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Vietnam reassures China: no foreign military bases will be hosted on its territory

By Ahmed Adel | November 2, 2022

China and Vietnam are strengthening their partnership to resist Western interference in their internal and regional affairs. Although the two Asian countries have major issues between them and centuries worth of historical animosity, Hanoi will never allow the US to use Vietnam to fight or pressure China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) Central Committee General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in Beijing on October 31. Xi Jinping emphazised in their meeting that the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Vietnam should not allow anyone to interfere in the sustainable progress of their respective countries.

For his part, Phu Trong clarified that China has the right to count on Vietnamese support in sensitive issues of regional security. Specifically, the Vietnamese leader assured that his country would maintain peace and stability at the land and sea border and not let issues over territorial waters hinder overall bilateral relations. He assured that Hanoi would not develop any official relations with Taiwan, and significantly, that no foreign country will be allowed to set up military bases on Vietnamese territory.

Reaffirming Vietnam’s position on issues that are sensitive and critical to regional security was one of the important outcomes of the high-level talks in Beijing. As Vietnam is the biggest country in Southeast Asia which borders China, in terms of economic power, the US hoped to use Vietnam as a tool of pressure against China. For Washington, it would be ideal if Vietnam and China clashed in the South China Sea so Hanoi could pivot towards AUKUS and/or QUAD.

To Washington’s disappointment though, Hanoi made it clear that it shares Beijing’s position on no foreign military bases and military alliances. At the same time, Vietnam maintains its position against Beijing on the South China Sea issue. Although this could be an issue for the US to exploit, Hanoi has stated that it will not use military force to solve it. Effectively, Vietnam signalled to the US that it will not be a tool to confront China.

At the meeting in Beijing, Xi Jinping noted that development between China and Vietnam faces serious risks and challenges. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has further highlighted the geopolitical issue between great powers, which has contributed to the multitude of challenges that developing countries are facing. Specifically, the energy and food crises are issues that deeply concern Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam.

According to the World Bank, Vietnam is projected to become the fastest growing economy in Asia this year despite a regional downturn caused by China’s sharp economic deceleration. In its most recent economic outlook report for East Asia and the Pacific, the World Bank forecast these regions to grow by 3.2% in 2022, down from 7.2% in 2021, before accelerating to 4.6% in 2023. The projected growth rate for this year marked a significant reduction on the 5% that the World Bank forecast for the year in its last outlook report in April.

Vietnam appears to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this growth, with the World Bank estimating the country’s economy to grow by 7.2% in 2022, up from its projection of 5.3% in April. The World Bank then projects it to grow by a further 6.7% in 2023. Impressively, Vietnam was one of the few countries whose economy grew during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. This comes as there is also a continuing trend to move high-tech production from China to Vietnam.

Given Vietnam’s growing importance in the region, the US hoped to exploit the historical animosity the Southeast Asian country has with Beijing and differences over the South China Sea. However, this has failed.

In fact, the two countries, along with several ASEAN countries, are working on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, something that Washington opposes. The Americans want to tighten pressure on China, but the successful visit of Phu Trong to Beijing has ended any thoughts of the US using Vietnam to pressure China. In this way, the US is finding it extremely difficult to find Southeast Asian allies to oppose China.

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

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Solidarity and Activism | , , | 1 Comment

China says it will ‘never seek hegemony’

Samizdat – November 2, 2022

China has condemned the US’ new National Defense Strategy (NDS), saying American policy is driven by “the logic of domination,” while insisting that Beijing will never seek “hegemony” over other nations.

Asked about the Pentagon’s 2022 NDS released in late October – which declares that China poses the “most consequential and systemic challenge” to US national security – Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the document “plays up major-country competition and deliberately misrepresents China’s foreign and defense policies.”

“It is driven ostensibly by a Cold War zero-sum mentality and the logic of domination and hegemonism and says everything about the ill intention of the US to contain and suppress China under various false pretexts,” the spokesman continued, adding that his country will reject all “attempts to blackmail, contain, blockade and exert maximum pressure.”

While the new NDS claims China has used its growing military and economic power to undermine US alliances across Asia, Zhao insisted Beijing’s foreign policy is aimed at “upholding world peace and promoting common development” between nations.

“No matter what stage of development we reach, we will never seek hegemony or engage in expansionism,” he said, urging Washington to “follow the trend of peace and development, abandon the Cold War zero-sum mentality, stop viewing today’s world and China-US relations from a confrontational perspective, and stop distorting China’s strategic intentions.”

The administration of US President Joe Biden has repeatedly declared China to be America’s top competitor and foremost concern, putting heavy focus on the country in its new NDS, as well as in a separate Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review.

Tensions between Washington and Beijing have risen significantly since August, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan despite loud objections from Beijing, which sees the island as part of its own territory. Though the trip prompted an unprecedented round of Chinese military drills in the air and waters surrounding Taiwan, Western delegations have nonetheless continued to visit Taipei in the months since, with Germany sending lawmakers on a junket there last week.

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How the West Brought War to Ukraine: A Review

By C.B. Forde | The Postil Magazine | November 1, 2022

It can be rather effectively argued that the greatest export commodity of the USA is war, commonly known as the Military Industrial Complex, which has spent the bloody decades after WWII bringing “democracy” to the benighted of the world—by bombs and sanctions, if necessary.

The latest such grand crusade is the war in Ukraine, which we have all been told to think of as “us” defending a fragile “democracy,” invaded out of the blue by the latest manifestation of Attila the Hun. Here was Ukraine happily minding its own business, until one day Putin woke up and decided that he needed to be a world-conqueror and off he went to “invade” Ukraine. The simplistic narrative of the “innocent” and the “criminal” has deep appeal in the Western psyche, conditioned no doubt by Hollywood. Thus, all the media had to do was point out the “criminal,” and the rest took care of itself. Out came all the virtue-signaling that the West is now so good at mustering. Now, there is not a shred of doubt in the minds of the majority in the West that this is a war between the “good guys” and the “Great Villain,” with the likes of Biden, Justin Trudeau, Britain and all the other cheerleaders for “democracy” constantly handing David’s loaded sling-shot to Ukraine to get the job done—but which the likes of Zelensky keep dropping. This is what fighting villainy to the last Ukrainian actually looks like.

But there is a far worse invasion that was completed a long time ago—that of the Western mind, addled by what is euphemistically known as “the mainstream media,” which knows that spin is the most effective form of victory in any war.

This is why Benjamin Abelow’s book, How the West brought War to Ukraine is a must-read, for it shows that this war is not about Ukraine, but about Russia, which needs to be brought to heel and become “democratic”: “…the vaunted goal of ‘regime change,’ which in the United States is sought by an informal alliance of Republican neoconservatives and Democratic liberal interventionists” (p. 5).

Abelow is careful in his analysis and gives a thorough and balanced account of what led Russia to undertake an attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Despite mainstream narratives, the attack was carefully provoked (orchestrated comes to mind). So, unlike “settled history,” which would have us believe that Ukraine is the “innocent bystander” in all this, Abelow undertakes a meticulous unpacking of the various provocations (Ukrainian and Western), which began in 1990 and finally came to a head on February 24, 2022. Wars don’t just happen; they are the result of a long series of failures and outrages. In the words of Professor Richard Sakwa: “In the end, NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement. The former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states joined NATO to enhance their security, but the very act of doing so created a security dilemma for Russia that undermined the security of all” (p. 51).

Given that Russia is a nation-state, it must look after its geopolitical interests and defend what is crucial to what it deems necessary to continue, as Jacques Baud has so often pointed out in this magazine. Not to recognize these interests is to be blind to reality: “The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war. These provocations placed Russia in an untenable situation, for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution” (p. 7).

These provocations are now well-known, and thus rigorously ignored, denied or glossed over as “Russian propaganda.” These include bringing arms as close to the Russian border as possible; the expansion of NATO, despite promises given to Russia that that would never happen; the withdrawal of the US from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (which now gives the US first-strike capability); the ousting of a democratically elected Ukrainian government and installing neo-Nazis into power in 2014; NATO military exercises along the Russian border; pushing Ukraine to join NATO, despite warnings from Russia that that would mean war; since 2014, training and arming the Ukrainian military, in which many of the units are openly neo-Nazi; actively nurturing Russophobia in Ukraine; encouraging the bloody war in the Eastern portions of Ukraine, which were seen as “pro-Russian” and therefore hostile. There are many others that can be listed.

Of course, the last provocation was telling Zelensky not to negotiate when Russia attacked on February 24. He was ready to do so, and a war would have easily have been avoided, and many helpless lives saved. But Boris Johnson flew out, met the Ukrainian president, and negotiation was off the table.

And this is the most baffling thing—the West does not want peace at all. It wants a war of total annihilation for Russia, which will never happen, of course, but which the West so far seems not to understand (perhaps because it is now governed by leaders who have little understanding of warcraft). No Western politician bravely calls for negotiations, for a ceasefire, for peace, for even a little breather. It’s war and more war, and the billions and arms keep pouring in: “To my knowledge, Zelensky never received any substantial American support to pursue his peace agenda. Instead, he was subjected to repeated visits by leading American politicians and State Department officials, all of whom spouted a theoretical principle of absolute Ukrainian freedom, defined as the “right” to join NATO and to establish a U.S. military outpost on Russia’s border. In the end, this “freedom” was worse than a pipe dream. Although it advanced the aims of the United States—or, more accurately, the interests of certain American political, military, and financial factions—it destroyed Ukraine” (p. 60).

The military historian Bernard Wicht, whose interview appears elsewhere in this magazine, very astutely observes that the West no longer has the ability to wage conventional war—not even the United States; this is why armed conflict in the 21st century is now “farmed” out to modern-day condottieri, who bring their private armies wherever their paymasters tell them to go. Is this is why billions are being sent to Ukraine, to pay for all the mercenaries? The war machine chugs along, indeed.

The strength of Abelow’s book is that it makes complexity accessible. Wars have so many moving parts, and Abelow with a deft hand guides the reader along. As is true of all good writers, this book is filled with clarity and insight, with an eye for the bigger picture, and all the while letting facts lead where they will. This is a rare talent nowadays.

Given the much-mentioned threat of nuclear war, the book ends with a prescient warning: “Policy makers in Washington and the European capitals—along with the captured, craven media that uncritically amplify their nonsense—are now standing up to their hips in a barrel of viscous mud. How those who were foolish enough to step into that barrel will find the wisdom to extricate themselves before they tip the barrel and take the rest of us down with them is hard to imagine” (p. 62).

Finally, as professor Sakwa pointed out, this entire tragedy would have been easily avoided if Zelensky had been encouraged to say just five little words: “Ukraine will not join NATO.” Why he could not say that lays the entire blood-guilt upon the collective leadership of the West.

How the West brought War to Ukraine is satisfying to read because it brings truth to light—and that is the highest calling any worthy writer can pursue. Rush out and buy it; and after you’ve read it, you will be both amazed and infuriated. The condottieri now run the show—but perhaps we the decent folk of this world will learn once again how to get rid of them. Perhaps this will be this war’s silver lining.

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 2 Comments

Lies, Spies and US Bioweapons on the Verge of Armageddon

By Wayne Cristaudo | The Postil Magazine | November 1, 2022

Initially, when the Russians brought the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs to the attention of the world, it was denied outright—the official Western response was—”those Ruskies just never stop lying.” And having shut down RT news, hardly anyone in the West knew anything about the Russian claim except that it was being made and it was therefore “disinformation,” and only conspiracy theorists believed it. Given there still has been no declaration of war by any Western country against Russia, one might think the “voices of social conscience” and the “guardians of truth” might at least be curious to know why the Western population was generally being “protected” from Russian news sources because the bright sparks thought the people just too dumb to be able to distinguish between truth and lie.

For a few years now, the bright sparks have decided that they alone know “the truth.” I am not sure which “settled science” it was exactly that decided that Russian media always tells lies, and that Western people are too gullible to be trusted with open access to Russian media. But it must have been the result of some scientific study by irreproachable “scientists,” because the masters of social conscience know and own the science on any given topic, and it was only us stooges that thought that such control of information was further proof of the dangerous totalitarian stranglehold of the Western world’s “leaders” and their mental enforcers.

But glory be, thanks to Victoria Nuland, that brain box and Democrat wife of Republican neo-con Robert Kagan, the current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of State European and Eurasian Affairs, the US go-to girl in the “Revolution of Dignity” (you know, the one where “Dignity” meant burning alive their political opponents in Odessa—which local Russian speakers put at close to 400. But, hey, what would they know—they only lived there)—the story needed to by updated. Nuland clarified to the hapless Marco Rubio, who, when questioning her, expected her to respond that there were no labs, that they were actually just perfectly safe biolabs, conducting public health research. But with Russians in the picture, Nuland took on the role of Cassandra to warn that said labs in Ukraine were now a cause for concern, because their benign public health research was sure to be turned into “bioweapons” by those evil Russians.

Of course, the issue of biolabs and bioweapons is central to what is happening now—and is yet another factor in Russia’s “invasion.” And to make sure we would all share “the correct” memory of all this, on June 9, 2022 AD, the Pentagon released a Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries. I think the centerpiece of the document is this:

The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.

On its release, some journalists, like Steve Sweeney from People’s World reported (June 14) that “The Pentagon said on Thursday that it has operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine handling dangerous pathogens, after previously dismissing the charges as Russian propaganda.” PolitiFact quickly weighed in with “The 46 facilities referenced in the articles and in the government’s fact sheet are owned and operated by Ukraine.” In the world of PolitiFact “working collaboratively” does not seem to be a synonym for funding. But while for the strict grammarians and guardians of “facts,” a tomato is definitely not a tomahto, the pertinent issue is smothered in the race to present nice, neat, clean facts to prevent us from ever believing anything that was not put together by team Goody Global Two Shoes—and that is the point made by bioweapons analyst Francis Boyle:

One of the latest explanations from a U.S. State Department spokesperson is that Ukraine has ‘biodefense’ laboratories, which are ‘not biological weapons facilities.’ The problem with making a distinction between ‘biodefense’ and ‘biowarfare’ is that, basically, there is none. No biodefense research is purely defensive, because to do biodefense work, you’re automatically engaged in the creation of biological weapons. All dual use research can be used for military purposes, and often is. As explained by Boyle, the idea behind ‘biodefense’ research is that there might be a natural pathogen out there that can cause a pandemic, or someone might release an engineered biological weapon, that we need to prepare a cure for.

How did such an obvious point pass the mental geniuses who tell us what to think? By the way Boyle is a human rights lawyer for all sorts of causes that generally fit neatly into the educated politically activist academic consensus (a critic of Israel and exponent of Palestinian rights, an advocate for indigenous and first nation rights, a supporter of Hawaiian self-determination, an international-law expert and legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president). Then, he took an interest in bioweaponry and connected it to COVID. At once he became a “conspiracy theorist.” Anyone who thinks Big Pharma is capable of hazardous decisions, leveraging government and being involved in cartel collusion, and profiteering, and that it should be subjected to the kinds of protocols that no longer seem to exist for any of the larger corporations — is now labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

If such a prime fact as Boyle’s about the nature of “biodefense” is smothered by weasel words, and by simply deferring to official statements made by the very operatives whose operations are being questioned, how was it ever possible for questions about government bioweaponry to get a serious airing in the public sphere? Answer—it was not possible, because the rules governing the “public square” no longer favor any kind of critical discussion—the public square itself dictates “the acceptable answers” to topics, and the public square is what the owners of that square say that it is — for the public square is very much a private possession.

But apart from the logic that Boyle brought to the conversation, even before every major news outlet in the country was falling over itself to attack right-wing conspiracy theorists, Newspunch counterpunched by demonstrating what a bunch of fraudsters the factcheckers are—when it reached back into the archives and found a piece from BioPrepWatch.com published in 2010: “Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Ordered Ukraine BioLabs to Develop ‘Deadly Pathogens.’” Allow me to reproduce the rest of the report:

Thenationalpulse.com reports: The article, which also highlighted the work of former Senator Dick Lugar, was additionally included in Issue No. 818 of the United States Air Force (USAF) Counterproliferation Center’s Outreach Journal.

Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu,” explained author Tina Redlup.

A 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Anticipating Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories explained how the Odessa-based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.

This laboratory was reconstructed and technically updated up to the BSL-3 level through a cooperative agreement between the United States Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine that started in 2005. The collaboration focuses on preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens, and knowledge that can be used in the development of biological weapons,” the report continues.

The updated laboratory serves as Interim Central Reference Laboratory with a depozitarium (pathogen collection). According to Ukrainian regulations, it has a permit to work with both bacteria and viruses of the first and second pathogenic groups,” explains the report.

A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.

Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”

Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”

The unearthed biolab facility follows intense scrutiny over the U.S. government’s decision to fund risky, “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan at a Chinese Communist Party-run lab with military ties.

The combination of algorithmic-controlled information and the vanishing of web sites that disprove the approved “line” of the cabal at Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., as well as the CIA, the FBI and the Government—is now such a conspicuous feature of our information flow in the West that an obvious question arises—how can anyone, who wants to get at the truth of things, still believe any official news source today? With respect to the war, in general, and the biolabs, in particular, the only position that is now permitted to be published in mainstream media is that if the Russians claim something, it is ipso facto propaganda and false. All nice and Manichean. And the way this seems to now be proven is that Government intelligence officials tell us so. Once upon a time academics and journalists were far more inclined to think that if the CIA said something there was a fair to good chance it was a lie.

So, before we carry on with looking briefly at the history of US biowarfare and what the Russian arguments and claims about US biolabs and weapons are, and why this should be widely known and discussed, instead of being denounced, and shutdown — let us just remind ourselves of a few unpleasant truths about the CIA, and why it is utterly imbecilic (and fully in keeping with the our age of the imbecilic) that journalists have derived their facts and larger narrative for understanding the Russia-Ukraine war from the Central Imbecilic (sorry, I meant, Intelligence) Agency.

Trust US. We are the CIA

Those of a certain age will most like be familiar with Phillip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which is Agee’s first-hand account of his twelve years as a CIA agent during his time in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Washington. The essentials are laid out in a couple of early paragraphs of the book, where he writes:

When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don’t know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA’s. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it’s concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress.

In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to “destabilize” the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Sometime later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.

Since Agee’s diary. there have been other accounts of the CIA, mainly by former operatives or academics, which go into the details of all the election rigging, coups, assassination attempts, false flag operations, torturing and various conspiracies (yes, shock, horror! the CIA has a history of conspiring to overthrow regimes, and fuel revolts and start wars). Before the Left was a woke joke, and the CIA had set up shop as a diversity service provider, scholars like William Blum (see his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) would write books exposing the various dirty tricks and machinations (installing bloody dictators, arming terrorists, working with drug runners, arms runners and money laundering—all for the good of the world. I thoroughly recommend Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World—it also has a chapter on the CIA in Ukraine. Here is synopsis of another book, Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former DEA agent, Michael Levine which gives a pretty good account of what the CIA have been up to in the more overtly criminal stakes:

… the CIA has perverted the American criminal justice system by protecting drug dealers and murderers from prosecution; that Federal judges and prosecutors alleged to have broken narcotics laws have been protected from investigation; that the government of Bolivia and South American drug cartel leaders have been assisted and even paid by the CIA… without CIA support, South American cartels and the epidemic of cocaine and crack use in the U.S. would never have occurred.

During the Maidan revolution in 2014, McCain and Nuland were doing photo ops with Svoboda (the neo-Nazi political party) leader Oleh Tyahnybok and his cronies who were busy assisting in regime change. After all, at the end of the Second World War US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II, who “successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.” This was hidden from the public for some fifty years, until documents pertaining to this history were declassified in 2002. The following from The National Security Archive in 2005 is worth quoting:

The documentation unearthed by the IWG (The Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group) reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material in May of 2004, in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service.

Apparently, the Nazi spies were a disaster! As the report continues:

Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem.

But now that Russia’s geopolitical concerns are strategically regional and have nothing in common with the globalist aspirations of the former Soviets, many of the very people who previously were very willing to denounce the CIA for its interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Indonesia etc. are more than willing to read from the script prepared by the CIA. Still, the take-home point from any of the left-leaning books on the CIA, written in the last thirty years or so, is that the CIA acted covertly, criminally, and very often under the veil of “plausible deniability;” which is to say, it was often left free to do whatever it thought necessary, without there being any followable line of command that would link its actions to the President—and, of course, it lied—constantly. It also involved itself in propaganda. It is obvious that the entrenchment of nefarious practices tend to continue well after any rationale for adopting them has vanished. On the issue of propaganda, the following from Agee is important:

The CIA’S role in the US propaganda program is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the ‘Grey Law’ of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID’S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.

Sound familiar? Allow me to align this with a piece by NBC (April 6 2022) that is breathtaking in its combination of chutzpah and imbecilic integrity. The headline reads “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.” “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something.”

It continues:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Who needs rock solid when the government and its intel are so great?

Let’s consider one last piece on the CIA—Tim Weiner’s, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It is a fairly sober account of the CIA by a journalist whose recent pronouncements—short of anything resembling proof—on this war seem to me to make him prey to his own quarry. But his book of 2007 makes some good points. The first is a good summing up of the limits of “intelligence”—which is salient to why it is insane for journalists to think they are doing a democracy anything other than a disservice by parroting the “talking points” of their “intelligence” sources: “Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: ‘There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,’ he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”

The second, is a good summary of how the intelligence game changed with the war on terror, and how that “war” has led to how the CIA now operates:

The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before–beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before–beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before–most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.” Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

Of course, the justification for the “war on terror” moved from the war against the Taliban to the war against Iraq; and while the rationale of that war, mentioned below, was based on false information, the real rationale enthusiastically repeated on numerous occasions by Tony Blair was that it was the task of democracies to overthrow tyrants wherever they were. Hence the requisite procedure in the international arena becomes one of declaring one’s enemy a tyrant to legitimate regime change. And as was signaled with the passing of the Magnitsky Act back in 2012, which enabled the seizure of Russian assets, the decision that regime change had to occur in Russia precedes not only the present war in the Ukraine, but the Maidan.

And if anyone out there still thinks the CIA is a trustworthy institution (and I have not even touched upon its various debacles which have been addressed by other authors) let’s go to the third passage from Weiner, which I think particularly pertinent because even the slew of pro-war Democrats might remember where they purportedly once stood (of course, I am joshing. Most of them went in boots and all with young George W and the CIA. So much for principles):

President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.

In a nutshell, there is nothing about the CIA’s history which indicates that it is a trustworthy operation. The good thing about most of the left-wing writings on the CIA—and even though I am often critical of the Left, I have always thought this aspect of their investigations to be a valuable contribution to any public considerations of state action—is that they invariably identity the nexus between corporate interests and the state. An iconic expression of the problem was by Major General Smedley Butler back in the 1930s in his War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Nothing has changed in that the real reason for NATO expansionism and for the most brazen proxy war funded by way Western governments funneling tax payers’ money, without resorting to anything remotely resembling electoral approval, to send weapons to Ukraine.

Far less reported are NATO’s nuclear war games which are being held some six hundred miles from Russia. And what is simply not known at all—is what the Russians are saying about US bioweapons.

A Brief History of The US Bioweapon Research and Why the Russians Are Bothered

US government research into biological warfare originated in the Second World War in response to British and French concerns that the Nazis might attack with biological weapons. They didn’t, but the Japanese were also developing biological weapons that they would use against the Chinese—they experimented on prisoners, poisoned wells, and dropped plague infested fleas over cities and rice fields. The Soviets had also been attacked with biological weapons, and after the war they convicted some of the Japanese researchers, although the Soviets had already been working on biological warfare from the 1920s and would become world leaders in bioweaponry until the Union collapsed.

The defeat of the Japanese provided a valuable source of new recruits for the US government in the area of biological warfare. The extent to which the US was able to make use of the Japanese research is not altogether clear, but we do know that both in the US and Japan secret research was being conducted, involving known war criminals for the next forty years. This information started coming to light in the 1990s when, as Sheldon Harris in his book of 1994, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, the Clinton administration “began to lift the veil of secrecy concerning United States; experiments with human subjects in hundreds of studies during and since the end of World War II.” Forgive the lengthiness of the quote from Harris; but as most people will not be aware of this, I think it important to cite in full; and it nicely provides something of a history of US, Japanese and Soviet bioweaponry:

We now know that American scientists tested humans with mustard gas, other chemical agents, exposed others to radiation tests, and still others to a variety of pathogens without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. In many instances, the most distinguished scientists from the most prestigious American universities participated both in deceiving their patients and in conducting the experiments. Even today, those scientists still active in the field, and their host universities, deny involvement. Recently opened former Soviet archives disclose that the Soviet Union inaugurated a large-scale biological warfare program beginning in the mid-1920s. Humans were used often in experiments that covered a variety of diseases potentially useful in biological warfare. Research facilities were established throughout that vast nation, and, according to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, such research continues covertly today.

The Soviet cover was partially blown in 1979 when a massive outbreak of anthrax affected a large area around the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. The most conservative estimates are that at least ninety-six people were infected, and that some sixty-six people died as a result of the outbreak. The true figures, no doubt, are higher. The most terrifying aspect of the outbreak was the disclosure that the Sverdlovsk biological warfare plant accidentally released less than one gram of anthrax spores, possibly as little as several milligrams. It does not take much imagination to calculate how much death and destruction the release of a few grams of anthrax spores into a heavily populated community could cause.

In Japan, scientists who participated in involuntary human experiments during World War II, and earlier, dominated the administration and controlled the areas of research of the country’s National Institute of Health for one half-century after the war ended… it should be noted here that at least seven of the NIH’s Directors and five of the Institute’s Vice Directors, during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged in biological warfare experiments which employed human test subjects. The National Institute of Health is a government-supported agency. Yet these known war criminals were employed by this institution, were given great powers within the organization and continued to use humans without their consent, and often without their knowledge, in investigations that were carried on during the course of more than forty years. It is known that experiments were authorized on prisoners, babies and patients in psychiatric hospitals in 1947, and from 1952 until 1955 by the NIH’s Vice Director Masami Kitaoka. Another researcher conducted bacteriological experiments on infants hospitalized in Tokyo’s National First Hospital in 1952. Later, this same researcher, from 1967 until 1971, used shigella in experiments on soldiers in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. In May 1985, an NIH researcher experimentally injected an unapproved vaccine against a Japanese encephalitis virus into nearly 200 hospitalized children without their parents’ consent. At different times over a three-year period, 1987, 1988, 1989, Kuniaki Nerome experimentally tested two types of genetically modified vaccine against influenza on approximately forty hospitalized children. Their parents were unaware of the tests and did not give their informed consent for the vaccines to be used on their children.

There are a number of international treaties being drawn up that seek to outlaw biological warfare, and, by implication, involuntary human experimentation. The United States, Russia (the former Soviet Union) and Japan are signatories to the various international agreements outlawing human experimentation, and the production of biological warfare agents. Nevertheless, both these activities appear to be flourishing today in all three countries, as well as elsewhere in various parts of the world. It appears that human testing, biological and chemical weapons will be part of former President George Bush’s so-called new world order for some time to come.

It is true that in 1969 President Nixon made a statement signaling the end of US offensive biological weapons programs and in 1972, along with Soviet Union, the Biological Weapons Conventions, outlawing biological warfare. What one makes of this very much depends upon what one thinks of the efficacy of international declarations, pieces of paper and signatures, and whether one thinks public gestures disclose hidden operations.

One investigative journalist who was doing his job well was Gordon Thomas. Early in his book, Spies and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, in the midst of discussing the anthrax attacks that took place in the US in October 2001, he writes:

In 2004, the U.S. armory of weaponized biological agents consisted of 19 bacteria, 43 viruses, 14 toxins and 4 rickettsiae. Their use remains outlawed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Within five years of the protocol’s creation Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the Soviet Union had all signed. The United States did not sign until 1975. By then the U.S. had developed a massive biochemical arsenal. Shortly before the September 11 attack, the Pentagon admitted that at Nellis Air Force base, one of the most secret in America, it had established the world’s largest stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. It had been created largely by CIA scientists. One of these scientists had been an obsessive “biochemist whose work pioneered the research which eventually led to the stockpile. His name was Frank Olson.

On that terrible September day in 2001, Olson’s son, Eric, was living in the family home in Frederick, Maryland, a short distance from Fort Detrick, where his father had worked for the CIA. That establishment then—and now—remains a restricted place, guarded by a variety of electronic defenses and armed “guards. As the television set in Eric’s living room endlessly replayed the 9/11 scenes of destruction from New York and Washington, he typed into his computer—on which he had stored so many astonishing matters relating to the death of his father—the most astounding claim of all:

“My father was murdered because the CIA feared he would reveal the biggest American secret of the Cold War, perhaps of all time. It is the secret of how the CIA was involved in biological warfare as well as mind control. My father had a key part in both programs.”

The takeaways from this very brief history are simply that the US has engaged in bioweapon research; that it has stockpiles — an “armory” — of weaponized biological agents; and that it is extremely secretive. Everything can of course have a purely benign spin—the research is purely defensive/preventative. It exists to save us from bio attacks by terrorists or rogue states — like Russia — and that it is important to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting hold of the research and having access to the biological agents. As we all know the United States is still the only state to have used nuclear weapons. It sets itself up as the moral arbiter of nations and what constitutes a just international order. It is entitled to be an exceptional state—that’s part of its Calvinist heritage (hard to believe when you see its public clowns today) — but it sticks to it. The question is: is the USA a force for the angels? Or does it say one thing and do another? Is its bioresearch all for the human good? Or is it a potential source of devastation?

Irrespective of what you or I might think, the thing that must be born in mind when the Russians went on the offensive about the biolabs in the Ukraine, and the US went from denial (and when that became too implausible) to “nothing to see here, all above-board, and there is nothing remotely dangerous in any of this.”

Apart from what seems to me to be the Western explanation—one can very easily find out why the Russians are bothered, and why it might even be reasonable for them to be bothered when one listens to what they are saying. And what they are saying is deeply disturbing, and as far as I can see it, while the very idea that Ukrainian/ US biolabs could be genuinely perceived as a serious threat to Russia is ridiculed and ‘factchecked’ by repeating government/ intelligence press releases, anyone who reads the Russian Government Report, The activities of the biological laboratories of the US Department of Defense in Ukraine will see that, at the very least, there is a story here, and that to bury it is but one more egregious example of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our “idea-broking” professionals.

An essential component of that story is the connection between the end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO (which the West refuses to concede is any serious cause of aggravation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which involves “experts” and “journalists” repeating the lie that none ever said NATO expansion would stop with the end of the Cold War), and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That Program was initiated by the US government working in cooperation with the Pentagon and CIA—the Pentagon Division was originally entitled the “Defense Special Weapons Agency,” before changing its name to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Army Institute for Medical Research on Infectious Diseases. The Program’s ostensible purpose was the elimination of stockpiles of Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which effectively gave the US control over former Soviet biological weapons.

Although, it might be a source of puzzlement for those who think that the USA, unlike any other imperial or hegemonic power, simply acts for the good of all human kind — and that it and its allies are not driven by the strategic self-interests of their ruling classes — the “Cooperative Reduction Program” not only involved taking over the stockpiles (and specialists trained in developing and studying pathogens and bioweapon technology) in Russia, but also countries “along the perimeter of the borders of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,” before expanding into other parts of Asia and Africa.

What was meant to be an elimination program morphed into something far more in keeping with a geopolitical strategy commensurate with the continuation of NATO expansion and the United States’ mission of a unipolar world, and a source of concern for the Russians, viz. “one after another transferred their collections of dangerous pathogens to the United States in exchange for American help. Who neutralized them in America, how and whether they were actually destroyed—remained a mystery.”

But then everything to do with the labs was a mystery—which, on a tangential though not completely unrelated matter, is why the issues of the laboratory source of COVID, and the pharmaceutical and financial and political networks involved in the origin of the pandemic (whether true or fake) are still smothered in deceit and mystery.

In any case, what was officially presented as a program of elimination turned into an opportunity too good to miss, as an extensive network of labs working with dangerous viruses were set up in former Soviet countries: “All of them were financed by the US Department of Defense, were called differently everywhere and were created, as a rule, on the basis of scientific research institutes and SES, created back in the Soviet period. One of the features of this program consisted in the fact that in each country not one object was erected, but a whole cluster at once. Part of it was concentrated directly in the capitals of the former republics, while related institutions were located in different parts of the country.”

The Report then identifies what it calls two “strong opinions” about this network in the former Soviet republics, and they are worth citing at length:

First. American biological programs in the post-Soviet states are a way to circumvent the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (BTWC). Despite the fact that the Convention was signed back in 1972, to this day, the control mechanism does not work largely due to the efforts of the United States, although the world expert community spent more than 45 years developing it. In 2001, the US demonstrated to the world that it had active bioprograms. After the attack on September 11, 2001, deaths of anthrax among people suddenly began to be recorded, and postal envelopes became the transmission route of this infection. The US Congress conducted an investigation (later it turned out that the recipe was combat and came out of the walls of the US Army bacteriological center at Fort Detrick). The attack against its own people, attributed to terrorists, gave huge political dividends to the US leadership. Now there was a formal reason to declare that the States are victims of biological terrorism and therefore unilaterally withdraw from the mechanism of collective control over the implementation of the BTWC. In autumn 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this in Geneva. At the same time, a biological threat reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) was proposed, and the United States began large-scale construction of military biological laboratories, including around Russia. But holding the United States accountable for conducting biological experiments that violate the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons is almost impossible. The US does not recognize the International Criminal Court and was not a signatory to the founding Rome Statute…

Second. The United States, after the collapse of the USSR, became very concerned about the conditions for the storage of pathogens and, as a result, the threat of a biological attack on America. The global American project declares its goal to minimize these threats, which is why tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in laboratories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Ukraine. They say that dangerous strains of microorganisms may leak into the environment in these countries. However, it does not explain how, for example, Armenia or Uzbekistan can organize a biological attack on the United States or why the laboratories are mainly located in large cities with a high population density or at a close distance from them. After all, it is much more logical, if there is even a minimal threat of pathogen leakage, to build such facilities in a desert area in order to eliminate the possibility of the spread of pathogens and epidemics.

As for the more specific purposes of the research, the penultimate paragraph of the Report sums it up thus:

The activities of American biological laboratories damage the economy, including by indirect methods (due to the destruction of livestock of diseased livestock, discrediting livestock products on local and world markets), as well as the human potential of Russia (reduction of general immunity and resistance to seasonal diseases, ability to reproduce, decreased efficiency, etc.), the diversion of significant forces and resources of the state to combat artificial outbreaks of infectious diseases. As a result the dependence of the attacked countries (Russia, China and Iran) on the products of the Western pharmaceutical industry is increasing, hoping in the future to offer medicines against artificially caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The Report also notes the mutuality of political, military and corporate interests that are embedded in bioresearch, and the geopolitical conditions that the US needs to establish and maintain for it to be effective. Again, I quote at length:

US biolaboratories located along the borders of the Russian Federation have a number of common features. These objects are strictly classified and are located in cities or near cities with a population of over a million (Odessa, Kharkov, Almaty), near seaports (Odessa), airports (Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv) or in earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia (Yerevan, Gyumri, Ijevan) , and even in areas with a probability of 9-magnitude earthquakes (Almaty). The construction of laboratories as part of projects to counter biological threats allows the United States to fully control the biological situation on the territory of both the respective post-Soviet countries and their transboundary neighbors. Virologists know that there is only one step from studying bacteria to creating a bacteriological weapon. In addition, the biolaboratories created by the United States, operating in a closed regime, are removed from the control of the governments of the countries in which they are located. Laboratories are often staffed by Americans with diplomatic immunity, and local health officials do not have direct access to these facilities.

The number of laboratory staff, from 50 to 250 people, far exceeds the number of personnel needed to maintain modern civilian laboratories with stated goals. The heads of the facilities are often appointed by persons from among the military loyal to Washington or intelligence officers. So, the CRL in Tbilisi was previously headed by the chief of Georgian intelligence Anna Zhvania and he was subordinate not to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Defense of Georgia.

In the case of Ukraine, and unlike other parts of the former USSR, it was not until the Presidency of George W. Bush that bioweapon research was conducted there. Like Obama and Trump after him, George W. originally campaigned on a foreign policy platform of cooperation with Russia—but that counted for zero once elected, and his regime’s setting up of military laboratories in Ukraine would be an important part in a chain of events that has led to the brink we now live upon.

The Report quotes the Political Scientist Dmitry Skvortsov: 

“Now there are 15 military laboratories in the country at once, and their activities are absolutely non-transparent and unaccountable. Hence the conclusion: these facilities were created by the Pentagon as manufacturers of biological weapons. Otherwise, why aim to prevent the spread of ‘technologies, viruses and pathogens’ used in the development of biological weapons in facilities where these weapons have never been developed?”

The Report also quotes the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov complaining about the secrecy surrounding the research and the lack of controls able to be exercised on the research.

When the story about the existence of the US/Ukraine biolabs was labelled “misinformation,” before being changed to “so what? It’s for our own good,” one might have thought that would be some follow up by journalists about claims of odd viral outbreaks in Ukraine. But that has never happened. Just because journalists do not report things does not mean such things do not exist. And the Report points out that there have been bacterial and viral outbreaks in Ukraine of the sort which indicate laboratory sources.

For example in 2010 and 2015, there were California flu pandemics:

… when the epidemiological threshold was exceeded in 20 regions. From October 2015 to February 2016, more than 350 virologically confirmed deaths from this type of A (H1N1) virus were registered in Ukraine, with 40% of deaths were young people from 18 to 26 years old who did not have chronic diseases.”

Also,

Since 1995, no cases of cholera have been registered in Ukraine. And suddenly in 2011 in Mariupol, 33 people get sick at once. In 2009, 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil suffered from a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic pneumonia. In 2014, there was another outbreak of cholera in Ukraine, which came from nowhere—then 800 people fell ill. The same thing happens in 2015 and 2017: about a hundred cases were registered in Mykolaiv.

In 2015, fatal cases of leptospirosis, rabies and other pathologies, which have long been forgotten in the EU countries, were recorded in Ukraine. In 2016, an epidemic begins in the country botulism, from which four people die, and in 2017—eight more, only according to official data.

In January of the same year, 37 residents of Nikolaev were hospitalized with “jaundice”, six months later 60 people with the same diagnosis were hospitalized in Zaporozhye. At the same time, an outbreak of hepatitis A was noted in Odessa, and 19 children from the boarding school were sent to the hospital in the Odessa region. In November 27 cases of infection have already been recorded in Kharkiv. The virus was transmitted through drinking water.

The Report also notes:

… the existence of 13,476 permanently dysfunctional anthrax sites in the country, which no one deals with, and some of them graze cattle. Only in the Odessa region there are 430 potentially dangerous objects where animals can catch the disease.

This is exactly what happened in 2018, when anthrax broke out in several villages of the Odessa region: five people ended up in the hospital with a skin form of the disease. In the Sumy region there are at least 20 animal burial grounds with anthrax, and not designated in any way.

The situation with the incidence of botulism is also close to catastrophic. In 2016, 115 cases of botulism were reported in Ukraine, of which 12 were fatal. In 2017, the country’s Ministry of health service has confirmed an additional 90 cases and 8 deaths. In subsequent years, the trend continued: 13 outbreaks were registered in the first three months of 2020 botulism, 15 people got sick, including one child of 9 years old.

The Report also draws attention to another tactic of biological weaponry that might be easier to ignore because its effects are far less dramatic and overt—and that is the release of many “small viruses, colds, varieties of runny nose, multiple strains of influenza,” that do not kill or seriously injure those affected, but which impact the general well-being and energy of a population.

And then there are the epidemics affecting agriculture and the economy:

With the beginning of the active work of DTRA in Ukraine, mass deaths from epidemics began not only of people, but also of animals. Avian flu and African swine fever have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s agriculture. For example, in 2015, 60 thousand pigs were killed and burned at the Kalita agricultural plant alone. At the end of 2016, the EU banned the import of poultry meat from Ukraine due to the epidemiological situation in the country. According to published data, since 2017 Ukraine already imports more sausage than it exports. Thus, Ukraine from a competitor in the market of agricultural products is turning into a market for these products from the EU and the USA. The money invested in the laboratory is returned.

Another example were the outbreaks of bird flu was in 2016 and 2017 that led to a temporary bans by the EU and some Eastern European countries on Ukrainian poultry.

Finally, let me cite one last section of the Report which discusses another report undertaken by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “analyzing the risks associates with activities in the field of American biological laboratories. In particular, the document notes that the program provides for the accumulation in the Kherson Regional Laboratory Center of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of Ukraine of samples of pathogens from different regions of Ukraine under the pretext of studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population”:

The next stage of cooperation, according to the SBU, should be the generalization and referral of research results to the Center for Biological Research at the US Defense Ministry, ostensibly to attract American specialists to develop vaccine samples that are maximally adapted to the residents of a particular region. The persistent efforts of the United States to resume the project indicate the intention to establish control over all domestic studies of pathogens of particularly dangerous infectious diseases that can be used for creation or modernization of new types of selective biological weapons. At the same time, it is not excluded that in the conditions of broad rights and powers guaranteed by the program, a foreign party will be able to study its own test systems on the territory of Ukraine, which creates a potential threat to epidemiological and epizootic situations, both in the region and in the country as a whole.

In sum, what the Russians fear about the biolabs is that research has been done with the explicit intention of breaking down the “national biological protection system.”

I have not the slightest doubt that if these claims were being made about the Russians the mainstream media would be creating a state of utter hysteria in the Western population. Already Western propaganda has succeeded in dehumanizing not only the Russians, but anyone who does not go along with the primary main stream media and the Pentagon and Intelligence claims made about the cause, meaning and justification of the war.

For my part, and as I have indicated in various essays for the Postil, I cannot ignore the constant calls for depopulation coming from the World Economic Forum and the likes of such gigantic brains and compassionate people as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari—and I cannot but think that bioweaponry can easily be used for that purpose.

Indeed, I ask myself, if it is necessary to save the planet by killing a few billion people, why wouldn’t our global leaders resort to biological weaponry? Perhaps that weaponry might be used in the most charitable way by simply attacking the reproductive capacities of the weakest of the species — and the weakest would be those who come from nations whose biological protective systems have been weakened through the deliberate release of pathogens.

That is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply posing the question, why would those who openly conspire to achieve the world they want — one with far less “useless people,” and as Harari points out without the least hesitation or sense of shame, most of the world’s population simply no longer have any further use — also not do the deeds that achieve their ends?

One way of doing the culling is to condemn entire peoples by dehumanizing them — initially by taking out nations who have been branded as “monsters,” and when that is not enough simply moving on to the useless.

As for those of you who think the concerns of the Russian “monsters” are just lies and propaganda, you might ask yourself why have they just drafted a proposal urging the UN Security Council to “set up a commission consisting of all members of the Security Council to investigate the claims against the US and Ukraine contained in the complaint of the Russian Federation regarding the compliance with obligations under the [Biological Weapons] Convention in the context of the activities biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” and present a report by November 30, 2022?

Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

GUINEA PIG KIDS

FULL BBC DOCUMENTARY (2004)

HIV positive children – some only a few months old – are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives by US government officials in partnership with the Big Pharma/vaccine industry.

In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care.

The city’s Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children’s homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs.

Reporter Jamie Doran talks to parents and guardians who fear for the lives of their loved ones, and to a child who spent years on a drugs programme that made him and his friends ill.

November 2, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

US agencies working directly with Big Tech to police Internet content

By Drago Bosnic | November 1, 2022

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States effectively became a police state. Government control and direct surveillance, the legality of which remains questionable at best, has been the norm ever since. With the advent of new technologies and the expansion of the so-called Big Tech (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, etc.), the government managed to acquire unprecedented access to the personal information of not just its own citizens, but hundreds of millions of others around the world as well.

For decades, Big Tech denied any involvement with US agencies, despite it being common knowledge for the vast majority of users. However, the level of cooperation and integration between the US government and the aforementioned Internet giants (all of which are private companies) has been truly staggering.

Back in August, while on the Joe Rogan podcast, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI worked with the company to suppress so-called “Russian propaganda” shortly before the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was published by the New York Post. However, new reports now indicate that this Big Tech-US government collusion goes much deeper, according to the leaked documents acquired by The Intercept. Their investigation revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “quietly broadening control over speech it considers dangerous.” Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

According to the report, the work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”, a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens US interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information, The Intercept reports.

During a March 2022 meeting, FBI official Laura Dehmlow warned that the “threat of subversive information on social media” could undermine support for the US government – stressing that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.” Interestingly, Dehmlow’s insistence on preventing the fall of support for the US government is clearly a priority over telling the truth. What’s more, the US agencies seem to have a strict bias towards certain power structures within the US establishment, primarily those dominated by the DNC neoliberals and partially the GOP neoconservatives. This was particularly noticeable during Donald Trump’s presidency, when undermining the 45th US president through disinformation and conspiracy theories such as the alleged “Russian election meddling” wasn’t seen as a “threat to our democracy”.

Expectedly, the Big Tech companies denied involvement. Twitter told The Intercept that they “do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions” and that they “independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules.” However, the claim doesn’t seem very convincing given the sheer amount of coordinated efforts by the Big Tech companies (seemingly unrelated, as they are all officially separate private entities) to suppress so-called MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation). Having every Big Tech corporation banning or restricting millions of users in a virtually identical manner can only be described as a cooperative effort directed by the same authority. The Intercept report indicates that this authority is none other than the US government itself.

The issue at hand is the fact that various interest groups within the US establishment are controlling what hundreds of millions of people get to see as the “undeniable truth”, or worse yet, billions when taking the global scale into account. Whether it’s the election meddling designed to push their preferred candidates or promoting wars around the world, these entities should be denied such a tremendous amount of power.

The so-called “struggle against MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation)” has become the No. 1 pretext to suppress any information deemed as such. This has gone so far that private companies are now fining their customers, with PayPal deducting $2500 from anyone’s account for “spreading MDM”. It’s clear that such a level of control is quite uncomfortable, to say the least. The question is, where does it stop?

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

On The Worship Of Sacred Cows

The strange death of real journalism

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 1, 2022

One of the extraordinary things about the past few years is the extent to which data which very obviously suggests one thing has been reinterpreted to suggest something else, merely to fit the “approved” narrative.

For no subject is this more apparent than that of the miracle covid injections. As a society we strained to attribute as many deaths as possible to “covid” — however unlikely they seemed to be connected. When discussing the vaccines, however, many defenders of the covid-cult seem willing and able to twist themselves into ludicrous contortions in an attempt to explain away any observations which don’t fully support the “safe and effective” (and necessary) official narrative.

This week has actually seen a flurry of such articles, of which the three below are just a selection.

Firstly, Canadian TV News excitedly reported on a study published in JAMA which found that the more severe the symptoms after mRNA vaccination, the higher the antibody levels generated.

This is, of course no surprise whatsoever, though is of questionable relevance given that even the CDC has said that there are “no correlates of protection” in terms of antibody levels. This is amply illustrated by the fact that despite extremely high Spike protein antibody levels in the population, seasonal waves of covid infections still appear to come and go in highly vaccinated countries, and triple (or more) vaccinated people still seem to be getting severely ill and even dying from covid.

The authors, all US clinicians or scientists, conclude their paper thus:

“In conclusion, these findings support reframing post vaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults.”

So, despite a complete lack of evidence for the clinical relevance of the raised antibody levels, they’re essentially saying “tell them that the more ill you are, the better it is working”.

Aside from the dubious ethics of this approach given the lack of supportive evidence of clinical relevance, this would of course discourage recipients from reporting adverse events, further compromising proper safety surveillance and signal detection in relation to these products, not that regulators appear to have actually performed any such useful analysis.

Lest those NOT experiencing side-effects be concerned about a lack of protection, CTVNews was of course happy to reassure them, apparently unaware of the contradiction with their main “message”, stating that:

But even though some people may have small, localized side effects or no symptoms at all, the vaccine still elicits robust immune responses in them too. Nearly all study participants exhibited a positive antibody response after completing a two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.

Our second example of delusional thinking this week is from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Their staff writer Sarah Knapton, who has fairly reliably been against the lockdowns and other restrictions, still cannot bring herself to question the “vaccine is our saviour” story, as evidenced in this bizarre piece, claiming, “Covid vaccines appear to work better for active people… suggesting that hard lockdowns were counterproductive.”

It is of course well known that fit and healthy and regularly active people were always at much lower risk from covid and stopping people exercising during lockdowns was just one of the more ridiculous features of such policies.

Hence it is difficult to see why this observation by a researcher in South Africa should come as a surprise to anyone:

“In terms of policy, retrospectively we can say those hard lockdowns were counterproductive from an immune point of view, and trying to facilitate exercise is beneficial.”

The paper’s authors, writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, conclude that:

“Public health messaging should encourage physical activity as a simple, cost-effective way of enhancing vaccine effectiveness to mitigate the risk of severe Covid-19 illness requiring hospital admission.”

So, apparently, the reason exercise works in reducing covid mortality is by “enhancing vaccine effectiveness”? It seems hard to believe that anyone could fail to see the ridiculousness in that conclusion. However, Sarah clearly doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to promote the vaccines, hence, combining her disdain for lockdowns with her cult-like devotion to the vaccines, she gives her piece the title:

Covid vaccine study finding contradicts lockdown rule

Later, she states that:

A new study by South African researchers has found that people who got the most exercise responded better to the vaccine, with fewer ending up in hospital following the jab.

So basically: lockdowns are bad as they reduce vaccine effectiveness.

You really cannot make this stuff up (well, apart from the fact that some people are making this stuff up).

Finally, this week also saw the publication of a major analysis of the waning over time of vaccine efficacy (for both Astrazeneca and Pfizer mRNA products) in the United Kingdom in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

This was a “target trial”, which seeks to emulate a “real” trial by identifying naturally occuring exposure groups. The study is notable for its size, covering 12.9m people.

Here is not the place to delve into the results in detail, except to mention that within the period of the study vaccine efficacy became negative (meaning an increased risk over the unvaccinated) for deaths and hospitalisation within just a few months of injection for all doses except the 2nd dose of the Pfizer product.

The results are summarised here:

The curious reader may ask why they are combining deaths and hospitalizations into a single metric; if there had actually been any reduction specifically in deaths (or the waning for protection against death had been less), the authors would surely have highlighted that.

The next point about this is that when they say the vaccine efficacy remained above zero “throughout” what they mean is “throughout the period observed”, which was stated to be 98 days (although in the graphs the data appears to extend approximately another week or so beyond that).

It can clearly be seen from the graph below that efficacy is tending consistently downwards (as the RR, or relative risk, trends upwards towards 1), and by eye one can estimate that it too would turn negative after around 120 days, or 4 months.

No mention of this is made in the paper.

The final point to make is that in attempting to explain away this phenomenon, the authors claim that:

We believe that the most likely explanation for negative VE/rVE is that vaccination caused recipients to believe they were protected, leading them to change their behaviour in ways that increase their chance of contracting the infection.

Aside from there being no evidence for this assertion (or “belief” as they quite rightly call it), it is to be noted that most of the severe illness is seen within the elderly and frail, and it is hard to imagine these people deciding suddenly to start partying after vaccination.

In fact, a notable feature of the vaccination campaign was that, in the elderly at least, the level of fear and apprehension about the virus appeared to be largely unchanged afterwards.

Moreover, for the authors’ explanation to have any credence, the vaccinees’ confidence would have had to have increased over time since injection, to account for the direction of travel of vaccine efficacy, whereas surely the opposite would seem more likely.

Stop Press:

Sarah Knapton has written a further piece for the Daily Telegraph. The headline and byline are below. The word “vaccine” does not appear anywhere in the article, despite the plethora of published papers now linking the mRNA vaccines to cardiac issues.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 2 Comments

Rumble says it won’t move its policy goalposts to appease France’s censorship demands

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 1, 2022

Growing video platform Rumble, based in the US, has refused to cave to ’s demands to censor Russian news sources such as RT France and Sputnik.

Rumble has instead chosen to pull its services from France rather than comply with the order.

“The French Government has demanded that Rumble @rumblevideo block Russian news sources. Like @elonmusk, I won’t move our goal posts for any foreign government,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski tweeted.

In a statement, Rumble said, “the French Government demanded that we remove certain Russian news sources from Rumble.”

Rumble outlined its commitment to free speech, adding, “As part of our mission to restore a free and open internet, we have committed not to move the goalposts on our content policies. Users with unpopular views are free to access our platform on the same terms as our millions of other users.”

Rumble said that it was disabling access to users in France while they look into challenging the legality of the government’s demands.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has a show on Rumble, weighed in on the decision. “If Rumble obeyed France’s censorship order – like Big Tech firms often do – it’d mean Americans could only access voices and views which foreign governments (EU, China, Iran, etc.) permitted to be aired.”

Several months ago, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on , including banning RT and Sputnik from being broadcast in member countries. The two news outlets were accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the invasion of .

The channels are not allowed on television or online in EU countries. However, they have been circumventing the sanctions through online platforms that are not based in the EU.

Last month, France’s President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the difficulties in blocking RT and Sputnik from the country, as French citizens still had online ways to access the content.

“We’re using the informational weapon and Russia was doing it even before by spreading propaganda on social networks, through propaganda channels that we have cut off on our soil but still continue to find channels to broadcast,” Macron said in an interview broadcast by France 2.

Rumble describes itself as a high-growth neutral video platform with independent infrastructure that is “immune to cancel culture” – and a platform with a mission of restoring the internet to its roots.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Clinton demands $1 million from Trump

Samizdat | November 1, 2022

Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton filed court papers on Monday in a bid to compel Donald Trump to pay her more than $1 million. According to the motion, she is demanding compensation for money spent fighting a lawsuit that alleged she had engaged in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by claiming he colluded with Russia.

Clinton’s legal team described Trump’s civil action, which was dismissed earlier this year, as frivolous and “a political stunt,” according to a filing in a federal court in Florida. Lawyers argued that it should result in sanctions in the form of $1.06 million that would be used to cover legal fees and costs.

“A reasonable attorney would never have filed this suit, let alone continued to prosecute it after multiple defendants’ motions to dismiss highlighted its fundamental and incurable defects,” Clinton’s attorneys wrote.

In March, Trump filed a lawsuit alleging that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and a number of other people had entered a malicious conspiracy to accuse his campaign of colluding with Russia in an effort to harm his electoral chances. At the time, Trump claimed the rumors had cost him over $24 million.

However, in September Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, the former US President and Hillary Clinton’s husband, threw out the lawsuit, arguing that it was nothing more than a “political manifesto.” He also noted that Trump filed the suit too late and failed to provide evidence for the alleged conspiracy. The former president has appealed the ruling.

Commenting on Clinton’s move, Trump’s attorney Alina Habba, denied the allegations, describing them as politically motivated. “This motion, conveniently filed one week prior to election day, is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to score political points,” she said in a written statement, as quoted by the Hill.

In 2016, the United States accused Russia of interference in the presidential election to harm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and boost the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump, an allegation which has been vehemently denied by Moscow. US authorities also investigated whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia, but failed to find evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | 3 Comments

The Pentagon Is Neither Woke Nor Based

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | November 1, 2022

The U.S. military has in recent times been making a big show of its “wokeness,” not only by changing the names of institutions to comply with the demands of race activists who wish to expunge from history all traces of the Confederacy, but also in its affirmation and encouragement of persons who lead alternative lifestyles. For nearly twenty years, beginning in 1993, the military maintained a “don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy on homosexuality. Since 2011, however, openly gay persons have been permitted to serve in the armed forces.

Given this context, some were surprised to learn that the Department of Defense has explicitly specified that transgender women must register for the Selective Service, while transgender men need not. The official website states:

Selective Service bases the registration requirement on gender assigned at birth and not on gender identity or on gender reassignment. Individuals who are born male and changed their gender to female are still required to register. Individuals who are born female and changed their gender to male are not required to register.

Through the Selective Service and Training Act, registration of men was first required in 1940 so as to make it possible for the government to locate potential soldiers in the event of a military draft. The law was amended as the Elston Act (aka the Selective Service Act) in 1948, and is still in place nearly seventy-five years later. There has been no draft called since the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, from 1964 to 1973, but the option remains open to the war-making authority, the executive branch of the government, at the pinnacle of which stands the politician who managed to be elected as president. Since 1940, males eighteen years of age have been required by law to register with the Selective Service; females have not.

Traditionalists (and students of biology) stand firm in their belief that the possession of a Y chromosome in every cell of one’s body properly identifies a human being as a biological male, whatever his lifestyle choices and preferences may be, and whatever surgical changes he may undertake to remove or alter body parts. Laypersons who in the era of “woke” dare to make such claims, what seems to many to be a matter of common sense, have been known to be denounced as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) by angry mobs online. Will the U.S. military now be subjected to similar barrages of anger?

Despite the military’s “woke” rhetoric regarding race and critical race theory, and its accommodating policies toward homosexual persons, it does look as though the Department of Defense has boldly affirmed the reality of biological sex, through its explicit assertion that a biological male is and always will be a biological male, even if he chooses to pump his body with estrogen, have his genitals surgically removed, wear makeup and don miniskirts. I include the latter two attributes because of the many trans-caricatures of femininity currently on display, as exemplified by Dylan Mulvaney, a twenty-five-year-old trans-activist who on day 222 of claiming “womanhood” was granted an interview with President Biden. Many of the very public, and often melodramatic, displays of transgenderism found not only on TikTok but also in commercial advertisements reduce women to the ditzy, superficial, and degrading stereotypes of decades past. If we are to believe transwomen such as Dylan Mulvaney, the “gentler sex” spends the bulk of their creative energy and time in endeavors such as painting their nails and shopping for new clothes.

In this somewhat astonishing cultural development, men who transition are thus allowed to indulge in outright misogyny, by overtly ridiculing women through conducting themselves in ways reminiscent of and entirely analogous to the racist portrayal of African Americans by white persons in blackface. Transwomen have also been permitted to compete alongside biological females in sports, with the predictable outcome that girls and women are being denied what would otherwise be their opportunity for success in athletics, and as a result do not enjoy the recognition, awards and scholarships which some of them surely deserve for their prowess.

Whatever sins of sexism transwomen may be permitted, they will not, the Pentagon has made clear, be able to evade the military draft. Yes, despite the reigning insanity on the transgender issue, propelled forward by misogynistic ad campaigns by companies such as ULTA, the U.S. military’s Selective Service registration policy is holding the line: a female is and always will be a biological female, even if she chooses to have some of the muscle in her leg transformed into a prosthetic penis, undergo a double mastectomy, and suffuse her body with testosterone in order to bulk up her muscles, lower her voice, and be able to grow a beard. The military powers that be have sided with traditionalists in asserting that, no matter how many surgeries they may undergo, “transmen are not really men,” and “transwomen are not really women,” because the former lack Y chromosomes, while the latter do not.

The Selective Service statement may look like a “gotcha” to those keen on calling a halt to the biology-denying madness. But just as earlier efforts to appear “feminist” arguably betrayed only the Pentagon’s concern to increase flagging enrollment, I strongly suspect that this bold proclamation of the reality of biological sex is part of a broader effort to force Selective Service registration upon every person, whether or not they possess a Y chromosome. By broaching the question of biological sex at all, the reignited debate about the requirement upon men, but not women, will likely be used to provoke lawmakers to “update” the requirement. It is obviously to the Pentagon’s advantage—and indeed, I am suggesting, it is their intent—to double the number of persons required to register and thus be prepared for future conscription in one of the many wars brewing on the horizon. Perversely enough, it will be yet another show of “wokeness” when the administration begins to insist that fairness and equity require that all persons, no matter their gender, be treated the same. In other words, the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for this sort of argument:

If biological males are required to register for Selective Service, then, because biological females are of equal value and worth to males, they, too, should be required to register. To hold any other position would be to claim that the sexes are not equal, to deny that females have the same worth and value as do males.

Lawmakers seem unlikely to abolish the Selective Service requirement for the same reason that they rubber stamp every single new military budget, prioritizing war over all other things. Indeed, Republican and Democratic lawmakers may disagree on every other possible allocation of taxpayers’ funds, but they form a united, virtually impenetrable front, the War Party duopoly, in supporting any and every initiative characterized, however implausibly, as a matter of national defense.

The Selective Service registration requirement has remained in place for so many decades because it is facilely depicted as a matter of necessary preparedness for the eventuality of conflicts such as World War II. But because every military intervention abroad is portrayed as a matter of defense—even the ongoing border dispute between Ukraine and Russia has been cast as a necessary defense of “democracy”—there is little reason to believe that lawmakers would agree to abolish the Selective Service registration requirement when it comes time to decide whether or not to include females alongside males. Instead, so-called liberals will be seduced by pseudo-feminist and “woke” rhetoric to insist much more enthusiastically than their “based” colleagues that the requirement be expanded, not abolished. Such unwitting dupes will no doubt be enlisted to help disseminate the Pentagon propaganda line according to which the affirmation of equality of all persons mandates that everyone of military age be required to register.

The Pentagon has been plagued by dwindling voluntary enlistments ever since the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. A series of atrocities committed by troops and private contractors throughout the “Global War on Terror” no doubt exacerbated the problem, by progressively chipping away whatever illusions of nobility prospective enlistees may have formerly associated with soldiering. Evidence that the recruitment crisis remains pressing in 2022 includes tweets from the Selective Service Twitter account (@SSS_gov), such as the one from October 7, in which parents are informed that even if they have only one son, he must register for the Selective Service.

On its face, this seems a bizarre announcement to make out of the blue. Except that it is not out of the blue, for all of these ploys are, again, plausibly part of the Pentagon’s gambit to increase the number of persons available for the wars which they are actively planning and fomenting, whether with Russia, China, Iran, the interminable “Global War on Terror” throughout the Middle East and Africa, or—why not?—yet another deadly meddling effort in Haiti.

As evidence of the ultimate aim of the Selective Service transgender policy, some of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s recent proclamations have been telling:

While I am encouraged to see a decrease in the suicide rate in our Active Component, we recognize we have more work to do. Every death by suicide is a tragedy that impacts our people, our military units, and our readiness.

Patriotism knows no gender, and neither does courage. Men and women hear the same call to serve our great country, and American women have always, always answered.

The U.S. military recently announced that it will pay for the travel of female troops who wish to terminate a pregnancy but are not located in a state where (post-Dodd) abortions are legal and therefore can be undertaken safely. It may sound cynical to suggest that females who carry their pregnancies to term, too, diminish the number of active troops, but in view of the scandalous epidemic of military rapes and sexual abuse endured by female enlistees in all branches of the armed forces in recent decades (see The Invisible Wara 2013 documentary film directed by Kirby Dick), it is not at all an implausible explanation for the accommodating stance of the DoD toward women seeking abortions.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s exuberant pro-war tweets regularly appear in my Twitter feed, and other users may have noticed in recent months an upsurge in the appearance of tweets from accounts not being followed. Significantly, these are not paid advertisements, but texts which are prioritized for dissemination and are all connected to the government in some way. Along with Austin, examples include NATO administrators, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Samantha Power (of USAID, which is well known to be a CIA front), among other figure heads, up to and including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the president himself, Joe Biden. War is the media topic of the day, but during the COVID crisis, I recall having been “treated” to a non-stop stream of tweets by vaccine entrepreneur Bill Gates—until I muted him.

Any number of less well known propagandists now appear to be paid specifically to promote war, and their slogans and exhortations also pop up in “the latest tweets” more frequently than even paid advertising. Meanwhile, accounts known to promote “dangerous” antiwar messages are shadowbanned, with tweets not even included in the feeds of their very own followers. (Anecdotally, I have determined from the analytics bar that Twitter allows my own tweets to appear in the feed of twenty-two persons.) Accounts with an antiwar “bias,” as the Disinformation Governance Board might characterize it, are capped so as to limit the number of followers. And of course anyone with an antiwar blog or website needs only to attempt to locate its articles through Google search to see how difficult they are to find.

All of this is to say that the government has commandeered social media as a vehicle for the promotion of its own propaganda. Governments have always attempted to control the narrative, but this trend has become especially glaring in the years since the ratification of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which lifted restrictions against propagandizing U.S. citizens by the government itself using (what else?) taxpayers’ own money to do so. In fact, that the U.S. government has exerted influence over Twitter is not all that surprising, given what we already knew about Facebook and YouTube.

The purchase of Twitter by self-proclaimed free speech champion Elon Musk may or may not improve the situation. It is worth remembering the recent report that the U.S. government intended to investigate Musk, which appeared shortly after he made the “mistake” of suggesting that the Ukraine-Russia conflict should be settled through negotiation. Musk has been providing internet access to the Ukrainian government through his Starlink company, but he crossed the MIC line when he dared to opine that negotiation might be preferable to nuclear holocaust. If Musk’s takeover of Twitter was greenlighted by the U.S. government, then it may well have been as a result of some sort of accommodation on his part.

In any case, regardless of what happens to Twitter, the Pentagon’s propaganda machine is so vast and powerful that self-styled liberals have already been swindled into supporting the allocation of massive funding to a border dispute—over a line drawn thirty years ago by a small committee of men—between a non-nuclear and a nuclear power. This infusion of billions of dollars into the conflict between Ukraine and Russia serves no purpose beyond lining the pockets of war profiteers, while diminishing rather than enhancing the security of those who foot the bill, by increasing the likelihood of a devastating conflict between two nuclear powers. It is striking that so-called progressives, who claim to care about the domestic problems currently faced by their constituents—the cost of healthcare, the housing and homelessness crisis, the drug overdose epidemic, elevated grocery and gas prices caused by inflation, etc.—have signed off on bills to print and dole out billions of dollars to Ukraine rather than address the pressing problems with which the nation itself is undeniably beset.

A recent letter by thirty lawmakers, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus led by Representative Pramila Jayapal, urged President Biden to pursue a negotiated solution to the Ukraine-Russia crisis and thus appeared to offer a glimmer of hope, albeit tardily. After six months of silence on the issue, it seemed that progressives were finally going to act as progressives, perhaps spurred on by the upcoming election and push back from voting constituents. To the great disappointment of sane people everywhere, however, the group abruptly withdrew the letter by the very next day, claiming (implausibly enough) both that it had been written months before and that it was sent out by a staffer in error. (It seems safe to say that prevarication is not Representative Jayapal’s forte.) One thing is clear: the saber-rattling Democratic Party no longer permits antiwar dissenters in its ranks, for it is obvious that someone was taken out to the woodshed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or one of her operatives.

These are troubling times for free thinkers and peace-loving people, and given the capture of both mainstream and social media by the military’s propaganda machine, it is sadly predictable how “progressive” congresspersons will vote when faced with the Selective Service registration issue. For if the choice is that either everyone or else no one must be prepared to defend the nation, we can expect self-styled human rights savvy progressive lawmakers to insist that the Selective Service requirement be expanded, not abolished. Indeed, the most vociferous supporters of expanding the Selective Service requirement will be found among the progressive “woke” camp, who will insist that the issue is a matter of human rights.

In truth, mandatory conscription is the very antithesis of upholding human rights, for draftees are the moral equivalent of slaves, and slaves are people from whom all rights have been stripped away. Any person, whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, is free to enlist in the military. The pertinent question, then, is whether it is fair for only men to be subject to enslavement by the government. But of course it is never “fair” to strip human beings of their freedom. The answer to the question is that no one, neither men nor women, should be transformed into slaves. Governments are erected and exist to serve the people. Any institution or administration which undermines or usurps the interests and rights of citizens should be defunded and disbanded, having transmogrified into the antithesis of what it purports to be. To borrow a term which has become popular in “woke” circles, a government which perpetrates such abuses of power should be cancelled.


Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone AgeWar and Delusion: A Critical ExaminationTheodicy: A Metaphilosophical InvestigationYou Can LeaveLaminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Concerns About Western Weapons Flowing to Ukraine Growing Louder

Samizdat – 01.11.2022

The US and its allies have earmarked nearly $100 billion in security and economic aid to Ukraine so far this year. Last month, the White House asked Congress for a $11.7 billion top-up. Where is this money going? Who’s benefiting from Western taxpayers’ generosity? And why are some US officials suddenly so concerned?

As the Ukrainian security crisis enters its ninth month and the seemingly bottomless pit of Western military and economic support for Kiev continues to expand, some US media and lawmakers have expressed growing weariness about the prospect of shoveling even more cash into the conflict in the weeks and months to come.

On Monday, the editors of Bloomberg, the New York-based financial and business media empire, sent a signal to America’s business community through a rare collective editorial requesting more “transparency” from the Biden administration about where American aid to Ukraine is going.

“The scale of the aid effort is unprecedented. In just seven months, the US has provided Ukraine with nearly double what it gave all of Western Europe on an annual basis during the Marshall Plan in real terms. Support for Ukraine’s military this year equals what the US provided Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan combined in 2020,” the business outlet stressed, calculating that Washington’s support accounts for $60 billion, or two thirds of all Western support for Kiev this year.

At least $27.5 billion of that is for military needs, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker.

Pointing out that Kiev hasn’t exactly been a paragon of good governance and anti-corruption, even before the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, Bloomberg made the unprecedented admission that there’s “the possibility, however slight, that US-made weaponry could fall into the wrong hands or be sold to actors outside Ukraine.” Accordingly, the outlet asked Washington to appoint a special watchdog on Ukraine aid, similar to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction created in 2008.

The effectiveness of such an appointment would be questionable at best, and futile at worst. Last year, Brown University’s Costs of War project calculated that the United States spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan, equivalent to over $300 million per day for 20 straight years. Still, the effort to turn the war-torn West Asian nation into a model of Western-style governance and democracy collapsed like a house of cards in August 2021, when the Taliban* smashed the country’s NATO-trained army in ten days as US and allied forces evacuated. The inspector general’s appointment seems to have done little in stopping or even stemming the largess of spending on the war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, even the mere admission that US arms could destabilize the situation and cause a spike in weapons flows to international black markets and criminal groups is significant, as it echoes concerns that Russian officials from the president to the foreign and defense ministries have been expressing for many months.

“This is not a question only of small arms; there are risks of more powerful weapons falling into the hands of criminals, including man-portable air defense systems and high precision weapons,” President Vladimir Putin said at a recent meeting with regional security officials.

Last month, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose party appears poised to take the House and possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, expressed opposition to giving Ukraine a never-ending “blank check” of American aid as ordinary Americans suffer the consequences of a recession. President Biden admitted that he was “worried” about McCarthy’s rhetoric, accusing the GOP of not “getting” that Washington’s assistance to Kiev wasn’t about Ukraine, but about Eastern Europe, NATO, and “really serious, serious consequential outcomes.”

As domestic weapons stocks show signs of running low and amid US media reports citing behind-the-scenes grumbling from the military and government over the issue continue to mount, it bears repeating the question about where Western arms support for Ukraine is actually going.

Where are the Weapons Zelensky?

It turns out the White House and the Pentagon don’t actually know where the aid goes, with sources telling US media back in April that the Pentagon has “zero” clue where most of the arms end up after they drop into the “big black hole” of the conflict. This is especially the case with small and compact arms like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, which can’t be tracked via satellites and “with nobody on the ground” to keep a lookout.

From time to time, moments of clarity poke through the fog of war.

On Sunday, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation reported that weapons sent to Ukraine had somehow found their way into the hands of local motorcycle gangs, as well as criminal groups in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Earlier this year, Sputnik Arabic plunged into the seedy recesses of the so-called dark web, finding a Ukraine-based arms dealer willing to ship US-made M4 assault rifles to the conflict zone in Yemen via Poland and Portugal, for a fee.

Separately, in August, a major US television network posted and then quietly scrubbed an investigative feature which revealed that as little as “30 percent” of the Western military aid sent to Ukraine was actually reaching the frontline.

Some Western-dominated regional and international security cooperation agencies have also given an indication (mostly underreported by the mainstream media) on the danger of sending weapons to Kiev.

Europol, the European Union criminal policing agency subordinated to Brussels, continues to resist admitting the scale of the weapons smuggling problem, assuring in July that it is “working with Ukrainian officials to mitigate the threat of arms trafficking into the European Union” and that it has “full confidence” in Kiev’s “measures to monitor and track these firearms.”

However, Interpol, Europol’s older and more respected cousin, has urged the international community to brace for weapons that have been sent to Ukraine ending up in criminal hands. Agency secretary general Juergen Stock warned in June that “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.” Criminal groups are already preparing. “This will come, I have no doubts,” Stock said.

Given the scale of the Ukrainian crisis, and the shady nature of criminal weapons smugglers’ activities to begin with, the real extent and scope of illicit arms smuggling operations, and just how far up the totem pole of Ukrainian and Western administrative power it goes, has yet to be revealed, and probably won’t be revealed, until years or even decades from now.

During the 1980s Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency ran ‘Operation Cyclone’, a drugs and weapons running operation which armed the Afghan Mujahedeen with over $3 billion in US- and European-made weaponry, including Stinger missiles and other sophisticated equipment.

In the decades that followed, Washington discovered how difficult it is to recover these arms from the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, and fought a two decade-long war against the US and NATO occupation, including using weapons sent in the 1980s. In the meantime, Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who served as one of the Arab commanders in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wound up declaring a holy war against the US, with Washington ultimately fingering his terrorist group for the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and in other attacks.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment