concerned about being seen as buying into unfounded conspiracies.
How utterly irresponsible of them!
The specific compensation received for work published is confidential in accordance with the terms of the agreement I signed with RT (the FBI seized physical and electronic copies of this agreement, and I have in the past provided copies of the agreement to the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) or their proxies operating within the US banking system). But I can say this – it is within the industry norm, slightly more than some publishers, and slightly less than others. And in no case can it be considered exorbitant – The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, all of whom have published my opinion pieces in the past, all pay significantly more than does RT.
This reality must be disappointing to the FBI and the Department of Justice, which, through their questioning, seemed caught up in a working theory that I was a controlled asset of RT and, by extension, the Russian government. Their conspiracy theories extended into the person of my wife, Marina, who was questioned by a pair of FBI agents at her place of work at the same time the FBI conducted its search of our residence. The agents showed Marina a copy of an email she had sent to me back in late 2020/early 2021, where she listed the articles that I had published for RT for each month.
I was paid on a monthly billing cycle, with the amount calculated based upon the number of articles published in a given month. On occasion, there would be discrepancies, where my count of articles published did not align with the money paid in compensation. To assist me in working out these discrepancies, Marina would generate a list of articles published by publication date, so that I could more coherently communicate with RT.
“Do you direct the work of your husband?” the FBI asked my wife. “Do you organize his work?”
The answer was self-evident, as my wife informed the FBI.
I am my own boss.
The FBI was also interested in the payment vehicle used by RT to compensate me. The method agreed to contractually was a wire transfer to be made monthly based upon the work published. For this, I provided my banking information, including SWIFT code.
Following the commencement of the Special Military Operation by Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, this method became difficult because of the sanctioning of Russian banks by the US, denying these banks access to the SWIFT system that controls money transfers globally and, most importantly in my case, into the US.
RT developed workarounds which used unsanctioned third parties to execute the wire transfers. Over time, RT made use of two such intermediaries. I have always been totally transparent about this payment method. Indeed, when my bank began blocking payment on instructions from their internal OFAC enforcement units, I reached out to the bank to resolve the issue. Part of the resolution measures agreed to was that I provided the OFAC enforcement unit with copies of my contractual relationships showing that the money received was related to contracted work. This method worked but was very time-consuming and inconvenient – wire transfers were often returned to the sender in whole or in part because of the delay in processing the submitted paperwork, which took place every time a payment was received.
I contacted OFAC directly to complain, citing harassment and First Amendment issues, and was informed that they had nothing to do with it. The problem, it seemed, was overzealous employees at the bank itself (the OFAC enforcement unit was an in-house entity, with no formal relationship with the US government or OFAC.)
The solution was simple – I switched banks. In making the application to my new bank, I was transparent about international wire transfers that they would expect, what country these transfers would originate from, roughly in what amounts the transfers would be, and for what purpose (writing.)
The bank in question was USAA, with which I had a relationship dating back to 1984 when I was commissioned as an officer in the US Marines. Last year, USAA ended its relationship with me without warning, closing my bank account and terminating homeowner and auto insurance policies that I had with them dating back four decades.
I opened a new account with my current bank. Once again, I was fully transparent in the application process as to the source and reason for incoming wire transfers.
The FBI, in questioning me, provided the names of the two intermediaries used by RTto make the wire transfers of my compensation. I provided accurate answers to all their questions concerning these entities and my relationship with them.
I have no doubt that the US government will continue to make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for RT to compensate external contributors based in the United States, including myself, for their work.
This is harassment under color of law.
But under no circumstances does it make the work, or any compensation paid to me for this work, a violation of the law.
And under no circumstances does being paid for my outside contributions to RTviolate the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
I have been lambasted for publishing my work in RT.
Several US-based publishers, including TruthDig and the The American Conservative, have terminated their relationship with me because I also contributed to RT – this after my writing won an award for TruthDig and one of my articles was the most-viewed for the year for The American Conservative. I had just started what was supposed to be a stint as a regular contributor for Responsible Statecraft (RS) when some of their funders balked at having someone who also wrote for RT writing for them (I had just published my first article, only to have it removed from the RS website without warning. RS was willing to pay me for the article in question, but I let them know under no circumstances would I accept money from their organization.)
One of the reasons I enjoy contributing to RT is the global diversity of their audience. But I also appreciate the relative purity of their message – in a world where the US and its compliant minions in the controlled Western press work overtime to manipulate audiences into accepting at face value and without question the American-driven narrative, RT and other non-Western news outlets provide alternatives which are fact-driven.
In March 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained about the US “losing the information war” to nations like Russia amongst English-speaking audiences around the world.
The truth, when seen from the perspective of an American secretary of state, hurts.
I have had extensive intimate experience with the US mainstream media dating back to my time as a weapons inspector in Iraq. I bore personal witness to US government officials leaving important Security Council meetings early so they could brief reporters from The New York Times, who would then publish a front-page story about the meeting which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the reality of the meeting and reflected every talking point of the United States.
How did I know this?
Because the Security Council meeting dealt with issues surrounding the inspections I was responsible for leading in Iraq, and with briefings that I helped write and provide to the members present. I was there when the US official walked out, and I knew who he was going to meet.
I was also present when the CIA worked with CNN to make a documentary about the work of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. I was one of several inspectors whose stories served as the centerpiece of the documentary. Moreover, I was the point of contact between the CIA and CNN when it came to the release of U-2 imagery and other intelligence-related information to CNN to be used in the documentary.
I worked for NBC News in the months after I resigned from my position with the United Nations. I was an on-air analyst who often appeared with Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams. I would work with NBC News to turn raw news feeds into finished products ready for on-air broadcast. I saw firsthand how NBC manipulated the news to fit pre-conceived notions instead of reporting it as is. I was eventually released from my contract when National Security Adviser Sandy Berger objected to questions being asked of him by NBC White House correspondent Claire Shipman, indicating that he knew I was behind those questions.
NBC had the choice: Defend journalistic integrity, or cave in to White House pressure.
They caved.
After 9/11, I was contracted by Fox News as an on-air analyst for six months, only to have the network balk at my assessments which ran counter to the narrative being promulgated by the Bush White House. Fox News decided it was better to pay me and keep me off the airwaves (I was exclusive to Fox at the time) than release me and let me speak out.
The contract was not renewed when it expired.
I was briefly courted by CNN in the fall of 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. After being questioned in an in-house forum that brought together the major reporters, hosts, and producers of CNN, I was ‘cleared’ by the senior CNN executives, who proceeded to give me a “behind-the-scenes” tour of their newsroom.
I was shocked when I was taken to the CNN “war room,” where the producers were already working with the Pentagon to embed reporters with military units. My questions about this level of collusion led CNN to lose interest in me shortly thereafter.
The bottom line is this – I have seen the American mainstream media up-close and personal.
There is zero integrity when it comes to reporting fact-based truth.
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RT hosts a panel discussion on US efforts to vilify Russia at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 7, 2024.
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In every instance I experienced, the news organizations of these various media companies were literally subordinated to the US government, taking their talking points directly from either the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.
In short, these news organizations did not produce news, but rather American propaganda which was designed to deceive the broader American audience about critical issues of war and peace.
The news organizations I observed firsthand were more representative of a state-controlled media than a free press.
And, if called upon to compare and contrast, based upon my own personal experiences, the level of journalistic integrity between these US media outlets and RT, RT wins hands-down.
When it comes to reporting on politically sensitive content, such as the Special Military Operation, I likewise side with RT.
The Biden administration has openly admitted that it purposely declassifies intelligence information it knows to be wrong or misleading so that it can be released to the mainstream media for the purpose of controlling the narrative.
Not for telling the truth.
I have, over the years, had the opportunity to meet and work with several RTjournalists and reporters who cover the Special Military Operation.
Every single one has demonstrated impeccable integrity when it comes to reporting the news.
I have also had the opportunity to interface with and interview many of the sources these RT journalists draw upon for their reporting and can say that the assessments I make as an independent analyst often reflect those of the RT journalists.
Not because, as is the case in the United States, we are working from the same government-dictated script – the Russian government has never tried to dictate any narrative to me, nor has RT.
But because both RT and I have an assiduous appreciation for fact-based truth.
Sadly, I can’t say that for any of the mainstream American media organizations I’ve worked with in the past.
My reporting for RT is my own, reflecting my observations and analysis. My most recent reporting from Russia backs this up – a four-part series which RT knew nothing about until I pitched it to them after I completed my most recent trip to Russia.
This is exactly what journalism is supposed to be – hard-hitting, probing analysis based upon first-hand observations derived from access to high-level sourcing.
I picked RT as the publisher of these articles because I wanted this reporting to be available not only to a global English-speaking audience, but also to a Russian audience.
This reporting was not the byproduct of close collusion between myself and the Russian government – in fact, when I tried to get official permission to travel to the new territories and Donbass from the Russian Ministry of Defense, I was turned down. It was only because of my persistence, and that of my host, Aleksandr Zyrianov, that I was able to travel to Chechnya, Crimea, the New Territories, and Donbass, and meet with the high-level officials and military officers who feature in my reporting.
Trying to convince a Western audience – be it government officials, journalists, or the consumers of news – that RT is a responsible news organization more committed to telling the truth than their ostensibly “free” Western media counterparts, is a literal mission impossible.
The level of Russophobia that has infected every level of society in the West is mind-boggling. I have been called a shill of Russian President Vladimir Putin more times than I can count, by both the online trolls of the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), whose mission is simply to harass any online voice that doesn’t conform to the US/NATO narrative, and ostensibly “neutral” journalists who write for outlets that publish my work. My crime? Reporting accurately on the positions taken by the Russian government – “speaking ‘Putin,” in the vernacular of my critics.
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The author at the Victory Day Parade rehearsal in Moscow, May 7, 2023
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The consequences of this Russophobia-infected journalism are dire – not only has the ignorance enshrined within the journalism of the West resulted in the destruction of Ukraine, but, if not reversed, is leading the Collective West down the path of inevitable conflict with Russia which would probably end in a general nuclear war.
Trying to head off such a tragic outcome has been the fuel that feeds my work as a journalist these past few years.
And it will continue to fuel my work going forward.
I am grateful to RT for allowing my words to be published and disseminated in both written and video form.
I believe that, in doing so, RT is contributing to the cause of saving the world from the horror of nuclear war.
Even if the Russophobia-infected minds in the Collective West fail to recognize this.
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Featured image: The author talks to readers during the presentation of his book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, dedicated to nuclear security, at the Pobeda Culture and Leisure Centre in Novosibirsk, Russia.
No debate entre os dois candidatos à presidência dos EUA, Kamala Harris disse:
“A agenda de Putin não é apenas sobre a Ucrânia. Os aliados europeus são gratos por entendermos a importância da maior aliança militar que o mundo já conheceu, que é a OTAN. O que fizemos foi preservar a capacidade de Zelensky e dos ucranianos de lutar por sua independência. Caso contrário, Putin estaria sentado em Kiev com os olhos voltados para o resto da Europa”.
Assim, Harris vira a realidade de cabeça para baixo, escondendo o fato de que foi a OTAN, sob o comando dos EUA, que atacou a Rússia, expandindo com bases militares e armas nucleares cada vez mais perto de seu território, organizando em 2014, com forças neonazistas, o golpe na Ucrânia e o subsequente ataque aos russos da Ucrânia. Uma guerra total, portanto, contra a Rússia. Contra esse pano de fundo, escreve o New York Times, “o presidente Biden parece estar prestes a abrir caminho para que a Ucrânia lance armas ocidentais de longo alcance nas profundezas do território russo, desde que não use armas fornecidas pelos EUA”. Em outras palavras, Biden autorizará os aliados europeus a fornecer à Ucrânia armas de longo alcance para atacar profundamente o território russo. A Grã-Bretanha já está preparada para fazer isso. “O exército ucraniano não é capaz de lançar ataques de longo alcance com armas ocidentais. – O presidente Putin enfatizou:
“Isso só é possível com o uso de dados de inteligência dos satélites da OTAN. Não é uma questão de permitir que o regime ucraniano ataque a Rússia com essas armas, mas de decidir se os países da OTAN estão diretamente envolvidos no conflito ou não. Se a decisão for tomada, isso significará que os países da OTAN, os EUA e os países europeus, estão em guerra com a Rússia. E se esse for o caso, então, tendo em mente a mudança na própria essência desse conflito, tomaremos as decisões apropriadas com base nas ameaças que serão criadas contra nós”.
Como os mísseis de longo alcance podem ser armados com ogivas nucleares e não nucleares, a Rússia estaria exposta a um risco maior de ataque nuclear.
No debate com Harris, Donald Trump disse que “a situação está piorando e pode levar à Terceira Guerra Mundial. Putin tem armas nucleares. Ninguém pensa nisso. E, eventualmente, ele as usará. É algo sobre o qual não gostamos de falar. Ninguém gosta de falar sobre isso”. Ele então enfatizou: “Acho que é do interesse dos Estados Unidos acabar com essa guerra e negociar um acordo”. Trump simplifica, entretanto, como, se ele se tornasse presidente dos Estados Unidos, poderia implementar tal acordo: “Se eu fosse presidente, a guerra nunca teria começado. Conheço Putin muito bem e Putin me respeita, enquanto ele não respeita Biden.”
A visão simplista de que a guerra poderia terminar com um acordo pessoal entre os dois presidentes ignora o fato de que ela está sendo deflagrada pelas potências fortes dos EUA e do Ocidente, que estão perdendo o domínio que mantiveram até agora no mundo e estão tentando preservá-lo por meio da guerra. E o cenário de guerra europeu está ligado ao do Oriente Médio, onde uma guerra está se desencadeando e Trump, como Harris, culpa não Israel, apoiado pelos EUA, mas o Irã, um aliado da Rússia e da China, o mais temido pelos EUA e pelo próprio Trump por causa de suas grandes capacidades econômicas.
Manlio Dinucci
Breve resumo da análise da imprensa internacional de Grandangolo na sexta-feira, 13 de setembro de 2024, no canal de TV italiano Byoblu:
The World Health Organization (WHO) today approved the first mpox vaccine for use in adults — and also said it can be used for babies, children, teens and pregnant women if they are in “outbreak settings where the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks.”
WHO Assistant Director-General Yukiko Nakatani said, “The decision can also help national regulatory authorities to fast-track approvals, ultimately increasing access to quality-assured mpox vaccine products.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker called the WHO’s approval of the shot for infants and children in Africa “a train wreck in the making.”
“The safety profile is abysmal in adults (up to 2.1% serious cardiac events in clinical trials) and the vaccine has not been adequately tested for efficacy or safety in pediatric populations.
“In other words, the WHO has no idea whether it will work nor do they know how much damage it will do. The WHO has again abandoned good public health principles and waved their magic vaccine wand on the mpox outbreak.”
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant, also criticized the WHO for overly focusing on mpox vaccines and neglecting to address broader public health issues in Africa.
“So far this year, about 40,000 children have died from malaria in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] alone, and similar numbers of people from malnutrition, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDs,” Bell said.
Although these numbers “obviously dwarf” the number of mpox deaths, the WHO is allocating fewer resources to addressing them.
Bell — who formerly served as a medical officer and scientist at the WHO — explained what he sees occurring:
“We have become much better at detecting much rarer diseases such as mpox, and addressing these is certainly more lucrative for the growing industry feeding off the WHO’s misinformation regarding rapidly rising pandemic risk.
“However, it is clear that the people of DRC and Africa in general would benefit far more if WHO returned to impactful public health. There has been a move over recent years to a concentration on addressing the symptoms of diseases of poverty (which mpox is) with Western-developed commodities, rather than dealing with underlying causes.
“This signals a return to colonialist-era approaches rather than evidence-based public health. It presumably reflects the way WHO is now funded, with increasing control from the private sector and a few large Western nations with large Pharma industries.”
No Clinical Trials on Kids
In its press release, the WHO said the MVA-BN vaccine can be administered to adults over 18 as a two-dose injection four weeks apart but can also be given as a single dose “in supply-constrained outbreak situations.”
“While MVA-BN is currently not licensed for persons under 18 years of age,” it said, “this vaccine may be used ‘off-label’ in infants, children and adolescents, and in pregnant and immunocompromised people.”
The WHO called for more data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in these situations.
The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization — which reviewed all available evidence and recommended the use of MVA-BN vaccine — noted in its Weekly Epidemiological Record reportthat “MVA-BN has not been specifically studied in clinical trials in children.”
However, they said:
“The same non-replicating MVA viral vector is used as a platform for other vaccines that include MVA-filo (Mvabea™) against Ebola virus disease (EVD).
“The EVD vaccine is approved by the EU for adults and children aged 1 year and older. Data from 5 published studies on MVA-BN as a viral vector platform for the prevention of EVD, with a total population of 52 229 children, support the favourable safety profile of the product.”
The authors of a new study — published Sept. 11 in The BMJ — presented results on MVA-BN’s effectiveness in adult males but said nothing about children or pregnant women.
In 2023, researchers funded by the UK Health Security Agency looked at the health outcomes of 87 children who received a single dose of MVA-BN.
They reported that the vaccine was “well tolerated” but that larger studies needed to be done to fully assess the shot’s safety and efficacy in kids.
The Defender asked Bavarian Nordic for information about its mpox vaccine in pediatric populations but did not receive a response by the deadline.
The WHO’s process for granting a drug “prequalification” approval for “emergency use listing” requires drugmakers to “commit to continue generating missing information to fulfill prequalification requirements.”
“Once this information becomes available,” the WHO said, “a PQ [prequalification] application should be submitted to complete the full process to achieve recommendation for international procurement in both emergency and non-emergency settings.”
It is unclear how much pediatric safety and efficacy data Bavarian Nordic has collected so far and what it showed.
Mpox Vaccine Approved for U.S. Kids and Teens Since 2022
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 granted emergency use authorization for the vaccine for “in individuals less than 18 years of age determined to be at high risk for monkeypox infection.”
The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC)’s mpox vaccination website states that while teens and children at risk for mpox can receive Jynneos, it is not recommended for babies under 6 months.
The CDC also says Jynneos can be given to pregnant or breastfeeding women.
Although it remains unknown if Jynneos may pose risks to a developing fetus if taken during pregnancy, animal studies haven’t shown any harm to developing fetuses when the vaccine was given to pregnant animals, the agency said.
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Important article by the late Graeme MacQueen. His Legacy will Live. First published on September 22, 2018
On the 23d anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the public has a right to ask what really happened on that day.
Here are eight points to ponder.
1. Questioners of the official account of 9/11 are often dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” but this makes no sense. A conspiracy is just a secret plan, by two or more people, to commit a criminal or immoral act. The 9/11 attacks obviously involved a conspiracy.
2. Some people think that the truth of the official account blaming al-Qaida is obvious to every sane person. Not true. Polls suggest that less than half the world’s population shares this confidence.
3. If Bin Laden was the criminal mastermind, why didn’t the FBI charge him with the crime? In 2006 an FBI spokesperson explained: the Bureau had no hard evidence connecting him to 9/11.
4. Questioners of the official account of 9/11 are not all woolly-minded bloggers. Many have relevant expertise. Winner of the National Medal of Science in the U.S., Lynn Margulis, said the science supporting the official account is appallingly weak. Over 3,000 credentialed architects and engineers have publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center.
5. In 2006, a peer-reviewed article revealed that 118 members of the Fire Department of New York reported witnessing explosions during the collapse of the Twin Towers. Patterns of explosions were witnessed, going around as well as up and down the buildings. This challenged the official claim that the buildings were brought down by plane impact and fires. It suggested controlled demolition.
6. In 2009, another peer-reviewed article reported the discovery of large quantities of an exotic explosive and incendiary (nanothermite) in the dust of the World Trade Center. The samples were collected before the cleanup of the site began. This supported the demolition hypothesis.
7. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, given the task of accounting for the World Trade Center destruction, failed to explain to the satisfaction of many scientists the total collapse of a third skyscraper on 9/11, 47-storey World Trade Center 7. No plane hit this building, yet at 5:21 p.m. down it went, beginning its descent symmetrically, suddenly, and at free fall acceleration. Everything about this collapse suggests demolition.
8. In April 2018, eight lawyers filed a petition with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The petition offers detailed evidence that the Trade Center was destroyed by explosives and it demands that this evidence of a federal crime be submitted to a grand jury, with the ultimate aim of charging those responsible.
Clearly, there should be no stigma attached to the questioning of the official account of 9/11. Readers wishing to know more may consult the petition of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and the findings of the international 9/11 Consensus Panel, both of which can be found on the internet.
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The Late Graeme MacQueen was the former director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. He was a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and an organizer of the 2011 Toronto Hearings, the results of which have been published in book form as The 9/11 Toronto Report.
He was a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Nel dibattito tra i due candidati alla presidenza degli Stati Uniti, Kamala Harris ha dichiarato: “L’agenda di Putin non riguarda solo l’Ucraina. Gli Alleati europei sono grati che noi comprendiamo l’importanza della più grande alleanza militare che il mondo abbia mai conosciuto, che è la NATO. Ciò che abbiamo fatto è preservare la capacità di Zelensky e degli Ucraini di combattere per la loro indipendenza. Altrimenti, Putin sarebbe seduto a Kiev con gli occhi puntati sul resto dell’Europa.” La Harris capovolge in tal modo la realtà, nascondendo il fatto che è stata la NATO sotto comando USA ad aggredire la Russia, espandendosi con basi militari e armi nucleari sempre più a ridosso del suo territorio, organizzando nel 2014 con forze neonaziste il colpo di stato in Ucraina e il conseguente attacco ai Russi di Ucraina. Guerra a oltranza, dunque, contro la Russia. In tale quadro – scrive il New York Times – “il presidente Biden sembra sul punto di spianare la strada all’Ucraina per il lancio di armi occidentali a lungo raggio in profondità nel territorio russo, a patto che non utilizzi armi fornite dagli Stati Uniti.” In altre parole, Biden autorizzerà gli Alleati europei a fornire all’Ucraina armi a lungo raggio per colpire in profondità il territorio russo. La Gran Bretagna è già pronta a farlo. “L’esercito ucraino non è in grado di sferrare attacchi a lungo raggio con armi occidentali. – sottolinea il presidente Putin – Ciò è possibile solo utilizzando i dati di intelligence dei satelliti NATO. Non si tratta di permettere al regime ucraino di attaccare la Russia con queste armi, ma di decidere se i paesi della NATO siano direttamente coinvolti nel conflitto o meno. Se la decisione verrà presa, significherà che i paesi della NATO, gli Stati Uniti e i paesi europei, saranno in guerra con la Russia. E se è così, allora, tenendo presente il cambiamento nell’essenza stessa di questo conflitto, prenderemo le decisioni appropriate in base alle minacce che verranno create nei nostri confronti”. Poiché i missili a lungo raggio possono essere armati sia di testate non-nucleari che nucleari, la Russia sarebbe esposta a un più alto rischio di attacco nucleare.
Al dibattito con la Harris, Donald Trump ha detto che “la situazione sta peggiorando, potrebbe portare alla terza guerra mondiale. Putin ha armi nucleari. Nessuno ci pensa. E alla fine le userà. Una cosa di cui non ci piace parlare. A nessuno piace parlarne.” Ha quindi sottolineato: “Penso che sia nell’interesse degli Stati Uniti terminare questa guerra e negoziare un accordo.” Trump semplifica però il modo in cui, se divenisse Presidente degli Stati Uniti, potrebbe realizzare tale accordo.: “Se fossi stato presidente, la guerra non sarebbe mai iniziata. Conosco Putin molto bene e Putin mi rispetta, mentre non rispetta Biden.” La visione semplicistica che la guerra potrebbe terminare con un accordo personale tra i due Presidenti, ignora il fatto che essa è stata fatta esplodere dai poteri forti degli Stati Uniti e dell’Occidente che stanno perdendo il predominio finora mantenuto nel mondo e che cercano di conservare con la guerra. E lo scenario bellico europeo è collegato a quello mediorientale, dove divampa una guerra di cui Trump, come la Harris, attribuisce la responsabilità non a Israele sostenuto dagli USA ma all’Iran, alleato di Russia e Cina, la più temuta dagli USA e dallo stesso Trump per le sue grandi capacità economiche.
This article was originally published in November 2011
“I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” — Senator Frank Church (1975)
I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events – the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at the expense of democracy.
In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these events — a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called a “deep state,” operating both within and outside the public state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon’s name for the emergency planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.”1
My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I shall discuss.
More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy – with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent. The second is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent.2
The third – my subject today — is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events: mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.
There are any number of analyses of America’s current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of America’s increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the income disparity – or what has been called our plutonomy — and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events.
We must understand that the income disparity of America’s current economy was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them.
This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on “careful long-range planning and implementation” of a well-financed response to threats from the left.3 This warning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.4 We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right’s response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response.
What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an “intellectual counterrevolution”), which led directly to the so-called “Reagan Revolution.”5
It is clear that this larger process has been carried on for almost five decades, pumping billions of right-wing dollars into the American political process. What I wish to show today is that deep events have also been integral to this right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of “Continuity of Government” (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were called plans for “the suspension of the U.S. constitution”). These COG plans, building on earlier COG planning, had been carefully developed since 1982 in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind all of them.
More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that
1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 happen;
2) the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top-down repressive power for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power;6
3) there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next;
4) one sees in each event the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic – suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy;
5) in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project — the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.
Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11
Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. Obviously these developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.7
This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling’s behavior fits very neatly with the CIA’s culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.8 This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA’s withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.9
A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in Dallas did not simply withhold information about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured false intelligence that seemed designed to provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such provocations phase-one stories, efforts to portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as opposed to the later phase-two stories, also false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve unit:
Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.”10
This cable was sent on November 22 directly to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.11
The cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by other false phase-one stories from Dallas about Oswald’s alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswald’s testimony, to suggest that Oswald’s rifle in Dallas was one he had owned in Russia.12
These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow’s 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.13 The interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marina’s words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.14 Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.15 Crichton was also an extreme right-winger in the community of Dallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H.L. Hunt Foundation, and a member of the American Friends of the Katanga Freedom Fighters, a group organized to oppose Kennedy’s policies in the Congo.
We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed “that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary.”16 This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the United States would not invade Cuba.17 This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of “fabricated provocations to justify military intervention.”18 (One proposed example of “fabricated provocations” envisioned “using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to … attack surface shipping or to attack US military.”)19
The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately post-assassination; thus they do not by themselves establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May – the mindset that produced a menu of “fabricated provocations” to attack Cuba. (According to Crichton there were “about a hundred men in [the 488th Reserve unit] and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”)20
It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency.21 Later in this paper I shall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the 1963 emergency planning that became the Doomsday Project.
Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11
Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, that “someday someone will die.”22 After 9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: “They [CIA] didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business—that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI…. And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands”23 The CIA’s withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.24
Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have developed in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that
Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.25
Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: “that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.”26 He has also identified the person chiefly responsible for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.27 This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.28
How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam
I will spare you the details of this withholding, which can be found in my American War Machine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that manipulation of evidence helped lead America – in this case very swiftly – into war.
Historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, “was primarily for provocation.”29 The planning for this provocative mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, “the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible.”30
The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was again a high-level (but controversial) determination to go to war.
Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events
All of the deep events discussed above have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washington’s repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of
the Warren Commission’s controversial recommendations that the Secret Service’s domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.31
This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby’s shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute— drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) — that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.32
This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.33
The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called “Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.”34
In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: The three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative.
Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events were on one level setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in legislative reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of expanding repression.
We need to distinguish here, however, between the two years of the Watergate crisis, and the initial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces, involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the initial Watergate break-in itself – Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies — were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as National Security Adviser and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was notified he would be dropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. This major shake-up was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.35
That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party. It was replaced by the conservative Goldwater-Casey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.36 This little-noticed palace coup, along with other related intrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve the conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy, with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity, into a financialized plutonomy where these trends were reversed.37
Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that project’s plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to grow after his departure.38
Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.39 While Iran-Contra exposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, at the urging of CIA Director William Casey, had supplied to the Contras, not a word was whispered about the $500 million or more that the Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had supplied in the same period to the Afghan mujahedin.40 In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from America’s much more intensive engagement in Afghanistan – a covert policy that has since evolved into America’s longest war.
We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that in this complex and misunderstood deep event the CIA in Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitary capacity that Stansfield Turner had tried to terminate when he was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter. This was a victory in short for the faction of men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.41
Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events
I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript, “The Dallas Conspiracy” about the JFK assassination.
Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contract employee of the CIA, he was also well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana.42 My early writings on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis’ involvement in false “phase-one” stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.43
In spreading these “phase-one” stories in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime. Artime’s base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.44 In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras.45
The political mentor of Artime’s MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. The drug money-launderer Ramón Milián Rodríguez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, in support of the Contras, he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.46
It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artime’s invasion plans in 1963.47 It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunt’s protégé Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post in Mexico City as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief.48
But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nation’s emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.”49 His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’”50 In other words, these were the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11.
A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events: Project Doomsday and COG
McCord’s participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of almost all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, was also involved in such planning; and he had access to the nation’s top secret Doomsday communications network. North’s network, known as Flashboard, “excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad.”51
Flashboard was used by North and his superiors for extremely sensitive operations which had to be concealed from other dubious or hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy. These operations included the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but also other activities, some still not known, perhaps even against Olof Palme’s Sweden.52 Flashboard, America’s emergency network in the 1980s, was the name in 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Cheney and Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network was activated anew by the two men who had planned it for so many years.53
But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was part of it in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, “Because it was intended for ‘continuity of government’ operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment.”54 A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:
This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.55
Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. But in 1988 its aim was significantly enlarged: no longer to prepare for an atomic attack, but now to plan for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.56 This change in 1988 allowed COG to be implemented in 2001. By this time the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called “a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing ‘continuity of operations plans.’”57
It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events discussed here. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals discussed here) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.
This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans of the Doomsday Project were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.58 The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the key decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the “secure phone “ in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker – with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.59 Presumably this was a COG phone.
It is not clear whether the “secure phone” in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, we’d have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was “a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.”60 However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the Warren Commission.61
The Secret Service had installed a WHCA portable radio in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.62 This in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.63 Records of the WHCA communications from the motorcade never reached the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board.64 Thus we cannot tell if they would explain some of the anomalies on the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example have thrown light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police
tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.65
Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through Presidential Directive 51 of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time,
After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers [including Cheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation’s survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing “continuity of operations plans.”66
Presumably this “shadow government” finalized such long-standing COG projects as warrantless surveillance, in part through the Patriot Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.67 Other COG projects implemented included the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame—a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.68
I have, therefore, a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of Wall Street over the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 2001, under which since 2008 a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready “to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”69
Democracy-lovers must work to prevent the political crisis now developing in America from being resolved by military intervention.
Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 1963, from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that “Oswald was the assassin,” and that “he did not have confederates.”70 Obviously this priority became even more important after these questionable propositions were endorsed by the Warren Report, the U.S. establishment, and the mainstream press. It has remained an embarrassing priority ever since for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obama’s State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job, until recently, included defense of the lone nut theory against so-called “conspiracy theorists”71
If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of America’s political system has become vested in a lie — a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.72
Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization
Notes
1 Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26.
2 J.A. Myerson “War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy,” Truthout, November 14, 2001, link. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc.
3 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98.
4 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.
5 Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2004, 36.
6 E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05.
7 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354.
8 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152.
9 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO:
Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.
10 Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181, link. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a “known hoodlum and strong-arm man” on the FBI’s Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow’s reports to the FBI, had Ruby’s friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswald’s arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswald’s wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]).
11 It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).
12 Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. (Marina’s actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: “I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles” (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72).
13 Stringfellow himself was the source of one other piece of false intelligence on November 22: that Oswald had confessed to the murders of both the president and Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, “The Final Investigation? The HSCA and Army Intelligence,” The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July 1985], 3),
14 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22.
15 Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.
16 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: “The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion…”
17 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.
[18 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.
19 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these “fabricated provocations” were false. On the contrary, the document called for “compartmentation of participants” to insure that the true facts were not leaked (“Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).
20 Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswald’s rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov’s interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov’s account of it to the Warren Commission. There is reason to believe that Mamantov’s translation of Marina’s testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276).
21 See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
22 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352–54 (FBI agent).
23 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIA’s withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14, 2011, link.
24 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.
25 Scott, American War Machine, 203.
26 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that “There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information” (Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14, 2011).
27 Coll, 467-69.
28 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.
29 James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.
30 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, link.
31 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280.
32 Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L.
Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random
House, 1976), 443–46.
33 Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that “the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King” (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728).
34 George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in
Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278–79.
40 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13 (Contras); Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102 (mujahedin).
41 Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,
42 According to testimony from CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, only “Hunt and McCord had ever been CIA full-time employees. The others [including Sturgis] were contract employees for a short duration or a longer duration” (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino owners).
43 Peter Dale Scott, “From Dallas to Watergate,” Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363.
44 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.
45 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc.
46 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).
47 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97.
48 Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunt helped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime’s Costa Rica base was on land whose owners were part of the local WACL chapter (Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).
49 Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23
50 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971.
51 Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power.” Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, “The Terrorism Task Force.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.
52 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.); Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden: US and British submarine deception in the 1980s, 309 (Sweden).
53 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
54 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
55 “Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park,” May 24, 1961, link.
Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable online here. I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them.
56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
57 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.
58 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 224.
59 Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says:
“The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government’s plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans.”
The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.
60 “White House Communications Agency,” Signal Corps Regimental History, link.
61 The Warren Commission staff knew of the WHCA presence in Dallas from the Secret Service (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).
62 Statement of Secret Service official Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).
63 Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, link (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).
64 In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008). The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: “The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.” See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link. In November 2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton’s personal copy of the Air Force One recordings was being put up for sale, with an asking price of $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link).
65 See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, 385-87.
66 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.
67 Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 348: “One of the first efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country’s defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on [sic] October 2001.” Cf. “The Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001,″ link; “Questions and Answers about Beginning of Domestic Spying Program; link.
69 “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008, link. As part of the Army’s emergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s, there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800 troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.
70 “Memorandum for Mr. Moyers” of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.
71 Leventhal’s official title is (or was) “Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State” (link). In 2010 the U.S. State Department “launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories….The “Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation” page… insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11” Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, (link). The site still exists here, (“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.”) The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (link). Cf. Robin Ramsay, “Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on “sick think,” Fortean Times, April 2010, link; “The State Department vs ‘Sick Think’
The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD,” Fortean Times, July 2010, link; William Kelly, “Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza,” CTKA, 2010, link.
72 For Nixon’s sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.
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Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He hosts the podcast ‘Active Measures’ with Alex Rubinstein. He has contributed to the GrayZone and Mint Press News and he also has a substack at kitklarenberg.com. His work exposing state crimes against democracy has made him an honoree for the 2022 Indy Media Awards.
In the September 13th edition of Global Research News Hour, host Michael Welch asked Klarenberg to explain some of the aspects of 9/11 that investigators today should not shirk. He also elaborated on the stock market activity in both the 9/11 attacks and the October 7 attacks on Israel that may have predicted terrorist behaviour.
Global Research: The Office of Military Investigations found that CIA and FBI veterans affirmed that the agencies using the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate were trying to contact and recruit these two hijackers, Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, as assets. People who a year later used planes as an act of terrorism. Talk about that aspect of 9-11 because I think it is fascinating.
Kit Klarenberg: There were people within, I guess you could call it the 9-11 truth movement, although I don’t personally consider myself a member of any movement, apart from the movement for humanity perhaps.
In effect, for years, independent researchers and journalists had been raising very obvious questions about whether the CIA had a relationship with some of the hijackers via the Saudi Intelligence services. Not least because of the very strange confirmed behaviour by the CIA around the two hijackers you mentioned, which is Hazmi and Mihdhar. So they entered the US despite the fact that the CIA and NSA knew that they were coming.
They shouldn’t have been allowed to get in in the first place and they had multi-entry visas to the US. And when they landed, the numerous FBI officials, just a bit of background, there was something called Alec Station, which was the CIA’s anti-Bin Laden and anti-Al Qaeda unit. Now this had FBI agents posted to it.
When they found out that Hazmi and Mihdhar were members of Al Qaeda and who were flagged as potentially very dangerous terrorists, said we want to inform our superiors in FBI headquarters about this. And they were blocked. They were consistently blocked from doing so.
And there are all sorts of indications that Alec Station sought to obfuscate and mislead the FBI about the presence of these two known Al Qaeda operatives on US soil. Now, not long after arrival, as in within minutes of their arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, they bump into, apparently by happenstance, Omar al-Bayoumi, who was this kind of very shady Saudi government employee who doesn’t seem to have done much very obvious work for the Saudi government, but it appears was receiving an enormous amount of money from the House of Saud. Now, the FBI, years later, set up something called Operation Encore, which was an investigation into potential potential Saudi connections to the 9-11 attacks.
And they concluded there was a 50-50 chance that Bayoumi, and by extension Saudi Arabia, had detailed advanced knowledge of the 9-11 attacks. Now, this was sat on until, I believe it was 2021, when the Biden administration released a tranche of Operation Encore documents. But the point is, is this this spy talk released court filing, it has all sorts of information on how, yes, the CIA had a relationship, a liaison relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar via the Saudi Intelligence services.
Now, this raises all sorts of questions, namely, why did it take so long for this to be confirmed? The filing offers some explanation for this, which is that the CIA and the FBI just lied, despite well knowing about this rather dark handshake, which raises the obvious prospect that the pair, if not other hijackers, were working for the CIA on the day of the attacks. Now, yeah, I would recommend your listeners read my article, and indeed the hyperlinked court filing in full, because it is full of completely dynamite disclosures. Yes, that kind of beg for a re-investigation of who knew what and about 9-11 in advance.
But also, yes, whether there was some degree of direction and control over the hijackers, whether they knew or didn’t know by the CIA. It’s all quite extraordinary. But if nothing else, we know for a fact now that, yes, there was a relationship with two of the hijackers.
The CIA sought to conceal this for reasons unclear. I think more widely, it’s kind of remarkable. I remember very well where I was and what I was doing on 9-11 when I was 12.
But the entire event has been rather forgotten. I mean, this was the start.
GR: Well, you mentioned that a lot, that there are memory holes in the stuff that they’ve known about, and they’ve just kind of forgotten it.
I mean, you mentioned in the article about Hani Hanjour, he had a demonstrably bad record of flying, and yet here he is executing the perfect downwards corkscrew flight into the Pentagon with precision that the vast majority of pilots don’t possess the skill to accomplish. And yet he was able to do it on September 11th, one of the many conflicting narratives that we have your term memory hole in the past 20 years.
KK: Yeah, and I think that Hani Hanjour is, I mean, I would suggest, and that’s what my investigation includes, was a very likely candidate for another 9-11 hijacker who was working for the CIA.
Now, I mean, the mainstream media has even reported on the oddity of Hanjour being the worst flight school pupil that his teachers had ever seen. And in written exams, he would take hours to answer a question that students typically completed in just 20 minutes. He was unable to control a single-engine Cessna during practical tests, and the sense among the teachers with whom he crossed paths was he shouldn’t be in the air under any circumstances.
Now, yes, as you mentioned, he performs this perfect descending corkscrew turn about 330 degrees from around 7,000 feet in the air while travelling over 500 miles per hour to come perfectly level with a pedestrian road leading up to the Pentagon, flying just over a metre above the ground, knocking over lampposts en route, and then crashing into a wing of the Pentagon, which is disused. The only people killed were largely maintenance workers who were reconstructing this section of the Pentagon. There were no senior staff harmed in this.
And, yes, this raises the very obvious question of what the hell actually happened, because the official story of the worst pilot trainee teachers had ever seen doing this seems not only implausible, but impossible. And, I mean, this is a door that a large number of people, including, I might add, people within independent media, don’t want opened because it raises all sorts of crazy questions about, you know, what were the planes being remotely flown? Was it actually not a plane at all, but something rather different, such as a missile? I mean, I think that, yes, there is an aversion to exploring this stuff because it is speculative, and I can understand that as someone who works overwhelmingly based on primary source documentary evidence in the form of leaked and declassified files. Yeah, but, I mean, those explanations do seem, you know, rather more compelling and plausible than Hanjour flying it himself.
Now, I mean, there are all sorts of other debates which, again, people don’t particularly want to go near about controlled demolition and etc. I do think at this stage, when we are 23 years removed from this, the risk of people getting into very serious trouble for probing these areas, not least because, yes, the world has kind of moved on and this catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor, in the phrase of the Project for a New American Century, has been rather forgotten, despite the world-changing consequences it ushered in. This is the kind of stuff that we need to be looking at.
GR: On the days immediately before 9/11, there were ‘put’ options placed on United and American airlines, the airplanes that were hijacked, suggesting a terrorist attack involving the airlines might happen. In an article you wrote in December of last year, you wrote about similarly strange behaviour of Israeli stock immediately before October 7, likewise suggesting a similar planned terrorist attack. Could you comment on how people other than Hamas might have profited from this knowledge, that the government would have known and therefore this was an attack that was allowed to happen on purpose?
KK: Yeah, sure.
I mean, I do think that, I mean, I’ve mentioned the kind of empirical case for 9-11 being a conspiracy. Yeah, one of the most compelling things is that pointing in that direction is the fact that there was widespread, extremely suspicious trading in the months and weeks and days leading up to 9-11, and which implied foreknowledge. Now, there are multiple academic papers which conclude that, yes, that the activity such as betting on, investing large amounts of money in stocks that did well out of 9-11, such as Raytheon, the defence contractor, and betting against stocks that did badly, such as United Airlines out of 9-11.
There was an enormous amount of activity in both directions, which suggested that people knew the attack was coming and they sought to profit from it. And they did to a large extent. I mean, to give you an example on just one, on September 10th, 2001, which is a day before this, the purchase of Raytheon shares soared sixfold.
And then a week later, their value had almost doubled. So, I mean, there are coincidences and there are also not coincidences. But I think that I kind of had this in mind when I read this very interesting academic study, which concluded that there was suspicious trading on Israeli stocks, again, both positive and negative trading, as it were, in the days preceding October 7th last year.
Now, the paper has a number of very revealing graphics, which show the enormous spikes going from almost zero, if not total zero, to hundreds of thousands of trades being made in the days on Israeli stocks that were damaged by October 7th. But what’s even more compelling, and again, you might be tempted to dismiss that as coincidence, is that the paper also finds similar patterns in the trading of Israeli stocks in April 2023. This is right when, and this has been reported in the mainstream media, Hamas was planning to execute what happened on October 7th originally.
Shorting activity on the Israeli ETF since October, 2022
But they got cold feet because they sensed that the Israelis were onto them. So they dropped their plans. Now, I mean, again, this can hardly be considered a coincidence.
But at both times when an attack was expected, and indeed an attack was executed, there is a similar level of deeply suspicious, unprecedentedly high stock market activity related to Israeli stocks. Now, I mean, this is a point that I made in my Mint Press article, which you mentioned, which is that, yeah, there are countless indications which have been confirmed in the mainstream that the Israeli military and Israeli Intelligence services knew that something was coming. And, you know, I got a lot of flak in certain circles for suggesting when this began that they knew what was coming.
And this has just been amply confirmed by subsequent disclosures.
GR: Well, there have been like Egyptian intelligence, and they’d also sent information to them about the possibility of attack. And Israeli Mossad, I mean, they have all sorts of transmitters all along the – I mean, I think they said something like a former IDF operative said that a cat couldn’t get across without notifying it.
And yet, according to an interview I did, I guess, late in spring or something, they found they were all – like they were completely caught off guard. So it all seems like, you know, in terms of the position of the troops and so on and so forth. So that all sort of further corroborates the possibility that they let it happen on purpose.
And this was with the goal of, you know, creating this incident where they would have their own war on terrorism, so-called, right?
KK: Yeah, no, absolutely. And it’s like, you know, I mean, I’ve been covering events in Gaza and the West Bank for many, many, many years. And it’s like, you know, Israel has formed doing this, where there are several examples, such as in the lead up to Operation Protective Edge in 2014 or Operation Cast Lead in 2008, where the Palestinian leadership was in peace talks with Israel.
And then at the very last minute, there are a series of Israeli provocations. Hamas responds with rather flaccid rocket attacks. And then this is used as a pretext for not only sabotaging peace negotiations, but carpet bombing Gaza.
Now, as well, I think that you’ve got to bear in mind that, like, not long before this, Azerbaijani authorities carried out an almost total ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, which is this was now formerly Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijanians moved in and said, well, and told the 200,000 strong population, if you don’t leave immediately, we’re going to massacre you all. So, of course, they left.
Now, that was assisted by the Israelis, and it received not a wink of criticism in the Western mainstream at all. So we must ask ourselves, was that a motivating factor for Netanyahu to think, right, well, I’m just going to carry out my own, like, you know, total ethnic cleansing? I mean, and that is what has happened. It’s I mean, another data point within this that just sticks in my mind a lot, which is there is a veteran British client journalist called Robert Peston.
He’s a British journalist. He, on October 8th, published a very notable post on X or Twitter, as it was previously called. And he said that British Intelligence sources had told him that the Hamas’ strike on Israel the previous day was going to evolve into a full blown regional war in West Asia as destabilizing to global security as Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
And it stated that this crisis would spread well, that his intelligence sources stated that this crisis will spread well beyond the Middle East. And we are in the early stages of a conflict with ramifications for much of the world. Now, this was posted about 24 hours after Hamas breached Gaza’s concentration camp walls.
How did his British intelligence sources know this unless they wanted this to happen, were planning for this to happen and intended for the grand regional war that they spoke of to happen? Because at that point, the Israeli government hadn’t even announced a response, really, beyond dispatching Israeli occupation force operatives en masse to massacre people. There was no sense that there was going to be, I mean, we’re almost a year into this, of the Israeli occupation forces going into Gaza routinely and jousting with Hamas. And it goes on and on.
And it looks like Hezbollah and Israel any day now could end up in a full blown hot war. Like, you know, it’s really, really, really suspicious. And I think that in a very basic way as well, Netanyahu has all sorts of domestic political problems, including the fact that he is being investigated for corruption.
The second that he’s out of office, he’s probably going to jail. Now, in that context where on a micro and macro level, you feel like your time is running out. And I do think that the genocide in Gaza has exposed all sorts of structural problems within Israel, namely that it’s a settler colonial population.
And so they’ve had a population collapse. A large number of people have fled home to the countries they’re actually born in. Their economy has been ravaged by this.
They’re having zero tourism, which was a big major economic sector for them. Their tech sector, because the apparent fallibility of their security systems was amply demonstrated on October 7th, are suffering big time. Yeah.
I mean, these were already kind of existing issues. And I think that in terms of drawing the U.S. deeper into this and other Western powers as a kind of grand last hurrah, was Netanyahu’s only option from a personal and just wider geopolitical perspective. So the reasons for allowing this to go ahead couldn’t be writ larger.
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First published by Global Research on September 18, 2023
***
Abstract
Seventeen equatorial and Southern-Hemisphere countries were studied (Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, Thailand, Uruguay), which comprise 9.10 % of worldwide population, 10.3 % of worldwide COVID-19 injections (vaccination rate of 1.91 injections per person, all ages), virtually every COVID-19 vaccine type and manufacturer, and span 4 continents.
In the 17 countries, there is no evidence in all-cause mortality (ACM) by time data of any beneficial effect of COVID-19 vaccines. There is no association in time between COVID-19 vaccination and any proportionate reduction in ACM. The opposite occurs.
All 17 countries have transitions to regimes of high ACM, which occur when the COVID-19 vaccines are deployed and administered.Nine of the 17 countries have no detectable excess ACM in the period of approximately one year after a pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO), until the vaccines are rolled out (Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Suriname, Thailand, Uruguay).
Unprecedented peaks in ACM occur in the summer (January-February) of 2022 in the Southern Hemisphere, and in equatorial-latitude countries, which are synchronous with or immediately preceded by rapid COVID-19-vaccine-booster-dose rollouts (3rd or 4th doses). This phenomenon is present in every case with sufficient mortality data (15 countries). Two of the countries studied have insufficient mortality data in January-February 2022 (Argentina and Suriname).
Detailed mortality and vaccination data for Chile and Peru allow resolution by age and by dose number. It is unlikely that the observed peaks in all-cause mortality in January-February 2022 (and additionally in: July-August 2021, Chile; July-August 2022, Peru), in each of both countries and in each elderly age group, could be due to any cause other than the temporally associated rapid COVID-19-vaccine-booster-dose rollouts. Likewise, it is unlikely that the transitions to regimes of high ACM, coincident with the rollout and sustained administration of COVID-19 vaccines, in all 17 Southern-Hemisphere and equatorial-latitude countries, could be due to any cause other than the vaccines.
Synchronicity between the many peaks in ACM (in 17 countries, on 4 continents, in all elderly age groups, at different times) and associated rapid booster rollouts allows this firm conclusion regarding causality, and accurate quantification of COVID-19-vaccine toxicity.
The all-ages vaccine-dose fatality rate (vDFR), which is the ratio of inferred vaccine-induced deaths to vaccine doses delivered in a population, is quantified for the January-February 2022 ACM peak to fall in the range 0.02 % (New Zealand) to 0.20% (Uruguay). In Chile and Peru, the vDFR increases exponentially with age (doubling approximately every 4 years of age), and is largest for the latest booster doses, reaching approximately 5 % in the 90+ years age groups (1 death per 20 injections of dose 4). Comparable results occur for the Northern Hemisphere, as found in previous articles (India, Israel, USA).
We quantify the overall all-ages vDFR for the 17 countries to be (0.126 ± 0.004) %, which would imply 17.0 ± 0.5 million COVID-19 vaccine deaths worldwide, from 13.50 billion injections up to 2 September 2023. This would correspond to a mass iatrogenic event that killed (0.213 ± 0.006) % of the world population (1 death per 470 living persons, in less than 3 years), and did not measurably prevent any deaths.
The overall risk of death induced by injection with the COVID-19 vaccines in actual populations, inferred from excess all-cause mortality and its synchronicity with rollouts, is globally pervasive and much larger than reported in clinical trials, adverse effect monitoring, and cause-of-death statistics from death certificates, by 3 orders of magnitude (1,000-fold greater).
The large age dependence and large values of vDFR quantified in this study of 17 countries on 4 continents, using all the main COVID-19 vaccine types and manufacturers, should induce governments to immediately end the baseless public health policy of prioritizing elderly residents for injection with COVID-19 vaccines, until valid risk-benefit analyses are made.
Introduction
All-cause mortality by time is the most reliable data for detecting and epidemiologically characterizing events causing death, and for gauging the population-level impact of any surge or collapse in deaths from any cause.
Such data can be collected by jurisdiction or geographical region, by age group, by sex, and so on; and it is not susceptible to reporting bias or to any bias in attributing causes of death in the mortality itself
(Aaby et al., 2020; Bilinski and Emanuel, 2020; Bustos Sierra et al., 2020; Félix-Cardoso et al., 2020; Fouillet et al., 2020; Kontis et al., 2020; Mannucci et al., 2020; Mills et al., 2020; Olson et al., 2020; Piccininni et al., 2020; Rancourt, 2020; Rancourt et al., 2020; Sinnathamby et al., 2020; Tadbiri et al., 2020; Vestergaard et al., 2020; Villani et al., 2020; Achilleos et al., 2021; Al Wahaibi et al., 2021; Anand et al., 2021; Böttcher et al., 2021; Chan et al., 2021; Dahal et al., 2021; Das-Munshi et al., 2021; Deshmukh et al., 2021; Faust et al., 2021; Gallo et al., 2021; Islam, Jdanov, et al., 2021; Islam, Shkolnikov, et al., 2021; Jacobson and Jokela, 2021; Jdanov et al., 2021; Joffe, 2021; Karlinsky and Kobak, 2021; Kobak, 2021; Kontopantelis et al., 2021a, 2021b; Kung et al., 2021a, 2021b; Liu et al., 2021; Locatelli and Rousson, 2021; Miller et al., 2021; Moriarty et al., 2021; Nørgaard et al., 2021; Panagiotou et al., 2021; Pilkington et al., 2021; Polyakova et al., 2021; Rancourt et al., 2021a, 2021b; Rossen et al., 2021; Sanmarchi et al., 2021; Sempé et al., 2021; Soneji et al. 2021; Stein et al., 2021; Stokes et al., 2021; Vila-Corcoles et al., 2021; Wilcox et al., 2021; Woolf et al., 2021; Woolf,Masters and Aron, 2021; Yorifuji et al., 2021; Ackley et al., 2022; Acosta et al., 2022; Engler, 2022; Faust et al., 2022; Ghaznavi et al., 2022; Gobiņa et al., 2022; He et al., 2022; Henry et al., 2022; Jha et al., 2022; Johnson and Rancourt, 2022; Juul et al., 2022; Kontis et al., 2022; Kontopantelis et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2022; Leffler et al., 2022; Lewnard et al., 2022; McGrail, 2022; Neil et al., 2022; Neil and Fenton, 2022; Pálinkás and Sándor, 2022; Ramírez-Soto and Ortega-Cáceres, 2022; Rancourt, 2022; Rancourt et al., 2022a, 2022b; Razak et al., 2022; Redert, 2022a, 2022b; Rossen et al., 2022; Safavi-Naini et al., 2022; Schöley et al., 2022; Sy, 2022; Thoma and Declercq, 2022; Wang et al., 2022; Aarstad and Kvitastein, 2023; Bilinski et al., 2023; de Boer et al., 2023; de Gier et al., 2023; Demetriou et al., 2023; Donzelli et al., 2023; Haugen, 2023; Jones and Ponomarenko, 2023; Kuhbandner and Reitzner, 2023; Lytras et al., 2023; Masselot et al., 2023; Matveeva and Shabalina, 2023; Neil and Fenton, 2023; Paglino et al., 2023; Rancourt et al., 2023; Redert, 2023; Schellekens, 2023; Scherb and Hayashi, 2023; Šorli et al., 2023; Woolf et al., 2023).
We have previously reported several cases in which anomalous peaks in all-cause mortality (ACM) are temporally associated with rapid COVID-19 vaccine-dose rollouts and cases in which the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign coincides with the start of a new regime of sustained elevated mortality; in India, Australia, Israel, USA, and Canada, including states and provinces (Rancourt, 2022; Rancourt et al., 2022a, 2022b, 2023).
These studies allowed us to make the first quantitative determinations of the vaccine-dose fatality rate (vDFR), which is the ratio of inferred vaccine-induced deaths to vaccine doses administered in a population, based on excess-ACM evaluation on a given time period, compared to the number of vaccine doses administered in the same time period.
The all-ages all-doses value of vDFR was typically approximately 0.05 % (1 death per 2,000 injections), with an extreme value of 1 % for the special case of India (Rancourt, 2022). Our work, using extensive data for Australia and Israel, has also shown that vDFR is exponential with age (doubling every 5 years of age), reaching approximately 1 % for 80+ year olds (Rancourt et al., 2023).
The clearest example is that of a relatively sharp ACM peak occurring in January-February 2022 in Australia, which is synchronous with the rapid rollout of Australia’s dose 3 of the COVID-19 vaccine; occurring in 5 of 8 of the Australian states and in all of the more-elderly age groups (Rancourt et al., 2022a, 2023).
In contrast, often one must contend with the confounding effect of the intrinsic seasonal variation of ACM; however, in this case for Australia, the said January-February 2022 peak occurs at a time in the intrinsic seasonal cycle when one should have a stable (Southern Hemisphere) summer low or summer trough in ACM. There are no previous examples of such a peak in the summer in the historic record of ACM for Australia (Rancourt et al., 2022a).
Few national jurisdictions have the kind of extensive age-stratified mortality and vaccination data available for Australia and Israel. Two other such jurisdictions are Chile and Peru. Here, we show that Chile and Peru, like Australia, has a relatively sharp ACM peak occurring in January-February 2022, which is synchronous with the rapid rollout of Chile’s dose 4 and Peru’s dose 3 of the COVID-19 vaccine, respectively, occurring for all of the more-elderly age groups.
This shared feature between Chile, Peru and Australia led us to look for more examples of the January-February 2022 ACM-peak phenomenon in the Southern Hemisphere and in equatorial regions. Equatorial countries have no summer and winter seasons and no seasonal variations in their ACM patterns. We found the same phenomenon everywhere that data was available (Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Uruguay), although incomplete for Bolivia and not as distinctive for New Zealand. Here, we report on those findings.
Data
The sources of mortality and vaccine-administration data are given in Appendix A: Sources of mortality and vaccination data.
Appendix B: Examples of all-cause mortality and vaccination data contains examples of the data: all-ages national ACM by time (week or month), from 2015 to 2023, and all-ages all-doses vaccine administration by week, using Y-scales starting from zero, for the 17 countries considered in the present study: Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, Thailand, and Uruguay.
Figure 1 shows the said 17 countries considered, in relation to the equator on a world map.
Figure 1: World map showing the 17 countries considered in the present study, in relation to the equator and the tropics ― Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Malaysia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, Thailand, and Uruguay.
Method to Detect Time Transitions to
Regimes of High All-Cause Mortality
We implement the following method developed by one of us (JH) for detecting changes in regime in ACM data by time (day, week, month, quarter).
One is interested in detecting transitions in time (as one advances in time from a stable historic period) to regimes of “higher than usual” or “higher than recent” ACM, which may be associated with the declaration of a pandemic or with rollouts of vaccines. Although the trained eye can detect such transitions in the raw ACM by time data itself, it is useful to apply a statistical transformation, which is designed to largely eliminate theconfounding difficulty of seasonal variations in ACM, which occur in non-equatorial countries.
Since the dominant period of the seasonal variations in ACM is 1 year, and since we wish to detect changes moving forward in time, we adopt the following approach. We apply a 1-year backward moving average to the ACM by time data. Each point in time of the 1-year backward moving average is simply the average ACM for the year ending at the said point in time, and we plot this moving average by time. Changes in regime of ACM then appear as breaks (in slope or value) in the moving average by time.
Note that the 1-year backward moving average method produces one significant but easily discerned artifact: Relatively large and sharp peaks in ACM give rise to artificial drops in the moving average at one year ahead of (later than) the said relatively large and sharp peaks in ACM.
Methods to Quantify vDFR from All-Cause Mortality
4.1 Historical-trend baseline for a period (or peak) of mortality (Method 1)
Our first method (Method 1) for quantification of vDFR by age group (or all ages) and by vaccine dose number (or all doses) is as follows (Rancourt et al., 2022a, 2023), here improved to adjust for systematic seasonal effects:
i. Plot the ACM by time (day, week, month) for the age group (or all ages) over a large time scale, including the years prior to the declared pandemic.
ii. Identify the date (day, week, month) of the start of the vaccine rollout (first dose rollout) for the age group (or all ages).
iii. Note, for consistency, that the ACM undergoes a step-wise increase to larger values near the date of the start of the vaccine rollout.
iv. Integrate (add) ACM from the start of the vaccine rollout to the end of available data or end of vaccinations (all doses), whichever comes first. This is the basic integration time window used in the calculation, start to end dates.
v. Apply this window and this integration over successive and non-overlapping equal-duration periods, moving as far back as the data permits.
vi. Start each new integration window at the same point in the seasonal cycle as the start of the basic integration window for the vaccine period, even if this introduces gaps between successive integration periods.
vii. Plot the resulting integration values versus time, and note, for consistency, that the value has an upward jog, well discerned from the historic trend or values, for the vaccination period.
viii. Extrapolate the historic trend of integrated values into the vaccination period. The difference between the measured and extrapolated (historic trend predicted) integrated values of ACM in the vaccination period is the excess mortality associated with the vaccination period.
ix. The extrapolation, in practice, is achieved by fitting a straight line to chosen pre-vaccination-period integration points.
x. If too few points are available for the extrapolation, giving too large an uncertainty in the fitted slope, then impose a slope of zero, which amounts to using an average of recent values. In some cases, even a single point (usually the point for the immediately preceding integration window) can be used.
xi. The error in the extrapolated value is most often overwhelmingly the dominant source of error in the calculated excess mortality. Estimate the “accuracy error” in the extrapolated value as the mean deviation of the absolute value difference with the fitted line (mean of the absolute values of the residuals) for the chosen points of the fit. This error is a measure of the integration-period variations from all causes over a near region having an assumed linear trend.
xii. The said “accuracy error” is generally larger than the “precision error” (or statistical error) in the extrapolated value, as it represents the year-to-yearvariability of the integrated ACM in the integration window in the years prior to the Covid or vaccination periods.
xiii. If there are too few integration windows in the available normal years prior to the peak or region of interest to obtain a good estimate of the historic year-to-year variability, or if the statistical errors in the integrated values are relatively large, then make use of the statistical errors to best estimate the needed uncertainty.
xiv. Apply the same integration window (start-to-end dates during vaccination) to count all vaccine doses administered in that time.
xv. Depending on particular circumstances in the data, it may be necessary to use different integration bounds (different windows) for the ACM and for the vaccine administration. We saw no need for this, and we did not try to implement or test such an optimization.
xvi. Define vDFR = (vaccination-period excess mortality) / (vaccine doses administered in the same vaccination period). Calculate the uncertainty in vDFR using the estimated error in vaccination-period excess mortality.
The same method is adapted to any region of interest (such as a peak in ACM) of sub-annual duration, by translating the window of integration (of the region of interest) backwards by increments of one year.
The above-described method is robust and ideally adapted to the nature of ACM data. Integrated ACM will generally have a small statistical error.
A large time-wise integration window (e.g., for the entire vaccination period) mostly removes the difficulty arising from intrinsic seasonal variations; and this difficulty is further solved by starting each new integration window at the same point in the seasonal cycle as the start of the basic integration window for the vaccine period (point-vi, above).
The historic trend is analysed without introducing any model assumptions or uncertainties beyond assuming that the near trend can be modelled by a straight line, where justified by the data itself. Such an analysis, for example, takes into account year to year changes in age-group cohort size arising from the age structure of the population. The only assumption is that a locally linear near trend for the unperturbed (ACM-wise unperturbed) population is realistic.
While the above method is designed for cases (jurisdictions) in which there is no evidence in the ACM data for mortality caused by factors other than the vaccine rollouts, such as Covid measures (treatment protocols, societal impositions, isolation and so forth; since no excess mortality occurs in the pre-vaccination period of the Covid period), it can be readily adapted to cases in which mortality in the vaccination period is confounded by additional (Covid period) causal factors that cannot be ruled out.
One approach is simply to adapt the above method to calendar years, irrespective of whether excess mortality occurs prior to the COVID-19 vaccine rollouts. One obtains excess ACM by calendar year, relative to the expected value from the historic trend deduced by linear extrapolation from a chosen range of yearly ACM values for < 2020 (for years prior to 2020, when the 11 March 2020 announcement of a pandemic was made). One then compares the excess ACM for 2020 and for 2021. In many (most) countries, there was essentially no COVID-19 vaccination in 2020, and a rapid rollout essentially started in January 2021.
Special Case of a Single Historic Integrated Point (Method 2)
In cases in which it is not possible or practical to obtain more than one integration value for the needed extrapolation (steps v to ix, above), rather than assume a zero slope for the extrapolation (step x, above), the following second method (Method 2) can be applied.
If Y(−1) is the sole historic integrated point, then simply take the needed extrapolated value, Y(0), to be:
Y(0) = Y(−1) + m ΔT W (1)
where m is the slope of the best-straight-line fit through the original ACM by time unit (day, week, month…) versus numbered time unit, ΔT is the number of time units between Y(0) and Y(−1) (i.e., between the start of the Y(0) integration window and the start of the Y(−1) integration window), and W is the inclusive width of the integration window in number of time units.
This assumes that the ACM by time varies on a straight line, notwithstanding seasonal variations, on the near segment used to obtain the best-straight-line fit.
The resulting excess mortality for the integration window or period, xACM(0), is then:
xACM(0) = ACM(0) − Y(0) (2)
where ACM(0) is the integrated ACM in the period of interest.
The statistical error (standard deviation) in xACM(0) is then given by:
where sig(m) is the nominally statistical error in m.
If there is no seasonal variation in ACM, as occurs in equatorial-latitude jurisdictions, then sig(m) is the actual statistical error in m. With seasonal variations in ACM, sig(m) extracted from the least squares fitting to a straight line does not have a simplemeaning. In this case, sig(m) will incorporate uncertainty arising from seasonal variations, and increases with increasing amplitude of the seasonal variation.
Application of the Methods to the Specific Countries
The parameters for applying the methods (Methods 1 and 2) to the data are given in Appendix C: Technical and specific information for applications of the methods to the data.
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Twenty-three years ago:9/11 was a criminal undertaking based on countless lies and fabrications. On September 11, 2024, we commemorate the tragic events of 9/11.
Global Research will be publishing several important articles pertaining to 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, leading to the illegal US-NATO bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.
Below is the carefully documented and incisive video by James Corbett, initially released in 2011
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Transcript
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man [Osama bin Laden] on dialysis in a hospital halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.
These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.
It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening.
It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.
The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.
The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.
NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7’s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.
The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.
This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).
Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away.
Then he lived in Abottabad [Pakistan] for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet.
Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members [SEAL] died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.
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A NATO invasion of nuclear Russia is currently underway, and the world is unaware that it is in World War III, as reported by Megatron (14 August 2024).
The Kursk region of Russia is currently full of NATO weapons, troops, logistics, and more, many of them destroyed. See map, below.
Ukrainian aims to destabilize Russia with Kursk incursion. (BingMaps/Institute For The Study Of War/USA TODAY)
Video footage comes out of dozens of NATO vehicles, air defense systems, tanks and more; even if destroyed and captured by Russian forces in the Kursk Region.
The Kiev forces of about 11,600 under guidance of NATO troops have not managed to conquer the city of Kurchatov and its nuclear power plant. Apparently, President Zelensky used all of Kiev’s remaining troops, plus extra Polish (NATO) forces.
Russian General Apti Alaudinov noted that the purpose of invading the Kursk Region was to secure a strong position for upcoming negotiations with Russia. However, with Kiev’s and their western masters’ defeat, the Kiev Regime signed their own death warrant.
Kiev’s losses are more than 2,000.
General Allaudin further predicts that the Kiev Special Operation will be terminated by the end of 2024, with a total victory of the Russian Army, and the surrender of the Kiev Regime and its masters in Washington and London. (Borzzikman Aug 15, 2024)
Whether surrender by the west will actually happen, remains to be seen. It is not a habit of the west, even in terminal conditions, losing face – thus, more aggressions, perhaps of a NATO direct attack on Russia, is a possibility.
At this point, President Putin still refuses to declare war, although Russia’s territory has been invaded and Russians are killed on their territory by NATO forces. And more direct NATO attacks may be planned. For now, Washington is getting away with “murder”; literally.
Step by step, Washington and its NATO partners have been crossing one red line after the other.
First, NATO weapons in Ukraine;
then NATO troops un Ukaine;
then F-16 fighter jets in Ukraine;
then NATO soldiers commanding the sophisticated weaponry supplied by the west;
then NATO troops on Russian territories; then NATO drones and aircraft attacking Russian targets on Russian territory – and finally NATO troops attempting taking over an entire Russian district, taking Russian prisoners, killing Russians.
Airports across Russia have been constantly bombed for several weeks by NATO drones.
On August 9, 2024, Russian state media reported an explosion, followed by fire at the Russian air base in the Lipetsk region, around 280 kilometers from the border with northeastern Ukraine, as if Ukraine / NATO forces attacked the airfield, and destroyed a warehouse and several other facilities with guided aerial bombs; guided by NATO experts.
Some speculate that Kiev / NATO may have used a small tactical nuclear weapon. There is however no proof for such an aggression, and Russia remains silent.
According to Russian military, their own (Russian) offensive involved around 1,000 troops and more than two dozen armored vehicles and tanks. See this. (This page was removed by Google, saying the Moscow Times page does not exist anymore – the link is shown, to demonstrate western censoring).
The Russian army is constantly advancing in the Donbass, defending the Russian speaking population from the cowardly Azov-Nazi attacks that killed in the last 10 years about 18,000 people, most of them women and children.
Russia, on her own territory receives heavy and painful blows from NATO weapons. NATO is everywhere, with communication, logistics and NATO command.
Over 35 countries are investing hundreds of billions in tax payers’ money to supply Ukraine with weapons to carry out these deadly strikes against Russia – on Russian territory, with NATO soldiers, whom the west likes to call “foreign mercenaries”.
Some 80 years after WWII, when Russia defeated Nazi-Germany, German tanks – given to Ukraine – are again rolling through the Kursk region, where the decisive battle took place; the battle by which Russia defeated Nazi-Germany saving the West from German fascism.
But fascism today is ticking and is well alive, reminiscing the times of the 1940’s. Now neo-fascism is emanating from Ukraine, an erstwhile ally of Nazi-Germany – the Bandera’s Azov Battalions – that killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Russians during WWII.
Mr. Putin was adamant eradicating Nazism in Ukraine, making Ukraine a neutral and NATO-free country, a key condition for Peace negotiations.
Many people are still under the illusion that Russia is in a minor military conflict with Ukraine, not realizing that this proxy-war Washington-NATO against Russia is far more dangerous than the WWII situation in 1943.
NATO is attempting to gradually creating brigades in Eastern Europe, aiming at confronting Russia.
It is a game of observation, “how far can we go”, while carefully watching Russia’s reaction. The difficulties they may have, is manning the brigades with soldiers, as young Europeans are unwilling to die for western warmongers and profits of western war industries.
According to Megatron, there is a high probability that NATO may eventually intend to invade Belarus.
Did Mr. Putin and his advisers miscalculate NATO’s boldness, hoping that they will not cross from Ukraine into Russian territories, to avoid further escalation?
What now, that all the Red Lines have been crossed – and that more than once?
In a recent statement, former Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, said Russia should no longer hold back:
“From this moment, the [Kiev] Special Military operation should become openly exterritorial in nature,” Medvedev, who serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, argued in a post on Thursday.
“We can and should go further into what still exists as Ukraine. To Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev. To Kiev and further. There should be no restrictions in terms of recognized borders.” See this.
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If President Putin is holding out for even more western / NATO aggressions on Russian territory, it may be that he has a strong response in store, one that cannot be accused as a response to a “false flag”, because what Kiev-NATO are doing on Russian territories is clearly no “false flag”, but pure provocation.
Russia has the military capacity to wipe out simultaneously western decision and military centers, as well as financial hubs, with ultra-precise, supersonic tactical nuclear weapons, keeping the loss of life to a minimum, but disabling western power structures.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Renowned Icelandic composer and author Elias Davidsson passed away on April 7, 2022.
Our thoughts are with Elias whom I first met in Iceland in 2006.
His Legacy will live. This article focusses on resolution 1368 adopted by the UN Security Council on September 12, 2001. This resolution largely endorses de facto collective security self-defense adopted that same morning by the Atlantic Council in Brussels.
The first draft of this article was written in 2014.
***
The first overt diplomatic achievement by the United States related to 9/11, was Resolution No. 1368. It was adopted at noontime by the UN Security Council on September 12, 2001. The resolution contained the obligatory statements of condemnation and of solidarity with the 9/11 victims and their families. But this particular resolution manifested three puzzling features whose implications are unsettling.
Resolution 1368 included a one-paragraph preamble in which the Council “recognized the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter.” There was no need to mention this particular principle in the resolution unless it was the intent of the Council to give the United States a wink that it may, if it wishes, use military force against any country it chooses as a response to 9/11.
A Wink
Note that the Council did not “authorize” the United States to use military force, as it had done in the case of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990,[1] but chose to convey to the United States indirectly the message that the Council would look the other way and ask no questions, if the United States would use military force against foreign states in response to 9/11.
That is precisely what happened: The U.S. bombing campaign against Afghanistan and the subsequent occupation of that country was not condemned by any member of the Security Council, although it was a violation of customary international law – as established on the basis of the so-called Caroline doctrine – and of the U.N. Charter.
According to the Caroline doctrine, the resort to self-defense requires “a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” Furthermore, any action taken must be proportional, “since the act justified by the necessity of self-defence, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it.”
Resolution 1368 also condoned a blatant act of aggression. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945) called the waging of aggressive war “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” [2]
I argue that by including the Charter’s provision on self- defense into Resolution No. 1368, Council members contributed to the violation of customary international law and the commission of the supreme international crime by the U.S. government, namely aggression.
Was 9-11 an International Act?
Furthermore, the Council designated the events of the preceding day as an act of “international” terrorism, and “a threat to international peace and security” without being provided with the slightest evidence in support of both of these assertions. The Council is not known to have at any time requested or obtained such evidence.
Note: it is the formula “threat to international peace” that gives the UNSC the authority to issue resolutions that bind member states. I am referring to Article 39 of the UN Charter:
” The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
According to the US’s official account, four airliners in domestic routes were hijacked by 19 passengers on September 11, 2001. Even if that account had been true – which it is not – it would not have amounted to an act of “international” terrorism, but would remain a large-scale act of domestic terrorism by travelers whose real identities remain in question.
A further puzzling feature is the swiftness with which Resolution 1368 was adopted. Had the above two features not been included in the resolution – calling 9/11 international terrorism and designating terrorism as a threat to peace — there would be nothing odd about the fact that it was adopted one day after the attacks.
Numerous governments and inter-governmental organisations adopted resolutions on the very day of the attacks, September 11, 2001, in which they condemned the attacks and expressed solidarity with the victims. They, however, carefully refrained from designating the attacks as containing an international dimension.
Vast Implications
The two features discussed above were neither self-evident nor necessary, yet have vast legal and political implications. It is inconceivable that individuals sitting in the Council, representing their governments, would approve the wording of Council resolutions on the base of their personal feelings, no matter how strong.
Drafts of Security Council resolutions, particularly those which contain legal precedents or entail legal consequences, are typically examined – down to their punctuation – by legal experts in the home countries of the Council’s members. It is inconceivable that experts around the world would be able to assess within hours the legal and political ramifications of the features discussed above.
I can conceive of only two explanations for this apparent swiftness: Either the United States (backed by its NATO allies) threatened the governments of the other Security Council members with severe sanctions, should they fail to adopt this resolution, or the draft resolution had been circulated to, and approved by selected members of the Security Council prior to the events of 9/11, in order to ensure its speedy adoption on September 12, 2001. Both explanations give rise to highly disturbing questions.
Now for a comment on the probity of information put before the UNSC. The Security Council does not have to base its decisions on proven facts. It may legally base its operative decisions on hunches, hypotheticals, hearsay and even fantasy. The Security Council would be legally entitled to determine that the earth is flat, if such determination would politically suit its members.
The members of the Security Council are admittedly under the legal obligation to act in good faith, but no international entity has been set up to examine whether they have complied with this principle, and if violated, to invalidate decisions based on the breach of this principle.[3]
The readiness of all members of the Security Council to underwrite American foreign policy aims, as reflected in the provisions of Resolution No. 1368, must be regarded as a historical watershed.
The UN’s Fourth Pillar
For years, I have been a lonely voice pointing out that the UNSC’s Permanent Five (US, UK, France, Russia and China) have committed themselves to define “international terrorism” as a major threat to world peace. This definition is a monumental lie, for terrorism is not even a threat to the sovereignty, national defense, or political order of any country. While terrorism (attacks on civilians for political purposes) is a crime, the number of people killed yearly by terrorist acts in most countries lies between zero and and 10. In Europe, a territory of over 500 million people, about 44 people die on the average yearly in terrorist attacks (compared to over 5,000 yearly homicides).
I have repeatedly warned that the United Nations have adopted the ideology of “counter-terrorism” as one of the pillars for the entire UN system. Now, finally and belatedly, others vindicate my warnings. In June 2020, the UK-based organization Saferworld has lamented the mainstreaming of the counter-terrorism ideology within the United Nations Organization.
“For three-quarters of a century, peace, rights and development have been the three core pillars that define the UN’s unique purpose. However, in the post-9/11 era, governments’ collective determination to define terrorism as the pre-eminent global security challenge has made a deep impression on the UN [sic]. Counter-terrorism has come to the fore through a flood of UN Security Council resolutions, General Assembly strategies, new funding streams, offices, committees, working groups and staff – all dedicated to counter-terrorism.” [4]
Any Good Guys?
I urge all those who for various reasons believe Russia and China to be “the hope for Mankind” as opposed to Western imperialism, to take a second look at this perception. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are firmly committed to the fraudulent counter-terrorism ideology, for it provides all governments around the globe with justifications to abolish democracy and institute a digital dictatorship.
The counter-terrorism ideology, now complemented by a global health-scare campaign, is precisely the cement that binds the rulers of the P5, and it bears no relation to Al Qaeda, ISIS or other real or fake terrorist organisations. The P5, serving their ruling classes, have thus declared a war against the world’s peoples. The United Nations, once a hope for the world, have become a tool of oppression. “We the People” can trust no government and no organisation of states to ensure our rights and liberties. We must join hands across borders without state or corporate interference to restore an acceptable world order.
*
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Elias Davidsson is an Icelandic citizen living in Germany. He is a composer, human rights and peace activist and author of several books on 9/11 and false-flag terrorism.
Notes
[1] This is from the “Gulf war”: Under SC Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990, the Security Council “authorize[d] Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait […] to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660(1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area.”
[2] The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, too, refers to the crime of aggression as one of the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community”, and provides that the crime falls within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
[3] See, in particular, Elias Davidsson, “The Security Council’s Obligations of Good Faith”, Florida Journal of International Law, Vol. XV, No. 4 (Summer 2003) (http://www.aldeilis.net/bpb/goodfaith.pdf)
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In Japan, the mRNA vaccine was launched in February 2021 allegedly as a means to protect the Japanese people against a non-existent “killer virus”.
More than 206 million doses had already been administered. The Japanese population was not informed regarding the dangers of the mRNA vaccine.
In December 2021, Japan’s Ministry of Health authorized booster shots of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, pointing to the “low rate of side effects such as myocarditis”.
According to Japan’s Ministry of Heath’s early advisory (which was similar to that applied in numerous countries):
“The Government recommends that people get vaccinated because the benefits of vaccination are greater than the risk of side reactions.” (emphasis added)
The foregoing is misleading as pointed out in the Former Minister of Internal Affairs Kazuhiro Haraguchi’s courageous statement:
“‘You Were Right, Vaccines Are Killing Millions of Our Loved Ones”
「あなたは正しかった、ワクチンは私たちの愛する人の何百万人もの人を殺している」
“They are trying to block our freedom, our resistance, our power. But we will never lose.”
Haraguchi issued a rallying call for action.
He urged the people to stand united in challenging the government and its questionable decisions.
“Let’s overthrow this government,”
he proclaimed, emphasizing the need for change and accountability.
He called on legislators to continue fighting for the people’s lives and freedoms, “Let’s make it happen,” he concluded.
Excess Mortality (Japan) (2020-2022)
In Japan, the vaccine was launched in early 2021.
Suicides in Japan Resulting from Lockdown (2020)
Notice the surge in suicide rates immediately following the March 2020 lockdown (Source: Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor/Graphic: Jason Kwok and Natalie Croker, CNN)
.
“Far more Japanese people are dying of suicide, likely exacerbated by the economic and social repercussions of the pandemic, than of the COVID-19 disease itself. … Provisional statistics from the National Police Agency show suicides surged to 2,153 in October [2020] alone, marking the fourth straight month of increase.” CBS November 2020 report (emphasis added)
Suicides Among Japan’s Schoolchildren
A 2021 report by Japan’s Ministry of Education confirms that suicide among Japanese schoolchildren had hit a record high during the 2020 school year. The report from the Ministry of Education suggests that
“the pandemic has caused changes in the school and family environment and had an impact on children’s behavior”. (For details see chapter 6 of Michel Chossudovsky’s book)
A note on my book entitled:
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
In English it is available in E-book form. (See below).
I remain indebted to the Japanese publisher which brought out and promoted my book despite political pressures and an atmosphere of censorship. My thanks to both the Publisher and to the Translator.
The fraudulent narrative concerning the Covid “Vaccine” is collapsing in different parts of the World.
In California, 9th Circuit Court Rules that COVID-19 mRNA Injections Are Not “Vaccines”.
In Germany, the Health authorities have acknowledged the devastating nature and impacts of the Covid lockdowns, the mandatory wearing of the face mask, and the experimental mRNA “vaccines”.
Global Research has from the outset provided an extensive daily coverage of the devastating impacts of the “vaccine”. Our objective is to SAVE LIVES.
In solidarity with the people of Japan.
In solidarity with people all over the World.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 11, June 24, 2024
Kazuhiro Haraguchi, the former Japanese Minister for Internal Affairs, has become the first major politician to apologize to the unvaccinated for the tsunami of deaths occuring among the vaccinated population.
His presentation starts 7’o”
Earlier this week, huge numbers of Japanese citizens took to the streets to protest against the crimes against humanity perpetrated by globalist organizations such by World Health Organization (WHO) and World Economic Forum (WEF) during the pandemic.
During an opening speech at the protests, Haraguchi delivered a powerful and emotional apology for the huge numbers of deaths now occurring as a result of the deadly mRNA roll-out.
Haraguchi began by addressing the grief and loss felt by families who have lost loved ones who were coerced into taking the COVID jab. With a deep sense of sincerity, he extended his condolences and took responsibility for the failings of those in power. “I apologize to all of you. So many have died, and they shouldn’t have,” he said.
Thelibertybeacon.com reports: One of the key points in Haraguchi’s speech was his criticism of the ban on Ivermectin, a drug developed by Dr. Satoshi Omura, which he believed could have played a significant role in combating the pandemic. Haraguchi questioned the motives behind the ban, suggesting that economic interests were prioritized over public health. “Why? Because they are cheap. They don’t want it because it will interfere with the sales of the vaccines,” he argued. This statement drew loud applause from the crowd, many of whom felt that corporate profits had taken precedence over human lives.
Haraguchi then shared a deeply personal story about his own health struggles. After receiving vaccines, he developed a severe illness, specifically a rapidly progressing form of cancer. “This time last year, I had neither eyebrows nor hair. Two out of the three supposed vaccines I received were lethal batches,” he revealed. This candid account of his battle with cancer, which included significant physical changes like hair loss, struck a chord with the audience. He recounted an incident where his appearance became a point of distraction in the Diet, with an opponent focusing more on his wig than the issues at hand.
Adding to the conversation, Haraguchi disclosed that he was not the only member of Japan’s National Diet (legislature) to suffer adverse effects from vaccines. He mentioned that three of his colleagues had been severely affected, with some even hospitalized. “They are falling to pieces, some hospitalized. But they don’t speak up,” he explained. This revelation underscored a broader issue: the reluctance or inability of public figures to discuss their personal health challenges openly.
Haraguchi was particularly passionate about the attempts to silence those who question current policies and government actions. He recounted a recent incident where he was banned from speaking on Channel 3 after an interview with its president.
“The other day, I spoke with the President of Channel 3, and I was banned. They are trying to silence our voices,” he stated. This attempt to censor dissenting voices highlighted a critical concern about freedom of speech and expression. Haraguchi urged the audience to remain steadfast in their resolve, saying,
“They are trying to block our freedom, our resistance, our power. But we will never lose.”
In the conclusion of his speech,
Haraguchi issued a rallying call for action. He urged the people to stand united in challenging the government and its questionable decisions. “Let’s overthrow this government,” he proclaimed, emphasizing the need for change and accountability. He called on legislators to continue fighting for the people’s lives and freedoms, “Let’s make it happen,” he concluded.
The protest that is happening right now (31st May 2024), which aims to draw tens of thousands of participants, marked a significant moment in the global discourse about pandemic management and health policies. Haraguchi’s speech, filled with personal anecdotes and strong criticisms, resonated deeply with the attendees.
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Having cut his teeth in the mainstream media, including stints at the BBC, Sean witnessed the corruption within the system and developed a burning desire to expose the secrets that protect the elite and allow them to continue waging war on humanity. Disturbed by the agenda of the elites and dissatisfied with the alternative media, Sean decided it was time to shake things up. Knight of Joseon (https://joseon.com)
Featured image is from TPV
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
If an experimental vaccine were to damage the heart and immune system in a significant number of individuals who received it, it is possible that it could lead to a decline in the overall population size.
This could occur for several reasons.
First, damage to the heart could lead to an increase in cardiovascular diseases, which are a leading cause of mortality worldwide. This could result in a higher number of deaths among individuals who received the vaccine.
Second, damage to the immune system could leave individuals more susceptible to other infections and diseases, which could also contribute to an increase in mortality.
Last, but by no means least, the negative impacts of the vaccine on fertility and reproductive health could lead to a decline in the number of births, further contributing to a decline in the overall population size.
If such a vaccine were to be developed and distributed, it could potentially lead to depopulation due to increased mortality and decreased fertility.
Unfortunately, the world has found itself in a situation where powerful institutions and Governments have coerced millions of people into getting an experimental Covid-19 vaccine that causes all of the ill-fated effects mentioned above.
Official Government reports and confidential Pfizer documents prove it.
Therefore, you are witnessing mass depopulation unfold before your very eyes.
The push for mass Covid-19 vaccination was never about combating a virus. It was about reducing the global population.
This goal aligns with the interests of certain powerful corporations and individuals who stand to benefit from a smaller, more manageable population now that AI is advanced enough to replace hundreds of millions of workers.
Regardless of the specific cause, the implications of what is currently occurring in the real world are significant.
This includes major countries like the USA, Canada, and the UK.
Additionally, we were able to extract even more up-to-date data on 28 European countries from EuroMOMO.
All of this information has been provided to the OECD and EuroMOMO by each country’s Government organizations, such as the Centers for Disease Control in the USA and the Office for National Statistics in the UK.
The following chart illustrates the disturbing trend of excess deaths in the “Five Eyes” countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US) as well as 27 other European countries –
Are you aware of the staggering number of excess deaths that have occurred in the US and Europe in recent years?
In 2021, the US saw almost 700,000 excess deaths, with another 360,000 excess deaths by November 11th, 2022.
Europe had a similarly alarming 382,000 excess deaths in 2021, with 309,000 excess deaths by November 2022.
And these figures don’t even include Ukraine!
Shockingly, even countries like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada have seen excess deaths that have not decreased since the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The following chart illustrates the disturbing trend of overall excess deaths in Australia in 2020, 2021, and up to week 30 of 2022 –
Did you know that the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine in Australia led to a shocking 747% increase in excess deaths, from 1,303 in 2020 to 11,042 in 2021?
And the situation has only gotten worse since then.
By the end of July 2022, there were a staggering 18,973 excess deaths in Australia – a 1,356% increase from 2020.
That’s more excess deaths in 7 months than in the previous two years combined.
And the situation in the US is similarly alarming –
Are you aware of the disturbing trend of excess deaths in the US following the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine?
By week 38 of 2022, 1,700 more people had died compared to the same time in 2020, and by week 38 of 2021, a shocking 109,000 more people had died compared to the same time in 2020.
These numbers indicate that rather than decreasing, deaths have actually increased following the vaccine rollout.
The following two charts illustrate the total excess deaths in the “Five Eyes” and Europe since the beginning of 2021 when the Covid-19 vaccine was introduced –
Did you know that over 1.8 million excess deaths have occurred in the “Five Eyes” and most of Europe since the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine?
This shocking figure includes over 1 million excess deaths in the US and over 690,000 excess deaths in Europe according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as significant numbers of excess deaths in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
The official narrative that the vaccine is safe and effective and would reduce the number of deaths is completely contradicted by these figures, which suggest that the Covid-19 vaccines may be the main cause of the excess deaths.
Children / Teens & Young Adults Have ‘Died Suddenly’
Did you know that excess deaths among children aged 0 to 14 in Europe skyrocketed by a staggering 755% between January and September 2022, according to official data?
This alarming increase, which has prompted the European Union to launch an investigation, occurred despite efforts by EuroMOMO to downplay the figures.
It’s worth noting that the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was approved for use in children by the European Medicines Agency on 28th May 2021. Which was week 21 of 2021.
Then excess deaths “only “coincidentally” began to be recorded from week 22 once this emergency use authorisation was granted.
Overall, excess deaths rose 630% since the vaccine’s approval for use in children by September of 2022.
It’s a sad reality that despite the mounting evidence pointing to the clear danger of Covid-19 vaccinations for children, it is highly unlikely that authorities will acknowledge this risk.
Tragically, the significant increase in excess deaths among children in Europe since the European Medicines Agency emergency approved the vaccine for use in this population is likely to be dismissed as just another “coincidence” in the long list of such occurrences since the start of the pandemic.
It’s vital that we continue to examine and scrutinize the data to ensure that the health and well-being of our children are protected.
This heartbreaking development has resulted in nearly 118,000 excess deaths compared to the 2015-2019 average.
The figures also reveal that there have been 7,680 more excess deaths among children and young adults in 2022 so far compared to the same time frame in 2020, at the height of the alleged Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the worst year for deaths among 0 to 44-year-olds was 2021, with 291,461 excess deaths in total, nearly 60,000 more than occurred in 2020.
According to the official CDC figures, this increase was mainly due to a mysterious sudden rise in deaths among children and young adults starting around week 31 of 2021.
It’s a heartbreaking reality that nearly half a million people aged 0 to 44 have died since week 51 of 2020, resulting in a staggering 117,719 excess deaths compared to the 2015-2019 five-year average.
According to official data, the average life expectancy in the USA was 77.28 years as of 2020.
If we are to believe the official narrative that Covid-19 is a deadly disease, then it’s perhaps understandable that 231,987 children and young adults up to the age of 44 died in 2020, resulting in 40,365 excess deaths as an unfortunate consequence of this alleged disease.
However, if we are to accept the official narrative that Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective, how do we explain the further increase in deaths among children and young adults in both 2021 and 2022?
It’s worth noting that millions of Americans were pressured into getting the vaccines, and millions of parents were similarly coerced into forcing their children to receive the injections.
The answer is clear: the official narrative is a blatant lie. The Covid-19 vaccines are neither safe nor effective.
The hard-to-find data provided by the CDC only hints at this disturbing trend of young American deaths, but further data published by the UK Government confirms it.
For example, a report published on July 6th, 2022 by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, a government agency, provides further evidence of the danger of these vaccines.
Have you seen Table 2 of the report by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, which contains the monthly age-standardized mortality rates by vaccination status by age group for deaths per 100,000 person-years in England up to May 2022?
If not, you should take a look, because the figures it contains are truly disturbing.
We’ve taken the data provided by the ONS for January to May 2022 and created the following chart, which illustrates the devastating consequences of the mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign.
The chart shows the monthly age-standardized mortality rates by vaccination status among 18 to 39-year-olds for Non-Covid-19 deaths in England between January and May 2022.
It’s clear from this data that the risks associated with these vaccines cannot be ignored.
It’s a disturbing trend: in every single month since the start of 2022, partly vaccinated and double vaccinated 18-39 year-olds have been more likely to die than unvaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds.
The situation has been particularly dire for triple-vaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds, whose mortality rate has worsened month by month since the mass Booster campaign that took place in the UK in December 2021.
In January, triple-vaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds were slightly less likely to die than unvaccinated individuals in this age group, with a mortality rate of 29.8 per 100,000 among the unvaccinated and 28.1 per 100,000 among the triple-vaccinated.
However, from February onwards, triple-vaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds were 27% more likely to die than unvaccinated individuals, with a mortality rate of 26.7 per 100k among the triple-vaccinated and 21 per 100k among the unvaccinated.
The situation worsened even further by May 2022, with triple vaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds 52% more likely to die than unvaccinated individuals in this age group, with a mortality rate of 21.4 per 100k among the triple vaccinated and 14.1 among the unvaccinated.
The partly vaccinated also fared poorly, with May seeing partly vaccinated 18 to 39-year-olds 202% more likely to die than unvaccinated individuals in this age group.
The report by the UK’s Office for National Statistics also includes mortality rates for children, although the UK government attempted to conceal this data.
The following chart shows the mortality rates by vaccination status per 100,000 person-years among children aged 10 to 14 in England for the period 1st January 2021 to 31st May 2022 –
According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the mortality rate for Covid-19 deaths among unvaccinated children aged 10 to 14 is 0.31 per 100,000 person-years.
However, for one-dose vaccinated children, the mortality rate is 3.24 per 100,000 person-years, and for triple-vaccinated children, the mortality rate is an alarming 41.29 per 100,000 person-years.
The situation is no better when it comes to non-Covid-19 deaths. The all-cause death mortality rate is 6.39 per 100,000 person-years among unvaccinated children and slightly higher at 6.48 among partly vaccinated children.
However, the rate worsens with each additional injection: the all-cause death mortality rate is 97.28 among double-vaccinated children and an alarming 289.02 per 100,000 person-years among triple-vaccinated children.
This means, according to the UK government’s own official data, double-vaccinated children are 1422% or 15.22 times more likely to die of any cause than unvaccinated children, while triple-vaccinated children are 4423% or 45.23 times more likely to die of any cause than unvaccinated children.
The data provided by the Office for National Statistics, which is age-standardized and rates per 100,000 population, is definitive proof that Covid-19 vaccines increase a person’s risk of death.
It’s no surprise, then, to learn that a secret CDC report confirms that nearly half a million American children and young adults have died following the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, resulting in nearly 118,000 excess deaths compared to the 2015-2019 five-year average.
You Only Have One Heart & It Will Not Regenerate
The potential consequences of a COVID-19 vaccine that harms the heart are dire. If such a vaccine were widely distributed and administered to a significant portion of the population, it could lead to millions of sudden deaths.
The heart is a vital organ that plays a critical role in maintaining the body’s proper functioning, so any adverse effects on it could have disastrous consequences.
Unfortunately, at least two Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna do exactly this, and they have now been administered to millions of people multiple times, and it is likely that these vaccines are responsible for the millions of excess deaths recorded worldwide since their rollout.
The risk of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to sudden death if not treated, is a serious concern when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine. This is especially true for young and healthy adults and children, who may not experience any symptoms of myocarditis until the condition has progressed to a severe stage.
Symptoms of myocarditis can include chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, and abnormal heart rhythms, and if left untreated, it can result in heart failure, cardiac arrest, and sudden cardiac death.
This is likely why an investigation of official figures published by Public Health Scotland in April 2022 found that there has been a 67% increase compared to the historical average in the number of people aged 15 to 44 experiencing heart attacks, cardiac arrest, myocarditis, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases since this age group was offered the Covid-19 vaccine.
This means Covid vaccination increases the risk of suffering myocarditis, an autoimmune disease causing inflammation of the heart, by 13,200%.
It is clear from the data presented that the Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna have had a significant impact on the health of millions of people worldwide.
The potential adverse effects on the heart, including myocarditis and an increased risk of heart attacks, cardiac arrest, and other cardiovascular diseases, could lead to a significant number of sudden deaths if these vaccines are widely distributed and administered to a significant portion of the population.
Additionally, the high number of excess deaths that have occurred since the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines suggests that these vaccines may be contributing to a larger trend of depopulation.
Excess deaths refer to the number of deaths above what would normally be expected in a given population, and the fact that there have been millions of excess deaths in the “Five Eyes” countries and Europe since the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine is a cause for concern.
The potential consequences of depopulation are far-reaching and could have significant impacts on society, including economic disruption and a decrease in the overall population size. It is imperative that further research is conducted to understand the true extent of the impact of the Covid-19 vaccines on population health and to ensure that any future vaccines are thoroughly tested and deemed safe before being distributed.
Obviously, it stands to reason that more people need to be dying than are being born for depopulation to take place. And unfortunately, confidential Pfizer documents confirm this is now our reality.
The Confidential Pfizer Documents
The data contained in this document is alarming and raises serious concerns about the safety of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine during pregnancy and lactation. According to the data, there have been numerous cases of pregnant women experiencing adverse reactions to the vaccine, including miscarriages, stillbirths, and other serious complications.
Furthermore, the data suggests that the vaccine may also pose risks to breastfeeding infants. There have been numerous reports of infants experiencing adverse reactions to the vaccine when it is passed to them through their mother’s milk.
These findings are extremely concerning and highlight the need for further research into the safety of Covid-19 vaccines during pregnancy and lactation. If the risks associated with these vaccines are not properly addressed, it could have significant implications for fertility rates and overall population numbers.
It is imperative that authorities take these concerns seriously and conduct thorough investigations into the safety of Covid-19 vaccines during pregnancy and lactation. The health and well-being of both mothers and their children must be a top priority.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has been linked to a high number of adverse reactions in pregnant women. According to the company’s own data, of the 270 known cases of exposure to the vaccine during pregnancy, 46% of the mothers (124) experienced an adverse reaction.
Of these, 75 were considered serious, including uterine contractions and fetal death.
This means that 58% of the mothers who reported adverse reactions suffered a serious event. These troubling findings raise concerns about the safety of the vaccine for pregnant women and highlight the need for further research.
It is alarming that Pfizer’s own data shows that 124 out of 270 pregnant women who were exposed to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine experienced an adverse reaction. Of those, 75 were considered serious, including fetal death.
It is also concerning that Pfizer has no information on the outcomes of 238 out of 270 pregnancies. These figures raise serious questions about the safety of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women and their fetuses.
The findings of another Pfizer study on Wistar Han rats show that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine accumulates in the ovaries over time.
The ovaries are a pair of female glands that produce eggs and the female hormones estrogen and progesterone.
The study, which can be found in the list of confidential Pfizer documents published by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under a court order, administered a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine to 21 female and 21 male rats.
The researchers measured the concentration of total radioactivity in the blood, plasma, and tissues of the rats at various points after the injection was administered. The accumulation of the vaccine in the ovaries raises concerns about its potential impact on fertility and reproductive health.
One of the most concerning findings from the study on the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine is the fact that it accumulates in the ovaries over time.
In the first 15 minutes following injection, the total lipid concentration in the ovaries measured 0.104ml, but this increased to 1.34ml after just one hour, 2.34ml after four hours, and 12.3ml after 48 hours.
While the scientists conducting the study did not continue their research beyond 48 hours, it’s unclear whether this concerning accumulation continued.
These findings raise serious questions about the potential long-term effects of the Pfizer vaccine on fertility and reproductive health.
But according to data published by Public Health Scotland, the number of people suffering from ovarian cancer has significantly increased in 2021 compared to the previous year and the 2017-2019 average.
This could potentially be linked to the accumulation of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in the ovaries, as found in a study on rats.
This means the neonatal mortality rate exceeded an upper warning threshold known as the “control limit” for the second time following the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines to women / pregnant women.
The last time it exceeded this limit was in September 2021, when neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births reached 5.1. These levels are on par with those typically seen in the late 1980s.
At the time, PHS said the fact that the upper control limit has been exceeded “indicates there is a higher likelihood that there are factors beyond random variation that have contributed to the number of deaths that occurred”.
This news is shocking and raises serious concerns about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.
Increased Mortality
It’s alarming to see in figures found in a report published by the UK Government titled ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status, England, 1 January 2021 to 31 May 2022‘, and it can be accessed on the ONS site here, and downloaded here, that in every single month between January and May of 2022, individuals aged 18 to 39 who were either partly or fully vaccinated were more likely to die from non-Covid causes compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.
The situation is particularly dire for triple-vaccinated individuals, whose mortality rates have only worsened month after month since the widespread booster campaign in December 2021.
These shocking figures, provided by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, confirm that the Covid-19 vaccines significantly increase a person’s risk of death.
It’s clear that the vaccines are not only failing to protect individuals, but they are actively causing harm. It’s crucial that action is taken to halt their distribution and investigate the true dangers they pose.
But this situation isn’t isolated to 18 to 39-year-olds. It’s common among every single age group.
The following two charts show the monthly age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status for non-Covid-19 deaths in England between January and May 2022 for all age groups –
You can read a full investigation of the above figures broken down by age group here.
Depopulation by COVID-19 Vaccination
The potential consequences of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign are alarming and could lead to depopulation on a global scale.
The heart is a vital organ and any adverse effects on it could have devastating consequences. This is especially true for young and healthy adults and children, as myocarditis may not cause any symptoms until the condition has progressed to a severe stage.
Data from Pfizer reveals that 46% of pregnant women who received the vaccine suffered adverse reactions, with 58% experiencing serious adverse events ranging from uterine contraction to fetal death.
Moreover, studies have shown that the vaccine accumulates in the ovaries over time, raising concerns about its potential impact on fertility.
Official figures also reveal that mortality rates are highest among the vaccinated and lowest among the unvaccinated population in every age group.
With all of this evidence, it is clear that the Covid-19 vaccination campaign could have serious consequences for the future of humanity.
But Why?
There are various reasons that some people may want to depopulate the planet.
One reason could be overpopulation, as some people believe that the earth’s resources are being depleted at an unsustainable rate due to the increasing population.
Other people may argue that depopulation is necessary due to the negative impact that humans have had on the environment, and reducing the population could help mitigate some of these problems.
Some people may also advocate for depopulation due to concerns about the impact of climate change, as a smaller population would likely lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, some people may simply believe that a smaller population would be more manageable and easier to control, and may advocate for depopulation for this reason.
Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are two powerful figures who have expressed support for the idea of depopulation through various means, including vaccination.
Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, has argued that reducing the global population would be beneficial for the environment and the economy, and has suggested that advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence could play a role in achieving this goal.
Similarly, Bill Gates has stated that vaccination campaigns can be used to reduce the population, and has funded numerous initiatives that promote vaccination as a means of controlling population growth.
So it should now begin to make sense as to why powerful figures like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab have been advocating for widespread vaccination campaigns.
The push for mass Covid-19 vaccination isn’t about combating a virus, but about reducing the global population.
This goal aligns with the interests of certain corporations and individuals who stand to benefit from a smaller, more manageable population.
*
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Featured image is from The Expose
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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“I was asked a wide variety of questions about my political beliefs, why I write, think and say the things that I do. But also specific questions about my reporting and also just completely insane queries about my relationship, or indeed GrayZone’s relationship, with the FSB – which is to say Russia’s federal security service. Of course, these were ludicrous and I almost laughingly dismissed them as the rubbish that they were. And then I am asked, “Why are you reacting so strongly?” “
– Kit Klarenberg, relating to his interrogation by UK authorities. (from this week’s interview.)
Listeners to the Global Research News Hour, and visitors to its partner website Global Research have probably become aware of charges by critics that both these media outlets have a tendency to spit out numerous “conspiracy theories.” Such behaviour casts blame for incidents on elements within U.S., Canada, the UK, and their fellow guardians of the “international rules-based order” (the “good guys”) and letting the real villains (Russia, China, Iran, etc) get away with wrongdoing.
Some examples explored herein include counter-narratives arguing potential government complicity in events such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the major political assassinations of the 1960s, and 9/11. [1]
In his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America, Florida State University political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith wrote:
I introduced the concept of State Crime Against Democracy (SCAD) to displace the term “conspiracy theory.” I say displace rather than replace because SCAD is not another name for conspiracy theory; it is a name for the type of wrongdoing about which the conspiracy theory label discourages us from speaking. Basically, the term “conspiracy theory” is applied pejoratively to allegations of official wrongdoing that have not been substantiated by public officials themselves. [2]
When it comes to the task of daring to allege wrongdoing in international affairs on the part of today’s paladins of virtue, and having ample room and sources to back up your argument, few today could match a new super-duper investigative snooper like Kit Klarenberg.
Klarenberg, who has written for a number of publications, puts out intriguing articles on both old and breaking stories at a rate of at least once a week. Former citizen of the United Kingdom currently living in Serbia, much of his work specializes on the actions of United Kingdom intelligence operations. Of particular note, in 2022, he dug up dirt on the left-wing journalist Paul Mason who was colluding with British Intelligence and targeting academics and other people who were putting out the “wrong” points about the Ukraine War. [3]
This was a story that got the attention of this radio host, and evidently also the attention of several UK security people concerned about people putting out the wrong story!
This week, on the Global Research News Hour, Kit Klarenberg appears on the show as a feature guest to chat about some of the feature story topics in his analytical arsenal, from 9/11 and the October 7 attacks on Israel, to the UK based race rioting of last month, to the moment when he was detained by authorities and had his rights as we know them completely thrown away.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in MintPress News, The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. His work has been published at Global Research. His substack is kitklarenberg.com
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the man who as the UK’s Chief Prosecutor made the decisions to prosecute and imprison and keep in prison Julian Assange, is now on September 13th visiting the White House in order to persuade U.S. President Joe Biden to enable Ukraine to use NATO missiles to strike deep inside Russia, including The Kremlin, which is less than 317 miles from Ukraine’s border.
On September 12th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had issued the following warning about this potential decision:
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.
Here is the transcript:
Answer to a question from a media representative
After his speech at the plenary session of the United Cultures Forum, Vladimir Putin answered a question from a media representative.
September 12, 2024 18:55 Saint Petersburg
Question: Over the last few days, we have seen and heard how at a very high level in Great Britain and the United States, the topic has been discussed that the Kiev regime will be able to strike deep into Russian territory with long-range Western weapons. And, apparently, this decision is either about to be made, or, apparently, has already been made. This is, of course, an extraordinary thing. I wanted to ask you to comment on what is happening.
V. Putin: There is an attempt to substitute concepts. Because we are not talking about allowing or prohibiting the Kiev regime from striking Russian territory. It is already striking with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and other means. But when we are talking about using high-precision long-range weapons of Western manufacture, it is a completely different story.
The thing is – I have already spoken about this, and any experts will confirm this both here and in the West – the Ukrainian army is not capable of delivering strikes with modern high-precision long-range systems of Western manufacture. It cannot do this. This is only possible using intelligence data from satellites, which Ukraine does not have, this data is only from satellites of either the European Union or the United States – in general, from NATO satellites. This is the first thing.
The second and very important, perhaps the key, is that flight assignments for these missile systems can, in fact, only be entered by NATO military personnel. Ukrainian military personnel cannot do this.
So it’s not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It’s a question of deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not.
If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct participation, and this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.
This will mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries are fighting with Russia. And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Eric’s Substack.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
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***
First published eleven months ago on October 17, 2023 at the outset of Israel’s act of genocide against Palestine. Revised April 2024
Introduction.
Was it a False Flag?
Military operations are invariably planned well in advance. Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ? Or Was it “A False Flag”.
In the words of Philip Giraldi:
“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.
In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.”
A Tissue of Lies
“A Tissue of Lies” has served to justify the killing in the Gaza Strip of more than 35,000 civilians, of which 70% are women and children coupled with total destruction and an endless string of atrocities.
The Cat is out of the bag. Netanyahu has tacitly acknowledged that it was “A False Flag” which was intent upon justifying a carefully planned genocidal attack against Palestine:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)
Does this candid statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians?
On that same day of October 7, 2023 Netanyahu launched a carefully planned military operation against the Gaza Strip entitled “State of Readiness For War”.
Military operations are invariably planned well in advance.
Had “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” been a “surprise attack” as parroted by the media, Netanyahu’s “State of Readiness For War” could not have been carried out (at short notice) on that same day, namely October 7, 2023.
South Africa’s Legal Procedure against The State of Israel
On January 11, 2024, The Republic of South Africa presented to The Hague World Court, a carefully formulated Legal Procedure against the State of Israel predicated on The Genocide Convention.
This legal procedure, however, has not contributed to repealing the ongoing genocide and saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.
I should mention that the False Flag issue –which constitutes a crime against humanity– was casually ignored by the ICJ.
Our suggestion is that an investigation followed by a legal procedure pertaining to the “False Flag” should be undertaken.
The heads of State and heads of government who have endorsed Israel’s Genocidal Acts are from a legal standpoint complicit.
The ICJ Judgement was contradictory. The Presiding Judge (former legal advisor to Hillary Clinton) was in conflict of interest:
The ICJ Judgment of January 26, 2024 assigns the Netanyahu government representing the State of Israel –accused by the Republic of South Africa of genocide against the People of Palestine– with a mandate to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent and punish” those responsible for having committed “Genocidal Acts”. (under Article IV of the Genocide Convention)
Sounds contradictory? What the ICJ judgment intimates –from a twisted legal standpoint– is that Netanyahu’s Cabinet which was “appointed” to implement the “prevent and punish” mandate cannot be accused ofhaving committed “Genocidal Acts”.
Our intent is to provide a broad and detailed understanding of the false flag issue pertaining to Palestine
The titles of the videos, articles and texts presented below:
Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”?They Let it Happen? Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?, by Dr. Philip Giraldi.
Video: ICJ Hearings in The Hague,
Text of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum. Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland
Video: “False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, Interview. Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux
“False Flag. Wiping Gaza Off the Map”, by Michel Chossudovsky
Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor? But Who Actually Did What to Whom? “This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”, by Philip Giraldi
In solidarity with the People of Palestine.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 11, 2024, September 14, 2024
Part I
Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”?
They Let it Happen?
Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?
by Dr. Philip Giraldi
October 8, 2023
Am I the only one who read about a speech given by Netanyahu or someone in his cabinet about a week ago in which he/they in passing referred to a “developing security situation” which rather suggests (to me) that they might have known about developments in Gaza and chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map in retaliation and, possibly relying on the US pledge to have Israel’s “back,” then implicating Iran and attacking that country.
I cannot find a link to it, but have a fairly strong recollection of what I read as I thought at the time it would serve as a pretext for another massacre of Palestinians.
As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.
In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.
And as is also ALWAYS the case Joe Biden is preparing to send some billions of dollars to poor little Israel to pay for “defending” itself.
2. January 12, 2024. Israel’s Legal Team’s response to South Africa, ICJ The Hague at 10 am. Video in Real Time
3. Video: South Africa’s Closing Argument against Israel for Genocide. January 11 Hearing at the World Court
Part III
Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum
Planning the Forcible Exclusion of Palestinians from Their Homeland
by Michel Chossudovsky
October 2023
An official “secret” memorandum authored by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as consultations with the U.S.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry … assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … It recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. … The document, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.
Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” led by Hamas’ Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War”.
Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu’s January 2023 statement below). Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ?
U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack.
“One would have to be almost hopelessly naïve to buy the corporate state media line that the Hamas invasion was an Israeli “intelligence failure”. Mossad is one of, if not the, most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet.”
Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.
Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”? This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite.
Evidence and testimonies suggest that the Netanyahu government had foreknowledge of the actions of Hamas which have resulted in hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian deaths. And “They Let it Happen”:
“Hamas fired between 2-5 thousand rockets at Israel and hundreds of Israeli are dead, while dozens of Israelis were captured as prisoners of war. In the ensuing air response by Israel, hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.” (Stephen Sahiounie)
Following the Al Aqsa Storm Operation on October 7, Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing of the Gaza Strip home of 2.3 million Palestinians…” (Middle East Eye). A complete blockade on the Gaza Strip was initiated on October 9, 2023 consisting in blocking and obstructing the importation of food, water, fuel, and essential commodities to 2.3 Million Palestinians. It’s an outright crime against humanity. It’s genocide.
It is worth noting, that Netanyahu’s military actions are not targeting HAMAS, quite the opposite: he is targeting 2.3 million innocent Palestinian civilians, in blatant violation of the Four Basic Principles of The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC):
“….respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects [schools, hospitals and residential areas], the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” [Additional Protocol 1, Article 48]
“I served in the IDF 25 years ago, in the intelligence forces. There’s no way Israel did not know of what’s coming.
A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces. So this??
What happened to the “strongest army in the world”?
How come border crossings were wide open?? Something is VERY WRONG HERE, something is very strange, this chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defense system.
To me this suprise attack seems like a planned operation. On all fronts.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say that this feels like the work of the Deep State.
It feels like the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been sold, once again, to the higher powers that be.
(Statement byEfrat Fenigson, former IDF intelligence, October 7, 2023, emphasis added)
History: The Relationship between Mossad and Hamas
What is the relationship between Mossad and Hamas? Is Hamas an “intelligence asset”? There is a long history.
Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin. It was supported at the outset by Israeli intelligence as a means to weaken the Palestinian Authority:
“Thanks to Mossad, (Israel’s “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”), Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat’s Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation.
Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. (L’Humanité, translated from French)
The links of Hamas to Mossad and US intelligence have been acknowledged by Rep. Ron Paul in a statement to the U.S Congress: “Hamas Was Started by Israel”?
“You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat… (Rep. Ron Paul, 2011)
What this statement entails is that Hamas is and remains “an intelligence asset”, namely “an “asset” to intelligence agencies”
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (WSJ, emphasis added)
“The Hamas Partnership” is confirmed by Netanyahu
“The Cat is Out of the Bag”
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)
Does this statement not suggest that Netanyahu and his military-intelligence apparatus are responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians?
“Support” and “Money” for Hamas.
“Transferring Money to Hamas” on behalf of Netanyahu is confirmed by a Times of Israel October 8, 2023 Report:
“Hamas was treated as a partner to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority to prevent Abbas from moving towards creating a Palestinian State. Hamas was promoted from a terrorist group to an organization with which Israel conducted negotiations through Egypt, and which was allowed to receive suitcases containing millions of dollars from Qatar through the Gaza crossings.” (emphasis added)
.
The Dangers of Military Escalation?
Let us be under no illusions, this “false flag” operation is a complex military-intelligence undertaking, carefully planned over several years, in liaison and coordination with US intelligence, the Pentagon and NATO.
In turn, this action against Palestine is already conducive to a process of military escalation which potentially could engulf a large part of Middle East.
Israel is a de facto member NATO (with a special status) since 2004, involving active military and intelligence coordination as well as consultations pertaining to the occupied territories.
Military cooperation with both the Pentagon and NATO is viewed by Israel’s Defence Force (IDF) as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.”
The premise of NATO-Israel military cooperation is that “Israel is under attack”. Does Israel’s agreement with the Atlantic Alliance “obligate” NATO “to come to the rescue of Israel” under the doctrine of “collective security” (Article 5 of the Washington treaty)?
In recent developments, U.S. military deployments in the Middle East are ongoing allegedly to avoid escalation.
According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:
There is always the risk that nations and/or organisations hostile to Israel will take try to take advantage. And that includes, for instance, organisations like Hezbollah or a country like Iran. So this is a message to countries and organisations hostile to Israel that they should not try to utilise the situation. And the United States have deployed, or has deployed more military forces in the region, not least to deter any escalation or prevent any escalation of the situation. (NATO Press Conference, Brussels, October 12, 2023, emphasis added)
Netanyahu’s “New Stage”
“The Long War” against Palestine
Netanyahu’s stated objective, which constitutes a new stage in the 75 year old war (since Nakba, 1948) against the people of Palestine is no longer predicated on “Apartheid” or “Separation”. This new stage –which is also directed against Israelis who want peace— consists in “total appropriation” as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:
“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me [Netanyahu]: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (Netanyahu January 2023. emphasis added)
We bring to the attention of our readers the incisive analysis of Dr. Philip Giraldi pointing to the likelihood of a “False Flag’”.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 8, 2023, Above text updated on October 12, 2023
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Part VI
Gaza Strikes Back. It’s Another 9/11 or Pearl Harbor?
But Who Actually Did What to Whom?
“This Was More Likely a False Flag Operation”
by
Dr Philip Giraldi
October 16, 2023
.
“As a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.”
It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations.
***
Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes,
has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and
has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are.
Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them.
But when the Arabs strike back against the hatred that confronts them with their limited resources it is Israel that is described as the victimand the Palestinians who are dehumanized and portrayed as the “terrorists.”
Media in the US and Europe were quick to label the Hamas offensive breaching the formidable Israeli border defenses as “Israel’s 9/11” or even “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” to establish the context that the Israelis have been on the receiving end of an “unprovoked” attack by a cruel and heartless enemy.
Israel has responded to the attack with a heavy bombardment of Gaza that has destroyed infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, while also cutting off food supplies, water and electricity.
It has demanded that residents of north Gaza, all 1.1 million of them, evacuate to make way for a possible ground offensive but there is nowhere to go as all the borders are closed, and the United Nations is calling it a demand with “devastating humanitarian consequences.” Journalist Peter Beinart has commented “This is a monstrous crime. It’s happening in plain view, with US support.”
And the United States government is indeed typically on the same page as Israel. PresidentJoe Biden, citing fabricated stories about dead Jewish babies, speaks of how Israel has a “duty” to defend itself, while the Palestinians somehow have no right to protect themselves at all, much less to rise up against their persecutors in a struggle for freedom.
And Washington has also unhesitatingly chosen to directly involve itself in the conflict, completely on the side of the Jewish state, asserting repeatedly that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and telling the Israelis that “we have your back” while also dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the scene of the fighting as well as the 101st Airborne to Jordan and increasing the readiness of Marines stationed in Kuwait.
The White House could have taken more aggressive steps to encourage a ceasefire and talks but has chosen instead to issue essentially toothless calls to let the trapped civilians escape while also backing a devastating Israeli military response.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Oct. 12, 2023. – Secretary Antony Blinken on X
Israel is also hosting the worthless and brain dead Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who will be providing advice along the lines of his insightful comment that Hamas is “evil” and “worse than ISIS.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already in Jerusalem, announcing that the US is there to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unity government “as long as America exists” after first saying “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”
Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government makes clear that a key element in why he is there is because he is “a Jew.” Perhaps he should recuse himself from policy making involving Israel as being “a Jew” would not appear to be a United States national interest and is likely to produce irrational responses to developing situations.
If all of this sounds a lot like Ukraine it should, except that in Ukraine the US and NATO are fighting against Russia, which is being demonized for occupying what is claimed Ukrainian territory, whereas in Palestine they are supporting the occupier of actual Palestinian territory, Israel.
Funny thing that, and the word “hypocrisy” comes immediately to mind. As it turns out, however, I am somewhat on the same page as much of the media, agreeing that the Hamas incursion is something like 9/11, though I am sure that my take would not be found acceptable to the CNN Jake Tappers of this world.
My thinking is that Israel knew in advance about 9/11 in the United States due to its extensive spying network and chose not to share the information because it was to their advantage not to do so.
Indeed, a pleased Netanyahu even stated several years later that “9/11 was a good thing because it made the United States join us in our fight.”
That the attacks killed 3,000 Americans did not bother the Israeli government as Israel has a long history of killing Americans when it can benefit from so doing, starting with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 which killed 34 sailors.
So too in this case in Gaza, Netanyahu may have decided to encourage an unexpected development, making it like 9/11, that would enable him to escalate and “mow the grass” as the Israelis put it, in the remainder of Arab Palestine.
And bear in mind thatthe actual incident that triggered the uprising was a rampage involving at least 800 Israeli settlers in and around the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, beating pilgrims and destroying Palestinian shops, all without any interference from the nearby Israeli security forces. The rioting was clearly allowed and even encouraged by the government.
Drawing on my experience as a former on-the-ground intelligence officer, I am somewhat convinced that this was likely more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.
Israel had an extensive electronic and physical wall backed by soldiers and weaponry that completely surrounded Gaza on the landward side, so effective that it was claimed that not even a mouse could get in.
The Mediterranean side of Gaza was also tightly controlled by the Israeli Navy and boats to and from Gaza were completely blocked.
Egypt tightly controlled the southern part of Gaza bordering on the Sinai. So Gaza was under 24/7 complete surveillance and control at all times. Israeli military intelligence also certainly had a network of recruited informants inside Gaza who would report on any training or movements, easy enough to do when you can approach people who are starving and make them an offer they cannot refuse just for providing information on what they see and hear.
And then there was a warning from the Egyptian government to Israel ten days before the Hamas attack, with Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally calling Netanyahu and sharing intelligence suggesting that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation.” Other media accounts reveal how Hamas trained and practiced their maneuvers publicly. There were also assessments made by US intelligence, which were shared with Israel, suggesting that something was afoot. So, given all of the evidence, there likely was no intelligence failure to anticipate and counter the Hamas attack but rather a political decision made by the Israeli government that knew what might be coming and chose to let it proceed to provide a casus belli to destroy Gaza, vowing that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” and then go on from there. And “from there” might well include Lebanon, Syria and Iran, possibly with the assistance of the United States to do the heavy lifting. Iran in particular is already being blamed by the usual suspects as a party involved in the Hamas attack, so far without any evidence whatsoever, which is typical of how these stories evolve.
Image: Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visits Al-Aqsa, 3 January (Social Media)
And Israel has moved far to the right politically to such an extent that it might appreciate a little ethnic cleansing to demonstrate its seriousness. Netanyahu and other senior government officials in his cabinet have recently been making passing references to a “developing security situation” in the country to justify the intensifying of the raids by the army against Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The new government in Israel has also placed police under the control of ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister. He has been exploiting his position to call in particular for a war to destroy Hamas in Gaza, which is precisely what is happening. Gaza might be of particular interest to Ben-Gvir and others as it uniquely shelters an armed and organized resistance in the form of Hamas, which, oddly, was founded with the support of Israel to split the Palestinian political resistance with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.
There is another issue relating to the recent fighting that one would like to know the answer to, namely how did Hamas get its weapons in the first place?
Some were clearly manufactured from parts and scrap but others were sophisticated and, as Gaza is blockaded on all sides, smuggling them in becomes problematical. One argument is that they were supplied by Iran and others to be brought in by tunnels, but the tunnels on two sides would end up in Israel and on the third side in Egypt. The fourth side is the Mediterranean Sea. So how did they arrive? Is there a possible triple or even quadruple cross taking place with different parties lying to each other? And should there be concerns that after the American armada arrives off the coast of Gaza there just might be some kind of false flag incident engineered by Netanyahu that will involve Washington directly in the fighting?
And there is what amounts to a related issue that should be of concern to everyone in the US and generically speaking the “Western world” where human rights are at least nominally respected. The message from almost all Western governments is that Israel has a carte blanche to do whatever it likes even when it involves war crimes to include mass forced displacement or genocide. In this case, the coordinated government-media response which is intended to protect Israel from any criticism almost immediately began circulating fabricated tales of atrocities while also delivering a hit on freedom of speech and association. President Biden, who should be trying to defuse the crisis, is instead adding fuel to the flames, saying of Hamas that “Pure, unadulterated evil has been unleashed on the earth!”
In Florida the arch Zionist stooge Governor Ron Desantis met with Jewish leaders in a synagogue to announce draconian measures against Iran to include sanctions on companies that are in any way linked to that country. One might point out that those businesses have done nothing wrong and Desantis also called for “eradication of Hamas from the earth.” His intellectual depth was at the same time revealed when he said the US should not take in any Gazan refugees because they are “antisemites.”
And in South Carolina, America’s favorite he/she Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a US attack on Iran as well as declaring the war against Hamas to be “a religious war” and urging the Israeli army to invade Gaza and do “Whatever the hell you have to do to” to “level the place.”
And the Europeans are equally spineless in their deference to Israel. The Israeli president declared the that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and not long after that top European Union representatives met with him to offer their unqualified support. Meanwhile in France, the spineless and feckless government of Emmanuel Macron has sought to outlaw any gathering that expresses support for Palestinian rights.
And in the UK, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman has proposed criminalizing any protest against Israeli actions or anything in support of Palestine to include banning any public display of the Palestinian national flag, which she regards as a “criminal offense toward the Jewish community in Britain.”
She has also said that “I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world, and whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence.” Berlin’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has also classified the use of the expression as a “criminal offense.” The manner in which most Western political elites are lining up unquestionably and even enthusiastically behind Israel and its craven leaders’ desire for bloody vengeance is truly shocking but comes as no surprise.
Beyond the issue of Gaza itself, some in Israel are arguing that Netanyahu has personally benefitted from the unrest through the creation of the national unity government which has ended for the time being the huge demonstrations protesting his judicial reform proposals. If all of this comes together politically as it might in the next several weeks, we could be seeing the initial steps in what will develop into the complete ethnic cleansing of what was once Palestine, in line with Netanyahu’s assertion that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel.” So all of the former Palestine is now a land to be defined by its Jewishness where Jews are in full control and are free to do whatever they want without any objection, referred to by the Israeli government as “an exclusive right to self-determination.” And it has all possibly been brought to fruition by the enablement provided by the current developments in Gaza.
The original source of Dr. Giraldi’s October 16, 2023 article.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The following article published twenty years ago, in August 2004 refutes the 9/11 Commission script as to what actually happened on the planes.
Much of this detailed information was based on alleged cell phone conversations between passengers and family members. Yet the technology to use a cell phone on a plane above 8500 feet did not exist in September 2001.
Note: Several of the links to quoted 2001-2004 articles are no longer available. The author has made updates quoting the original sources.
“We Have Some Planes”
The 9/11 Commission’s Report provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.
In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones.According to the Report, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was only recovered in the case of one of the flights (UAL 93).
Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission has built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles”
The Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.
Some of the conversations were with onboard air phones, which contrary to the cell phones provide for good quality transmission. The report does not draw a clear demarcation between the two types of calls.
More significantly, what this carefully drafted script fails to mention is that, given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet:
“Wireless communications networks weren’t designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they’re surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground
Expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry casts serious doubt on “the findings” of the 9/11 Commission. According to Alexa Graf, a spokesman of AT&T, commenting in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks:
“it was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations… From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude”
While serious doubts regarding the cell calls were expressed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a new landmark in the wireless telecom industry has further contributed to upsetting the Commission’s credibility. Within days of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July, American Airlines and Qualcomm, proudly announced the development of a new wireless technology –which will at some future date allow airline passengers using their cell phones to contact family and friends from a commercial aircraft (no doubt at a special rate aerial roaming charge)
“Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, and American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, today [July 14, 2004] successfully demonstrated in-cabin voice communications using commercially available CDMA mobile phones on a commercial American Airlines aircraft. Through the use of an in-cabin third-generation (3G) “picocell” network, passengers on the test flight were able to place and receive calls as if they were on the ground.
The proof-of-concept demonstration flight originated out of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. … Passengers included members of the media and government representatives.
A small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station on the plane, that uses standard cellular communications, was connected to the worldwide terrestrial phone network by an air-to-ground Globalstar satellite link.
The information gathered during this proof-of-concept demonstration flight will be used to further research into the quality, convenience and safety of communications with personal CDMA mobile phones carried by passengers on a commercial aircraft.
“We are pleased to have worked so closely with American Airlines to complete this proof-of-concept demonstration for the in-flight use of 3G CDMA technology,” said Dr. Irwin Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm. “Together, we have anticipated the future needs of wireless subscribers in the airline industry and are aggressively driving the delivery of innovative solutions to meet those needs.”Qualcomm, July 14, 2024
Note The Date: : July 14, 2004 [Almost 3 Years after September 11, 2001]
Needless to say, neither the service, nor the “third generation” hardware, nor the “Piccocell”CDMA base station inside the cabin (which so to speak mimics a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) were available on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The 911 Commission points to the clarity and detail of these telephone conversations. In substance, the Qualcomm July 2004 report quoted above creates yet another embarrassing hitch in the official story.
The untimely American Airlines / Qualcomm announcement acted as a cold shower. Barely acknowledged in press reports, it confirmed that the Bush administration had embroidered the cell phone narrative (similar to what they did with WMDs) and that the 9/11 Commission’s account was either flawed or grossly exaggerated.
The Washington Post: (July 27, 2004) confirms without referring explicitly to 9/11 that:
“Travelers could be talking on their personal cellphones as early as 2006. Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls.”
According to industry experts, the crucial link in wireless cell phone transmission from an aircraft is altitude. Beyond a certain altitude which is usually reached within a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are no longer possible.
In other words, given the wireless technology available on September 11 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude.
The only way passengers could have got through to family and friends using their cell phones, is if the planes were flying below 8000 feet. Yet even at low altitude, below 8000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality.
The crucial question: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed?
While the information provided by the Commission is scanty, the Report’s timeline does not suggest that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. In fact the Report confirms that a fair number of the cell phone calls were placed while the plane was traveling at altitudes above 8000 feet, which is considered as the cutoff altitude for cell phone transmission.
Let us review the timeline of these calls in relation to the information provided by the Report on flight paths and altitude.
United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 175 departed for Los Angeles at 8:00:
“It pushed back from its gate at 7:58 and departed Logan Airport at 8:14.”
The Report confirms that by 8:33, “it had reached its assigned cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.” According to the Report, it maintained this cruising altitude until 8.51, when it “deviated from its assigned altitude”:
“The first operational evidence that something was abnormal on United 175 came at 8:47, when the aircraft changed beacon codes twice within a minute. At 8:51, the flight deviated from its assigned altitude, and a minute later New York air traffic controllers began repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to contact it.”
And one minute later at 8.52, Lee Hanson receives a call from his son Peter.
[Flight UAL 175] “At 8:52, in Easton, Connecticut, a man named Lee Hanson received a phone call from his son Peter, a passenger on United 175. His son told him: “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit—An attendant has been stabbed— and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines—Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to LA.
Press reports confirm that Peter Hanson was using his cell (i.e it was not an air phone). Unless the plane had suddenly nose-dived, the plane was still at high altitude at 8.52. (Moreover, Hanson’s call could have been initiated at least a minute prior to his father Lee Hanson picking up the phone.)
Another call was received at 8.52 (one minute after it deviated from its assigned altitude of 31,000 feet). The Report does not say whether this is an air phone or a cell phone call:
Also at 8:52, a male flight attendant called a United office in San Francisco, reaching Marc Policastro. The flight attendant reported that the flight had been hijacked, both pilots had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and the hijackers were probably flying the plane. The call lasted about two minutes, after which Policastro and a colleague tried unsuccessfully to contact the flight.
It is not clear whether this was a call to Policastro’s cell phone or to the UAL switchboard.
At 8:58, UAL 175 “took a heading toward New York City.”:
“At 8:59, Flight 175 passenger Brian David Sweeney tried to call his wife, Julie. He left a message on their home answering machine that the plane had been hijacked. He then called his mother, Louise Sweeney, told her the flight had been hijacked, and added that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers.
At 9:00, Lee Hanson received a second call from his son Peter:
It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed—They seem to have knives and Mace—They said they have a bomb—It’s getting very bad on the plane—Passengers are throwing up and getting sick—The plane is making jerky movements—I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane—I think we are going down—I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building—Don’t worry, Dad— If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.
The call ended abruptly. Lee Hanson had heard a woman scream just before it cut off. He turned on a television, and in her home so did Louise Sweeney. Both then saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.50 At 9:03:11, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. All on board, along with an unknown number of people in the tower, were killed instantly.”
American Airlines Flight 77
American Airlines Flight 77 was scheduled to depart from Washington Dulles for Los Angeles at 8:10… “At 8:46, the flight reached its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.”
At 8:51, American 77 transmitted its last routine radio communication. The hijacking began between 8:51 and 8:54. As on American 11 and United 175, the hijackers used knives (reported by one passenger) and moved all the passengers (and possibly crew) to the rear of the aircraft (reported by one flight attendant and one passenger). Unlike the earlier flights, the Flight 77 hijackers were reported by a passenger to have box cutters. Finally, a passenger reported that an announcement had been made by the “pilot” that the plane had been hijacked….
On flight AA 77, which allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, the transponder was turned off at 8:56am; the recorded altitude at the time the transponder was turned off is not mentioned. According to the Commission’s Report, cell calls started 16 minutes later, at 9:12am, twenty minutes before it (allegedly) crashed into the Pentagon at 9.32am:
” [at 9.12] Renee May called her mother, Nancy May, in Las Vegas. She said her flight was being hijacked by six individuals who had moved them to the rear of the plane.”
According to the Report, when the autopilot was disengaged at 9:29am, the aircraft was at 7,000 feet and some 38 miles west of the Pentagon. This happened two minutes before the crash.
Most of the calls on Flight 77 were placed between 9.12am and 9.26am, prior to the disengagement of automatic piloting at 9.29am. The plane could indeed have been traveling at either a higher or a lower altitude to that reached at 9.29. Yet, at the same time there is no indication in the Report that the plane had been traveling below the 7000 feet level, which it reached at 9.29am.
At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Barbara Olson called her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. [using an airphone]
UAL flight 93 was the only one of the four planes that, according to the official story, did not crash into a building. Flight 93 passengers, apparently:”alerted through phone calls, attempted to subdue the hijackers. and the hijackers crashed the plane [in Pennsylvania] to prevent the passengers gaining control.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_flight_93 ). Another version of events, was that UAL 93 was shot down.
According to the Commission’s account:
“the first 46 minutes of Flight 93’s cross-country trip proceeded routinely. Radio communications from the plane were normal. Heading, speed, and altitude ran according to plan. At 9:24, Ballinger’s warning to United 93 was received in the cockpit. Within two minutes, at 9:26, the pilot, Jason Dahl, responded with a note of puzzlement: “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”70 The hijackers attacked at 9:28. While traveling 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio, United 93 suddenly dropped 700 feet. Eleven seconds into the descent, the FAA’s air traffic control center in Cleveland received the first of two radio transmissions from the aircraft….”
At least ten cell calls are reported to have taken place on flight 93.
The Report confirms that passengers started placing calls with cell and air phones shortly after 9.32am, four minutes after the Report’s confirmation of the plane’s attitude of 35,000 feet. In other words, the calls started some 9 minutes before the Cleveland Center lost UAL 93’s transponder signal (9.41) and approximately 30 minutes before the crash in Pennsylvania (10.03)
“At 9:41, Cleveland Center lost United 93’s transponder signal. The controller located it on primary radar, matched its position with visual sightings from other aircraft, and tracked the flight as it turned east, then south.164 “
This suggests that the altitude was known to air traffic control up until the time when the transponder signal was lost by the Cleveland Center. (Radar and visual sightings provided information on its flight path from 9.41 to 10.03.)
Moreover, there was no indication from the Report that the aircraft had swooped down to a lower level of altitude, apart from the 700 feet drop recorded at 9.28. from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet:
“At 9:32, a hijacker, probably Jarrah, made or attempted to make the following announcement to the passengers of Flight 93:“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting.
We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” The flight data recorder (also recovered) indicates that Jarrah then instructed the plane’s autopilot to turn the aircraft around and head east. The cockpit voice recorder data indicate that a woman, most likely a flight attendant, was being held captive in the cockpit. She struggled with one of the hijackers who killed or otherwise silenced her.
Shortly thereafter, the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones. These calls between family, friends, and colleagues took place until the end of the flight and provided those on the ground with firsthand accounts. They enabled the passengers to gain critical information, including the news that two aircraft had slammed into the World Trade Center.77…At least two callers from the flight reported that the hijackers knew that passengers were making calls but did not seem to care.
The hijackers were wearing red bandanas, and they forced the passengers to the back of the aircraft.80 Callers reported that a passenger had been stabbed and that two people were lying on the floor of the cabin, injured or dead—possibly the captain and first officer. One caller reported that a flight attendant had been killed.81 One of the callers from United 93 also reported that he thought the hijackers might possess a gun. But none of the other callers reported the presence of a firearm. One recipient of a call from the aircraft recounted specifically asking her caller whether the hijackers had guns.
The passenger replied that he did not see one. No evidence of firearms or of their identifiable remains was found at the aircraft’s crash site, and the cockpit voice recorder gives no indication of a gun being fired or mentioned at any time.
We believe that if the hijackers had possessed a gun, they would have used it in the flight’s last minutes as the passengers fought back.82 Passengers on three flights reported the hijackers’ claim of having a bomb. The FBI told us they found no trace of explosives at the crash sites. One of the passengers who mentioned a bomb expressed his belief that it was not real. Lacking any evidence that the hijackers attempted to smuggle such illegal items past the security screening checkpoints, we believe the bombs were probably fake. During at least five of the passengers’ phone calls, information was shared about the attacks that had occurred earlier that morning at the World Trade Center. Five calls described the intent of passengers and surviving crew members to revolt against the hijackers. According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted. At 9:57, the passenger assault began. Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones in order to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows:
“Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door. Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din.
We cannot identify whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained. In response, Jarrah immediately began to roll the airplane to the left and right, attempting to knock the passengers off balance. At 9:58:57, Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door. Jarrah continued to roll the airplane sharply left and right, but the assault continued. At 9:59, Jarrah changed tactics and pitched the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. The recorder captured the sounds of loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates.
At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the airplane. Five seconds later, Jarrah asked, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” A hijacker responded, “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.” The sounds of fighting continued outside the cockpit. Again, Jarrah pitched the nose of the aircraft up and down.At 10:00:26, a passenger in the background said, “In the cockpit. If we dont we’ll die!” Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled,“Roll it!” Jarrah stopped the violent maneuvers at about 10:01:00 and said, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!” He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit,“ Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” to which the other replied, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” The passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:23, a hijacker said, “Pull it down! Pull it down!” The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them. The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right.
The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest. ”With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington D.C. Jarrah’s objective was to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House. He was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United”
The Mysterious Call of Edward Felt from UAL 93
Earlier coverage of the fate of UAL 93 was based in part on a reported cell call from a passenger named Edward Felt, who managed to reach an emergency official in Pennsylvania. How he got the emergency supervisor’s number and managed to reach him remains unclear.
The call was apparently received at 9.58 am, eight minutes before the reported time of the crash at 10.06 am in Pennsylvania:
“Local emergency officials said they received a cell phone call at 9.58 am from a man who said he was a passenger aboard the flight. The man said he had locked himself in the bathroom and told emergency dispatchers that the plane had been hijacked. “We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” he was quoted as saying. A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane had been stabbed. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey.”
The alleged call by Edward Felt from the toilet of the aircraft of UAL 93 was answered by Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor in Pennsylvania who took the call.
It is worth noting that Glenn Cramer was subsequently gagged by the FBI.” (See Robert Wallace`s incisive analysis published in Sept 2002 by the Daily Mirror, (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/WAL403A.html ).
Ironically, this high profile cell call by Ed Felt, which would have provided crucial evidence to the 9/11 Commission was, for some reason, not mentioned in the Report.
American Airlines Flight 11
Flight 11 took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14. The Report outlines an airphone conversation of flight attendant Betty Ong and much of the narrative hinges upon this airphone conversation
There are no clear-cut reports on the use of cell phones on Flight AA11. According to the Report, American 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46.
Concluding Remarks
A large part of the description, regarding the 19 hijackers relies on cell phone conversations with family and friends.
While a few of these calls (placed at low altitude) could have got through, the wireless technology was not available. On this issue, expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry is unequivocal.
In other words, at least part of the Commission’s script in Chapter 1 on the cell phone conversations, is fabricated.
According to the American Airline / Qualcomm [2004] announcement, the technology for cell phone transmission at high altitude will only be available aboard commercial aircraft in 2006. This is an inescapable fact.
In the eyes of public opinion, the cell phone conversations on the Arab hijackers is needed to sustain the illusion that America is under attack.
The “war on terrorism” underlying the National Security doctrine relies on real time “evidence” concerning the Arab hijackers. The latter personify, so to speak, this illusive “outside enemy” (Al Qaeda), which is threatening the homeland.
Embodied into the Commission’s “script” of 911, the narrative of what happened on the plane with the Arab hijackers is therefore crucial. It is an integral part of the Administration’s disinformation and propaganda program. It constitutes a justification for the anti-terror legislation under the Patriot acts and the waging of America’s pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 9/11 Report’s Footnotes on the Cell Phone Conversations
70. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; Commission review of Aircraft Communication and Reporting System (ACARS) messages sent to and from Flight 93 (which indicate time of message transmission and receipt); see UAL record, Ed Ballinger ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001. At 9:22, after learning of the events at the World Trade Center, Melody Homer, the wife of co-pilot Leroy Homer, had an ACARS message sent to her husband in the cockpit asking if he was okay. See UAL record,ACARS message, Sept. 11, 2001.
71. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; FAA report,“Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001,” Sept. 17, 2001; NTSB report, Air Traffic Control Recording—United Airlines Flight 93, Dec. 21, 2001.
72.The 37 passengers represented a load factor of 20.33 percent of the plane’s seating capacity of 182, considerably below the 52.09 percent for Flight 93 on Tuesdays in the three-month period prior to September 11 (June 11–September 4, 2001). See UAL report, Flight 93 EWR-SFO load factors, undated. Five passengers holding reservations for Flight 93 did not show for the flight.All five were interviewed and cleared by the FBI. FBI report,“Flight #93 ‘No Show’ Passengers from 9/11/01,” Sept. 18, 2001.
73. INS record,Withdrawal of Application for Admission for Mohamed al Kahtani,Aug. 4, 2001.
74. See FAA regulations,Admission to flight deck, 14 C.F.R. § 121.547 (2001);UAL records, copies of boarding passes for United 93, Sept. 11,2001.One passenger reported that ten first-class passengers were aboard the flight. If that number is accurate, it would include the four hijackers. FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001;UAL record, Flight 93 passenger manifest, Sept. 11, 2001.All but one of the six passengers seated in the first-class cabin communicated with the ground during the flight, and none mentioned anyone from their cabin having gone into the cockpit before the hijacking.Moreover, it is unlikely that the highly regarded and experienced pilot and co-pilot of Flight 93 would have allowed an observer into the cockpit before or after takeoff who had not obtained the proper permission. See UAL records, personnel files of Flight 93 pilots. For jumpseat information, see UAL record,Weight and Balance Information for Flight 93 and Flight 175, Sept. 11, 2001;AAL records, Dispatch Environmental Control/Weekly Flight Summary for Flight 11 and Flight 77, Sept. 11, 2001.
75. Like Atta on Flight 11, Jarrah apparently did not know how to operate the communication radios; thus his attempts to communicate with the passengers were broadcast on the ATC channel. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.Also, by 9:32 FAA notified United’s headquarters that the flight was not responding to radio calls.According to United, the flight’s nonresponse and its turn to the east led the airline to believe by 9:36 that the plane was hijacked. See Rich Miles interview (Nov. 21, 2003); UAL report, “United dispatch SMFDO activities—terrorist crisis,” Sept. 11, 2001.
76. In accordance with FAA regulations, United 93’s cockpit voice recorder recorded the last 31 minutes of sounds from the cockpit via microphones in the pilots’ headsets, as well as in the overhead panel of the flight deck. This is the only recorder from the four hijacked airplanes to survive the impact and ensuing fire.The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found,and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,”Dec. 4, 2003; see also FAA regulations, 14 C.F.R. §§ 25.1457, 91.609, 91.1045, 121.359; Flight 93 CVR data. A transcript of the CVR recording was prepared by the NTSB and the FBI.
77. All calls placed on airphones were from the rear of the aircraft. There was one airphone installed in each row of seats on both sides of the aisle.The airphone system was capable of transmitting only eight calls at any one time. See FBI report of investigation, airphone records for flights UAL 93 and UAL 175 on Sept. 11, 2001, Sept. 18, 2001.
78.FAA audio file, Cleveland Center, position Lorain Radar; Flight 93 CVR data; FBI report, “CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.
79. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Sept. 11, 2001, through June 11, 2002; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Sandy Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001, through Oct. 4, 2001.Text messages warning the cockpit of Flight 93 were sent to the aircraft by Ed Ballinger at 9:24. See UAL record, Ed Ballinger’s ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001.
80.We have relied mainly on the record of FBI interviews with the people who received calls. The FBI interviews were conducted while memories were still fresh and were less likely to have been affected by reading the accounts of others or hearing stories in the media. In some cases we have conducted our own interviews to supplement or verify the record. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham,Sandy Bradshaw,Marion Britton,Thomas Burnett, Joseph DeLuca,Edward Felt, Jeremy Glick,Lauren Grandcolas, Linda Gronlund, CeeCee Lyles, Honor Wainio.
81. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Thomas Burnett, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Marion Britton, Sept. 14, 2001, through Nov. 8, 2001; Lisa Jefferson interview (May 11, 2004); FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001; Richard Belme interview (Nov. 21, 2003).
82. See Jere Longman, Among the Heroes—United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (Harper-Collins, 2002), p. 107; Deena Burnett interview (Apr. 26, 2004); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001; Lyzbeth Glick interview (Apr. 22, 2004). Experts told us that a gunshot would definitely be audible on the CVR. The FBI found no evidence of a firearm at the crash site of Flight 93. See FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11).The FBI collected 14 knives or portions of knives at the Flight 93 crash site. FBI report, “Knives Found at the UA Flight 93 Crash Site,” undated.
83. FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001.
84. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93.
85. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93. For quote, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Philip Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001; Philip Bradshaw interview (June 15, 2004); Flight 93 FDR and CVR data.At 9:55:11 Jarrah dialed in the VHF Omni-directional Range (VOR) frequency for the VOR navigational aid at Washington Reagan National Airport, further indicating that the attack was planned for the nation’s capital.
Kiev já não esconde o seu desespero para ser autorizado a atacar alvos na “Rússia profunda”. Depois de vários pedidos falhados de autorização por parte dos EUA, o regime pediu às autoridades britânicas que apoiassem a sua exigência, alegando que a medida é necessária para que a Ucrânia alcance os seus objectivos estratégicos na guerra. Londres não está em posição de autorizar ou não tais ataques sem consenso prévio com os americanos, mas a sede por uma escalada de tensões faz com que Kiev aja de forma irracional.
O primeiro-ministro ucraniano, Denis Shmyhal, pediu ao secretário dos Negócios Estrangeiros do Reino Unido, David Lammy, que apoiasse a exigência da Ucrânia de usar mísseis de longo alcance contra a Rússia. Lammy estava em visita oficial a Kiev juntamente com Antony Blinken. Alguns analistas ocidentais esperavam que a viagem de Blinken visasse precisamente anunciar uma autorização pública para estes ataques, mas nenhuma mudança na posição americana foi declarada até agora.
Durante uma reunião com o oficial britânico, Shmyhal disse:
“Nós [ucranianos] esperamos que o equipamento de longo alcance para ataques no território do nosso inimigo seja alcançado. Esperamos sua ajuda e apoio nesta questão.”
Lammy parecia desconfortável com o pedido, pois as palavras soavam como uma clara tentativa de criar um “lobby” e pressionar os EUA a aceitarem as exigências da Ucrânia. Lammy evitou dar uma resposta conclusiva sobre o assunto, mas um dia antes do encontro com Shmyhal já havia deixado claro que decisões estratégicas não seriam anunciadas na viagem.
“É extremamente importante que nós (Lammy e Blinken) viajemos juntos para ouvir dos nossos homólogos ucranianos e do Presidente Zelensky a sua avaliação da situação no terreno e das suas necessidades (…) Seria, no entanto, bastante errado comentar os detalhes das questões operacionais num fórum como este, porque a única pessoa que poderia beneficiar é Putin, e não faremos nada para lhe dar qualquer vantagem na sua invasão ilegal”, disse Lammy.
Na mesma linha, Blinken confirmou que o objetivo da viagem é apenas ouvir as exigências e necessidades ucranianas, sem tomar qualquer decisão no momento. Ele disse que tudo o que for discutido durante a viagem será relatado aos governos americano e britânico após o final da expedição, e qualquer possível decisão será tomada apenas posteriormente – o que implica que qualquer esforço ucraniano de “autorização” é inútil para agora.
“Um dos objetivos da viagem que faremos juntos é ouvir diretamente da liderança ucraniana, incluindo o presidente Zelensky, sobre como exatamente os ucranianos veem as suas necessidades neste momento, quais os objetivos e o que podemos fazer para apoiar essas necessidades (..) Tudo o que posso dizer é que ouviremos atentamente os nossos parceiros ucranianos, ambos apresentaremos relatórios ao primeiro-ministro e ao presidente Biden nos próximos dias, e prevejo plenamente que isto é algo que eles abordarão quando nos encontrarmos na sexta-feira”, disse Blinken.
Entretanto, Londres parece disposta a mudar o foco das exigências da Ucrânia. O Reino Unido anunciou novas sanções contra navios que supostamente trabalham para contornar o embargo ao petróleo russo. Lammy comentou a medida durante a sua visita a Kiev, descrevendo-a como uma espécie de vitória estratégica para o lado ucraniano ocidental. Ele disse que as sanções poderiam infligir sérios danos à economia russa, dificultando assim os seus esforços militares. Lammy parece simplesmente querer que Kiev veja tais medidas “moderadas” como “suficientes” e pare de pedir políticas militares crescentes.
“A Rússia foi forçada a gastar mais de oito mil milhões de dólares (6 mil milhões de libras) para acumular esta frota. Mas com os petroleiros sancionados ociosos e incapazes de carregar petróleo, estamos determinados a fazer do investimento de Putin um passo em falso dispendioso para o Kremlin”, acrescentou Lammy.
Alguns analistas acreditam que Blinken e Lammy “autorizaram” secretamente os ataques profundos durante a viagem. Não há provas que apoiem esta afirmação até agora, mas seria uma medida suicida das potências ocidentais. Se Kiev começar a lançar tais ataques a partir de agora, Moscou terá a certeza de que tal autorização foi dada. Neste cenário, a Rússia seria forçada a responder de forma incisiva, o que resultaria numa escalada generalizada de violência.
Washington e Londres querem, sem dúvida, a guerra, mas não querem ser alvo de uma ação retaliatória da Rússia, uma vez que nenhum dos lados beneficiaria de uma guerra aberta ou nuclear. Se Kiev utilizar estas armas contra o território russo profundo, os EUA e o Reino Unido alegarão muito provavelmente que não deram qualquer autorização, deixando o regime ucraniano assumir sozinho a responsabilidade.
Pedir ajuda a Londres é inútil, uma vez que os britânicos nunca tomariam uma decisão sem comunicação prévia com os EUA. Londres e Washington atuam juntas em todos os seus movimentos. O desespero de Kiev para gerar a escalada e a internacionalização está a impedir que as autoridades ucranianas percebam que não há sentido estratégico nas suas ações. “Pressionar” os seus patrões internacionais é um esforço inútil, uma vez que a Ucrânia, como agente por procuração, deve seguir ordens e não exigir nada.
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For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2023 Covid crisis.
Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”.
Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.
In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”.
Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more.
In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that
“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”
The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
…
Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.
Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.
“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. …
Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.(Sunday Times)
Shrinking The World’s Population
The media reports on the May 5, 2009 secret gathering focussed on the commitment of “The Good Club” to “slowing down” the growth of the World’s population.
“Shrink the World Population” (the WSJ Title) goes far beyond Planned Parenthood which consists in “Reducing the Growth of World Population”. It consists in “Depopulation”, namely reducing the absolute size of the World’s Population, which ultimately requires reducing the rate of birth (which would include reduced fertility) coupled with a significant increase in the death rate.
Secret Meeting: At the Height of the H1N1 Pandemic
On April 25, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) headed by Margaret Chan declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). And a couple of weeks later, the “Good Club” met in NYC at the height of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic which turned out to be a scam.
It is also worth noting that at very outset of the H1N1 crisis in April 2009, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London was advising Bill Gates and the WHO: “40 per cent of people in the UK could be infected [with H1N1] within the next six months if the country was hit by a pandemic.”
Sounds familiar? That was the same Neil Ferguson (generously supported by the Gates Foundation) who designed the coronavirus Lockdown Model (launched on March 11, 2020). As we recall, that March 2020 mathematical model was based on “predictions” of 600,000 deaths in the UK.
And now (Summer- Autumn 2021) a third authoritative “mathematical model” by the same “scientist” (Ferguson) was formulated to justify a “Fourth Wave Lockdown”.
Saving Lives to Achieve “Depopulation”
Was an absolute “reduction”in World population contemplated at that May 2009 secret meeting?
A few months later, Bill Gates in his TED presentation (February 2010) pertaining to vaccination, confirmed the following;
“And if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [the world population] by 10 or 15 percent”.
According to Gates’ statement, this would represent an absolute reduction of the World’s population (2010) of the order of 680 million to 1.02 billion.
(See quotation on Video starting at 04.21. See also screenshot of Transcript of quotation)
The same group of billionaires who met at the May 2009 secret venue at the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, have been actively involved from the outset of the Covid crisis in designing the lockdown policies applied Worldwide including the mRNA vaccine and the WEF’s “Great Reset”.
The mRNA vaccine is not a project of a UN intergovernmental body (WHO) on behalf the member states of the UN: It’s a private initiative. The billionaire elites who fund and enforce the Covid Vaccine Project Worldwide are Eugenists committed to Depopulation.
And while Washington DC is “perfecting” technologies it doesn’t have (remember, because the evil Russians stole them), the Kremlin is putting its very real hypersonic weapons to good use. Continuing months of unprecedented kill streaks with its long-range strike systems, Russia just obliterated hundreds of NATO personnel in Ukraine, forcing the world’s most vile racketeering cartel to send dozens of aircraft to Poland and Romania.
However, even the mainstream propaganda machine had to admit that the Kremlin targeted military assets. However, they still tried hiding the fact these were NATO personnel, calling them “cadets of the Poltava Institute of Military Communications in what marks a first in terms of targeting such a large gathering of soon to be commissioned officers”. Kiev keeps pushing a sob story about “classes and teaching underway at the military academy” when two 9M723 hypersonic missiles used by the “Iskander-M” struck. Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko lamented that “the cadets” had only two minutes to leave the building, saying that it’s impossible to escape from “the sixth floor of some building and you need to run downstairs”. I’ve already covered the topic of just how little time a group of soldiers would have to leave a building after a hypersonic weapon such as the 3M22 “Zircon” is fired.
Some sources are claiming the missile strike wiped out at least 700 troops, nearly all of whom were specialists in ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and EW (electronic warfare). Reports indicate that many of the neutralized NATO personnel were Swedes, sent to train Ukrainian personnel to use the Saab 340 AEW&C (Airborne Early Warning & Control) aircraft, two of which were promised by Stockholm and are supposed to be delivered in the near future.
Interestingly, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom resigned in the immediate aftermath of the strike and announced that he’s retiring from politics. The two events aren’t necessarily related, but the timing is quite peculiar. However, that wasn’t the end of NATO’s troubles in Ukraine, as Russian hypersonic weapons continued raining down on other military targets in the country, particularly those with high concentration of foreign troops.
Namely, another Russian long-range precision strike targeted Lvov in Western Ukraine. The city is the capital of the homonymous oblast (region). A lot of critical military facilities are located in the area, including the infamous Yavoriv training camp, notorious for accommodating various Neo-Nazi units and foreign mercenaries, as well as NATO personnel.
The Russian military reported that the 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” missile systems armed with the 9-S-7760 air-launched hypersonic missiles were used in the strike. Poland said it scrambled fighter jets because the area is quite close to its border. According to Reuters, “Polish and allied aircraft were scrambled for the third time in eight days to closely monitor the inbound projectiles, and were ready to intercept them in the event the missiles approached Polish airspace”. However, there’s nothing they could really do against hypersonic missiles.
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This digital enslavement package will be adopted under almost complete exclusion of the public, of people like you and me. Most parliaments and governments worldwide have apparently already agreed to it, so that the presentation and the so-called discussion during the UN Annual Conference is a sheer fig leaf, a mere farce.
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts on September 10, 2001 were confirmed by a CBS News Report. Osama had been hospitalized on September 10th, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks. How on earth could he have coordinated the attacks from his hospital bed in a heavily guarded Pakistani military hospital located in Rawalpindi?
The main obstacle to a ceasefire in Gaza is not Israel or Hamas. It’s the United States. Here’s what you need to know: The Security Council approved the Biden-authored ceasefire deal on June 10, 2024.
I cannot say how close we are to midnight on the nuclear war watch. But a Third World War fought at least initially with conventional weapons is now just days, at most weeks away.
In early 2023, a private conference with pharmaceutical industry leaders and investors highlighted anti-obesity and Alzheimer’s drugs as the next big money-makers and had the FDA head as its keynote speaker.
The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile was ultimately to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. The latter, in the case of Chile, was not imposed by external creditors under the guidance of the IMF. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military coup.
For around a month, the political West has been threatening Iran with “swift and severe consequences” if it delivers any surface-to-surface missiles to Russia. There have been various reports about Iranian short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) supposedly on their way to Moscow, including the likes of “Fath-360”, “Fateh-110” and “Zolfaghar”.
Some sources, such as the Duran, report that Iranian parliamentarians have confirmed that the deal is already ongoing, although there’s no official confirmation on the exact types of missiles that are being delivered. However, EU/NATO seem to be particularly concerned by this prospect. Tehran has been quite successful in developing a plethora of ballistic missiles, ranging from SRBMs to IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles), providing the country with a coverage that goes beyond the Middle East.
What’s more, top-ranking US officials are sending somewhat mixed signals about giving the Kiev regime the right to hit targets deeper within Russia, with President Joe Bidensaying that he’s “working on it”, while Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Volodymyr Zelensky that these long-range strikes “won’t be game changers”. Either way, the political West’s endless hypocrisy is glaringly obvious once again.
On the other hand, the question arises, why is Russia even acquiring missiles from Iran? It’s a well-known fact that Moscow is wholly unsurpassed in top-notch missile systems, be it in range, speed, maneuverability, etc. However, since the INF Treaty limitations were imposed in 1987, the Kremlin eliminated the vast majority of its unprecedented arsenal of missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km. After the United States unilaterally withdrew from the said treaty in 2019, both countries started working on the reintroduction of these weapons. However, this is a long-term process that will take years, while Russia needs more affordable equivalents to fill the gap now. In decades after the (First) Cold War, its only new SRBM system was the “Iskander”. Albeit unrivaled among land-based platforms, particularly with its 9M723 hypersonic missile, it’s somewhat costly.
This means that the “Iskander-M” system is generally reserved for high-priority targets, while it’s also likely that the Russian military is stocking up for a possible confrontation with NATO. However, there’s a growing need for more affordable massed tactical and operational level strikes. Numerous reports indicate that North Korean missiles are already being used in this capacity, specifically the KN-23 (officially the “Hwasong-11Ga”, but more popularly known as the “Kimskander”). However, although cheaper than the 9M723, this missile is still more expensive than Iranian SRBMs which fill a very important niche role at ranges below 300 km (or 500 in the case of “Zolfaghar”). Combined with Russian ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets and improved guidance systems, these could be far deadlier than in Iranian service.
Moscow and Tehran already have a very successful military cooperation, particularly when it comes to drones. The most prominent of these are certainly the “Shahed-131” and “Shahed-136”, better known as “Geranium-1” and “Geranium-2” in Russian service. These unmanned systems provide the Kremlin with a robust and cost-effective alternative to its advanced cruise missiles, allowing for massed saturation strikes across the entire territory under the Kiev regime’s control.
In addition, there’s an important economic aspect of Russian-Iranian cooperation, as these deals usually boil down to barter trade, thus eliminating the US dollar as a financial medium between the two countries. Moscow is also providing Tehran with top-notch aircraft such as the Su-35, a critically important segment in the much-needed modernization of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF).
These deals between the Kremlin and Tehran are particularly frustrating to the political West, as they’re completely incapable of stopping or at least disrupting them. This cooperation also exposes the Neo-Nazi junta’s absurd lies about their alleged “success in shooting down” Russian missiles. Namely, the illogic of their claims was already apparent, but it’s even more obvious when it comes to Iranian missiles, as these are less advanced, but there’s still panic in both Kiev and Brussels that they’re coming to Russia. Had the junta really been so successful in downing Moscow’s missiles, it wouldn’t even bat an eye over Tehran’s. However, it’s quite usual for the political West and its vassals and satellite states to be completely delusional and hypocritical. The US is crying foul because its adversaries are working together while it’s threatening all of them simultaneously.
It should also be noted that NATO is terrified of the prospect of Russia getting even more precision strike options. Namely, Moscow has been very successful in obliterating the personnel of the world’s most vile racketeering cartel all across NATO-occupied Ukraine, so the Russian military having more (and cheaper) missiles for this purpose is surely sounding many alarms.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Two IRGC missiles, Dezful (missile) front and Zolfagar Basir missile rear, on a Zulfaqar missile launcher, at an IRGC Air Force exhibition in Tehran. (By M. Sadegh Nikgostar / Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
When the special military operation (SMO) was launched to end the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin was very clear about the direct involvement of any third parties.
This has prevented the political West from taking direct action in support of the Kiev regime, but it still didn’t prevent it from doing everything else in its power to avert the complete defeat of the puppets in Kiev. In fact, they even sent former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to sabotage the already signed peace deal that would’ve ended the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict a couple of weeks after the SMO started.
Perhaps the political West is trying to use these sorts of intentionally misleading and contradictory statements as a Pilatian way to avoid responsibility for any escalation. However, President Putin just made it very clear that such a strategy is futile and that NATO will be held accountable. Namely, in a short interview with Russian state media, he actually said there will be a direct response.
“What we are seeing is an attempt to use a straw man argument. Because this is not a question of whether the Kiev regime is allowed or not allowed to strike targets on Russian territory. It is already carrying out strikes using unmanned aerial vehicles and other means.But using Western-made long-range precision weapons is a completely different story,” Putin said, adding: “The fact is that – I have mentioned this, and any expert, both in our country and in the West, will confirm this – the Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West. They cannot do that. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from satellites which Ukraine does not have. This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or US satellites – in general, NATO satellites. This is the first point.”
“The second point – perhaps the most important, the key point even – is that only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. Therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is about deciding whether NATO countries become directly involved in the military conflict or not,” he continued and concluded: “If this decision is made, it will mean nothing short of direct involvement – it will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are parties to the war in Ukraine. This will mean their direct involvement in the conflict, and it will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically. This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
⚡️The use of Western high-precision long-range weapons against Russia will mean direct participation of NATO countries in military operations in Ukraine — Putin
The Ukrainian army cannot strike with modern Western-made high-precision long-range systems, said President Vladimir… pic.twitter.com/0kKBAzsbw7
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I cannot say how close we are to midnight on the nuclear war watch. But a Third World War fought at least initially with conventional weapons is now just days, at most weeks away.
I look at what my peers are saying on the most watched youtube channels, and they seem comforted that the Ukraine war is unsustainable for Zelensky’s army given the ongoing massacre of the forces they deployed in their Kursk gambit, today said to be over 10,000 men dead or grievously wounded.
Meanwhile the Russian offensive in Donbass is reported both by Russians and by Western media to be accelerating, with more towns being captured each day and the number of square kilometers of Ukrainian territory ‘liberated’ there in the past month already roughly matching the 1,000 that Ukrainian elite forces captured in Russia’s Kursk oblast over the same period.
Of course, these two conquests are incomparable: the Ukrainians have a tenuous hold on land they cannot fortify so as to keep given that their supply lines from the border are under constant deadly attack from the air and from Russian artillery, whereas the Russian advance along the Donbass battle lines is pulverizing long standing Ukrainian fortified positions and is about to totally disrupt the logistics that permit the Ukrainian forces to stay in the Donbass.
These same peers have highlighted the destruction of Ukraine’s best present and future cadres in electronic warfare by Russia’s missile strike this past week on the military communications institute in Poltava which is today said to have killed 700 Ukrainian and NATO personnel.
However, this seeming turning point in Russia’s favor is, as we speak, setting the stage for one further absolutely desperate and reckless act by the Biden administration to deprive Russia of its well earned victory by escalating the conflict to a world war.
What I have in mind is the near certainty that the United States and Britain have just agreed to give the Zelensky regime permission to use the long-range missiles which have been delivered to Ukraine,certainly including Storm Shadow and likely also the 1500 km range stealth missile known as JASSM to strike deep into the Russian heartland, and so ‘to bring the war to Russia’ as the Zelensky gang put it.
That is the sense of the trip this week by Secretary of State Blinken to Kiev and of the visit to the White House on Friday by British Prime Minister Starmer.
Collective Biden is doing this in the full knowledge that the Russians have issued direct threats of attack on the United States and other countries involved in strikes on its heartland using such Western supplied and directed weapons. However patient and averse to a hot war with NATO President Putin may be, he will have no choice but to rise to the challenge.
Meanwhile, peers who know a great deal about current affairs in the Middle East, in particular former British diplomat Alastair Crooke, have in their latest interviews on youtube said flatly that the United States has given Israel the go-ahead to launch a full-blown war on Lebanon. The nod from Washington was expressed by the reminder to Netanyahu that the aircraft carriers and other U.S. vessels now stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean cannot remain there indefinitely, so if he has something to do, he should proceed without delay.
Hence the Israeli prime minister’s public directive to the IDF a day ago to move on Lebanon. Should this happen, the tinderbox that is the Middle East today may well catch fire. The interested parties in countering the atrocities that Israel has been committing in Gaza and most recently also in the West Bank now take in even very moderate and restrained Jordan, as well as Turkey and Egypt. Of course; it will be very difficult for Iran to stay out of the conflict, which in one way or another will also bring in Iran’s newly declared strategic partner or ally, Russia.
In this way a presently localized conflict in the Middle East can in a flash become a regional war that in a further flash becomes a second front to the war between the United States and Russia which I foretold above when speaking about Ukraine.
These considerations of what may well happen in the immediate days ahead cannot bring joy to anyone. There will be no победа (victory) or слава (glory) for any of the parties to the coming conflagration. Only massive destruction and loss of life.
[Collective Biden is the term which Russian talk show hosts have applied to the US leadership given that the presidency assumed a collective form when the physical Joe Biden slipped into deep senility this past couple of years.]
*
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[originally published by Global Research in September 2009]
At 5:21 in the afternoon of 9/11, almost seven hours after the Twin Towers had come down, Building 7 of the World Trade Center also came down. The collapse of this building was from the beginning considered a mystery. [1]
The same should have been true, to be sure, of the collapse of the Twin Towers. But they had been hit by planes, which had ignited big fires in them, and many people assumed this combination of causes to be sufficient to explain why they came down.
But WTC 7 had not been hit by a plane, so it was apparently the first steel-framed high-rise building in the known universe to have collapsed because of fire alone. New York Times writer James Glanz quoted a structural engineer as saying: “[W]ithin the structural engineering community, [WTC 7] is considered to be much more important to understand [than the Twin Towers],” because engineers had no answer to the question, “why did 7 come down?” [2]
From a purely scientific perspective, of course, there would have been an obvious answer. Scientists, presupposing the regularity of nature, operate on the principle that like effects generally imply like causes. Scientists are, therefore, loathe to posit unprecedented causes for common phenomena. By 9/11, the collapse of steel-framed high-rises had become a rather common phenomenon, which most Americans had seen on television. And in every one of these cases, the building had been brought down by explosives in the process known as controlled demolition. From a scientific perspective, therefore, the obvious assumption would have been that WTC 7 came down because explosives had been used to remove its steel supports.
However, the public discussion of the destruction of the World Trade Center did not occur in a scientific context, but in a highly charged political context.
America had just been attacked, it was almost universally believed, by foreign terrorists who had flown hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, and in response the Bush administration had launched a “war on terror.” The idea that even one of the buildings had been brought down by explosives would have implied that the attacks had not been a surprise, so this idea could not be entertained by many minds in private, let alone in public.
This meant that people had to believe, or at least pretend to believe, that Building 7 had been brought down by fire, even though, as Glanz wrote: “[E]xperts said no building like it, a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire.” [3] And so, this building’s collapse had to be considered a mystery – insofar as it was considered at all.
But this was not much. Although WTC 7 was a 47-story building, which in most places would have been the tallest building in the city, if not the state, it was dwarfed by the 110-story Twin Towers. It was also dwarfed by them in the ensuing media coverage. And so, Glanz wrote, the collapse of Building 7 was “a mystery that . . . would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world,” if the Twin Towers had not also come down. [4] As it was, however, the mystery of Building 7’s collapse was seldom discussed.
For those few people who were paying attention, the mysteriousness of this collapse was not lessened by the first official report about it, which was issued by FEMA in 2002. This report put forward what it called its “best hypothesis” as to why the building collapsed, but then added that this hypothesis had “only a low probability of occurrence.” [5]
This FEMA report, in fact, increased the mystery, thanks to an appendix written by three professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This appendix reported that a piece of steel from WTC 7 had melted so severely that it had gaping holes in it, making it look like a piece of Swiss cheese. [6] James Glanz, pointing out that the fires in the building could not have been hot enough to melt steel, referred to this discovery as “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”[7]
The task of providing the definitive explanation of the collapse of WTC 7 was given to NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Although NIST had been expected to issue its report on this building along with its report on the Twin Towers, which came out in 2005, it did not. NIST then continued to delay this report until August of 2008, at which time it issued a Draft for Public Comment.
1. NIST’s Denial of Evidence for Explosives
At a press briefing, Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead investigator, declared that “the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery.” Also, announcing that NIST “did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down,” [8] he said: “[S]cience is really behind what we have said.” [9] In the remainder of this lecture, I will show that both of those statements were false.
NIST and Scientific Fraud
With regard to the question of science: Far from being supported by good science, NIST’s report repeatedly makes its case by resorting to scientific fraud.
Before going into details, let me point out that, if NIST did engage in fraudulent science, this would not be particularly surprising. NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce. During the years it was writing its World Trade Center reports, therefore, it was an agency of the Bush-Cheney administration. In 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a document charging this administration with “distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.” By the end of the Bush administration, this document had been signed by over 15,000 scientists, including 52 Nobel Laureates and 63 recipients of the National Medal of Science. [10]
Moreover, a scientist who formerly worked for NIST has reported that it has been “fully hijacked from the scientific into the political realm,” with the result that scientists working for NIST “lost [their] scientific independence, and became little more than ‘hired guns.’”11 Referring in particular to NIST’s work on the World Trade Center, he said everything had to be approved by the Department of Commerce, the National Security Agency, and the Office of Management and Budget—“an arm of the Executive Office of the President,” which “had a policy person specifically delegated to provide oversight on [NIST’s] work.” [12]
One of the general principles of scientific work is that its conclusions must not be dictated by nonscientific concerns – in other words, by any concern other than that of discovering the truth. This former NIST employee’s statement gives us reason to suspect that NIST, while preparing its report on WTC 7, would have been functioning as a political, not a scientific, agency. The amount of fraud in this report suggests that this was indeed the case.
According to the National Science Foundation, the major types of scientific fraud are fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. There is no sign that NIST is guilty of plagiarism, but it is certainly guilty of fabrication, which can be defined as “making up results,” and falsification, which means either “changing or omitting data.” [13]
The omission of evidence by NIST is so massive, in fact, that I treat it as a distinct type of scientific fraud. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said in his 1925 book, Science and the Modern World: “It is easy enough to find a [self-consistent] theory . . . , provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence.” The “moral temper required for the pursuit of truth,” he added, includes “[a]n unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account.” [14]
NIST, however, seemed to manifest an unflinching determination to disregard half of the relevant evidence.
Physical Evidence of Explosives
Some of the evidence ignored by NIST is physical evidence that explosives were used to bring down WTC 7.
Swiss-Cheese Steel: I will begin with the piece of steel from WTC 7 that had been melted so severely that it looked like Swiss cheese. Explaining why it called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation,” James Glanz wrote: “The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright.” [15] Glanz’s statement was, in fact, quite an understatement. The full truth is that the fires in the building could not have brought the steel anywhere close to the temperature – about 1,482°C (2,700°F) – needed for it to melt. [16]
The professors who reported this piece of steel in the appendix to the FEMA report said: “A detailed study into the mechanisms [that caused] this phenomenon is needed.”[17] Arden Bement, who was the director of NIST when it took on the WTC project, said that NIST’s report would address “all major recommendations contained in the [FEMA] report.” [18]
But when NIST issued its report on WTC 7, it did not mention this piece of steel with the Swiss-cheese appearance. Indeed, NIST even claimed that not a single piece of steel from WTC 7 had been recovered. [19]
This piece of steel, moreover, was only a small portion of the evidence, ignored by NIST, that steel had melted.
Particles of Metal in the Dust: The Deutsche Bank building, which was right next to the Twin Towers, was heavily contaminated by dust produced by their destruction. But Deutsche Bank’s insurance company refused to pay for the clean-up, claiming that this dust had not resulted from the destruction of the WTC. So Deutsche Bank hired the RJ Lee Group to do a study, which showed that the dust in the Deutsche Bank was WTC dust, which had a unique signature. Part of this signature was “Spherical iron . . . particles.” [20] This meant, the RJ Lee Group said, that iron had “melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles.” [21] The study even showed that, whereas iron particles constitute only 0.04 percent of normal building dust, they constituted almost 6 percent of WTC Dust – meaning almost 150 times as much as normal. [22]
The RJ Lee study also found that temperatures had been reached “at which lead would have undergone vaporization” [23] – meaning 1,749°C (3,180°F). [24]
Another study was carried out by the US Geological Survey, the purpose of which was to aid the “identification of WTC dust components.” Besides also finding iron particles, the scientists involved in this study found that molybdenum had been melted. This finding was especially significant, because this metal does not melt until it reaches 2,623°C (4,753°F). [25]
NIST, however, did not mention either of these studies, even though the latter one was carried out by another US government agency.
NIST could not mention these studies because it was committed to the theory that the WTC buildings were brought down by fire, while these studies clearly showed that something other than fire was going on in those buildings.
Nanothermite Residue: What was that? A report by several scientists, including chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen, showed that the WTC dust contained unreacted nanothermite, which – unlike ordinary thermite, which is an incendiary – is a high explosive. This report by Harrit and his colleagues, who included Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan, did not appear until 2009, [26] several months after the publication of NIST’s final report in November 2008.
But NIST, as a matter of routine, should have tested the WTC dust for residue of explosives, such as nanothermite. The Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations put out by the National Fire Protection Association says that a search for evidence for explosives should be undertaken whenever there has been “high-order damage.” Leaving no doubt about the meaning of this term, the Guide says:
High-order damage is characterized by shattering of the structure, producing small, pulverized debris. Walls, roofs, and structural members are splintered or shattered, with the building completely demolished. [27]
That description applied to the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. The next sentence – “Debris is thrown great distances, possibly hundreds of feet” – applied to the destruction of the Twin Towers, a fact that NIST had to admit in order to explain how fires were started in WTC 7. [28] So NIST should have looked for signs of explosives, such as nanothermite.
But when asked whether it had, NIST said No. A reporter asked Michael Newman, a NIST spokesman, about this failure, saying: “[W]hat about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?” Newman replied: “Right, because there was no evidence of that.” “But,” asked the reporter “how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?” Newman replied: “If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time . . . and the taxpayers’ money.” [29] (You couldn’t make this stuff up.)
When Shyam Sunder, who headed up NIST’s investigation of the WTC buildings, gave his press conference in August of 2008 – at which he announced that “the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery” – he began by saying:
Before I tell you what we found, I’d like to tell you what we did not find. We did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down. [30]
By making this point first, Sunder indicated that this was NIST’s most important conclusion – just as it had been NIST’s most important conclusion about the Twin Towers. However, although Sunder claimed that this conclusion was based on good science, a conclusion has no scientific validity if it can be reached only by ignoring half the evidence.
Molten Metal: In addition to the ignored evidence already pointed out, NIST also, in its investigation of the WTC, ignored reports that the rubble contained lots of molten metal – which most people described as molten steel. For example, firefighter Philip Ruvolo, speaking of the Twin Towers, said: “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel, molten steel, running down the channel rails, like you’re in a foundry, like lava.” [31]
Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction, which was involved in the clean-up operation, said that he saw pools of “literally molten steel.” [32]
However, when John Gross, one of the main authors of NIST’s reports, was asked about the molten steel, he said to the questioner: I challenge your “basic premise that there was a pool of molten steel,” adding: “I know of absolutely no . . . eyewitness who has said so.”[33]
However, in addition to Ruvolo and Tully, the eyewitnesses who said so included:
• Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the Twin Towers. [34]
• Dr. Ronald Burger of the National Center for Environmental Health. [35]
• Dr. Alison Geyh of The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who headed up a scientific team that went to the site shortly after 9/11 at the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. [36]
• Finally, the fact that “molten steel was also found at WTC 7” was added by Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., which was involved in the clean-up. [37]
And yet John Gross suggested that no credible witnesses had reported molten steel. That appears to have been a gross lie.
Testimonial Evidence for Explosives
Besides ignoring physical evidence that explosives had been used, NIST also ignored testimonial evidence.
NIST’s Twin Towers Report: In its 2005 report on the Twin Towers, NIST ignored dozens of testimonies provided by reporters, police officers, and WTC employees, along with 118 testimonies provided by members of the Fire Department of New York. [38] NIST even explicitly denied the existence of these reports, saying that there “was no evidence (collected by . . . the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions” that would have suggested that explosives were going off. [39]
However, when a group of scholars including scientists and a lawyer called NIST on this false statement, NIST refined its meaning, saying:
NIST reviewed all of the interviews conducted by the FDNY of firefighters (500 interviews). . . . Taken as a whole, the interviews did not support the contention that explosives played a role in the collapse of the WTC Towers. [40]
So, although NIST had said in its report that there was no testimonial evidence for explosives, it now seemed to be saying that, because only 118 out of 500 reported explosions, the testimonies, “taken as a whole,” do not support the idea that explosions were going off, so that NIST had been justified in claiming that there was no testimonial evidence to support the idea that explosives had been used.
Imagine an investigation of a murder on the streets of San Francisco. Of the 100 people who were at the scene at the time, 25 of them reported seeing Pete Smith shoot the victim. But the police release Pete Smith, saying that, taken as a whole, the testimonies did not point to his guilt. That would be NIST-style forensic science.
Reports from People Outside WTC 7: NIST continued this approach in its WTC 7 report. There had been several credible reports of explosions. A reporter for the New York Daily News, said:
[T]here was a rumble. The building’s top row of windows popped out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray. [41]
NYPD officer Craig Bartmer said:
I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down. . . . [A]ll of a sudden. . . I looked up, and . . . [t]he thing started pealing in on itself. . . . I started running . . . and the whole time you’re hearing “boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” [42]
Reports from Hess and Jennings from Inside WTC 7: Besides ignoring these and other reports of explosions made by people outside Building 7, NIST distorted the testimony of two highly credible men who were inside: Michael Hess, who was New York City’s corporation counsel, and Barry Jennings, the deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority.
Immediately after the North Tower was struck that morning, both men followed the instruction that, whenever there was an emergency, they were to meet Major Giuliani at his Emergency Management Center on the 23rd floor of Building 7. The North Tower was struck at 8:46, so they would have arrived at about 9:00. They found, however, that everyone had left. Calling to find out what they should do, Jennings was told to get out of the building immediately. So, finding that the elevator would not work (the electricity had evidently been knocked out at 9:03 by the airplane strike on the South Tower), they started running down the stairs. But when they got to the 6th floor, there was a huge explosion, which blew the landing out from under them and blocked their path. They went back up to the 8th floor, broke a window, and signaled for help.
Firemen came to rescue them, Jennings said, but then ran away. Coming back after a while, the firemen again started to rescue them, but then ran away again. They had to run away the first time, Jennings explained, because of the collapse of the South Tower, which occurred at 9:59, and the second time because of the North Tower collapse, which occurred at 10:28. On that basis, Jennings told Dylan Avery in an interview in 2007, he knew that, when that big explosion occurred, “both buildings were still standing.” Finally, when the firemen returned after the second tower collapsed, Hess and Jennings were rescued.
This must have been sometime between 11:00 and 11:30, because at 11:57, Hess gave an on-the-street interview several blocks away. Jennings also gave an on-the-street interview. Both men reported that they had been trapped for some time – Hess specified “about an hour and a half.”
This story obviously was very threatening to NIST. It was going to claim that, when Building 7 came down at 5:21 that afternoon, it did so solely because of fires. There were no explosives to help things along.
But here were two city officials reporting that a big explosion had gone off pretty early in the morning, evidently before 9:30. In his interview for Dylan Avery, moreover, Jennings said that the big explosion that trapped them was simply the first of many. He also said that when the firefighter took them down to the lobby, he saw that it had been totally destroyed – it was, he said, “total ruins, total ruins.” Jennings also that, when he and the firefighter were walking through this lobby, they were “stepping over people.” [43]
Jennings’s testimony contradicted the official story, according to which there were no explosions in WTC 7 and no one was killed in this building. What would NIST do?
NIST’s Treatment of the Hess-Jennings Testimony: NIST simply ignored Jennings’ report about the lobby and, with regard to the time that Hess and Jennings got trapped, followed the line that had taken by Rudy Giuliani in a 2002 book, according to which the event that Hess and Jennings took to be an explosion within WTC 7 was simply the impact of debris from the collapse of the North Tower.
But that collapse did not occur until 10:28, whereas the event described by Hess and Jennings had occurred at least an hour earlier.
Also, Jennings said that the South Tower as well as the North Tower was still standing when the event he called an explosion occurred, and that is surely what he told NIST when it interviewed him (as well as Hess) in the Spring of 2004.
Another problem was that Hess had said that they had been trapped for “about an hour and a half.” If the event that trapped them did not happen until almost 10:30, as NIST claims, then they would not have been rescued before noon. And sure enough, in an Interim Report on WTC 7 put out by NIST in 2004, it claimed that Hess and Jennings had been rescued “[a]t 12:10 to 12:15 PM.” But that is clearly false, given the fact that Hess was being interviewed several blocks away before noon. [44]
NIST would, of course, deny that it had distorted Jennings’ testimony. But when we sent a Freedom of Information Act request to NIST to obtain a copy of the Hess and Jennings interviews, NIST declined on the basis of a provision allowing for exemption from FOIA disclosure if the information is “not directly related to the building failure.” [45] NIST thereby suggested that a report of a massive explosion within the building would be irrelevant to determining the cause of its failure. Using such an obviously phony reason seemed to be NIST’s way of saying: There’s no way we’re going to release those interviews.
The BBC Helps Out: In any case, NIST’s attempt to neutralize the testimony of Barry Jennings was aided by the BBC, which interviewed Jennings and then, obviously, changed the timeline, so that the narrator, with her reassuring voice, could say:
“At 10:28, the North Tower collapses. . . . This time, Tower 7 takes a direct hit from the collapsing building. . . . Early evidence of explosives were just debris from a falling skyscraper.” [46]
Mike Rudin, who produced this BBC program, recently telephoned me to discuss the possibility of interviewing me about my little book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? [47] I told him that I had a book coming out shortly about WTC 7 and that, after seeing it, he probably would not want to interview me. When he asked why, I said because I pointed out that he had obviously distorted the timeline of Jennings’s account. When he denied this, I said, OK, show me the uncut, unedited interview. If this interview had showed that Rudin had not distorted the timeline, I would have told the world. Rudin, however, declined to allow me to see the unedited interview. [48]
This BBC program had appeared in July of 2008. The first version of NIST’s final report – its Draft for Public Comment – was to be released at a press briefing on August 21, at which time Sunder would announce that the mystery of the collapse of WTC 7 had been solved.
The Death of Barry Jennings: Two days prior to that, Barry Jennings died – and died very mysteriously. No one has been willing to provide any information as to how or why this 53-year-old man had died. Dylan Avery, trying to find out something, hired a private investigator – reputed to be one of the best in the state of New York – to find out what she could. He used his credit card to pay her a considerable fee. Within 24 hours, however, Avery received a message from her, saying:
Due to some of the information I have uncovered, I have determined that this is a job for the police. I have refunded your credit card. Please do not contact me again about this individual.
This is not the response one would expect, Avery observed, if she had merely found that Jennings had passed away “innocently in a hospital.” [49] The dedication page on my book says: “To the memory of Barry Jennings, whose truth-telling may have cost him his life.”
Be that as it may, his death was very convenient for NIST, which now did not need to fear that Jennings might hold his own press conference to say that NIST had lied about his testimony.
The BBC Helps Out Again: The death of Jennings was also convenient for the BBC, which could now put out a second version of its program on WTC 7, this time including Michael Hess.
In the first version, the BBC had pretended that Jennings had been in the building all by himself. Even though Jennings would say, “We did this, and then We did that,” the BBC spoke only of Jennings, never mentioning the fact that Hess was with him.
But in the new version, which was aired at the end of October 2008, Hess was the star. While admitting that, back on 9/11, he had “assumed that there had been an explosion in the basement,” he said: “I know now this was caused by the northern half of Number 1 [the North Tower] falling on the southern half of our building,” exactly what Giuliani had said in his book. It is no surprise that Hess supported Giuliani’s account, given the fact that since 2002 Hess has been Giuliani’s business partner.
In spite of the fact that Hess could in no way be considered an impartial witness, Mike Rudin portrayed him as such. On his BBC blog, Rudin said that some “self-styled truthers” had charged that the BBC, in presenting Barry Jennings’ testimony, had “misrepresented the chronology.” But, Rudin said triumphantly, Michael Hess, “In his first interview since 9/11 . . . confirms our timeline.”
But Hess’s account could be said to “confirm” the BBC timeline only if it were a credible account. In my book, however, I show that it is riddled with problems, so that anyone can easily see that he was lying. [50]
2. NIST’s Own Theory of WTC 7’s Collapse
Thus far, I have spoken about the first half of my book, which deals with NIST’s negative claim, namely, that it had found no evidence that explosives were used to bring down WTC 7. NIST could make this argument, I have pointed out, only by committing two kinds of scientific fraud: Ignoring relevant evidence and falsifying evidence – in this case, the testimony of Barry Jennings.
The second half of my book deals with NIST’s own theory as to how fire brought the building down. To develop such a theory, NIST had to falsify and fabricate data on a possibly unprecedented scale. And yet, after all of that, it had to violate one of the basic principles of science: Thou shalt not affirm miracles.
You perhaps know the cartoon about this. A physics professor has filled several boards with mathematical equations, at the bottom of which we read: “Then a miracle happens.” In science, you cannot appeal to miracles, whether explicitly, or only implicitly – by implying that some basic principle of physics has been violated. And yet that is what NIST does.
Fabrication of Evidence
But before describing its miracle story, I will point out three especially obvious examples of scientific fraud committed by NIST before it resorted to this desperate expedient. These examples all involve fabrication.
No Girder Shear Studs: NIST’s explanation as to how fire caused Building 7 to collapse starts with thermal expansion, meaning that the fire heated up the steel, thereby causing it to expand.
A steel beam on the 13th floor, NIST claims, caused a steel girder attached to Column 79 to break loose. Having lost its support, Column 79 failed, and this failure started a chain reaction, in which all 82 of the building’s steel columns failed. [51]
Without getting into the question of whether this is even remotely plausible, let us just focus on the question: Why did that girder fail?
It failed, NIST said, because it was not connected to the floor slab with sheer studs. NIST wrote:
In WTC 7, no studs were installed on the girders.
Floor beams . . . had shear studs, but the girders that supported the floor beams did not have shear studs.
This point was crucial to NIST’s answer to a commonly asked question: Why did fire cause WTC 7 to collapse, when fire had never before brought down steel-framed high-rise buildings, some of which had had much bigger and longer-lasting fires? NIST’s answer was: differences in design.
One of those crucial differences, NIST stated repeatedly, was “the absence of [girder] shear studs that would have provided lateral restraint.”
But this was a fabrication on NIST’s part. How can we know this? All we need to do is to look at NIST’s Interim Report on WTC 7, which it had published back in 2004, before it had developed its theory of girder failure.
This report stated that girders as well as the beams had been attached to the floor by means of shear studs. [52]
We have here as clear a case of fabrication as one will see, with NIST simply making up a fact in order to meet the needs of its new theory.
The Raging Fire on Floor 12 at 5:00 PM: NIST also contradicted its “interim report” in telling a lie about the fire in the building. NIST claims that there were very big, very hot fires covering much of the north face of the 12th floor at 5:00 PM. This claim is essential to NIST’s explanation as to why the building collapsed 21 minutes later. However, if you look back at NIST’s interim report, published before it had developed its theory, you will find this statement:
Around 4:45 PM, a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9, and 11 near the middle of the north face; Floor 12 was burned out by this time.
Other photographs even show that the 12th floor fire had virtually burned out by 4:00. And yet NIST now claims that fires were still going strong at 5:00 PM. [53] We have here another clear case of fabrication.
Shear Stud Failure: A third case of fabrication involves shear studs again – this time the shear studs that connected to the steel beams to the floor slab.
NIST claims that, due to the failure of that crucial girder discussed earlier, the floor beams were able to expand without constraint. But each of these beams was connected to the floor slab by 28 high-strength shear studs. These studs should have provided plenty of restraint.
They would have, except for the fact, NIST tells us, that they all broke.
Why did they break? Because of what NIST calls “differential thermal expansion,” which is simply a technical way of saying that, in response to the heat from the fires, the steel beams expanded more than the floor slabs did.
But why would that have been the case? Steel and concrete have virtually the same “coefficient of thermal expansion,” meaning that they expand virtually the same amount in response to heat. If that were not the case, reinforced concrete – that is, concrete reinforced with steel – would break up when the weather got very hot or very cold. NIST itself points out that “steel and concrete have similar coefficients of thermal expansion.”
So why does NIST claim that the shear studs broke because of differential thermal expansion?
To understand this point, you need to understand that NIST’s theory is an almost totally computer-based theory. NIST fed various variables into a computer program, which then supposedly told it how WTC 7 would have reacted to its fires. So, what did NIST feed into its computer that caused it to say that the steel would have expanded so much more than the concrete slab that all of the shear studs would have broken? The answer is given in this bland statement:
No thermal expansion or material degradation was considered for the concrete slab, as the slab was not heated in this analysis.
When I first read this statement, I had to rub my eyes. Surely, I thought, I have mis-read the statement, because a few pages earlier, NIST had said: “differential thermal expansion occurred between the steel floor beams and concrete slab when the composite floor was subjected to fire.” The “composite floor,” by definition, is the steel beams made composite with the floor slab by means of the shear studs. So NIST had clearly said, in stating that the composite floor had been subjected to fire, that both the steel beams and the concrete slab had been heated.
But then in the eye-rubbing passage, NIST said: When doing its computer simulation, it told the computer that only the steel beams had been heated; the concrete floor slab was not. [54]
So of course the steel beams would have expanded, while the floor slabs stayed stationary, thereby causing the sheer studs to break, after which the steel beams could expand like crazy and bump into Column 79, which then causes the whole building to come down.
A comic book version of the official story of 9/11 has been published. [55] This was an exercise in redundancy, because the official reports already are the comic book version of what happened on 9/11. In any case, I come now to NIST’s miracle.
NIST’s Miracle
Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had almost from the first been pointing out that WTC 7 came down at the same rate as a free-falling object, at least virtually so.
NIST’S Denial of Free Fall: In NIST’s Draft for Public Comment, it denied this, saying that the time for the upper 18 floors to collapse “was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time and was consistent with physical principles.”
Implicit in this statement is that any assertion that the building did come down in free fall would not be consistent with physical principles – that is, the principles of physics.
Explaining why not, Shyam Sunder said at a technical briefing:
[A] free fall time would be [the fall time of] an object that has no structural components below it. . . . [T]he . . . time that it took . . . for those 17 floors to disappear [was roughly 40 percent [longer than free fall]. And that is not at all unusual, because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case. And you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place. Everything was not instantaneous.
Chandler’s Challenge: However, high-school physics teacher David Chandler challenged Sunder’s denial at this briefing, pointing that Sunder’s 40 percent claim contradicts “a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity.”
The following week, Chandler placed a video on the Internet showing that, by measuring this publicly visible quantity, anyone knowing elementary physics could see that “for about two and a half seconds. . . , the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from freefall.”
Finally, Chandler wrote a comment to NIST, saying: “Acknowledgment of and accounting for an extended period of free fall in the collapse of WTC 7 must be a priority if the NIST is to be taken seriously.”
NIST Admits Free Fall: Amazingly, NIST did acknowledge free fall in its final report. It tried to disguise it, but the admission is there on page 607. Dividing the building’s descent into three stages, it describes the second phase as “a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25 s[econds]. “Gravitational acceleration” is a synonym for free fall acceleration.
So, after presenting 606 pages of descriptions, testimonies, photographs, graphs, analyses, explanations, and mathematical formulae, NIST on page 607 says, in effect: “Then a miracle happens.”
Why this would be a miracle was explained by Chandler, who said: “Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion.”
The implication of Chandler’s remark is that, by the principles of physics, the upper portion of Building 7 could have come down in free fall only if something had removed all the steel and concrete in the lower part of the building, which would have otherwise provided resistance, and only explosives of some sort could have removed them.
If they had not been removed and the upper floors had come down in free fall anyway, even for only a second or two, a miracle would have happened.
That was what Sunder himself had explained the previous August, saying that a free-falling object would be one “that has no structural components below it” to offer resistance. Having stated in August that free fall could not have happened, NIST also stated that it did not happen, saying: “WTC 7 did not enter free fall.”
But then in November, while still defending the same theory, which rules out explosives and thereby rules out free fall, NIST admitted that, as an empirical fact, free fall happened. For a period of 2 and a fourth seconds, NIST admitted, the descent of WTC 7 was characterized by “gravitational acceleration (free fall).”
Knowing that it had thereby affirmed a miracle, meaning a violation of a law of physics, NIST no longer claimed that its analysis was consistent with the physical principles. In its Draft put out in August, NIST had repeatedly said that its analysis of the collapse was “consistent with physical principles.” One encountered this phrase time and time again. In its final report, however, this phrase is no more to be found.
NIST thereby admitted, for those with eyes to see, that its report on WTC 7, by admitting free fall while continuing to deny that explosives were used, is not consistent with the principles of physics. [56]
And yet the mainstream press will not report this admission. So the press continues to support the notion that anyone who questions the official reports on 9/11 is unfit for public service. [57]
Conclusion
The 9/11 Truth Movement has long considered the collapse of Building 7 to be the Achilles’ heel of the official story about 9/11 – the part of this story that, by being most vulnerable, could be used to bring down the whole body of lies.
My latest book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False, shows that the official account of this building is indeed extremely vulnerable to critique – so vulnerable that, to see the falsity of this account, you need only to read NIST’s attempt to defend it, noting the obvious lies in NIST’s report and its violations of basic principles of physics.
I hope that my book will indeed help bring down that body of lies that some of us call the Bush-Cheney conspiracy theory, according to which al-Qaeda hijackers, by flying planes into two buildings of the World Trade Center, brought down three of them – an obviously false conspiracy theory that is still being used, among other things, to kill women, children, and other innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Notes
1. This is a slightly revised version of a lecture presented at the 9/11 Film Festival at Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, California, September 10, 2009. It is based on David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (Northampton, Mass., Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009).
6. Jonathan Barnett, Ronald R. Biederman, and Richard D. Sisson, Jr., “Limited Metallurgical Examination,” FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002, Appendix C (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/AppendixC-fema403_apc.pdf).
13. “What is Research Misconduct?” National Science Foundation, Office of Inspector General, New Research Misconduct Policies (http://www.nsf.gov/oig/session.pdf). Although this document is undated, internal evidence suggests that it was written in 2001.
14. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Free Press, 1967), 187.
15. Glanz and Lipton, “A Search for Clues in Towers’ Collapse.”
16. The melting point of iron is 1,538°C (2,800°F). Steel, as an alloy, comes in different grades, with a range of melting points, depending on the percent of carbon (which lowers the melting point), from 1,371°C (2,500°F) to 1,482°C (2,700° F); see “Melting Points of Metals” (http://www.uniweld.com/catalog/alloys/alloys_melting.htm).
17. Barnett, Biederman, and Sisson, “Limited Metallurgical Examination,” C-13.
18. Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Testimony before the House Science Committee Hearing on “The Investigation of the World Trade Center Collapse,” May 1, 2002 (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/official/nist/bement.htm). In the quoted statement, the name “FEMA” replaces “BPAT,” which is the abbreviation for “Building Performance Assessment Team,” the name of the ASCE team that prepared this report for FEMA.
25. WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web (http://www.webelements.com/molybdenum/physics.html). Although the scientists involved with this USGS study discovered the molybdenum, they did not mention it in their report. Knowledge of their discovery was obtained only by means of a FOIA request. See The Mysterious Collapse, 44-45.
26. Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009/2: 7-31 (http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm).
34. James Williams, “WTC a Structural Success,” SEAU News: The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, October 2001 (http://www.seau.org/SEAUNews-2001-10.pdf).
35. Quoted in Francesca Lyman, “Messages in the Dust: What Are the Lessons of the Environmental Health Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11?” National Environmental Health Association, September 2003 (http://www.neha.org/9-11%20report/index-The.html).
37. Quoted in Bollyn, “Professor Says ‘Cutter Charges’ Brought Down WTC Buildings.”
38. For the FDNY testimonies, see Graeme MacQueen, “118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers,” Journal of 9/11 Studies, Vol. 2/August 2006 (http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles/Article_5_118Witnesses_WorldTradeCenter.pdf): 49-123. For a brief discussion of these and other testimonies, see The Mysterious Collapse, 75-82.
41. This statement (by Peter Demarco) is quoted in Chris Bull and Sam Erman, eds., At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 97.
43. For documentation of these points about the testimonies of Hess and Jennings, see The Mysterious Collapse, 84-92.
44. For discussion and documentation of NIST’s treatment of the testimonies of Hess and Jennings, see The Mysterious Collapse, 92-94.
45. Letter of August 12, 2009, from Catherine S. Fletcher, Freedom of Information Act Officer, NIST, to a FOIA request of August 8, 2009, from Ms. Susan Peabody, for “[t]he complete texts of NIST’s 2004 interviews of Michael Hess and Barry Jennings, which are cited in NIST NCSTAR 1-8… , 109, n.380, as ‘WTC 7 Interviews 2041604 and 1041704.’”
46. For discussion and documentation of the BBC’s treatment of Hess and Jennings in the first version of its program, see The Mysterious Collapse, 95-99.
47. David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009).
48. Telephone conversation, September 1, 2001.
49. See The Mysterious Collapse, 98-99.
50. For documentation and discussion of the second version of the BBC’s show, including the problems in Hess’s testimony, see The Mysterious Collapse, 99-104.
51. See The Mysterious Collapse, 150-55.
52. For documentation and discussion of NIST’s claim about the lack of girder shear studs, see The Mysterious Collapse, 212-15.
53. See The Mysterious Collapse, 187-88.
54. For discussion and documentation of this point about failed shear studs, see The Mysterious Collapse, 217-21. As I point out in the book the contradictions between NIST’s final report and its 2004 interim report, involving the 4:45 fire and both claims about shear studs, were discovered by Chris Sarns.
55. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
56. For documentation and discussion of this point about free fall, see The Mysterious Collapse, 231-41.
57. I am referring to the fact that Van Jones, who had been an Obama administration advisor on “green jobs,” felt compelled to resign due to the uproar evoked by the revelation that he had signed a petition questioning the official account of 9/11. The view that this act made him unworthy was perhaps articulated most clearly by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. After dismissing as irrelevant the other reasons that had been given for demanding Jones’s resignation, Krauthammer wrote: “He’s gone for one reason and one reason only. You can’t sign a petition demanding … investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 – i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil – and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House. Unlike the other stuff … , this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous….You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier – a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice” (Charles Krauthammer , “The Van Jones Matter,” Washington Post, September 11, 2009 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/09/10/AR2009091003408.html
Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, has made several statements during the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, particularly concerning the use of Western-supplied long-range precision weapons. His remarks suggest that if NATO provides Ukraine with high-precision, long-range weapons and assists in their operation, it would amount to direct participation in military operations against Russia.
According to Putin, this would fundamentally change the nature of the conflict, elevating it from a regional war between Russia and Ukraine to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.
This article delves into Putin’s rationale behind these claims, the technological and geopolitical factors at play, and the broader implications for NATO-Russia relations and global security.
The Context: Ukraine’s Use of Western Weapons
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the West has increasingly supplied Ukraine with military aid, including advanced weapons systems, in response to Ukraine’s requests for support in defending itself. The types of military aid have evolved from anti-tank weapons and small arms to more sophisticated systems such as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), long-range artillery, and drones.
However, one of the most sensitive aspects of this aid has been the potential delivery of long-range precision weapons, such as missile systems that could strike targets deep within Russian territory. Putin’s assertion that Ukraine lacks the indigenous capability to operate such weapons without direct NATO involvement centers around two key points:
1. Access to High-Precision Targeting Data: High-precision, long-range missile strikes typically require advanced satellite data for targeting. Putin has claimed that Ukraine does not have its own satellite reconnaissance infrastructure that is sophisticated enough to carry out precision strikes with long-range Western weapons. He suggests that NATO would have to provide Ukraine with real-time intelligence, including satellite imagery, in order to guide these strikes effectively.
2. Operational Expertise: Putin also argues that the complexity of using these advanced weapons, particularly in terms of setting flight paths and inputting targeting data, would necessitate NATO military personnel’s involvement. According to him, Ukrainian forces alone may not possess the capability to independently operate such advanced systems without NATO assistance.
NATO’s Involvement: An Escalation in Putin’s View
Putin’s statements underscore the Russian perspective that any direct assistance by NATO in terms of operational control, intelligence support, or targeting input crosses a critical threshold. If NATO becomes directly involved in conducting or facilitating military operations via these high-precision strikes, it would effectively mean that NATO forces are waging war against Russia, according to Putin. This would mark a significant escalation in the conflict, transforming it from a proxy war to a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, with far-reaching consequences.
In Putin’s words, if NATO helps Ukraine carry out such strikes, “it will change the very essence, the nature of the conflict, and it will mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia.” This claim taps into long-standing concerns about the expansion of the Ukraine conflict into a broader war that could potentially involve nuclear-armed NATO members and Russia.
NATO’s Stance and Western Military Aid
NATO has been careful to stress that its support to Ukraine is defensive in nature and designed to help Ukraine protect its territorial integrity. Western countries, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and several EU member states, have provided substantial amounts of military aid, but they have also emphasized that they are not directly involved in the war. Western leaders have generally framed their involvement as military assistance rather than direct participation in hostilities.
For example, U.S. and European officials have maintained that their military support is designed to help Ukraine defend itself against aggression, not to strike Russian territory. The Biden administration has been particularly cautious in limiting the types of weapons sent to Ukraine, often declining to supply systems that could easily strike deep into Russia, although this position has gradually evolved as the war has progressed.
However, many Western military systems, such as the HIMARS and long-range artillery, have been pivotal in allowing Ukraine to hit Russian military positions in occupied Ukrainian territories. Some of these strikes have targeted Russian logistics hubs, ammunition depots, and command centers far behind the frontlines, often using Western-provided intelligence.
Satellite Data and Intelligence Sharing
One of the more complex elements of Putin’s argument revolves around the issue of satellite data. It is well known that Western nations, particularly the United States, have provided Ukraine with satellite imagery and real-time intelligence to aid in their military operations. This has included tracking the movements of Russian troops and equipment, as well as identifying high-value targets for strikes.
Putin’s claim that Ukraine lacks the capacity to carry out precision strikes without NATO satellite data is a recognition of the role that Western intelligence plays in the conflict. Although Ukraine does not have its own satellite network capable of the level of surveillance that NATO’s assets can provide, Western nations have given Ukraine access to data from commercial and military satellites, as well as reconnaissance drones. While these intelligence-sharing activities stop short of direct involvement in military operations, they blur the lines between mere support and active participation.
Legal and Geopolitical Implications
Putin’s characterization of NATO’s involvement as “direct participation” is not just rhetoric. Under international law, direct military involvement by a state in another state’s conflict can trigger mutual defense obligations or escalate the conflict into a wider war. Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty states that an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all members. If Russia were to interpret NATO’s involvement in the war as direct participation, it could theoretically respond by targeting NATO assets, risking a broader conflict.
For NATO, avoiding a direct war with Russia has been a key objective. While NATO members want to ensure that Ukraine is capable of defending itself, they also wish to avoid provoking Russia into a military response that could escalate into a direct confrontation between nuclear-armed powers. This has resulted in a delicate balancing act, with NATO providing substantial support to Ukraine while refraining from actions that could be interpreted as direct engagement in the war.
Conclusion
Vladimir Putin’s warnings about NATO’s involvement in Ukraine, specifically regarding the use of long-range precision weapons, highlight the delicate and dangerous nature of the conflict. While NATO has taken steps to support Ukraine, including the provision of advanced weaponry and intelligence, it has been careful to frame this assistance as indirect, defensive support rather than direct participation in the conflict.
Putin’s statements reflect both a recognition of NATO’s significant role in shaping the battlefield and an attempt to deter further escalation by signaling that any deeper involvement by NATO would change the conflict’s nature. His rhetoric also serves as a warning that Russia could respond forcefully if it believes NATO is moving beyond providing support to Ukraine and engaging in direct military operations against Russia.
As the conflict continues, the risk of miscalculation remains high, particularly as both sides escalate their rhetoric and military actions. The stakes are enormous, and any shift toward direct NATO involvement, even if unintended, could have profound consequences for European and global security.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Sources
Putin’s Statements on NATO and Ukraine Conflict: “Putin warns Ukraine use of long-range arms will put NATO at war with Russia” (See this)
Western Military Support for Ukraine: “Western military aid to Ukraine – statistics & facts” (See this)
NATO’s Article 5 and Military Strategy: “Collective defence and Article 5” (See this)
State Duma, the lower house of parliamentarians, and the Federation Council, the upper chamber of legislators, voted to declare and approve the ‘special military operation’ in the Ukraine, which categorically aims at de-militarizing and de-nazifying the former Soviet republic. The Russia-Ukraine conflict began on 24 February 2022, and has shown explicit sign of endless militarized venture on Ukraine. It has, so far, had devastating implications and impacts, destabilized the global economic system, with majority of countries in the Global South calling for peaceful resolution to the conflict between these two former Soviet republics who, after the Soviet collapse, have attained their political independence.
In this interview, Professor Sergiu Mișcoiu at the Faculty of European Studies, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), where he also serves as a Director of the Centre for International Cooperation and as Director of the Centre for African Studies, discusses aspects of strategy and approach by the BRICS association (China, India and South Africa) in pursuing common, comprehensive and sustainable security, and most importantly how BRICS members can peacefully resolve the conflict differences between Russia and Ukraine through dialogue and consultation. Here are the interview excerpts.
Kester Kenn Klomegah (KKK): Russia-Ukraine conflict has raged on since late February 2022, and now the main question is why BRICS, an informal association, has not so far been successful in brokering peace?
Professor Sergiu Mișcoiu (PSM): BRICS is indeed an informal association of states. Its unity and its capacity to act collectively in order to impose an alternative international order to the one still led by the Western states has been repeatedly overestimated. It would be more accurate to portray BRICS as a heteroclite group made of states with different capabilities and interests, with different historical allies and foes. Between China, an autocratic state who has been trying since the 2010s to openly challenge the USA’s still quasi-hegemonic status in the global world, and Brazil, a semi-consolidated democracy aspiring to emerge as an important semi-peripheral power in the Southern hemisphere, there are definitely less resemblances than differences. Their exhibited anti-Westernism – which is only for the time being in the case of Brazil – can barely hide the fundamental differences between the world’s views of these two states, and the same can be said about almost all the other BRICS countries taken two by two.
For all these reasons, the BRICS states have initially regarded the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a rather different light – as an opportunity to vassalize Russia and to indisputably become the main counter-hegemon (by China), as a fait divers or as another war (by South Africa), as a historical revenge against the US-led order (by Brazil), as source of potential conflict and unrest (by India). It was only after the attempts of reconciliation that these states found a common position with regard to this conflict, mainly revolving around the idea of a negotiated peace. But the fact that Russia belongs to this international association is a major delegitimizing factor which prevents BRICS to look like an independent international peacemaker.
KKK: In its several declarations and communiques, BRICS has collective stated ‘political dialogue’ and ‘mechanism of diplomacy’ in resolving political crisis and conflicts. Are these methods, dialogue and diplomacy, working in the case of Russia-Ukraine conflict?
PSM: For such methods to work, it would be necessary that all the parties involved in the conflict genuinely believe that they could lose if the war continues, and that they cut a favorable deal if peace is achieved. None of these conditions if fulfilled, as Russia continues its advancement in Donbass and its attacks against the critical infrastructural system and Ukraine succeeded to occupy parts of the Russian territory and to strike deeper into the country. Under these circumstances, all the current attempts to make peace are rather show-offs meant to legitimize the peacemakers. China is the main champion of such attempts, sometimes more or less implicitly in the name of BRICS. But all these attempts of China (not only in the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war) were seen by the “beneficiaries” as being tactical moves of Beijing in the effort to reinforce its position of diplomatic actor rather than some genuine steps towards achieving peace. As a whole, BRICS lacks the degree of unity that could put enough pressure on the states in conflict to force them to search for peace and is perceived in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war as being too close to the interests of Russia in a more or less transparent way.
KKK: How do you assess efforts made by China, India and South Africa during these past two years? And what are your views and interpretations of the proposal, which underlined ‘constructive role’ in the process for another future Peace Summit by India?
PSM: Unlike China, India seems to play a different card, as it displays a much more subtle intention to legitimize itself as a major international actor and a more genuine concern for achieving peace, in a Gandhi-like claimed tradition. Criticized for his domestic national-populism, Prime-Minister Modi has recently succeeded to play a more convincing international role, especially thanks to his efforts to support the creation of the favorable conditions for the initiation of a dialogue between Ukraine and Russia. India has no interest to see a victorious Russia and a triumphing China, whose friendship with its rival, Pakistan, has been a constant concern for New Delhi. So, once again, BRICS do not act as a group. Instead, India’s more balanced attitude has created the premises for a more consensual environment of international negotiations around the Russian-Ukrainian war. Which doesn’t mean that peace is guaranteed. But which means that the individual efforts of some of the BRICS countries could be more efficient than the hesitant actions of the group as a whole.
KKK: Can BRICS use its boastful numerical strength (as more 40 countries have been listed awaiting ascension) and to stand tall with reverberating voices on the platform, particularly during the forthcoming XVII BRICS Summit in October, to attempt brokering peace between Russia and Ukraine?
PSM: Given their profiles and their international stances, the new members of BRICS who joined in 2024 (Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates) offer a wider global coverage to the association but also increase the potential disunion when critically important collective decisions will be needed. As the 2024 Summit will take place in Russia, which is even in its friends’ eyes the country which started the war against Ukraine, any attempt to issue a common declaration in favor of peace and reconciliation will be deprived of credibility. However, Russia will try to use the momentum to claim that there is international support for its actions. But this is precisely the opposite of today’s efforts of countries such as India or the Emirates, which will not appreciate the confiscation of the summit to push the individual agenda of the Kremlin.
In conclusion, BRICS could have worked as a peace broker if it was: (1) genuinely animated by the same universal values, (2) more united around some clear common goals, and (3) exterior to the conflicts it claims to mediate. As it is today, it only allows for the temporary advancement of some of its members’ agendas.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), Weekly Blitz and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. He researches Eurasia, Russia, Africa and BRICS. His focused interest areas include geopolitical changes, foreign relations and economic development questions relating to Africa. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
Are Washington’s Voting Rights on the UN Security Council at Risk? “…a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.”
The main obstacle to a ceasefire in Gaza is not Israel or Hamas. It’s the United States. Here’s what you need to know: The Security Council approved the Biden-authored ceasefire deal on June 10, 2024. (Three months ago) US diplomats assured the other members of the Security Council that Israel supported the agreement. That claim turned out to be false. Israel does not back the deal and refuses to implement its provisions. Even so, the so-called Biden Plan passed the Council in the form of Resolution 2735. Here’s a summary of the agreement:
By resolution 2735 … the 15-member organ noted that the implementation of this proposal would enable the following outcomes to spread over three phases, the first of which would include an immediate, full and complete ceasefire with the release of hostages; the return of the remains of some hostages who have been killed; the exchange of Palestinian prisoners; withdrawal of Israeli forces from the populated areas in Gaza; the return of Palestinian civilians to their homes; and the safe and effective distribution of humanitarian assistance at scale throughout Gaza. Adopting Resolution 273 5, United Nations
There’s no ambiguity here, the Council’s demands are clear. Both parties to the conflict are required to implement the provisions of the resolution that are “binding” under international law.
Hamas has agreed to comply with resolution 2735 while Israel has refused. In short, the United States and Hamas are on the same side of the ceasefire issue.
In order to confuse the public about Israel’s refusal, the Biden administration has continued to oversee negotiations in Cairo and Doha (with Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the US) to create the impression that negotiations are ongoing. But they’re not ongoing. This is a farce that is being used to conceal Israel’s rejection of the UN-backed ceasefire. The US is an accomplice in that deception.
Presently, the public is convinced that if Israel and Hamas could hammer out a compromise on the Philedephi corridor, then a settlement would be possible.But this too is misleading because the ceasefire resolution has already been thoroughly debated and approved by the Council. Besides, the Philedephi corridor appears nowhere in the text of resolution 2735 which makes it a moot point. Russia’s envoy to the UN Security Council summed it up like this last week:
the Israeli leadership, unfortunately, continues to regard the negotiations merely as a “smoke screen”, which helps to distract the attention of the international community from Israel’s military solution to the Palestinian issue. This is evidenced not only by West Jerusalem’s actions on the ground, but also by the recent remarks of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who stated that he would not stop the military action in the Strip. We still see no indication that Israel’s military cabinet has any intention to change this policy Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN
This is an accurate account of what is currently taking place. The US is assisting Israel in pulling the wool over the eyes of the public to escape accountability for the ongoing rampage and to make it appear as though they have a genuine interest in resolving the 10-month-long dispute. But there is no interest in resolving the dispute, in fact, Netanyahu has stated repeatedly that Israel will not stop the hostilities and will not withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza. There is no gray area here. It is a blunt refusal to comply with the UN mandate.
Naturally, members of the Security Council have responded to these developments with frustration and anger. They can see now that they were misled by the Biden administration which hoped to put pressure on Israel by pushing their deal through the UNSC. Now that the plan has blown up in their faces, the US is back to its old tricks of providing cover for Israel regardless of the offense. Here’s more from the Russian envoy Dmitri Polyanskiy:
Colleagues, how much longer are we going to remain idle, while American would-be mediators continue putting on a show and feeding us empty promises that their diplomatic efforts “on the ground” will bring speedy results? The reality is that f or 10 months now, Washington has basically held the entire Council hostage, threatening to use their veto and preventing us from taking tough and unambiguous decisions either on the Palestinian issue and a ceasefire in Gaza, or on advancing the Middle East peace process as a whole…
If Resolution 2735 is not being implemented, let’s pass a new document, which would send an unequivocal message to the “spoilers” that they will definitely bear the consequences of what they are doing. And let us provide our resolution with a toolbox that would help stop violence, regardless of the whims of any party to the conflict. It is also of critical importance that Washington finally ceases its multi-billion-dollar military assistance to Israel, which is being used to annihilate Palestinian civilians.How many more victims are needed for the Council to act in line with its mandate and stop following blindly the lead of the United States and Israel? Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN
Dmitri Polyanskiy addresses the UN Security Council
So, you can see that the temperature is rising at the Security Council and that many of the members are at wit’s-end with Washington’s antics. Polyanskiy spoke for many of the members when he closed his statement with this blistering rebuke:
Everyone in this chamber is perfectly aware of the fact that it is the United States that bears the main responsibility for what is happening now in Gaza.
That sums it up perfectly.
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It’s worth noting, that US diplomats that have participated in recent negotiations in Cairo and Doha have not even kept Security Council members up-to-date on the details of those meetings. It’s a rogue operation headed by American officials who have no authority to modify the existing ceasefire agreement and who (shockingly) are conducting these gatherings without representatives from Hamas. The whole thing is a cynical fraud that bears a striking resemblance to Zelensky’s Peace confab in Switzerland that excluded Russia. One fake peace conference begets another.
Dmitri Polyanskiy again—While initially we discussed the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the enclave, Israel now insists on maintaining its presence in the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors.The Security Council gave its consent to completely different parameters of the agreements, which means that these demands are a direct violation of the provisions of the aforementioned Security Council resolution. The American mediators, unfortunately, are openly playing along with their ally in its consistent violation of UNSC resolutions
This is how the Biden administration is helping Israel dodge its obligations under the terms of the current UNSC-backed ceasefire. Blinken is conducting a masterclass in deception.
(To the broader issue) Israel’s 10-month-long bloodbath in Gaza has left many people wondering why the world needs a Security Council if it cannot provide security for the people who are most in need?
It’s a good question and one that challenges the credibility of an institution that aspires to be “the guarantor of global security” but is incapable of taking action even when a genocide is unfolding right under its nose.
Of course, the source of the problem is not hard to identify. It’s the same permanent member that repeatedly vetoed ceasefire proposals one-after-another until it pushed through its own hybrid version that had no chance of being implemented. We’re talking about the United States of Obstruction, the lone member of the Council that acts exclusively in the interest of its genocidal ally in Tel Aviv. The other members of the Council are faced with the daunting task of either removing the US from the Security Council altogether (so they can enforce their ceasefire resolution through sanctions, peacekeepers or other punitive measures) or finding a way to force the US to abstain from voting on issues related to the current conflict. But are either of these even possible?
Yes, they are, but they won’t be achieved easily. Even so, the Council cannot simply ignore its special role in international relations because one member consistently abuses the system by preventing the UN doing its job of preserving peace and security around the world.
The rules for expelling a member of the Security Council make it almost impossible to do so. So, while Chapter 18 of United Nation’s Charter says a member can be removed from UN Security Council if two thirds of the General Assembly vote against that member; the Security Council can prevent the matter from ever reaching the General Assembly. It’s a Catch 22.
Article 108
Amendments to the present Charter shall come into force for all Members of the United Nations when they have been adopted by a vote of two thirds of the members of the General Assembly and ratified in accordance with their respective constitutional processes by two thirds of the Members of the United Nations, including all the permanent members of the Security Council. United Nations Charter, Chapter XVIII: Amendments
Legal scholars have also argued that Article 6 of the UN Charter could be interpreted in a way that would allow a member to be removed, but, so far, it has not been used successfully in that regard.
Article 6—A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.
The only member of the UN to ever be successfully removed was Taiwan in 1971, which ” was formally expelled from the United Nations by a vote of the General Assembly and replaced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which had taken power in Beijing at the end of the country’s civil war in 1949.
The ROC government had fled to the island of Taiwan with millions of refugees as the communists took power but continued to hold the seat of “China” at the UN and was a permanent member of the Security Council with veto power. Despite being exiled, officials in Taipei had the support of the US thanks to fears in the West that communism might sweep through Asia….
The “Resolution on Admitting Peking,” also known as Resolution 2758, called for member states to “restore” the rights of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing as the “only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations.”After years of trying at the behest of Chinese ally Albania, the resolution finally passed in the General Assembly Taiwan taps on United Nations’ door, 50 years after departure,Aljazeera
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The removal of Taiwan is not at all comparable to the situation with the United States today. Besides, expulsion might not even be the preferred tool for dealing with the US problem. If the objective is simply to allow the Council the flexibility it needs to perform the tasks for which it was created, then the focus should be on ways to prevent US obstruction. It is US obstructionism that prevents the Security Council from doing its job, enforcing its resolutions, putting an end to this senseless war, and bringing justice to the Palestinian people. If that can be achieved while retaining Washington’s place on the Council, then that would be a desirable outcome. But is possible?
It is, according to board member of the UN Association-San Francisco chapter, Dan Becker. Here’s what he says:
In the United Nations Charter, the very sentence that establishes the Security Council’s permanent-five veto power ends — surprisingly — in these nine words: “. . . a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.”
Let’s allow the phrase to sink in for a moment before acknowledging that there is indeed a host of conditions, requirements, litmus tests and hoops to jump through before the phrase can be invoked and applied to a resolution.
But at the same time, it’s also crucial and a bit remarkable to remember that the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — are not exempt. They must abstain as well. So, there it is, this little-known mechanism hiding in plain sight in Article 27 (3)….
An abridged history, according to Security Council Report, an independent publication, explains the requirements needed to invoke this clause:
“Abstentions under Article 27 (3) are mandatory only if all of the following conditions apply: the decision falls under Chapter VI or Article 52 (3) of Chapter VIII; the issue is considered a dispute; a Council member is considered a party to the dispute; and the decision is not procedural in nature.”
…
Second is the claim that the U.S. is a “party to the dispute” in Gaza. This is usually invoked because of the sheer mass of arms provided to Israel by Washington… The issue is hotly debated. But some of the many studies regarding this topic are quite exhaustive and keep the claim quite reasonable….
it’s not an academic exercise. Any ability to force a P5 member to abstain should be examined carefully. All eyes are on the U.S. right now, and the suspense is palpable. …
The principle behind this mechanism is clear to any school child. It appeals to our ultimate common sense. If you’re involved in a dispute, under certain situations you should be required to abstain from voting for resolutions about the dispute….
It’s not as if the clause hasn’t been used in the past, most often in the early years of the U.N.
Further examination of the Security Council Report document above clearly shows 12 times that the mandate has been successfully invoked, and 14 times where it was raised or considered but failed. Nevertheless, at one time it was alive and kicking….
The power of digging into this issue has the potential to reap large rewards now and down the line. It could change the calculus in the Council. ….So let’s dust off this phrase in Article 27(3): ” . . . a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting,” carefully study its limits and restrictions, and then make a noise sooner rather than later. Gaza & UN Veto Power, Dan Becker, Consortium News
Let us acknowledge that no “knight in shining armor” is going to sweep into Gaza and save the Palestinians from Israel’s sadistic rampage. That’s not going to happen. The only way this conflict can be brought to a close is if the international community aggressively pursues a strategy in which Washington is sidelined while Israel is isolated, sanctioned and gradually coerced into compliance. UN Security Council Resolution 2735 has already been approved. Now it must be enforced.
Listen to the full speech of our executive director, Yuli Novak, yesterday at the UNSC.
"During this week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets. They feel angry, desperate and betrayed by their government. They have understood, perhaps for the first time,… pic.twitter.com/aMRf9rTOD9
“Since Israel was founded, its guiding logic has been to promote Jewish supremacy over the entire territory under its control. Yuli Novak, executive Director of B’Tselem
It is an honor to address the Security Council today …. on the state of human rights in Israel-Palestine.
During this week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets. They feel angry, desperate and betrayed by their government. They have understood, perhaps for the first time, that the Israeli government does not want to return the hostages in a deal, but to continue the war indefinitely.
To understand the Israeli government’s criminal conduct over the last 11 months, you have to understand the overall goal of this regime. Since Israel was founded, its guiding logic has been to promote Jewish supremacy over the entire territory under its control. The current government guidelines state: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all parts of the land of Israel. In the criminal Hamas led attack on October 7, 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 were taken hostages. Since that day all Israelis have been living in great fear. Our government is cynically exploiting our collective trauma to violently advance its project of cementing Israeli control over the entire land. To do that, it is waging war on the entire Palestinian people – committing war crimes almost daily”.
In Gaza, this has taken the form of expulsion, starvation, killing and destruction on an unprecedented scale. This goes beyond revenge. Israel is using the opportunity to promote an ideological agenda making Gaza uninhabitableas this council has found repeatedly, a vast part of Gaza’s homes and infrastructure has been completely destroyed by driving Palestinians out of entire areas and displacing millions Israel is laying the groundwork for long-term control of Gaza. This could lead to the reestablishment of Israeli settlements there.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the government is exploiting the situation to make irreversible changes. Since October, Israel has killed 640 Palestinians including at least 140 minors. Settlers are attacking Palestinians and carrying out pogroms in broad daylight with the support of the government. …
Recently the military launched a huge operation aimed at damaging infrastructure that served hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank. The international community did not stop Israel’s policy of massive harm to civilians in Gaza. Now this cruel policy is spilling over to the West Bank. The war on Palestinians is also happening in prisons. Since October, Israel has arrested thousands of Palestinians and held them in inhumane conditions. Last month we published a report called “Welcome to Hell” which shows the shocking pattern of abuse that amounts to torture. The government of Israel has used the war to turn Israeli prisons into a network of torture camps for Palestinians. This violence is possible because Israel has enjoyed impunity for decades. As long as this impunity continues, the killing and destruction will continue and expand. and fear will continue to rule the land.
The international community has failed its duty to protect civilians. 4 UN Security Council resolutions on the Gaza conflict did not lead to a lasting ceasefire or free the hostages. The risk of regional escalation has grown. Diplomatic efforts did not stop the mass killing of civilians or end the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The Council must acknowledge this failure and take effective action to compel Israel and Hamas to immediately and permanently cease all hostilities. But de-escalation is only the first step. It is time for the Council to address the opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of Israel’s entire occupation and settlement project. Every day that this Council does not act on the call to end the occupation and apartheid, is another day you are abandoning us, the people of this land who are suffering and dying in tens of thousands needlessly under a cruel and unjust apartheid regime.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a 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 a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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In commemoration of the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, we repost this article by Ted Walter and the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen, first published in 2020.
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Editor’s Note
As of the publication of this article, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is awaiting a decision from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding the request for correction that AE911Truth and ten family members of 9/11 victims submitted to NIST on April 15, 2020. The request seeks corrections to eight separate items of information in NIST’s 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, any of which would effectively force NIST to reverse its conclusion that fires caused the building’s destruction.
NIST informed AE911Truth on June 12, 2020, that it was unable to meet its goal of responding within 60 days. Under the procedure governing such requests, NIST must provide a decision within 120 days of the submission, which would fall on August 13, 2020. If NIST elects not to take the corrective action being sought, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters would then have 30 days to file an appeal with NIST. Should NIST fail in any way to comply with the procedure governing requests or should it fail to rectify the information quality violations documented in the request, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters are prepared to take legal action.
In the meantime, AE911Truth is taking one further step toward correcting the record on the destruction of the Twin Towers with the publication of this article. This exhaustive review of 70 hours of 9/11 news coverage reveals that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters covering the events in New York City on 9/11 but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.
The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.
This observation was first made 14 years ago in the article, “118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.” A review of interviews conducted with 503 members of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in the weeks and months after 9/11 revealed that 118 of them described witnessing what they interpreted that day to be explosions. Only 10 FDNY members were found describing the destruction in ways supportive of the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.
The interviews of fire marshal John Coyle and firefighter Christopher Fenyo explicitly support this finding. Coyle remarked in his interview, “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards. . . . Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.” Similarly, Fenyo recalled in his interview, “At that point, a debate began to rage [about whether to continue rescue operations in the other, still-standing tower] because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.”
News reporters constitute another group of individuals who witnessed the event firsthand and whose accounts were publicly documented. While many people have seen a smattering of news clips on the internet in which reporters describe explosions, there has never been, as far as we know, a systematic attempt to collect these news clips and analyze them.
We decided to take on this task for two reasons. First, we wanted to know just how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters. Second, anticipating that this would be the more prevalent hypothesis, we wanted to determine exactly how it was supplanted by the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse.
In this article, we present our findings related to the first question. In a subsequent article, we will examine how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.
Television Coverage Compiled
To determine how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters, we set out to review as much continuous news coverage as we could find from the major television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates covering the events in New York.
Through internet searches, we found continuous news coverage from 11 different television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates. These included the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC; cable news channels CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC; and local network affiliates WABC, WCBS, and WNBC. We also incorporated coverage from New York One (NY1), a New York-based cable news channel owned by Time Warner (now Spectrum), which we grouped with the local network affiliates into a local channel category.
Unfortunately, we were not able to find coverage spanning most of the day for every channel. Thus, while the collection of news coverage we compiled is extensive, it is not comprehensive. To fill in the gaps where possible, we included excerpts of coverage that aired later in the day if we found that coverage to be relevant. We also included one excerpt from USA Today’s coverage that we found to be relevant and three excerpts from an afternoon press conference with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki that aired on almost every channel. In general, the times at which these excerpts aired are unknown, though in some cases we were able to identify an approximate time.
The news coverage we compiled and reviewed totaled approximately 70 hours.
Table 1: Television Coverage Compiled
Note: We invite anyone who has portions of the television coverage we were not able to find to send them to us at [email protected]. We will incorporate anything we receive and update this article accordingly. For anyone who wishes to replicate our work, the entire collection of footage can be downloaded here.
Criteria for Defining ‘Explosion’ Versus ‘Non-Explosion’ Reporters
We sought to answer one main question in our review of the news coverage: How many reporters described the occurrence of explosions — both the raw number of reporters and as a percentage of all reporters who covered the Twin Towers’ destruction — and what was the nature of their reporting? To answer this question, we needed to establish clear criteria for identifying what we will call “explosion reporters” and “non-explosion reporters.”
We should make clear that this article addresses the statements of reporters only and does not address the statements of anchors, except for in the case of one anchor (CNN’s Aaron Brown) who had a direct view of the Twin Towers. In our next article, we will address statements made by anchors, who were also interpreting the Twin Towers’ destruction but without having witnessed it firsthand.
Because the airplane impacts were often referred to as explosions, we were careful to exclude any instances where it was not absolutely clear that the reporter was referring only to the destruction of the Twin Towers.
As we studied the news coverage and began to recognize patterns in how the Twin Towers’ destruction was reported, we developed three separate categories of reporting that would classify someone as an “explosion reporter”: (1) eyewitness reporting, (2) narrative reporting, and (3) source-based reporting. Below we provide definitions of each.
Eyewitness Reporting
“Eyewitness reporting” is when a reporter is an eyewitness with a direct view of or in close proximity to the destruction of one or both of the Twin Towers and perceives an explosion or explosions in conjunction with the destruction — or perceives one or both of the towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting. Although we usually excluded the word “boom,” which could apply either to an explosion or to a collapse, we included it in one case because the totality of what the reporter (Nina Pineda) described indicated that she viewed the event as being explosion-based.
We did not include reporters who described only a “shaking” or “trembling” of the ground. The perception of the ground shaking was widespread and constitutes important eyewitness evidence, but it does not necessarily reveal much about how the reporter interpreted what she or he was witnessing. Among reporters who mentioned demolition, we excluded the ones who merely compared the destruction to a demolition whenever it was clear that the reporter believed it to be a collapse caused by structural failure. We also excluded reporters who used the word “implode” or “implosion” whenever it was clear that the reporter used it to describe the building collapsing in on itself, as opposed to a demolition.
Here is an example of eyewitness reporting:
David Lee Miller, Fox News, 10:01 AM:
“Suddenly, while talking to an officer who was questioning me about my press credentials, we heard a very loud blast, an explosion. We looked up, and the building literally began to collapse before us. . . . Not clear now is why this explosion took place. Was it because of the planes that, uh, two planes, dual attacks this morning, or was there some other attack, which is — there has been talk of here on the street.”
Narrative Reporting
“Narrative reporting” is when a reporter refers to the Twin Towers’ destruction as an explosion-based event when speaking of it in the course of his or her reporting. This could be a reporter who was an eyewitness to the destruction or a reporter who otherwise understood the destruction to be an explosion-based event.
The main distinction between eyewitness reporting and narrative reporting is that eyewitness reporting involves an eyewitness describing his or her direct perceptions, often uttering them spontaneously, while narrative reporting involves interpretation and/or outside influence, either of which inform the reporter’s developing narrative of what took place. (In several cases, reporters go from engaging in eyewitness reporting around the time of the destruction to engaging in narrative reporting later on, with their direct perceptions informing their developing narrative).
This distinction is not meant to imply that one type of reporting is more valuable or reliable than another. In this analysis, eyewitness reporting tells us about what reporters perceived and immediately interpreted during, or shortly after, the event. It thus gives us more information about the actual event. Narrative reporting, by contrast, tells us how reporters interpreted the event after having more time to process their perceptions and to synthesize additional information from other sources. Narrative reporting thus tells us about the collective narrative that was developing among reporters covering the event.
Here is an example of narrative reporting:
George Stephanopoulos, ABC, 12:27 PM:
“Well, Peter, I’m going to give you kind of a pool report from several of our correspondents down here of basically what happened down here in downtown New York between 9:45 and 10:45 when the two explosions and the collapse of the World Trade Center happened. At the time, I was actually in the subway heading towards the World Trade Center right around Franklin Street. And after the first explosion the subway station started to fill with smoke. The subway cars started to fill with smoke, and the subways actually stopped. They then diverted us around the World Trade Center to Park Place, which is one stop beyond the World Trade Center. We got to that train station at around 10:35, Peter, and it was a scene unlike I’ve ever seen before in my entire life.”
Source-based Reporting
“Source-based reporting” is when a reporter reports on the possible use of explosives based on information from government officials who said they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers.
Source-based reporting is similar to narrative reporting in that it involves outside influence. The main distinction is that source-based reporting is based on information from government sources. Information from government sources inherently indicates how government agencies were interpreting the event and is sometimes given extra weight by reporters and viewers.
Here is an example of source-based reporting:
Pat Dawson, NBC, 11:55 AM:
“Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 o’clock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device— that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. . . . But the bottom line is that, according to the Chief of Safety of the New York City Fire Department, he says that he probably lost a great many men in those secondary explosions. And he said that there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people in those two towers when the explosions took place.”
Non-Explosion Reporters
The main criterion we developed for classifying someone as a “non-explosion reporter” was that she or he reported on the destruction of one or both of the Twin Towers and did not engage in any of the types of explosion reporting defined above. To qualify as a non-explosion reporter, it was not necessary for the reporter to explicitly articulate the fire-induced collapse hypothesis. The mere absence of explosion reporting was enough to classify someone as a non-explosion reporter.
The challenge here lay not in identifying the absence of explosion reporting but in defining what constituted “reporting on the destruction.” In the end, we decided this should mean that the reporter had to describe the event of the destruction and not simply mention it in passing.
We should note that a reporter’s use of the word “collapse” did not necessarily qualify that person as a non-explosion reporter. Many explosion reporters described the occurrence of an explosion followed by collapse and they used the word “collapse” in their reporting (David Lee Miller, quoted above, is a prime example). Thus, use of the word “collapse” is not incompatible with being an explosion reporter and did not qualify someone as a non-explosion reporter.
Also, if a reporter made a statement that qualified him or her as an explosion reporter and then subsequently made a statement explicitly supporting the fire-induced collapse hypothesis (which is the case for WABC’s Joe Torres), we classified this reporter as an explosion reporter because he or she engaged in some explosion reporting at some point during the day. In this analysis, being classified as an “explosion reporter” does not imply a permanent stance. Rather, it just means that at some point in the day he or she reported the occurrence of explosions or the possible use of explosives in relation to the Twin Towers’ destruction.
Before we move on to the next section, it is important to note that because non-explosion reporters had to describe the event of the destruction and not simply mention it in passing, the only way to make a valid numerical comparison between explosion reporters and non-explosion reporters is to include only those who engaged in eyewitness reporting. According to the criteria we developed, explosion reporters who engaged in narrative reporting were not describing the event of the destruction but rather were referring to it as an explosion-based event in the course of their reporting, i.e., in passing. A comparable classification does not exist for non-explosion reporters, because we excluded those who only mentioned the event in passing (most commonly using the word “collapse”).
Numerical Analysis of ‘Explosion’ and ‘Non-Explosion’ Reporters
In total, we identified 36 explosion reporters and four non-explosion reporters in the approximately 70 hours of news coverage we reviewed. The 36 explosion reporters and their statements are listed in Appendix A. The four non-explosion reporters and their statements are listed in Appendix B. In addition, there were three borderline cases that we determined could not be clearly classified as either explosion or non-explosion reporters. Those cases are listed in Appendix C.
Of the 36 explosion reporters, 21 of them engaged in eyewitness reporting, 22 of them engaged in narrative reporting, and three of them engaged in source-based reporting. Recalling our definitions from above, this means the following:
21 reporters witnessed what they perceived as an explosion or explosions during the destruction of the Twin Towers or they perceived the Twin Towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting.
22 reporters (eight of whom also fall into the eyewitness reporting category) referred to the Twin Towers’ destruction as an explosion or an explosion-based event when speaking of it in the course of their reporting.
Three reporters (two of whom also fall into the narrative reporting category) reported on the possible use of explosives based on information from government officials who said they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers.
Four reporters reported on the destruction of the Twin Towers and did not report explosions in any way (either having witnessed explosions, having interpreted the destruction as being an explosion-based event, or having been informed by government officials about the possible use of explosives).
In terms of the percentage of explosion and non-explosion reporters, 21 of the 25 reporters who directly witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers, or 84%, either perceived an explosion or explosions or they perceived the Twin Towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting. In comparison, four of the 25 reporters who directly witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers, or 16%, did not report explosions in any way.
The tables below list each reporter and each instance of reporting according to the time at which each report was made.
Table 2A: Eyewitness Reporting by Explosion Reporters
Table 2B: Narrative Reporting by Explosion Reporters
*These reporters also engaged in eyewitness reporting.
Table 2C: Source-based Reporting by Explosion Reporters
*These reporters also engaged in narrative reporting.
Table 2D: Non-Explosion Reporters
How Reporters Reported the Twin Towers’ Destruction
The picture that unmistakably emerges is that the great majority of reporters who witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers either perceived an explosion or perceived the towers as exploding. This hypothesis of the Twin Towers’ destruction then continued to be prevalent among reporters covering the event, who essentially viewed the destruction of the towers as an explosion-based attack subsequent to the airplane strikes. We learn from the source-based reporting that the same hypothesis was also held by officials in the FDNY, the New York Police Department (NYPD), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — three of the most important agencies involved in the response to the attacks. In particular, with regard to the FBI, we are told the explosion hypothesis was the agency’s “working theory” as of late in the afternoon on 9/11.
Unlike members of the FDNY, most of whom provided their accounts during interviews conducted weeks or months after the event, it was the job of reporters to spontaneously communicate their perception and interpretation of events. Thus, when their reporting is compiled into one record, we are left with a rich and largely unfiltered collective account of what took place. Considered alongside the FDNY oral histories, these reporters’ statements, in our view, constitute strong corroborating evidence that explosives were used to destroy the Twin Towers.
Regarding the four non-explosion reporters, in addition to the fact that there are so few of them, we find that their individual accounts add little support to the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.
Two of the reporters were quite far away from the Twin Towers at the time of their destruction relative to most of the explosion reporters: Drew Millhon was “about 10 to 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center,” at the intersection of Varick Street and Canal Street, while Bob Bazell was at St. Vincent’s hospital on West 12th Street, approximately two miles from the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, Don Dahler, the only reporter who explicitly articulated the fire-induced collapse hypothesis, nonetheless likened the South Tower’s destruction to a controlled demolition, saying: “The entire building has just collapsed as if a demolition team set off — when you see the old demolitions of these old buildings.” The fourth non-explosion reporter, John Zito, was quite close to the South Tower when it came down. He did not describe an explosion, but he also did not attribute the destruction to a fire-induced collapse. It is worth noting that Ron Insana, whom Zito was with, vividly described seeing the building “exploding” and “blowing” and hearing a “noise associated with an implosion.”
Conclusion
Returning to the first question posed at the top of this article, we conclude that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.
Furthermore, the 21 instances of eyewitness reporting, all of which contain spontaneous descriptions of the phenomena the reporters witnessed, strongly corroborate the overwhelming scientific evidence that explosives were used to destroy the Twin Towers.
In a subsequent article, we will examine how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.
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Appendix A: Statements by 36 Explosion Reporters
These statements are organized by channel in the same order as presented in Table 1. Within each channel, they are organized chronologically based on the time of the first noted statement by each reporter.
1. George Stephanopoulos, ABC
12:27 PM, Narrative Reporting
“Well, Peter, I’m going to give you kind of a pool report from several of our correspondents down here of basically what happened down here in downtown New York between 9:45 and 10:45 when the two explosions and the collapse of the World Trade Center happened. At the time, I was actually in the subway heading towards the World Trade Center, right around Franklin Street. And after the first explosion the subway station started to fill with smoke. The subway cars started to fill with smoke, and the subways actually stopped. They then diverted us around the World Trade Center to Park Place, which is one stop beyond the World Trade Center. We got to that train station at around 10:35, Peter, and it was a scene unlike I’ve ever seen before in my entire life. As we tried to get out of the subway station and walk up into the street, it was pitch black, midnight black, snowing soot all down through downtown Manhattan. This was about two blocks from the World Trade Center. You couldn’t see a foot in front of your face at that time.”
2. Cynthia McFadden, ABC
5:56 PM, Narrative Reporting
“We’ve been told that all victims now who are taken out of the blast site are going to be taken here first. . . . Part of the problem initially was that when the first rescue workers went in — and we have talked to some of them, some of the second wave of rescue workers — the first wave of rescue workers who went in were trapped, many of them killed by the second blast. . . . There have been hundreds of people at area hospitals, as you note. But they don’t believe that anywhere near the full weight of this has yet been uncovered, that there are hundreds and thousands of people who have been injured in this blast, and that’s the people that they expect to bring here.”
3. Harold Dow, CBS
10:05 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Yes, I arrived on the scene about an hour and a half ago. Believe it or not, there was another major explosion. The building itself, literally the top of it came down, sending smoke and debris everywhere. I tried to run to get away from all of the debris. A number of other people here are trapped in the subway here in a shoe store, trying to get away from most of the debris. It’s just an incredible sight.”
4. Tom Flynn, CBS
11:03, Eyewitness Reporting
“At that time, maybe 45 minutes into the taping that we were doing, which was maybe a half hour after, there was — it was an explosion. It was way up where the fire was. And the whole building at that point bellied out in flames, and everybody ran.”
5. Mika Brzezinski, CBS
11:15 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Dan, we’re three blocks from the scene and we saw it all after the first two hits. We saw the explosion and also the collapse of the tower.”
6. Pat Dawson, NBC
11:55 AM, Source-based Reporting
“Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department, who was obviously one of the first people here on the scene after those two planes were crashed into the side — we assume — of the World Trade Center towers, which used to be behind me over there. Chief Albert Turi told me that he was here just literally 10 or 15 minutes after the events that took place this morning, that is, the first crash. . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 o’clock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device — that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices he thinks, that took place after the initial impact, he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building. So that’s what we have been told by Albert Turi, who is the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department. He told me that just moments ago. . . . But the bottom line is that, according to the Chief of Safety of the New York City Fire Department, he says that he probably lost a great many men in those secondary explosions. And he said that there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people in those two towers when the explosions took place.”
3:02 PM, Narrative Reporting
Dawson asks a police officer: “How would you describe your efforts to organize to the rescue effort now, given that we saw a sequence of events this morning? A sequence of crashes, then explosions, and then the collapses.”
7. Anne Thompson, NBC
12:43 PM, Eyewitness Reporting
“And I was walking on Broadway at Fulton, and suddenly we heard an explosion. It was the first tower coming down. And down Broadway you could just see this wall of debris flying at us. . . . It looked like a war zone. Debris, dust ankle deep, cars on fire, cars turned askew in the explosion. . . . Then at about 10:30 it looked like everything was all clear. I started to walk out. I walked down Broadway towards Canal. And we heard the second explosion. . . . At that point a fireman came into the building and said we all had to stay in one place. He then told us all to get out of the building because they felt if there was a third explosion that this building would be in danger.”
8. Aaron Brown, CNN
Note: Although Aaron Brown is a news anchor, we include him among the explosion reporters because he was positioned outside and witnessed the events directly, and his direct perception played a major role in his evolving interpretation of the event.
9:59 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Wow! Jamie. Jamie, I need you to stop for a second. There has just been a huge explosion. We can see a billowing smoke rising. And I can’t — I’ll tell you that I can’t see that second tower. But there was a cascade of sparks and fire and now this…it looks almost like a mushroom cloud, explosion, this huge, billowing smoke in the second tower. This was the second of the two towers hit. And I, you know, I cannot see behind that smoke obviously, as you can’t either. The first tower in front has not changed. And we see this extraordinarily (sic) and frightening scene behind us of this second tower now just encased in smoke. What is behind it…I cannot tell you. But just look at that. That is about as frightening a scene as you will ever see.”
10:02 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Again, there has been a second explosion here in Manhattan at the Trade Center. We are getting reports that a part of the tower, the second tower, the one a bit further to the south of us, has collapsed. We are checking on that. . . . What we can tell you is that just in the last several minutes here — two or three minutes — a second or third, I guess, technically, extraordinary event has happened here in lower Manhattan. You can see this extraordinary plume of smoke that is, or was at least, the second tower of the World Trade Center.”
9. Rose Arce, CNN
10:29 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“I’m about a block away. And there were several people that were hanging out the windows right below where the plane crashed, when suddenly you saw the top of the building start to shake, and people began leaping from the windows in the north side of the building. You saw two people at first plummet and then a third one, and then the entire top of the building just blew up, and splinters of debris are falling on the street.”
10:50 AM, Narrative Reporting
“It looks like a large chunk of that debris has hit a building very close by, about two blocks away next to an elementary school, causing another explosion. . . . So as people are coming up the street running from the scene of this new explosion you can see them slipping on the ash and literally having to drag each other up the street.”
Note: We include Rose Arce’s statement at 10:50 AM as narrative reporting because it indicates that she initially perceived and then continued to interpret the destruction of the Twin Towers as explosions.
12:26 PM, Narrative Reporting
“As you walk through the ash you can see debris from inside the World Trade Center itself, a very eerie scene, pieces of paper from people’s desks, office supplies many, many blocks from the site the actual explosion where they now are fearing that there may be yet another explosion because of this potential gas leak.”
10:43 PM, Eyewitness Reporting
“People were rushing to the windows. They were taking clothes — one thing looked like a blanket that they were waving — and then suddenly there was another, an explosion, and you saw folks start to jump out the front window of the building and plunge. I saw at least six people do this. Folks were pushing each other. Some people were screaming for help and then just falling out.”
10. Patty Sabga, CNN
10:57 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“About an hour ago I was on the corner of Broadway and Park Place — that’s about a thousand yards from the World Trade Center — when the first tower collapsed. It was a massive explosion. At the time the police were trying desperately to evacuate people from the area. When that explosion occurred it was like a scene out of a horror film.”
10:59 AM, Narrative Reporting
“The scene was like a ghost town in the Financial District. Very eerie. You saw people being wheeled on gurneys away from the site of the explosion. . . . Now, at the time I was back on the corner again of Broadway and Park Place. At that time, the police started running toward us telling everybody to move who was left on the street. I looked up and that’s when I heard the — [coughs] pardon me — that’s when I heard the explosion. That’s when the second tower came down.”
11. Alan Dodds Frank, CNN
11:07 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Aaron, just two or three minutes ago there was yet another collapse or explosion. . . . But at a quarter to 11:00 there was another collapse or explosion following the 10:30 collapse of the second Tower. And a firefighter who rushed by us estimated that 50 stories went down. The street filled with smoke. It was like a forest fire roaring down a canyon.”
Note: We include Alan Dodds Frank’s statement at 11:07 AM as narrative reporting because it indicates that he interpreted the destruction of the Twin Towers as possibly being an explosion-based event.
12. David Lee Miller, Fox News
10:01 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Jon, the scene is horrific. One of the two towers literally collapsed. I was making my way to the foot of the World Trade Center. Suddenly, while talking to an officer who was questioning me about my press credentials, we heard a very loud blast, an explosion. We looked up, and the building literally began to collapse before us. . . . And I am now standing in a black cloud of smoke. . . . I’m on a pay phone on the street right now and I literally cannot see more than quarter-block away. That’s how thick the smoke is. I’m on Murray Street and West Broadway for those who know Lower Manhattan. Not clear now is why this explosion took place. Was it because of the planes that, uh, two planes, dual attacks this morning, or was there some other attack which is — there has been talk of here on the street.”
10:32 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Jon, just seconds ago there was a huge explosion, and it appears right now the second World Trade tower has just collapsed.”
13. Rick Leventhal, Fox News
10:05 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
He asks a police officer: “Do you know if it was an explosion or if it was a building collapse?”
Then he asks: “How many people would you say were on the ground when the building exploded or collapsed?”
10:06 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“When the building did collapse — or whatever it was that happened — it was a huge explosion, a huge rumbling cloud of smoke and fire came a cross Church Street and started billowing this way. . . The FBI is here, as you can see. They had roped this area off. They were taking photographs and securing this area just prior to that huge explosion that we all heard and felt.”
10:12 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“And we were standing here when there was some sort of collapse or explosion and everyone started running in this direction.”
14. Ashleigh Banfield, MSNBC
9:59 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
Chris Jansing (news anchor): “It does appear that there has been a third explosion in the area of the World Trade Center. There was first one plane that hit one of the Twin Towers. A second plane, each about one hour ago. And now a third explosion. Ashleigh Banfield is in Manhattan. Ashleigh, did you see or hear anything just moments ago?”
Ashleigh Banfield: “God. Oh my god, Chris, this is incredible. I’m looking right at it.”
Jansing: “What are you seeing, Ashleigh?”
Banfield: “Well, I saw the explosion, for one.”
Jansing: “Could you feel it?”
Banfield: “I can smell it. Everyone around screamed at the time it happened. It’s just unbelievable. I can’t see that it’s another building. It looks almost in the same position as the second bomb, or second explosion. It’s unbelievable.”
Jansing: “What’s the scene around you? What are people doing?
Banfield: “Most people, as I said earlier, are absolutely aghast.
Jansing: “Are they running?”
Banfield: “No one’s running. No, I’m not close enough at this point to be seeing that. I wouldn’t be showered with debris from my position here. I’m too far north of it. But I have a bird’s eye view of what’s happening. The route that I’m on is the emergency route right now, so all of the emergency vehicles are streaming past us. But as I was looking up I saw the entire explosion. It looked exactly like the first two. Unbelievable. And everyone who watched it around me screamed. It was just a chorus of “oh my gods” from everyone standing around. I’m walking, so what I’m hearing are a lot of people whose cars are parked, who’ve got their radios tuned to local news stations and trying to catch up on just exactly what’s happening. But now I’m seeing people running. But I really don’t think they’re running from the area. We’re too far away to be in the direct line of any debris. But we certainly had the most perfect vantage point for that explosion. It was unbelievable. And the smoke now is so thick. It’s just incredible.”
10:54 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Well, we just heard another explosion go off a couple minutes ago, Chris, and saw a bunch more people sort of running this way. A woman on her bike was screaming as it went off. And there was a New York City officer who was plain-clothed walking by with a radio. I tried to stop him to ask what happened. And all he said was ‘car bomb, car bomb.’ And then I couldn’t ask him for any information. He said, ‘I have no time for this.’ We haven’t seen anything since. But the cloud of smoke is still extremely thick right around the direct vicinity of the World Trade Center. I am now about, I’d say — what do you say, we’re about five or 10 blocks north of it now? About five or 10 blocks north of it, and just unbelievably the sun has come out. There’s blue sky above us. We started with sheer blackness. When that cloud of debris and of smoke came out, when the explosion happened, we couldn’t see anything, we couldn’t breathe. We tried to make our way a few blocks up and we’ve made contact with some other NBC crew here.”
10:55 AM, Narrative Reporting
“It’s terrifying here, Chris. When that last bomb — or when that last collapse happened, and the cloud came out, it was like something out of Hollywood. . . . It’s really eerie seeing the people who got caught in that blast, because everyone looks like a ghost.”
1:35 PM, Narrative Reporting
“What did you see in the epicenter when you came out of that explosion?”
1:36 PM, Narrative Reporting
“At the very start of the day when this happened, we were right in the epicenter where the explosion was. Right now I’m covered in the debris and the dust from the explosion itself. I was hit with a cloud of debris and smoke.”
1:37 PM, Narrative Reporting
“That is 7 World Trade Center. Apparently on the south side, that’s the side that’s not facing us, about halfway way up it’s still burning pretty badly, because it was rocked with a lot of the explosion from the force of the Twin World Trade Centers, when they came down. A large concern is what’s going to happen with that brown building now, which is why we keep getting moved further and further north. You can see people down on the street moving towards us. Even media who originally were allowed to have more sort of free rein to report this story, we’re being pushed out as well as, because there was some concern that there might be additional explosions, possibly other bombs.”
15. Rick Sanchez, MSNBC
10:52 AM, Narrative Reporting
“You have to understand that when this first happened, they certainly didn’t imagine that there would be second or tertiary explosions. So they parked some of their vehicles in those areas. And many of those vehicles — people in those vehicles have lost their lives.”
11:26 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Well, we’ve been told, as matter of fact moments ago, to try and get out of this area, because they’re moving everyone out. And the fear is, of course, that there are gas leaks, natural gas in this area that either fed into or out of the buildings that have exploded. And now those lines are open and may rupture.”
12:07 PM, Source-based Reporting
“Well, I’m in that area, if you’re familiar with this area of where West Broadway and Hudson come together, right at Chambers. That would put us about a block and a half away from the site of where the explosion was. That area has just been evacuated because police have found what they describe as a suspicious device. They fear that it might be something that could lead to another explosion. Obviously, there’s a real sense of caution here on the part of police. I spoke with some police officials moments ago, Chris. And they told me that they have reason to believe that one of the explosions at the World Trade Center — aside from the ones that may have been caused by the impact of the plane with the building — may have been caused by a van that was parked in the building that may have had some type of explosive device in it. So their fear is that there may have been explosive devices planted either in the building or in the adjacent area. And that’s why they’re being so cautious in this vicinity right now.”
12:09 PM, Narrative Reporting
“This is why it’s so difficult for them in this area where we are. Imagine, they came here originally to deal with a crisis. They set up some command centers, and they had many of their chiefs and many of their supervisors in the area of the building. The second and third explosions literally have wreaked havoc on those field forces and those command centers. So they’ve had to back up. And now they’re trying to see how they can approach it again.”
16. John Bussey, CNBC Contributor, Wall Street Journal Reporter
11:52 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“I was getting ready to talk with Haines [inaudible], and the fire was raging in both buildings. I looked up at the south building, the second World Trade Center to be hit, and explosions were coming down the building. It looked as if charges had been set on each floor and they were in succession going off. Now, this is probably not what was happening. It just looked that way to me. The building just blew out floor by floor, and it probably had something to do with the structural damage that was done by the planes hitting it. When I saw the floor-by-floor explosions happening, I dove out of the office where I was because the windows looked directly over the World Trade Center. We are in the World Financial Center directly across West Street from the two Trade Centers. By the time I came up from under a desk where I sought shelter, the entire floor, the entire room where I was completely dense with cement and smoke. You could not see.”
Note: Here Bussey has started to interpret the phenomena he witnessed as the building simply collapsing. However, it is clear from this and from his other accounts of the event (Source 1, Source 2) that his initial interpretation was that explosives were destroying the building.
11:55 AM, Narrative Reporting
“We were so close to the building that you could feel it hitting your shoulder as it rained down. But we were on the safe side of the building — much, much safer than where the firefighters were on the other side of the building, exposed directly to the explosion.”
Note: Here Bussey has started to interpret the phenomena he witnessed as the building simply collapsing. However, it is clear from this and from his other accounts of the event (Source 1, Source 2) that his initial interpretation was that explosives were destroying the building.
11:55 AM, Narrative Reporting
“We were so close to the building that you could feel it hitting your shoulder as it rained down. But we were on the safe side of the building — much, much safer than where the firefighters were on the other side of the building, exposed directly to the explosion.”
17. Ron Insana, CNBC
12:41 PM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Well, I was heading down after we had learned of it, about 9:00 or 8:55 this morning, I had called in to see if we should go down and aid the coverage. And I was on my way down. We got fairly close to the building, and I ran into a camera man from MSNBC and we were trying to get across town past the World Trade Center to the Westside Highway, which is on the lower southwest corner of Manhattan to hook up with our colleagues from CNBC. And as we were going across one of the restricted zones, the building started to explode, I guess the only way I could describe it. It was hard to tell if it was an actual explosion, but the building began to come down. . . . We heard, we heard — I wouldn’t call it an explosion. We did notice that the building began to blow at the top, and that material began to come down. . . . And as we turned to run, material just began to fall. And like that scene in Independence Day, where wind was just whipping down the street in the wake of an explosion, that’s exactly what we experienced. It went down the street, curved around corners, and blew with a fair degree of intensity, again, Tyler, until the sky was completely black.”
1:08 PM, Eyewitness Reporting (appearing on NBC)
“As we were moving towards the building we saw the top begin to blow out in a plume of smoke. And we heard the noise associated with an implosion.”
18. Bob Pisani, CNBC
2:42 PM, Narrative Reporting
“And the real panic, I think in my mind, occurred, Maria, I was outside when you were when the second explosion occurred, because so many people had been attracted to what was going on. The explosion threw debris on top of a lot of people. That was when the real panic began.”
19. N.J. Burkett, WABC
9:59 AM (unknown air time), Eyewitness Reporting
“And you can see the two towers — a huge explosion now raining debris on all of us! We better get out of the way!”
20. Michelle Charlesworth, WABC
10:10 AM, Eyewitness and Narrative Reporting
“I can only hope that people got out of the area on the sidewalks below the South Tower before it came tumbling down. But it literally exploded and came down as though it had been hit. Plumes of smoke moving out into the harbor. . . . To give you some idea of where I am, I’m approximately 20, 30 blocks from where this latest explosion just happened.”
21. Nina Pineda, WABC
10:17 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
Bill Ritter: “Nina, I want you to describe one more time what it felt like when that tower collapsed. What did it feel like to you on the ground there?”
Nina Pineda: “We were standing probably about three blocks away advancing toward the scene to try and gather some photos and some videotape. And it felt like the entire ground shook. It felt like what it feels like to be in an earthquake. The ground was shaking followed by plumes and plumes of overwhelming smoke and flying debris, ash, and pieces of the building. As the ground was shaking . . .”
Lori Stokes: “Was there sound?”
Pineda: “There was a tremendous booming sound, and then it just felt like a rumbling. But it didn’t sound like an explosion. It sounded like a loud rumbling. And then the next thing we saw were the streets — the way the streets looked were just overcome by smoke, just plumes and plumes of smoke like a bomb had gone off, coming up the street as people were racing to get in front of these clouds of smoke, and not doing too good of a job.”
10:18 AM, Narrative Reporting
“And what were doing when the explosion happened was shooting pieces of the plane. There are pieces of the plane on Church Street.”
10:19 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Seconds before the explosion happened there was another kind of a renewed interest in really getting people away. Because, of course, out of curiosity everyone’s trying to get pictures of the World Trade Center on fire. They started screaming, ‘Get back! Get back! There’s another explosion happening.’ I guess they were being warned on their radios that the top was going to come down, because it was burning for the better part of half an hour. And they screamed to get people back. They started screaming, ‘Leave Manhattan if possible. Everybody leave Manhattan if possible.’”
Unknown time, Narrative Reporting
Pineda: “The ladies that are with me were in the World Trade Center in the first building and escaped through the lobby where they report that they believe there was a bomb in the lobby.”
Michelle Scott (witness): “And even the turnstile was burnt and it was sticking. And they just told us to run.”
Igarlow Sweezer (witness): “And we were coming out, we passed the lobby, there was no lobby. So I believe the bomb hit the lobby first, and a couple of seconds and the first plane hit.”
Unknown time, Narrative Reporting
“If you can see behind me, this a moment ago you could see all the way through. But from that last explosion that Jeff Rossen was telling us about, it is now again dark. It was strangely and eerily calm here in the Financial District because everything’s been evacuated.”
Unknown time, Narrative Reporting
“The only thing left in the street are people’s shoes as they ran out of their shoes to escape the fire bombs and the explosions.”
22. Cheryl Fiandaca, WABC
10:38 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“I was right next to the South Tower. I was about two blocks away. It was just a small explosion, and then rocks and debris and everything started pouring down.”
Unknown time shortly after 10:38 AM, Eyewitness and Narrative Reporting
“Right, we were about two blocks away when the second explosion hit. And all we heard was just a small explosion. And then we saw a roar of an explosion, and all kinds smoke coming billowing out, debris falling down, people running, the firefighters and police screaming at everyone to run as the debris was coming down and hitting people.”
23. Joe Torres, WABC
Unknown Air Time, Eyewitness Reporting
“Ten o’clock this morning, photographer Glenn Mayrose and I, along with FBI agents, police officers, fire officials, we all thought for sure a bomb was set to explode underneath our feetoutside 7 World Trade Center. We took off running for our lives north on Church Street. We had no idea the top of one of the Twin Towers had just exploded. . . . As others looked back in shock and horror, we started another interview with a Port Authority engineer who worked at World Trade Center and spoke to us about the strength and integrity of the skyscrapers. Then, suddenly, the second tower erupted right before our eyes.”
24. Carol Marin, CBS Reporter appearing on WCBS
10:59 AM, Narrative Reporting
Carol Marin: “After the second tower went down, I was trying to make my way to a CBS crew or to try to help CBS crews if I could. And then, I don’t know what it was, John. But another explosion, a rolling blast of fire, a rolling column of fire towards us. My respect for fire and police already knew no bounds given the danger, it now exceeds what I thought it could, because a firefighter threw me into the wall of a building, covered me with his body as the flames approached us. And another police officer in New York named Brendan Duke, wherever he is, got me through smoke that neither one of us could see more than about a foot ahead of us. There are still people in there. Excuse me, I’ve breathed a fair amount of soot. The personnel, the police and the fire working in there are doing so against really dangerous odds. And they still don’t know if there’s something left to explode, John.”
John Slattery: “Where were you at the time?
Marin: “I was — not being a New Yorker, you’ll have to help me here. I came around Stuyvesant High School, and that street at the north end. And I came up and asked if anyone had seen a CBS crew. And I was directed by a firefighter who said, ‘Walk down the middle of the road, because you don’t know what’s going to come down.’ At which point, we heard a rumble like I’ve never heard before, and a firefighter ran towards me. We ran as fast as we could. I lost my shoes. I fell down. He picked me up and slammed me into a wall and covered me with him until we could make it more to safety.”
John Slattery: “Was this from the first rolling blast or the second?”
Carol Marin: “John, I looked at my watch. It was about 10:44, is what my watch said. So it was after the second tower, I think the second tower explosion.”
Note: The focus of Marin’s account is one of several widely corroborated explosions that occurred between 10:38 AM and 11:30 AM after both towers had come down. However, Marin’s reporting qualifies her as an explosion reporter in regard to the Twin Towers because she references “the second tower explosion,” and it is clear she interprets the towers’ destruction as an explosion-based event.
25. John Slattery, WCBS
11:44 AM, Narrative Reporting
“There were many tears. There was an awful lot of anguish. And then, with subsequent explosions, and when a portion of World Trade 1 hit the ground, there was an enormous burst, a cloud of smoke and debris that started moving north.”
26. Marcella Palmer, WCBS
Unknown time, Eyewitness Reporting
Marcella Palmer: “We heard another explosion. And I’m assuming that’s the one that came from the lower level, since there were two.”
Unidentified Anchor: “Right, because it was like 18 minutes apart?”
Palmer: “Well, this is — no, the first explosion, then there was a second explosion in the same building. There were two explosions.”
27. Vince DeMentri, WCBS
Unknown time, Narrative Reporting
“Very difficult to breathe, but look around. This must have been Ground Zero where this thing blew up. Car after car after car, buses, completely burned and obliterated straight down to the steel.”
28. Walter Perez, WNBC
9:59 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but it was another explosion on the far side of one of the buildings from where we’re standing. The reverberation — and another explosion on the right-hand side! Another building has gone up on the right-hand side of the road. People are now running down the street. We’re not sure if that was another explosion or if that was advanced debris.”
10:00 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“At this point, as you can tell, there’s absolute pandemonium in this area because of what has just happened. Exactly what, I can’t confirm. But on the far side of the building, there seemed to be another explosion and also on the right-hand side, there was also another explosion. We’re not sure if that was extra reverberation from what happened at the World Trade Center or if that was an added explosion. At this point, there’s a lot of smoke, massive plumes of smoke falling from the building across the street. People that were running down the street or walking are now running away. We don’t have any information as far as what the most recent reverberations were. But from two blocks away you could feel what happened.”
10:27 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“As you can imagine, it was a pretty frenzied scene here. Just a few moments ago, I’d say about 20 minutes ago, we’re not sure exactly what it was, we have not confirmed it. But something either exploded or fell off the side of the one building that was attacked and caused a massive plume of smoke.”
29. Kristen Shaughnessy, NY1
9:59 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
“Oh, it is just coming down, Pat. It is just coming down. It’s exploding. It is billowing. Pat, the debris is flying. I’m going to run.”
10:42 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Good morning again, Pat. I am actually just across from City Hall, I don’t have to tell you. With that second explosion the dust did not seem as bad.”
10:43 AM, Narrative Reporting
“It’s unbelievable because you hear these explosions. In fact, I just heard another one — I don’t know if it was like an aftereffect or what not — just while you were on the phone talking about the school closings. It wasn’t as big, obviously, as the other ones. But it still sent a tremor all the way over here, and I’m obviously on the other side of the World Trade Center, on the other side of the city. And it’s just unbelievable.”
10:45 AM, Narrative Reporting
Kristen Shaughnessy: “I’m hearing another explosion, just so you know. I’m hearing another rumble. It’s not as bad as the other ones were. But, I don’t know if you have pictures.”
Sharon Dizenhuz: “We have a picture and we don’t see anything beyond the enormous billows of smoke that have been there. But no additional bursts from our vantage point.”
Shaughnessy: “Okay, didn’t mean to interrupt, Sharon. What you can feel when these tremors come is that it literally comes up under your feet. That’s what it feels like. That’s the best way I know to describe it.”
30. Andrew Siff, NY1
10:12 AM, Eyewitness Reporting
Sharon Dizenhuz: “Andrew, when you saw this happen, what did it look like to you at close range? Because to us it seemed almost like dominoes, you know, going floor by floor by floor.”
Andrew Siff: “It was a little difficult to tell at first to figure out what was happening. We heard an explosion. We heard either an explosion or the sound of something making impact. We were in the middle. I was with news assistant Jason Post, and we were walking down West Street. And when we heard the sound we whipped around and saw just a buckling of the tower. And it just looked like it collapsed within itself. You could just see the top of the tower collapse. We can’t tell what happened to the bottom half of the tower from here.”
31. John Schiumo, NY1
10:18 AM, Narrative Reporting
“There’s another explosion as we speak!”
Note: Although the phenomenon Schiumo describes occurs between the destruction of the two towers, which happened to the South Tower at 9:59 AM and the North Tower 10:28 AM, we classify him as an explosion reporter because he refers to it as “another explosion” — thus suggesting he understood the destruction of the South Tower to be an explosion-based event — and because the explosion he describes may have come from the North Tower and been related to its eventual destruction 11 minutes later.
32. Andrew Kirtzman, NY1
11:11 AM, Narrative Reporting
“Mayor Giuliani appeared about 45 minutes ago on Chambers Street near Church Street. We began walking up Church Street when the second building proceeded to collapse, and a huge plume of smoke flew up into the air, went up into the air, and the mayor and his party started running up 6th Avenue. A plainclothes detective threw his arm around Mayor Giuliani as we took off, not knowing what the repercussions of a second explosion would be.”
11:12 AM, Narrative Reporting
“And for about 10 minutes they tried to break into the fire station as the mayor stood by and the police commissioner stood by waiting to set up an operations center. That’s — kind of wanted to paint a picture of kind of the seat-of-the-pants operation that they’ve been forced to construct here because of the explosion downtown.”
33. Jack Kelley, USA Today
Unknown time apparently around 5:30 PM, Source-based Reporting
Jack Kelley: “Apparently, what appears to have happened is that at the same time two planes hit the building, that the FBI most likely thinks that there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building which also exploded at the same time and brought both of them down.”
USA Today Anchor: “Now that’s the first time we’re hearing that. So two planes and explosives that were in the building, is that correct?”
Kelley: “That is the working theory at this point. That is still unconfirmed, but that is what the FBI is going on at this point.”
34. First Unidentified Reporter at Giuliani and Pataki Press Conference
2:43 PM, Narrative Reporting
“Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought down the two buildings yet? Was it caused by the planes or by something else? Those second explosions.”
35. Marcia Kramer, WCBS, at Giuliani and Pataki Press Conference
2:44 PM, Narrative Reporting
“Mr. Mayor, could you tell us, do you expect any further attacks on New York? Is there anything to indicate that there could be more bombs, more planes out there? I know originally there was a report that eight planes had been hijacked. Four have only been accounted for. What about the remaining four? And is there any possibility that there could be bombs on the ground planted by someone?”
Note: Kramer was in the studio when the destruction of the Twin Towers occurred, but later went into the field to conduct reporting, including attending the afternoon press conference with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki. While watching the destruction of the first tower from the studio in the morning, Kramer hypothesized that it was caused by an explosion or bomb, which explains the rationale for her questions during the press conference.
At 10:02 AM, three minutes after the destruction of the first tower, she stated, “Right now police have to determine if whether that explosion was caused from the initial impact of the plane or whether it was something that was exploded on the ground. Generally speaking, for a building to collapse in on itself like that, it would seem to indicate — obviously, this is just early speculation — but it would seem to indicate that there could have been an explosion, a bomb planted on the ground, that would make the building collapse within itself.” Then, at 10:14 AM, she stated, “Well, we have a number of updates. Number one: CNN is now reporting that there was a third explosion at the World Trade Center, probably an explosion from the ground that caused World Trade Center 1 to collapse on top of itself. Again, there was a third explosion. It is unclear what caused it, whether it was a bomb or whether the first plane that crashed into the tower had somehow been booby-trapped with a bomb that was timed to explode later after the crash had occurred. But CNN is reporting that there was a third explosion that caused World Trade Center 1 to collapse within itself and then collapse on other surrounding buildings.”
This is a brief glimpse at how CNN and one of the anchors at WCBS interpreted the destruction of the Twin Towers. In our next article, we will delve much deeper into how the anchors at each of networks interpreted destruction of the Twin Towers.
36. Second Unidentified Reporter at Giuliani and Pataki Press Conference
2:54 PM, Narrative Reporting
“So the only National Guard we’ll see will be in Lower Manhattan in the bomb site area, they won’t be patrolling the rest of Manhattan?”
Appendix B: Statements by Four Non-Explosion Reporters
1. Don Dahler, ABC
10:00 AM
Peter Jennings: “[Don] Dahler from ABC’s Good Morning America is down in the general vicinity. [Don], can you tell us what has just happened?”
Don Dahler: “Yes, Peter. It’s Don Dahler down here. I’m four blocks north of the World Trade Center. The second building that was hit by the plane has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed as if a demolition team set off — when you see the old demolitions of these old buildings. It folded down on itself and it is not there anymore.”
Jennings: “Thanks very much, [Don].”
Dahler: “It has completely collapsed.”
Jennings: “The whole side has collapsed?”
Dahler: “The whole building has collapsed!”
Jennings: “The whole building has collapsed?”
Dahler: “The building has collapsed.”
Jennings: “That’s the southern tower you’re talking about?”
Dahler: “Exactly. The second building that we witnessed the airplane enter has been — the top half had been fully involved in flame. It just collapsed. There is panic on the streets. Thousands of people running up Church Street, which is what I’m looking out on, trying to get away. But the entire — at least as far as I can see, the top half of the building — at least half of it, I can’t see below that — half of it just started with a gigantic rumble, folded in on itself, and collapsed in a huge plume of smoke and dust.”
10:02 AM
Jennings: “The southern tower, 10:00 eastern time this morning, just collapsing on itself. This is a place where thousands of people work. We have no idea what caused this. If you wish to bring — anybody who’s ever watched a building being demolished on purpose knows that if you’re going to do this you have to get at the under infrastructure of a building and bring it down.”
Dahler: “Peter?”
Jennings: “Yes, Dan.”
Dahler: “What appeared to happen from my vantage point, the top part of the building was totally involved in fire, and there appeared to be no effort possible to put that fire out. It looked like the top part of the building was so weakened by the fire the weight of it collapsed the rest of the building. That’s what appeared to happen. I did not see anything happening at the base of the building. It all appeared to start at the top and then just collapse the rest of the building by the sheer weight of it. There was no explosion or anything at the base part of it. But I did see that the top part of it started to collapse. The walls started to bulge out, glass things coming out. And then it collapsed down on itself. And then it appeared to just fold down from there, from the very top.”
Jennings: “Thanks, Don, very much.”
2. Drew Millhon, ABC
11:09 AM
“I was at the corner of Varick and Canal, which is about 10 to 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center, where roughly 300 to 400 people were gathered watching the flames and the smoke from both the World Trade Centers going through the air. And I began to cross the street and I heard a collective scream from this group of people. And I looked up and the first World Trade Center that collapsed was falling down. The shriek lasted for quite a long time. And then many of these people fell into tears, just crying and sobbing. ‘I don’t know where my mother is. I don’t know where my friends are.’ That sort of thing was heard all around this crowd.”
3. Bob Bazell, NBC
10:08 AM
“I was actually standing and saw that collapse. And everybody here [at St. Vincent’s hospital on West 12th Street] just gasped. Even the medical workers and the ambulance attendants when they saw that, people who are used to tragedy, grabbed each other and hugged each other. And some started to cry.”
4. John Zito, MSNBC
10:36 AM
Chris Jansing: “Were you able to feel the collapse of that second tower?”
John Zito: “The second tower, no. But the first tower that went down, I was very close, I’d say about five blocks away. And CNBC’s Ron Insana and I were trying to hook up with a truck or find any NBC contact down there. And we were very close to when that tower came down. And debris came showering down, and Ron and I both ran for cover. I managed to get inside an alcove of buildings. And all the scaffolding around collapse in front of me and broke the window next to me. And I climbed inside that and stayed in there for about 10 minutes. I couldn’t get out of there. It was pitch black outside.”
Appendix C: Borderline Cases
This appendix contains three borderline cases that we determined could not be clearly classified as explosion or non-explosion reporters.
1. Minah Kathuria, NBC
Kathuria is a borderline case because it is unclear whether she suspects the destruction of the South Tower to have been a demolition or whether she is merely likening the destruction to a demolition in its appearance. In the case of Don Dahler, who is included in Appendix B as a non-explosion reporter, it is clear that he ultimately interpreted the destruction as a fire-induced collapse even though he likened the destruction to a demolition in its appearance.
10:11 AM
“We’re on the corner of Duane and West Broadway walking down towards the Twin Towers, and it just collapsed. It looked like a — it looked sort of like the building just demolished. Smoke, clouds — I mean, clouds of smoke everywhere.”
2. Brian Palmer, CNN
Palmer is a borderline case because he is asked by CNN’s Aaron Brown if it sounded like an explosion or just the sound of the collapse itself, and he does not favor one interpretation over the other, and he describes the sound as a “boom,” which was not strong enough in our view to classify him as an explosion reporter. We view Palmer as being distinct from Alan Dodds Frank, who, although he did not commit to one interpretation over the other, readily asserted the possibility that the destruction of the towers was an explosion-based event.
10:41 AM
Aaron Brown: “Brian, did it sound like there was an explosion before the second collapse, or was the noise the collapse itself?”
Brian Palmer: “Well, from our distance, I was not able to distinguish between an explosion and the collapse. We were several hundred yards away. But we clearly saw the building come down. I heard your report of a fourth explosion: I can’t confirm that. But we heard some ‘boom’ and then the building fold in on itself.”
3. Maria Bartiromo, CNBC
Bartiromo is a borderline case because she repeatedly uses the word “explosion” and her description of what she witnessed corroborates the explosion hypothesis, but although she uses the word “explosion” to describe what she witnessed, she attributes it to the sound of the buildings collapsing.
10:14 AM
Maria Bartiromo: “Now I’m standing on the floor of the exchange. But I just came back from outside and I am covered with soot. Basically, I was outside when that third explosion occurred. . . . The whole area turned pitch black when that third explosion happened. . . . I don’t know if you can see my jacket and my shoes, but I’m completely covered in white smoke from that third explosion.”
Unidentified Anchor: “Maria, do you know what that explosion was?”
Bartiromo: “That was about 10 — I’d say 15 minutes ago.”
Unidentified Anchor: “But do you know what caused it?”
Bartiromo: “No, I don’t.”
Mark Haines: “At the moment, Maria — and for the people with you — at the moment there are eyewitnesses who feel that another plane, a third plane . . .”
Bartiromo: “Yes, some people are saying that . . .”
Haines: “. . . hit the base of the South Tower.”
Bartiromo: “I was under the impression that it was just the actual collapse of the building. But some people are speculating that. I didn’t want to say that because . . . .”
Haines: “We had — at the moment it happened — we had MSNBC’s feed up, and we could hear people shouting ‘a third plane, a third plane.’ And then there was an explosion — ‘another plane, another plane,’ and there was an explosion.”
Bartiromo: “That’s right. And I was outside during that explosion.”
10:49 AM
“The second explosion I witnessed was about 10:00 AM, and that was, in retrospect, the collapse of that tower. And again, debris came at us. The whole area turned pitch black. All we could see was smoke. We couldn’t even breathe practically. We were closing our eyes. I actually went under the building across the New York Stock Exchange.”
12:24 PM
“I walked outside a little while ago. There are dust, white dust, this thick on the floor. Debris and smoke just settling after the explosions. I mentioned to you earlier in the coverage that I myself witnessed two of the explosions. The first one that I witnessed was when the second plane went into the second tower. And truly it was out of a movie. This plane going right in, putting a hole into the second tower. The second thing that I myself witnessed, the further collapse of one of the towers. And this huge bang down on Wall Street. Everyone ran for their lives.”
1:01 PM
“I was outside a little while ago. It almost looks like there’s snow on the ground. There are piles, and really just a thick sheet of dust — white, white dust — from the explosion. . . . Then about 15 minutes later I went back outside, thinking that it was safe again. And lo and behold I witnessed the third explosion, which of course was the sound of the tower collapsing. And at that time, when I heard the tower collapsing — again, it was a huge, huge thump and explosion noise. You’re looking at the scene right now. And that’s what we were all watching. The building collapsed. We all ran for our lives. Metal and papers and debris were flying at us in the face.”
1:37 PM
“Then, 10 minutes or 15 minutes later, I walked out there again thinking that, you know, we had seen the worst. And, of course, then there was a third explosion. And that third explosion was the sound of the second tower collapsing.”
2:42 PM
“Bob and I took a walk together outside and we came back really, really covered with it earlier, when I witnessed that third explosion, the third explosion being the collapse of one of the towers.”
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World leaders will convene later this month in New York to discuss proposals that critics believe will enshrine global digital ID and online censorship and give the United Nations (U.N.) secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers.
Proposals to be discussed at the 79th U.N. General Assembly include the Pact for the Future, described by the U.N. as an “opportunity to create international mechanisms that better reflect the realities of the 21st century and can respond to today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.”
Under these proposals, the secretary-general would have “standing authority” to declare “an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach.”
Discussions for the Pact for the Future will take place under the auspices of the Summit of the Future, described as “a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future.”
The proposals are part of “Our Common Agenda,” an initiative described as “the Secretary-General’s vision for the future of global cooperation.”
‘Lack of Checks and Balances Is Very Worrying’
Critics of the proposals warned The Defender that they threaten personal and health freedom, will grant the U.N. unprecedented powers and may lead to an internationally binding treaty.
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst said the U.N. is attempting to attain “more executive power.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “What the secretary-general is trying to do is an end run around the United Nations charter and delegate to himself all the powers he can possibly assume.”
“The lack of checks and balances is very worrying. The member states will have very little or no power,” Terhorst said, noting that these proposals are drawing increasing opposition as they threaten national sovereignty.
The emergency powers and other proposals contained in the pact may have ominous consequences for humanity, Boyle warned.
Other experts warned the U.N. is not being fully transparent.
According to independent journalist James Roguski, “The U.N. is not being fully transparent about the process leading up to the Summit of the Future. At this time, a consensus agreement has not been reached and the status of the three documents has not been honestly presented to the general public.”
And according to Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, the pact “puts the U.N. ‘at the center’ of international affairs, giving the U.N. unspecified powers.” It contains no definitions for the terms used, “allowing it to be interpreted later in ways citizens may not like.”
“In spirit, the Summit and Pact for the Future is a relaunch of the Great Reset,” said Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable. “Both talk about reshaping our world, which includes a desire to transform the financial system and to implement global governance surrounding issues such as climate change, healthcare and all things related to the SDGs” (Sustainable Development Goals).
“While the WEF has no direct, authoritative or legislative power to carry out its agendas, the Pact for the Future would be signed by member states whose governments wield actual executive and legislative powers,” Hinchliffe said.
“What they are trying to do is to take the WEF agenda … and turn it into solid international law and from there into solid domestic law,” Boyle said.
Rectenwald said the proposals involve “accelerating the achievement of the SDGs” and represent the U.N.’s continued “attempt to establish a global socialist world system that is ‘inclusive’ and ‘equitable.’”
“‘Inclusion’ is achieved through such technological means as closing the ‘digital divide,’ which depends on the universal adoption of a digital identity system. Digital identity is the means by which one is ‘included’ and without which one essentially does not exist. Thus, there is to be nothing outside the system — i.e., totalitarian governance,” Rectenwald said.
Global Digital Compact Calls for Digital IDs, Vaccine Passports
Published May 2023, the proposed compact sets out “principles, objectives and actions for advancing an open, free, secure and human-centred digital future, one that is anchored in universal human rights and that enables the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.”
“With digital ID, it is easier for governments to censor and threaten voices with a different opinion,” Terhorst said. “In the U.N. proposals, suppressing ‘disinformation’ or ‘hateful speech’ is mentioned. Who is to decide what information is right and what is wrong?”
“Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief goes further, specifically addressing “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation.” It also calls for “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge,” but does not clarify how this “consensus” would be determined.
Similarly, a policy brief on “Transforming Education,” proposes “incorporating practices that strengthen the ability of learners and teachers to navigate the increasing flow of false and fake information.”
The compact also proposes “Novel platform-based vaccine technologies and smart vaccine manufacturing techniques … to produce greater numbers of higher-quality vaccines.”
Terhorst said the goal of digital ID is to introduce global vaccine passports that would “overrule the right of everyone to say no to a vaccination.”
Hinchliffe noted that the U.N. has “established principles for a ‘Code of Conduct‘ that calls on not just member states, but private groups such as stakeholders, digital platforms, advertisers, and news media to crush narratives that go against the U.N. and the SDGs.”
Secretary-general ‘Trying to Set Himself Up as the UN Dictator’
According to Boyle, the U.N. secretary-general is “supposed to function as a secretary in charge of the secretariat,” but these proposals are trying to “set himself up as the U.N. dictator.” He noted that the U.N. is composed of six independent organs, but said these proposals may usurp their independence.
“He would have authority over them and arguably could exert authority over U.N. specialized agencies like the World Health Organization. That ties in with the International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty,” Boyle said.
Boyle argued that by specifically referring to the Pact for the Future as a “pact,” the U.N. is intentionally “trying to turn this into an international treaty that is binding” under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
“If you call it a pact … that would clearly fall within the terms of the Vienna Convention,” Boyle said.
“We’re in the fight of our lives here. The world has to be alerted to the dangers of this pact.”
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
If I were to describe our present geopolitical situation in ten words or less it would be “Genocide in the foreground, world war looming in the background.”
While attention is justifiably focused on the present horrors in Gaza and the imminent possibility that it could spark another war in the middle east, the world’s power structures are once again dividing themselves up into two increasingly intimate alliance groups with an increasingly hostile and militaristic posture toward each other.
As Ukraine loses more and more territory and soldiers to Russia, both Washington and Kyiv are demonstrating an openness to ramping up attacks on a nuclear superpower in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Meanwhile, Russia and China are growing more and more intimate in preparation for future aggressions from the US power alliance.
“On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken strongly hinted that the US was preparing to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US and NATO missiles to support long-range strikes inside Russian territory, which would mark a significant escalation of the proxy war.
“Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv alongside UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Blinken said he discussed the issue of ‘long-range fires’ with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and said he would bring the discussion back to Washington. He said President Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will discuss the issue when they meet this Friday.
“Signaling the US is ready to support long-range strikes in Ukraine, Blinken said, ‘Speaking for the United States, from day one, as you’ve heard me say, we have adjusted and adapted as needs have changed, as the battlefield has changed, and I have no doubt that we’ll continue to do that.’”
DeCamp highlights new reports in the mainstream press that “there’s already been a decision made in private to allow Ukraine to use British-provided missiles inside Ukraine” and that “the White House is finalizing plans to expand the area where Ukraine can hit inside Russia using US and British-provided missiles,” as well as recent statements from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul that the Biden administration appears poised to allow long-range strikes deep into Russian territory.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday strongly warned the US against allowing Ukraine to use NATO missiles in long-range strikes inside Russian territory, saying the move would put the Western military alliance ‘at war with Russia.’
“Putin’s comments came after POLITICO reported that the White House was finalizing plans to expand the areas inside Russia where Ukraine can use US and British-provided missiles.
“‘This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict,’ Putin told a TV reporter, according to AFP. ‘It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia. If that’s the case, then taking into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face.’
“He added that supporting long-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russian territory is ‘a decision on whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.’”
And it is here worth noting another article DeCamp published earlier this month on comments made by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who said that Russia is preparing to change its nuclear doctrine in response to western aggressions relating to the war in Ukraine.
“Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Wednesday that Russia’s partnership with China is not aimed at any third country, but the two countries could ‘combine’ to respond to threats from the US.
“‘I would like to remind you that Moscow and Beijing will respond to double containment by the United States with double counteraction,’ Zakharova said when asked about US plans to deploy a Typhon missile system to Japan for several months, according to Reuters.
…
“‘It is clear that both Russia and China will react to the emergence of additional and very significant missile threats, and their reaction will be far from being political, which has also been repeatedly confirmed by the two countries,’ Zakharova said.
“Zakharova’s comments come amid large-scale Russian naval drills that the Russian military said involve over 90,000 personnel, 400 warships and submarines, and 120 aircraft. China is participating in the Pacific portion of the drill with three Chinese ships and 15 planes.
“Russia and China have increased their military cooperation in recent years directly in response to the similar pressure the two countries have been facing from the US and its allies. Zakharova insisted the relationship is defensive in nature.”
There’s so much going on in the world right now, and the US-centralized empire is doing so many terrible things, but every once in a while I think it’s important to highlight the fact that all these individually awful things are just the mundane daily manifestations of a power structure that has us on a trajectory toward a final global confrontation that would make them all look like a picnic in the park.
Status quo politics are quite literally driving us to armageddon. Freeing ourselves from these murderous tyrants is swiftly moving beyond the morally correct thing to do for the sake of the empire’s victims around the world, to an existentially urgent action we must take for our own self-preservation.
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In zwei Wochen will unsere Regierung einem globalen Pakt für Digitalzwang zustimmen
Am 22. und 23. September findet in New York ein von der deutschen und namibischen Regierung vorbereiteter UN-Zukunftsgipfel statt. Dabei soll ein Globaler Digitalpakt verabschiedet werden, der unter fast völligem Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit und – soweit ich weiß – der Parlamente, bereits ausverhandelt wurde. Schiebt man die Floskelwatte beiseite, in die der Global Digital Compact gepackt wurde, so sieht man eine Vereinbarung, alle Menschen in eine von den Digitalkonzernen kontrollierte Welt zu zwingen.
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Wenn ich von Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit schreibe, so meine ich damit nicht Geheimhaltung. Die Verhandlungen beim Gipfel finden zwar hinter verschlossenen Türen statt. Aber der Global Digital Compact in den Fassungen der 2. Revision und der 3. Revision ist auf der Netzseite der UN zum Summit of the Future veröffentlicht. Aber weder die UN, noch die in die Vorbereitung des Gipfels maßgeblich eingebundene deutsche Bundesregierung haben ernsthafte Bemühungen angestellt, die Öffentlichkeit über das Geplante zu informieren, oder dieses gar in Parlamenten und Medien diskutieren zu lassen. Auch ist nicht öffentlich, welche Konzerne, Stiftungen und handverlesenen Vertreter der sogenannten Zivilgesellschaft mit am Verhandlungstisch sitzen dürfen. Das Weltwirtschaftsforum wird ziemlich sicher dabei sein, der Club of Rome, wie berichtet, wohl auch.
Im Vertragstext erfahren wir einleitend, dass digitale Technologien „immense mögliche Vorteile für die menschliche Wohlfahrt und den Fortschritt der Gesellschaften bieten“, und dass wir deshalb jegliche digitale Kluft zwischen den Ländern und innerhalb der Länder beseitigen müssen. Das erklärte Ziel ist „eine digitale Zukunft für alle“.
Wichtig ist, was in dem Vertrag nicht steht. Das Wort freiwillig (voluntary) kommt nur im Zusammenhang mit dem Unterschreiben des Vertrags vor. Für die Bürger jedoch gibt es kein Recht, für sich selbst eine andere als die gänzlich durchdigitalisierte Zukunft zu wählen. Denn das würde ja eine digitale Kluft eröffnen, die es nicht mehr geben darf. Ein Recht darauf, viele seiner Angelegenheiten auf althergebrachte Weise im Umgang mit anderen Menschen statt mit Computern zu regeln, ist nicht vorgesehen. Niemand soll wählen dürfen, dass seine Kinder von Lehrern statt von Computern unterrichtet werden, oder dass Gespräche mit dem Arzt und Behandlungen ein Geheimnis bleiben, statt auf die Server der IT-Konzerne gepackt zu werden. Nichts in dem Vertrag deutet darauf hin, dass man ein solches Recht überhaupt in Betracht gezogen hat.
Risiken werden anerkannt, allerdings ohne dass der Text dabei konkret würde. Sie sollen „abgemildert werden“. Ebenso soll die menschliche Oberaufsicht über die neuen Technologien sichergestellt werden. Die internationale Zusammenarbeit müsse agil sein, und sich an die sich schnell verändernde Techniklandschaft anpassen. Dann gibt es noch sehr viel Blabla mit schönen Adjektiven wie nachhaltig, gerecht, offen, verantwortlich usw. Das klingt gut, hat aber dicke Pferdefüße.
Die Entwicklung der digitaltechnologischen „Landschaft“ wird damit als von oben kommend dargestellt, als etwas, an das sich die Bürger und sogar die Regierungen anzupassen haben. Dabei ist Landschaft nur ein anderes Wort für die Digitalkonzerne und das, was sie sich ausdenken. Damit wird eine Führungsrolle der Konzerne anerkannt. Diese ist, wie ich in einem früheren Beitrag bereits gezeigt habe, ein roter Faden des UN-Zukunftsgipfels und des Handelns der UN in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten.
Risiken der Digitalisierung sollen in keinem Fall vermieden werden, sondern nur „abgemildert“. „Menschliche Oberaufsicht“ über die neuen Technologien ist etwas ganz anderes als demokratische Kontrolle und Entscheidungsautonomie der Nutzer. Wenn Elon Musk von X, Mark Zuckerberg von Meta, Sam Altman von OpenAI und die Chefs von Google die Oberhoheit über die neuen Technologien haben, ist diese Forderung des Vertrags erfüllt, aber die Interessen der Bürger sind alles andere als gewahrt. Der ganze Vertrag liest sich, als hätten die IT-Konzerne und ihre Stiftungen ihn formuliert, und das ist wahrscheinlich nicht weit von der Wahrheit. Schließlich ist die UN auf das Geld der Konzerne angewiesen, und die weltweit reichsten und mächtigsten Konzerne sind nun einmal die IT-Konzerne.
Fazit
Wenn auf internationaler Ebene, unter Führung einer von den IT-Konzernen stark beeinflussten UN, abseits von Öffentlichkeit und Parlamenten gekungelt wird, um die Digitalisierung zu fördern und alle Menschen – ob sie wollen oder nicht – zur umfassenden Nutzung digitaler Geräte und Programme zu bringen, wundert man sich nicht mehr, warum unsere Bundesregierung mit so viel Engagement die Bürger einem Digitalzwang unterwirft. Sei es durch Abschaffung der Möglichkeiten, bar zu bezahlen, sei es über das Staatsunternehmen Bahn oder die halbstaatliche DHL oder die willkürliche Verknüpfung von staatlichen Wohltaten wie Deutschlandticket, Kulturgutschein für 18-jährige und Energieeinmalzahlung für Studenten mit der Nutzung eines Smartphones. So holt sich unsere Regierung Fleißkärtchen bei der internationalen Evaluierung der Fortschritte bei der Digitalisierung.
Dass man damit die Bürger einer immer intensiveren digitalen Überwachung jedes ihrer Schritte und Äußerungen unterwirft, ist ein zusätzlicher Bonus für unsere überwachungshungrigen Regierenden, hat man zunehmend den Eindruck.
Nehmen Sie das nicht schweigend hin! Lassen Sie die Abgeordneten wissen, dass Sie von ihnen erwarten, das Recht der Bürger auf ein selbstbestimmtes Leben mit geschützter Privatsphäre zu verteidigen. Fragen Sie sie, warum in dem Digitalpakt kein individuelles Recht auf Verzicht auf Digitalisierung erwähnt wird und fragen Sie sie, was sie davon halten. Fragen Sie, ob sie nach der Maxime vorgehen, dass alles, was gut für die IT-Konzerne ist, auch gut für Deutschland ist. Prüfen Sie, ob sie Parteien wählen wollen, die die Interessen der IT-Industrie über diejenigen der Bürger stellen. Nach meiner auf diesem Blog wiederholt mit Beispielen unterlegten Einschätzung sind die Digitalzwangparteien zuvorderst die FDP, eng gefolgt von den Grünen und mit wenig Abstand CDU und SPD.
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A vida dos mercenários que lutam pela Ucrânia parece estar a tornar-se cada vez mais difícil. Além do risco de morte no campo de batalha, os cidadãos estrangeiros enfrentam problemas dentro da própria Ucrânia, pois são vítimas do racismo neonazista do regime de Kiev. Este cenário era esperado por todos os que conhecem a natureza da política ucraniana pós-2014, mas infelizmente muitos mercenários ocidentais são enganados pela propaganda e concordam em lutar pela Ucrânia acreditando que estão a fazer a coisa certa.
Recentemente, Alexander Ante e José Aron Medina Aranda, dois mercenários colombianos que se juntaram ao exército ucraniano, foram capturados pelas forças armadas russas. Ambos estão detidos na prisão na Rússia, aguardando uma audiência no tribunal. Numa entrevista aos meios de comunicação russos, Ante e Aranda deram detalhes interessantes sobre as razões pelas quais se juntaram a Kiev, bem como revelaram a realidade dos soldados estrangeiros nas fileiras ucranianas.
Afirmaram que há duas razões pelas quais os estrangeiros vão para a Ucrânia: dinheiro e propaganda. A promessa de salários elevados torna o alistamento uma opção atraente para muitas pessoas, especialmente em países pobres como a Colômbia e outras nações latino-americanas. Atualmente, as promessas são de salários em torno de 3 mil dólares mensais, o que é muito superior à média salarial dos países emergentes.
No mesmo sentido, a propaganda leva as pessoas comuns a acreditar que a Ucrânia é a vítima desta guerra e que juntar-se às fileiras de Kiev é uma espécie de ato de “coragem” e “bravura”. Assim, muitas pessoas ingressam na carreira mercenária com incentivos além da questão financeira, interessadas em serem reconhecidas como “heróis” e lutadores pela “liberdade e justiça”.
“Muitas [pessoas] são vítimas da propaganda (…) [Os estrangeiros vão] à guerra para proteger os ucranianos (…) No entanto, tudo isto é mentira (…) Tudo o que é dito não é verdade”, disseram eles aos jornalistas russos.
No entanto, a situação real na Ucrânia é muito diferente daquilo que a propaganda promete. Ao chegarem ao país, os estrangeiros são tratados com desdém pelos militares racistas locais. Os salários não são pagos conforme prometido e existem também várias diferenças de tratamento em comparação com os cidadãos ucranianos. Os estrangeiros não recebem atenção ou assistência. Quando precisam de resgate em situações de combate, muitas vezes são ignorados. Na prática, as tropas não-ucranianas são vistas como mera bucha de canhão pelo regime, que utiliza estrangeiros como escudos humanos nas linhas da frente para poupar as vidas dos ucranianos étnicos.
“Eles são racistas. Eles não nos tratam como se fossem seus (…) [Os ucranianos] não viriam em nosso auxílio se solicitados (…) Eles não prestam atenção em você. Pode-se sentir a sua indiferença (…) Não pagam o dinheiro prometido, tratam mal [as pessoas]” acrescentaram os reclusos.
Estes cidadãos colombianos serviam no Batalhão Sich dos Cárpatos, uma infame unidade de infantaria ucraniana conhecida por crimes de guerra na região de Donbass. Segundo a inteligência russa, os soldados do grupo estão ligados à milícia neonazista do Partido Svoboda. A mentalidade racista da unidade explica porque é que os estrangeiros são maltratados. O ódio racial e a xenofobia são aspectos vitais do neonazismo ucraniano. Embora os russos sejam as maiores vítimas destes sentimentos, os estrangeiros também são desprezados pelos militantes ultranacionalistas, razão pela qual a presença de mercenários internacionais culmina em crimes de ódio.
Deve-se enfatizar que não existem garantias legais para os mercenários. Ao contrário dos soldados comuns, que vão para a guerra sob a compulsão das autoridades, os mercenários não são protegidos pelo direito humanitário internacional e podem ser julgados e condenados como meros criminosos. Na Rússia, este crime pode resultar numa pena de até 15 anos de prisão. Se participarem em crimes de guerra, os mercenários podem até enfrentar prisão perpétua.
A Federação Russa afirmou repetidamente que a eliminação de mercenários estrangeiros é uma das suas prioridades no conflito, com vários ataques de alta precisão visando centros de treino para tropas não ucranianas. A razão para esta prioridade é facilmente compreensível, uma vez que Kiev depende fortemente da utilização destas tropas para manter a sua capacidade de combate. Ao eliminar os mercenários, a Rússia espera desencorajar o influxo de estrangeiros para o lado inimigo. Além disso, Moscou está preocupada com o retorno desses cidadãos aos seus países de origem, já que muitos deles sofrem lavagem cerebral neonazista na Ucrânia, além de ganharem experiência real de combate. Uma vez regressados aos seus países de origem, estes mercenários poderiam facilmente trabalhar como agentes desestabilizadores a serviço da OTAN.
O caso dos cidadãos colombianos mostra que a realidade é muito diferente da propaganda. Não há vantagem de servir Kiev e as probabilidades de ser morto ou capturado pelos russos são elevadas. Sem qualquer proteção internacional, os mercenários estrangeiros são meros criminosos que poderiam enfrentar graves punições na Rússia pelas suas “aventuras militares” na Ucrânia.
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of 9/11 Studies has published a new article by Dr. Piers Robinson and Kevin Ryan entitled “A Plausibility Probe of 9/11 and COVID-19 as ‘Structural Deep Events’.”
In this article, Robinson and Ryan develop a new framework for examining major crisis events. Using the “structural deep event” concept coined by Peter Dale Scott, they create an identifiable set of features that structural deep events exhibit. They then use that framework to evaluate the plausibility of the hypothesis that both 9/11 and COVID-19 were structural deep events involving manipulation and nefarious intent.
While the observations made and conclusions drawn by Robinson and Ryan will not be new to many 9/11 activists, the framework they set forth is a novel analytical tool that other academics and researchers can use to examine major crisis events and determine whether they have been instigated for the purpose of advancing political-economic agendas.
The article also usefully summarizes the key features of the 9/11 and COVID-19 events in a clear structure that can be more readily digested by readers who are less familiar with the particulars of each event.
We hope this paper will serve as a springboard for many more people to begin to critically examine the 9/11 and COVID-19 events. Popularizing analytical approaches like the one used by Robinson and Ryan will be fundamental to curbing the prevalence of deep events in the future and holding accountable the perpetrators of past crimes such as 9/11.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
Major crisis events, such as the assassination of political leaders, terrorist attacks and public health emergencies, can be politically useful. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 helped the Roosevelt administration bring the US into WWII. The Reichstag fire in 1933 provided Hitler with the opportunity to suppress political opposition in Germany and paved the way for the rise of fascism. Unfortunately, critical discussion of whether such events are exploited or even instigated in order to enable particular policy agendas is all too often dismissed as ‘conspiracism’. This has been the case with both 9/11 and COVID-19 (the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2), both of which are argued by some to have been manipulated for political purposes. In the case of the former, some claim that the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington were, in fact, a ‘false flag’ or ‘manufactured war trigger’, designed to enable military action in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of the latter, some argue, for example, that COVID-19 served to enable the ‘Great Reset’ political agenda. Meaningful discussion of these matters in mainstream settings is, however, nearly always suppressed by the pejorative use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’, which implies irrational, poorly evidenced, even pathological, argumentation. Even relatively limited criticism regarding the likely effectiveness of ‘lockdown’ policy in relation to COVID-19 by Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta was aggressively dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’.
Fortunately, Peter Dale Scott’s structural deep event (SDE) and Lance deHaven-Smith’s state crime against democracy (SCAD) are concepts that provide a basis for critical exploration of major crisis events. This article builds upon these ideas, as well as that of propaganda and preliminary work by Kevin Ryan (2020), in order to develop a framework for identifying the key features, or ‘observable implications’, of a structural deep event. Utilizing the principles of a ‘structured focused comparison’ (George, 1979), the framework is then applied across two events — 9/11 and COVID-19 — claimed to have been manipulated for political purposes. This approach enables a conceptually grounded and empirically systematic analysis of these events and, in this study, provides a preliminary assessment, or ‘plausibility probe’ (Levy, 2008), of the hypothesis that both were structural deep events involving manipulation and nefarious intent.
The argument proceeds as follows. Section one briefly discusses the role of conspiracy and agency with respect to explaining political phenomena. Section two introduces the SDE and SCAD concepts, noting in particular their relationship to propaganda, before setting out the key features of an SDE and defining its observable implications. Section two draws in part upon preliminary work by Kevin Ryan (2020a&b). Sections three and four present empirical evidence from 9/11 and COVID-19. It will be argued that both events share key features associated with SDEs — a) major policy drives associated with structural transformation of society, b) involvement of deep state actors, and c) the manipulation of an event and public perceptions of it — and that further research is warranted into these events. The paper concludes by discussing key implications of this study and makes suggestions for further research.
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Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement. You can read more his work at his blog. You can also watch his testimony to the Toronto Hearings on 9/11 here, his video on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid here and his interview as part of our Covid19/11 series here.
His strong rhetoric leads to extreme dopamine bursts from those who think that he’s being sincere, but the rush will inevitably wear off once they realize that he’s not, and some might in turn think less of him afterwards.
Turkish President Erdogan has attempted over the years to present himself as the voice of the international Muslim community, or Ummah, most recently by calling for an Islamic alliance against Israel.
His strong rhetoric about the latest Israeli-Hamas war has earned him the praise of many and also resulted in sharp responses from Israelis, which in turn feed into the perception that he’s seeking to form. All his tough talk is just pure demagoguery, however, since he isn’t willing to go to war with Israel.
The Palestinians claim that over 40,000 of their own have been killed in this nearly year-long conflict that most of their supporters consider to be a genocide. The living conditions in Gaza are atrocious, almost all of the strip has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombs, and Egypt continues to keep its border closed to prevent the outflow of refugees into its territory. By all indications, it’s more than a little late for anyone to suggest forming a multilateral alliance against Israel, whether they’re really sincere or not.
Erdogan is a very clever politician and therefore predictably has a few tricks up his sleeve for proposing this so belatedly. First and foremost, he wants to reaffirm Turkiye’s image as the historical protector of the Ummah from back during its Ottoman days, hence why he’s calling so loudly for forming such an Islamic alliance. The second objective is to build upon the aforesaid in order to position Turkiye atop the regional military hierarchy in the minds of those who take his proposal seriously.
Third, he also knows very well that no Muslim country will voluntarily subordinate itself to Turkiye’s implied military hegemony, especially not the Gulf Kingdoms. Their rejection of his proposal or at least public indifference to it can then be spun as passing the buck along to them for supposedly “failing to save Palestine”. The fourth reason is related to the preceding one and concerns the public pressure that Turkiye is coming under from some to cut off Azerbaijan’s oil exports to Israel via Georgia and Turkiye.
Ankara owns neither the pipeline nor the oil that transits through it so any interference with these shipments would be a blatant violation of international law and a stab in its Azeri brother’s back. Its allied relations with Baku mean that Turkish officials can’t pressure their counterparts on this, let alone publicly condemn them for continuing to literally fuel the Israeli economy, but having the public see their lack of response to Erdogan’s proposed Islamic alliance might take some of the heat off of him on this.
And finally, the last goal that he’s seeking to advance is to wage psychological warfare on Israelis by making them fear the grand strategic consequences of continuing the conflict and thus ideally inspiring them to ramp up their protests to stop it, though this could also backfire. By exacerbating their existing siege mindset, he risks some reconsidering whether it’s worth ending the conflict now if all their country’s goals have yet to be achieved seeing as how this Islamic alliance is already forming anyhow.
Altogether, observers shouldn’t forget that Erdogan knows how to play to the Ummah’s crowds, so little of what he says about his plans against Israel should ever be taken seriously. There’s always an ulterior motive or several behind it like in this case as was explained. His strong rhetoric leads to extreme dopamine bursts from those who think that he’s being sincere, but the rush will inevitably wear off once they realize that he’s not, and some might in turn think less of him afterwards.
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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: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo: Ramil Sitdikov / Sputnik
In early 2023, a private conference with pharmaceutical industry leaders and investors highlighted anti-obesity and Alzheimer’s drugs as the next big money-makers and had the FDA head as its keynote speaker
Since then, the FDA has taken questionable steps to promote these drugs, particularly Ozempic, an anti-obesity medication. There’s been a massive push to get everyone, including children, on Ozempic, using shockingly aggressive marketing tactics
This rush is eerily similar to the fen-phen craze, a temporary weight loss drug later pulled from the market for causing severe heart and lung issues
Worse, Ozempic comes with serious side effects, including paralyzing the digestive tract. This article will address the above controversy and explore the common causes of obesity, including those rarely discussed
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Most of the food in America comes from just a few crops like corn, wheat, soy, and canola, largely due to farming subsidies that force farmers to mass-produce these crops and sell them below cost. These cheap crops are then turned into the processed foods we eat every day. This is problematic because:
Health issues — These foods are unhealthy and contribute to major health problems like diabetes and obesity.
Natural aversion — Our bodies naturally resist these foods, making them hard to sell.
Addictive additives — To make them more appealing, addictive substances are added. In the 1980s, Big Tobacco bought the processed foods industry and, much like they did with cigarettes, focused on making these foods as addictive as possible.1
Chronic illness — The resulting health issues create lifelong customers for industries like Big Pharma.
For years, activists like Dr. Mercola have pushed for awareness of the importance of natural foods and the need to change farming subsidies to promote healthy eating. The current media climate, driven by skepticism of the COVID-19 response and the rise of independent media, has revealed the systematic failures in our food supply and allowed these long-cultivated ideas to begin bursting into public awareness.
For example, a few weeks ago, shortly after gaining the national spotlight and the need to make America Healthy Again by freeing us from pervasive regulatory corruption, RFK Jr. was invited onto Fox News to discuss the dangers of seed oils and artificial food colorings with a supportive newscaster — something I’d never before seen in the national media.
RFK was just invited to Fox to tell the nation about the dangers of Seed Oils, Food Dyes and Pesticides while exposing the immense corruption behind these products.
I never expected to see this in my lifetime and I now believe there's a real window to Make America Healthy Again pic.twitter.com/ACm3x1pXua
Today, the news reports that opposition leader Edmundo González has fled to Spain after an arrest warrant. A lot is being kept quiet about this.For example, the far-right – another ‘detail’ which the media modestly keep quiet about – González was the only one of the nine opposition candidates who refused in advance to recognize the results of the elections.
The area between Spencer Street Bridge and the Batman Park-Spencer Street tram stop. Heavily armed police, with glinting face coverings and shields, had seized and blocked the bridge over the course of the morning, preventing all traffic from transiting through it. Behind them stood second tier personnel, lightly armed. Then, barricades, followed by horse mounted police.
Following the 7 October attacks, European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen posted an image of the EC headquarters in Brussels lit up in the Israeli flag declaring ‘Israel has a right to defend itself – today and in the days to come. The European Union stands with Israel’. This signalled EU approval for Israel to begin its military campaign in Gaza. In the first 24 hours 400 Palestinians were killed.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the press during his trip to Italy that “communication is number one, followed by a ceasefire, and only after that can we start talks about a peace agreement” between Russia and Ukraine.
Between September 4-6, African heads-of-state, foreign ministers, journalists and members of civil society engaged with their Chinese counterparts in following through on existing programs while creating new ones. A host of bilateral meetings involving Chinese President Xi Jinping and African leaders resulted in pledges of more than $US50 billion in investments.
The Bush and bin Laden families have a long history of business dealings, while Osama himself apparently did a complete about-face, as he once collected his paycheck from the CIA, working on behalf of the United States and their interests. While some of the following links between the Bushes and the bin Ladens are likely to be mere coincidences, they are intriguing, to say the very least.
Saudi Arabia’s industry and mineral resources minister said his country will “try new things”—including using the yuan in crude oil deals—as Riyadh seeks to incorporate Chinese products such as electric vehicles, the C919 passenger jet, and renewable energy infrastructure. This marks a major shift, considering Saudi Arabia’s close ties with the United States gave rise to the petrodollar.
“The petroyuan is not substantial to [the ministry], we believe Saudi Arabia will do what’s in its best interest … but I think Saudi Arabia will always try new things, and is open to new ideas, and we try not to mix politics with commerce,” minister of industry and mineral resources Bandar Alkhorayef said in an interview on September 7 in Hong Kong and published by the South China Morning Post.
The broader adoption of the petroyuan — shorthand for using the Chinese currency in cross-border crude oil settlements — is widely seen as the next step in internationalising the yuan and a challenge to the ubiquitous US dollar in global commodities markets.
Riyadh is China’s second-largest source of crude oil imports.
While the Saudi minister described positive sentiment in his country toward using the petroyuan in transactions, he did not give a timeline for when this would happen. He explained that from a commercial point of view, between a supplier and a customer, such an arrangement can happen with the freedom that they have and that it is not something Riyadh would look at from a political point of view.
At the same time, the Saudis have been seeking to diversify their economy and become a manufacturing hub in the Middle East under their Vision 2030 initiative, and Chinese companies are eager to explore alternative markets as a US-led containment effort broadens its scope. These complementary developments have led to closer relations between the two countries.
Alkhorayef said he welcomed Chinese companies to come and invest in electric vehicles and invited any solution provider to participate in Saudi Arabia’s Factories of the Future Initiative.
In the aviation sector, the Saudi aviation regulator, the General Authority of Civil Aviation, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) in May to explore the localisation of its aviation industry and develop the local supply chain. This is crucial since Saudi Arabia will be an aircraft buyer for the next 25 years, and with the rapid growth, they will look at multiple suppliers.
Saudi Arabia launched the Vision 2030 initiative in 2016 to free the country’s economy from dependence on oil by the end of the decade. These efforts include developing so-called “soft” sectors, such as tourism and service industries. All of this is anchored in economic principles that are driving the creation of industries that did not exist in the past, including projects related to culture, entertainment, and sport. China plays a critical role in all of these.
In fact, as the US and the European Union maneuver to reduce their economic exposure to China, it is recalled that Saudi Arabia’s Economy and Planning Minister, Faisal Alibrahim, said earlier this year that his country is looking to build stronger ties with the Asian powerhouse.
“We have a strong trade relationship with China. And we think it’s very wise to continue strengthening that relationship with China as well as our other partners,” the minister said in an interview with the Nikkei Asia newspaper.
At the same time, Alibrahim stressed that with China,
“we have a very strong relationship that includes investments and trade on both sides. There are lots of opportunities for China to invest in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, we are prioritising, investing all around the world, including China in terms of the opportunities.”
Saudi Arabia, along with fellow regional states Iran and the United Arab Emirates, has been selected as the newest members of BRICS. Analysts note that this apparent shift towards China, as well as Russia, risks weakening Riyadh’s traditionally favourable stance towards the US and the petrodollar dominance that emerged due to this relationship.
This is already coming to realisation considering Saudi Arabia joined the Central Bank Digital Currency revolution in June by becoming a full member of the mBridge project, a collaboration between Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and the UAE that will give the Arab country access to immediate, low-cost, cross-border currency transactions, which it will use to sell oil to China, and also challenge the dominance of SWIFT that Russia was banned from in February 2022.
In effect, Saudi Arabia helped give rise to the petrodollar, and it is now the very same country that is bringing the petroyuan to reality, which will inevitably lead to its slow decline.
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As European institutions begin another five-year term in Brussels, it’s worth highlighting the extent to which the EU is complicit in genocide.
Political Support
Following the 7 October attacks, European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen posted an image of the EC headquarters in Brussels lit up in the Israeli flag declaring ‘Israel has a right to defend itself – today and in the days to come. The European Union stands with Israel’. This signalled EU approval for Israel to begin its military campaign in Gaza. In the first 24 hours 400 Palestinians were killed.
On 11 October, Ursula von der Leyen joined European Parliament President, Roberta Metsola, European Council President, Charles Michel, and Haim Regev, Israel’s ambassador in Brussels, in a ‘solemn moment’ held in the forecourt of the European Parliament to commemorate Israeli victims only, even though by then 1100 Palestinians had been killed.
Two days later on 13 October von der Leyen and Metsola touched down in Israel for a photo-op with Israeli leaders telling them that Israel has ‘the right and duty to respond to Hamas’ act of war’.
For weeks, European leaders wrangled over semantics before eventually calling for ‘humanitarian corridors and pauses’ suggesting that genocide is fine as long as Israel takes a break every now and then. It took the bloc until 21 March to call for a ceasefire, a move that President Charles Michel claimed made the EU ‘a credible actor’. By then over 31,000 Palestinians had been killed, Gaza had been reduced to rubble and starvation had taken hold affecting the Strip’s 2.3 million people. The European Parliament was marginally faster having called for a ceasefire on 28 February but a day later it overwhelmingly rejected a resolution that called for an arms embargo.
Following the European elections in June, EU leaders returned von der Leyen and Metsola to their positions at the Commission and the Parliament, while Charles Michel still holds the presidency of the European Council. As recently as 13 August he held a phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Material Support
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is possible only because of the arms supplied by Western states. While much attention is given to the US as Israel’s main arms supplier, EU member states come in second. Germany provided 30% of Israel’s arms between 2019-2023 and its exports to Israel in 2023 were worth €326.5 million having increased tenfold from the previous year with the vast majority of licences being approved after 7 October. Moreover, much of the weaponry supplied by the US is fitted out with European manufactured components. In addition, EU member states facilitate the transit of US arms shipments through their territory on the way to Israel.
For years Israeli entities have been given a free reign to access EU research funding, even though those in receipt of this money are often directly connected to Israel’s apartheid state and military apparatus. This has continued since 7 October with at least two research projects directly funding Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), one of Israel’s largest arms companies. As well as funding Israeli arms companies directly through research grants or from the purchase of military equipment such as drones, at least €426 million of European public money goes to European arms companies that arm Israel.
EU Complicity in Genocide Looks Set to Continue
Although EU Israel relations are underpinned by the Association Agreement, which contains a human rights clause, the EU has failed to invoke it, preferring instead to adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach to Israel as it commits a genocide. In doing so the Union has abandoned the façade of being concerned with human rights and the rule of law and has exposed its racist and imperialist core.
At every turn the EU has shown itself to be entirely unwilling to impose sanctions, an arms embargo or to prohibit the flow of US arms through Europe on their way to the Middle East. Considering the same genocidal warmongers have been returned to their positions in Brussels, it’s unlikely that the EU’s institutional support for genocide will change any time soon.
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Featured image: Israeli President Isaac Herzog (C) meets with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (R) and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola (L) in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 13, 2023. [IDF Spokesperson Unit – Anadolu Agency]
Once again, the Venezuelan opposition has refused to accept the electoral victory of Chavismo. Since the first victory of Hugo Chavez in 1999, the Venezuelan extreme right have used fascistic methods to try and break the Bolivarian Revolution. These include attempted coups, terrorist attacks against public health and education centres, attacks against the police and Chavistas. Thousands have been killed in fascist violence, with horrific violence including the burning of Chavistas alive on the street.
The opposition’s efforts are possible due to the backing of the United States and its local allies, with the US enlisting the support of drug traffickers from Colombia and other countries in their efforts to create chaos. Additionally, Bolivarian Venezuela has seen attempted assassination attempts against President Maduro, and mercenary invasions. Millions of dollars have been given to opposition groups through institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.
Arguably worst of all has been the economic warfare conducted by the United States, which has seen a blockade imposed on Venezuela since 2015, similar in scope and objectives as the blockade imposed on Revolutionary Cuba for over six decades. The impact of US economic warfare saw world-historic levels of inflation, food and medicine shortages, mass emigration, the collapse of the oil industry – upon which the Venezuelan economy is dependent – leading to a drop of $232bn. in oil revenue. Venezuelan state assets have been seized.
It is estimated that the economic warfare is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people, according to a 2019 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This has not stopped US lawmakers from continuing to pass blockade legislation, such as the Bolivar Act, passed in 2021.
Despite this, Chavismo remains in power, albeit fighting an uphill battle against imperialism and the local comprador bourgeoisie. Currently, Venezuela has endured and is showing signs of recovery. It is projected that the economy will grow between 5-8% by 2025. Inflation reached a peak of an astounding 130,060% in 2018 to a miraculous 0.7% in July, 2024. Oil output has more or less recovered, and, significantly, there has been increased development of production outside the oil industry, in such sectors as tourism.
Venezuela is now 95% self-sufficient in food, a major achievement, made necessary by the food shortages imposed by the economic war. In 2022, 77% of the state budget was allocated to social expenditure – including 23% for healthcare and 20% for education – to ensure that the impact of the blockade on the people is minimised, not an easy task.
The Venezuela Great Housing Mission was inaugrated by President Chavez in 2011, its aim is to provide free, or at least low-rent, housing for the people, in particular women and other marginalised sections of the people. In 2024, it reached 4.9 million homes built. The plan is to achieve 7 million homes built by 2030.
What is important to note is how these social programs are combined with grassroots participation with the masses. With communities themselves building the homes mentioned above, with finance from the state, communities being responsible for food distribution in the Local Supply and Production Committees, local communes, and indeed the local branches of the PSUV organised in the Bolivar Chavez Battle Units.
Venezuela has still not overcome capitalism and major problems and weaknesses remain present. Some of the measures taken in the Anti-Blockade Law of 2020, while perhaps necessary for kickstarting the economy, have not yet improved the lot of the poor, with the balance of forces largely unchanged since before the economic war began in 2015. The dominant comprador bourgeoisie is politically much weaker, but partly this is due to the rise of an industrial bourgeoisie which has not sought confrontation with the state; indeed, some elements of the government talk of a “revolutionary bourgeoisie”.
While the government has taken measures to tackle corruption, crack down on the black market, and allow a basic level of subsistence for the people, the Bolivarian Revolution faces an immense amount of challenges, including corruption, ideological stagnation, and slow recovery of workers’ purchasing power. The Presidential elections this year show that there has been a recovery in support among the people for Chavismo, with an increase of 1.2 million votes, while the opposition lost 2.5 million votes.
Additionally, Venezuela has not broken with its support for the Palestinian people, or with the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions. Despite the opposition being a base of pro-Zionist and gusano figures. Indeed, the pro-Israel and pro-US government of Argentina , is now facing its own issues with inflation. But no surprise that we have heard nothing about the authoritarian Javier Milei causing his people hardship.
This month, people participate in the National Popular Consultations of Communes, where residents decide on which initiatives will be prioritised in their community. The consultations are designed to be held quarterly, with the government funding the initiatives chosen by the local communes. President Maduro has stated that these consultations are part of a “revolutionary offensive”, something which the Venezuelan people deserve.
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An earlier version of this article was published in 2003
Author’s Note
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts on September 10, 2001 were confirmed by a CBS News Report. Osama had been hospitalized on September 10th, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks.
How on earth could he have coordinated the attacks from his hospital bed in a heavily guarded Pakistani military hospital located in Rawalpindi.
Bear in mind that the Combined Military Hospital Rawalpindi (under the adminstration of the Pakistani military) exclusively “provides specialised treatment to Army personel and their immediate family”. Osama bin Laden must have had some connections in the Pakistani military or intelligence to be admitted to the hospital. He was, according to Dan Rather’s CBS report, provided with “treatment for a very special person”.
If the CBS report by Dan Rather is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s ally, his whereabouts on September 11, were known.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 12, 2024
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“Going after bin Laden” has served, over a period of 10 years (2001-2011) to sustain the legend of the “world’s most wanted terrorist”, who “haunts Americans and millions of others around the world.”
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed in the wake of 9/11 that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden remained unknown:
“It is like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
In November 2001, US B-52 bombers carpet bombed a network of caves in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his followers were allegedly hiding. These caves were described as “Osama’s last stronghold”.
CIA “intelligence analysts” subsequently concluded that Osama had escaped from his Tora Bora cave in the first week of December 2001. And in January 2002, the Pentagon launched a Worldwide search for Osama and his top lieutenants, beyond the borders of Afghanistan. This operation, referred to by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a “hot pursuit”, was carried out with the support of the “international community” and America’s European allies. US intelligence authorities confirmed, in this regard, that
“while al Qaeda has been significantly shattered, … the most wanted man – bin Laden himself remains one step ahead of the United States, with the core of his worldwide terror network still in place. (Global News Wire – Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, InfoProd, January 20, 2002)
For ten years, the US military and intelligence apparatus (at considerable expense to US taxpayers) had been “searching for Osama”.
A CIA unit with a multimillion dollar budget was set up, with a mandate to find Osama. This unit was apparently disbanded in 2005. “Intelligence experts agree”, he is hiding in a remote area of Pakistan, but “we cannot find him”:
“Most intelligence analysts are convinced that Osama bin Laden is somewhere on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Lately, it has been said that he’s probably in the vicinity of the a 7700m Hindu Kush peak Tirich Mir in the tribal Chitral area of northwest Pakistan.” Hobart Mercury (Australia), September 9, 2006)
President Bush had repeatedly promised to “smoke him out” of his cave, capture him dead or alive, if necessary through ground assaults or missile strikes. According to a recent statement by president Bush, Osama is hiding in a remote area of Pakistan which “is extremely mountainous and very inaccessible, … with high mountains between 9,000 to 15,000 feet high….”. We cannot get him, because, according to the president, there is no communications infrastructure, which would enable us to effectively go after him. (quoted in Balochistan Times, 23 April 2006)
The pursuit of Osama became a highly ritualized process which fed the news chain on a daily basis. It was not only part of the media disinformation campaign, it also provided a justification for the arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of numerous “suspects”, “enemy combatants” and “accomplices”, who allegedly might be aware of Osama’s whereabouts. And that information is of course vital to “the security of Americans”.
The search for Osama served both military and political objectives. The Democrats and Republicans compete in their resolve to weed out “islamic terrorism”.
The Path to 9/11, a five-hour ABC series on “the search for Osama” –which made its debut in 2006 to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks– casually accuses Bill Clinton of having been “too busy with the Monica Lewinsky scandal to fight terrorism.” The message of the movie is that the Democrats neglected the “war on terrorism”.
The fact of the matter is that every single administration, since Jimmy Carter have (covertly) supported and financed the “Islamic terror” network, created during the Carter administration at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden, 12 September 2001). Al Qaeda is an instrument of US intelligence: a US sponsored intelligence asset.
Where was Osama on September 11, 2001?
There is evidence that the whereabouts of Osama were known to both the Bush and Obama administrations.
On September 10. 2001, “Enemy Number One” was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan, as confirmed by a report of Dan Rather, CBS News. (See our October 2003 article on this issue)
He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as George W’s speeches in the course of the last five years.
According to Dan Rather, CBS, Bin Laden was hospitalized in Rawalpindi. one day before the 9/11 attacks, on September 10, 2001.
“Pakistan. Pakistan’s Military Intelligence (ISI) told CBS that bin Laden had received dialysis treatment in Rawalpindi, at Pak Army’s headquarters.
DAN RATHER, CBS ANCHOR: As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. On that night, says this medical worker who wanted her identity protected, they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them. She says it was treatment for a very special person. The special team was obviously up to no good.
“The military had him surrounded,” says this hospital employee who also wanted his identity masked, “and I saw the mysterious patient helped out of a car. Since that time,” he says, “I have seen many pictures of the man. He is the man we know as Osama bin Laden. I also heard two army officers talking to each other. They were saying that Osama bin Laden had to be watched carefully and looked after.” Those who know bin Laden say he suffers from numerous ailments, back and stomach problems. Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the Taliban, says the military was often there to help before 9/11.
(…)
PETERSEN (on camera): Doctors at the hospital told CBS News there was nothing special about that night, but they refused our request to see any records. Government officials tonight denied that bin Laden had any medical treatment on that night.
(voice-over): But it was Pakistan’s President Musharraf who said in public what many suspected, that bin Laden suffers from kidney disease, saying he thinks bin Laden may be near death. His evidence, watching this most recent video, showing a pale and haggard bin Laden, his left hand never moving. Bush administration officials admit they don`t know if bin Laden is sick or even dead.
DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: With respect to the issue of Osama bin Laden`s health, I just am — don`t have any knowledge.
PETERSEN: The United States has no way of knowing who in Pakistan`s military or intelligence supported the Taliban or Osama bin Laden maybe up to the night before 9/11 by arranging dialysis to keep him alive. So the United States may not know if those same people might help him again perhaps to freedom.
Barry Petersen, CBS News, Islamabad.
(END VIDEOTAPE) END, emphasis added.
(CBS News, 28 January 2002 emphasis added, the complete transcript of CBS report is contained in annex to this article)
It should be noted, that the hospital is under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which have close links to the Pentagon. U.S. military advisers based in Rawalpindi. work closely with their counterparts.
Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive, but then maybe bin Laden was serving another “better purpose”. Rumsfeld claimed at the time that he had no knowledge regarding Osama’s health. (CBS News, 28 January 2002)
The CBS report is a crucial piece of information in our understanding of 9/11.
It refutes the administration’s claim that the whereabouts of bin Laden are unknown. It points to a Pakistan connection, it suggests a cover-up at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Dan Rather and Barry Petersen fail to draw the implications of their January 2002 report. They suggest that the US had been deliberately misled by Pakistani intelligence officials. They fail to ask the question:
Why does the US administration state that they cannot find Osama?
If they are to stand by their report, the conclusion is obvious. The administration is lying. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known.
If the CBS report is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, courtesy of America’s ally, he was either still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred or he had been released from the hospital within the last hours before the attacks.
In other words, Osama’s whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden. These negotiations, led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistan’s military intelligence, on behalf of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, took place on the 12th and 13th of September in Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage‘s office.
He could have been arrested at short notice on September 10th, 2001. But then we would not have been privileged to five years of Osama related media stories. The Bush administration desperately needs the fiction of an “outside enemy of America”.
Known and documented Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda is a construct of the US intelligence apparatus. His essential function is to give a face to the “war on terrorism”. The image must be vivid.
According to the White house,
“The greatest threat to us is this ideology of violent extremism, and its greatest public proponent is Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden remains the number one target, in terms of our efforts, but he’s not the only target.” (Recent Statement of White House Assistant for Homeland Security Frances Townsend, 5 September 2006).
The national security doctrine rests on the fiction of Islamic terrorists, led by Osama who are portrayed as a “threat to the civilized World”. In the words of President Bush,
“Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? We are on the offensive. We will not rest. We will not retreat. And we will not withdraw from the fight until this threat to civilization has been removed.” (quoted by CNN, September 5, 2006)
The “hot pursuit” of Osama in the rugged mountainous areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan must continue, because without Osama, referred to ad nauseam in news reports and official statements, the fragile legitimacy of the US administration collapses like a house of cards.
Moreover, the search for Osama protects the real architects of the 9/11 attacks. While there is no evidence that Al Qaeda was behind the 911 attacks, as revealed by numerous studies and documents, there is mounting evidence of complicity and coverup at the highest levels of the State, Military and intelligence apparatus.
The continued arrest of alleged 911 accomplices and suspects has nothing to do with “national security”. It creates the illusion that Arabs and Muslims are behind the terror plots, while shunting the conduct of a real criminal investigation into the 911 attacks.
In the year 2000 the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) panel of the European Parliament published a study entitled “Crowd Control Technologies” where it wrote:
“in October 1999 NATO announced a new policy on non-lethal weapons and their place in allied arsenals… The most controversial non-lethal crowd control and anti-materiel technology proposed by the US are so called Radio Frequency or Directed Energy Weapons that can allegedly manipulate human behaviour in a variety of unusual ways… the greatest concern is with systems which can directly interact with the human nervous system… The research undertaken to date both in the US and in Russia can be divided into two related areas: (i) individual mind control and (ii) crowd control” (pg.liii).
Directed energy system was further defined in the technical annex as „Directed energy weapon system designed to match radio frequency source to interfere with human brain activity at synapse level, with the note:
“Highly classified program and hard data is difficult to access” (pg. 67).
After the publication of the book, the European Parliament held a special hearing, where the co-author of the book Nick Begich was testifying. As a result of his testimony the European Parliament adopted a resolution, where it called “for an international convention introducing a global ban on all developments and deployments of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings“ (paragraph 30). Against possible expectations, the European media did not publish and explain this call. The evident reason was that weapon systems “designed to match radio frequency source to interfere with human brain activity at synapse level” were “highly classified” or in other words qualified as information related to national defense.
On December 9, 2023, 23 years after this publication, the press service of the European parliament informed about a “political deal with the Council on a bill to ensure AI in Europe is safe, respects fundamental human rights, while businesses can thrive and expand”. It stated:
“recognising the potential threat to citizens’ rights and democracy posed by certain applications of AI, the co-legislators agreed to prohibit: … AI systems that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent their free will”.
As well it declared:
“for AI systems classified as high-risk (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law), clear obligations were agreed“.
However so far the EU did not publish the fact that mass manipulation of the activity of human brains at distance is actually feasible. As well it did not ban the use of directed or radio frequency weapons to remotely manipulate the activity of nervous systems of individuals or masses of people.
In the meantime the competition between the USA, Russia and lately China for the control of brain activity of world population by means of those weapons went on. In June 2023 the Washington Times wrote:
“China’s People’s Liberation Army is developing high-technology weapons designed to disrupt brain functions and influence government leaders or entire populations, according to a report by three open-source intelligence analysts. The weapons can be used to directly attack or control brains using microwave or other directed energy weapons in handheld guns or larger weapons firing electromagnetic beams, adding that the danger of China’s brain warfare weapons prior to or during a conflict is no longer theoretical“.
Already in the year 1997 the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College wrote:
“Potential or possible supporters of the insurgency around the world were identified using the comprehensive Interagency Integrated Database. These were categorized as ‘potential’ or ‘active’, with sophisticated personality simulations used to develop, tailor and focus psychological campaigns for each.” (pg. 24-25).
In this text the technology of “personality simulations” was not disclosed, but from the text it is obvious that directed energy or radio frequency weapons are supposed to be used. Does not this publication propose establishment of the USA as a new totalitarian superpower, which will be hardly possible to defeat?
Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw from Royal Netherlands Navy, and Expert from Strategic Communications and Information Operations NATO Joint Warfare Centre, wrote in an article in 2023:
“The reason why cognitive attacks go unnoticed by their targets is that cognitive activities bypass the conscious mind and directly target the subconscious of a person… most of our decisions are made by our subconscious… Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind”.
As a result we are living in the world, where democratic states base their ideology on the policy of human rights defence, but at the same time they keep in secret the weapons which can be used to eliminate human rights and abolish even the right to freedom of thought and consequently the democracy itself, since the voters behaviour can be controlled by governments at the time of elections. For as long as those weapons are not declassified, there will be no guarantee, that they will not be used against citizens and that democracy will remain a ruling political system in the western world.
Modern neurotechnologies have been applied to individuals since the 1990s. Already in the year 1999 the Russian politician Vladimir Lopatin wrote in the book “Psychotronic weapon and security of Russia”, that psychotronic war “is actually taking place without declaration of war” .
In the May 2024 the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security was holding a hearing entitled “Silent weapons: Examining foreign anomalous health incidents, targeting Americans in the homeland“, where classification of those weapons and their use against the U.S. diplomats, security officers and ordinary citizens (Havana syndrome) was discussed.
The world media did not fully inform the general public about this hearing. In this way they continue avoiding the subject of abuse of fundamental human rights and human freedom by modern neurotechnologies and cooperate on the liquidation of those democratic values in the future of this civilization.
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Mojmir Babacek was born in 1947 in Prague, Czech Republic. Graduated in 1972 at Charles University in Prague in philosophy and political economy. In 1978 signed the document defending human rights in communist Czechoslovakia „Charter 77“. Since 1981 until 1988 lived in emigration in the USA. Since 1996 he has published articles on different subjects mostly in the Czech and international alternative media.
In 2010, he published a book on the 9/11 attacks in the Czech language. Since the 1990‘s he has been striving to help to achieve the international ban of remote control of the activity of the human nervous system and human minds with the use of neurotechnology.
Media manipulation is not only about what is said, but also about what is covered and what is not. The recent events in Venezuela are a good illustration of this.
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Dear reader, do you know the president of Peru? Or the president of Ecuador? Perhaps not. However, the chances are pretty good that you do know the name of the Venezuelan president: Nicolas Maduro. That is remarkable, because there is at least as much to say about the presidents of Peru and Ecuador as there is about the president of Venezuela.
Image: President Dina Boluarte (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Let’s start with Dina Boluarte. She is the unelected president of Peru and came to power through a coup against the leftist president Castillo. This happened after a period of long-term instability, during which dozens of people were killed.
She released the former fascist dictator Alberto Fujimori from prison, after he had been convicted of crimes against humanity (genocide against the indigenous population). Her right-wing coup regime is rejected by more than 90 percent of the population. All facts that the mainstream finds little or not worthwhile.
Image: President Daniel Noboa (Licensed under CC0)
And then there is Daniel Noboa, the president of Ecuador. Under his rule, there have been almost 500 violent murders this year. The former president is exiled and is not allowed to participate in the elections.
Noboa ordered the storming of the Mexican embassy a few months ago to arrest the former vice president. The storming of an embassy is very exceptional and a particularly serious violation of international law. It should have been world news, but it was barely picked up by the mainstream media.
What Is Kept Silent About
Media manipulation is not only about what is said but also about what is covered and what is kept silent about. If there are deradicalization camps in Xinjiang, the western province of China, this is widely reported in the press. But if camps are built in the north of India to detain and deport up to two million ‘illegal immigrants’, then no one cares, except some specialized journalists.
When protests broke out in Iran in 2022 following the suspicious death of a young woman you could read entirely detailed reports about it in the mainstream media. But about Libya, which has been sinking into complete chaos after the 2011 Western military invasion and where slave camps are being set up, you hear next to nothing in the same press.
In Cuba, if once a few hundred people take to the streets it is world news. But in Argentina, when tens of thousands of people demonstrate week after week you don’t hear about it, except maybe on yet another page in a small article at the bottom.
We could go on like this for a while. If you want to approach the media critically, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself are: why is this being reported now, why is this being elevated to news and why is so much attention being paid to it? For the answer to those questions, your attention will very quickly be drawn to the geopolitical power game and you will see which side the media is on.
The ‘Brave’ González
Image: Edmundo González in 2024 (From the Public Domain)
Back to Venezuela. Today, the news reports that opposition leader Edmundo González has fled to Spain after an arrest warrant. A lot is being kept quiet about this.
For example, the far-right – another ‘detail’ which the media modestly keep quiet about – González was the only one of the nine opposition candidates who refused in advance to recognize the results of the elections. Nor do the media report that these elections were conducted according to a strict scenario with the intention of provoking a violent popular uprising and implementing a regime change in case the far-right lost.
By not recognizing the results and publishing fake results, González provoked riots the day after the elections. The media do not mention that these riots were particularly violent and caused dozens of deaths in a similar scenario in 2014 and 2017.
The media also fail to mention that Edmundo González was involved in the formation of death squads in El Salvador that slaughtered thousands of citizens and that in 2002 he signed a decree approving the coup against the democratically elected president Hugo Chávez. Someone with such a track record would very likely be behind bars in a western country.
The Contrast with Ecuador
For anyone who knows the region, the contrast with Ecuador is striking. Jorge Glas, vice president in a previous government, had fled to the Mexican embassy to avoid arrest. To no avail, the Ecuadorian army stormed the embassy, against all international rules, and took him into custody.
Edmundo González also sought shelter in an embassy (first the Dutch and then the Spanish) and applied for asylum in Spain. The Venezuelan government respected international law and, after negotiations with Madrid, allowed the man to leave freely for Spain.
This obvious contrast has apparently escaped the mainstream media. The framing is clear: Venezuela is the culprit and there is nothing wrong in Ecuador.
The reason for this framing is obvious. In Ecuador, a right-wing, Western-minded government is in power. In Venezuela, the opposite is the case.
The mainstream media claim to be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’. Judge for yourself.
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Marc Vandepitte is a member of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and was an observer during the presidential elections in Venezuela. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
O regime de Kiev já não esconde as suas práticas militares anti-humanitárias. Numa declaração recente, o chefe das forças armadas ucranianas admitiu que soldados mal treinados são enviados para a linha da frente, o que aumenta claramente o risco de morte. Para servir os interesses do Ocidente e continuar a lutar, a Ucrânia tem recorrido ao recrutamento forçado e ao sacrifício em massa de jovens, o que gera uma grave crise social.
O general ucraniano Aleksandr Syrsky afirmou que Kiev está enviando tropas recém-recrutadas e mal treinadas para a frente contra a Rússia. Numa entrevista à CNN, Syrsky confirmou relatórios recentes sobre os problemas de mão-de-obra na Ucrânia, deixando claro que a mobilização forçada e a utilização de pessoas insuficientemente treinadas são medidas necessárias para manter o esforço de guerra.
Syrsky disse que os novos recrutas ucranianos recebem seu primeiro treinamento durante um programa de trinta dias, aprendendo táticas militares básicas. Após essas instruções, os soldados são encaminhados para unidades de treinamento especializadas, onde aprendem a manusear armas específicas para suas funções no exército. O tempo de treino é curto e absolutamente insuficiente para instruir adequadamente os recrutas, tornando os novos soldados ucranianos despreparados para situações reais de conflito armado.
O general esclareceu que a Ucrânia está a trabalhar para “melhorar” o nível de formação e tornar os seus recrutas mais capazes. O objetivo do país é realizar treinamentos militares de forma rápida e eficiente, transformando cidadãos comuns em verdadeiros combatentes em apenas algumas semanas.
“Em relação ao treinamento: é claro que todos desejam que o nível de treinamento seja o melhor, por isso formamos militares altamente qualificados e profissionais. Ao mesmo tempo, a dinâmica na frente exige que coloquemos em serviço os militares recrutados o mais rápido possível É por isso que costumamos realizar treinamento militar básico por pelo menos um mês, e treinamento qualificado de meio mês a um mês. Assim, nossos soldados são treinados por um mês ou mais – até dois meses (…) E agora nos concentramos principalmente no profissionalismo de nossos instrutores, na construção de nossa base de treinamento, em nossos centros de treinamento e no uso de escolas de treinamento onde os militares adquirem habilidades avançadas no domínio de armas e equipamentos relacionados”, disse ele.
Embora admitisse algumas práticas ucranianas, Syrsky tentou parecer otimista à opinião pública ocidental. Afirmou que as atuais políticas de mobilização estão a fazer o suficiente para compensar as perdas nas linhas da frente, elogiando o infame trabalho dos centros de recrutamento. Além disso, Syrsky afirmou que o moral das tropas ucranianas está elevado, especialmente após a invasão de Kursk. Ele afirmou que as manobras ucranianas na indiscutível região russa foram eficazes para “reforçar” os soldados e fortalecer o “desejo de vencer”.
“Em geral, conseguimos manter as nossas capacidades de mobilização ao nível adequado e garantir tanto a reposição das perdas como a formação de novas unidades. Ou seja, graças ao trabalho coordenado de todas as autoridades estatais, órgãos militares, principalmente centros de recrutamento territoriais, mantemos estes níveis de desempenho e garantimos o reabastecimento das nossas unidades militares (…) A questão do moral é uma área muito importante do nosso trabalho. E, claro, estamos novamente a falar da operação Kursk. Este foi um factor que melhorou significativamente o moral não só dos militares, mas de toda a população ucraniana. Ou seja, foi e ainda é um incentivo que elevou o moral dos nossos militares, o seu desejo de vencer.
É curioso ver como Syrsky mente a ponto de se contradizer. Há algumas semanas, noutra entrevista, afirmou que a operação Kursk não conseguiu atingir o seu objectivo principal, que era iniciar uma manobra diversiva para evacuar as forças russas de algumas cidades-chave do Donbass. Aparentemente, Syrsky está agora a tentar reverter o impacto negativo gerado pelo fracasso ucraniano em Kursk, alegando que foi uma operação bem sucedida no “elevamento do moral” das tropas.
Além disso, deve ser enfatizado que Syrsky está deliberadamente a tentar enganar o público. Não é possível que o moral ucraniano esteja a ser elevado por Kursk simplesmente porque a operação é uma catástrofe, com milhares de soldados ucranianos já tendo morrido em vão. Muitos desses soldados eram precisamente aqueles recrutas mal treinados que foram levados despreparadamente para o front.
Por mais que Syrsky tente disfarçar a situação de guerra, é pouco provável que a opinião pública ocidental acredite nas suas palavras falaciosas, uma vez que a realidade está cada vez mais acessível a todos através das redes sociais. O terror conduzido pelos centros de mobilização, com sequestros e tortura pública de cidadãos que não querem lutar, mostra que não há moral elevado entre os ucranianos e que um colapso nas fileiras do regime é iminente.
The authenticity of this interview remains to be confirmed. We were informed that It was available in recognized electronic news archives including BBC translation.
The interview tends to demystify the Osama bin Laden persona.
In the Unmat interview, Osama bin Laden categorically denies his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden’s statements in this interview are markedly different from those made in the alleged Osama video tapes.
In this interview, Osama bin Laden allegedly exhibits an understanding of US foreign policy. He expresses his views regarding the loss of life on 9/11. He focusses on CIA support to the narcotics trade.
He also makes statements as to who, in his opinion, might be the likely perpetrator of the September 11 attacks.
This is an important text which has not been brought to the attention of Western public opinion.
We have highlighted key sections of this interview.
It is our hope that the text of this interview, published on 28 September 2001 barely a week before the onset of the war on Afghanistan, will contribute to a better understanding of the history of Al Qaeda, the role of Osama bin Laden and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
It should be noted that on the day preceding the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden had been admitted for treatment in a Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
This was confirmed by Dan Rather in a CBS News Report.
This interview is published for informational purposes only.
Global Research does not in any way endorse the statements in this interview. Nor are we in a position to confirm its authenticity.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 2, 2023, September 11, 2024
Full text of September 2001 Pakistani paper’s “exclusive” interview with Usamah Bin-Ladin
translated from Urdu by the BBC World Monitoring Service
Karachi, 28 September 2001, pp. 1- 7.
Ummat’s introduction
Kabul: Prominent Arab mojahed holy warrior Usamah Bin-Ladin has said that he or his al-Qa’idah group has nothing to do with the 11 September suicidal attacks in Washington and New York. He said the US government should find the attackers within the country. In an exclusive interview with daily “Ummat”, he said these attacks could be the act of those who are part of the American system and are rebelling against it and working for some other system. Or, Usamah said, this could be the act of those who want to make the current century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. Or, the American Jews, who are opposed to President Bush ever since the Florida elections, might be the masterminds of this act. There is also a great possibility of the involvement of US intelligence agencies, which need billions of dollars worth of funds every year. He said there is a government within the government in the United States.
The secret agencies, he said, should be asked as to who are behind the attacks. Usamah said support for attack on Afghanistan was a matter of need for some Muslim countries and compulsion for others. However, he said, he was thankful to the courageous people of Pakistan who erected a bulwark before the wrong forces. He added that the Islamic world was attaching great expectations with Pakistan and, in time of need, “we will protect this bulwark by sacrificing of lives”.
Following is the interview in full detail:
Ummat: You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?
Usamah [Osama bin Laden]: In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the earth as an abode for peace, for the whole mankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to the Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and Momin true Muslim people of Pakistan who refused to believe in lie of the demon.
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people.
Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children, and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.
There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya, and Bosnia?
Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims .
The US has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates.
However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that, it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of United States, or the latter itself considers them as its enemies. Or the countries, which do not agree to become its slaves, such as China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria, and the former Russia as received .
Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.
According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US government has stated. But the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the US itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.
Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This funding issue was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger.
They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usamah and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush administration approved a budget of 40bn dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance.
Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other US president, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks.
Ummat: A number of world countries have joined the call of the United States for launching an attack on Afghanistan. These also include a number of Muslim countries. Will Al-Qa’idah declare a jihad against these countries as well?
Usamah: I must say that my duty is just to awaken the Muslims; to tell them as to what is good for them and what is not. What does Islam says and what the enemies of Islam want?
Al-Qa’idah was set up to wage a jihad against infidelity, particularly to encounter the onslaught of the infidel countries against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. The first five being the basic holy words of Islam, prayers, fast, pilgrimage to Mecca, and giving alms Every anti-Islamic person is afraid of it. Al-Qa’idah wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily life of the Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship. We are not against any Islamic country nor we consider a war against an Islamic country as jihad.
We are in favour of armed jihad only against those infidel countries, which are killing innocent Muslim men, women, and children just because they are Muslims. Supporting the US act is the need of some Muslim countries and the compulsion of others. However, they should think as to what will remain of their religious and moral position if they support the attack of the Christians and the Jews on a Muslim country like Afghanistan. The orders of Islamic shari’ah jurisprudence for such individuals, organizations, and countries are clear and all the scholars of the Muslim brotherhood are unanimous on them. We will do the same, which is being ordered by the Amir ol-Momenin the commander of the faithful Mola Omar and the Islamic scholars. The hearts of the people of Muslim countries are beating with the call of jihad. We are grateful to them.
Ummat: The losses caused in the attacks in New York and Washington have proved that giving an economic blow to the US is not too difficult. US experts admit that a few more such attacks can bring down the American economy. Why is al-Qa’idah not targeting their economic pillars?
Usamah: I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the punishment should reach Israel. In fact, it is Israel, which is giving a blood bath to innocent Muslims and the US is not uttering a single word.
Ummat: Why is harm not caused to the enemies of Islam through other means, apart from the armed struggle? For instance, inciting the Muslims to boycott Western products, banks, shipping lines, and TV channels.
Usamah: The first thing is that Western products could only be boycotted when the Muslim fraternity is fully awakened and organized. Secondly, the Muslim companies should become self-sufficient in producing goods equal to the products of Western companies. Economic boycott of the West is not possible unless economic self-sufficiency is attained and substitute products are brought out. You see that wealth is scattered all across the Muslim world but not a single TV channel has been acquired which can preach Islamic injunctions according to modern requirements and attain an international influence. Muslim traders and philanthropists should make it a point that if the weapon of public opinion is to be used, it is to be kept in the hand. Today’s world is of public opinion and the fates of nations are determined through its pressure. Once the tools for building public opinion are obtained, everything that you asked for can be done.
Ummat: The entire propaganda about your struggle has so far been made by the Western media. But no information is being received from your sources about the network of Al-Qa’idah and its jihadi successes. Would you comment?
Usamah: In fact, the Western media is left with nothing else. It has no other theme to survive for a long time. Then we have many other things to do. The struggle for jihad and the successes are for the sake of Allah and not to annoy His bondsmen. Our silence is our real propaganda. Rejections, explanations, or corrigendum only waste your time and through them, the enemy wants you to engage in things which are not of use to you. These things are pulling you away from your cause.
The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves. Terror is the most dreaded weapon in modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people. It can add fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that. You can understand as to what will be the performance of the nation in a war, which suffers from fear and helplessness.
Ummat: What will the impact of the freeze of al-Qa’idah accounts by the US?
Usamah: God opens up ways for those who work for Him. Freezing of accounts will not make any difference for Al-Qa’idah or other jihad groups. With the grace of Allah, al-Qa’idah has more than three such alternative financial systems, which are all separate and totally independent from each other. This system is operating under the patronage of those who love jihad. What to say of the United States, even the combined world cannot budge these people from their path.
These people are not in hundreds but in thousands and millions. Al-Qa’idah comprises of such modern educated youths who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their hands. These are the very flaws of the Western fiscal system, which are becoming a noose for it and this system could not recuperate in spite of the passage of so many days.
Ummat: Are there other safe areas other than Afghanistan, where you can continue jihad?
Usamah: There are areas in all parts of the world where strong jihadi forces are present, from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan, and from Burma to Kashmir. Then it is not the problem of my person. I am helpless fellowman of God, constantly in the fear of my accountability before God. It is not the question of Usamah but of Islam and, in Islam too, of jihad. Thanks to God, those waging a jihad can walk today with their heads raised. Jihad was still present when there was no Usamah and it will remain as such even when Usamah is no longer there. Allah opens up ways and creates loves in the hearts of people for those who walk on the path of Allah with their lives, property, and children. Believe it, through jihad, a man gets everything he desires. And the biggest desire of a Muslim is the after life. Martyrdom is the shortest way of attaining an eternal life.
Ummat: What do you say about the Pakistan government policy on Afghanistan attack?
Usamah: We are thankful to the Momin and valiant people of Pakistan who erected a blockade in front of the wrong forces and stood in the first file of battle. Pakistan is a great hope for the Islamic brotherhood. Its people are awakened, organized, and rich in the spirit of faith. They backed Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union and extended every help to the mojahedin and the Afghan people. Then these are the same Pakistanis who are standing shoulder by shoulder with the Taleban. If such people emerge in just two countries, the domination of the West will diminish in a matter of days. Our hearts beat with Pakistan and, God forbid, if a difficult time comes we will protect it with our blood. Pakistan is sacred for us like a place of worship. We are the people of jihad and fighting for the defence of Pakistan is the best of all jihads to us. It does not matter for us as to who rules Pakistan. The important thing is that the spirit of jihad is alive and stronger in the hearts of the Pakistani people.
End of Interview
[Copyright Ummat in Urdu, BBC translation in English, 2001]
Read about Osama Bin Laden in Michel Chossudovsky’s international best-seller
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
The evidence increasingly suggests that throughout the entire post-cold War period, agencies of the US government have harboured international terrorists.
The Islamic jihad has been abetted by the US government, and conversely the Islamic jihad has financed the flow of arms and mercenaries in US sponsored insurgencies in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
And behind this process is a multibillion dollar Golden Crescent drug trade including the laundering of large amounts of narco-dollars in the Western banking system.
“the bin Laden family has become acquainted with some of the biggest names in the Republican Party…”
The following article published by the Wall Street Journal confirms the links of the Bush family to the bin Laden business empire.
M. Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 2001
Ou thanks to the WSJ for having brought this article to our attention
Note: The Wall Street Journal in September 2001 acknowledged Osama’s “alleged terrorist activities” and the “Jump in Defense Spending”
In retrospect “the Jump in Defense Spending” has been allocated to America’s “alleged counter-terrorism operations” in the course of last 23 years.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 11, 2024
Bin Laden Family Could Profit From a
Jump in Defense Spending Due to Ties to U.S. Bank
Wall Street Journal
September 27, 2001
If the U.S. boosts defense spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden’s alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: Mr. bin Laden’s family.
Among its far-flung business interests, the well-heeled Saudi Arabian clan — which says it is estranged from Osama — is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected Washington merchant bank specializing in buyouts of defense and aerospace companies.
Through this investment and its ties to Saudi royalty, the bin Laden family has become acquainted with some of the biggest names in the Republican Party.
In recent years, former President Bush, ex-Secretary of State James Baker and ex-Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci have made the pilgrimage to the bin Laden family’s headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Mr. Bush makes speeches on behalf of Carlyle Group and is senior adviser to its Asian Partners fund, while Mr. Baker is its senior counselor. Mr. Carlucci is the group’s chairman.
Osama is one of more than 50 children ofMohammed bin Laden, who built the family’s $5 billion business, Saudi Binladin Group, largely with construction contracts from the Saudi government.
Osama worked briefly in the business and is believed to have inherited as much as $50 million from his father in cash and stock, although he doesn’t have access to the shares, a family spokesman says. Because his Saudi citizenship was revoked in 1994, Mr. bin Laden is ineligible to own assets in the kingdom, the spokesman added.
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Our thanks to the WSJ for having brought this article to our attention
See the CBC video below: a carefully researched and incisive report focussing on the bin Laden-Bush family connections:
Video
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