The Vietnam War ended nearly 50 years ago. Still, the killing and maiming is not over. People continue to suffer from and succumb to injuries from the war long past. And others, often people born since the war’s end, are killed or injured by the explosion of some of the many bombs from the war that now clutter Vietnam.
A March 15 New York Times article profiles Chuck Searcy who, as a United States Army intelligence analyst in Vietnam, became disillusioned with the war. Years later, writes Seth Mydans in the article, Searcy is working in Vietnam on ameliorating the harm from the left behind bombs. Project Renew that he cofounded has been “deploying teams of de-miners, teaching schoolchildren how to stay safe, and providing prosthetics and job training to victims” for over 20 years. You can read the article here.
It is inspiring that people are dedicated to trying to minimize the long-term damage of the US government’s wars. It is unfortunate, though, that, since the Vietnam War, Americans have been suckered into allowing their government to pursue a series of devastating wars across the world. These wars, like the Vietnam War, have killed and maimed many people and then, after their conclusion, left behind new streams of suffering that flow into the future.
The world would do much better if there were a big uptick in one “illness” in America: the Vietnam Syndrome.
A new peer-reviewed study concluded that heavy cellphone use was not associated with an increased risk of developing brain tumors. But some critics questioned the results, citing methodological flaws and bias from industry funding.
The authors of the COSMOS study (Cohort Study on Mobile Phones and Health) promoted it as the world’s largest multinational prospective cohort study on the potential health risks of cellphone use.
They said the study, published in Environmental International, found “no evidence” of increased risk for developing three common brain tumors linked to heavy cellphone use.
“Our findings to date, together with other available scientific evidence,” the authors wrote, “suggest that mobile phone use is not associated with increased risk of developing these tumours.”
Dr. Lennart Hardell, a leading scientist on cancer risks from radiation, told The Defender the study “lacked scientific integrity.”
“This is a product defense study, not suitable for a scientific journal claiming to have conducted a credible review of a submission,” Hardell said. “Obviously the referees have not done their proper job or have not been listened to. In the latter case, it casts doubt on the scientific credibility of the very journal.”
What Hardell found “most remarkable” was that the study authors failed to cite or reference important studies documenting an increased incidence of brain tumors among those who heavily used a cellphone, he said.
“It is hard to believe that the study authors are so incompetent and/or perhaps so biased towards the ‘no risk’ paradigm,” he said. “One may rightly ask what results they are hiding — at least a clarification is needed.”
“One must also ask if there is influence by industry,” he added.
In an article critiquing the study, Nilsson said telecommunication companies were the ones who initiated the study and provided some of the study’s initial funding. “They have an interest in showing that mobile phones do not have negative health effects.”
Additionally, the researchers who conducted the study “have a long history of dismissing evidence of health risks,” she said. In her opinion, their results have “low credibility.”
Despite the study’s faults, Nilsson predicted it will be used “as effective evidence for the telecom industry” in lawsuits regarding brain tumors alleged to be caused by mobile phone use.
“The study will also be used in expert opinion reports as an argument that radiation from wireless technology does not cause cancer … So the telecom industry’s investment in the COSMOS study has been successful,” Nilsson told The Defender.
Methodological flaws underestimate risk
The COSMOS study included 250,000-plus participants from Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.K.
The researchers recruited participants between 2007-2012 and had them complete a detailed questionnaire about their lifetime mobile phone use.
Roughly seven years later, the researchers looked at cancer registries to see if any of the participants had developed one of three kinds of brain tumors: glioma, meningioma or acoustic neuroma.
Through statistical analyses, the researchers examined whether heavy cellphone use was associated with an increased risk of developing a brain tumor.
But the way they conducted their analyses was flawed, Nilsson said.
Rather than compare those who were heavily exposed to RF cellphone radiation with those who weren’t exposed, the study authors compared those who were heavily exposed with those who were just less exposed.
The authors simply split their participants into two groups based on total call time — the 50% who used their cellphones more versus the 50% who used their cellphones less — and compared those two groups.
“This leads to an underestimation of the risk,” Nilsson said, “because the exposed people were not compared with unexposed people but with a group of other exposed people.”
Hardell agreed and noted several other ways in which the analyses may have inaccurately minimized the risk of developing a brain tumor from RF radiation exposure.
For instance, the researchers didn’t analyze which side of the head participants said they held their phone in relation to the site of the brain tumors they later detected in some participants.
“These questions are vital for studying the association between use of wireless phones and brain tumor risk,” Hardell said.
They also didn’t include data on cordless phone use in their analyses, even though they asked the participants detailed questions about their cordless phone use.
“This is scientific misconduct,” Hardell said, “It is a shame to the participating individuals who gave of their time to answer the questionnaire.”
Prior research has shown that RF radiation from both cellphones and cordless phones — which were still very much in use during the study period — can be a risk factor for developing brain tumors, so researchers must look at people’s use of both, Hardell said.
Moreover, the study authors dropped 629 participants from the study because they had brain tumors before the start of the study. This could have further affected the analyses, Hardell said.
The study authors even failed to report “basic information,” including how many people were initially invited to participate and the breakdown of their gender, ages and country of origin, he said. “It is remarkable that the study was published in the current version.”
The COSMOS study is ongoing, meaning the researchers will follow up with the study cohort in the future.
In this first follow-up report on the COSMOS cohort, participants reported using mostly phones on a 2G and/or 3G network.
“Future updates of the COSMOS cohort on cancer outcomes will provide additional information on potential long-term effects of RF-EMF from more recent technology,” the authors wrote.
Telecom industry provided money, input
Three Swedish telecommunications companies — Ericsson, TeliaSonera and Telenor — provided funding for the COSMOS study data collection, according to the authors’ funding statement.
“The study appears to have been initiated by Ericsson and the Swedish scientists at KI,” the Karolinska Institutet, a major medical university in Sweden, Nilsson said.
Ericsson representatives in 2005 contacted Karolinska Institutet researchers Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting, she said. “They agreed to collaborate on a research project, with industry paying 50% of the costs.”
A 2012 report by the Swedish weekly magazine,Ny Teknik, revealed that the industry representatives and researchers had discussed arrangements and funding before turning to Vinnova, a Swedish governmental research agency, to draw up an agreement that ostensibly guaranteed COSMOS’ scientific independence from the industry, Nilsson said.
“In 2005,” she continued, “when the researchers and Ericsson started meeting, Ericsson made certain demands on ‘quality criteria’ and had views on the design of the study, according to Christer Törnevik, head of research at Ericsson.”
According to the funding section, the authors who were involved in acquiring funding for the study also contributed to the study concept — meaning that researchers who secured the money made seminal decisions about what the study would look at and what it would not look at.
Moreover, initially COSMOS was supported for five years by the U.K.’s Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research program, jointly funded by the U.K. Department of Health and the mobile telecommunications industry, the funding section said.
Several other telecom industry entities — including Nokia, Elisa and the Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum — also contributed to COSMOS.
The study also received funding from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, the Danish Strategic Research Council, Finland’s National Technology Agency, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, the Kone Foundation, the U.K. Department of Health & Social Care, and the U.K.’s National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit and The Netherlands Organization for Health Research.
Feychting, the study’s lead author, did not respond when asked by The Defender what she would like to tell people who are concerned that industry influences may have biased the research.
She also did not comment on the allegation that the study’s findings lacked credibility.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
In so many words—and data—CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, especially the vaccines, all of it failed to control the pandemic. It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period, in 2006. The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilizing vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.
Covid-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully two-three weeks later. Thus, management of the Covid-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalized or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities. Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because Covid-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious “long-Covid” on first infection.
Nevertheless, once the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, with a new large wave of the delta strain spreading across the US in July-August 2021 even after eight months of the vaccines taken by half of Americans, instead of admitting policy error that the Covid vaccines do not much control virus spread, our public health administration doubled down, attempting then to compel vaccination on as many more people as could be threatened by mandates. That didn’t work out too well as seen when the large Omicron wave hit the country during December 2021-January 2022 in spite of some 10% more of the population getting vaccinated from September through December of 2021.
A typical mandate example: in September 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued Emergency Proclamation 21-14.2, requiring Covid-19 vaccination for various groups of state workers. In the proclamation, the stated goal was, “WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are effective in reducing infection and serious disease, and widespread vaccination is the primary means we have as a state to protect everyone … from COVID-19 infections.” That is, the stated goal was to reduce the number of infections.
What the CDC recently reported (see chart below), however, is that by the end of 2023, cumulatively, at least 87% of Americans had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to and thus had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this in spite of the mammoth, protracted and booster-repeated vaccination campaign that led to about 90% of Americans taking the shots. My argument is that by making policies based on number of infections a higher priority than ones based on the more serious but less common consequences of both infections and policy damages, the proclaimed goal of the vaccine mandate to reduce spread failed in that 87% of Americans eventually became infected anyway.
In reality, neither vaccine immunity nor post-infection immunity were ever able fully to control the spread of the infection. On August 11, 2022, CDC stated, “Receipt of a primary series alone, in the absence of being up to date with vaccination through receipt of all recommended booster doses, provides minimal protection against infection and transmission (3,6). Being up to date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.” Public health pandemic measures that “wane over time” are very unlikely to be useful for control of infection spread, at least without very frequent and impractical revaccinations every few months.
Nevertheless, infection spread per se is not of consequence, because count of infections is not and should not have been the main priority of public health pandemic management. Rather, the consequences of the spread and the negative consequences of the policies invoked should have been the priorities. Our public health agencies chose to prioritize a failed policy of reducing the spread rather than reducing the mortality or the lockdown and school and business closure harms, which led to unnecessary and avoidable damage to millions of lives. We deserved better from our public health institutions.
8. Massetti GM, Jackson BR, Brooks JT, Perrine CG, Reott E, Hall AJ, Lubar D, Williams IT, Ritchey MD, Patel P, Liburd LC, Mahon BE. Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems – United States, August 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2022;71(33):1057-1064. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7133e1.htm
Dr. Harvey A. Risch MD, PhD is a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and a guest contributor for Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America
A colleague in HART has drawn my attention to this article on “TKP”, an Austrian sceptical website. As usual, machine translation does a good enough job to discern the gist for us non-German speakers.
It is reported that in an official government report entitled Virus Epidemiological Information No. 18/20 published in April 2020:
Prof. Judith Aberle reported on evidence of immunity against SARS-CoV-2 through T cells in blood samples from Austria going back to 2018 and in some other countries even as far back as 2015. It would probably have been the duty of the MedUni Vienna to make the public aware of the findings about widespread immunity.
The article goes on to state that Prof. Aberle disclosed that:
… in studies from the USA, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain, SARS -CoV- 2 specific T -Cells were detected:
“Depending on the study, T cells against SARS-CoV-2 could be detected in 20 to 50 percent of blood donors. In Austria, too, in our previous studies we found T cells against various SARS-CoV-2 proteins in 30 percent of the blood samples from 2018-2019, i.e. before the pandemic.”
The actual reports in question are available here, and the specific one cited above (report 18-20) here.
Sure enough, Google translate confirms the Professor states the following:
Interestingly, T cells against SARS-CoV-2 can also be found in some pPeople who have not yet had contact with the new coronavirus. Show that several international studies from the USA, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain. Those used for these investigations Blood samples come from healthy people from 2015-2018, i.e. a long time before SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in China. Depending on the study, 20 to 50 percent of blood donors have T cells detected against SARS-CoV-2 become. In our previous studies in Austria we have also found 30 Percent of blood samples from 2018-2019, i.e. before the pandemic, T cells found against various SARS-CoV-2 proteins. We now know about it Studies from the USA and Germany show that it is primarily about memory T cells are involved in infections with those four known Coronaviruses have been formed that cause relatively mild respiratory infections cause. They are called HCoV-OC43, -229E, -HKU1 and -NL63, occur worldwide and cause around 30% of colds However, you can get it back every year.
So, she is basically suggesting that the T cell reactivity comes from previous exposure to other coronaviruses.
However, as the article states:
The other explanation, which is at least as plausible, would be that SARS-CoV-2 spread significantly before 2020.
Whether “the virus” was “novel” or not seems to be an academic question, unless the new virus was causing lots of extra illness or death. But – as would be expected for something for which so many people seemed able to mount an adequate immune defence – it wasn’t.
The article then links to a piece from a few days ago about a recent episode of a TV show held in “Hangar 7” in which various state officials either maintained that covid was a terrible disease or that it couldn’t have been known back in spring 2020 that it wasn’t.
But, as the article points out:
In an 9 April 2020 edition of the same program John Ioniodis’s data suggesting very low mortality was discussed.
On April 10th , a TKP article was published in which not only Ionnidis’ findings were presented, but also the French study by Didier Raoult with the telling title ” SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data “, as well as a study from Wuhan with similar infection mortality.
Even the decidedly mainstream vienna.at on April 7, 2020 reported that: “Analysis shows: Covid-19 victim curve corresponds to “normal” mortality”, concluding: “The Covid-19 victim curve in Austria roughly corresponds to the “normal” mortality for men and women in the individual age groups”.
Translated: Analysis shows: Covid-19 victim curve corresponds to “normal” mortalitySo the article states plainly that:
So the facts were well known, people knew about it.
Ultimately, the alleged danger of the virus was only “scaled up” in order to get the mRNA into people. The virus was pretty insignificant and I think the many discussions about its laboratory origin were smoke grenades or media hype to attribute a meaning to the virus that it didn’t even have. It was never about the virus, it was about the mRNA.
This business concept is now obvious.
It will be interesting to see if these revelations result in any more indignation in the Austrian population than we are seeing in other countries – where, considering the scale of the lies and harms caused, voices are extraordinarily muted.
A group of 19 House Republicans bucked GOP leadership and voted with Democrats against a bill that would extend Section 702, the law that allows for mass surveillance and the collection of Americans’ data.
On Wednesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) brought the legislation up for a procedural vote, and it failed 193-228. The Republican opposition was made up of a group of freedom-oriented Representatives led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
“The reauthorization lacks essential reforms to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, such as requiring the FBI to obtain a warrant before searching Americans’ data and a prohibition on the government purchasing Americans’ data from third-party data brokers,” the Flordia congressman said in a statement. “FISA authorities have been used to violate the law more than 278,000 times by the national security state, and there has yet to be any consequences for this illegal activity by our government.”
Gaetz criticized Johnson for letting a bill to renew Section 702 come to the floor without sufficient reforms. “If Speaker Johnson is unwilling to fix FISA Section 702, we are left wondering what he is indeed willing to fix. Now, the very authorities that we saw weaponized against President Trump and the American people are poised to get enhancements under this reauthorization, rather than any of the reforms that are so desperately needed,” he explained.
In the leadup to the 2016 election, the FBI launched an investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign and alleged ties to the Russian government. That probe was based on opposition research paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and ultimately failed to prove any ties between Trump and the Kremlin.
Trump announced his opposition to the bill prior to the vote on Truth Social, saying, “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” While Trump now says he opposes Section 702, he signed extensions to the program when he was in the White House.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 has allowed the US government to warrantlessly sweep up the information of millions of Americans for decades. It is set to expire on April 19.
However, even if Congress fails to act before April 19, the Wall Street Journal reports that surveillance will continue for at least a year. 702 spying “could potentially continue for another year due to how and when the secretive court that oversees the program grants annual approval for the categories of intelligence collection it allows.” WSJ adds, “Such a continuation of the program would almost certainly be met with legal challenges, a complexity that Biden administration officials have said they want to avoid.”
Advocating for transparency in the interactions between Big Tech and the government, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has taken further action. On Tuesday, he issued letters to the FBI, Department of Justice, and CEOs of key Big Tech firms, including Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. These letters were not just mere inquiries; they were demands for documents that could shed light on the Biden administration’s communication with social media companies.
Jordan’s initiative isn’t isolated but comes in the context of an ongoing legal battle concerning the government’s alleged collaboration with social media platforms. He pointed out in a recent press release that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) had, as of March, re-engaged with major social media companies. This development, especially considering the FITF’s prior interactions with these companies during the 2020 presidential election, raises significant concerns for Jordan. With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, he finds the renewal of this relationship between the FITF and Big Tech worrisome.
He expressed these apprehensions, stating, “Given the FITF’s improper role in communicating with social media and technology companies during the 2020 presidential election, the resumption of meetings between the FITF and Big Tech before the 2024 presidential election is deeply troubling.”
But Jordan’s requests went beyond mere expressions of concern. He specifically asked Alphabet, and similarly, the other companies and government agencies, to produce detailed documentation of their communications with the FITF or the San Francisco Field Office of the FBI. He underscored the urgency and legitimacy of his request by referencing a continuing subpoena issued last year.
In a scathing account from within National Public Radio (NPR), Senior Editor Uri Berliner blasted the company for open political bias and activism. Berliner, who says that he is liberal politically, wrote about how NPR went from a left-leaning media outlet to a virtual Democratic operation echoing narratives from figures like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.). The objections have long been voiced, including on this blog, but this account is coming from a long-standing and respected editor from within the company.
Berliner details how NPR, like many media outlets, became openly activist after the election of Donald Trump to the point that the company now employs 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions but not a single Republican in its Washington, DC, headquarters.
In his essay for The Free Press, Berliner notes that after Trump’s election in 2016, the most notable change was shutting down any skepticism or even curiosity about the truth of Democratic talking points in scandals like Russiagate. Berliner said that NPR “hitched our wagon” to Schiff and his now debunked claims.
Berliner says that he was rebuffed in seeking a modicum of balance in the coverage about the coronavirus “lab leak theory,” the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2016 Russia hoax.
As discussed on this blog, NPR repeated false stories like the claims from the Lafayette Park riot. Berliner gives an account that is strikingly familiar for many of us who have raised the purging of conservative or libertarian voices from our faculties in higher education:
“So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thoughtwhen she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations”
Former NPR analyst Juan Williams stated in an interview this week that, as a strong liberal voice (now at Fox), he found the same bias at NPR. Williams was fired by NPR as this shift seemed to go into high gear toward greater intolerance for opposing views.
Despite these criticisms, NPR has doubled down on its activism. For example, when it came time to select a new CEO, NPR could have tacked to the center to address the growing criticism. Instead, the new CEO became instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump. Those deleted postings included a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. They also included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.
NPR has abandoned core policies on neutrality as its newsroom has become more activist and strident. For example, NPR declared that it would allow employees to participate in political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”
The rule itself shows how impressionistic and unprofessional media has become in the woke era. NPR does not try to define what causes constitute advocacy for the “freedom and dignity of human beings.” How about climate change and environmental protection? Would it be prohibited to protest for a forest but okay if it is framed as “environmental justice”?
NPR seems to intentionally keep such questions vague while only citing such good causes as Black Lives Matter and gay rights:
“Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes.” But in practice, NPR journalists will have to discuss specific decisions with their bosses, who in turn will have to ask a lot of questions.”
So the editors will have the power to choose between acceptable and unacceptable causes.
The bias seemed to snowball into a type of willful blindness in the coverage of the outlet, which is supported by federal funds.
After the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, NPR declared that it would not cover the story. It actually issued a statement that seemed to proudly refuse to pursue the story, which was found to be legitimate:
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
Berliner’s account is reminiscent of the recent disclosures from within the New York Times. Former editors have described that same open intolerance for opposing views and a refusal to balance coverage.
Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet has finally spoken publicly about his role in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American journalism: the Times’ cringing apology for running a 2020 column by Sen. Tom Cotton. Bennet said publisher AG Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” to appease the mob.
Former New York Times editor Adam Rubenstein also wrote a lengthy essay at The Atlantic that pulled back the curtain on the newspaper and its alleged bias in its coverage. The essay follows similar pieces from former editors and writers that range from Bari Weiss to his former colleague James Bennet. The essay describes a similar work environment where even his passing reference to liking Chick-Fil-A sandwiches led to a condemnation of shocked colleagues.
None of this is likely to change the culture at NPR any more than such discussions have changed faculties in higher education. Raising the virtual elimination of conservative or Republican voices on faculties is met by the same forced expressions of disbelief. While mild concern is expressed, it is often over the “perception” of those of us who view universities as intolerant or orthodox.
Of course, there remains the question of why the public should give huge amounts of money to a media outlet that is so politically biased. News outlets have every right to pursue such political agendas, but none but NPR claim public support, including from half of the country that embraces the viewpoints that it routinely omits from its airways.
GAZA – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) killed three sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haneyya and three of their children in Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza, on Wednesday evening.
Local sources said that Amir, Mohammed, and Hazem, the sons of Haneyya, were killed in the IOF shelling of their car along with three of their offspring, while a fourth kid was injured and taken to hospital.
Haneyya, commenting on the incident, said that it was an honor for his family that his sons were martyred, adding that around 60 of his family members were killed in the ongoing Israeli aggression on Gaza.
“Such crimes will only boost our steadfastness and insistence on upholding our principles,” he added.
“The enemy is in big illusion if it thinks that killing my sons will make us change our positions,” Haneyya underlined.
For its part, the Government Media Office (GMO) said in a statement on Wednesday that the IOF committed yet another massacre on the first day of the holy Eid al-Fitr by targeting the car in which the sons of Haneyya and their children were aboard.
The GMO strongly condemned the continuing Israeli massacres, adding that 125 martyrs were transferred to hospitals over the past 24 hours.
On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.
The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”
In keeping with those meditations on Germany’s ever-worsening woes, The Economist’s bleak diagnosis made no mention of how Western sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2022 created Berlin’s crisis. Scholz was a prominent cheerleader for the Biden administration’s push to “make the Ruble rubble.” Now that effort has so spectacularly backfired that it can no longer be ignored or spun otherwise; Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.
Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any U.S. counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inescapably disastrous.
For this failure, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of U.S. military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.
This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.
“Enormous Presence”
Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of U.S. foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.
After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the U.S., the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to U.S. “commercial interests.”
In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription.
Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to challenging capitalism in a serious way. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies.
In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there–which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations—was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing U.S. military occupation.
This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the U.S. military, posing as mere soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. U.S. operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”
Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same organizations. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”
“Discredit and Destroy”
Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”
Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.
The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG—along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned—and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.
The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of U.S. troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.
While intended to punish Germany for greenlighting the now-destroyed Nord Stream 2, polls indicated most Germans were only too happy to say “auf wiedersehen.” In all, 47% were in favor of them leaving, while a quarter called for the permanent closure of all U.S. bases on their soil. Yet, just two weeks after entering the White House, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s policy, returning 500 soldiers who had departed.
The President also scrapped plans to relocate the Stuttgart-based U.S. Africa Command, which effectively embeds Washington in the armed forces of 53 countries across the continent, elsewhere in Europe. Research shows the Command’s training programs have precipitated a significant rise in the number of military coups in Africa. As Agee attested, U.S. military bases are a hotbed of CIA spies. Berlin therefore must remain “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” within and without the country, whether Germans like it or not.
Ukraine, which no longer holds elections, is ahead of Hungary in terms of democracy, according to a major German media group index that references 10 experts, nine of whom are directly funded by billionaire oligarch George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
The results were produced by the German Bertelsmann Foundation’s democracy index, which was published in the print edition of the media group’s Frankfurter Allurement Zeitung.
Despite Hungary having a functioning and vibrant democracy that includes actual elections, the index claims that the country is less democratic than Ukraine, which is under martial law, has banned opposition parties, and has no elections.
According to the paper’s analyst, the new EU member states have made huge political and economic progress since 2004, with only Poland and Hungary representing or still representing a “politically authoritarian tendency.”
“Despite the country’s EU membership, Fidesz, led by Viktor Orbán and in power since 2010, has seriously undermined Hungary’s initially well-functioning democracy,” claims Ralph M. Wrobel, who argues that without pressure from Brussels, Poland and Hungary would have become fully authoritarian states.
It is worth noting, however, that the Bertelsmann Foundation’s biannual ranking is based on the opinions of country experts, not on facts.
“Nine of the ten ‘independent experts on Hungary’ are from Political Capital. Political Capital, founded by a former SZDSZ member, which received contracts worth hundreds of millions of forints from the previous Socialist governments of Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai for communications consultancy, and of course among its supporters we find the Open Society Foundations led by George Soros,” government spokesman Zoltán Kovács pointed out earlier.
Kovács added that the Bertelsmann Group is the owner of RTL Television, among others. In a previous analysis, Hungarian news portal Mandiner pointed out that the group had woven its way into the EU institutions by hiding behind pro-Europeanism.
The US staked a claim on half the world, as Senate Armed Services Committee chair Jim Inhofe said Washington might have to intervene in Venezuela if Russia dares set up a military base not just there, but “in our hemisphere.”
“I think that it could happen,” Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) told a group of reporters on Tuesday. “You’ve got a guy down there that is killing everybody. You could have him put together a base that Russia would have on our hemisphere. And if those things happen, it may be to the point where we’ll have to intervene with troops and respond.”
Should Russia dare encroach on the US’ neck of the woods, Inhofe said: “we have to take whatever action necessary to stop them from doing that.” … continue
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The sprawling U.S. embassy in Berlin. [Source: 
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