A family – displaced from Khirbet Samra in July 2025 after years of constant harassment by occupation forces and violent settler Uri Cohen – moved to Atouf, where they purchased a plot of land, determined to defy the occupation’s efforts to destroy their livelihood.
Having to leave their home of more than 20 years was both deeply traumatic and hugely expensive. The 40 dunams in Atouf cost half a million shekels (about 160,000 USD) and transportation costs for all their livestock and belongings were high. Atouf is a primarily agricultural area and there is little grazing land; the family is therefore forced to feed their animals grain and hay. They have also had to spend 150,000 shekels (50,000 USD) on building pens spacious enough to protect their sheep from the heat. The costs of maintaining their flock of 800 sheep have proved unsustainable, and the family has had no choice but to sell 300 of them.
In early December 2025, less than six months after their arrival in Atouf, the family received a demolition order: their property is situated on the path of “Crimson Thread”, a Zionist project that entails the construction of a 22 km long military road with an apartheid fence and a 20m wide “buffer zone” running along eitherside. Stretching from Ein Shibli to Tayasir, the barrier will cut through — and off from one another — the communities of Atouf, Tammoun and Yarza.
On the occupation’s plans, the road cuts almost exactly through the middle of the family property; 36 dunums have already been confiscated, and in January 2026 demolition orders were issued for the remaining 4 dunums, which include the family’s house and the sheep pens.
The family, together with other families and the Tubas municipality appealed the demolition orders, submitting the landowners’ deeds, and the barrier project was temporarily suspended. But then, on June 7, the Israeli court ruled that in 5 of the 7 areas impacted by the project the excavation work could continue (the two sections in which the suspension order still applies are those in the vicinity of Khirbet Yarza). Building demolitions (32 across five sections, 9 of which are residential structures) are still under discussion in court.
Since June 13, the family have had to endure the constant presence of soldiers and bulldozers on their property. The military have installed caravans and tents and dug a trench between the 36 confiscated dunums and the family’s home and pens. Now, the bulldozers are at work preparing for the construction of the barrier; the digging has destroyed the pipes that transport water to the family’s crops and livestock. When a family member went to get water from a well that is situated on the family’s land he was accused by the occupation forces of stealing water.
The family, together with the whole community of Atouf and all the Palestinian villages threatened by “Crimson Thread” are calling for international media and institutional attention in order to expose the brutality of this project which is intended to bisect the Jordan Valley, further isolating Palestinian communities from one another and dramatically worsening their conditions of life.
“during the day they carry out cutting, bulldozing, and destruction works, while at night they fire burning illumination flares over the area. These are dropped near the livestock shelters, creating constant fear, as we worry they might fall onto animal fodder or plastic greenhouses and set everything on fire.” – a family member
It’s not every day that an EU member state has the opportunity to push back in favor of freedom. At least not without elections. But a German court did have that chance – and promptly blew it on behalf of European citizens everywhere.
Back in 2022 when the Ukraine war was ramping up, the European Commission made an executive order banning Russian media broadcasting in the EU. Meaning that you couldn’t – and still can’t – access RT from within the EU, either on TV or on the web, without a VPN.
So some folks running a website in Saarbrucken, Germany, near the French border, started including some RT videos in their live feed. They reportedly did this exactly four times, back in 2023. Whoop-dee-do, right?
Wrong. This is the EUSSR we’re talking about, remember?
For this, the accused ended up facing criminal prosecution in Germany for promoting some EU-sanctioned RT Germany content. But it turns out that even the German court in Saarbrucken considering this case had doubts as to whether these guys and their website actually fit the definition of an “operator” under the EU sanction’s language that “prohibits any operator from broadcasting, enabling, facilitating or otherwise contributing to broadcast, any” Russian media content. So the German court referred the question to the European Court of Justice tasked with interpreting and clarifying EU regulations and laws.
Wrong question, guys. Why didn’t you start with asking the ECJ whether the regulation itself, made unilaterally by the EU’s unelected and unaccountable executive branch, is even valid at all under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and its Article 11 protecting freedom of expression? The fact that the question wasn’t put to the European court by the German one has spawned a judgment that’s stunning in its failure to interpret the application of any free speech restrictions narrowly enough to avoid the disproportionate limiting of free expression.
The German court missed the forest for the trees and got down into the weeds and all hung up on the comparatively minor issue of whether the website could be considered an “operator” without being a commercial entity. Which the European court then used as a prelude to launch a sweeping McCarthyist “reds under the bed”-style tirade.
“The term ‘disinformation’ is a translation of the Russian word ‘дезинформация’ (dezinformatsiya), coined in the early 1920s by the Soviet intelligence services. Joseph Stalin is credited as being the originator of that term, deliberately making it sound French in order to make it seem Western in origin and thereby enhance its credibility,” wrote the EU court, self-identifying as a history professor. How about if I take that as an open invitation to self-identify as a judge in my capacity as a final-year law student?
The ECJ ultimately ruled that commercialism is irrelevant when the website solicits donations, and had raised over €60,000 within a period of a year. It basically said, look, any commercial nature of the platform risks being a false dichotomy, because who’s to say that the sanctioned entities themselves wouldn’t be paying these independent outlets through donations to promote their banned content: ”Even though, for the purposes of classification as an ‘operator’, no economic activity or income generation is necessary, the context of an appeal for donations enabling such sums to be collected warrants some comment. The fact that some websites are financed by donations rather than by a registered commercial activity justifies increased vigilance as to their possible use as a tool for propaganda purposes, in particular in the case of State-sponsored disinformation campaigns,” the European court ruled. “That lack of clarity makes it more difficult to identify financial flows and, therefore, the actors likely to influence editorial policy or content. It thus creates an environment conducive to interference by external interests, including by third countries, which may intervene directly or indirectly in the production or broadcasting of content.”
Isn’t it the prosecution’s job to present actual evidence and proof of influence through the powerful state-backed legal instruments at its disposal? Shouldn’t the ECJ’s definition of “operator,” if it leans so heavily on the risk of foreign corruption, therefore hinge on whether actual collusion has first been established beyond any reasonable doubt? The ECJ sounds shockingly blasé here about the basic burden of proof for criminal conviction.
This court case had been stayed, or suspended, in Germany pending the ruling by this European Court of Justice. But now it’s free to convict these guys of promoting banned Russian content, under the pretext that just maybe they’re not-so-independent media that schemed on the down-low to distribute Russian media content – something that a lot of people have been doing all over social media of their own volition.
Ultimately, what the buzz around this case effectively does is put a chilling effect on that sharing, and it also risks making people self-censor out of fear of being dragged into court for a judicial proctology exam and having their lives potentially ruined in the press over accusations of Russian collusion. What if these guys (and others) just happen to agree with some of the views expressed on banned Russian media? Who’s going to protect their honestly-held views from establishment authoritarianism?
Hang on, here’s a volunteer for the task.
“Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of democracy. And the EU protects what matters, including the right to receive independent, reliable information. The European Media Freedom Act helps keep journalists and sources safe, strengthens editorial independence and protects media organizations from undue interference or legal intimidation. Today, on World Press Freedom Day, we reaffirm our duty to support and protect journalists so they can do their work free from pressure, intimidation, or harm,” says unelected European Commission President and de facto Queen Ursula von der Leyen.
Oh, great. So the same people who censor speech are also its self-appointed defenders. Like an arsonist who goes running around setting fires but also works as a firefighter as their day job.
What’s clear from all this is that EU regulation may look precise on paper, but enforcement isn’t so straightforward. When even member state courts require an official interpretation, then how is the average person supposed to avoid running afoul of the law? The result ends up being less about what’s actually banned and more about what merely feels safe to touch. Not exactly the kind of vibe that one tends to aim for in a democracy.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
The book, also available on Amazon documents “systemized medical abuse” that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chapter 1. From Quackery To Criminality
The medicinal use of mercury offers a long-running example of medically induced harm. Although centuries of whistleblowers have warned that dosing patients with it constitutes reckless quackery—and the U.S. government presently places mercury at number three on its “Substance Priority List,” right under arsenic and lead—the heavy metal has figured prominently in the “medical armamentarium” from as far back as the sixth century BC through the present day.
In his important book Evidence of Harm, author David Kirby exposed the pharmaceutical industry’s controversial practice of including mercury preservatives in vaccines. Pointedly using the word “criminal,” Kirby wrote in the foreword to another book about mercury (The Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill) that the “blind belief in a known poison” has been “misguided, immoral, and in some cases, patently criminal.”
The “Messianic” Benjamin Rush
In many ways, the medical practices and beliefs of U.S. Founding Father, physician, and University of Pennsylvania medical school professor Benjamin Rush may have set the stage for modern medicine’s stubborn adherence to dangerous protocols—despite clinical evidence of harm—and its silver-bullet fascination with vaccines “as substitutes for right living,” as Eleanor McBean put it in her 1957 book The Poisoned Needle: Suppressed Facts About Vaccination.
The reportedly “messianic” and “uncompromising” Rush’s late-1700s stock-in-trade was a radical protocol involving bloodletting and purging with—what else?—mercury, a practice that medical historians later dubbed “heroic medicine.” Rush had his own proprietary brand of laxative called “Thunderclappers,” consisting of approximately 60% mercury chloride (also called calomel), which he promoted as “a purgative of explosive power.” As Rush honed his clinical methods, he passed them on to a phalanx of enthusiastic students and disciples during yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia, where he would bleed and purge up to 100 patients a day. Although use of calomel was not uncommon among doctors of that era, Rush prescribed up to 10 times more than his medical peers and also recommended the removal of huge amounts of patients’ blood, erroneously believing that the blood would replenish itself in a matter of a day or two. “A patient’s failure to respond to this disastrous therapy,” one historian wrote in 2004, “won [the patient] only another round of bleeding and purging.” In another modern writer’s colorful description, “So much blood was spilled in the front yard that the site became malodorous and buzzed with flies.”
No less a figure than George Washington underwent a rapid and gruesome death after Rush protégé Dr. Elisha Dick (and two other Johnny on-the-spot physicians) poisoned Washington with mercury and removed 40% of the beleaguered general’s total blood volume—a quantity that, to this day, “continues to amaze and appall laymen and physicians alike.” From many historians’ point of view, Washington’s doctors caused his death, a death that may well have changed the course of history.
Rush was enthusiastic about promoting his “heroic medicine” protocol, “proclaim[ing] the success of his cure to the public and his medical colleagues” in newspapers, advertisements, and brochures, and even “harangu[ing] people in the streets.” In addition, he was an early and explicit proponent of smallpox vaccination. In 1803, he joined with 30 other Philadelphia doctors in signing a public notice “expressing their confidence in vaccination and recommending it for general use.” Significantly, smallpox vaccination represented a turning point in the “medicalization of the general public” in both early nineteenth-century America and Europe, and a boon for the burgeoning medical profession:
Since the late eighteenth century, doctors had intensified their efforts to win government support for their plans to bring the whole population under medical control. . . . Thus Jenner’s method of cowpox vaccination presented medical practitioners with a new chance to increase their prestige and influence on public health affairs [bold added]. Doctors also foresaw an increase in their income through vaccination fees and hoped to establish themselves, with the help of the vaccine, among those classes of the population who had not consulted doctors before.
From 1813 to 1822, the young U.S. government appointed James Smith as the nation’s “federal vaccine agent,” charging him with “maintaining a supply of the smallpox vaccine and distributing it nationwide”; Smith had been a student of Rush’s at the University of Pennsylvania and was a fellow member of the “well-educated medical elite.” Although other physicians of the day argued that smallpox vaccination was both dangerous and ineffective, then—as now—defenders of the practice prevailed by using “more or less perverted statistics,” with one doctor urging his “professional brethren to be slow to publish fatal cases of small-pox after vaccination” and others passing off vaccine-induced fatalities as some other disease.
Reflecting on Rush’s medical legacy, U.S. Army medical officer P.M. Ashburn made remarks in 1929 that highlight one of the many reasons why Rush’s cautionary tale is still pertinent today. Ashburn wrote that by virtue of Rush’s “social and professional prominence, his position as teacher and his facile pen,” the Philadelphia physician “was more potent in propagation and long perpetuation of medical errors than any man of his day,” thereby “blacken[ing] the record of medicine.” This observation illustrates how social prestige—coupled with “unyielding devotion to dogma”—often helps practitioners of dangerous medicine beat back their critics.
In Rush’s time, those critics included fellow physician Elisha Barlett, who opined about Rush’s medical theories, “In the whole vast compass of medical literature, there cannot be found an equal number of pages containing a greater amount of utter nonsense and unqualified absurdities,” as well as feisty British journalist and pamphleteer William Cobbett, who dared to publish tracts asserting that Rush’s yellow fever treatments were both ineffective and dangerous—and “a perversion of nature’s healing powers.” In response, Rush sued Cobbett for libel and won, in “one of the largest libel awards in American history at the time.”
One of Cobbett’s fascinating observations—which reverberates uncannily in the COVID era—was that extreme fear (in this instance, of yellow fever) made members of the public far more willing to subject themselves to Rush’s “experiments” than they otherwise might have been. Cobbett wrote:
[Rush] seized, with uncommon alacrity and address, the occasion presented by the Yellow Fever, the fearful ravages of which were peculiarly calculated to dispose the minds of the panick-struck people to the tolerance, and even to the admiration, of experiments, which, at any other time, they would have rejected with disdain.
Interestingly, after Rush’s libel victory, Cobbett exacted a modicum of revenge by assembling data from municipal records (acknowledged today as “an epidemiological tour de force”), which pointed to a 56% mortality rate among Rush’s yellow fever patients that contrasted starkly with the physician’s own claim of a greater than 90% survival rate. When word of those dismal statistics got out to the public, Rush’s medical practice suffered. Undaunted, Rush went on to become Treasurer of the U.S. Mint under President John Adams. As the author of America’s first psychiatric textbook, he is also revered today as “the father of American psychiatry.” Rush proposed the same general treatments for madness that he favored for physical ailments, supplemented by straitjackets and other “modes of punishments” for tough cases.
For his part, in 1800, a disgusted Cobbett returned to London, where he continued to hold medicine’s feet to the fire, including condemning smallpox vaccination as “quackery.”
A “Patently Criminal” Model
Some modern medical historians are willing to go so far as to characterize medicine, in periods and places like 18th-century America, as “deplorable,” and to suggest that back then, “a doctor was just as likely to kill you as save you.” Most, however, frame medical barbarity as a thing of the past. Shielded by high-end machines, complex drug technologies, glossy scientific publications, and lingo like “rigorous” and “evidence-based,” the current medical-pharmaceutical-regulatory establishment and its hagiographers would have the public believe that “safe and effective” now rules the day.
There is ample evidence to show that pledges of safety often are either disingenuous or false, and there are indications that Kirby’s description of the medical model as sometimes “patently criminal” was squarely on the mark. At the level of individual medical practitioners, law firms specialized in malpractice note that if a doctor “appears to be indifferent to patients’ well-being or safety,” that indifference can be grounds for criminal liability. A search of the word “criminal” on the website of Medpage Today (a conventional news service that is generally protective of medicine’s reputation) brings up countless articles about doctors and other health care providers running “pill mill” operations, carrying out fraud, taking kickbacks, tampering with drugs, faking data, sexually assaulting or abusing patients, and engaging in other types of “unprofessional” and unethical conduct. The site’s “Investigative Roundups” feature stories (often formulated as questions to soften the impact) with titles like “Columbia protected predator doc?”, “Psychiatrist held patients against their will?”, “$15K surgery shakedown?” or “Doc pushed unneeded surgery?” Other Medpage Today headlines flamboyantly bandy about words like “deadly,” “loophole,” “games,” “tactics,” “unethical,” and “secretive.”
Sometimes, individuals who defend the medical status quo blame whichever reports of misbehavior manage to surface (many do not) on “a few bad apples.” Others, such as Harvard scientist and patient safety advocate Lucian Leape, do the reverse, shifting the blame from “bad people” to nebulous “bad systems;” Leape suggests that a cycle of disrespect is “learned, tolerated, and reinforced in the hierarchical hospital culture.” The fact is, however, that medical harms flow from both individuals and institutions. Most health care providers operate in broader organizational and corporate contexts—and it is policymakers and decision-makers at those levels who often give medical-pharmaceutical corruption and criminality a green light. This is illustrated by the phenomenon (for which there is even an academic field of study) called “clinicide,” defined as serial medical killers responsible for “the unnatural death of multiple patients in the course of treatment;” not infrequently, the killers’ host institutions countenance or “enable” this clinicide by choosing to ignore red flags.
As an extension of the “bad apples” argument, some upholders of the status quo point to the fines that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) routinely levies on hospitals and pharmaceutical corporations, suggesting that these are an adequate mechanism to catch and punish players engaged in malfeasance. However, given that medical-pharmaceutical culprits not infrequently are criminal recidivists and that the fines generally amount to “little more than a slap on the wrist,” it is fair to ask “whether such a monetary punitive system really does much to prevent bad behavior.”
Moreover, DOJ rarely prosecutes or holds corporate leaders accountable, despite having a “powerful legal tool” at its disposal to go after the executives at the helm of medical misconduct; it has done so only 13 times since the year 2000. Instead, many signs point to a wink-and-a-nod sub rosa understanding between the various parties, with the penalties doing nothing to prevent future harms but instead furnishing a generous flow of kickbacks that prosecutors and regulators can funnel into various sectors of the federal budget (see Illegal But Profitable). In fact, under the False Claims Act, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gets a 20 to 1 return on every dollar it “invest[s] in prosecutions and investigations.”
To our knowledge, a parent company has never been excluded from participation in Medicare and Medicaid for illegal activities, which endanger the public health and deplete taxpayer-funded programs. Criminal prosecutions of executives leading companies engaged in these illegal activities have been extremely rare. Much larger penalties and successful prosecutions of company executives that oversee systemic fraud, including jail sentences if appropriate, are necessary to deter future unlawful behavior. Otherwise, these illegal but profitable activities will continue to be part of companies’ business model.
Iatrogenocide Takes Center Stage
Even before COVID, available data indicated that 20th- and 21st-century Western medicine had failed to improve health in any meaningful way, instead trading off the industrial-age diseases of yore for modern chronic disease epidemics, many or most with iatrogenic causes or contributors. Unfortunately, recent events suggest that medicine—forging an unhealthy partnership with government—may now be more dangerous than it has ever been.
Until 2020, the Americans who were most concerned about medical risks and medical criminality belonged to groups already adversely affected, such as those injured by vaccines or opioids. However, with the advent of life-threatening COVID “countermeasures” and lethal protocols in U.S. hospitals and in other countries such as the UK, medical pharmaceutical gangsterism—seemingly occurring with government cognizance—has begun attracting more widespread notice. When governments began parlaying the dubious health “emergency” into an excuse to authorize and mandate the COVID vaccines and boosters—and proceeded full tilt even when unprecedented injuries and deaths immediately began piling up—some segments of the public saw the contours of an officially sanctioned medical crime.
As Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Vera Sharav communicated in her docuseries Never Again Is Now Global, medical coercion and the suspension of constitutional freedoms have never led anywhere good. Unfortunately, history shows that governments intent on “state repression, brutality and genocide” can usually count on the readiness of some doctors to serve as accomplices, even if their complicity has the potential to turn them into “mass murderers on an exponential scale.”
On November 14, 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act into law.¹ The legislation ended more than a decade of tort litigation against vaccine manufacturers by transferring civil liability for injury and death from the companies producing the products to the American taxpayer. The pharmaceutical industry had threatened to leave the childhood vaccine market. Reagan’s signature ensured they would stay, at a price paid by parents who would never be told what had been arranged on their behalf.
Twenty-five years later, in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the Supreme Court closed the last remaining exit. The 2011 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, held that federal law preempts all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers in state courts.² Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justice Ginsburg, identified the practical effect: no federal agency, no state court, no jury of citizens would henceforth ensure that vaccine manufacturers accounted for scientific advances when designing their products. The manufacturers had been placed outside the accountability structure that governs every other industry in the United States.
The 1986 Act and the 2011 ruling together defined the shape of what now exists. Every function of the vaccine program — licensing, recommendation, purchase, safety monitoring, patent holding, research funding, injury adjudication, and courtroom defense — resides in the federal government. When the products kill a child, the state prosecutes the parents.
Leslie Manookian, founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, mapped this architecture in a twelve-point summary published to her readers.³ What follows walks through the machine she described, in five stages. Each stage encloses the next. By the fifth, the shape of the trap around the American parent becomes fully visible.
1. The License
The Food and Drug Administration licenses vaccines on the basis of clinical trials that do not use inert placebo controls. This fact is documented in the FDA’s own package inserts and in sworn testimony by the industry’s most senior figures.
In January 2018, attorney Aaron Siri deposed Dr. Stanley Plotkin in New Hope, Pennsylvania — the vaccinologist widely regarded as the industry’s founding figure and co-editor of the standard reference textbook Plotkin’s Vaccines.⁴ Under oath, Siri walked Plotkin through the pre-licensure clinical trials for each product on the recommended childhood schedule. The pattern that emerged was uniform.
The safety review period following each dose was 48 hours for the IPOL polio vaccine. 48 hours for ActHIB. Four days for Engerix-B, the hepatitis B vaccine administered to newborns on their first day of life. Five days for Recombivax HB, the other hepatitis B product. Siri produced, for comparison, the package insert for Enbrel — a drug given to adults with rheumatoid arthritis — and asked Plotkin to confirm that its pre-licensure clinical trials monitored patients for up to 80 months. Plotkin confirmed. A drug given to sick adults was studied for six and a half years. Vaccines given to healthy newborns were studied for 48 hours to five days.
Plotkin then confirmed, product by product, that these trials had no saline placebo control group. Not Recombivax HB. Not Engerix-B. Not IPOL, whose trial subjects received the polio vaccine concurrently with DTP, making it impossible to attribute any reaction to either product. Not ActHIB. The MMR II vaccine, which Plotkin himself was present for the licensure of, had, in his own words, no control group “for the studies that I’m recalling.” When the Hiberix Hib vaccine was later licensed, the manufacturer used ActHIB itself as the “placebo” — testing one Hib vaccine against another.
On the necessity of a saline control, Plotkin was direct: “Without a control group, if you’re looking for a phenomenon occurring in the vaccine group, you cannot judge that phenomenon without having a control group.” That is the industry’s founding figure, testifying under oath, describing the epistemic condition of the products his industry markets.
The pattern in the trials produces a specific consequence. When a new vaccine is tested against an existing licensed vaccine as its control, any injury rate common to both groups becomes invisible. The comparison measures relative difference, not absolute harm. If the existing vaccine produces seizures at a rate of 1 in 500, and the new vaccine produces seizures at a rate of 1 in 500, the trial reports no significant difference — and both products remain on the market.
The Gardasil trial illustrates what happens when a saline group is included but the result is inconvenient. Merck’s pre-licensure clinical trial for its HPV vaccine assigned 9,412 subjects to a “placebo” arm. Of these, only 594 received actual saline. The remaining approximately 8,800 received AAHS — the aluminum-containing adjuvant used in the Gardasil formulation itself. Merck reported the two groups combined, showing 2.3% of the “placebo” arm developing what the trial recorded as systemic autoimmune events, matched by 2.3% in the Gardasil arm. The vaccine was declared safe on the strength of no difference.
Siri produced the underlying trial data. Broken out separately, the saline placebo group of 594 girls and women showed zero such events. The aluminum group showed approximately 2.5%. Merck had recorded the difference and reported the combination.
Plotkin was asked why the two groups had been combined for that analysis when they were broken out separately for local reaction analysis on the preceding pages. His response, verbatim: “So going into the study, they just assumed aluminum wouldn’t cause autoimmunity and so that’s how they proceed in designing it.” A pre-licensure trial for a product administered to schoolgirls declared the vaccine safe by defining the aluminum adjuvant as inert, then combining subjects receiving that adjuvant with subjects receiving nothing.
Once a vaccine reaches the schedule, the failure to test it against saline becomes permanent. For each product Siri walked Plotkin through, he asked whether a proper placebo-controlled study could now be conducted. Plotkin confirmed, product by product, that it could not — running such a trial would be “unethical” in children whose vaccines are already recommended. The absence of a control group at the point of licensure becomes the reason no control group can ever be introduced. The regulatory record is locked at the point of the initial deception.
When a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Informed Consent Action Network in 2018 asked the Department of Health and Human Services to produce the biennial vaccine safety reports required by Section 300aa-27 of the 1986 Act, HHS was forced to respond that it had not produced a single such report in the thirty-two years since Reagan signed the law.⁵ The statutory obligation to review safety had been ignored for the entire life of the program.
The FDA license then triggers the second function. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convenes the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which votes on whether to add the newly licensed vaccine to the recommended childhood schedule. ACIP members are drawn from the same institutional networks that developed and defended the products. Once added, the vaccine appears on the schedule that is distributed to every state health department in the country. The recommendation is not a mandate. It becomes one at the next stage.
Under oath in the same deposition, Plotkin acknowledged that he had served as medical and scientific director of Sanofi Pasteur in the 1990s, that he operated a personal consulting entity called Vaxconsult, and that he had received payments over the preceding two decades from Merck, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and, in his own phrasing, “essentially all of the major manufacturers.” He had also consulted for the FDA. The industry’s founding figure had confirmed the case against the products his industry markets. He was also paid by every major manufacturer of those products.
The federal government does not directly mandate childhood vaccines. That function is delegated to the states.
Every state in the union has passed legislation requiring specified vaccines for school attendance. The specific list varies. The mechanism is uniform. Parents who wish to enroll their children in public school — and in many states private school — must produce documentation that their children have received the vaccines on the state’s list. The state list is drawn from the CDC schedule; the CDC schedule from the ACIP recommendation; the ACIP recommendation from the FDA license. The FDA license rests on trials that were never controlled against a genuine placebo.
The chain is complete before the parent enters the pediatrician’s office.
Under the Vaccines for Children program, established in 1993, the federal government purchases half of all childhood vaccines administered in the United States. Recent VFC spending has exceeded $5 billion annually.⁶ The federal government is the largest single purchaser of the products it licenses, the products it recommends, and the products the states mandate.
This creates a market structure without parallel elsewhere in American pharmaceutical policy. The maker of a blood pressure medication faces market discipline. Doctors may prescribe it or not, patients may fill the prescription or not, insurance may cover it or not. The maker of a childhood vaccine faces no equivalent constraint. The state compels administration; the federal government guarantees a buyer; demand is legislated. Revenue is secured before a single dose is delivered.
The mandate has hardened as it has aged. Every state at some point permitted medical, religious, and in some cases philosophical exemptions from the vaccine schedule. Over the past decade, state legislatures have moved to close them. California eliminated its personal belief exemption in 2015 through SB 277 following the Disneyland measles cluster. In 2019, New York eliminated its religious exemption; Maine followed the same year. Connecticut eliminated its religious exemption in 2021. The pattern has been consistent: a highly publicised incident, a legislative response drafted with industry input, and the removal of the exit ramp. The federal government does not need to mandate. The state legislatures have been prevailed upon to do it, and to progressively narrow the terms under which the mandate can be refused.
Leslie Manookian, in the interview she gave me,¹⁹ described the shape of what has been built here. “When we succeed and thrive outside the extant medical paradigm, we pose an existential threat to the medical complex which is why the main actors fight our information, experiences, and independence so fervently.” The compelled purchase is what makes the mandate machinery operate. Without it, the products would compete on their merits. With it, they do not compete at all.
The 1986 Act shielded manufacturers from every category of liability that governs other industries. The immunity covered injuries caused by design choices themselves — the composition of the product, the adjuvants used, the decisions about testing. A safer alternative product could exist and the manufacturer could refuse to adopt it, and the injured child’s family could not sue.
Justice Scalia’s opinion in Bruesewitz addressed a case brought by Robalee Bruesewitz on behalf of her daughter Hannah, who had suffered residual seizure disorder and developmental delay after receiving the DPT vaccine manufactured by Wyeth. The Bruesewitz family had exhausted the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. They then attempted to sue Wyeth in state court, arguing that a safer alternative vaccine design existed and Wyeth had refused to adopt it. The Supreme Court held that federal law preempts such claims. The manufacturer’s choice to continue producing a design that injured children could not be litigated.
Sotomayor’s dissent identified the consequence. Vaccine manufacturers now occupy a regulatory space in which no external mechanism — regulatory agency, court, or jury — holds them accountable for design decisions. This is not an inference. It is a description of the legal structure the majority created.
Behind the shield sits a further conflict. The Department of Health and Human Services — the parent agency of the FDA, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the Health Resources and Services Administration that runs the injury compensation program — holds patents on multiple childhood vaccines. HHS scientists Douglas Lowy and John Schiller developed the recombinant protein technology underlying Merck’s Gardasil and receive royalties on its sale.⁷ Similar patent and royalty arrangements extend to other products in the childhood schedule. The regulator collects revenue on the products it approves.
The research infrastructure that would produce independent safety findings is subject to a parallel capture. Studies funded by the CDC, the NIH, or by the manufacturers themselves consistently produce findings favorable to the schedule. The vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison studies that would settle the fundamental question about long-term outcomes have not been funded. When independent researchers attempt them — Anthony Mawson’s 2017 study of homeschooled populations,⁸ Paul Thomas’s cohort analysis of his own pediatric practice⁹ — the results are attacked, retracted, or ignored, and the researchers face professional consequences.
The capture extends inside the agencies themselves. In August 2014, Dr. William Thompson, a senior epidemiologist at the CDC and co-author of the 2004 DeStefano study widely cited to reject any link between the MMR product and neurodevelopmental injury, submitted a statement through his attorney acknowledging that he and his co-authors had “omitted statistically significant information” from the published paper and had disposed of documents to conceal the omission.¹⁰ The withheld data showed an elevated risk of neurodevelopmental injury among African American boys who received the injection before thirty-six months of age. Thompson’s disclosure was made under whistleblower protection. Congress has never subpoenaed him to testify. The DeStefano paper remains uncorrected.
Merck faced a parallel qui tam action from two of its own virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, who alleged in a federal filing that Merck had falsified mumps vaccine efficacy data submitted to the FDA over the course of a decade.¹¹ The case, filed in 2010, moved slowly through the courts. The Department of Justice declined to intervene. Merck retained its exclusive contract to supply mumps vaccine to the U.S. government. The plaintiffs’ allegations of test manipulation entered the public record and produced no regulatory action.
The shield is a network. Liability preemption from Congress protects the manufacturer. Patent revenue aligns the regulator with the products it approves. Captured research funding directs the studies that might identify harm away from the questions that would find it. Judicial preemption then blocks any citizen who attempts to litigate the design decisions the products embody. Each layer supports the others. The whole structure is invisible to the parent standing in a pediatrician’s office being told the shot is safe.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention operates the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It also runs the promotional campaigns that place vaccination on the pediatric schedule. The agency responsible for detecting harm from the products is the same agency responsible for driving their uptake.
The conflict is not theoretical. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, under a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality within HHS, conducted an internal study of VAERS reporting rates in a Massachusetts patient population between 2007 and 2010. The study found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events were being captured by the reporting system.¹² When the researchers attempted to communicate their findings to the CDC in order to develop improved reporting mechanisms, the agency stopped responding to their emails. The grant ended. The improved reporting system was never built.
The passive reporting infrastructure that captures under 1% of injuries then becomes the basis for the CDC’s public assurances that adverse events are rare.
The injury table itself has been subject to steady contraction. When the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program began in 1988, the injury table included a broader range of conditions presumed to be caused by vaccination, with corresponding timelines within which onset would qualify a case for compensation.¹³ Over the following decades, categories were removed or narrowed. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, initially compensable when it followed vaccination within a specified window, was removed. Neurodevelopmental injury, briefly acknowledged as a category during the 1990s when concerns about the MMR product and other injections emerged, was removed. The seizure timelines were narrowed. Encephalopathy definitions were tightened.
The 1995 amendment illustrates the pattern. Residual seizure disorder — a category under which many families of children who had suffered seizures after DPT vaccination had successfully claimed compensation — was removed. Encephalopathy criteria were revised in ways that made the diagnosis nearly impossible to satisfy. The Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, which recommended the changes, drew a majority of its membership from the same medical-institutional networks that administered and defended the vaccine schedule. Petitioners whose cases had been filed under the earlier table found themselves adjudicated under the new one. Cases that would have succeeded were denied.
Each removal reduced the number of compensable claims. The fund benefited. So did the manufacturers whose products would otherwise be more clearly implicated in the injury pattern.
The Institute of Medicine, tasked periodically with reviewing whether specific vaccines cause specific injuries, has repeatedly concluded that the evidence is insufficient to accept or reject a causal relationship for a majority of the injury-outcome pairs it examines.¹⁴ This finding — insufficient evidence — is then used in the injury compensation courtroom to deny claims. The absence of evidence functions as evidence of absence, produced by the very research infrastructure that would have to fund the studies to end the insufficiency.
The industry’s founding figure confirmed the position under oath in the same deposition. Asked directly whether he could make the scientific statement that childhood vaccines do not cause autism, Plotkin answered: “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.” The IOM had found no study establishing that the DTaP or Tdap products do not cause autism. Plotkin acknowledged that no such study existed and that he personally held no evidence to support the claim his industry has spent three decades making.
The parent whose child seized within twelve hours of vaccination, developed encephalopathy, and never recovered enters a system that was prepared for her arrival. The injury table’s timeline for seizure onset has been shortened past the point where her child’s case qualifies. The IOM has declared the evidence insufficient. VAERS captured her report and did nothing with it. The monitor was never separate from the promoter.
5. The Court and the Blame
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is administered by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It is not a court in the ordinary sense. The proceedings involve no juries, no meaningful discovery, and no Article III judges — no judges appointed for life under the constitutional protections designed to insulate the judiciary from executive influence.
Cases are heard by “Special Masters,” Article I officers appointed by the Chief Judge of the Court of Federal Claims to seven-year terms. The Special Masters are drawn from a pool of attorneys with prior government experience. The Department of Justice provides the attorneys who defend against injury claims. HRSA administers the fund. The petitioner’s attorneys are paid from the same fund out of which awards are made.
Every party in the courtroom — the judge, the government’s defense attorneys, the fund itself, and the petitioner’s legal counsel — is paid by the federal government. The injured child’s family stands before a tribunal in which no independent party has an interest in a finding of injury.
The statistics reflect the structure. The majority of petitions filed with the VICP have been dismissed rather than compensated over the life of the program.¹⁵ Of the cases that succeed, the majority are settled rather than adjudicated on the merits, with no admission that the vaccine caused the injury. The compensation cap for a vaccine-caused death — $250,000 — has not been raised since the statute was passed in 1986.
The excise tax that funds the program is $0.75 per antigen per dose. The fund now holds over $4 billion.¹⁶ The families whose children were injured cannot access it through the ordinary legal system because the ordinary legal system has been closed to them.
This is the structure Leslie Manookian described in her twelve-point summary. Her exact phrasing on the final function is worth returning to: “So, parents who’ve already suffered an unimaginable tragedy are up against a govt court staffed by govt paid special masters and attorneys with no due process defending a govt licensed and govt mandated product for which they blame the victims for harm.”
The final phrase — “they blame the victims for harm” — describes the twelfth function of the machine. When a child collapses after vaccination with the sudden onset of retinal hemorrhages, subdural hematoma, and cerebral edema — the triad — the diagnosis assigned in emergency departments and coroner’s offices is “shaken baby syndrome” or its rebranded successor, “abusive head trauma.” The triad is presumed diagnostic of parental abuse. The parents are arrested.
The vaccine reaction that produces the identical triad — through encephalopathy, elevated intracranial pressure, and hemorrhagic events following injection — is not considered in the differential diagnosis.¹⁷ The diagnostic criteria for “shaken baby syndrome” were developed without accounting for it. The emergency physician, the coroner, and the child protective services investigator have all been trained within an institutional framework in which vaccine injury of this magnitude does not exist.
Alan Yurko’s ten-week-old son died in November 1997 shortly after receiving a round of childhood vaccinations. Yurko was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999 on the basis of the triad diagnosis and sentenced to life plus ten years in Florida state prison. He was released in 2004 after independent medical review of the case demonstrated that the shaking diagnosis could not be sustained and post-conviction proceedings established alternative medical explanations for the child’s injuries.¹⁸ Yurko is one documented case. There are others. The precise number is unknown because the diagnostic framework prevents the question from being asked.
A parent whose child dies after vaccination faces a compound structure. The vaccine that caused the death is licensed by the federal government, recommended by the federal government, purchased by the federal government, and defended in the injury court by the federal government. The manufacturer is shielded from civil liability by federal statute and Supreme Court precedent. The injury table does not recognize the death as vaccine-caused. The state, meanwhile, has assigned the triad diagnosis and turned the case over to the district attorney. The parent must now prove — in a criminal court, against the state — that the child was not shaken.
Robalee Bruesewitz spent nearly two decades in litigation on behalf of her daughter. The Supreme Court’s ruling denied her family relief and closed the door behind them for every family that would come after. The 1986 Act had shifted liability from the manufacturer to the taxpayer. Bruesewitz confirmed that the shift was permanent and that no design decision made by the manufacturer could be challenged in any court open to ordinary Americans.
This is the position in which the American parent now stands. Her child’s pediatric visit will produce a recommendation to administer products licensed on the basis of trials that were never controlled against saline. The state will require their administration for school attendance. When injury results, over 99% of adverse events never reach VAERS at all, and the reports that do reach it change nothing. A family that attempts compensation will petition a court in which every party is paid by the federal government to defend the products or administer the fund. And when death occurs with the triad present, the emergency department’s diagnostic framework will not include vaccine reaction in the differential, and the parent enters the criminal jurisdiction as the presumed cause of the child’s death.
There is no exemption from this structure that carries no cost. State legislatures have progressively narrowed medical and religious exemptions; declining vaccines removes a child from school; injury bars a family from ordinary civil courts. And when death is accompanied by the triad, the state prosecutes the parent for the death.
Leslie Manookian described this arrangement, at the close of her twelve-point post, as “crony capitalism at best and pure evil fascism at worst.” The characterization is precise. A private industry produces the product. The state compels its administration, indemnifies the manufacturer against claims of harm, and prosecutes the parent when the harm arrives.
The machine’s design serves the flow of money and the concentration of power. Every safeguard the ordinary citizen might rely on — informed consent, product liability, judicial review, jury trial, prosecutorial restraint — has been removed at the point where the childhood vaccine schedule intersects with the American family. The parent who accepts the recommendation and whose child is injured has no meaningful path to redress. Refusal costs school access. Death with the triad opens the parent to criminal prosecution for a killing they did not commit.
This is the environment in which every American child is now born. The machine was assembled piece by piece across four decades, ratified by every institution that could have prevented it, and defended by the same institutions today. What Leslie Manookian named as crony capitalism at best and fascism at worst describes a working system, operating as designed, in a country that once organised its politics around the presumption that no such system could be permitted to form.
For a Six-Year-Old
There is a big company that makes shots.
The government helps the company make the shots and sell them. The government tells your school that you have to get the shots before you can come to school.
Nobody checks the shots very well. The people who are supposed to check work with the company. So the shots go out into the world before anyone really knows if they are safe.
When a child is hurt by a shot, the family cannot go to a normal judge. There is a special room where a different kind of judge decides. That judge is paid by the government. The lawyers on the other side are paid by the government. The government made the shot rules. The government bought the shots. And the government decides whether the shot hurt you.
Most families are told the shot did not hurt their child, even when it did.
When a shot makes a baby die, the doctors sometimes think the mother or father shook the baby. The parents can be arrested. They can go to prison. For what the shot did.
The company that made the shot never gets in trouble. The company keeps making the shots. Your school keeps requiring them. The next family goes through the same door.
That is the machine.
References
¹ National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, Public Law 99-660, 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-1 et seq.
² Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223 (2011).
³ Leslie Manookian, twelve-point summary post, X (@LeslieManookian), July 3, 2026, status/2072712451800625369.
⁴ Deposition of Stanley A. Plotkin, M.D., taken January 11, 2018, in Matheson v. Schmitt, State of Michigan, Circuit Court for the County of Oakland, Family Division, Case No. 2015-831539-DM; transcript published via Informed Consent Action Network.
⁵ ICAN v. HHS, correspondence dated July 9, 2018, in response to FOIA request; HHS acknowledged no biennial reports produced under 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-27(c).
⁶ Vaccines for Children Program expenditure data, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; annual VFC purchasing figures.
⁷ U.S. Patents 5,437,951 and related — Lowy, Schiller et al., “Self-Assembling Recombinant Papillomavirus Capsid Proteins,” assigned to the United States Department of Health and Human Services; licensed to Merck & Co. for Gardasil.
⁸ Mawson AR et al., “Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children,” Journal of Translational Science, 2017.
⁹ Thomas JL, Lyons-Weiler J, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020.
¹⁰ Statement of William W. Thompson, Ph.D., through counsel Rick Morgan, August 27, 2014; documentation regarding DeStefano DA et al., “Age at first measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in children with autism and school-matched control subjects: a population-based study in metropolitan Atlanta,” Pediatrics, 2004.
¹¹ United States ex rel. Krahling and Wlochowski v. Merck & Co., Inc., No. 2:10-cv-04374, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, complaint filed 2010.
¹² Lazarus R et al., “Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS),” Grant Final Report, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., 2011 (AHRQ Grant ID R18 HS 017045).
¹³ Vaccine Injury Table history, Health Resources and Services Administration; successive amendments to 42 C.F.R. § 100.3.
¹⁴ Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (2011) and predecessor reports.
¹⁵ Health Resources and Services Administration, VICP claim adjudication statistics.
¹⁶ Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund monthly balance report, U.S. Department of the Treasury.
¹⁷ Michael Innis, “Vaccines, Apparent Life-Threatening Events, Barlow’s Disease, and Questions about ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome,’” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 2006; Harold Buttram and Alan R. Yurko, “Shaken Baby Syndrome or Vaccine-Induced Encephalitis?” Medical Sentinel, subsequent case documentation.
¹⁸ State of Florida v. Alan R. Yurko, Ninth Judicial Circuit, 1999; post-conviction proceedings and release 2004; contemporaneous medical review including Harold E. Buttram, M.D.
¹⁹ Unbekoming, “Interview with Leslie Manookian, Health Freedom Defense Fund,” Lies are Unbekoming, Substack, April 13, 2024.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have officially begun a one-year process to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the court has announced.
The three West African countries previously said they would leave the ICC, describing it as “a tool of new colonial oppression,” according to Reuters.
The presidency of the ICC’s governing body confirmed that Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger had submitted formal notices of withdrawal, triggering a one-year process to leave the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.
In a statement, the presidency said the move could weaken global efforts to end impunity and undermine the pursuit of justice. It urged the three countries to remain committed to the Rome Statute.
The statement also stressed that withdrawal does not release a state from any obligations arising during its membership of the Rome Statute.
Mali’s army announced on Saturday that insurgents launched attacks before dawn against its positions in Aguelhok, Anefis, Gao, Sévaré, and Kenieroba, spanning the country’s north and center. Fighting in the different locations began around 5 am local time.
The army says the assaults were attempted strikes on its positions, according to a statement carried on state television.
In Gao, a local official told Reuters that gunfire and rocket fire had targeted a military camp since before dawn. Explosions were also reported in Sévaré, with aircraft later spotted flying over the area, a security source told AFP.
In Kenieroba, roughly 74 kilometers from Bamako, a major prison complex holding extremist prisoners came under attack. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
FLA claims gains in Anefis
The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg-led separatist movement, confirmed it carried out the assault on Anefis, in the northeastern Kidal region.
For his part, spokesperson Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane told Reuters that several army positions in the town had fallen and that clashes were ongoing inside it.
A resident reached by AFP said armed fighters had entered the town but that the army camp had not yet fallen, and government forces were still resisting.
JNIM, the al-Qaeda-linked coalition that has also operated alongside the FLA, had not issued a claim as of Saturday.
Anefis and Aguelhok are the only locations in the Kidal region where Malian troops have maintained a presence since the collapse of government control there in late April, when FLA and JNIM fighters seized the city of Kidal itself.
Russian forces, deployed to Anefis after that offensive, are also stationed in the area, making it a focal point for both Bamako and Moscow’s regional military presence.
Part of a broader pattern since April
Saturday’s attacks come just over two months after JNIM and the FLA carried out a coordinated wave of strikes on military and administrative targets across Mali, including in Bamako, Kati, Gao, Sévaré, and Kidal.
That offensive killed Defense Minister Sadio Camara, whose responsibilities were temporarily transferred to President Assimi Goïta, and led to the withdrawal of Malian and Russian forces from Kidal and other northern towns.
Russia’s Defense Ministry described the April events as a foiled coup attempt involving roughly 12,000 fighters, it said were trained with Western support.
The funeral ceremony for the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, brought together one of the largest gatherings of foreign dignitaries in Iran in recent decades, with representatives from across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and major international organizations attending the event in Tehran.
The delegations included presidents, prime ministers, parliamentary speakers, foreign ministers, senior government officials, political leaders, and representatives of religious organizations and resistance movements, underscoring the broad international participation in the ceremony.
Asia
Asia accounted for the largest share of official delegations.
From West Asia, Iraq sent one of the largest delegations, including Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, senior officials, and representatives of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
Saudi Arabia was represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed Al-Khuraiji, while Oman sent the chairman of its State Council and Qatar was represented by Parliament Speaker Hassan bin Abdullah Al Ghanim.
Shia community representatives also attended from Bahrain and several other Persian Gulf countries.
Lebanon dispatched Defense Minister Michel Menassa alongside senior delegations from Hezbollah and the Amal Movement.
Yemen was represented by Vice President Mahmoud al-Junaid and an Ansarullah delegation.
Palestinian groups also attended, including senior Hamas leaders and Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah.
From the wider Asian region, Pakistan sent one of the highest-level foreign delegations, headed by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir. The delegation also included the Senate speaker, senior government officials, and religious leaders.
Afghanistan was represented by delegations from the Taliban administration and the Afghan resistance.
India sent a special government envoy at the deputy foreign minister level.
China was represented by He Wei, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon attended the ceremony in person, while Armenia was represented by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Georgia sent President Mikheil Kavelashvili along with a Muslim delegation.
Türkiye dispatched Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, together with political and party representatives.
Turkmenistan was represented by Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Chairman of the People’s Council and National Leader.
Among other participants were Azerbaijan’s parliament speaker, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister; the parliamentary speakers of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; Thailand’s deputy prime minister; Malaysia’s agriculture minister; Myanmar’s special envoy; and official delegations from South Korea and North Korea.
Africa
Several African governments were represented by ministerial- or cabinet-level delegations.
Egypt sent its Senate speaker.
South Africa, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Tanzania, and Tunisia all sent official representatives.
Nigeria and Senegal also dispatched delegations to participate in the funeral ceremonies.
Europe and the Americas
Russia sent Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, as President Vladimir Putin’s special representative.
Belarus was represented by its parliament speaker, while Serbia sent its communications minister. Bulgaria also dispatched parliamentary and political representatives.
Germany was represented by members of the country’s Shia community.
From Latin America, Cuba sent its higher education minister as a special representative, while Nicaragua was represented by Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke.
International organizations
The ceremony also drew senior representatives of several international organizations.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was represented by Secretary-General Nurlan Yermekbayev, while the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) sent Deputy Secretary-General Tariq Ali Bakheet.
The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation and the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) were represented by their respective secretaries-general.
Protesters gathered outside the General Medical Council’s headquarters in London to slam the council’s attempt to silence those speaking out about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Protesters describe the surgeon as one of the world’s leading war doctors and argue that the regulator’s actions amount to an attempt to silence those who speak publicly about the realities of war,
So we are demonstrating in front of the GMC, because the GMC has decided to appeal against the rulings of two of its own tribunals, so that the High Court would allow it to try me for a third time, in order to get the right political result that it wants.
The GMC is conducting a political campaign against, not just myself, but every doctor who’s spoken up against the genocide, in order to silence us, in the service of the genocidal project. – Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, British-Palestinian Surgeon
Doctors, campaigners, and members of the public traveled to attend the demonstration, asserting that the proceedings are about more than one individual, warning that they could have a chilling effect on healthcare professionals speaking about humanitarian crises.
Actually, there probably were a group of lawyers set up by the Israelis again to pursue highly charged politicized campaigns against professionals and workers in this country who stand against genocide.
So, really, it’s the action of how the British government and the Israelis who are trying to persecute and outlaw speech in support of Palestine in the heartland of Britain.
Actually, from, we know where our government, you know, the British government, the Labour government, and the Tory government before it have been complicit in genocide from bases like RAF Akrotiri, where Keir Starmer went and complimented the troops.
They run the genocide, they send the planes over Gaza, they stream that information live to the Israelis as they’re committing that genocide.
So our government is complicit, and what they’re doing with their complaints is they’re making it illegal for us to oppose it. – Ranjeet Brar, NHS Surgeon
Speakers at the rally urged the GMC to withdraw the appeal; assisting medical professionals should not face professional consequences for raising concerns over civilian suffering in conflict zones.
There’s a clear example here with Dr. Ghassan, where UK law is for Israel, that it is essentially standing up for the rights of a foreign entity, have been pressuring patients, pressuring people to make complaints against Dr. Abu-Sittah, and this is just one example of many other institutions, medical institutions like the Royal Colleges, and even the journals, the medical journals that we publish in, where they’ve been pressured from UK pro-Israel lobby groups to censor and to shut down any form of pro-Palestine activism.
So, I think we’re seeing this now very clearly with Dr. Ghassan, but the reality is it’s much more widespread than any of us think. – Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, British-Egyptian Pediatric Neurologist
Organizers say they will continue campaigning until the proceedings against Dr. Abu-Sittah come to an end, maintaining that doctors must be free to speak about humanitarian consequences of war without fear or professional repercussions.
Supporters gathered outside the General Medical Council in London to stand behind British Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, accusing the regulators of attempting to silence one of the world’s most prominent war doctors.
Demonstrators say the case is not simply about one medic, but the right of healthcare professionals to speak out on the atrocities of Gaza without professional retaliation.
Israeli spyware was used to hack the phone of a former Greek member of the European Parliament while he was serving on a committee investigating spyware abuses in Europe, according to a report by Citizen Lab published on Friday, Anadolu reports.
The University of Toronto-based research group said that forensic analysis found Stelios Kouloglou’s iPhone was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli company NSO Group, in October 2022 and again the next March.
Kouloglou, a journalist and former MEP, was at the time a substitute member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, which was established to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware in EU member states.
Citizen Lab said the infections took place during key periods of PEGA committee activity and could have exposed non-public information, confidential documents, and internal committee deliberations.
“The spyware would have likely captured non-public information about committee activities, possibly breaching EU parliamentary confidentiality and privilege frameworks,” the report said.
The first infection occurred as the committee was preparing hearings on spyware, working on its draft report, and planning fact-finding visits to Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration. Citizen Lab said Kouloglou’s phone was hacked 10 days before those visits began.
The second infection took place while the committee was engaged in intense discussions over the final drafting process of its report. Kouloglou was in Brussels on March 6-7, 2023, during the period of the infection.
Kouloglou said he was shocked by the findings, describing it as “inconceivable” that a member of the parliamentary committee investigating spyware abuses had himself become a surveillance target, according to Greek news outlet Dnews.
He said he plans to pursue legal action against NSO Group and those responsible for infecting his device, while also raising the issue again through contacts in the European Parliament.
Citizen Lab said the attacks used a “zero-click” exploit, meaning the phone could be compromised without the user opening a link or taking any action.
The group said it was not attributing the attacks to any specific government and found no indication that the Greek government was responsible.
However, it said the first infection overlapped with a previously identified Pegasus campaign targeting Russian and Belarusian-speaking exiled journalists and activists in Europe, suggesting that a Pegasus customer authorized to operate in multiple European countries may have been behind the attack.
Citizen Lab warned that the case posed a serious threat to democratic institutions, saying the hacking could have exposed confidential exchanges among lawmakers and staff, including to parties under investigation by the committee itself.
When it comes to war, the Trump administration faces a credibility problem. According to CNN, between late March and early June, the president claimed he was on the verge of reaching a peace deal with Iran at least 38 times. Such fabrications came nearly a full year after Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” and suffered “monumental damage.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been equally sanguine these past months, bragging at one April Pentagon press conference that Operation Epic Fury, the campaign against Iran launched on February 28, had been “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital-V military victory.” And yet the war continued on.
Now, a tenuous “memorandum of understanding” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift Iranian sanctions, while raising alarm among some members of Congress, has been painted by Trump as a major win thanks to a “record high” stock market and “tumbling” oil prices.
Such optimistic yet fallacious progress reports elicit memories of another American war in which credibility became contested ground, both at home and abroad. The lies of Vietnam created a “credibility gap” between the White House and American public — one that has now turned into a credibility chasm undermining the trust necessary for political leaders to deliver on their national security promises.
It is with good reason that the American war in Vietnam has come to be seen as one of the most contentious conflicts in our nation’s 250-year history. The political-military struggle set a historical benchmark for how we talk about — and lie about — war. Distortion and deception seemed indivisible from the very conduct of American military interventionism.
The duplicity started early. Gen. Paul D. Harkins, the first chief of the U.S. military assistance command in Vietnam, openly boasted that “I am an optimist, and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic.” Not surprisingly, rosy reports flowed into Washington. The communist insurgents were diminishing in strength and influence. The Saigon government was attracting loyalty among the rural population. The war was being won.
In August 1964, months after Harkins’ tour ended, Washington Postreporter Arnold Beichman shared a popular refrain Americans were still singing outside of Saigon. “We are winning, this we know / General Harkins tells us so.” When Beichman asked a group of U.S. advisors if they thought the South Vietnamese indeed were winning, they unanimously declared “no.”
Less than a year later, there seemed little doubt about the U.S. advisory mission’s inability to stanch the communist tide. In the spring of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched ground combat troops to South Vietnam at the behest of senior military commanders. At Johns Hopkins University that April, the president suggested he had little choice but to escalate. “We do this in order to slow down aggression,” he shared.
But the falsehoods only multiplied. Johnson spoke of the “deepening shadow of Communist China,” masking the reality that this conflict was, at its core, a Vietnamese civil conflict. He spoke of strengthening the world order by defeating North Vietnam, avoiding questions of how such a small Southeast Asian country could pack such a huge international wallop. And he spoke of increasing “the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam,” overlooking the damage being done by American firepower on an already dispossessed rural population.
As American troops poured into South Vietnam, journalists took note of the disconnects between official White House narratives and their own observations. David Wise of the New York Herald Tribune first used the term “credibility gap” in May 1965, followed by Murrey Marder of the Washington Post that December. Marder found “creeping signs of doubt and cynicism about Administration pronouncements” and a “perceptibly growing distrust… about the candor or validity of official declarations.”
White House untrustworthiness was undermining U.S. foreign policy. Worse was yet to come.
By the summer of 1967, two years after U.S. Marines first landed at Da Nang, the war had devolved into a blood-stained impasse. The military command in Vietnam dutifully reported progress at daily press briefings, disparagingly called the “Five O’clock Follies” by skeptical journalists. Back home, the media increasingly spoke of a “stalemate” that only “moved to a higher level of combat, casualties, and destruction.”
Concerned about growing domestic discord, the president summoned home his war managers to help “sell” the war. In November, General William Westmoreland, Harkins’ successor, and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker presented an optimistic report on Meet the Press. The general highlighted “significant evidence” of “real progress being made,” while Bunker intimated that media reports were misrepresenting the allied war effort. Days later, the president castigated the disparities between “constructive dissent and storm-trooper bullying.”
Then the walls crumbled. In early 1968, Vietnamese communists launched a general offensive across South Vietnam during the Tet holiday, hoping to spur a general uprising among the southern population. The American public relations campaign came crashing down as television viewers back home watched military police fighting across shattered U.S. embassy grounds.
When word of the attacks reached respected news broadcaster Walter Cronkite, his reaction mirrored many of his fellow Americans. “What the hell is going on,” he reportedly asked. “I thought we were winning the war.” And still, the war dragged on.
By the time of Richard Nixon’s presidency, in historian Christian Appy’s words, “the credibility gap took on Grand Canyon-like proportions.” The New York Times’ June 1972 decision to publish the “Pentagon Papers,” a classified record of duplicitous decisions leading the nation to war, surely aided in this massive breakdown of trust. When asked to justify leaking the secret report, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg turned the tables, asking what made officials “feel like they had a right to keep silent about the lies that had been told… the crimes that had been committed, the illegalities, the deception of the American public?”
The lies of which Ellsberg spoke matter because they endure, having been replicated, if not intensified, by a Trump administration indifferent to being truthful about the causes, conduct, and consequences of war. Indeed, the administration seemingly has gone out of its way to hide any inconvenient truth from the American public. Earlier this month, Secretary Hegseth declared the Pentagon press office a “classified space,” curtailing journalists’ ability to report on national security issues. The Five O’clock Follies look comparatively transparent.
Of course, Vietnam was not the only case of political leaders using deception to justify military adventurism. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, for instance, was far less an “intelligence failure” than a comprehensive case of intelligence manipulation.
Yet the war in Vietnam, perhaps better than any conflict over the nation’s 250-year history, lays bare how dishonesty perpetuates conflict and how the responsibility, if not burden, of citizens in a democracy is to demand a more truthful accounting of wartime decision-making and to question overzealous “progress” reports.
Historian Barbara Tuchman thought the solution for opposing senior officials who peddle falsehoods lay outside the halls of government. Writing less than a decade after Saigon’s fall, she believed that avoiding similar “betrayals” like the one in Vietnam depended upon “educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz.”
If Americans haven’t necessarily rewarded integrity at the ballot box lately, we shouldn’t lose hope that credibility and character still matter when it comes to wartime leadership. There is no better time than our 250th anniversary to demand that our leaders shrink the credibility chasm that we are peering across today.
This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace.
Gregory A. Daddis is the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University and author of Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945 (2025). He served 26 years in the U.S. Army before entering academia and is a board member of the Quincy Institute.
France’s Foreign Ministry has announced ongoing preparations with Italy to form new international coalition forces to be deployed in southern Lebanon after the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) ends.
Speaking to Saudi broadcaster Al Hadath, the ministry said the multinational force would be deployed in southern Lebanon with US backing and the participation of several European countries.
It said the force would be deployed at the request of the Lebanese authorities to support the Lebanese army in carrying out its duties and to strengthen stability.
The ministry added that consultations with partners are continuing to finalise the force’s deployment mechanism, amid security arrangements linked to the recent framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel.
NS Euthanasia Propaganda Poster, around 1938. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
By John Wear | Inconvenient History | August 31, 2017
I have been asked the question: Why do you think the German euthanasia program happened during World War II, but not the Holocaust? This article will show that the evidence for the German euthanasia program is overwhelming, while the evidence to support the Holocaust story is severely lacking. … continue
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