2023 December 12 « Aletho News

We Must Save Ourselves from the Public Health Professionals

By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | December 12, 2023

Like other aspects of medicine, public health is about dealing with life and death. In the international sphere, this involves big numbers. If, as a group, a few million dollars is allocated here, it may save thousands of lives. Actual people living rather than dying, or grieving. If it’s allocated there, it may even promote death – diverting other resources from a more useful approach or causing direct harm.

Dealing with such issues affects people’s egos. Humans are prone to think themselves important if they seem to have power over the lives of others. With international public health staff this is reinforced by people they meet, and the media glorifying their work. The public hears little of the high, often tax-free salaries or the travels and 5-star hotels that boost these egos still further, but instead are fed pictures of (usually brown) children lining up to be saved by people in (usually blue) vests with nice logos. It all feels good.

The result, inevitably, is an international public health workforce that has a very high opinion of itself. Possessing values that it considers superior to those of others, it feels justified in imposing its beliefs and values on the populations who are the target of its work. As their role seems to them more important than bringing up kids in some random village or working at an airport check-in counter, they can feel virtuous when seeking to impose their superior opinions on others. The WHO’s insistence that countries globally embrace certain Western cultural values supporting abortion on request until time of delivery are a powerful example, irrespective of what one considers its ‘rightness.’ More so as the WHO also claims to support ‘decolonization.’

Things get tricky when the ultimate source of funding has its own commercial or geopolitical priorities. As an example, expenditure of the World Health Organization (WHO) is now over 75% specified by the funder, including those who stand to gain financially from such work. Large organizations that helped the WHO run its Covid-19 response, such as Gavi (vaccines) and CEPI (vaccines for pandemics), were jointly set up by private and corporate interests who are now represented on their boards and directing them.

The interface between these self-interested funding sources and the populations upon whom they seek to impose their will is where the self-righteousness culture of the public health workforce becomes so important. They need enforcers whose culture renders them willing to impose harm and restrictions upon others. Apologists and sanitizers who are in a position of trust.

A Captured but Willing Workforce

If you are going to sell a product, you can advertise it and hope potential buyers are interested. This carries a commercial risk. If a product can be mandated – essentially force the market to buy it – then this risk is eliminated. If you can then remove any liability for harm done, you are simply printing money with no risk at all. This is such a ridiculous and indecent approach that it would never fly in a normal commercial context. You would need a workforce capable, en-masse, of putting aside the moral codes that prevent such practices. A shield between the people being managed and the commercial or political interests standing to gain.

Historically, public health has often provided such a shield – a way of sanitizing vested interests that would otherwise appear repulsive to the public. In the United States, it implemented racist and eugenic policies to sterilize and send into decline ethnic groups it considered inferior, or individuals considered to have lesser mental capacity (or socially inferior).

The Johns Hopkins University psychology laboratory was founded by proponents of just such an approach. The fascists in Italy and Germany were able to extend this to active killing first of the physically ‘inferior,’ then whole ethnic groups claimed by governments and health professions to be threats to the purity of the majority. Examples such as the Tuskegee study show that this attitude did not stop with World War Two.

Most of the doctors and nurses implementing eugenics and other fascist policies will have convinced themselves that they were acting for the greater good, rather than demons. Medical schools told them they were superior, patients and the public reinforced this, and they convinced each other. Having the power to directly save or not save lives does that, while carting trash and repairing sewers (equally important to public health) does not. It enables people to tell others what to do for a perceived greater good (even sterilization or worse) and to then stand together as a profession to defend it. They will do this for those who direct them, as health professionals are also trained to follow guidelines and superiors.

Accepting Humility

The hardest thing in public health is accepting that none of the above is actually for the public’s health. It is about unleashed human ego, a large part of greed, and a trained and frequently reinforced willingness to bow to authority. Hierarchies feel good when you are near the top.

In contrast, health depends on mental and social well-being, and all the multiplicity of influences from within and without that determine whether each person experiences, and how they deal with, disease. It requires individuals to be empowered to make their own choices, irrespective of human rights, because mental and social health, and a large part of physical health, are dependent on the social capital this agency enables. Public health can advise but once it steps over the line to coerce or force, it ceases to be an overall positive influence.

To provide sensible public health, you must therefore be comfortable allowing others to do what you consider to be against their physical interests or some ‘greater good.’ When you are convinced that you have superior intellect, this can feel wrong. It is harder again when deferring to the public means breaking ranks with, and losing standing with, peers who consider themselves superior and more virtuous.

To do this, one has to accept that intellect has no standing when assessing human worth, and that each human has some intrinsic characteristic that puts them above all considerations regarding greater societal good. This is the basis of fully informed consent – a very difficult concept when considered deeply. It has its basis in the Nuremberg Code and post-1945 medical ethics and human rights, and is a concept with which many in our health professions and their institutions disagree.

Facing Reality

We are now entering one of those more extreme periods, where the hierarchy really becomes clear. Those pulling the public health strings have gained enormous power and profit from Covid-19 and are focused on getting more. Their chosen enforcers did their job during Covid-19, turning a virus outbreak that kills near an average age of 80 years and at a rate globally perhaps slightly higher than influenza into a vehicle to drive poverty and inequality. They continue to do this, pushing ‘boosters’ associated with rising rates of the infection they are aimed against, and with unusual evidence of harm, ignoring prior understanding of immunology and basic common sense.

Now public health is moving further in response to the same masters, the Covid profiteers, promoting fear of future outbreaks. With near-total obeisance, they are now supporting a reordering of society and health sovereignty through amending the WHO IHR regulations and negotiating a pandemic treaty to build a permanent health technocracy to sustain concentration of wealth and power through recurrent pharmaceutical profit.

This reordering of our democracies into Pharma technocracies, with the public health bureaucracy being aligned to enforce it, will make the right to travel, work, go to school, or visit sick relatives dependent on compliance to health dictates passed down from a massively wealthy corporate aristocracy. Those health dictates will be enforced by people whose training was funded and careers supported by those who directly profit. The modelers who will produce the numbers needed to scare will be similarly funded, while a sponsored media will continue to promote this fear unquestioningly. The institutions above this, the WHO and the big public-private partnerships, take funding and direction from the same sources. The proposed pandemic regulations and treaty are just cementing all in place, repeating the massively harmful restrictions on human rights applied during Covid whilst ensuring that there is less room for dissent.

We need legislators, and the public, to reclaim public health ethics and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as the WHO once did – “physical, mental and social.” This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom, and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, Johns Hopkins University, WHO | Leave a comment

A Conversation with Dr. Paul Oosterhuis on Lessons From the Down Under

By Julie Obradovic | The Defender | December 11, 2023

Sitting in front of a computer screen in August 2021, Dr. Paul Oosterhuis was prepared.

The regulators, the people who hold the registrar of health practitioners in Australia, had recently come out with a document informing practitioners they could only speak about the positives of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Saying anything negative or cautionary was not allowed.

Dr. Oosterhuis addressed the document in a tweet. Since the COVID crisis began on the other side of the world the year prior, he had become rather outspoken on social media about many pandemic protocols.

Now that the virus was finally at Australia’s doorstep, he had a lot to say. “The document is ridiculous,” he tweeted.

“In science,” he argued, “you can’t give informed consent without saying the pluses and minuses, the hazards and the benefits.”

A combination of tweets, Facebook posts and Facebook comments like this had already ruffled some feathers. During an event he refers to as “Facebook fear porn” in March of 2021, the registrar insisted the only way to save lives was with the jab.

“Please tell everyone to take vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin as an evidence-based approach for treatment,” he countered.

And rather quickly he was told, “This is misinformation. I’m going to report to you.”

So later that year, in August, when he tweeted New South Wales Health Minister Brad Hazard, he wasn’t surprised by what happened next. Mr. Hazard had rounded up 24,000 school kids at Sydney Arena to get the experimental COVID-19 injection. Dr. Oosterhuis was furious.

“Here’s the childhood infection fatality rate by age. Kids are more likely to die from sharp objects.”

He went even further. At that time, the infection fatality rate for kids was .00016%, effectively zero.

“If there is even one death among these 24,000 kids, you have a signal of harm. And if you’re not watching for it, you will be held culpable.”

Two hours later, he received a call. The Medical Council of New South Wales was hastily putting together an immediate suspension hearing under the “Immediate Action Powers for Public Protection” section 150 of Health Practitioner Regulation National Law.

The hearing would be based on 10 social media posts where Dr. Oosterhuis had stated there was no evidence for anything the government was doing, whether it be masks, mandates or jabs, specifically regarding antibody-dependent enhancement. These were the posts selected as high heresy and grounds for suspension.

So here he was, sitting in his living room on a computer screen, participating in what he considered to be an online kangaroo court, but eager to participate anyway. He wanted to put them on notice. Whether they were calling it a vaccine or gene therapy, it hadn’t undergone the safety testing it should have.

There were no long-term data on the vaccine’s safety or efficacy, and they had an obligation to say so.

But it turned out, they weren’t interested in anything he had to say about that. Likewise, they had no interest in debating the science he provided or the merit of what he had claimed in any of his posts.

In fact, they only had one question: “Are you vaccinated?”

The answer was, no. And for the first time, there was a press release with his name on it. Dr. Paul Oosterhuis was officially labeled a threat.

‘Flabbergasted’: a doctor could lose his license for tweeting about informed consent?

I first met Paul in my parents’ kitchen 11 years ago.

He had flown to America with my cousin to attend a family event. Traveling the world after college, my cousin had never made her way home. Instead, she settled in Australia, married Paul, and had children. It was my first time meeting them too.

Eleven years ago I was very involved in the vaccine-safety-medical-freedom-quest-for-justice movement, which was substantially smaller then. I had helped form The Canary Party, now called Health Choice, the first political organization whose mission was to fight for medical freedom, justice for the vaccine injured, and systemic change to the vaccine program in the United States.

I had raised money for various autism organizations, marched on Washington, repeatedly met with my legislators, appeared on television, spoken at conferences and written more articles than I can count as a contributing editor to the Age of Autism blog and for other publications.

In short, I was pretty outspoken myself. And given this was long before anyone could have ever imagined the COVID pandemic, or that a highly respected mainstream doctor from Australia would lose his license for tweeting about informed consent, we didn’t really discuss my views on autism causation.

In fact, I’m fairly certain I totally avoided it.

So when my mom texted me last year that Paul had caused quite a stir and lost his license to practice medicine because of his opinions about COVID policies and protocols, I was admittedly pretty flabbergasted.

I had learned over time that the majority of physicians didn’t look at their practices as being responsible for creating negative health outcomes. Clearly, it seemed, he wasn’t afraid to do so. I decided right then and there I needed to reach out.

‘Something’s not right’

Dr. Oosterhuis completed medical school at Sydney University, also training at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center and in Papua New Guinea. After completing his residency with rotations in internal medicine, cardiology, general surgery, neurosurgery and intensive care, he decided he liked critical care best. Anesthesiology was his preferred practice.

“I’ve seen more cardiac arrests than most people have had hot breakfasts,” he commented about his time in emergency medicine over the last three decades.

This explains why he was hyper-aware of what was happening in the world regarding COVID in hospitals long before he became labeled a public health threat. He comes at it from a critical care space.

At the start of his career 30 years ago, Paul believed the Australian system of medical care was the best. Clinicians could still observe, speculate and doubt about a patient’s condition and care, he told me. Hospitals were full of doctors, nurses and other health practitioners.

Over time, however, he began to see a shift. Hospitals became less occupied by medical experts and more occupied by administrators and bureaucrats.

“It drove me mad from the get-go, the never-ending increase in red tape and bureaucracy,” he said. “It all became more and more leftist, more and more ‘woke-ian’ over the last eight years or so.”

The first red flag came in 2016 when a sign on an operating door said that any physician without a flu shot had to wear a mask for the following 12 months. To him, it made no sense. He had looked at the literature and found no evidence that masks prevented influenza in emergency room departments.

On top of that, in 2015, he received the flu shot, not only ending up feeling terrible for one week afterward but also getting the worst flu of his life a few weeks after that. He wasn’t the least bit interested in trying it again.

“I couldn’t leave the bed. And then a few weeks later, I got the flu. And it was the worst flu I’ve ever had. So when I saw that notice on the operating door, I went, no. I’m going to look into this. There’s something not right here. It doesn’t add up.”

No matter, it seemed. Suddenly, all the hospital administration cared about was his vaccine status for his re-employment contract.

From there, the changes ramped up. Senior staff were being moved out of the decision-making tree. He started recognizing pollution in the journal space, conflicts of interest and questionable findings in published science. His faith in the scientific literature was being damaged. His faith in the medical system even more so. All of it was causing him great concern.

So when COVID came, he was early to the question, “Why are the doctors and nurses falling sick in northern Italy?” Surely, he thought, they had to have good quality PPE (personal protection equipment) like they did in Australia. Didn’t they?

To avoid the same crisis in Australia, he began speaking out. In his mind, a lack of quality PPE was a bureaucratic failure. He pointed out that Italy may have failed to prepare, but Australia had time to do so.

He started by asking for quantitative fit testing of their masks. He suggested alternatives when they refused. Alas, it fell on deaf ears.

“I could see there was no openness to anything I was suggesting.”

In January 2020, he tweeted the prime minister that doctors were going to hardware stores to get effective PPE. He was adamant they work on this problem, that medical staff have a safe work environment.

And that’s when the online attacks against him began.

Amid those attacks, and after pointing out that strangely, no masks had been given to busy clinics where people from hot spots like Iran and China were coming to, his medical director suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t turn up for his next list (of patients) if he were going to keep this up.

Before he even had the chance to reply, however, he had to go into isolation. A nurse he worked with was diagnosed with COVID.

While in quarantine, Dr. Oosterhuis remained in contact with his fellow doctors and nurses, none of whom could get testing. When an email came from the medical director claiming everyone had been tested and all had been negative, he knew for a fact it was a bald-faced lie.

“I had lost trust in the system by then,” he said. “They were lying. They were not acting logically. They were not working on the problem. They were not listening to solutions that would work. Something was very wrong.”

And then, the coup d’état. He saw the NFR (not for resuscitation) and intubation orders and got a clear sense they were heading toward something very dystopian. The paranoia of viral contamination was so strong, that they were just going to let people die. No one would be getting CPR.

‘Like water on a raincoat’

To counter the insanity, Dr. Oosterhuis began aggressively researching treatment protocols. If they weren’t going to help prevent people from getting sick, at least they could treat them, he reasoned.

That’s when he discovered things like taking zinc, hydroxychloroquine, quercetin and vitamin D could have a powerful effect.

“The things they censored were very instructive,” he said. “The truth could be found in whatever that was.”

For most of 2021, he continued to follow the research and speak out, telling anyone who would listen about options for treatment. Eerily, however, it was like they couldn’t hear it. Long before Robert Malone talked openly about mass formation psychosis, he claims he could see and feel it for himself.

“It was truly bizarre. [Suggestions for treatment] would hit them like water on someone covered in a raincoat,” Dr. Oosterhuis said. “It rolled right off them.”

Alas, it soon began to make sense. The gene therapy injection was coming. The document from the regulators released in March of 2021 confirmed it. Only the vaccine, they insisted, would be able to save everyone.

By August, challenging that narrative would cost him his license.

‘Beyond the scope of authority’

During his suspension, Dr. Oosterhuis attended several protests alongside hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens. He went to one in Melbourne with a half million people. He went to another and marched on Parliament House in Sydney with a half million more. He even attended Australia’s trucker protest. They had one, too.

Although the press refused to cover the demonstrations fairly, he describes the cooperation and camaraderie of the people as nothing he had ever experienced. Everyone was so happy to know they weren’t alone, he told me.

“We had the sense we were living through history and felt sorry for the people captured by the narrative and living in fear. Human rights, bodily autonomy, informed consent — none of that seemed to matter to them.”

At the protests, several people suggested a legal brief he could take to the Australian Supreme Court to challenge the Medical Council’s decision and restore his medical license. He wasn’t going to be able to debate the merit of his social media posts, that much had been made clear.

But he was possibly going to be able to prove they didn’t follow the law in making their decision. The council had acted ultra vires, it seemed — or, beyond their powers.

He summoned the Supreme Court and Medical Council for judicial review, representing himself. Once again he found himself in his living room on a computer screen, this time in his pajama bottoms, with people trying to ruin his livelihood and reputation.

The first time around, he admits, he was nervous. By the 12th hearing, however, he was a warrior ready for battle. And on May 10, 2022, he emerged victorious. All anonymous complaints, and the suspension of his medical license, had been lifted. He had won his case.

Dr. Oosterhuis wasn’t entirely satisfied, however, as his true goal had been getting medical freedom back for all Australians. There was still work to do, he claimed. He had really hoped to get a ruling stating they had acted unlawfully, not just out of their jurisdiction. It would have overturned all suspensions — and potentially the regime of terror against doctors with it.

‘Give me my orders’

Paul now considers himself a soldier in the war for medical freedom. He sees himself as a part of the machine trying to get sanity back in science and to protect the public. In the environment of censorship and propaganda, he believes, you no longer have a democracy. Informed consent becomes impossible.

We talked for well over an hour about the parallels of our journeys for the same things, and how even though he’s later to the party than me, he’s in it for life. He insists he won’t stop fighting until they stop injecting our kids.

He also admits he just wasn’t awake. He took all vaccines without question until his horrible experience with the flu shot in 2015. He has also had to reevaluate past practices and assumptions.

Having resuscitated many SIDS babies over the years he realized, “Never once had it crossed my mind to ask, ‘When was their most recent vaccination?’”

Likewise, he has dug deeply into the literature on vaccine safety, or rather, the lack thereof. He understands now how they manipulate and censor science if they don’t like the outcomes, specifically citing Paul Thomas and James Lyons-Weiler’s study of the vaccinated versus unvaccinated and how the publisher pulled it, not a doctor or scientist.

“They don’t like having control groups,” he said. “One of the most sinister agendas in this whole thing is they never study any of these agents versus a placebo control.”

He went further adding, “And we know why. Because it would show it’s an unmitigated disaster.”

Paul went on to describe just how deeply this experience has affected him personally. Besides the trauma of losing his medical license after a stellar record of 30 years in practice, and for social media posts nonetheless, it has helped him formulate a new personal philosophy.

“I personally will not have another vaccine in this body in this lifetime,” he told me.

“I had made an oath a year and a half ago that that was my decision,” he said. “And so then the question was, how am I going to live in this world where they seem determined to inject every man, woman, child and animal on the planet with this thing? Like I say, I’m opposed to it. I’m a soldier. And I am opposed to it to my death.”

‘Real threat to the whole of humanity’

Dr. Oosterhuis hasn’t returned to the hospitals where he once worked. For one, they still have their vaccine mandates. And two, far too many of his colleagues have chosen to stay asleep, he feels. He can’t go back to it pretending none of this is real.

Instead, he spends his time now speaking out. In addition to being interviewed globally by people such as Steve Kirsch, Pierre Kory, and Peter McCullough, he has created a Substack with a substantial following. Topics have included the increase in the all-cause mortality signal; fraudulent PCR tests; and the shocking damage to fertility we see happening all over the world.

“In country after country, you see nine months after the roll out (of the vaccine), a collapse in birth rates, a massive increase in infertility, and problems with women’s cycles,” he said. “This is a real threat to the whole of humanity.”

He’s equally concerned about the power grab of the World Health Organization and other health agencies. When I commented that without liability, pharmaceutical companies have no incentive for restraint, he took it a step further. They don’t just lack an incentive for restraint, he countered. They are now incentivized to create disasters.

“It’s criminality that’s become an existential threat to humanity. We don’t have any choice but to push back.”

‘I hoped I was wrong’

From the very beginning, Paul insists that he wanted to be wrong. He wanted to be wrong about it all. He was simply putting questions out into the digital universe.

What if they tried a different mask? Where was the proper PPE? Why was there such resistance to treatment protocols? Why were they giving 24,000 students an experimental injection for a disease they’d never die from? None of it made any sense.

“I hoped I was wrong. I really did,” he said. “But within days I heard a report of a high school student who had died, and I heard there was going to be a service. Then there were other reports of deaths in the 24,000. At the time of my tweet, I prayed I was wrong. I would have been happy to be wrong. But my role was to put them on notice. I didn’t want them to be able to say, ‘we didn’t know.’ It’s on public record, they did.”

When top officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration resigned last year over the pressure to push for boosters, Paul says their parting letter didn’t pull any punches. The danger was not just to the credibility of the COVID-19 vaccine, these officials claimed, but to the credibility of all vaccines. Paul believes they are right, and that accountability is coming, even if it’s slow.

Meanwhile, his trust in the government, medicine, science, journalism and the media has been destroyed. He carries a sense of disgust that many of us have already carried for some time, and he is adamant that we have to rebuild our institutions from the ground up. We need true science, true integrity and an end to conflicts of interest.

“Public-private partnerships sound great until you put a jackboot on it,” he says.

Most of all, he insists, we need bodily autonomy.

“If we don’t have bodily autonomy, we are already enslaved.”

‘A coincidence theorist’

Paul tells me that he is not a conspiracy theorist but rather a coincidence theorist. I laugh, only because the name of my book, which he hadn’t known, is “An Unfortunate Coincidence: A Mother’s Life inside the Autism Controversy” (Skyhorse 2016).

Both of us notice the coincidences. When they become less and less probable, “you start to think, maybe this is the way reality actually works.”

We commiserate for a little while over the figurative costs of being in this fight, and how neither one of us could have ever imagined being a part of it, or really ever having needed to be. Science was once sacred, I remind him. He agrees, but pushes back.

“The fight is here. It’s now,” he said. “The ultimate battle is here. And as big as the cost is of speaking out, the cost of not speaking out is exponentially larger. And the cost gets greater every day that passes.”

I am inspired again to pick up my proverbial sword. It has been almost six years since I have actively spoken out or regularly written anything. Fifteen years in the fight prior affected me in profoundly personal ways that required a reprieve.

And yet, I know he is right. The fight is here. It is time to get back in the ring. I thank him for reminding me of that and all he is doing.

“For decades, I have fought for everyone’s lives, and I’m still doing it. I’m not doing it in the operation theater, but I’m doing it on a different scale now. The only way you can protect those closest to you is to end this for everyone.”

Paul and I finish the conversation. It is late for me in Chicago while he is in Sydney. Once again, he is in his living room over a computer screen, in the same space where he lost his medical license and then took on the Australian Supreme Court to regain it.

In the same place he intends to save many more lives.

Even in his pajamas.

Julie Obradovic is a contributing editor to the Age of Autism blog, a founding member of The Canary Party and the author of “An Unfortunate Coincidence: A Mother’s Life inside the Autism Controversy.”

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.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Australia, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment

UK Government Justifies Using Royal Air Force To Monitor Online COVID Speech, Calls “Disinformation” a “Serious Threat”

Even lawmakers and journalists had their speech monitored

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 12, 2023

The Mail on Sunday reported that UK Royal Air Force (RAF) intelligence agents participated in a covert operation run by Whitehall, which was suspected of surveilling private citizens speaking out against Covid lockdown measures. This secretive operation was led by The Army’s “information warfare brigade,” tasked with analyzing online commentary—a charge the Ministry of Defence repeatedly rebuffed publicly until the recent reveal.

Documentation furnished by this publication suggests the Armed Forces, particularly those located at RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire, assisted various government bodies, such as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport’s Counter Disinformation Unit and the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit. Their engagement in these initiatives was much more substantial than formerly known, per this latest revelation.

The clandestine operations in focus took on the challenge of countering “disinformation” and “harmful” narratives throughout the pandemic. However, they also garnered severe backlash for allegedly gathering data from lawful social media posts that challenged the Government’s lockdown maneuvers.

Prominent public figures, like David Davis MP, who voiced skepticism over the Covid mortality rates’ computed projections, and journalist Peter Hitchens, were the subjects of government reports. Insiders from the defense department conceded that the military’s contribution to such operations might be portrayed as spying on UK citizens, a segment from the furnished documents revealed.

However, the MoD alleged that the absence of Armed Forces support in overseeing online discourse could catalyze the propagation of “misinformation,” which could cause harm.

Jake Hurfurt, representing the advocacy group Big Brother Watch, didn’t mince his words, slamming these activities asking for a review on how the government monitored the British people throughout the pandemic period. He stated to the Mail on Sunday, “The revelations that the RAF as well as the Army spied on the British people during the pandemic is yet more evidence that the MoD misled the public about the role of its psyops troops in 2020.”

The government responded to these allegations stating, “Online disinformation is a serious threat, which is why in the pandemic we brought together expertise from across government to monitor disinformation about Covid.”

They alleged that all data collected were from public sources and the units did not target individuals or interfere with public discussions.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

Biden Announces He’s Signed ‘Another $200 Million Drawdown’ From Pentagon for Ukraine

By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 12.12.2023

US President Joe Biden announced during a Tuesday joint meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he has “just signed another $200 million drawdown” from the Pentagon for Ukraine.

Biden used the “drawdown” provision in the Foreign Assistance Act that allows him to provide Defense Department stockpiles to countries without congressional approval. The $200 million package is the 53rd such drawdown package provided to Ukraine since March 2022, in addition to billions of dollars in aid authorized by Congress.

The announcement comes as Congress remains deadlocked on authorizing more aid to Ukraine. Biden has asked Congress to provide $60 billion in aid to Ukraine in a funding package that also includes aid for Israel and money to secure the southern US border.

However, some Republicans have asked for more concessions on the border, including changes to the asylum system, a non-starter for many Democrats, in exchange for increased funding in Ukraine. The House of Representatives also passed a standalone aid bill for Israel, which the Senate has refused to consider.

Zelensky visited Washington in what has been described by US media as a “last-ditch effort” to convince Congress to authorize more aid to his country. Part of that visit included separate meetings with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Both Johnson and Schumer said their meetings with Zelensky went well but had different opinions on the details of their meetings.

Johnson criticized the Biden administration for not articulating how Ukraine can win against Russia. “The Biden administration appears to be asking for billions of dollars without specifics, without a clear strategy for winning, and without the answers I think the American people deserve,” he said at a news conference following his meeting with Zelensky.

Meanwhile, Schumer, who has been extremely hawkish on Ukraine since the start of the special military operation, claimed that Zelensky explained Ukraine’s path to victory to him.

“He [Zelensky] described in detail what kind of help was needed and how it would help win. Even many of our Republican politicians were saying that we were winning this war,” Schumer claimed.

Schumer said he called Johnson and asked him to keep the House open after this week so the $61 billion aid package can be approved.

“Last night, I spoke with Speaker Johnson and urged him to keep the House in session a little longer to give the supplemental a chance to come together,” Schumer said at a briefing.

The much smaller aid package announced by Biden on Tuesday uses an authorization provided in the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) which allows the president to provide foreign aid using stocks the Defense Department has on hand without congressional approval.

This latest drawdown is at least the 53rd drawdown ordered by the Biden administration since the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.

The last drawdown, costing $175 million, was ordered by the Biden White House last week.

According to US media, the latest package includes High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), anti-armor systems, artillery rounds, demolition munitions, small arms ammunition, high-speed anti-radiation missiles, generators and spare parts, among other equipment.

US media also reported the Defense Department has about $4.4 billion in weapons remaining that it can use through drawdown authorizations.

According to a 2004 Department of Defense Security Cooperation handbook on the drawdown procedure, all equipment sent using drawdown authorization must be replaced with operations and maintenance funds already part of the Defense Department budget.

During the meeting with Biden, Zelensky told reporters that he wants to use the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to fight the conflict if Congress will not provide more aid. When asked if his country could win against Russia without aid from Congress, Zelensky reportedly did not answer verbally, shrugging his shoulders instead.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Joe Biden, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Israeli military abducts Gaza hospital director after he decries siege

Press TV – December 12, 2023

The Israeli military has abducted the director of a main hospital in the northern Gaza Strip after he decried the occupying regime’s days-long siege of the facility and its draconian and deadly repercussions.

Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahiya, was arrested and taken to an “unknown destination outside the hospital,” Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

The hospital has been under siege by Israeli tanks for the past four days. Earlier on Tuesday, health officials reported that Israeli forces had stormed the hospital, rounding up Palestinian men for interrogation.

Before his abduction, Kahlout had strongly criticized the siege laid on the hospital, saying it had caused the situation at the facility to become “very difficult.”

“No electricity, water, or food at the hospital,” Kahlout had bemoaned, and noted that “three children at the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen.”

“Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital,” he had also said, announcing that the Israeli military had shelled the facility’s maternity ward and water system, forcing the staff to rely on groundwater.

The Israeli military was sustaining its siege and attacks on the hospital, while the facility was accommodating “65 injuries, including 12 children in intensive care, six children with serious injuries, and 3,000 displaced people,” the hospital director had said.

The remarks came amid an ongoing war by the Israeli regime against the entire Gaza, which Tel Aviv began on October 7 in response to an operation staged by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

Nearly 18,500 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks, most of them women and children.

Also on Tuesday, the UN said only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip were partially functional as Israeli occupation forces were targeting medical centers and staff amid heavy bombardment of the besieged territory.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report that the services provided to patients at operational hospitals were “limited” as the facilities had run out of bed capacity.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Euro-Med Monitor: “In Gaza, Israel’s Army Replicates the Crimes Committed by Zionist Gangs in 1948”

IMEMC | December 12, 2023

An urgent international investigation must be opened into horrific crimes committed by the Israeli army during its land incursions into the Gaza Strip, including field executions, torture, and rape threats, said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, citing testimonies collected from newly-released civilians.

Euro-Med Monitor said that Israeli army forces are reenacting the same crimes committed by Zionist gangs during the 1948 Nakba, which resulted in the collective displacement of Palestinians.

These crimes include premeditated murder, setting fire to Palestinian homes and properties, torture, and insulting and humiliating detained civilians.

The human rights organisation highlighted the Israeli forces’ brutal storming of civilian homes in crowded residential neighbourhoods during the ongoing genocide.

Members of Israel’s military terrorized and beat residents, plus arrested hundreds of them, including women, children, and sick people.

According to testimonies gathered by Euro-Med Monitor from several detainees who were newly released, the Israeli forces took the detainees from their homes, stripped them naked, and attacked them with machine guns, electric cables, and cold water.

Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Aslim told the Euro-Med team that the Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in Al-Shuja’iya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, after they were trapped for an entire week without food and water.

He stated that over the past few days, Israeli forces killed everyone in his neighbourhood who tried to leave their home, including Aslim’s brother.

Israeli forces later stormed his family’s house, said Aslim, and destroyed its contents with heavy gunfire. His family members were gathered naked and handcuffed before being violently assaulted and beaten.

Aslim still does not know what happened to his mother and sisters, who were captured and kidnapped by the Israeli army.

The Euro-Med Monitor team has gathered statements and testimonies about Israeli special forces raiding refugee centres in Gaza City and its northern areas, which housed thousands of displaced Palestinians.

These raids have involved the execution of young men who were shot with live ammunition at point-blank range.

Displaced people at the Cairo School, which houses hundreds of displaced people west of Gaza City, told Euro-Med Monitor’s team that several civilian cars carrying Israeli special forces stormed the school yard on Friday December 8, killing and wounding a number of unarmed young men.

According to the testimonies, the Israeli special forces ordered all of the men in the school to quickly gather and line up opposite them. Four of the men were executed, and the others were arrested after a brief interrogation.

Muhammad Abu Mustafa said that three individuals—two from the Abdul Ghafour and Abu Zaid families and one from his own family—were shot and killed by Israeli snipers after they went to assist a neighbour in Al-Shuja’iya neighbourhood. The victims were left bleeding to death.

Similar violations were reported on Saturday by other internally displaced people at the UNRWA-run Khalifa Bin Zayed School, in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia.

They reported that the Israeli forces arrested dozens of men and minors in the school. The detainees were stripped of their clothes, bound, and taken to another location, where they were interrogated and tortured. Some of them were released, while the rest were kept in custody.

One of the released men, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they were ordered to take off their clothes after being handcuffed and blindfolded.

They were then put in trucks and taken to the seashore, where they were kept shackled for about 19 hours.

According to the young man, they were subjected to insults, severe beatings, threats of being shot in the head, and had numbers written on their hands. They were also deprived of drinking water for many hours.

Upon their release, they were transferred naked to Salah al-Din Street, south of Gaza City, where the soldiers ordered them to walk on foot towards the central areas of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli random arrests also targeted a young disabled man who suffers from hemiplegia.

The young man had been displaced from Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood in Gaza City to a relative’s apartment in the city centre before he and his brother were arrested; their fate remains unknown.

Ms. M.Z., a resident of Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood who was displaced to Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the southern part of the Strip, said that an Israeli soldier pointed his gun at her head and threatened to kill her even though she had told him she was five months pregnant.

The soldier ordered her to take off her clothes and threatened to rape her.

As it continues to document testimonies from victims of the Israeli army’s crimes and random arrests, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor renewed its call for an urgent international investigation into Israel’s violations and crimes against civilians, and called on the United Nations to assume its responsibilities and provide a safe passage for the displaced to use to evacuate.

Israel is required by international humanitarian law to take all reasonable steps to prevent harm civilians and to guarantee their safe shelter.

The Geneva-based rights organization emphasized, however, that civilians who choose to stay in areas designated for evacuation do not forfeit their protection, and cannot be singled out or targeted for any reason.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Iran: EU sanctions others, looks the other way on Gaza genocide, ethnic cleansing

Press TV – December 12, 2023

Iran has denounced the EU’s recent sanctions on its defense industry over “baseless” allegations of drone delivery to Russia, slamming the block for turning a blind eye on Israel’s “genocide” unfolding in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement on Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani “strongly condemned” European Council’s “destructive actions” and imposing sanctions against 6 persons and 5 entities involved in Iran’s development and production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

“The desperate efforts of some malicious actors with political motives in order to use the inefficient sanctions and spread of false information only create more self-made obstacles in the path of relations between the Islamic Republic and Europe and prove ineffective,” he said.

Kan’ani said the EU talks about international law and the United Nations Charter, while it is “practically turning a blind eye on Israel’s war crimes” and violation human rights and international humanitarian laws.

He further criticized EU for not making any tangible efforts to stop Israel’s “unquestionable genocide and ethnic cleansing” against the “oppressed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Kan’ani also reaffirmed the Islamic Republic’s supports for efforts aimed at finding a solution to the Ukraine military conflict through peaceful means.

Tehran says it reserves the right to retaliate after the European Union imposed new sanctions against Iran in connection with the allegation, he concluded.

The European Union and the US have long accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine.

The Council’s sanctions, announced on Monday, imposed restrictive measures against the Shahed drone-maker Shakad Sanat Asmari, its CEO, deputy CEO and chief scientist.

The other companies hit were the Baharestan Kish Company, Saad Sazeh Faraz Sharif, the Sarmad Electronic Sepahan Company and the Kimia Part Sivan Company.

The US has also imposed similar sanctions on a number of entities and individuals based in Iran and other countries, accusing them of supporting Tehran’s drone development.

Iran has repeatedly rejected the West’s claim, saying it has not sold any weapons to Russia for the the war against Ukraine, and asked the West to offer evidence for the allegation.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | European Union, Iran, Israel, Palestine | Leave a comment

Canadian mayor backs Israel’s actions no matter how many children die

RT | December 12, 2023

The mayor of the Montreal suburb of Hampstead Jeremy Levi has said that, regardless of the number of children’s lives taken, he would continue to support Israel in its ongoing offensive in Gaza.

More than 18,200 people have so far died in the nine-week bombardment of Gaza, health officials in the besieged enclave said on Monday, as Israel’s retaliatory campaign in response to Hamas’ October 7 cross-border attack continues at pace. Israeli officials say that 1,147 of its citizens were killed in the October assault, while another 240 were seized as hostages.

But as international condemnation of Israel’s siege of Gaza swells, Levi – who was elected last year to govern the predominantly Jewish Hampstead community – has said that Israel’s military offensive must continue until “good” prevails over “evil.”

“I’m not calling for a ceasefire,” Levi said in a video posted to social media on Monday by Yves Engler, a vocal critic of Israel. “I want the hostages home, but I’m not calling for a ceasefire.”

The mayor added about the increasing death toll in Gaza, particularly deaths of children: “I would never support [the killing of children], it’s terrible. But Israel has to do whatever they have to do to protect the security of their own people.”

The Palestinian ministry of health has said that about 70% of those killed in the enclave since Israel’s offensive began are women and children under the age of 18. United Nations humanitarian officials said late last month that about 160 children are being killed each day in Gaza, or one child every ten minutes.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder added to reporters in Geneva in November that conditions are deteriorating further, and forecasted a deepening humanitarian crisis “if youngsters continue to have restricted access to water and sanitation in Gaza.”

“Hamas must be eradicated completely,” Levi continued in his video clip. “[The collateral death toll] is terrible, but there is no other way. My heart goes out to all the innocent people who have suffered great loss in this tragedy, but good needs to prevail over evil.”

Asked if he would continue to support Israel if 100,000 children were killed, Levi said: “You can give me all sorts of numbers, my answer is going to be the same: Israel needs to eradicate Hamas.”

Last month, Levi imposed a bylaw in the Hampstead community which would see anyone who tore down a poster of missing Israeli citizens fined CAN$1,000 – with the money being donated directly to Israel.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Canada, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israeli regime turning to Western mercenary groups to back its war on Gaza

By Reza Javadi | Press TV | December 12, 2023

Apart from the lavish military aid offered by the United States and Europe, the Israeli military is turning to Western mercenary groups in its genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.

In a recent interview with Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Pedro Diaz Flores, a notorious Spanish mercenary, revealed that the Israeli regime is recruiting Private Military Companies (PMCs) to achieve its interests in the besieged territory.

He revealed that “many” mercenary groups have joined Israel’s army, which pays them “very well.”

“So I came for the economy, for money. They pay very well, they offer good equipment and the work is calm. It is 3,900 euros [$4,187] per week, complementary missions aside,” Flores said.

Flores, who fought alongside neo-Nazis in Ukraine, spoke of his group’s assistance to Israeli forces.

“We only provide security support to arms convoys or the troops of the Israeli armed forces that are in the Gaza Strip,” Flores said, confirming the presence of PMCs in Gaza.

“We are in charge of the security of the checkpoints and access control on the borders of Gaza and Jordan. There are many PMCs here and they share the work. Traditionally they have guarded border terminals between Eliat and Aqaba.”

According to the images posted by a leading American PMC, Forward Observations Group (FOG), the American PMCs seem to be active in the occupied Palestinian territories aiding the Israeli regime.

On their social media accounts, FOG posted numerous images and stories showing its recruits in Palestine, surrounded by a large cache of weapons and sporting combat gear.

Wearing the American flag on their uniforms, the mercenaries’ social media accounts show that they are stationed alongside the Gaza border in the occupied territories.

In a YouTube video posted back in January, the group revealed its presence on the frontlines of the Ukraine war, assisting the Ukrainian forces in their war against Russian forces.

On its social media channels and website, FOG has advertised its gear through its training videos.

The founder of FOG is US mercenary and ex-US paratrooper, Derrick Bales, who has taken heat for his association with Vadim Lapaev, a member of the far-right Azov Battalion in Ukraine.

Bales, the former US infantry soldier who also served in Afghanistan, apologized but downplayed the radical aspects of those Ukrainian fighters.

Lapaev was quoted as saying by Vice News that he regretted his past association with neo-Nazis.

Apart from unconventional forces, the US has deployed more than 15,000 military troops to the occupied territories since the regime launched its fresh aggression against Palestinians on October 7.

Deployments disclosed by the Pentagon back in October also include two US aircraft carriers and their associated escort ships, in addition to the repositioning of an amphibious task force made up of about 4,000 US Marines and sailors.

The task force of sailors and Marines embarked aboard the USS Bataan and two other warships, includes an infantry battalion of about 900 combat personnel, F-35B fighter jets, armored vehicles and other weapons.

Apart from billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli regime, the US military still continues to ship weapons and has pledged to provide more missile interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome military system, small-diameter bombs and other GPS-guided weapons, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed recently.

In this regard, the US is covertly providing 2,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs to Israel’s air force to be used against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), some 100 of the BLU-109 bombs – designed to penetrate hardened surfaces to reach underground targets such as military bunkers – have been sent to Tel Aviv.

The bombs, which carry a warhead weighing more than 900 kilograms, are capable of penetrating hardened structures such as concrete before exploding, causing heavy casualties.

The covert arms transfers are being reported when the US claims that it is urging Israel to limit civilian casualties in its military campaign in Gaza. However, the US-provided weapons have been the main cause of high civilian casualties across Gaza.

According to US officials, an airstrike that hit the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in the initial days of the war that killed over 100 people was conducted using US-provided bombs.

According to another latest report, phosphorus shells used by Israeli forces in an October attack on a Lebanese village were also provided by the US.

The revelation came after US officials expressed “concern” over the regime’s use of white phosphorous, which human rights campaigners say should be investigated as a war crime.

Meanwhile, some Russian news agencies and several experts have reported about mercenaries leaving Ukrainian soil and heading to the occupied territories to aid the regime forces against the Palestinian resistance movement.

“Assistance and attention to Kiev are noticeably decreasing due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which cannot but worry the Ukrainian authorities,” a Russian news agency posted on Telegram.

“The transfer of Foreign Legion fighters to participate in the war on the side of the Israel Defense Forces can greatly affect the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” wrote another X account.

“Is the West ready to close the Ukraine project and devote all its attention to a new conflict in the Middle East?”

In this regard, the deployment of mercenaries in Gaza raises questions about accountability and the role of the international community, as it exacerbates the suffering of Palestinians.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

‘Let it be a tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the martyrdom of the Gaza intellectual

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 12, 2023

What is taking place in Gaza is meant for the history books: an epic tale of a small nation under a long, decades-long brutal siege, facing one of the greatest military powers in the world. And yet, it refuses to be defeated.

Not even the legendary tenacity of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace characters can be compared to the heroism of Gazans, living over a tiny stretch of land while subsisting on the precipice of calamity, even long before the Israeli genocide.

But if Gaza has already been declared uninhabitable by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as early as 2020, how is it able to cope with everything that took place since then, particularly the grueling and unprecedented Israeli war, starting on 7 October?

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on 9 October. In fact, Israel carried out far greater war crimes than the choking of 2.3 million people.

“No place is safe, not even hospitals and schools,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on X on 11 November. Things have become far worse since that statement was made.

And, because Gazans refused to leave their homeland, the 365 square kilometres – approximately 141 square miles – turned into a hunting ground of human beings, who were killed in every way imaginable. Those who did not die under the rubble of their homes, were gunned down by attack helicopters while attempting to escape from one region to another, the rest are now dying from disease and hunger.

Not a single category of Palestinians has been spared this horrible fate: the children, the women, the educators, the doctors and medics, the rescuers, even the artists and the poets. Each one of these groups has an ever-growing list of names, updated daily.

Fully aware of the extent of its war crimes in Gaza, Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s storytellers – its journalists and their families, the bloggers, the intellectuals and even the social media influencers.

While Palestinians insist that their collective pain – and resistance – must be televised, Israel is doing everything in its power to eliminate the storytellers.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement on 6 December that 75 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the beginning of the war.

The above number does not include many citizen journalists and writers who do not necessarily operate in an official capacity. It also does not include members of their families, like the family of journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh or the family of Moamen Al Sharafi.

Aware that their intellectuals are targets for Israel, Gazans have, for years, attempted to produce yet more storytellers. In 2015, a group of young journalists and students formed a group they called ‘We Are Not Numbers’. “We Are Not Numbers tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights,” WANN described itself.

READ: Silencing the journalists

A co-founder of the group, Professor Refaat Alareer, is a beloved Palestinian educator from Gaza. A young intellectual, whose brilliance is only matched by his kindness, Alareer believed that the story of Palestine, Gaza in particular, should be told by the Palestinians themselves, whose relationship to the Palestinian discourse cannot be marginal.

“As Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and tell her stories. For Palestine,” Alareer wrote in his contribution in the volume Light in Gaza: Writing Born of Fire.

He edited several books, including Gaza Writes Back and Gaza Unsilenced, which also allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he wrote in Gaza Writes Back.

Alareer reportedly refused to leave northern Gaza, even after Israel managed to isolate it from the rest of the Strip, subjecting it to countless massacres.

As if aware of the fate awaiting him, Alareer tweeted this line, along with a poem he had penned: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”

On 7 December, the writers’ collective, We Are Not Numbers, declared that their beloved founder, Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza.

Alareer was not the only member of the collective who was killed by Israel. On 14 October, Yousef Dawas and on 24 November, Mohammed Zaher Hammo, were killed, with members of their families, in Israeli strikes on various parts of the Gaza Strip.

In one of the workshops I did with the group, prior to the war, Yousef Dawas stood out, and not only because of his unusually long hair, but because of his clever and pointed questions.

He wanted to tell the stories of ordinary Gazans, so that other ordinary people around the world can appreciate the everyday struggle of the Palestinian people, their righteous quest for justice and their hope for a better future.

These storytellers were all killed by Israel, with the hope that the stories will die with them. But Israel will fail because the collective story is bigger than all of us. A nation that has produced the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Basil Al-Araj and Refaat Alareer will always produce great intellectuals, who will serve the historic role of telling the story of Palestine and her liberation.

This is the last poem shared by Alareer.

“If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.”

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Ukrainian trial demonstrates 2014 Maidan massacre was false flag

By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | December 11, 2023

A massacre of protesters during the 2014 Maidan coup set the stage for the ouster of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Now, an explosive trial in Kiev has produced evidence the killings were a false flag designed to trigger regime change.

Two police officers charged with the mass shooting of opposition protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014 have been released after a Ukrainian court determined the fatal shots in the infamous massacre were fired from an opposition-controlled building.

On October 18 2023, Ukraine’s Sviatoshyn District Court determined that of the five officers on trial, one would be acquitted outright, while another was sentenced to time served for alleged “abuse of power.”

The remaining three, who no longer live in Ukraine, were convicted in absentia on 31 counts of murder and 44 counts of attempted murder. This, under a Supreme Court opinion stipulating suspects can be held collectively responsible for the actions of a group deemed criminal.

The verdict means no one will face jail time, or be in any way punished for their alleged role in the infamous Maidan massacre, which saw over 100 protesters killed, triggered an avalanche of international condemnation and led directly to the downfall of President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled the country mere days later.

The trial began in Kiev in 2016, but the case languished for years. Matters were further complicated in 2019, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traded all five of the accused for prisoners held by Donbas separatists. Two subsequently returned on a voluntary basis to have their day in court.

Unsurprisingly, the verdict has triggered outrage among victims’ families, and prosecution lawyers say they plan to appeal. By contrast, the mainstream media has so far remained eerily indifferent. In an apparent attempt to distort the trial’s outcome, several outlets — including Reuters — simply referred to the court “sentencing” the officers in their headlines. The Kyiv Post went as far as falsely claiming all five had been found “guilty” of “Maidan crimes.”

But there is more to the story than these outlets have let on. As even the Western-funded Kyiv Independent acknowledged, “a former top investigator” previously tasked with probing the massacre said the verdict followed years of deliberate sabotage by Ukrainian authorities, who “have done their best to make sure there are no real results.”

The question of why officials in Kiev would seek to sabotage the probe has been largely ignored by legacy media outlets. But the verdict offers some highly revealing clues.

‘Unknown persons’ behind killing

Littered throughout the 1,000,000 word document are passages demonstrating conclusively that the sniper fire emanated from buildings controlled by the opposition to Yanukovych. Collectively, these excerpts strongly suggest the Maidan massacre was a false flag carried out by nationalist elements who aimed to ensure the president’s ouster.

The evidence “was quite sufficient to conclude categorically that on the morning of February 20, 2014, persons with weapons, from which the shots were fired, were in the premises of the Hotel Ukraina,” the court found.

Another section reveals “Hotel Ukraina” was “territory… not controlled by law enforcement agencies at that time.” Numerous video recordings show that before, during, and after the massacre, the building was overrun by the far-right opposition party Svoboda, whose leaders used the premises to coordinate their anti-Yanukovych activities on the streets below.

In at least 28 of the 128 shootings considered during the trial, the court ruled that whether “due to the lack of information, the incompleteness or contradictory nature of the submitted data,” the “involvement of law enforcement officers has not been proven,” and that “other unknown persons cannot be ruled out.”

Furthermore, the verdict effectively ruled out any involvement of Russian security and intelligence services in the massacre, a conspiracy theory promoted heavily by pro-Maidan elements.

“The ‘Russian trace’ was not confirmed after examining the relevant documents,” the court found. It concluded that those individuals who were suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, and were being “constantly monitored,” did not have “any participation in the events on the street.”

For Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, a University of Ottawa political science professor who has spent years documenting overwhelming evidence of opposition responsibility for the massacre, such findings are a long-overdue vindication of his research. In comments to The Grayzone, he explained that the conviction of three police officers in absentia for the murder of 28 Maidan protesters and attempted murder of 36 was “based on a single fabricated forensic ballistic examination.”

The flawed “forensic examination of bullets reversed [the] results of 40 other ballistic examinations” taken previously — every one of which, Katchanovski notes, “showed bullets of Berkut police Kalashnikovs did not match those retrieved from bodies of killed Maidan protesters.”

In the end, “the trial produced an extraordinary volume of evidence proving protesters were shot at from various buildings controlled by pro-Maidan elements,” he says, pointing to the “over 100 witnesses, including 51 anti-government activists injured during the shooting, [who] testified to having been shot from these areas, or seeing snipers located there.”

Elsewhere, the verdict rejected a 3D-model reconstruction of the shooting of three Maidan activists, produced by a New York City-based “unconventional architecture practice” named SITU. This bogus analysis, which was financed to the tune of $100,000 by the Kiev branch of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, was heavily promoted by The New York Times and other Western media outlets and held up as definitive proof that Ukrainian security forces were responsible for the deaths. But the SITU model changed the location of victim’s wounds — from the side or back of their body to the front — and altered the angles of the bullets’ trajectory to fraudulently convict police for their murders.

As Katchanovski explains, “This is deliberate fraud and disinformation.”

“SITU’s bogus modeling allowed The New York Times and many others to deny the existence of Maidan snipers, and brand as ‘conspiracy theory’ any suggestion the massacre was a ‘false flag,’” he says.

But if the Berkhut officers were not responsible for the dozens of deaths that day, the question remains: who was?

Maidan killers move to Odessa

In August 2023, the New York Times revealed that the Ukrainian gunrunner Serhiy Pashinksy, once openly condemned by Zelensky himself as a “criminal,” had become the top private supplier of arms to Ukraine. Pashinsky sourced grenades, artillery shells and rockets “through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then sold, bought and resold the arms “until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most.” The hustle has enriched him to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Pashinsky, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, was a central figure in the Maidan coup. As The Grayzone subsequently revealed, he has been accused by three Georgian mercenaries of personally orchestrating the February 2014 massacre, supplying the weapons used and personally picking targets to be shot. When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about these allegations, he threatened to have his associates track them down at home and “tear them apart.”

During the Maidan trial, defense lawyers made prominent mention of those same Georgian mercenary snipers. Along with Maidan leaders, and Western-backed fascist paramilitary Right Sector, the snipers were also implicated in the May 2014 Odessa massacre, a gruesome incident in which scores of Russian-speaking anti-Maidan protesters were forcibly herded into the city’s Trade Unions House, which was then set alight. In all, 46 died due to burn injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, and attempts to escape the horrors by jumping out of windows. Non-fatal casualties reportedly totaled around 200.

Katchanovski says that as with Maidan, evidence points to the role of an extremely well-organized plot to carry out the Odessa killings:

“A Georgian sniper who confessed their Maidan massacre role in an Israeli documentary also revealed one of the massacre’s organizers dispatched them to Odessa right before the attack on separatists there.”

Post-coup, coverup after coverup

From the beginning of the Maidan trial, witnesses and prosecutors were subjected by far-right Ukrainian figures to a campaign of intimidation. During proceedings, Neo-Nazi C14 and Azov activists stormed the courtroom, attacked defendants, and placed tires outside the court in an apparent threat to burn the building down. The presiding judge was even beaten by a Maidan activist.

“Covert pressure from Zelensky’s administration and the far-right is likely much greater than what we have seen publicly,” Katchanovski commented to The Grayzone. “Ukraine’s judiciary isn’t independent. Zelensky’s administration routinely and openly interferes in proceedings, and even dismissed the entire Constitutional Court. It’s a very difficult situation for the judges and jury. There were direct threats from the far-right to convict the accused.”

Accordingly, some wounded protesters who initially testified to the presence of snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings later revoked their accounts. They subsequently admitted the prosecution met with them privately, to discuss what they’d said on the witness stand. For Katchanovski, “this is proof the coverup goes to the top of the Ukrainian government.”

Many Ukrainians, especially in the East, have held this same suspicion since Ukraine’s post-Maidan nationalist coup government adopted a wide-ranging amnesty law in 2014. That legislation granted Maidan protesters blanket immunity from prosecution for every serious crime imaginable, including murder, terrorism, and seizure of power. The law also prohibited official investigation of any anti-government agitator for these crimes, and ordered the destruction of all relevant evidence that had previously been collected.

A high-ranking official within Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Office has since admitted that prosecutors handling the Maidan massacre investigation and trial were covertly selected and appointed by none other than Pashinsky. Efforts to conduct a parliamentary commission to probe the killings were blocked by Petro Poroshenko, the rabidly anti-Russian President of Ukraine who succeeded the ousted Yanukovych in 2014.

The official tampering was understandable, Katchanovski argues, given how fundamental Kiev’s narrative of the Maidan massacre is to the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. The false flag mass murder led directly to Yanukovych, justifying the withdrawal of government forces from downtown Kiev, the seizure of government buildings by Maidan activists, and the president’s unconstitutional removal by the Ukrainian legislature.

All these developments paved a path to the eight-year-long civil war in Donbas, which claimed the lives of over 14,000 and precipitated Russia’s invasion in February 2022. For Katchanovski, the link between the false flag massacre and ongoing war in Ukraine is obvious. The verdict, he says, makes that even more clear.

As retaliation for his groundbreaking investigations into the Maidan massacre, Katchanovski’s home and property were illegally seized by local courts in 2014 “with the involvement of senior officials.” Yet the professor remains more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the story.

“One day, the truth of what happened will be officially acknowledged — the only question is when,” he vowed. “Delayed acknowledgment and lack of justice in this case has already cost Ukraine very dearly. There are many conflicts, including the ongoing war, which spiraled from the Maidan massacre. Countless people have suffered needlessly as a result. The time for truth and reconciliation is well overdue.”

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Open Society Foundation, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Why the Pentagon is a multitrillion-dollar fraud

By Scott Ritter | RT | December 12, 2023

Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.

The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.

This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment.

Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.

Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.

These numbers are mind-numbingly large – so large that they become meaningless to the average person. The US defense enterprise is so massive that it is literally a mission impossible to speak of balancing the books. The American people might be willing to shrug off an accounting error or two. But the defense budget equates to American military power and the perceptions of national worth that translate into notions of American exceptionalism.

The fact of the matter is that our cavalier approach to defense spending has resulted in fraud of a massive scale. The American people were sold a bill of goods – a military capable of projecting power world-wide to sustain the so-called “rules based international order” upon which the notion of American exceptionalism has been premised. As it turns out, the US military is as hollow as the numbers on the Pentagon ledgers. The American people have bought an apparatus that is incapable of fighting and winning a major war against any of the potential opponents arrayed against it. We failed to defeat Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. And we are not able to defeat either China or Russia, let alone regional powers like North Korea and Iran. And yet we will simply continue to invest, in seemingly unquestioning fashion, into this enterprise, expecting somehow that a system that cannot pass an audit will somehow magically produce a different result despite the fact that we, the American people, are doing nothing to demand such a result.

In short, the defense budget is the equivalent of “pay-to-play,” in which the American people pay the US government to produce the results necessary to sustain their overinflated sense of self-worth. We Americans have become so accustomed to being the biggest, baddest bully in the global arena that we assume that simply by pouring money into a system that had produced the desired results for more than seventy years that we could keep the good times rolling. But when you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house of cards.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’

December 12, 2023 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism | United States | Leave a comment

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The Occupied Mentality Syndrome

Saudi Arabia on the American chessboard – Part 2

By B. J. Sabri | American Herald Tribune | April 19, 2016

Since the Korean War, but particularly since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 until today, the United States has been steadily escalating its military presence in the Persian Gulf. Taking advantage of many colossal events of the past 36 years, [1] the hyper-empire has institutionalized its massive presence on land and sea, and expanded its objectives to include the unambiguous physical control of the area, as well as the clear understanding that local Arab governments should abide by them. The pretext is always the same: in “defense” of the national interests and security of the United States. From observing how the United States has been interacting with the governments of the region, and by judging from the size of its expeditionary force, we could reach a basic conclusion. The United States is occupying, de facto, the entire Arabian Peninsula. (Yemen, devastated by Saudi and American jets is yet to be conquered. Oman? Britain returned not as colonial ruler but as a soft occupying power.)

Under this articulation, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are virtually occupied countries. If we compare this type of occupation to the mandate and protectorate regimes of the past, the results might be identical—the nations affected by it lose sovereignty. When Arab governments comply with the objectives of a foreign power that station military forces on their national milieu, then that power controls them in multiple ways including how they react to policy deliberations and what decisions they intend to take on specific issues. A good method to verify the concept of effective occupation is this: take notice of what the United States says and wants, and then compare it to what the gulf rulers do in response. (I shall discuss this detail at some point in the upcoming parts.)

If the presence of US forces or other means of political pressure are a factor in Saudi Arabia’s interventionist Arab wars, then we need to debate this issue. However, from the history of resistance to colonialism, we learnt: if a powerful state imposes its order on a nation by military means or other forms of coercion, and if this nation does not resist that imposition, then a mental subordination to the powerful state will ensue. This is especially true in the case of Saudi Arabia. One single event, 9/11, has transformed it from a US “ally” into an instant political hostage of the American Empire. … continue

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