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Imran Khan’s Arrest Will Bring Pakistan’s Year-Long Crisis Much Closer To Its End Game

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 9, 2023

The post-modern coup that removed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan from office last April as punishment for his multipolar foreign policy catalyzed cascading crises across the economic, judicial, political, and security spheres that have shaken this South Asian state to its core. The US-backed regime that was installed in his place refuses to hold free and fair elections as early as possible since they know they’d lose after the former premier’s PTI party won multiple by-elections over the past year.

During that same time, the post-modern coup regime viciously cracked down on society by abducting dissidents and censoring the media out of desperation to retain power. Far from pressuring the Pakistani people into silence and forcing them to accept what Khan calls their imported government, they continued peacefully protesting for the right to exercise their democratic will sooner than later. Only upon resolving Pakistan’s political crisis in that manner, these patriots believe, can the other ones then be tackled.

To their credit, they remained committed to this path despite last November’s assassination attempt against Khan that he blamed on The Establishment, the raid on his home in mid-March, and the Interior Minister’s continued death threats against him. Their red line was always that he wasn’t to be arrested on trumped-up charges as part of the post-modern coup regime’s lawfare since this scenario would pose a threat to his life due to The Establishment’s reputation and also likely doom any democratic solution.

That red line was just crossed after dozens of Ranger paramilitary forces stormed an Islamabad courthouse to abduct him on Tuesday in a move that former PTI Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari described “as if (they were) invading an occupied land”. Nationwide protests were organized in response and are still occurring at the time of this analysis’ publication, but the post-modern coup regime might exploit this reaction to justify a conventional military coup in the worst-case scenario.

The Establishment’s latest power play is extremely dangerous since these stakeholders already know very well how polarized society has become over the past year. They could have responsibly exerted influence on their political proxies that replaced Khan after last April’s regime change to organize free and fair elections as early as possible in order to serve as a pressure valve. That could have averted the cascading crises that followed and just risked reaching their breaking point on Tuesday.

Some sort of pragmatic working arrangement could still have been brokered between them and the PTI in theory upon the latter returning to power as expected in that case, yet no such outcome appears possible now after The Establishment crossed the opposition’s red line as part of their power play. They’re practically daring people to publicly defy them and thus put their lives on the line, yet a large number of them are doing precisely that out of patriotic fervor since they fear losing their country.

In their minds, a new dark age is rapidly descending upon Pakistan, which might never restore the sovereignty that it’s losing by the day as a result of the cascading crises catalyzed by last April’s regime change. They can’t in good conscience sit back and let this happen without knowing in their hearts that they tried doing something tangible to stop it. This explains why they’re literally risking their lives right now protesting against Khan’s abduction and all that it entails for their country’s democratic future.

At present, it appears unlikely that The Establishment will relent by releasing him and pressuring their political proxies to publicly agree on a date for holding free and fair elections sometime in the very near future, but that doesn’t mean that their calculations might not change. In any case, it’s clear that Pakistan’s year-long crisis is reaching its end game since there are really only two mutually exclusive outcomes that are possible: a chance at true democracy or continuing to languish under dictatorship.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Syria’s Return to Arab League Shows US Gulf Allies Tired of ‘Regime Change’

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 09.05.2023

Syria’s secular government is still standing after more than a decade of sectarian terrorist insurgency backed by the US and its regional allies. Independent investigative journalist Christopher Helali said its readmittance to the Arab League was a sign of waning US power in the Middle East.

Return of Damascus to the bosom of the Arab League after 11 years of pariah status shows the failure of the US doctrine of regime change, a journalist says.

The regional group of nations voted on Sunday to reverse its 2012 decision to expel the Syrian Arab Republic over President Bashar al-Assad’s resistance to religious-sectarian ‘rebels’ backed by the Western powers and several of the Gulf monarchies.

The tide of the conflict turned in 2015 with Russia’s military assistance, helping to break the sieges of Aleppo and other cities alongside volunteers from Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Christopher Helali told Sputnik that the major change of stance by the Arab nations was “part of the ongoing geopolitical shifts that we’re seeing in the wider region.”
“Syria being allowed back into the Arab League is certainly a coup, not only for the Arab countries, but I think for countries like China behind the scenes who have been pushing diplomacy and pushing rapprochement between different sides in the Syrian civil war,” Helali said.

The welcome back for Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad showed there was “no more appetite for regime change” or for backing the “alphabet soup of jihadist groups” funded and armed by Washington — the al-Nusra Front, Islamic State, various al-Qaida affiliates and the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Those sectarian terrorist forces were supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and possibly Qatar and Jordan, the journalist said.

The journalist noted there was “growing discontent” among the Arab states over how the conflict has progressed and its unwanted effects. “People are saying, okay, let’s just let’s finish it and let’s send a lot of these refugees back.”

The other question is who Assad must negotiate with to finally end the 12-year conflict, given the Gulf monarchies previous insistence on a political “transition” that brings the “rebels” into the mainstream.

Those groups have been “allowing different Western journalists there to show that ‘we are moderate rebels… we are Islamists, but we’re not fanatical like ISIS, even though they are underground’,” Helali said.

“Ultimately, Assad would have to speak to the great power brokers in this conflict — the people who supported those groups. So you’d have to think about Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the United States, Russia, Iran, everybody would have to be at the table,” he continued. “But of course, nobody’s coming to that table except for the people already on Assad’s side. Plus Turkiye, because it’s being pushed to find a settlement, especially for the northern part of Syria, especially by Russia and as well as Iran.”

The elephant in the room remains the illegal US occupation of north-eastern Syria, with its concentration of lucrative oil fields, along with its outpost at al-Tanf in the southern desert near the border with Jordan.

“There can be no peace plan, there can be no situation in which everything is resolved so long as foreign troops, including US troops, still occupy sovereign Syrian territory and so long as arms and equipment and funding keeps funnelling in to Syria, to other armed groups,” Helali stressed.

“Once that stops and once there can be sovereignty over in territorial integrity, Syria reclaiming all of its borders, then there can be some plan. But that plan will have to be Syrian-led” and not imposed form outside, he said.

The ultimate significance the republic’s return to the League is the tacit admission that the US-led plan to overthrow Syria’s government failed — with disastrous consequences for her neighbours.

“What the Arab League is saying is that we’ve tried, it’s failed. Assad is here to stay and we have to find some normalization because we’re also dealing with millions of refugees in the region,” Helali said. “There has to be some political resolution to this conflict so that people can return home. Turkiye has 5 million Syrian refugees. Everybody wants a resolution to this.”

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Difference Between Secrets and Lies

Can the White House even understand the difference?

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW •  MAY 9, 2023

Recent developments in Washington relating to Ukraine and the Middle East remind me that there is a big difference between maintaining secrecy when a situation warrants it and lying over issues where there is no compelling reason to do so beyond political expediency. Having spent more than twenty years in American intelligence agencies where secrecy was the operative norm, I would illustrate that difference as follows: a legitimate secret would be something like not revealing information that would place people or vital national interests in jeopardy, while a lie would be committing a crime and fabricating a narrative that would deny or obfuscate that anything dire had actually taken place. When it comes to lying, I am, of course, referring to the bizarre behavior by the United States government, most particularly ever since 9/11, to commit war crimes and then come up with reasons for its foreign and national security policies to have taken a singular aggressive and coercive turn not justified by reality or by any real threat. That shift in behavior has had a profoundly negative consequence, with much of the world now inclined to identify the United States as the most dangerous country globally speaking in terms of being the greatest threat to peace among nations.

One might reasonably award the gold medal for creative destruction in that light to the Administration of George W. Bush, which elevated lying to a level hitherto hardly imagined in Washington. Bush had a neocon dominated foreign policy team, concentrated in the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith and with Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office, which did not hesitate to stovepipe fabricated information through the system to justify a totally fraudulent war against Iraq. The conspirators, most of whom were Jews who had close ties to the Israeli government, were supportive of the Jewish state’s desire to have the US attack Baghdad. They were joined in their drive to war by a hapless Secretary of State Colin Powell, a woefully ignorant National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and a ruthlessly ambitious George Tenet at CIA to go along for the ride. Within that context, what the president of the United States actually thought, if he was thinking at all, remains unknowable. The result was the catastrophe of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of dead civilians over a totally invented threat of “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Currently, twenty years after the event, Washington still has soldiers in Iraq even though the Iraqi parliament has repeatedly asked them to leave.

Interestingly, however, what played out under George Bush was child’s play compared to the contemporary political environment where the media has joined the Joe Biden Administration in lying about nearly everything. This has included an act of war committed against both a nuclear armed adversary and an ally in the form of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, which was clearly carried out by the United States against Russia and Germany after Biden even incoherently warned publicly that he would do it. Since investigative journalist Seymour Hersh blew the lid off the story, the US and its captive media have responded by helping to float a completely implausible alternative tale of how it may have been accomplished by a handful of rogue Ukrainians operating off a fishing boat. Russian attempts to get the incident investigated by the United Nations and/or the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been successfully blocked by the US, which has in response supported a British jurist’s successful attempt to get the Russians themselves investigated for war crimes by the ICC.

In the latest edition of lies and more lies, the US is hanging out to dry a twenty-one year old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira whom it is charging with stealing and making public on an internet chat room highly classified national security related information. The airman might indeed be guilty of having done just that though his motive continues to be elusive and his actual ability to access some of the material he obtained is questionable. More to the point, however, is the back story, which is that the documents reveal that the Ukrainians are clearly losing the war against Russia, prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to seek both NATO membership and newer longer-range weapons so he can hit Russia directly and hard enough to bring the US and NATO directly and fully into the conflict. The recent possible attempt to kill Vladimir Putin using a drone may be part of such planning and, if it had come closer to being successful, the Russian overwhelming response would likely have escalated the conflict to produce a disaster of possibly global proportions.

The leaked intelligence suggests that Ukraine will not be able to defend its airspace at all after this month and will also soon be running out of ammunition. These “facts” were known to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin when he testified several weeks ago that the Kiev was winning its war against Moscow. Biden, for his part re the conduct of the war, has continued to deny that US soldiers are “boots on the ground” engaged in Ukraine. The leaked documents demonstrate that he is also either lying or poorly informed about that. The only intelligence item that seems to reflect some measure of acknowledgeable truth is the information indicating that there is no intention on the part of Washington to take steps to initiate peace talks to put an end to the fighting in 2023. That is clearly what the White House wants going into the 2024 elections, where Joe Biden or whoever succeeds him will want to look like a “war president,” a vigilant defender of the United States to appeal to voters.

From the viewpoint of a tax paying American citizen, the fact that the US Treasury has given or promised well in excess of $100 billion to a hopelessly corrupt Ukrainian government to oppose a nuclear-armed Russia that did not threaten the United States in any way prior to the fighting breaking out last February should be significant. And what happened to the so-called War Powers Act requiring Congress to make a declaration of war? So where is the upside of all of this for the American people?

And there’s more. There is also the recent revelation, also from Sy Hersh, that Volodymyr Zelensky and his gang of crooks have stolen $400 million from the cash provided by the Biden Administration to buy diesel fuel for the Ukrainian Army. The fraud was discovered by the CIA, whose Director William Burns actually personally confronted Zelensky with the numbers and names of those involved in January. Zelensky and his profiteers carried out their project by obtaining the money from the United States Treasury at the US petrodollar rate per gallon plus shipping costs before turning around and buying the fuel from cheaper suppliers located regionally, including the Lukoil Neftohim Burgas refinery located in Bulgaria. The difference then disappeared into the pockets of Zelensky and his generals. And where did the less expensive fuel come from? Mostly from Russia and also from Iran!

To be sure there has been some pushback from a small group of mostly Republican congressmen. Matt Gaetz has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives requiring the White House to provide full information, to include “copies of any and all documents outlining plans for military assistance to Ukraine. Additionally, the resolution directs Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to disclose the number of United States Armed Forces, including special operators, deployed to Ukraine without Congressional authority. The Biden Administration and other allied countries have been misleading the world on the state of the war in Ukraine. There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine.”

Maverick GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also got into it with her GOP colleagues after she praised the alleged leaker of the Pentagon documents due to his exposure of the lies surrounding the Ukraine war. She said “Jack Teixeira is white, male, Christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. Ask yourself who is the real enemy?” Senator Lindsey Graham as well as the Republican Party leadership immediately jumped on Greene, denouncing her for being against the war. Graham, who recently advocated invading Mexico to solve America’s drug problem, in particular dubbed her response “one of the most irresponsible statements she could make,” adding that it would “destroy America’s ability to defend itself.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan also denounced Greene’s comments, declaring that “From my perspective, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene has demonstrated time and time again that she’s not fit to hold public office…” Recall for a moment that Brennan was himself one of the most disastrous CIA Directors to ever hold office. He advocated torture of “terrorists” by the Agency as well as “signature” drone strikes to kill suspects on the ground in the Middle East and Asia. He collaborated with efforts to derail the Donald Trump campaign and signed on to a letter in October 2020 claiming that Trump’s re-election campaign might well be benefitting from a Russian disinformation operation, an initiative that may have influenced the election outcome. On one occasion, after a Trump meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018, Brennan observed that “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of ‘treasonous.’ Not only were Trump’s comments ‘imbecilic,’ he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

The exchanges with the GOP as well as from nearly all Democrats serve as one more indication that the problem with the United States government is systemic: going to war while also denigrating critics and then lying about it all to avoid a perceived problem is always the preferred option for both the White House and Congress. No matter who wins in 2024, with the possible exceptions of Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard, the outcome in terms of a fractured and incoherent foreign policy that actually itself threatens the United States at every level will be roughly the same.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , | Leave a comment

Serbian president reveals what West wants him to do

RT | May 9, 2023

The West has not given up on steamrolling Serbia into imposing sanctions on Russia, the country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, has revealed. However, he said Belgrade has so far been able to resist the pressure.

Speaking to Serbia’s Happy TV channel on Monday, Vucic said that “whoever comes [to Belgrade feels their] first obligation is to explain to me that I am a jerk who did not introduce sanctions.”

The Serbian head of state acknowledged that he had already gotten used to constant “pressure [and] ultimatums” from Western representatives.

Last month, the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee slammed Serbia for its failure to join the EU sanctions against Russia, and urged Belgrade to shut down Russian “disinformation” outlets, including RT Balkans.

The US State Department also called for a ban on the media outlet, which began broadcasting in November 2022.

Speaking in mid-March, President Vucic reiterated that his government’s “position is to not impose sanctions” on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine. He made it clear that this could be changed only in “circumstances when there is no way out.”

His remark came in response to calls made earlier that month by the country’s Economy Minister Rade Basta on social media. Basta argued that Belgrade should impose punitive measures because Western pressure was becoming unbearable.

The minister quickly came under fire from within his own party for his comments.

Serbia has resisted pressure from the EU and the US to sanction Russia, citing, among other things, the apparent discrepancy between Western demands that Belgrade recognize the independence of the breakaway province of Kosovo and their simultaneous insistence on Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

Former Pakistani PM detained

The Cradle | May 9, 2023

Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan has been arrested by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) from the Islamabad High Court (IHC), Geo News reported on 9 May.

Khan was taken into custody by security personnel known as “Rangers” outside the IHC where he had gone to seek bail as a result of graft charges.

According to Fawad Chaudhry, the official spokesperson of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf party (PTI), the ex-prime minister has been “abducted from court premises. Scores of lawyers and general people have been tortured.”

Khan was arrested in connection with the allegations that Bahria Town allotted land worth 530 million rupees to the Al-Qadir Trust, owned by the PTI chairman and his wife, according to Islamabad police.

“Khan has been whisked away by unknown people to an unknown location,” Chaudhry said.

According to Imran Khan’s spokesman Raoof Hasan, “He was taken away… before he could appear before the judges, which is in violation of all laws.”

“The party has given a call to immediately start protests across Pakistan,” PTI leader Azhar Mashwani tweeted.

Khan’s arrest was not authorized by IHC Chief Justice Aamer Farooq, however, who requested the attorney general appear before the court within 15 minutes and instructed him to immediately find out who was behind the arrest.

“If an inquiry has to be conducted, action will also be taken against the prime minister and ministers,” the chief justice said.

Security forces previously attempted to detain Khan last March after an Islamabad court issued an arrest warrant to ensure his attendance in court to face graft charges.

However, security forces were blocked by hundreds of the former prime minister’s supporters, who gathered outside his Lahore home to prevent his arrest. The clashes between both sides, in which security forces fired tear gas and water cannons, and Khan’s supporters threw stones, led to dozens of injuries.

The former cricket star, who was ousted as prime minister in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022, went to Islamabad to appear before three courts on charges of selling state gifts and failing to disclose assets but failed to appear before the fourth court to face indictment in the graft case, which is a legal process for starting his trial.

Khan claimed the charges filed against him, which include terrorism charges, are an effort by his successor, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, to discredit him and prevent him from contesting the upcoming elections.

At the time of his ousting as prime minister, Khan accused the United States of working with a coalition of Pakistani opposition parties to topple his government.

Khan alleged that US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu met with the Pakistan Ambassador Asad Majeed and warned that there could be implications if Khan was not ousted as prime minister.

Khan has long been known for his opposition to US foreign policy. In 2017, Khan organized a motorcade march to Pakistan’s tribal areas to protest US drone strikes against Islamic militants.

In November 2022, Khan was the target of an assassination attack. A gunman opened fire with an automatic weapon on his convoy of lorries and cars, injuring Khan’s leg and killing one of his supporters, and injuring seven more.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Israel jails former Jerusalem minister under administrative detention order

The former Palestinian minister of Jerusalem affairs on 26 September 2011 [Mahfouz Abu Turk/Apaimages]
MEMO | May 9, 2023

The Israeli occupation authorities jailed former Jerusalem Minister Khaled Abu Arafa for four months on Monday under an administrative detention order. The order was imposed a week after he was kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces from his temporary residence in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

Abu Arafa and three other Jerusalemites were stripped of their Israeli identity documents when they won seats in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election. They were all jailed under administration detention orders which were renewed regularly with neither charge nor trial until they were released in May 2010. They were then expelled from Jerusalem after staging a protest in the office of the International Red Cross in the city that lasted until September 2011, and were forbidden from returning to the occupied city.

Since then, they have been living in temporary homes in the occupied West Bank. This has not stopped the occupation authorities from harassing and now detaining them under new administrative detention orders.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden unilaterally extends ‘national emergency’ targeting Syria

The Cradle | May 9, 2023

On 8 May, US President Joe Biden signed a new one-year extension for the “national emergency” declared concerning Syria, just one day after the Arab League approved Damascus’ reentry to the bloc despite Washington’s objections.

Initially signed in 2004 by former president George W. Bush, Executive Order 13338 classified Syria, a nation nearly 10,000km away from Washington, as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

“The United States will consider changes in policies and actions of the Government of Syria in determining whether to continue or terminate this national emergency in the future,” Biden’s letter concludes.

On Sunday, White House officials confirmed that crushing US sanctions on Syria would continue to be enforced despite an ongoing push by the Arab world to normalize ties with the war-torn country.

“We do not believe that Syria merits readmission to the Arab League at this time, and it’s a point that we’ve made clear with all of our partners,” US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said on 7 May.

Since 2011, Syria has been the setting of a brutal war sponsored by several members of NATO and regional nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. This includes the ongoing occupation of large swathes of its territory by the US and Turkiye and the plundering of its natural resources and humanitarian aid by anti-government militias.

While the CIA was tasked with arming and training extremist groups in Syria since late 2012, US troops officially entered the fray once Damascus asked for Russia’s help to push back against ISIS in 2015.

Seeing the gains the Syrian and Russian armies made against ISIS and other armed groups, the US partnered with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to create the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), effectively starting a race for control of Syria’s resource-rich Deir Ezzor and Hasakah governorates.

Around 900 US troops are still present in Syria. Their deployment is illegal under international law, as the government in Damascus did not approve it.

Moreover, former US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump deployed the troops without congressional approval, abusing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in 2001 in the wake of the 11 September attacks.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

Russian citizen killed in Israeli raid

The aftermath of the Israeli strikes on Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip, May 9, 2023 © AP / Yousef Masoud
RT | May 9, 2023

The Israel Defense Forces launched operation ‘Shield and Arrow’ against the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza on Tuesday morning, allegedly killing several high-ranking militants – as well as their wives, children and other civilians nearby.

A spokesperson for the Palestinian Health Ministry, Ashraf al-Qedra, told RIA Novosti that one of the victims was a citizen of Russia, Jamal Abu Haswan, who “died in Gaza City as a result of shelling by the Israel Defense Forces.”

A neighbor and friend of the deceased told the agency that “a rocket hit the apartment where Abu Haswan lived, which led to his death along with his wife and son.” According to RIA, Abu Haswan worked at a medical facility that “specializes in physical therapy and medical rehabilitation.”

The air raid took place at around 2am local time and left at least 20 people injured in addition to the 12 killed, according to the latest estimates.

The IDF has issued a rare statement confirming its military operation against the PIJ, claiming to have neutralized three top members of the group.

The Palestinian Health ministry said the militants’ families and other civilians were killed in the strikes on an apartment building in Gaza City and a house in the southern city of Rafah.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Andrew Bridgen and Fraser Myers clash in fiery debate on Covid vaccine harms

GBNews | May 8, 2023

Andrew Bridgen, a Member of Parliament in the UK, has been vocal about vaccine harms and the origins of Covid.

Fraser Myers, deputy editor of Spiked online, published an article called “The delusions of Andrew Bridgen – Conspiratorial thinking corrodes reason, democracy and humanism”.

The pair joined Andrew Doyle on GB News in a fiery debate.

May 9, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | 1 Comment

NATO ‘s Great New Idea: ‘Let’s Start A War With China!’

By Ron Paul | May 8, 2023

NATO’s post-Cold War history is that of an organization far past its “sell-by” date. Desperate for a mission after the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO in the late 1990s decided that it would become the muscle behind the militarization of “human rights” under the Clinton Administration.

Gone was the “threat of global communism” which was used to justify NATO’s 40-year run, so NATO re-imagined itself as a band of armed Atlanticist superheroes. Wherever there was an “injustice” (as defined by Washington’s neocons), NATO was ready with guns and bombs.

The US military-industrial complex could not have been happier. All the Beltway think tanks they lavishly fund finally hit on a sure winner to keep the money pipeline flowing. It was always about money, not security.

The test run for NATO as human rights superheroes was Yugoslavia in 1999. To everybody but NATO and its neocon handlers in DC and many European capitals, it was a horrific, unjustified disaster. Seventy-eight days of bombing a country that did not threaten NATO left many hundreds of civilians dead, the infrastructure destroyed, and a legacy of uranium-tipped ammunition to poison the landscape for generations to come.

Just last week tennis legend Novak Djokovic recalled what it felt like to flee his grandfather’s home in the middle of the night as NATO bombs fell and destroyed it. What a horror!

Then NATO got behind the overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya. The corporate press regurgitated the neocon lies that bombing the country, killing its people, and overthrowing its government would solve all of Libya’s human rights problems. As could be predicted, NATO bombs did not solve Libya’s problems but made everything worse. Chaos, civil war, terrorism, slave markets, crushing poverty – no wonder Hillary Clinton, Obama, and the neocons don’t want to talk about Libya these days.

After a series of failures longer than we have space for here, DC-controlled NATO in 2014 decided to go all-in and target Russia itself for “regime change.” First step was overthrowing the democratically elected Ukrainian government, which Victoria Nuland and the rest of the neocons took care of. Next was the eight years of massive NATO military assistance to Ukraine’s coup government with the intent of fighting Russia. Finally, it was the 2022 rejection of Russia’s request to negotiate a European security agreement that would prevent NATO armies circling its border.

Despite the mainstream media and US government propaganda, NATO has been about as successful in Ukraine as it was in Libya. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been flushed away, with massive corruption documented by journalists like Seymour Hersh and others.

The only difference this time is that NATO’s target – Russia – has nuclear weapons and views this proxy war as vital to its very existence.

So now despite its legacy of failure, NATO has decided to start a conflict with China, perhaps to take attention off its disaster in Ukraine. Last week NATO announced that it will open its first-ever Asia office in Japan. What next, NATO membership for Taiwan? Will Taiwan willingly serve as NATO’s newest “Ukraine” – sacrificing itself to China in the name of blundering NATO’s seemingly endless appetite for conflict?

We can only hope that America will elect a president in 2024 who will finally end NATO’s deadly world tour.

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute.

May 8, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

One Health: A Plan to ‘Surveil and Control Every Aspect of Life on Earth’?

This is part two of a two-part series on the One Health initiative. Read part one here.

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 8, 2023

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines “One Health,” as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems,” as they are “closely linked and interdependent” — a concept that on the surface appears to promote noble goals interlinking human and environmental health.

However, some scientists and medical experts are concerned about One Health’s vague goals. Arguing that the concept has been “hijacked,” they question the intent of those involved with the development and global rollout of the concept — including the WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Bank.

Experts who spoke with The Defender also raised questions about other aspects of the One Health concept, including a biosecurity agenda, a global surveillance system, vaccine passports and restrictions on human behavior.

While these goals are underpinned by a vaguely defined “Theory of Change,” experts told The Defender that major financial interests are at the heart of the One Health agenda, which appears to be closely linked to climate change and sustainable development initiatives promoted by the same global organizations.

One Health objectives include a ‘global takeover of everything’

In a May 1 article, Dr. Joseph Mercola connected the One Health concept, as promoted by global organizations, to the policies and restrictions pursued in response to COVID-19, describing it as an attempted “global takeover of everything.”

Mercola tied the One Health concept to key entities that have supported gain-of-function research. According to Mercola:

“Interestingly, the term ‘One Health,’ which was formally adopted by the WHO and the G20 health ministers in 2017, was first coined by the executive vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the same firm that appears to have had a hand in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.”

During the 2019 lecture “Can One Health Help Prevent the Next Pandemic?” EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, Ph.D., commissioner in The Lancet’s One Health Commission, said “emerging infectious diseases” are “a growing global threat.”

He also argued that many of these emerging diseases are “zoonotic — spread from animals to humans.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, questioned this narrative, telling The Defender :

“All these ‘emerging infectious diseases’ are emerging out of their offensive biological warfare weapons programs conducted in their BSL4 [biosecurity level 4] and BSL3 laboratories.

“If you look at the people on the WHO advisory committee dealing with ‘emerging infectious diseases,’ that’s exactly what they are doing — ‘emerging’ them from their labs.”

One example is that of Marion Koopmans, DVM, Ph.D., director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for emerging infectious diseases at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands and member of the WHO’s One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP).

According to Boyle, “Erasmus is where this offensive Nazi biowarfare gain-of-function death science dirty work first became notorious under Fouchier, [who] started the entire controversy over his gain-of-function work there.”

Boyle was referring to Ron Fouchier, Ph.D., who also is deputy head of Erasmus’ Viroscience Department and who, according to Science, “alarmed the world” in 2011, after he and other researchers “separately modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets” — an early example of gain-of-function research.

Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and biological warfare epidemiologist who is a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said such objectives are kept deliberately vague. She referred to a CDC document that stated:

“Successful public health interventions require the cooperation of human, animal, and environmental health partners … Other relevant players in a One Health approach could include law enforcement, policymakers, agriculture, communities, and even pet owners.

“By promoting collaboration across all sectors, a One Health approach can achieve the best health outcomes for people, animals, and plants in a shared environment.”

Nass wrote on her blog, “I anticipate that One Health will be used to impose changes in the way humans and animals interact … most likely based on the needs of the WEF [World Economic Forum]/elites and not the needs of the people or the animals that will be affected.”

Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and co-chair of the Stop Vaccine Passports Task Force, told The Defender, “It’s not clear that One Health is prioritizing human health.”

Highlighting the “vague” language employed by the global organizations promoting One Health, Littlejohn said that one goal may be to “govern farm animal health in addition to human health,” through which “they could do things like forcing vaccines on livestock.”

One Health means ‘surveilling everything’

The experts who spoke with The Defender expressed concerns over the biosecurity agenda that is associated with the stated objectives of One Health.

According to Nass, this reflects how the WHO “has been changing into a biosecurity agency,” adding that “the justification, apparently, for the WHO’s director-general to take over jurisdiction of healthcare during pandemics, but also potentially ecosystems, animals and plants, is through One Health.”

Nass noted that One Health “is mentioned several times in the National Defense [Authorization] Act for Fiscal Year 2023” (NDAA), which includes 18 pages on “pandemic preparedness” and a formal definition of the “One Health approach” on page 952 of the act.

Independent journalist and researcher James Roguski also highlighted the prominent placement of One Health in the NDAA and noted that, by formally defining the concept within the act, it is now part of the Code of Federal Regulations.

However, Roguski said the NDAA goes even further:

“The U.S. has pledged a billion dollars a year to the World Bank Pandemic Fund in support of the global health security agenda. The WHO is one of 14 intermediaries who will receive and redistribute some of that billion dollars.

“Basically, it’s capitalism, it’s corruption, it’s an abomination from a health perspective. Let’s just throw money at pharmaceutical companies, build out the infrastructure in these nations and, if you’re making tons of products locally, you’re going to be able to convince the local government to stick them in people’s arms or shove it down their throat.

“And none of it really has shown to be of any health benefit. It’s damage to people’s health.”

Associated with the promotion of a global biosecurity agenda is the development of a global surveillance infrastructure that would purportedly protect human and animal health and the environment. An Oct. 3, 2022, WHO document states:

“The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID-19 has underlined the need to strengthen the One Health approach, with a greater emphasis on connections to animal health and the environment …

“… It uses the close, interdependent links among these fields to create new surveillance and disease control methods. …

“We now have an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen collaboration and policies across these many areas and reduce the risk of future pandemics and epidemics while also addressing the ongoing burden of endemic and non-communicable diseases

“Surveillance that monitors risks and helps identify patterns across these many areas is needed.”

Remarking on this, Littlejohn said One Health’s proponents talk about “interoperable, integrated surveillance systems.” She told The Defender :

“I believe … these surveillance systems of people, animals, plants, and the environment are going to be coordinated by some kind of a global surveillance system that is interoperable globally and integrated.

“Whoever’s running this show, the WHO, the Chinese Communist Party … the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are the people who really appear to be running the show at the WHO, are going to be able to tap into and see all of our private information. Not just us, but animals and plants.”

Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant and former director of global health technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, told The Defender that what global organizations intend is “surveilling everything.” He said:

“It means surveilling everything, surveilling the climate for possible threats, surveilling animal population, surveilling wildlife, surveilling the soil to see if there’s new traces of virus or bacteria in river systems, et cetera.

“This allows you to ‘discover’ what we already know is nature, and then turn nature into a potential threat or into a threat. The more surveillance you have and the wider it is, the more inevitable ‘threats’ you’ll find … because you can make an argument that almost any new variant virus is a ‘threat.’

“It will allow them to keep a constant kind of fear which then allows you to introduce authoritarian controls such as central bank digital currencies and digital passports … that allow them to monetize the human population more effectively.”

Nass noted that global actors such as the WHO “talk about sharing of specimens during a pandemic … so they can try to make vaccines too. However, they don’t talk about performing surveillance on human beings. But what they did say, which let the cat out of the bag, is that they would want to get informed consent from countries for sharing of genomic data, rather than from individuals.”

Part of this surveillance infrastructure also would include vaccine passports, which figure prominently in the pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) currently under negotiation at the WHO.

According to Littlejohn:

“I believe that they laid the infrastructure during the COVID-19 crisis, and we’re having a little bit of a ‘break’ here between pandemics, but that structure, that infrastructure is going to snap shut with the next pandemic if we don’t stop it. That structure has to do with vaccine passports.

“It could be called a ‘smart health card’ or ‘digital health ID,’ or even a mandatory digital driver’s license can serve as the platform for a China-style social credit system. And there’s a new bill in front of the Senate right now … the Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023 … It’s a mandatory national ID that’s going to be interoperable, coordinated, integrated and can serve as the same platform as China’s social credit system … to surveil us.”

Restrictions on human behavior could lower humans to the level of animals

The WHO’s Oct. 3, 2022, document also claimed that “Some 60% of emerging infectious diseases that are reported globally come from animals, both wild and domestic,” adding that “human activities and stressed ecosystems have created new opportunities for diseases to emerge and spread.”

Such stressors “include animal trade, agriculture, livestock farming, urbanization, extractive industries, climate change, habitat fragmentation and encroachment into wild areas,” according to the WHO.

“To the extent that carbon emissions due to transportation within cities would contribute to climate change, then the ‘15-minute city’ would be a way of addressing that,” Littlejohn said. “The danger is that they will enforce it by having surveillance cameras everywhere to make sure you don’t go outside of your district without permission.”

In a March 30 article, “Your Daughter for a Rat,” Bell cited a One Health editorial published in The Lancet stating that “all life is equal, and of equal concern.” In response, Bell suggested that One Health aims to lower humans to the level of animals.

The same Lancet article described One Health as “a call for ecological, not merely health, equity” and called for a “subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective” away from “anthropocentrism”: “All life is equal, and of equal concern.”

“It looks like this is going to be the justification for moving people down to the value of animals,” Nass said in response; a sentiment shared by Boyle, who said, “One Health relates the healthcare of human beings to the healthcare of animals and thus reduces healthcare for human beings to the level of healthcare for animals.”

According to Bell, “suggesting that we have a duty as a species on this planet to look after every species equally and treat them more equally [is] becoming sort of a religion or dogma. It defies what any rational society in the history of humanity” has practiced and is “a very unusual approach and potentially very scary.”

One Health: Follow the money

The WHO has attempted to give theoretical credence to the One Health concept by developing a so-called “Theory of Change” (ToC).

Although the WHO says the ToC is designed to provide “a conceptual framework” for “organisations, agencies and initiatives working towards similar One Health goals” and a “common narrative of coherence,” the theory itself does not appear to have a clear definition.

“They want to be able to do whatever they want,” Littlejohn said. “If you define it, then you can hold them to the definition … one of the tactics is just to be really obscure and incomprehensible.”

“This is a term that is used in these circles,” Bell added. “It’s stating the obvious, that if you do a certain act, you’ll have a certain outcome. It’s a fancy way of saying that.”

Bell also referred to the “fallacy that is being pushed that humans are having increasing contact with wildlife,” supposedly leading to “this threat of viruses jumping from wildlife to humans.”

Calling it a “ludicrous claim,” Bell said that “when humans move into wildlife habitats, the wildlife don’t start living with humans. They die out.”

Noting that “it used to be very common” for people to live with farm animals, Bell added that the claim that pandemics are becoming more common due to increased contact with animals is itself “not true,” but is “used to instill fear and to try to get people to buy into this One Health, constant health emergency agenda.”

Nass said One Health proponents “don’t actually have any evidence” to support their claims, offering the example of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria found in meat consumed by humans, as a result of antibiotics administered to livestock. “That’s been the hook that One Health has been hung on,” Nass said.

However, Nass said this problem “could be solved in a heartbeat if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture just told farmers they can’t put antibiotics into animal feed anymore, they can only use them when an animal gets sick.”

In his recent article, Mercola suggested following the money. “Private interests wield immense power over the WHO, and a majority of the funding is ‘specified,’ meaning it’s earmarked for particular programs. The WHO cannot allocate those funds wherever they’re needed most.”

As a result, this “massively influences what the WHO does and how it does it. So, the WHO is an organization that does whatever its funders tell it to do,” naming organizations such as the Gates Foundation as prime funders of the WHO.

Bell said that supporters of One Health include “those who have been pushing the COVID agenda … and enriching themselves from it,” including “private foundations who are on the bandwagon” and “corporations who stand to gain from controlling the food chain and controlling agriculture and pharmaceuticals, et cetera.”

“It’s corporate authoritarians that have benefited themselves from public health through COVID and the certainly inappropriate COVID response,” Bell added. “And it’s the same and it’s not disconnected with the climate emergency agenda.”

One prominent financial actor closely involved with the development of the One Health agenda is the World Bank, as WHO documents indicate.

At a November 2022 OHHLEP meeting, Franck Berthe, the World Bank’s senior livestock specialist, introduced the World Bank’s Financial Intermediary Fund, which would “allow countries to borrow funds to strengthen their health system and promote the OH [One Health] approach.”

According to Nass, “the WHO and the World Bank have helped form this financing operation for the biosecurity agenda,” while Boyle told The Defender, “There is nothing humanitarian about these backers and the WHO promoting the One Health agenda.”

Both Nass and Bell said the One Health agenda is closely tied to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Bell said that the One Health agenda attempts to deal with a supposed “existential threat to human health” that “must be dealt with in a centralized way, rather than giving people a choice.”

One Health closely tied to WHO pandemic treaty, IHR amendments

Experts who spoke with The Defender also emphasized the connections between the One Health concept and the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments under negotiation.

Mercola wrote that through the One Health agenda, which recognizes “a very broad range of aspects of life and the environment [that] can impact health and therefore fall under the ‘potential’ to cause harm,” the WHO “will be able to declare climate change as a health emergency and subsequently require climate lockdowns.”

Roguski, who has extensively researched the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments, said that in amendments the EU recently proposed for the pandemic treaty, the term “One Health” appears 29 times, including calling upon countries to develop and regularly update pandemic prevention plans via the One Health approach.

Referring to the need to prevent potential “pandemic situations,” the proposals also call for strengthening global public health surveillance “using a One Health approach,” which will also “address the drivers of the emergence and re-emergence of disease at the human-animal-environment interface, including but not limited to climate change, land use change, wildlife trade, desertification and antimicrobial resistance.”

The proposals also suggest the One Health approach could be used “to produce science-based evidence, and support, facilitate and/or oversee the correct, evidence-based and risk-informed implementation of infection prevention and control,” and go as far as to suggest targets on “antimicrobial consumption/use.”

Roguski told The Defender that the latest draft of the pandemic treaty refers to One Health 13 times. Such language would “be used to take over complete control of our lives,” Roguski added.

For example, one proposal states, “Each Party shall, in accordance with national law, adopt policies and strategies, supported by implementation plans, across the public and private sectors and relevant agencies, consistent with relevant tools, including, but not limited to, the International Health Regulations, and strengthen and reinforce public health functions for: (c) surveillance (including using a One Health approach).”

Other proposals include:

“The Parties commit to strengthen multi-sectoral, coordinated, interoperable and integrated One Health surveillance systems … to identify and assess the risks and emergence of pathogens and variants with pandemic potential, in order to minimize spill-over events, mutations and the risks associated with zoonotic neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases, with a view to preventing small-scale outbreaks in wildlife or domesticated animals from becoming a pandemic.

“Each Party shall … develop and implement a national One Health action plan on antimicrobial resistance that strengthens antimicrobial stewardship in the human and animal sectors, optimizes antimicrobial consumption, increases investment in, and promotes equitable and affordable access to, new medicines, diagnostic tools, vaccines and other interventions, strengthens infection prevention and control in health care settings and sanitation and biosecurity in livestock farms, and provides technical support to developing countries.”

Roguski said the phrase “One Health” doesn’t directly appear in documents related to the proposed IHR amendments, but he added the WHO “is going to try to get them both to prevail,” referring to both the treaty and IHR amendments.

Littlejohn said, the One Health approach and the proposed language in the treaty “gives them the right to surveil and potentially control every aspect of life on earth.”

Noting that the proposed treaty also calls for a “commitment to counteract ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘false news,’” Littlejohn added, “they’re going to surveil our social media … and if any of us steps out of line by contradicting what the WHO says, then we could be censored.”

“That’s what I think is in mind with this commitment to ‘coordinated, interoperable and integrated’ One Health surveillance systems,” Littlejohn added. “I think that’s how it could end up being deployed. Ultimately, globalist entities, such as the World Economic Forum and the UN are using the WHO as their way of establishing global control.”

“The reason that health is such a good pretext is that people can become terrified,” Littlejohn added. “To the extent that their minds are paralyzed if they think they could die or get really sick, they’re willing to give up freedoms that they would not be willing to give up in other contexts.”

Roguski told The Defender :

“They made a lot of bad decisions. They gave a lot of bad advice [and] they caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. You can’t just give those people more power, authority and control without looking at what they did and going, ‘no, you should not be in charge of any of this.’”

In turn, Mercola wrote that “The globalist takeover hinges on the successful creation of a feedback loop of surveillance for virus variants, declaration of potential risk followed by lockdowns and restrictions, followed by mass vaccinating populations to ‘end’ the pandemic restrictions, followed by more surveillance and so on.”

And according to Bell, One Health “is part of a much bigger picture of finding ways to pull apart the intrinsic ideas that most societies have been built on.”

“I think that this is part of a move to undo these sorts of ideas and to replace them with a sort of religion of fear of our surroundings and denigration of other humans that can then be used by very greedy people to increase their wealth and power,” Bell said. “It’s taken over public health to a large extent.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

China won’t forget NATO’s ‘barbaric’ actions in Yugoslavia

RT | May 8, 2023

Beijing has neither forgotten nor forgiven the May 1999 bombing of its embassy in Belgrade, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters on Monday. Wang condemned the US-led bloc for creating conflict while posing as a defensive alliance, urging it to “seriously reflect” on its crimes.

Wang noted that May 7 was the anniversary of the embassy attack, in which three Chinese journalists were killed and 20 diplomatic staff members were injured. “The Chinese people will never forget what they sacrificed to uphold the truth, fairness and justice. Nor will we ever forget this barbaric atrocity committed by US-led NATO,” he told reporters.

While claiming to be a regional defense bloc, NATO has “repeatedly lit the fuse and brought conflicts to places all over the world,” Wang noted, “from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Kosovo, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and from Libya to Syria.”

Having participated in wars that have killed hundreds of thousands and displaced tens of millions, NATO is now “making forays eastward into the Asia-Pacific, instigating bloc confrontation and undermining peace and stability in the region,” the spokesman added. “The US-led NATO needs to seriously reflect on the crimes they’ve committed, abandon the outdated Cold War mentality, stop inciting tensions in the region, and stop sowing division and instability.”

The embassy strike happened six weeks into the NATO air war against Yugoslavia, waged on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Five bombs struck the compound, killing Shao Yunhuan, Xu Xinghu and his wife Zhu Ying. Beijing condemned the bombing as a “barbaric act.”

The US claimed it had struck the embassy by accident, using an “old map” of the Serbian capital. The real target, Washington said, had been the Yugoslav government agency for military procurement, which was almost 500 meters (1,640 feet) away. The strike was carried out by a B-2 stealth bomber, using JDAM bombs that are accurate to within 14 meters (46 feet) of the target. It was the first and only mission during the 78-day campaign that had been planned by the CIA, the agency’s director George Tenet later testified before the US Congress. One CIA agent was reportedly fired and six were reprimanded over the incident.

US President Bill Clinton offered a public apology. Washington later paid a compensation of $28 million to the Chinese government and $4.5 million to the families of the victims.

The NATO-backed war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia cited this, as well as the CIA disciplinary measures, among the reasons for not opening an investigation into the bombing, much less pressing charges.

May 8, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

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