Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia.
What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.
Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow.
At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.
Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.
British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory.
And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.
Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too.
A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.
Lip service
Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.
During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets.
Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.
Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine.
After a highly staged “surprise” visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said he had been given a “flat reassurance” that the jets would not attack Russian territory.
British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks.
‘Rightful place is in Nato’
No 10 has made clear that Sunak’s purpose is to build “a new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets” and that the prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”.
These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out against Nato’s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.
“The prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”
It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia’s neighbour.
Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base that first set Moscow on course to invade.
At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine.
This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record £8.5bn, more than double last year’s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.
Risk to health
Europe’s weapons largesse is, we are told, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.
Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise “Ukraine will fall in a matter of days”, he said.
Borrell’s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine’s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.
And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on – among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia’s borders too – may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.
In March, Declassified broke the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kiev are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants.
Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party has said it “fully supports” the UK government’s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.
DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified that the ammunition produces “chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people”.
Nonetheless, British ministers insist the threat to human health is low – and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks.
Cancer deaths
As Declassified has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.
Italian courts have upheld compensation claims against the country’s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU.
Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.
In 2001 Tony Blair’s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy’s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a “moral obligation” to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.
The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.
Nonetheless, Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.
The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported to suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs.
In 2018 the British government reclassified a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier.
Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.
But as Weir told Declassified in March: “None of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.”
In other words, they simply don’t know – and possibly don’t care to find out.
Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.
British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe – as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.
However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson told Declassified that, despite the British government’s assertions, DU was no longer an “active area of policy research”.
Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian that soldiers and civilians in Iraq “were in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.”
At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society’s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, also warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.
Voices silenced
By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.
First, it is driving the war’s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.
Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a “dirty bomb”.
In March Putin responded to the UK’s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move “tactical” nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said it put the world “fewer and fewer” steps away from “nuclear collision”.
But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.
Russia struck a military ammunition depot in western Ukraine, creating a giant fireball. Rumours suggested the site may have included British DU shells.
Whether this is true or not, it is a reminder that Moscow could hit such a storage site, intentionally or not, spreading contamination widely over a built-up area.
With Ukraine soon to be in possession of a full array of offensive weapons, largely courtesy of the UK – not only long-range drones, cruise missiles and tanks but fighter jets – it is not hard to imagine terrifying scenarios that could quickly bring Europe to the brink of nuclear conflict.
Moscow hits a DU ammunition depot, exposing a large civilian population to toxic contamination. Ukraine retaliates with air strikes deep inside Russia. The path to a nuclear exchange in Europe has never looked closer.
Those who warned that peace talks were urgently needed rather than an arms race in Ukraine are looking more prescient by the day. For how much longer can their voices continue to be silenced, not only by western leaders but by the western media too?
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, UK, Ukraine |
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On the 19th of May, the Financial Times quoted the British Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, stating that the West could face the threat of full-scale war with Russia and China by the end of the decade and proclaimed defence preparation a paramount task for Western countries.
One has to wonder what universe Mr. Wallace and his boss, Rishi Sunak, are living in since Britain is engaged in war with Russia right now, has, with every step, every hostile action, set itself up for a full-scale war, a full-scale catastrophe, which they cannot prevent. Why Britain would go to war with China as well as Russia when China has not threatened it and is oceans away, no one can explain in rational terms. Yet, this is the British rhetoric, the fetishistic parroting of the words of their lord and master, the USA.
Many argue that statements, a war is not happening, that it is something that exits only in the future, are desperate attempts to fool the British people, to lie to them about their government’s intentions and what is coming. Others argue that they are signs that the British government has no sense of reality. But, in the end, one has to conclude that they are both at the same time.
Worse, these statements speak of a government, that seems to think it is untouchable, that the war with Russia will be limited in geographic space to Ukraine, that Britain’s participation in the war against Russia will have no direct consequences for Britain and its people, that Russia will not dare to follow military and political logic and conduct military strikes against Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the British establishment, dreaming of its past, is unable to accept reality, is leading the British people towards disaster, as the gathering storm of war edges ever closer to their shores.
The deluded thinking in Britain is an extension of the same psychosis that grips all the halls of power in the western world, a psychosis that has its roots in the deeply troubled societies which have developed in the west and whose causes will be the subject of study of future social scientists and historians if there are any. In fact, these governments display observable and classical symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders, leading to the complete break with reality that constitutes psychosis. This is a very dangerous state of affairs because someone who is delusional, who has no grip on reality, who cannot make distinctions between reality and imagination or wishful thinking, will make decisions and take actions that are dangerous to everyone around them, in this case, Russia, and beyond, the whole world.
Just after Russia began its Special Military Operation, Britain declared its support for Ukraine along with the rest of NATO and announced it would supply it with weapons and munitions to fight Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, in response, stated that NATO states providing weapons to Ukraine could be hit in strikes.
Ms Zakharova said:
“Do we understand correctly that for the sake of disrupting the logistics of military supplies, Russia can strike military targets on the territory of those NATO countries that supply arms to the Kyiv regime?
“After all, this directly leads to deaths and bloodshed on Ukrainian territory. As far as I understand, Britain is one of those countries.”
The Russian defence ministry, after several attacks inside Russia backed by NATO, has repeatedly said:
“We would like to stress that the direct provoking by London of the Kyiv regime into such activities attacking Russian territory, should there be an attempt to realise them, will immediately lead to our proportional response.”
In April, when the UK announced it was sending depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine, Russia said it would respond and did so, destroying those munitions in Ukraine just after they arrived, and now a radioactive cloud is drifting west towards Europe and the UK. Russian warnings of the danger of this happening were ignored.
On May 11, Ben Wallace announced a further act of aggression against Russia with the decision to send Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, which have since been used to attack civilian centres in Russia. Again, Russia stated clearly that there would be a military response to this action.
On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued another warning, on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region, an openly terrorist action backed by the UK and the other NATO states. From Vientiane, he stated,
“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”
Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,
“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”
But Russia can strike using its conventional weapons as well, against which the UK has no defence whatsoever.
Still, the British attitude towards these warnings is to call on the magic of “legality” as if they can weave a protective cloak around the island with incantations. Yet, everyone knows that to use incantations to ward off danger, the formula used must have mojo or force; otherwise the words have no effect.
In 2022, for example, then Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, hit back, after Russia suggested it could target British military installations over its support for Ukraine, by branding the Kremlin’s claim “unlawful.” Wallace, Sunak, and others have repeated this claim multiple times.
Raab, and the rest, can only be right if Britain had maintained its neutrality in the war between Ukraine and Russia. But, as we know, this is really a war by the USA, Britain and their NATO mafia against Russia and has been all along. Ukraine is the present battlefield. So, for Britain to claim that it has maintained neutrality is an absurdity.
A neutral state violates neutrality by breaching its obligation to remain impartial, to not participate in the conflict. It violates neutrality by supplying warships, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, either directly or indirectly, to a belligerent, by engaging its own military forces, or by supplying military advisors to a party to the armed conflict, by allowing belligerent use of neutral territory as a military base, or for the storage of war material or passage of belligerent troops or munitions in neutral territory, by furnishing troops to a belligerent, or providing or transmitting military intelligence on behalf of a belligerent are also examples of violations of neutrality.
A State’s neutrality ends when the State becomes a party to an armed conflict, or, in other words, a belligerent. A State becomes a belligerent under the law of neutrality by either declaring war; or participating in hostilities to a significant extent, or engages in systematic or substantial violations of its duties of impartiality and non-participation.
Britain meets all the requirements of a co-belligerent, that is, of a party to the war with Russia; it not only supplies munitions and weapon systems to Ukraine with the objective of attacking Russia and Russian forces in Ukraine it has a direct role in directing the war against Russia, including sending military officers and soldiers to advise and operate with the Ukrainian forces, by preventing any peace negotiations – we remember the action of Boris Johnson just as Ukraine and Russia were about to conclude a peace settlement – by the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Britain and transporting them to the front, by supplying the Ukrainian forces with reconnaissance and intelligence data, actively sending aircraft close to the war zone for this purpose, by providing communications systems, by providing financial aid to Ukraine at the same imposing economic warfare measure on Russia, euphemistically termed “sanctions. These conditions apply to all the NATO allies, of course, but Britain’s role is an especially egregious one.
In fact, Britain’s aggression against Russia began much earlier than 2022. Britain, as part of NATO, supported the insurgency in the Caucasus region in the mid-1990s. Britain took part in the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, part of the strategy to attack Russia, eliminating a potential Russian ally, just as Hitler did in 1941. The Georgian attack on Russian forces in 2008 was also supported by NATO.
All through this period, the UK government and media put out a constant stream of propaganda against Russia, culminating in the wild claims by the British that Russia tried to use novichok nerve poison to kill two Russian citizens, the Skripals, in the UK. That incident had one objective, to prepare the minds of the British people for war with Russia. That no one has seen or heard from the Skripals for several years now, that Britain rejects Russia’s right to meet with them to see if they are all right, is never mentioned in the West. They have disappeared, their fate unknown, two expendable pieces on the chessboard of war.
Lastly, Russia claims, with some evidence to back up their claims, that the UK was involved, with the US and other NATO nations, in the attack on the NordStream Pipeline, an act of war against both Russia and Germany, though the Germans, still occupied by US forces, are required to accept this humiliation and keep quiet.
So British claims that Russia has no legal right to retaliate against it are absurd. Britain, as with all the NATO countries, cannot claim to have a neutral status in the war. It has become in law and in fact a party to the war.
It follows that any action taken by Russia against the UK to force the UK to stop its assistance to Ukraine and end its participation in the war against Russia will be legitimate under international law and justified under the ancient military doctrine that a nation cannot suffer the attack of another without retaliating to stop the attack and making sure that another attack will not follow.
The NATO gang’s claim of acting in “collective self defence,” a phrase Ben Wallace likes to use a lot, so that they can claim to maintain a neutral status, is not a valid or logical one and does not apply. It is clear that the USA and NATO have been planning an attack on Russia for a long time, and the Ukraine war is a part of this attack. The conspiracy to commit aggression has been developed over decades. Part of the preparation for the war was the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine and the installation in its place of a puppet government that was then used to attack the Donbass and Russia itself. They now openly admit that the Minsk Accords were a ruse to stall Russia while they prepared the Ukrainian forces for war against Russia.
Further, they cannot rely on Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, since that clause can only be invoked if there is an unprovoked Russian attack on a NATO country. But when a NATO country attacks Russia, and here we have them all joining in the attack, it is the aggressor and therefore cannot claim to be are acting in self-defence. It is also important to bear in mind Article I of the NATO Treaty, since it requires NATO to act in conformity with the UN Charter. It states
Article 1
The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
But the NATO nations have done the exact opposite. They have blocked peace at every turn and push Ukraine to keep the war going. Their forces are directly involved. They have even attempted to expand their military bloc by inviting Finland and Sweden to join the war alliance, in order to increase the forces available to them, with one purpose, to prosecute the war against Russia. They now openly state their objective is to destroy Russia. So, the NATO nations are not only active co-belligerents in the war, they are, in fact, the main protagonists of the enemy camp that Russia faces. They are, therefore, all legitimate targets.
But is an attack likely, and what will its nature be, and what will be the consequences? These are questions only the Russian General Staff can know and foresee. We can only speculate. But speculation can be useful, especially for the British people to realise the danger their criminal government is putting them in.
Medvedev warns again of the dangers of nuclear war, but Russia has no need to resort to that to retaliate against Britain. Conventional stand-off weapons will be more effective, and what can the UK do if a strike on military airfields takes place, on port facilities, to stop the shipment of weapons, on army bases where Ukrainian soldiers are trained, on warehouses storing munitions and weapons marked for shipment to Ukraine, or eliminating the UK Trident nuclear submarine force in Scotland, or any number of other targets they could select? They can do nothing.
The National and Defence Strategies Research Group based in the UK stated in a report on Britain’s air defences in 2016, that,
“Since the withdrawal from service of the Bloodhound missile system in the 1980s, the UK’s Air Defence posture has diminished to mainly a homeland benign airspace policing and point defence posture for deployed forces. The UK no longer has a comprehensive, integrated, or robustly layered short to long-range Air Defence capability, nor a credible or enduring operational capacity.”
Nothing has changed since then, except to get worse. In other words, the UK is defenceless against modern Russian stand-off weapons.
I can remember, as a boy, my mother taking me several times on a bus through London. It must have been 1955 or so and I can remember mile upon mile of burnt-out blackened buildings, as far as the eye could see, especially in east London where entire districts were levelled by German bombs. The country, despite its heroic RAF fighter pilots, could not stop the bombing and then missile attacks which went on for five years.
The British government assured the people before that war, that all would be well, that they would have peace in their time. But they lied to the people then, as they are lying to them now. Britain was never the same after that war. It never really recovered from it. Once again, the British government, ever saluting the masters in Washington, leads the British people into a dangerous war, which they were never asked about, and which they do not want. It lies to them about the causes, it lies to them about the fighting, and it lies to them about the dangers they face, placing them in a distant future, and hides from them the consequences of its actions. The British people must be warned. Britain is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. They are predictable and they will be catastrophic.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | NATO, UK, United States |
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Leaked secret US documents have revealed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been planning to escalate the current confrontation with Moscow by invading Russian villages, targeting Russia beyond the Donbass and the current conflict zone with longe-range missiles and even blowing up the Druzhba pipeline which provides NATO member Hungary with Russian oil, according to the Washington Post. Kiev’s plans for further exacerbating the crisis cross a number of red lines and should be a problem for Washington too, as US President Biden has already made clear to Zelensky that he and his Western allies want neither “to go to war with Russia” nor “a third world war”. However, paradoxically, the US seems to be pushing for precisely such escalation.
The possible scenarios are quite worrisome. In addition to the aforementioned developments, according to the same leaks, Ukraine was also planning to attack Russian forces in Syria, which would mean making the Eastern European conflict spill into the Middle East and thus risk spiraling out of control across Western Asia and subsequently maybe even the Caucasus, too. Some analysts have already pointed out that the Russian-Ukraine confrontation potentially intersects with the South Caucasus, which is already the stage for today’s Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
According to Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’ report, countries in the region such as Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, led by Poland are pressuring Zelensky to find a compromise and end the crisis, even by resigning himself if needed.
The conflict had been transitioning into a protracted phase and the US seems to be encouraging Kiev to intensify its hostilities along the whole front line. However any kind of trench warfare or proxy attrition war is extremely harmful for Ukraine – and would not be such bad news for Russia, who can go on with a minimal offensive strategy further exhausting Ukrainian forces.
A major problem, from an American perspective, is that the Ukrainian political elite and its military leaders seem to be increasingly inclined to ignore the advice and instructions of their Western benefactors. Besides the aforementioned bold plans against Russia, there have been other signs of it: Zelensky refused to withdraw troops from Artemovsk, for example, which resulted in Ukrainian defeat there. Kiev’s political and military elite itself are divided however, and a rising number of voices are reconsidering Zelensky’s ideas about “reconquering Crimea” and openly talking about compromising.
Moreover, in the US itself, according to Hersh’s intelligence sources, “some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president” and he “is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence”, while CIA Director William Burns “has come around in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies.” This indicates that there is division within Washington’s “deep state” also over the issue.
Calls for escalation, both in Kiev and in Washington, might also be a sign of desperation. There clearly is no consensus in the United States’ own establishment regarding the matter of aid to Ukraine itself – Republican lawmakers are opposing it also due to the debt ceiling now and former President Donald Trump, who is still a Republican favorite, has promised to end it if re-elected. Corruption scandals abound in both US and Ukraine and recent reports about a $3 billion Ukraine aid “error” are part of the latest one. The truth is that American weapons’s manufacturers as well as Western ones have been profiting from prolonging the conflict while also selling obsolete military equipment. Moreover, Zelensky’s rebellious “stubbornness” can only increase such division within Washington and across the transatlantic alliance, as seems to be already happening in Eastern and Central Europe. All of that creates a very dangerous and unstable situation which is quite unpredictable.
Harvard political scientist Graham Ellison has warned that Western countries are trying to solve their own problems by escalating the Eastern European crisis and should it spiral out of control this could lead to dangerous war between the great powers involved.
The Western air defense systems Kiev is getting are in itself, for a number of reasons, not enough to protect Ukraine’s airspace, as I wrote. Neither are F-16s, for that matter. So far, Washington has been showing itself to be really willing to fight “to the last Ukrainian” (as in the cruel joke which Biden almost paraphrased in a December statement). Further escalation would show a willingness to fight if not literally to “the last European”, at least to something quite near it in terms of the damage to local economies and the migration/refugee crisis. It remains to be seen whether Europe in general and particularly Poland, Hungary and other nations in the region happen to also have a similar inclination – and for how long.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine, United States |
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The stability of oil supplies from Kazakhstan to the global market relies on transit through Russia, the country’s ambassador to the US, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, has stated. He added that any disruption to flows caused by sanctions could trigger a dire scenario.
“We proceed from the mutual interest of all parties, the interest in the stability of the global market, in the stability of supplies. This is vital both for the functioning of our [Kazakh] economy and for the entire global economy,” the envoy told RIA Novosti on Thursday on the sidelines of the Trans-Caspian Forum in Washington.
When asked whether he sees any risk that sanctions could make it difficult or impossible for Kazakhstan to transit oil, the diplomat described it as “some kind of apocalyptic scenario.”
Kazakhstan supplies oil to the global market via one of the world’s largest pipelines, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).
A multinational project, the CPC involves Russia, Kazakhstan and a consortium of leading oil companies. The pipeline system mainly collects crude from the large oil fields of western Kazakhstan, but also from Russia. Its total capacity is over 1 million barrels of oil per day, which is 2.3% of global seaborne crude trade.
The CPC delivers around 1.2 million barrels of crude oil daily from Kazakhstan to Europe, and for subsequent shipment to the US. The pipeline’s operations were interrupted last year by storm damage to equipment at a Black Sea terminal, with the disruption sparking concerns of a global supply crisis.
According to Ashikbayev, the CPC remains an important project for Kazakhstan, accounting for 80% of the country’s crude oil exports.
Kazakhstan has strengthened its oil and gas ties with Russia despite the threat of secondary sanctions from the US and EU.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Kazakhstan, United States |
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By Ahmed Adel | May 26, 2023
On May 22, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the country may be unable to service its debt by June 1 unless Congress raises its ceiling or suspends it. In turn, President Joe Biden ruled out the declaration of default. At the same time, despite all the predictions of doom and gloom, the US could benefit from a default, especially to wreak havoc on the international economy and competitors.
In the US, the amount of public debt is limited by law. Currently, it has reached $31.4 trillion. It is up to the US Congress to raise the national debt ceiling, but this year the issue became a major contention between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican party, with a majority in the House of Representatives, set a condition: it will vote to raise the ceiling if the Democratic government accepts significant cuts in budget spending.
Specifically, the Republicans propose cutting tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and the installation of solar panels, as well as reducing public spending on the repayment of educational loans. For Democrats, if they want to win the 2024 presidential election on their terms, these conditions are unacceptable.
No economic reasons for default prevent raising the public debt ceiling. Still, there are political reasons. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives want to bring greater accountability to the Biden Administration, which has been making economic decisions without consulting Congress. The Republicans hope to catch the Biden Administration, the Federal Treasury, the State Department, and the Defense Department violating American law.
There is a low chance of default in Washington, but this does not rule it out entirely because a default can be used as a financial weapon capable of unleashing a global economic crisis which will also affect the US’s main competitors. It is much easier and more politically legitimate to default in the context of increasing global military and political tensions. For this reason, it cannot be entirely ruled out that Biden will pursue such a path.
Likewise, the US could use default to influence other countries. Despite the enormous debt figure of $31.4 trillion, the external debt is only $7 trillion. Consequently, some countries —which Washington will want to target economically and geopolitically— may be the victims of this default.
Even so, the main thing for the US is not to let doubts about the sustainability of its economy and debt loom. If a default occurs, it will be more difficult for the US to obtain loans.
For this reason, the probability of default is low because many tools exist to avoid it. Article 14 of the Constitution could be invoked, which states that the US debt cannot be called into question. Also, the Federal Reserve could easily double its balance sheet and buy all foreign debt.
On May 24, the US House of Representatives speaker, Kevin McCarthy, acknowledged that the Republicans and the White House maintain substantial discrepancies on the increase in the public debt limit requested by the Biden administration. The senior official expects to negotiate with the president daily until an agreement is reached.
Even if Republicans and Democrats overcome the impasse, it is recalled that in 2011, the last time the two parties had such fiscal odds, the most severe turmoil happened after a deal was struck, which saw shares fall the most steeply since the 2008 financial crisis. This was also amid worries about the impact of the spending cuts made to get the agreement and the implications of a downgrade in America’s bond rating by one credit rating agency.
Fitch Ratings on May 24 put the US on a negative watch – the first step toward a downgrade in the country’s rating by the major credit ratings firm. The credit agency cited “increased political partisanship” and weak governance compared to other countries that hold its top rating.
“The brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, failure of the US authorities to meaningfully tackle medium-term fiscal challenges that will lead to rising budget deficits and a growing debt burden signal downside risks to US creditworthiness,” the company said.
All this signals that the US is on the economic brink. What is most alarming, though, is that if the US was to default, it might not do so quietly and calmly but instead use an opportunity to bring down the world economy to hurt enemies and partners alike.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
May 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics | United States |
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examined independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s 2018 tax returns on December 24, 2022, which was a Saturday and Christmas Eve. It was soon after Taibbi published the first batch of Twitter Files, internal Twitter documents exposing how federal government agencies pressured Twitter to censor content.
The timing raised eyebrows and many believed it to be an act of retaliation for sounding the alarm on government-backed censorship.
The House Judiciary Committee obtained the details after the IRS was criticized for visiting Taibbi’s home in March about the tax filing, on the same day the journalist testified before Congress about the Twitter Files.
In a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, chair of the Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said the documents the agency provided “raise more questions than they answer.”
The IRS defended the review by saying it was trying to determine that Taibbi was not the victim of identity fraud. It further claimed that in 2019, it wrote to Taibbi to explain that there was a discrepancy in his 2018 tax return. However, the documents obtained by the committee show that the IRS opened a review of the tax return on Christmas Eve last year.
Additionally, Taibbi did not owe the IRS. In fact, he was owed a refund, according to the documents obtained by the Committee.
“The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019 — nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return — asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed,” Jordan wrote.
“The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020.
“However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return — that is until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later.
“The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.”
Jordan added: “The IRS’s production shows that the IRS opened its examination of Mr. Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on December 24, 2022. Not only was this date Christmas Eve and a Saturday, but it also happened to be three weeks after he published the first Twitter Files detailing government abuses and the same day that Mr. Taibbi published the ninth segment of the Twitter Files, detailing how federal government agencies ‘from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA’ coordinated to censor and coerce speech on various social media platforms.”
In March, Taibbi said that an IRS agent visited his home in New Jersey and left a note telling him to contact the agency.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, IRS, United States |
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The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) member states should establish a rating agency to provide adequate assessment tools for the region’s growing economic activity, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
The proposal was made during a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow on Thursday.
Currently, the market for international credit ratings is dominated by three US-based agencies: Moody’s Investor Services, Standard and Poor’s (S&P), and Fitch Group. Countries outside the West have accused them of economic and political bias when it comes to assessing their markets.
“It would be useful to establish the Eurasian rating agency,” Putin stated, adding that principled approaches and strict criteria are needed. “It is important to guarantee that the work is absolutely objective. This is its whole value. If this is not the case, then there is no point in it,” the Russian leader stressed.
In addition, the president called for the development of industrial cooperation and an increase in the number of new joint ventures under the common trade mark “Made in the EEU.”
“It is important that such a new brand become recognizable and gain popularity among consumers in all our countries as soon as possible, and the Eurasian quality mark on goods manufactured in the territory of the five countries means that products meet the highest standards,” he stressed.
Additionally, the Russian leader called on participants at the EEU summit to develop common priorities for technological development, and create technological alliances with the involvement of third countries. Such associations could help set up new science-intensive and high-tech industries in the region, according to Putin.
The EEU, which is based on the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, was established in 2015. It was later joined by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. This year, Iran sealed a memorandum on free trade with the bloc. The union is designed to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers between member nations.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics | EEU |
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Due to the importance of the issue of Covid-19 vaccinations to society, PANDA calls on Lancet to retract a seminal paper that is demonstrably incorrect in its assumptions.
To the Editor of The Lancet
On June 23, 2022, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases published an article by Watson et al. entitled Global Impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study.[1] The authors of this paper “estimated that vaccinations prevented 14.4 million deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020 and Dec 8, 2021.” This estimate is so impossibly high that this article should be retracted by The Lancet. The obvious impossibility of their estimate may be demonstrated by any of the following five relatively simple calculations.
First, the WHO reports that as of Feb 17, 2023 there were “756.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 including 6.84 million deaths.”[2] This gives an overall case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.9%. At this rate, had the Covid vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in the space of one year, then they would also have needed to prevent 1.59 billion confirmed cases in that same year. But this is more than twice the total number of cases in three years, meaning it would require a six-fold increase in the number of confirmed cases since the beginning of the Covid era. Therefore, based on the overall CFR it is impossible that the vaccines saved 14.4 million deaths.
The situation is unchanged if we use data from before the vaccines were rolled out. The WHO reports that on December 28, 2020 there had been 84.9 million cases and 2.0 million deaths. This gives a CFR of 2.4%. To save 14.4 million deaths at this rate would require preventing 611 million cases, meaning it would require a 7 fold increase in infections and deaths in 2021 from Covid.
Second, it is well established that the infection fatality rate (IFR) of Covid is age-dependent. For instance, the BMJ published an article on Oct 26, 2020 which noted that “the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said that eight in 10 Covid-19 related deaths reported in the country have been among people aged 65 years or over.”[3] Therefore, for vaccinations to have prevented 14.4 million deaths, they would need to have prevented 11.52 million deaths among those over 65 years of age. According to the UN, the world population is about 7,954 million, of which about 10% are over 65.[4] That means that there are 795 million people in this age group. To have prevented 11.52 million of them from dying would have required the following things to have happened during that one year:
- All 795 million people over 65 are vaccinated,
- None of these people contracted Covid while waiting to be (fully) vaccinated.
- The vaccines are 100% effective (absolute risk reduction) against death,
- Without vaccination, all 795 million would have contracted Covid, and
- The average IFR of Covid for those over 65 and unvaccinated is at least 1.45%.
In an earlier article in The Lancet it was estimated that the IFR of Covid (before vaccination) for those over 60 is 1.0035%.[5] Thus, all five of these requirements are either incorrect or impossible. Therefore based on age-specific mortality rates it is impossible that the vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths.
Third, on Mar 10, 2022, The Lancet published an article in which it was estimated that between Jan 1, 2020 and Dec 31, 2021 about “18.2 million people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic.”[6] If the vaccines had successfully prevented another 14.4 million deaths, then 32.6 million deaths would have occurred without the vaccines. For this many people to have died, it would have required all eight billion people in the world to have been infected with Covid, and a global average IFR of at least 0.41%. But a bulletin published by WHO estimates the IFR to be at most 0.23%, and it “might even be substantially lower than 0.23%.”[7] One must conclude from this that either the Lancet article claiming 18.2 million people died in the first two years of Covid is incorrect, or the Lancet article claiming that 14.4 million deaths were prevented in the first year of the vaccines is incorrect, or both Lancet articles are incorrect. Therefore, based on published average IFRs, it is impossible that both Lancet articles are correct.
Fourth, on Jan 25, 2023, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) published a report that estimated the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent a Covid hospitalisation. In Table 4 of Appendix 1, they say that 2,500 people over 70 must be vaccinated to prevent one severe hospitalisation in that age group.[8] This is the smallest NNV figure in the table. If we apply this number to the entire world population, and assume both that the entire population is over 70 years of age and that every last soul was vaccinated, according to the UKHSA data, only 3.2 million severe hospitalisations would be prevented. Therefore, it is clearly impossible for the vaccines to have prevented 14.4 million deaths.
Fifth, according to the published results of Pfizer’s Phase 3 clinical trials, of the 21,728 volunteers who received the placebo shot, 162 contracted Covid. Conversely, of the 21,720 volunteers who received the BNT162b2 injection, eight contracted Covid.[9] This means that the Pfizer shot may have prevented about 154 infections per 21,720 persons receiving the vaccine. According to Our-World-In-Data, about 4.5 billion people received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine during the first year of the roll-out.[10] Although not all received the Pfizer product, the majority did in many countries, and the Pfizer shot is generally held as the superior option. Thus, using Pfizer’s own results, at most 31.9 million infections might have been prevented in the first year of the vaccines. Using the IFR of 0.23% mentioned earlier, the maximum number of deaths prevented by the vaccines after one year is 73,384. This is almost 200 times less than the 14.4 million estimate put forward in the Lancet article.
It may be worthwhile to point out that Watson et al. inadvertently provide at least some of the reasons why their estimate is so obviously incorrect. In the first place, the authors expressly state that “excess all-cause mortality … [was] used to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.” However, so many health variables were altered in 2020 and 2021 that it is certain that multiple factors contributed to excess mortality, not just Covid. Thus, they overestimated how lethal Covid was. And secondly, the authors testified that they assumed the vaccines were effective: “Vaccination was assumed to confer protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission, and to reduce transmission from vaccine breakthrough infections (i.e. we assumed vaccinated individuals who develop infection would be less infectious than unvaccinated individuals).” Since all of these assumptions are false (as Pfizer’s own clinical trial results testify), it is certain they overestimated the effectiveness of the vaccines.[11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]
In conclusion, by overestimating the mortality caused by Covid, and by overestimating how effective the vaccines were, Watson et al. came up with obviously incorrect conclusions about how many deaths were prevented by the Covid vaccines. Whether one looks at the average CFR, or the age-specific IFR, or the average IFR, or the NNV, or Pfizer’s own data, it is quite impossible that the Covid vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in the first year. Since this is a tremendously important issue to society at large, it is requested that the editors at The Lancet retract this obviously flawed paper.
References
- Watson, Oliver, et al, “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study,” June 23, 2022 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00320-6
- Anonymous, “WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard,” World Health Organization, 2023, https://covid19.who.int/
- Mahase E. “Covid-19: Why are age and obesity risk factors for serious disease?” BMJ 2020; 371 :m4130 doi:10.1136/bmj.m4130
- Anonymous, “World Population Dashboard,” United Nations Population Fund, 2023, https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard
- Covid-19 Forecasting Team, “Variation in the COVID-19 infection–fatality ratio by age, time, and geography during the pre-vaccine era: a systematic analysis,” February 24, 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02867-1
- Wang, Haidong, “Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21,” March 10, 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02796-3
- Ioannidis, John P A. (2021). Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 99 (1), 19 – 33F. World Health Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.265892
- Anonymous, “Appendix 1: estimation of number needed to vaccinate to prevent a COVID-19 hospitalisation for primary vaccination, booster vaccination (3rd dose), autumn 2022 and spring 2023 booster for those newly in a risk group,” 2023, UKHSA, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1131409/appendix-1-of-jcvi-statement-on-2023-covid-19-vaccination-programme-8-november-2022.pdf
- Polack, Fernando et al, “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine,” December 31, 2020 N Engl J Med 2020; 383:2603-2615 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
- Anonymous, “Number of people vaccinated against COVID-19, World, Dec 30, 2021,” Our World in Data, 2023, COVID-19 Data Explorer – Our World in Data
- Pritchard et al, “Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey,” medRxiv 2021.04.22.21255913; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.22.21255913
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, “Rates of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status,” 2022, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
- Yasmin Tayag, “Why has the CDC stopped collecting data on breakthrough Covid cases?,” 2021, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/06/cdc-covid-coronavirus-data-breakthrough-cases
- Wang, Lindsey et al, “Increased risk for COVID-19 breakthrough infection in fully vaccinated patients with substance use disorders in the United States between December 2020 and August 2021,” Wiley Online Library, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20921
- Marking, Ulrika et al, “High rate of BA.1, BA.1.1 and BA.2 infection in triple vaccinated,” medRxiv 2022.04.02.22273333; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.02.22273333
- Pfizer confidential data released by FOIA, “Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” 2021, https://www.scribd.com/document/543857539/CUMULATIVE-ANALYSIS-OF-POST-AUTHORIZATION-ADVERSE-EVENT-REPORTS-OF-PF-07302048-BNT162B2-RECEIVED-THROUGH-28-FEB-2021#
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Everyone ‘knows’ that flu disappeared in the winter of 2020-2021. The popular explanation for this is ‘viral interference’, whereby one virus replaces another in circulation, as often happens with different strains of flu. The assumption is that flu was outcompeted by SARS-CoV-2 and hence largely vanished.
However, the stark juxtaposition of its absence and its replacement by the ‘novel and deadly’ SARS-CoV-2 virus remains an open question, given that flu vanished only from Westernised countries yet remained prevalent in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti and Bangladesh in the winter of 2020/21.
Tracking the prevalence of any virus relies not only the quality and extent of testing, but also on the protocols, procedures and the public health bureaucracy that govern when the test should be administered and how the test result is validated, interpreted and reported. Therefore a systematic assessment of the effects of seemingly unrelated policy decisions is needed to determine whether policies were enacted – wittingly or unwittingly – which brought about a particular result as a kind of ‘spooky action at a distance’ that caused flu to appear to vanish from some countries but not others.
By now we are all familiar with the problems associated with SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing. Ultimately clinical judgement regarding Covid-19 was delegated from the physician to a diagnosis based solely on the PCR test. The possibility of false positives and negatives was entirely absent from clinical decision-making, despite the now well understood issues where false positives can be caused by high cycle thresholds, cross reactivity, and the use of single genes to declare positive results. In other words: ‘it was all about the test’.
If we have good reason to mistrust the testing regime for SARS-CoV-2, why should we trust the testing and surveillance regime used for flu?
Quarantines were promoted as measures to reduce spread of SARS-CoV-2 and are also paradoxically claimed to have prevented the spread of flu (even though they did not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2). There is the possibility that what they actually did was dramatically reduce the chance of receiving a positive flu test result. If you don’t have a positive flu result, there was little possibility of being diagnosed with flu in the presence of a contradictory explanation – SARS-CoV-2. Given that PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 were mandated (when not enthusiastically and voluntarily performed by a populace terrified by propaganda) there was therefore a very high chance of being diagnosed with Covid-19 instead of the flu.
Flu tests are recommended to be administered within four days of symptom onset. If they are administered after four days, they would likely produce a false negative result for someone with flu (flu tests are rarely administered routinely anyway). Mandatory Covid-19 tests, run at high cycle thresholds and suffering from cross-reactivity with other pathogens (amongst other operational issues), may well have resulted in false positives for Covid-19, when in fact the pathogen causing symptoms may have been flu. Therefore, people with flu would have been wrongly categorised as having Covid-19, and as a result quarantined for a period sometimes up to 14 days. Hence any flu test given after quarantine ended would inevitably result in a negative for flu even if that was the causative agent, because it was given later than the four days needed for the flu test to be accurate.
Compared with Covid-19, diagnosing flu ‘out of season’ is fraught with tricky clinical and bureaucratic barriers, which also served to depress the likelihood of reporting flu cases. According to CDC (the US Centers for Disease Control) algorithms for diagnosing flu ‘out of season’, in the event of a positive flu test the clinician is asked to pause and consider if this is a false positive. Furthermore, they also need to justify any decision to support the positive result and diagnose flu with an assessment of whether there is evidence of an epidemiological link between this case and others (i.e. link to existing circulation in the community). Likewise, the clinician would also have to consider the signs and symptoms of flu, but given that these will heavily overlap with Covid, which the authorities are proclaiming as an epidemic, it looks as if the cards are stacked against them.
There is an elegant logical circularity at play here that a physician needs to consider. The CDC say you need an outbreak and an epidemiological link to help justify a positive flu test, but surely you only know there is an outbreak, and can determine an epidemiological link, if you and others, in coordination, have already accumulated enough positive test results. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Who determines whether there is an outbreak? None of the CDC documents says.
Therefore, even if a physician was armed with a positive flu test result the chances of this overruling an all-pervasive prior belief in Covid-19 being the cause of all respiratory illnesses, encouraged by powerful incentives directed by a centralised bureaucracy, would have been close to zero.
In combination it is possible that these primary mechanisms, rather than ‘viral competition’ between flu and SARS-CoV-2 or ‘effective lockdowns’, could partially or wholly account for the disappearance of flu. If flu did not disappear then what might then have been the primary cause of those who died with symptoms of a respiratory virus in 2020/21?
This article is based on an original article co-authored with Professor Norman Fenton and Jonathan Engler. The extended version of the article is available from the substack Where are the Numbers?
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
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Rep. Chris Smith wants an investigation into the World Health Organizations plans to surveil speech and more
If you’ve been following our reporting on the issue, you’ll already know that the new World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic prevention initiative, the Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET), recommends using “social listening surveillance systems” to identify “misinformation.” But as more people are learning about how unelected bodies are being used to suppress speech and potentially override sovereignty, it’s starting to get more pushback.
According to documents from the UN agency, PRET aims to “guide countries in pandemic planning” and work to “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The PRET document describes misinformation as a “health threat,” and refers to it as an “infodemic.”
“Infodemic is the overabundance of information – accurate or not – which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities. The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness,” the document states.
However, it continues to recommend invasive methods of countering the spread of misinformation.
“Establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation,” the WHO wrote in the PRET document.
“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs in risk communications principles and encourage their application.
Communication should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups.
“New tools and approaches for social listening have been developed using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media (such as the Platform EARS developed by WHO).”
The document also recommends testing these tactics during “acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.”
“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza. This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies,” it explains.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is holding a Congressional hearing on the WHO’s pandemic accord.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently met with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, to discuss the accord and the “critical role” of the US “in global health security.”
In his opening remarks at the World Health Assembly, Ghebreyesus said: “I urge you to deliver the pandemic accord on time, as a generational commitment. The next pandemic will not wait for us. We must be ready.”
The Accord’s preliminary document, zero draft, was first published in February.
In March, the Biden administration’s envoy at the negotiations, Pamela Hamamoto, said that the administration is “committed to the Pandemic Accord, to form a major component of the global health architecture for generations to come.”
“The American people have a right to know exactly what the Biden Administration is negotiating at the WHO, especially as the President remains silent and fails to reassure us that he will protect our Constitution from bureaucrats at this troubled United Nations body,” Rep. Smith said.
Smith is particularly concerned that the Accord could undermine the sovereignty of the US over its healthcare infrastructure.
“The zero-draft WHO pandemic treaty starts off with very harsh criticism of the United States and the international community by calling it a ‘catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic,’” Rep. Smith noted. “Article 4 of the treaty pays lip service to sovereignty and then completely overcomes that lip service by saying, ‘provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries,’ which empowers the WHO to step in and prescribe what each country would do.”
During the hearing, Smith plans to ask Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the contents of the accord’s zero draft.
“Under absolutely no circumstances should the Biden Administration surrender American sovereignty to the World Health Organization and allow the voice of the American people and consent of the governed to be subjugated to dictates of an agenda-driven global administrative bureaucracy,” Smith insisted.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States, WHO |
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Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.
On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.
Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.
In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.
The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.
Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Google, WHO, YouTube |
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Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering U.S. intelligence assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can’t win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed several dozen U.S. soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known to be calling missile and artillery strikes in the war.
Just days after his April 13 arrest, local Boston television news stations were broadcasting Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record. He was suspended in high school for “threatening” language, don’t-cha know?
It’s like the old joke about the principal telling a kid that “this is going on your permanent record,” except it’s now reality. If only Teixeira could have cut a deal like Bart Simpson, we wouldn’t have to be having this discussion right now.
What does Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record have to do with his revelations about official lies and secrets about America’s involvement in a war with the world’s other nuclear superpower?
Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. A whole number between -1 and 1.
There’s no journalistic value in the story that Teixeira was suspended in high school for “threatening” language (he said he was describing a video game at the time). It has no relationship to the story about Ukrainian war lies, and has as much journalistic value as my own high school disciplinary record (or yours). Such dirty laundry in decades past used to be relegated to discussions of celebrity divorces in supermarket tabloids.
But it has a lot of value if your goal is to engage in a general character-assassination using compliant media.
So it brings up a couple of questions: Why is the news media reporting this? And how did they get this information?
The second question is the easiest to answer: The U.S. government’s executive branch careerists gave it directly to them. It was part of the official filing by (now former) U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins asking the federal district court to keep Teixeira in jail until trial.
And one must wonder how that made it into the official filing. How is this relevant to the legal need to deny Teixeira bail and keep him in jail until trial, if the worry was that he wouldn’t return to court for his trial or would publicly reveal more official state secrets?
Again, it doesn’t. At all.
The purpose of including Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record—one that was confidential and which could only be obtained through court warrants or Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance—in the filing was to engage in a deliberate and planned public character-assassination of Teixeira through compliant media organs.
Rollins—or more likely, her handlers in Washington—wanted to destroy this young man publicly by unnecessarily releasing his private sins to the press in an attempt to distract the media from exposing the official lies that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and that U.S. combat troops are not present on the ground. Plus, as a bonus, it serves the double-purpose of poisoning the available pool of unbiased jurors in advance of trial and making a public example to deter future whistle-blowers.
Say what you will about Rollins, the Feds assigned this role to someone who has hands-on experience in this specific task. Rollins resigned Friday, May 19 from her role as U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts because an Inspector-General Report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed she’d done the same thing to a candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney (an elected state position). According to the Inspector General report on Rollins, “Rollins assisted a candidate in a partisan political election and sought to influence the election by, among other things, disclosing non-public, sensitive DOJ information to the press.”
In other words, she conspired to engage in a media smear of a public person using confidential, non-public information.
Sound familiar?
But there’s an important difference between both the Teixeira case (and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax) and the local candidate Rollins was accused of smearing. Disclosing private information to defame a candidate in a local election is a no-no, unless he is an enemy of the Deep State. But if the Deep State wants to character-assassinate someone, whether holder of the highest office in the land or all the way down to some lowly Air National Guard private, then that’s just spiffy.
Rollins suffered no negative consequences from smearing Teixeira. Only when smearing someone who wasn’t an enemy of the Deep State did she face an inquiry.
Now back to the original question about CBS-Boston and other media reporting that Teixeira was suspended during high school. Why are they reporting something that has no news value? Because word was put out to destroy his character in order to distract from his revelations about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they used compliant media networks to do just that.
Some time after the defection of Soviet spy Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1962, the former KGB officer suggested to his CIA handler that National Review founder and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley help edit the book he was working on, and that it be serialized in Reader’s Digest. It was a logical request. Conservative icon Buckley was known to be a CIA veteran (and had formed National Review around his Langley friends), and with circulation in the millions Reader’s Digest was probably the highest circulation periodical with CIA assets on staff. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the height of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, where agents infiltrated and controlled hundreds of media corporations and journalists, respectively, toward the CIA’s stated goals of fighting the Cold War against the Soviet empire. Operation Mockingbird is a campaign still officially denied by the CIA, so its activities can be said to have never been completely shut down, even if they were suspended for a few years.
The reforms of the 1970s imposed some nominal restraints via executive order upon the rogue CIA (along with the FBI) in the reforms of the post-Vietnam era. After the contentious Church and Pike Committee hearings, CIA officials publicly promised they weren’t infiltrating media and poaching journalists as spies and influence-peddlers. But even by the mid-1980s, CIA chiefs were publicly stating they might have to do so again in the future.
The restraints came off the IC (“Intelligence Community”) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks with Congress passing the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s hard to say when the IC began to focus more upon the U.S. domestic media than foreign media, but it’s safe to say it was having a measurable impact upon domestic media by the early 2010s. It was at that point even media traditionally antagonistic to government power had been transformed from watchdogs into Deep State lapdogs.
The “Deep State” can be loosely defined as executive branch careerist bureaucrats and their nominally private sector but government-funded “NGO” contractors who don’t have to face elections or the voters, and who make policy outside of directives from elected officials in the legislative branch and the president.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government used to curate a list of the “Captive Nations” who were under the thrall of the Soviet empire based upon subservience to the Soviet imperial interests. Today, much of the U.S. corporate media is obviously captive to the American empire’s intelligence behemoth in its recent expansion of Operation Mockingbird. I’ve come to call it the “captive media,” in homage to the Cold War-era “Captive Nations” terminology.
The last hurrah of journalistic independence and antagonism to power for The Washington Post was the Edward Snowden affair in 2013. After Snowden’s revelations, the Post never seriously challenged the Deep State again, including its Big Pharma subsidiary, nor have they engaged in any significant actions against the government’s other alliances with giant corporations. The New York Times had been captured by the Deep State as early as 2002 when Judith Miller was acting as stenographer for lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Times and Post both became de facto state assets, along with the five giant U.S. media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Comcast, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and Fox-Newscorp), and all today routinely condemn enemies of the national security state and Big Pharma rather than expose the excesses of those powerful special interest groups within the executive branch of government. Likewise, many social media and tech corporations have been revealed by the #TwitterFiles to be adjuncts of what journalist Matt Taibbi accurately labels the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
One key “tell,” to use a poker term, to identify a likely captive media organ is to observe media character-assassination of a person threatening the primacy of the military-industrial complex. This label of captive media is all the more likely to be accurate when the character assassination doesn’t even address the newsworthy revelations or political positions of that person, and when all the other captive media organs are chiming in chorus with the same condemnation.
The Teixeira case is instructive on the Deep State’s penetration of U.S. media. The modus operandi of the Deep State is to distract from their own corruption by smearing anyone who exposes them or opposes them, and to publicly ruin someone in a key government position who expresses intolerable levels of heterodoxy from the official narrative. The latter was the reason for smearing presidential candidate Donald Trump with the gamut of their arsenal: he was an apex-level racist, a Russian asset, probably an anti-Semite, a threat to democracy, etc.
All this is not to say that Donald Trump was a good president. He wasn’t, and his politics were seriously deficient from a libertarian perspective on many fronts. But he wasn’t enough on “Team Deep State” to avoid the careerists in the executive branch conspiring with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring him down with multiple lies, as the Durham Report makes eminently clear.
None of the Russia-collusion hoax lies against Trump were true, but truth—like the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth—was immaterial to the issue. One of my favorite podcasts used to be Unfilter, and one of the libertarian hosts revealingly noted back before the podcast went dark, “Trump is not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.” This distinction is highly significant. A liar expects you to believe his lies, but to a bullshitter both the truth and your level of belief in his lies are irrelevant. A bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe him; the only important thing is how you react to his lies. Trump was—and remains—an expert-level bullshitter. He can trigger the corporate media into giving him free press coverage constantly; the CNN Town Hall spectacle with Trump serves as the most recent hilarious example. Everything he says is to get a reaction, not to reveal some truth.
That’s the Deep State’s working model right now. They don’t care if you believe them. All that matters is your emotional reaction: to hate Donald Trump, to hate Jack Teixeira, and to hate anyone else they believe is a threat to their power and their agenda. They’re confident they can dig up dirt on every person with their surveillance panopticon, and can find enough sin on anyone to ruin any heterodox person publicly. They’ve taken the Orwellian “two minutes of hate” and perfected it, treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a roadmap rather than a warning.
That’s why my working thesis on media corporations is that any company which focuses upon personal attacks rather than the relevant issues to journalism and public policy, especially if the personal attacks coincide with the official Deep State narrative (and they usually do), they’re likely among the captive media.
This also works to some degree for individuals, even if they’re not explicit agents of the Deep State. Anyone who hates a political figure—whether Donald Trump, Ron Paul, or Joe Biden—based upon personal characteristics rather than public positions and routinely resorts to baseless smears of being a racist, an anti-Semite or a foreign agent is probably compromised (or at the very least, a toxic person) whose opinions are worth ignoring entirely.
It should go without saying Americans can’t trust the captive media, of whom it could be accurately said that truth and factual accuracy are irrelevant. The long-running Russia-collusion hoax is but the latest example exposed. There’s a long list of official lies: cloth masks stop transmission of COVID-19, the vaccine stops transmission of the virus, gas attacks in Syria, Ghaddafi’s imminent genocide in Libya, all the way back to Judith Miller. And those are just a handful of hundreds of examples.
The good news is that The New York Times and Washington Post‘s circulation reach new lows every month, as do the ratings of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. CNN’s ratings hilariously fell below NewsMax last week.
Lies don’t sell well.
So look for the Deep State to infiltrate ever-more media outlets in the future as their lies and captive media platforms lose audience and, as a result, the impact of the captive legacy media wanes. Those of us opposing the surveillance panopticon and the perpetual warfare state will need to use both the patterns described above and leaked truths to reveal the captive media, as they are taken over.
The Jack Teixeira and #TwitterFiles revelations are but the latest in a line of exposures of official lies beginning with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner. There will be others.
It’s also encouraging to hear the U.S. House of Representatives is holding at least some tentative hearings on the weaponization of the executive branch in the election cycle. Liberty-loving individuals need to encourage more of those hearings, and a much deeper-dive into revealing their secrets, followed by legislation that would (if not outright abolish) at least re-impose some limits upon the “Intelligence Community.”
Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer published in more than twenty periodicals, holds a master degree in economics from Boston College and is communications director for the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts.
May 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, CNN, FBI, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, United States |
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