2020 May « Aletho News

How a US Government-Sponsored Outlet Sparked Media Hysteria About Kim Jong-un’s ‘Death’

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – May 3, 2020

After weeks of speculation fueled by a lengthy absence, the North Korean leader suddenly reappeared in public on May 1 at the opening of a new fertilizer plant, dispelling rumours that he was dead or ‘gravely ill’.

Kim Jong-un’s surprise reemergence in public after weeks of speculation regarding his health raise a couple of important questions, specifically: how did the rumours get started, and who was behind them?

Queries regarding the North Korean leader’s whereabouts began swirling in mid-April, after he missed the public celebration of the Day of the Sun, the all-important April 15 anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Before that, Kim also missed the session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, making his last public appearance on April 11 at a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea politburo.

NED-Sponsored Rumours

It was Daily NK, a South Korean-based online newspaper which receives grant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded non-profit with the stated goal of ‘promoting democracy abroad’, which began the rumour that Kim had undergone a “cardiovascular surgical procedure.” What was the paper’s information based on? An unnamed source inside North Korea.

CNN took the rumour and ran with it, with a US official ‘with direct knowledge’ of the situation telling the network on April 21 that US intelligence was monitoring reports that Kim was “in grave danger” after undergoing surgery.

South Korean officials, meanwhile, maintained at the time that Seoul had “seen no unusual signs with regard to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s health.” Also telling was the fact that US President Donald Trump, who initially ‘wished Kim well’ after hearing the reports, quickly corrected himself, saying he thought CNN’s reporting was “incorrect” and based on “old documents.”

On April 26, a senior advisor to South Korean President Moon Jae-in spoke to CNN directly, once again dismissing rumours regarding Kim’s health, and reiterating that as far as Seoul was aware, he was doing just fine.

As for North Korean media, it issued a series of statements about Kim’s regular back-and-forth communications with officials, foreign leaders, and construction workers in Samjiyon, a model city in the country’s north.

Still, the lack of photos or videos meant that speculation would go on, with political talking heads mulling over Kim’s possible successor, possibly his sister Kim Yo-jong, while the Washington Post and the New York Times chalked out various apocalyptic scenarios, from panic buying in Pyongyang stores to fears of a cross-border refugee crisis and even a possible military incursion into North Korea leading to nuclear war.

Kim Reappears

On May 1, following an absence of 20 days, North Korean television broadcast a report featuring Kim attending a ceremony opening a new fertilizer plant in Sunchon, an industrial city north of Pyongyang. Photos shared by Korean Central News Agency showed Kim cutting a ceremonial red ribbon at the factory, flanked by officials. Video footage of the event emerged a day later, showing Kim speaking with officials, seemingly in good health and good spirits.

Undeterred by the photo and video evidence challenging their claims, the rumour mill has continued to churn, with ‘health professionals’ telling NK News, a South-Korean-based online newspaper with alleged links to the CIA, that a mark on Kim’s arm seen in the footage actually “corroborates” earlier reports about his alleged heart surgery.

On Sunday, a senior official from the South Korean President’s office dismissed these claims, telling Yonhap that Seoul has “reasons to believe that there was no surgery, but cannot disclose such details.”

The swirling of rumours regarding Kim’s health led to an explosion of memes after his reemergence in public.

Still, only a handful of observers have called out the mainstream media for this latest bout of “fake news,” with journalist and The Grayzone assistant editor Ben Norton calling it “example number 92,730,274 of how the Western corporate media is a totally useless propaganda machine that prints lie after lie in service of Western governments.”

Meanwhile, in South Korea, the country’s ruling Democratic Party reportedly demanded an apology from two defector parliamentarians on Sunday for their alleged role in circulating the fake news regarding Kim’s health. Before the release of fresh photos and video of Kim, high-profile defector and lawmaker Thae Yong-ho publicly said he was confident that the North Korean leader “cannot stand up by himself or walk properly,” while Ji Seong-ho, another opposition lawmaker, claimed he was “99 percent sure” Kim was dead. Jung Choun-sook, Democratic Party lawmaker and spokesperson, called on the pair of MPs to apologize over their now demonstrably “groundless remarks.”

May 3, 2020 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CNN, NED, New York Times, United States, Washington Post | 1 Comment

REVIEW: ‘Planet of the Humans’ lands the occasional hit, but pulls too many punches

By John Steppling | OffGuardian | May 3, 2020

Michael Moore is estimated to be worth 50 million dollars. He is a wealthy man. His political support is for the Democratic Party. He has stumped for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in New York and for Rashida Tlaib in Michigan (does one need to say more?). Moore is essentially a brand.

Moore came to prominence with Roger and Me, but became a part of the cultural zeitgeist with Bowling for Columbine. Moore was satirized in TV cartoons like South Park (a sort of cultural marker for brand success), but despite his celebrity there has been in subsequent films a gradual yet inexorable expression of the law of diminishing (box office) returns.

He has now granted his imprimatur as producer (a bit like Nike is now branding medical face masks. Well… OK… not exactly like that, but still…) on a new documentary by Jeff Gibbs: Planet of the Humans.

Now, the essential and overriding two problems with this film can be generalized as absence of class analysis, and an absent analysis of western Imperialism.

More succinctly, the military is never mentioned, not ever. And the open Malthusian meme ‘we are the problem’, or what is often called ‘the overpopulation argument’ (or Pogo argument) is a profoundly reactionary and racist idea based on classic eugenics, and the one glaring omission and the other rather disturbing ideology, eclipse the genuine (though limited) truths of the film.

And I say limited because while, yes, Al Gore is a ruling class vulture and Bill McKibben an opportunistic self-promoting liar, and pointing this out is correct and even satisfying, these points are subsumed by Gibbs greater political mystifications.

The curious result of these missing ideas and the criticism of them and by extension the film, means that finds oneself aligned, however fleetingly, with people who hate the film for exactly the wrong reasons — the pro capitalist DNC linked pro climate justice. Green energy supporters, among whom one can count Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who producer Michael Moore supports and campaigns for (cognitive dissonance exhibit A) and all the myriad other corporate interests that Cory Morningstar painstakingly catalogues in her Wrong Kind of Green blog.

There have been hysterical attacks on Gibbs from these people, and they are wrong. And their egregious *wrongness* here still doesn’t mean its not a flawed film.

But herein lies the real issues that need to be carefully tweezed apart. Even Cory Morningstar linked to the film on the above-mentioned blog.

On an importantly positive note, the stuff that Gibbs gets right is important and one wishes dearly he were a more sophisticated political thinker. And that he wasn’t working with Moore. But details on industrial energy, palm oil, all the massive destruction caused by solar and wind power. That the hype for renewable energy is dishonest and manipulative. Gibbs is exactly right (though a bit late to the party one has to say).

The attacks on him from the proto-capitalist green energy people are cynical and dishonest.

The film is not without poignancy. The image of an 800-year-old Joshua Tree being ground up will not soon leave you, nor the image of the Orangutan – that Orangutan – this is the future under capitalism. There is no escape from it.

I want to return to the nature of the acute ambivalence this film elicits, but first, another factor needs to be noted. Timing.

That this film (which was rejected, apparently, by major distributors, although I have no direct evidence of this) is released during the Corona panic (for free), during the global house arrest (and this, in turn, means a necessary sidebar on Bill Gates) is troubling.

One of the most prevalent themes being repeated ad nauseam in media is one that depicts the suddenly clean waters of the Venice canals, the return of wildlife to the suburbs of America and northern Europe, and the generally breathable air of previously polluted big cities. And the message is, like the Gibbs film, “we are the problem”. Get rid of people, or keep them inside, and voila… an Edenic Gaia. The film then becomes tantamount to a marketing campaign for depopulation simply by virtue of its release date.

This, in turn, links to another problem with Planet of the Humans, and that is that it is very white. And I find a surprising number of (surprise) white people who either will object to this description, or simply tell you it has no meaning. But it does have meaning and it has history.

A history where twelve presidents owned and worked slaves. A history in which the U.S. Army gave out blankets, infected with smallpox, to native american tribes. Ponder that. The U.S. history is so interwoven with its slave-owning and genocidal past; add Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe doctrine, and sixty years of intense anticommunism and covert CIA coups – many of which targeted post-independence Africa – that history is inseparable from any cultural or political product.

THAT history colours all cultural discussion, it cannot be escaped. And there is an unsettling sense of privilege (even if not literally true) in listening to a white guy intone for a hundred minutes.

So, when white men narrate films where nearly all humans are white, it is ipso facto problematic. White men with apparently no politics beyond ‘trees are nice’.

Now, having said this, the subject Gibbs is tackling is important. Many of his conclusions are correct, but only up to a point because looming over everything is the spectre of de-population. And this Malthusianism is so threadbare at this point, so utterly at odds with the facts, that for Gibbs to promote it means he loses credibility for everything. And it’s sinister.

There are not too many people; thats simply not true, and in fact across the planet birth rates are cratering (why is IVF such big business?) But again, if one reads the reviews in corporate-owned media (Vox, or Salon et al.) it’s enough to make one root for and defend Gibbs… almost.

In fact, reading the mainstream press on the topic of this film is an object lesson in how propaganda is disseminated. It is a perfect illustration of the internalizing of the meta-narrative for climate, as it is for Covid 19. They can’t be separated, just as drone assassination and US/NATO Imperialist wars cannot be separated from SWAT teams kicking in doors in south-central.

The fact that the U.S. has over two million people in prison, which is the most per capita and real in the world, and that two million with a disproportionate number of black prisoners, is also suggestive of a deep intractable terror of a planet with dwindling white power.

But cutting across this, as I say, is the frightening erosion of democracy in the Covid 19 emergency. Never mind Malaria killed 400,000 last year, or that even the slimy frontman for Gates and his friends, Dr Fauci, admits the case mortality rate will be very low. It doesn’t matter because this stopped being about the virus long ago.

Here is essential reading regarding Gates…. two pieces. One from Jake Levich and the next from Alison McDowell.

I read in social media how people are so inspired about ‘frontline medical workers’ (you see there is always a new vocabulary, much like with climate and carrying capacity and wet bulbs and 6th mass extinction etc) and yet, in fact, huge numbers of hospitals are closing (likely to never reopen) and those doctors and nurses and now among the growing mass of unemployed in the US.

It seems the American bourgeoisie want to believe this is a dire threat. They want to self isolate. Perhaps this massive quarantine is a time of leisure that they don’t often get. I have no idea, honestly. But I do know for certain the quarantines will kill far more than the virus, in the long term, and that the new mass upticks in surveillance and invasions of privacy won’t ever be rolled back. But the bigger question is in terms of global travel and the Gates agenda (see Fourth Industrial Revolution, smart cities, etc).

What Gates wants is everyone to carry a certificate (or microchip) that indicates if they have had this or that vaccination. This is exactly what your dog has to have when you fly them out of the country.

I am deeply sorry Gibbs did not resist, or maybe actively joined, the agenda of the eugenicists. And as to the lack of mention of the military, well, I honestly don’t know how that is even possible if you claim to be making a documentary about destruction of the planet. The US war machine cuts across ever aspect of human existence today. That is not hyperbole. And yet Gibbs ignored it. I want to defend Gibbs against the corporate attacks against him, but I find it hard. And a final thought on all this.

The white liberal educated class so hate Trump that all rational perspective is lost. Anything that throws shade on Trump is a good thing. And this hatred is being enjoyed far too much; it is as if Trump came along and answered their unconscious prayers for active exercise of a deep soul-crushing hate. It bonds people, a negative bonding to be sure, but that is better than nothing.

The pimps for lockdown seem impervious to the loss of millions of jobs (just today in Norway SAS airlines cut 5000 jobs, and nobody expects them back. Or in Hollywood, as shooting resumes, crews are decimated. Thousands of jobs that likely won’t return). The importance of specific facts in Planet of the Humans are undeniable. I sincerely hope people will watch it, but watch it with an educated critical eye. For Gibbs is in bed with this man.

Two multi-millionaires performing the role of concerned citizens, and confused, confused I tell you, why people don’t want to lose their jobs and ability to feed their families.

Cory Morningstar wrote just the other day:

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the #coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days.”

There seems an almost class divide actually, for both climate discourse and corona discourse. The working-class fear loss of food and shelter far more than an only moderately lethal virus. They fear the excesses of federal bureaucracies, and the boot-heel of domestic US city police departments, not to mention custodial supervision. The white educated bourgeoisie fear but are also exhilarated by this contagion. As the lockdown began the top viewing film on Netflix that week was Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011).

This is exciting they think, and it allows yet another new vocabulary. So in social media where once one was confronted with endless white guys who were getting to play being scientists and climatologists, now one is running into a constant stream of Epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and biologists.

I’m going to quote myself here, with apologies, from a recent blog post:

The pandemic is fetishized and much like the climate alarmism associated with Greta and The Guardian paper, there is a curious fetishized and cultic response in much of the population. And it is the latent masochism of the already terrorized. It also feels like a faint cry of Puritan angst, a call to piety. This is a very American sensibility, this punitive moralism.

And I want to quote Paul Haeder, who is a social worker and writer in Oregon. This is a comment he made on his blog (which you should all read) here:

And the underlying message is population control. The great white hope of Michael Moore and I guess Jeff Gibbs is really the underpinning of the flick – and no credence is given to the millions upon millions of people fighting this bastardization of humanity, of life, called Western Capitalism. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of groups that Gibbs could have put front and center who are local, indigenous, part of the peasant movement, others, who are real forest protectors and water protectors and life protectors.

The for Evidence-Based Medicine (Oxford University) has the infection fatality rate at between 0.1% and 0.36%. That is pretty much what seasonal flu comes in at. [It should be noted that SARS-CoV-2 is far more transmissible, and that populations still lack immunity, making comparison with influenza based simply on the infection fatality rate fundamentally wrong (.36% of 7 billion is over 25 million)]. Something many of us said a month ago. The comparisons between the climate discourse and the Covid discourse are striking. One might even think there was an agenda here. But such topics are nowhere to be seen in the Gibbs film.

Which is fine, I suppose, if he only had viewed the lies and venality of the boosters for New green capitalism in something like a political frame. His obvious personal disappointment ends up feeling like, again, privilege.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is one meant to permanently eliminate humans from their work and livelihoods. This is the dream of the 1%. The fact that western capital continues to promote the “we are the enemy” meme should make us suspicious. It does not seem to have made Gibbs suspicious at all.

Watch the full documentary on Bitchute.

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

The Covid-19 “Manhattan Project” and its Ties to the CIA

By Daniel Espinosa Winder | Dissident Voice | May 2, 2020

On April 27, the Wall Street Journal reported about the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for Covid-19. A “secret group”, consisting in a dozen scientists and a few billionaires, was working “to cull the world’s most promising research on the pandemic” to then advise the White House in the best course of action.

As Rob Copeland wrote for the journal, the group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture-capitalist named Tom Cahill, a graduate from Duke University with extensive – maybe too extensive – contacts in the business world, as we will explore below. The “lockdown-era Manhattan Project”, as the group describes its own endeavor, is all about “distilling unorthodox ideas” from around the globe. As we can remember, the MP created the atomic bomb during WW II.

Cahill’s “secret group” is already influencing the Trump administration, which is taking advice from its 17-page memo, also made available by the journal. In other example of its influence, by the end of March Dr. Cahill made a phone call to Mike Pence’s aid, Nick Ayers, who managed to accelerate a lucrative FDA permission for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals – working on a potential vaccine for COVID-19 – to move its production to Ireland, where taxes and licenses are more lax.

Other policies included in the memo regard mandatory smartphone apps that will require people to report about their health and potential symptoms to a government agency on a daily basis.

But the brazen pecuniary nature of their enterprise comes to light when the WSJ informs us that the group of scientists working around Cahill – and their billionaire backers:

… has acted as the go-between for pharmaceutical companies looking for a reputable link to Trump administration decision makers. They are working remotely as (an) ad hoc review board for the flood of research on the coronavirus, weeding out flawed studies before they reach policy makers.

In other words, a private filter made of billionaires and scientists – who as we will see, own stock in some very profitable big pharma companies or work for them – is arbitrarily “weeding out” ideas from around the world regarding solutions to the pandemic… in the purported benefit of society?

Some could argue that that very same logic brought us to where we are right now: underfunded healthcare systems collapsed under a pandemic that was foreseen years or even decades in advance. As tens of writers and journalists have outlined in recent weeks around the world, what was needed for an up-to-the-task response to a threat like coronavirus, like stockpiles of specific medical equipment, more hospital beds and health professionals, was not a lucrative enough alternative for the privatized healthcare mercenaries in charge.

As few alternative media commented on the WSJ revelation, Naked Capitalism noted:

In essence, the country would be betting on venture capitalists and private equity specialists to solve the Covid-19 epidemic; oligarchs, in other words. I’m not entirely sure that’s a good bet… private equity is, after all, responsible for a range of social ills, including surprise billing from practices in privatized emergency rooms…

Just two months ago, when the pandemic was starting, Dr. Peter Hotez, from the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital, told the US Congress that in 2016 he and his team of researchers had a vaccine for a strain of coronavirus “ready to go”, but by then, “nobody was interested…”, so they didn’t obtain funding to test it on humans. Hotez, who also stated that his vaccine “may have provided cross-protection from the (present) strain”, says that the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the MERS or camel flu of 2012, should have “triggered major federal and global investments to develop vaccines in anticipation…”

It didn’t. Our good doctor even approached big pharma companies after the recent outbreak regarding his would-be vaccine. He literally got this response from one of them: “Well, we’re holding back to see if this thing comes back year after year…”

Now some big pharma investors, hiding behind their scientists/employees –young Dr. Cahill is presented by the WSJ as an stoic “one suit” living in a “one bedroom rental near Boston’s Fenway Park”– are looking to make a kill among the biggest disaster in recent times, with an economic fallout yet to be seen.

And just as the billionaires behind the “Covid-19 Manhattan Project” are tied to big pharma and some of the most powerful investment trusts in the world, its head, Dr. Tom Cahill, is tied to the CIA’s venture capital, In-Q-Tel.

Cahill, Seventh Sense BioSystems, and the Gates Foundation

As former CIA director George Tenet stated in his memoirs: “… CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology”. In-Q-Tel is notorious for investing in Keyhole, the technology that later became Google Earth.

As mentioned, Dr. Tom Cahill’s tender age didn’t stop him from developing a list of contacts among billionaire “philanthropists” like the notorious Michael Milken, and elite capitalist ventures like … well, the CIA’s investment fund.

Seventh Sense BioSystems was created in 2008 to develop a blood collection system that would facilitate diagnosis around the world, especially in the underdeveloped world. They designed a small device armed with micro-needles that would be fixed to the upper arm of the patient, drawing blood with a painless tap and storing it.

Dr. Cahill is a member of the board of directors at Seventh Sense. The medical technology start-up obtained money from In-Q-Tel for its very first round of funding ($4.2 million in total; the exact amount coming from the CIA’s front is unknown). Although the donation, made with tax-payer money, isn’t officially secret – the CIA’s venture fund works openly but discreetly –, the reasons why the agency could be interested in the project remain a mystery.

A few years after that, in 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted Seven Sense BioSystems over $2 million for its second round of funding. We should note that Novartis, also a Gates Foundation grantee, was tied to the recently incarcerated Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s lawyer. Novartis, working on a hydroxychloroquine treatment for the virus, paid Cohen more than $1 million for “policy insights” after Trump’s election in 2016. After their relationship was leaked, Novartis apologized. Later, a congressional investigation revealed the real objective of Novartis, the company: “explicitly sought to hire Michael Cohen to provide the company ‘access to key policymakers’ in the Trump administration…”

Dr. Cahill’s access to the White House, on the other hand, is a benefit provided to him by his own powerful godfathers, like Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and co-chairman of Bane Capital – involved in “some of the biggest investments in biotech” since 2016. According to the WSJ, Pagliuca passed on a version of Cahill’s Scientists to Stop Covid-19 memo and policy recommendations to a Goldman Sachs executive, David Solomon, who then handed it to Trump’s Treasure Secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

As the WSJ stated, Pagliuca, along with PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Jim Pallotta – owner of Raptor Capital, also invested in biotechnologies and Big Pharma – and Michael Milken (a “philanthropist” and convicted felon who invented the “junk bonds”) gave Cahill the “legitimacy” to reach the White House “in the middle of the crisis”.

Finally, in an even more unintendedly sarcastic manner, the WSJ piece assures its readers that: “no one in the group stands to gain financially”. Maybe not directly.

An elite club of interconnected billionaire investors

A recent short documentary from The Corbett Report’s, “How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health”, carefully explains how the Gates Foundation (also) donates millions of dollars to many world renowned media like The Guardian, the BBC, NPR and ABC News, where its dollars fund health related news segments. Its influence in media, the World Health Organization and hundreds of grants for research and development let Gates set the agenda for human health, to the point that is: “almost impossible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…

“It was Gates who sponsored the meeting that led to the creation of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, a global public-private partnership bringing together state sponsors and big pharmaceutical companies…” as Corbett reports. The openly stated objective of GAVI is to ensure healthy markets (for vaccines and other pharma products).

Government reactions in the US and UK, he adds, were shaped by the advice of two research groups, one from London’s Imperial College and the other from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Seattle), both heavily funded by – you guessed it – the Gates Foundation.

Despite dubious disclaimers, the fact is that the handful of billionaires and multimillionaires backing Cahill’s group of Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have important and overlapping investments in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and therefore could be expected to make huge deals out of the present pandemic and the proposed solutions. Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Capital made millions investing in Hospira, a pharmaceutical company bought by Pfizer in 2015. Steve Pagliuca’s Bain Capital Life Sciences also invests in two dozen biotech startups, with special mentions to a couple Pfizer spinouts.

All of the billionaires or multimillionaires mentioned throughout this article seem to deal with the same companies, venture funds and holdings, as if they were part of an elite club of investors. Peter Thiel, through the Founders Fund, invested in Stemcentrx, a company designing cancer treatments with stem cells that was bought by AbbVie, owned in part by the Vanguard Group. The latter also have interests in Pfizer and half a dozen big pharma names that overlap with those receiving “charitable” donations from the Gates Foundation. The Vanguard Group is also one of the top institutional shareholders of Class B shares from Berkshire Hathaway, where Warren Buffett is CEO.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, according to a recent investigation by The Nation, own stock from a dozen well-known names in pharmaceuticals like GSK, Merck, Pfizer or Eli Lilly, while at the same time – and in an open conflict of interests – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation makes “philanthropic” donations to them.

Most of these firms, including “charities”, holdings and venture funds, have no qualms in dealing with pharmaceuticals and the kind of private companies that make them direly needed in the first place, like Coca-Cola, McDonalds or giants of the oil and agricultural industries, including the producers of glyphosate-carrying concoctions.

The so-called “Covid-19 Manhattan Project” is, in sum, an open door to the White House for an elite club of billionaires aiming at enlarging their already extravagant business portfolio at the expense of a catastrophic emergency. Far from new, it follows the same neoliberal logic that brought us to this point, putting in the hands of the superwealthy 0.01 % the future of health in the United States and the world just like another business opportunity.

As Joachim Hagopian once wrote for Global Research:

This is neither a new nor unique story. In fact, the story of big pharma is the exact same story of how big government, big oil, big agro-chem giants like Monsanto have come to power. The controlling shareholders of all these major industries are one and the same.

Daniel Espinosa Winder lives in Arequipa, second largest city of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching propaganda and mainstream media. He writes for a peruvian in print weekly, “Hildebrandt en sus trece” since 2018. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in society”.

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | Corruption | Bill Gates, CIA, United States | Leave a comment

Why I No Longer Read Facebook

By Eve Mykytyn | May 2, 2020

In an effort to stem the torrent of ‘false’ cures and conspiracy theories about COVID-19, Facebook announced it would begin informing users globally who have liked, commented on, or shared “harmful” misinformation about the coronavirus, that the content they reacted to was incorrect and pointing them in the direction of what Facebook considers to be a ‘reliable’ source. The reliable source? The World Health Organization. Here’s the distinctly noninformative WHO Covid 19 website .

I don’t know what caused Covid 19 to become our disease du jour. Was it a bat? A natural or laboratory mutation? Not only do I not know, but I don’t believe that Facebook, or the WHO know either. Why not let theories abound? Perhaps free speech means that we trust the people to evaluate the source and sort out the facts for themselves.

The general rule in the US is that no publisher has an obligation to print any particular view: that rule dates from when ‘publisher’ meant print and print was inexpensive. The founders intentionally strove to open a ‘marketplace of ideas,’ a ‘public square’ with pamphleteers and speeches. Published content was restricted only by the threat of litigation over libel or defamation which requires publishing material known (or should have known) to be false.

Exceptions to the general rule came about when publishing was through a limited medium regulated by the government. When television stations were a limited resource obtained through government licensing of the few channels, the government imposed free speech requirements including an equal time rule, requiring television stations to present both sides of an issue. The rule was dropped, considered unnecessary only when television began to offer a plethora of stations.

So now we get to Facebook ( youtube, twitter, etc.). Which is it most like, television or freely available printing?

For many years, including the time that these major platforms became monopolies, the internet depended on cable service which due to the physical nature of cable was a limited resource for which the government issued licenses to certain cable companies. In 1965, the FCC established rules for cable systems and the Supreme Court affirmed the FCC’s jurisdiction over cable. I believe that Facebook is also subject to regulation as a monopoly as the government has authority to interfere with monopolies, particularly when they are successful (which is, admittedly another issue) ask AT&T.

But Facebook wants it both ways. They don’t admit liability for defamatory statements published on their site. They argue that they behave simply as a platform, a means of transmission. But they also reserve the right to censor content by restricting or deleting material they deem incorrect. So which is it? If they have the power to censor what we see why shouldn’t they be liable for the content?

This censoring of free speech applies broadly. Google favors some content over others in its search engine, Youtube has been on a tear not only deleting videos but replacing videos with others that express an alternative view. See where they plan to ban holocaust ‘denial’ (revisionist in any way) videos and offer wikipedia instead. Further they intend to offer the banned videos to researchers and NGOs “looking to understand hate in order to combat it,” thereby providing content only to a restricted class of their own choosing. Twitter inserts a page when a ‘controversial’ link is clicked warning the user that the link has been identified as malware although Twitter admits that malware warnings are posted based on content.

What is it that compels these platforms to come down on both sides of the free speech issue? After all, by editing content Facebook becomes more like a publisher and less like a mere platform. Facebook does so because it regularly gets brought before Congress to explain free speech congress doesn’t like. Facebook also defers to European countries that regulate speech.

Facebook argues that internet companies aren’t governments and they can restrict what they like. That’s why they don’t follow the First Amendment and instead enforce more restrictive rules in response to criticism of their content. See, for ex., the New Yorker on the ‘free speech excuse.’

I believe that major platforms have become the public square. Yet we allow Facebook to restrict our speech and they do so effectively. As owners of the public square they are uniquely positioned to and do silence dissenters. Platforms take down posts that don’t fit their ‘standards, and they do so swiftly. Perhaps before we allow Facebook to be the arbitrator of free speech, we should rethink the present day meaning of a marketplace of ideas.

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Twitter, YouTube | 1 Comment

“Turkey lied to us.” Syrian Mercenaries in Libya are Desperate to Leave

By Lindsey Snell | The Investigative Journal | April 27, 2020

“I just got back from Libya yesterday,” said Zein Ahmad*, a Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) militant in Afrin. “But I had been trying to leave for more than a month.” When the Libyan National Army (LNA) neared Tripoli in April 2019, the rival UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli called on Turkey for military support.

Turkish forces began heavily recruiting militants from SNA factions in Syria to fight on their behalf, and began flying hundreds to Libya every week. The exact number of Syrian militants Turkey has sent is unknown, but estimates range from 5,000 to 17,000. Flights carrying Syrians to Libya continue, despite the Coronavirus pandemic.

Ahmad is a member of Ahrar al-Sharqiya, an SNA faction notorious for its bad treatment of civilians and a tendency to fight other SNA factions in the areas they invade. Ahmad had been based in Afrin with the faction since Turkey’s Operation “Olive Branch” in 2018. The Turkish invasion of Afrin led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. Ahrar al-Sharqiya has been accused of widespread war crimes in the city, including looting, murder, kidnapping, and serial rape.

When asked if he believed in Turkey’s mission in Afrin, Ahmad laughed. “I was a mercenary going to Afrin, and I was a mercenary going to Libya. There is no jihad. The jihad ended when [the Syrian opposition] lost Aleppo to Assad in 2016. Since Aleppo, it has been just money for us. We don’t care who we are fighting.”

Ahrar al-Sharqiya’s atrocities spread beyond Afrin when, in October 2019, Turkey launched Operation “Peace Spring” on North and East Syria. Ahrar al-Sharqiya militants stopped the vehicle of Syrian Future Party leader Hevrin Khalaf at a checkpoint they’d constructed along Syria’s M4 highway. The militants pulled Khalaf from her car, bludgeoned her, dragged her by her hair, and shot her five times. They posted video of the attack on their social media accounts.

Ahmad won’t comment on the assassination of Hevrin Khalaf or any of the other war crimes his and other Turkish-backed factions have been accused of in recent times. “I know the groups did bad things in Afrin when we entered the city,” Ahmad said. “But I never did, personally. I never looted when I was in Afrin. But I did loot when I was in Libya. We all did. They stopped paying us.”

The Syrian militants in Libya were promised salaries ranging from $2000-3000 per month, but reports from militants in several factions suggest the GNA has not kept up with payments as promised. One Hamza Division member said he’s been paid $2000 every month and a half rather than every month. Some Faylaq al-Majd members who have been in Libya for more than three months say they were paid once and never again.

“They told us we would be paid $3000 a month. That never happened. The first month we got $2000. The second month, they gave us $1400. The third month, we weren’t paid at all,” Ahmad said. “So we looted. We took copper from the homes, anything gold we could find, anything valuable we could find. And the Libyans with us would take the items and sell them for us.”

A militant from the Hamza Division says that a GNA-affiliated Libyan militant assigned to his group takes the Syrians into shops in Tripoli so they can sell their stolen wares. “Some fighters were looting instead of fighting,” he said. “In fact, many of our fighters were killed because they would steal from homes near the frontlines, and Haftar’s forces would ambush them and kill them.”

Hilal Hesham*, a businessman in Tripoli, has two friends who own shops frequented by the Syrian militants. “One shop owner tried to call the police when the Syrians came in the first time,” he said. “It was obvious the items they had were stolen. But of course, the police did nothing. It is militia rule in Tripoli. The shop owners aren’t happy with their presence, but they are required to do business with them.”

Hesham says he isn’t aware of the Syrian militants physically harming any civilians. “Maybe they realize that in Tripoli, we are all armed,” he said. “But in my mind, these [Syrian] men are extremists, are terrorists, are ISIS. I want to make it clear that I, and many other civilians here, are waiting for the [Libyan National] Army to enter Tripoli.”

***

Zein Ahmad says most of the other promises Turkish forces made to the SNA militants failed to materialize. “They told us first that if we stayed and fought for six months, that we would get Turkish citizenship,” he said. “That was lies. They told us if we died fighting in Libya, our families would get Turkish citizenship. Now that so many Syrians have died in Libya, we know this is also a lie.”

Ahmad says that when a fellow Ahrar al-Sharqiya member was killed in a battle in February, his widow in Afrin was given around $8000. “Of course, she did not get the Turkish citizenship,” he said. “She’s living in a camp in Syria with no husband now.”

Ahmad says the Turkish commanders who briefed them on the Libya mission grossly misrepresented the dangers they’d be facing. “They told us it would be minor combat. They said it was safer and easier than fighting in Syria,” he said. “And for the first month, it was. It was great.”

After arriving in Libya, Ahmad stayed in a house in Tripoli with ten other Syrian militants and a Libyan militant who accompanied them whenever they left the house. The house was a well-appointed villa, almost certainly abandoned by its rightful owners when clashes intensified and drew closer.

“Then, after some weeks, heavy battles began. We moved to Salah al-Din. It was worse than in Syria,” Ahmad said. “Bodies fell in the street and no one picked them up. So many Syrians have died.” Ahmad isn’t sure exactly how many Syrians have died in Libya, but says he personally saw more than a dozen killed in battle.

“It was nothing like we are used to in Syria,” Ahmad said. “It’s urban street combat. We don’t have the right weapons or the right skills. We are being slaughtered. And so, many of us started to refuse to fight. Or we’d be taken to the frontlines and hide there.”

Ahmad says that when the Syrian militants began defying orders, Libyan soldiers aligned with the GNA would come and beat them. He says once, when a Syrian had refused to fight three times in a row, a Libyan militiant shot him in the leg.

The number of Syrians desperate to leave Libya is growing by the day. “The last lie that Turkey told us was that we would only have to stay for two months, or three months,” Ahmad said. “But more than three months had passed for my group, and they weren’t letting us back.”

Ultimately, Ahmad was forced to pay his Syrian commander $700 to fly home to Syria. “There were around 100 of us,” he said. “Some paid $500, and some as much as $1000, but then they put us on a plane with the dead and injured and allowed us to return to Syria.”

Ahmad plans to resign from his faction. When asked what he thought the future held for him, he scoffed. “You shouldn’t ask me that. Don’t ask any of us that,” he said. “I don’t even know what the present is going to be for me.”

A Turkish soldier in Tripoli reports a markedly different Libya experience. “Look, everyone is happy,” he said. “All Turkish military here have good morale. And we’re getting good money.” When asked about the situation the Syrian militants are facing in Libya, the Turkish soldier said he didn’t know. “But I heard if they want to return to Syria, they can,” he said.

*an alias

Lindsey Snell is a print and video journalist specializing in conflict and humanitarian crises. She has produced documentary-style videos for MSNBC, VICE, Vocativ, ABC News, Ozy, Yahoo News, and Discovery Digital Networks. Her print work has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast, al Araby and others. One of her pieces, on Aleppo schools hit by airstrikes, won an Edward R. Murrow award in 2016.

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Libya, Turkey | Leave a comment

White House efforts to exonerate Michael Flynn could see America explode

By Robert Bridge | RT | May 1, 2020

As new information indicates the FBI set a ‘perjury trap’ for Trump’s former national security adviser, the gloves have come off between the Democrats and Republicans. The epic showdown could lead to a national existential crisis.

For much of the world – transfixed as it is with the Covid-19 pandemic and a crumbling global economy – Russiagate sounds like ancient history. From the perspective of the Trump administration, however, it is a lingering, festering wound that points to corruption and possibly even treason at the highest levels of the US political and intelligence circles. That is why Michael Flynn’s possible exoneration is, or should be, a very serious news story.

Yet for Americans searching for information on the subject, they will be greeted by the cacophony of crickets. The Drudge Report, for example, devoted just one short article to the controversy since the news broke on Thursday. And in the event that one of the Big Six media corporations reports on it, they can be trusted to do so without any modicum of objectivity. CNN, for example, fired up its snark machine to produce this whopper of an article-opener: “Trump went on a Twitter rampage Thursday about his former adviser Michael Flynn, flooding the zone with conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations that crooked FBI investigators entrapped Flynn as part of a ‘deep state’ plot.”

Conspiracy theories and paper-thin allegations? Even for CNN, that is quite a stretch. Not even the dullest tool in the box could fail to see what appears to be a clear attempt to ensnare the 33-year military veteran in a perjury trap. “What is our goal,” an FBI agent reportedly asked in a memo shortly before Flynn was subjected to an ‘ambush interview’ inside of the White House. “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

As it turned out, Flynn was fired for providing misleading information with regards to his conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; the perfectly legal conversations took place as the outgoing Obama administration was deliberately torpedoing US-Russia relations.

Now that there is an opportunity to set the historical record straight with regards to Michael Flynn, as well as the three-year political drama known as Russiagate, the media has decided once again to take a pass. That is both unfortunate and dangerous because, before long, it seems, these sorts of stories will blow up in America’s lap.

An approaching storm?

Since the media never discusses it, few people seem to know that back in May 2019 Trump launched an investigation into the origins of the Russiagate debacle. And unlike the notorious nothingburgers served up cold by the Democrats ever since the mogul from Manhattan entered the Oval Office, the Republicans actually have something that Joe Public can sink his teeth into.

It is no secret that the Obama-era FBI was responsible for organizing an extremely shady investigation into members of the Trump campaign. The operation, dubbed ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ relied on the investigative work of former British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on the Manhattan real estate developer turned political maverick. However, what the FBI failed to mention was that Steele had been funded by a firm doing political opposition research for the Democratic Party and for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Had the FISA Court been made aware of such gross conflicts of interest, the FBI would never have been granted a warrant to investigate the Trump campaign on suspicion of ‘colluding with the Russians,’ and the country could have been spared a four-year witch hunt.

Now, Donald Trump, a one-time Washington outsider who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ on the campaign trail, looks very determined to avenge himself for those past wrongs. And judging by recent comments from Attorney General William Barr, his chances of success appear better than average.

“I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in an interview last month with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.

Barr went on to say that the FBI counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia served to “sabotage the presidency… without any basis.”

The implication here is that a lot of high-ranking people involved in the Russiagate scam – up to and including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – could be expected to testify in a court of law to defend their behavior. The problem, however, is that so few Americans seem to understand that such a scenario could actually transpire.

America’s parallel reality

It has become a bit of a cliche, but the American people really are experiencing a parallel reality from inside the echo chambers of two camps that absolutely loathe each other. In fact, it is difficult to believe that the two groups are comprised of fellow American citizens. This deep fissure that now exists between America’s two predominant parties precludes any ‘meeting of the middle ground,’ as it were, a dilemma that harks back to the realities of the Civil War days (1861-1865) when members of the same family found themselves pitted against each other on the battlefield.

On the left, the corporate-owned media has created an image of Donald Trump as some sort of banana republic caricature who has placed the nation on the express lane to ruin. On the right, meanwhile, a handful of pro-Trump outlets comprised of Fox News and some alt-right sources, which largely owe their feudalistic existence to the overlords in Silicon Valley, are desperate to project a more sympathetic image of the US leader. Meanwhile, the cherished middle ground, where the Democrat and Republican camps could meet and civilly discuss and work out their differences, continues to be no-man’s land. Unless that changes, that vacant piece of real estate could eventually turn into a very real battleground.

If and when the other shoe drops, and Trump decides to seek justice for the past sins of Russiagate in a court of law, the streets of America may explode in pent-up political passions, which are already severely strained with presidential elections just months away. The American mainstream media would have to accept a large portion of the blame in the event of such a scenario considering how hard they have worked to keep the American people in the dark about the political realities, even if it goes against their political tendencies. It’s still not too late to bring the two sides together in some kind of mutual agreement, but the clock is ticking.

Robert Bridge, an American writer and journalist, is the author of the book, ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge

May 2, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | FBI, Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States | Leave a comment

Russia-China entente deepens in the shadow of the pandemic

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | May 2, 2020

The Russian-Chinese entente emerged as one of the most significant templates of international politics in the recent period since the hugely consequential developments in Ukraine in 2014 that led to western sanctions against Moscow, which in turn galvanised the latter’s ‘pivot to Asia’.

Of late, this entente, which falls short of a formal alliance, assumes prominence, given the shift under way in regional and global alignments triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. The world economy faces recession and the US is threatened by a crisis unmatched since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits is soaring past 30 million.

The decline of the US as a global power is accelerating. But the US refuses to come to terms with this geopolitical reality and is determined to perpetuate its domination of the global arena, no matter what it takes. China and Russia have been cast in the ‘enemy’ image. In the short term at least, tensions will rise — in the US-China relations, in particular.

It was reported last week that the US is deploying missile defence systems near Russia’s borders with the potential to deliver a surprise nuclear strike. A Tass report quoted the First Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff’s Main Operations Department Lt. Gen.Viktor Poznikhir as saying that the US has developed a concept of pre-launch interception and planned to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles of Russia, China and other countries while they are still in launchers.

Suffice to say, it is in the common interests of Russia and China that in their growing confrontation with the US, they stand by each other and support each other. There is every indication that US imperialism will assume an even more violent and oppressive character in the prevailing world situation.

The Russia-China entente is driven by their leaderships. Within the period of a month in March-April, there have been two telephone conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss the pandemic and its ramifications as well as the imperative need to jointly face the ensuing challenges.

The Chinese readouts (here and here) underscored that Putin was critical of the “provocation and stigmatisation by some country” (read the US) and the “attempt by some to smear China on the question of the origin of the virus.” Putin affirmed that since the start of COVID-19, Russia and China have “stood in unity and extended mutual support, which is a testament to the strategic nature and high quality” of their relationship.

The mutual support Russia and China are extending to each other creates space for both to effectively push back at the US. Earlier this week on April 29, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman endorsed the concerns expressed by Moscow from time to time in recent years over the presence of Pentagon’s labs in the countries of the former Soviet Union for weaponising diseases. Moscow has cited a specific lab near Tbilisi in Georgia, even claiming intelligence regarding visits by senior Pentagon officials to the centre recently.

The Russians claim that there are 11 such labs in Ukraine developed by the Pentagon. They say when Crimea rejoined Russia in 2014, they found out that in one such lab in Simferopol, which was apparently a hub for collecting materials and sending them to Europe, 104 pools of ectoparasites, 46 samples of internal organs of rodents and 105 samples of human blood serum were found ready for despatch.

Moscow alleges that these labs conduct study on dangerous diseases, targeting specific ethnic groups, and include projects that are banned within the US itself. On April 29, at a media briefing in Beijing, the Chinese spokesman said,

“We noted the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson’s remarks and related reports. The US established multiple biological laboratories in former USSR countries but kept its mouth shut regarding the labs’ functions, purposes and safety, causing deep concerns from local people and surrounding countries. As we know, some local people strongly demand the labs be closed. We hope the US will act in a responsible manner, heed the concerns from the international community, attach importance to local people’s health and safety, and take concrete measures to eliminate the doubts.”

As the legal successor of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited its status as a party to the Geneva Protocol and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1992. China too had acceded to the BWC in 1984. All Asian countries are signatories to the BWC. Interestingly, so is the US, which had ratified the protocol in 1975.

Now, the US Government has not officially accused China of intentionally developing the COVID-19 as a biological weapon, while Trump keeps talking in innuendos. According to the assessment of the US intelligence, the virus was not man-made or genetically modified. But Trump claims he has seen evidence suggesting the novel coronavirus originated in a virology lab in Wuhan — although he couldn’t provide any evidence to support that claim.

China has reacted strongly to Trump’s jabs while Russia has been supportive of the Chinese stance. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently spoke derisively about the talk in some European countries demanding compensation from Beijing for “failing to timely inform the world community” — and by Trump himself saying similar US claims would be “much bigger than hundreds of billions US dollars.”

Indeed, this may become serious stuff if Trump chooses to pursue a punitive strategy towards China. The Washington Post wrote on Thursday, “In private, Trump and aides have discussed stripping China of its ‘sovereign immunity,’ aiming to enable the U.S. government or victims to sue China for damages.”

For the present, Russia agrees with the Chinese perception that the Trump administration is ratcheting up the rhetoric over Covid-19 to draw public attention away from its incompetence in countering the pandemic. But Russian support becomes crucial for Beijing if push comes to shove with Trump in the coming months.

Up until now, neither Russia nor China has sought each other’s help while negotiating bilateral relations with the US. There is a paradigm shift taking place here, which becomes a leap of faith for both China and Russia as well as a qualitatively new phase in their entente, which has so far been focused on regional and global issues of common concern.

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | China, Covid-19, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

ICC Delivers a Blow to Israel’s Lobbying Efforts, Declares Jurisdiction over State of Palestine

Palestine Chronicle – May 1, 2020

Palestine is a state, and therefore the International Criminal Court (ICC) has legal jurisdiction to rule on alleged war crimes committed there, the ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda reiterated on Thursday, April 30.

The statement was a firm response to intense lobbying efforts by Israel and its supporters, especially Germany, to delegitimize the proceeding altogether.

The 60-page document was entitled: A Response to the ‘Observations of Amici Curiae, Legal Representatives of Victims, and States’. (It can be read in full here).

“Once a state becomes a party to the Statute, the Court is automatically entitled to exercise jurisdiction over article 5 crimes committed on its territory” without any further “separate assessment” by organs of the Court as to the Statehood of the State Party,” the statement reads in part.

“Palestine’s viability as a State—and the exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self determination—has been obstructed by the expansion of settlements and the construction of the barrier and its associated regime in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which have been found to violate international law,” the document also stated.

The ICC pre-trial chamber will now decide how to move forward with the investigation.

“The Prosecutor advanced quite compelling arguments and properly addressed those submissions which aimed at persuading the court not to move forward,” Dr. Triestino Mariniello, member of the Legal Team Representing Gaza Victims before the ICC, told The Palestine Chronicle.

Mariniello also told the Chronicle that although Bensouda’s “observations were compelling,” her decision to call on the pre-trial chamber was not a mandated legal procedure and “it only causes unnecessary delays.”

“Since Palestine submitted a referral to the court, the ICC had the power to open an investigation without asking the pre-trial chamber to rule on the matter,” he said.

“The victims we represent are worried about further delays. The victims are also worried about the so-called ‘narrow scope of investigation’, which is a de facto exclusion of crimes that were committed since 2015 against Palestinian civilians.”

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine | 1 Comment

Why Foreign Interventionism?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | Future of Freedom Foundation | May 1, 2020

What is the point of U.S. foreign interventionism?

Why are U.S. troops killing and dying in faraway countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia?

Why does the U.S. government have 165,000 troops stationed in more than 150 foreign countries?

Why is the U.S. government enforcing economic sanctions and embargoes against the people of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries?

Why are U.S. officials waging trade wars against foreign nations?

Why do the CIA and the Pentagon assassinate foreigners?

Why are U.S. officials provoking conflicts with Iran and Venezuela?

Why is regime change a core feature of U.S. foreign policy?

Why do U.S. officials partner with tyrannical foreign regimes?

Why does the U.S. government tax hard-pressed American citizens in order to send money to foreign regimes, including dictatorial ones?

Why does the U.S. government initiate wars of aggression against countries that have never invaded or even threatened to invade the United States?

Why do U.S. officials spend taxpayer money on foreign interventionism?

Why do U.S. troops inflict death, suffering, and destruction in foreign lands?

What are U.S. troops dying for in faraway lands?

After all, let’s acknowledge the obvious: No nation-state is invading the United States. No nation-state has the money, resources, personnel, equipment, and supplies to cross the ocean and invade and conquer the United States. There is no possibility of an invasion and conquest of the U.S. by Canada or any Latin American country.

Therefore, what is the purpose of all that U.S. meddling in overseas countries? We don’t like foreign regimes meddling in American affairs. Why should U.S. officials be meddling in the affairs of other countries, especially when the meddling involves the infliction of death, suffering, and destruction?

Consider Switzerland. It doesn’t have troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It doesn’t send foreign aid to regimes. It doesn’t assassinate people. It doesn’t initiate wars of aggression against Third World countries. It just devotes itself entirely to defending Switzerland against an invasion. And no one ever jacks with the Swiss.

In fact, have you ever wondered why U.S. officials call the Department of Defense by that name? I can see why Switzerland would use such a name. But the U.S.? it seems to me that the more truthful name would be the Department of Foreign Interventionism.

The Swiss model of non-intervention was actually the founding foreign policy of the United States. This was reflected by John’s Quincy Adams’ profound Fourth of July, 1821, speech to Congress entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” In that speech, Adams observed that if America were ever to abandon her founding foreign policy of non-intervention, “She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In fact, that was one of the reasons why the Framers and our American ancestors had such a deep antipathy for what they called “standing armies,” by which they meant large, overgrown military-intelligence establishments, or what President Dwight Eisenhower would later label “the military-industrial complex,” or what we call today a “national-security state.” The Framers and our ancestors didn’t want a “standing army” large enough to engage in foreign interventionism.

Where to go from here? Isn’t the answer obvious?
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States | 1 Comment

With apparently fabricated nuclear documents, Netanyahu pushed the US towards war with Iran

By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | April 29, 2020

President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”

In early April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”

However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself.

According to the official Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in Central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells about the story’s legitimacy.

Even more problematic was the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse which contained the binders with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a handful of people” knew.

But two former senior CIA official, both of whom had served as the agency’s top Middle East analyst, dismissed Netanyahu’s claims as lacking credibility in responses to a query from The Grayzone.

According to Paul Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the region from 2001 to 2005, “Any source on the inside of the Iranian national security apparatus would be extremely valuable in Israeli eyes, and Israeli deliberations about the handling of that source’s information presumably would be biased in favor long-term protection of the source.” The Israeli story of how its spies located the documents “does seem fishy,” Pillar said, especially considering Israel’s obvious effort to derive maximum “political-diplomatic mileage” out of the “supposed revelation” of such a well-placed source.

Graham Fuller, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia as well as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, offered a similar assessment of the Israeli claim. “If the Israelis had such a sensitive source in Tehran,” Fuller commented, “they would not want to risk him.” Fuller concluded that the Israelis’ claim that they had accurate knowledge of which safes to crack is “dubious, and the whole thing may be somewhat fabricated.”

No proof of authenticity

Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve a plan to build five nuclear weapons by mid-2003.

Another document that generated widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussion among leading Iranian scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s Defense Minister to separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert parts.

Left out of the media coverage of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency.

Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.

“Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,” Rauf explained. “Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.”

But as Rauf noted, the “nuclear archive” documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government agency.

What those documents do have in common is the mark of a rubber stamp for a filing system showing numbers for a “record”, a “file” and a “ledger binder” — like the black binders that Netanyahu flashed to the cameras during his slideshow. But these could have easily been created by the Mossad and stamped on to the documents along with the appropriate Persian numbers.

Forensic confirmation of the documents’ authenticity would have required access to the original documents. But as Netanyahu noted in his April 30, 2018 slide show, the “original Iranian materials” were kept “in a very safe place” – implying that no one would be allowed to have any such access.

Withholding access to outside experts

In fact, even the most pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy – reported in October 2018 that they had been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the documents.

When a team of six specialists from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged through a bit of it.”

But they were shown no documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”

Typically, it would be the job of the U.S. government and the IAEA to authenticate the documents. Oddly, the Belfer Center delegation reported that the U.S. government and the IAEA had each received only copies of the entire archive, not the original files. And the Israelis were in no hurry to provide the genuine articles: the IAEA did not receive a complete set of documents until November 2019, according to Bunn.

By then, Netanyahu had not only already accomplished the demolition of the Iran nuclear deal; he and Trump’s ferociously hawkish CIA-director Mike Pompeo had maneuvered the president into a policy of imminent confrontation with Tehran.

The second coming of fake missile drawings

Among the documents Netanyahu flashed on the screen in his April 30, 2018 slide show was a schematic drawing of the missile reentry vehicle of an Iranian Shahab-3 missile, showing what was obviously supposed to represent a nuclear weapon inside.

Technical drawing from David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” published by the Institute for Science and International Security on October 28, 2018.

This drawing was part of a set of eighteen technical drawings of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. These were found in a collection of documents secured over the course of several years between the Bush II and Obama administrations by an Iranian spy working for Germany’s BND intelligence service. Or so the Israeli official story went.

In 2013, however, a former senior German Foreign Office official named Karsten Voigt revealed to this writer that the documents had been initially provided to German intelligence by a member of the Mujaheddin E-Khalq (MEK).

The MEK is an exiled Iranian armed opposition organization that had operated under Saddam Hussein’s regime as a proxy against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It went on to cooperate with the Israeli Mossad beginning in the 1990s, and enjoys a close relationship with Saudi Arabia as well. Today, numerous former US officials are on the MEK’s payroll, acting as de facto lobbyists for regime change in Iran.

Voigt recalled how senior BND officials warned him they did not consider the MEK source or the materials he provided to be credible. They were worried that the Bush administration intended to use the dodgy documents to justify an attack on Iran, just as it exploited the tall tales collected from Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As this writer first reported in 2010, the appearance of the “dunce-cap” shape of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle in the drawings was a tell-tale sign that the documents were fabricated. Whoever drew those schematic images in 2003 was clearly under the false impression that Iran was relying on the Shahab-3 as its main deterrent force. After all, Iran had announced publicly in 2001 that the Shahab-3 was going into “serial production” and in 2003 that it was “operational.”

But those official claims by Iran were a ruse aimed primarily at deceiving Israel, which had threatened air attacks on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In fact, Iran’s Defense Ministry was aware that the Shahab-3 did not have sufficient range to reach Israel.

According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic “triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.

As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.

The role of the MEK in passing the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad.

For the Mossad, the MEK was a convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’S credibility in the eyes foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later, it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations.

By trotting out the same discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington and the Western corporate media.

Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the precipice of military conflict with Iran.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, United States | 1 Comment

Censorship Continues. Facebook Permanently Deleted SouthFront’s Page

SouthFront | April 30, 2020

SouthFront once again has become a target of corporate censorship. On April 30, Facebook permanently deleted our page (LINK) with about 100,000 followers.

This is not the first time that SouthFront has become a target of a technical and propaganda pressure campaign. On April 9, Facebook placed limits on SouthFront’s page claiming that its activities “don’t comply with Facebook’s policies.” (LINK)

On July 21, 2015, Facebook deleted our previous page used to inform people about the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Syria and other key developments around the world. (LINK)

The motivation in 2015 of US intelligence, and Facebook as a tool of US special services, when the situation in eastern Ukraine was especially tense, is clear. However, the current move raises many more questions.

It is likely Facebook was triggered by SouthFront’s video released on April 29. Entitled “SpaceX: Camel’s Nose under the Tent of Space Militarization”, it covers key aspects of the international situation and the US security strategy. With facts and examples, the video highlights the point of view that supposedly “private” global corporations based in the US are first of all the tools of, likely, the ‘neo-liberal’ part of the US establishment.

Another article that may have scared Facebook censors is “Leaked Video Reveals Pentagon Briefing On Development Of Vaccine To Modify Human Behavior”. This article was released on April 28 and objectively covered the background of the circulating video and questions the authenticity of claims that it shows Bill Gates. If this post became the reason of SouthFront’s ban on Facebook, this will mean that the leaked video poses an exceptional threat to a part of the US establishment.

In the meantime, SouthFront is facing an increasing media pressure. Recently, Deutsche Welle and several other mainstream media outlets released articles alleging that SouthFront is spreading disinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak. An interesting fact is that Deutsche Welle appeared to be unable to answer to SouthFront’s official email regarding its accusations against our organization. (LINK)

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Human rights | 2 Comments

How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health

Corbett • 05/01/2020

Rumble

Who is Bill Gates? A software developer? A businessman? A philanthropist? A global health expert? This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development. And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.

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TRANSCRIPT

BILL GATES: Hello. I’m Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. In this video you’re going to see the future.

SOURCE: Hello, I’m Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft

Who is Bill Gates? A software developer? A businessman? A philanthropist? A global health expert?

This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development. And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.

GATES: [. . .] because until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won’t be fully back to normal.

SOURCE: Bill Gates on Finding a Vaccine for COVID-19, the Economy, and Returning to ‘Normal Life’

Bill Gates is no public health expert. He is not a doctor, an epidemiologist or an infectious disease researcher. Yet somehow he has become a central figure in the lives of billions of people, presuming to dictate the medical actions that will be required for the world to go “back to normal.” The transformation of Bill Gates from computer kingpin to global health czar is as remarkable as it is instructive, and it tells us a great deal about where we are heading as the world plunges into a crisis the likes of which we have not seen before.

This is the story of How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health.

You’re tuned into The Corbett Report.

Until his reinvention as a philanthropist in the past decade, this is what many people thought of when they thought of Bill Gates:

NARRATOR: In the case of the United States vs Microsoft, the US Justice Department contended that the software giant had breached antitrust laws by competing unfairly against Netscape Communications in the internet browser market, effectively creating a monopoly. Bill’s first concern was that the prosecution could potentially block the release of his company’s latest operating system, Windows 98.

SOURCE: Bill Gates Defends Microsoft in Monopoly Lawsuit

GATES: Are you asking me about when I wrote this e-mail or what are you asking me about?

DAVID BOIES: I’m asking you about January of 1996.

GATES: That month?

BOIES: Yes, sir.

GATES: And what about it?

BOIES: What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 96?

GATES: I don’t know what you mean, “concerned.”

BOIES: What is it about the word concerned that you don’t understand?

GATES: I’m not sure what you mean by it.

SOURCE: Bill Gates Deposition

STEVE JOBS: We’re going to be working together on Microsoft Office on Internet Explorer on Java and I think that it’s going to lead to a very healthy relationship. So it’s a package announcement today. We’re very, very happy about it, we’re very very excited about it. And I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink, and if we could get him up on the stage right now.

[BILL GATES APPEARS, CROWD BOOS]

SOURCE: Macworld Boston 1997-The Microsoft Deal

DAN RATHER: Police and security guards in Belgium were caught flat-footed today by a cowardly sneak attack on one of the world’s wealthiest men. The target was Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, arriving for a meeting with community leaders. Watch what happens when a team of hitmen meet him first with a pie in the face.

[GATES HIT IN THE FACE WITH PIE]

RATHER: Gates was momentarily and understand to be shaken but he was not injured. The hit squad piled on with two more pies before one of them was wrestled to the ground and arrested, the others at least for the moment got away. Gates went inside, wiped his face clean, and made no comment. He then went ahead with his scheduled meeting. No word on the motive for this attack.

SOURCE: Bill Gates Pie in Face

But, once reviled for the massive wealth and the monopolistic power that his virus-laden software afforded him, Gates is now hailed as a visionary who is leveraging that wealth and power for the greater good of humanity.

KLAUS SCHWAB: If in the 22nd century a book will be written about the entrepreneur of the 21st century [. . .] I’m sure that the person who will foremost come to the mind of those historians is certainly Bill Gates. [applause]

SOURCE: Davos Annual Meeting 2008 – Bill Gates

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Bill Gates is singularly—I would argue—the most consequential individual of our generation. I mean that.

SOURCE: Bill Gates Talks Philanthropy, Microsoft, and Taxes | DealBook

ELLEN DEGENERES: Our next guest is one of the richest and most generous men in the world. Please welcome Bill Gates.

SOURCE: Bill Gates on Finding a Vaccine for COVID-19, the Economy, and Returning to ‘Normal Life’

JUDY WOODRUFF: At a time when everyone is looking to understand the scope of the pandemic and how to minimize the threat, one of the best informed voices is that of businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates.

SOURCE: Bill Gates on where the COVID-19 pandemic will hurt the most

The process by which this reinvention of Gates’ public image took place is not mysterious. It’s the same process by which every billionaire has revived their public image since John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee to transform him from the head of the Standard Oil Hydra into the kind old man handing out dimes to strangers.

MAN OFF CAMERA: Don’t you give dimes, Mr. Rockefeller? Please, go ahead.

WOMAN: Thank you, sir.

MAN: Thank you very much.

ROCKEFELLER: Thank you for the ride!

MAN: I consider myself more than amply paid.

ROCKEFELLER: Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!

SOURCE: John D. Rockefeller – Standard Oil

More to the point, John D. Rockefeller knew that to gain the adoration of the public, he had to appear to give them what they want: money. He devoted hundreds of millions of dollars of his vast oil monopoly fortune to establishing institutions that, he claimed, were for the public good. The General Education Board. The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. The Rockefeller Foundation.

Similarly, Bill Gates has spent much of the past two decades transforming himself from software magnate into a benefactor of humanity through his own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In fact, Gates has surpassed Rockefeller’s legacy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation long having eclipsed The Rockefeller Foundation as the largest private foundation in the world, with $46.8 billion of assets on its books that it wields in its stated program areas of global health and development, global growth, and global policy advocacy.

And, like Rockefeller, Gates’ transformation has been helped along by a well-funded public relations campaign. Gone are the theatrical tricks of the PR pioneers—the ubiquitous ice cream cones of Gates’ mentor Warren Buffett are the last remaining hold-out of the old Rockefeller-handing-out-dimes gimmick. No, Gates has guided his public image into that of a modern-day saint through an even simpler tactic: buying good publicity.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends tens of millions of dollars per year on media partnerships, sponsoring coverage of its program areas across the board. Gates funds The Guardian‘s Global Development website. Gates funds NPR’s global health coverage. Gates funds the Our World in Data website that is tracking the latest statistics and research on the coronavirus pandemic. Gates funds BBC coverage of global health and development issues, both through its BBC Media Action organization and the BBC itself. Gates funds world health coverage on ABC News.

When the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer was given a $3.5 million Gates foundation grant to set up a special unit to report on global health issues, NewsHour communications chief Rob Flynn was asked about the potential conflict of interest that such a unit would have in reporting on issues that the Gates Foundation is itself involved in. “In some regards I guess you might say that there are not a heck of a lot of things you could touch in global health these days that would not have some kind of Gates tentacle,” Flynn responded.

Indeed, it would be almost possible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It was Gates who sponsored the meeting that led to the creation of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, a global public-private partnership bringing together state sponsors and big pharmaceutical companies whose specific goals include the creation of “healthy markets for vaccines and other immunisation products.” As a founding partner of the alliance, the Gates Foundation provided $750 million in seed funding and has gone on to make over $4.1 billion in commitments to the group.

Gates provided the seed money that created The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a public-private partnership that acts as a finance vehicle for governmental AIDS, TB, and malaria programs.

When a public-private partnership of governments, world health bodies and 13 leading pharmaceutical companies came together in 2012 “to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases,” there was the Gates Foundation with $363 million of support.

When The Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents was launched in 2015 to leverage billions of dollars in public and private financing for global health and development programs, there was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a founding partner with a $275 million contribution.

When the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases, there was the Gates Foundation with an initial injection of $100 million.

The examples go on and on. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s fingerprints can be seen on every major global health initiative of the past two decades. And beyond the flashy, billion-dollar global partnerships, the Foundation is behind hundreds of smaller country and region-specific grants—$10 million to combat a locus infestation in East Africa, or $300 million to support agricultural research in Africa and Asia—that add up to billions of dollars in commitments.

It comes as no surprise, then, that—far beyond the $250 million that the Gates Foundation has pledged to the “fight” against coronavirus—every aspect of the current coronavirus pandemic involves organizations, groups and individuals with direct ties to Gates funding.

From the start, the World Health Organization has directed the global response to the current pandemic. From its initial monitoring of the outbreak in Wuhan and its declaration in January that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission to its live media briefings and its technical guidance on country-level planning and other matters, the WHO has been the body setting the guidelines and recommendations shaping the global response to this outbreak.

But even the World Health Organization itself is largely reliant on funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO’S most recent donor report shows that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the organization’s second-largest donor behind the United States government. The Gates Foundation single-handedly contributes more to the world health body than Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia and the UK combined.

What’s more, current World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is in fact, like Bill Gates himself, not a medical doctor at all, but the controversial ex-Minister of Health of Ethiopia, who was accused of covering up three cholera outbreaks in the country during his tenure. Before joining the WHO he served as chair of the Gates-founded Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and sat on the board of the Gates-founded Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Gates-funded Stop TB Partnership.

The current round of lockdowns and restrictive stay-home orders in western countries were enacted on the back of alarming models predicting millions of deaths in the United States and hundreds of thousands in the UK.

HAYLEY MINOGUE: Imperial College in London released a COVID-19 report and that’s where most of our US leaders are getting the information they’re basing their decision making on.

[. . .]

The report runs us through a few different ways this could turn out depending on what our responses are. If we don’t do anything to control this virus, over 80% of people in the US would be infected over the course of the epidemic, with 2.2 million deaths from Covid-19.

SOURCE: Extreme measures based on scientific paper

BORIS JOHNSON: From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction: you must stay at home.

SOURCE: Boris Johnson announces complete UK lockdown amid coronavirus crisis

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Enough is enough. Go home and stay home.

SOURCE: ‘Enough is enough’, Trudeau with a strong message to Canadians

GAVIN NEWSOM: . . . a statewide order for people to stay at home

SOURCE: California Gov Newsom issues statewide ‘SAFER AT HOME’ order

The work of two research groups was crucial in shaping the decision of the UK and US governments to implement wide-ranging lockdowns, and, in turn, governments around the world. The first group, the Imperial College Covid-19 Research Team, issued a report on March 16th that predicted up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the US unless strict government measures were put in place.

The second group, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Bill Gates’ home state of Washington, helped provide data that corroborated the White House’s initial estimates of the virus’ effects, estimates that have been repeatedly downgraded as the situation has progressed.

Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation has injected substantial sums of money into both groups. This year alone, the Gates Foundation has already given $79 million to Imperial College, and in 2017 the Foundation announced a $279 million investment into the IHME to expand its work collecting health data and creating models.

Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, has become the face of the US government’s coronavirus response, echoing Bill Gates’ assertion that the country will not “get back to normal” until “a good vaccine” can be found to insure the public’s safety.

ANTHONY FAUCI: If you want to get to pre-coronavirus . . . You know, that might not ever happen, in the sense of the fact that the threat is there. But I believe with the therapies that will be coming online, and with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right back now.

SOURCE: Dr. Anthony Fauci on return to normalcy from pandemic

Beyond just their frequent collaborations and cooperation in the past, Fauci has direct ties to Gates projects and funding. In 2010, he was appointed to the Leadership Council of the Gates-founded “Decade of Vaccines” project to implement a Global Vaccine Action Plan, a project to which Gates committed $10 billion of funding. And in October of last year, just as the current pandemic was beginning, the Gates Foundation announced a $100 million contribution to the National Institute of Health to help, among other programs, Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ research into HIV.

Also in October of last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the World Economic Forum and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to stage Event 201, a tabletop exercise gauging the economic and societal impact of a globally-spreading coronavirus pandemic.

NARRATOR: It began in healthy-looking pigs months, perhaps years, ago: a new coronavirus.

ANITA CICERO: The mission of the pandemic emergency board is to provide recommendations to deal with the major global challenges arising in response to an unfolding pandemic. The board is comprised of highly experienced leaders from business Public Health and civil society.

TOM INGLESBY: We’re at the start of what’s looking like it will be a severe pandemic and there are problems emerging that can only be solved by global business and governments working together.

STEPHEN REDD: Governments need to be willing to do things that are out of their historical perspective, or . . . for the most part. It’s really a war footing that we need to be on.

SOURCE: Event 201 Pandemic Exercise: Highlights Reel

Given the incredible reach that the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have into every corner of the global health markets, it should not be surprising that the foundation has been intimately involved with every stage of the current pandemic crisis, either. In effect, Gates has merely used the wealth from his domination of the software market to leverage himself into a similar position in the world of global health.

The whole process has been cloaked in the mantle of selfless philanthropy, but the foundation is not structured as a charitable endeavour. Instead, it maintains a dual structure: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation distributes money to grantees, but a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, manages the endowment assets. These two entities often have overlapping interests, and, as has been noted many times in the past, grants given by the foundation often directly benefit the value of the trust’s assets:

MELINDA GATES: One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly.

[. . .]

My first trip in India, I was in a person’s home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that’s really what I see all over the world. So in short, I’m startled by all the things that they don’t have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous.

And so when I come back from these trips, and I’m thinking about development, and I’m flying home and I’m thinking, we’re trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations, you know? Coke’s success kind of stops and makes you wonder: How is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can’t governments and NGOs do the same thing?

SOURCE: Melinda French Gates: What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola

AMY GOODMAN: And the charity of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda is under criticism following the disclosure it’s substantially increased its holdings in the agribusiness giant Monsanto to over $23 million. Critics say the investment in Monsanto contradicts the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s stated commitment to helping farmers and sustainable development in Africa.

SOURCE: Gates Foundation Criticized for Increasing Monsanto Investment

LAURENCE LEE: The study from the pressure group Global Justice now paints a picture of the Gates Foundation partly as an expression of corporate America’s desire to profit from Africa, and partly a damning critique of its effects.

POLLY JONES: You could have a case where the initial research is done by a Gates-funded institution. And the media reporting on how well that research is conducted is done, the media outlet is a Gates-funded outlet, or maybe a Gates-funded journalist from a media program. And then the program is implemented more widely by a Gates-funded NGO. I mean . . . There are some very insular circles here.

LEE: Among the many criticisms, the idea that private finance can solve the problems of the developing world. Should poor farmers be trapped into debt by having to use chemicals or fertilizers under written by offshoot of the foundation?

SOURCE: Gates Foundation accused of exploiting its leverage in Africa

This is no mere theoretical conflict of interest. Gates is held up as a hero for donating $35.8 billion worth of his Microsoft stock to the foundation, but during the course of his “Decade of Vaccines,” Gates’ net worth has actually doubled, from $54 billion to $103.1 billion.

The Rockefeller story provides an instructive template for this vision of tycoon-turned-philanthropist. When Rockefeller faced a public backlash, he helped spearhead the creation of a system of private foundations that connected in with his business interests. Leveraging his unprecedented oil monopoly fortune into unprecedented control over wide swathes of public life, Rockefeller was able to kill two birds with one stone: moulding society in his families’ own interests even as he became a beloved figure in the public imagination.

Similarly, Bill Gates has leveraged his software empire into a global health, development and education empire, steering the course of investment and research and ensuring healthy markets for vaccines and other immunisation products. And, like Rockefeller, Gates has been transformed from the feared and reviled head of a formidable hydra into a kindly old man generously giving his wealth back to the public.

But not everyone has been taken in by this PR trick. Even The Lancet observed this worrying transformation from software monopolist to health monopolist back in 2009, when the extent of this Gates-led monopoly was becoming apparent to all:

The first guiding principle of the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation is that it is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family.” An annual letter from Bill Gates summarises those passions, referring to newspaper articles, books, and chance events that have shaped the Foundation’s strategy. For such a large and influential investor in global health, is such a whimsical governance principle good enough?

SOURCE: What has the Gates Foundation done for global health?

This brings us back to the question: Who is Bill Gates? What are his driving interests? What motivates his decisions?

These are not academic questions. Gates’ decisions have controlled the flows of billions of dollars, formed international partnerships pursuing wide-ranging agendas, ensured the creation of “healthy markets” for big pharma vaccine manufacturers. And now, as we are seeing, his decisions are shaping the entire global response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Next week, we will further explore Gates’ vaccination initiatives, the business interests behind them, and the larger agenda that is beginning to take shape as we enter the “new normal” of the Covid-19 crisis.

May 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, WHO | Leave a comment

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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016

… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article

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ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Technical drawing from David Albright, Olli Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” published by the Institute for Science and International Security on October 28, 2018.

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