I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.
The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.
Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.
We may, if so inclined, most charitably explain the persistence of the Black Budget by appeal to bureaucratic habits (which do die hard…), even when the rational grounds for the secrecy no longer obtain. The strategic grounds originally used to justify the Black Budget disappeared with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but so did the tactical grounds, given that advanced nuclear weapons systems are already possessed by several governments, and the technology has been shared with others as well—whether by spies, defectors or simple mercenaries. The secrets, then, remain secrets, ironically enough, only to the very citizens who pay for the systems, including nearly all of their elected representatives.
Legislators continue nonetheless reflexively to approve every new defense budget, along with any requests for funding which anyone cares to cast as a matter of national defense. Indeed, embedding controversial, non-defense measures within National Defense Authorization Acts (NDA) has become a tried-and-true technique of passing new laws which would never have been ratified on their own, as stand-alone bills. A notable and relevant example is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which was rolled into the NDA of 2013. This tactic works because any congressperson who votes against “national defense” becomes an instantly denounced target by the political opposition and the media.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned in 1961 about the danger of perversely prioritizing state means of mass homicide over every other thing. How this ultimately came to fruition has been illuminated by Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), who shows how historical crises invariably expand the power of the state, the agents of which are loath to give any of it back. Even when the originating crisis is somehow mitigated or resolved, the government does not retract in size. Instead, it continues to “ratchet up” in response to each new crisis, with the previous expansion regarded as the new baseline.
Everyone is aware of this dynamic on some level, whether or not they spend much time reflecting on foreign affairs. We all know, to take a considerably less grave example than the summary execution of persons deemed “suspicious” by anonymous analysts, that when we prepare to fly anywhere in the world from the United States, we are not permitted to transport in our carry-on luggage any liquids or gels in volumes greater than 100ml (~3.3 ounces). Why do we still have to remove our footwear to get through airport security, more than two decades after September 11, 2001? Because some incompetent dude thought that he could use explosives hidden in his shoes to blow up a plane.
The post-9/11 travel security measures seem unlikely ever to change, and we can also expect the structural features of the sprawling homeland defense apparatus, including mass surveillance of citizens not suspected of any crimes, to continue to grow, given the conservative nature of belief conjoined with the bet-hedging behavior of lawmakers. Setting what is arguably bribery by lobbyists to one side, the primary driving factor in the minds of politicians who wish to be reelected is plausibly that they want not to be blamed, should anything untoward happen after they vote to reduce the defense budget or eliminate any of the security-related laws already in place. And God forbid that unelected bureaucrats who dispense unaccountable Black Budget funds at their caprice should be “hobbled” through oversight!
The reasoning of opportunistic politicians appears to be that adding even more restrictions, filling the (feckless) defense department’s already overflowing coffers, and allowing off-the-leash bureaucrats to do whatever they may deem necessary in the name of national defense, will all be seen in a positive light by citizens who are counting on the government to serve as their protector. This fictional image is maintained, against all empirical evidence of the actual outcomes of every military intervention since World War II, because the populace is constantly “tutored” by the government-coopted mainstream media to support anything whatsoever labeled by anyone as “defense”. Examples include the “War on Terror”; the “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the Libyan people; the empowerment of Saddam Hussein; the arming of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and, later, in Syria; the bombing of Kosovo; and the goading of Russian President Putin in 2022 to the point where he may opt to use nukes. Despite the human misery which these undertakings have caused, all have been “worth it,” according to mainstream media pundits, and as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might say.
Now, given the tendency of government restrictions enacted in response to crises to expand, the power of government authorities in such circumstances to augment, and the natural resistance of human beings to relinquish any of that power, the persistence and expansion of the Black Budget may not seem puzzling in the least. Having been trained quite effectively to believe that “national defense” is always and everywhere good, few citizens would find it troubling even to learn that trillions of Pentagon dollars have been “lost track of”—creating what is in effect an enormous supplement to the Black Budget, which should perhaps be termed the Ultra Black Budget.
Albeit considerably less charitable than the “bureaucratic habit” explanation for the persistence and growth of the Black Budget, equally plausible is that it has created a class of people who now wear what is tantamount to the ring of Gyges (Plato’s Republic). They are capable of committing crimes invisibly, with no possible risk of being redressed, much less punished, for their morally dubious activities. Why would anyone in such a position ever renounce that privilege, the unassailable power to do anything at all to anyone at all for any reason at all and with complete impunity? To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature and the reality of corruption, it should be clear that the ongoing pretext of state secrets privilege has opened up the possibility of an entire criminal underworld operating under the aegis of the U.S. government and fully funded by taxpayers.
What it worse, far from serving either strategic or tactical roles in defending our waning republic, the Black Budget is arguably being used to undermine it. Let us take as a possible example the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines between Russia and Europe. If this intentional act of piracy was perpetrated by the United States, then it is equivalent to a declaration of war against Russia. As a Black Op, the secret need never be admitted to anyone, even if it leads to World War III and nuclear holocaust. And therein lies the irony: the means to destroy the United States in toto are now possessed by a few individuals with access to the Black Budget, even though all of what they do is paid for by citizens under the assumption that they are being protected. Such is the logic of the legislatively shielded Black Budget that, if in fact the Nord Stream sabotage was a U.S. operation, then anyone who knows what happened and who dares to go public with compelling evidence of the truth becomes guilty of espionage, if not treason, and subject to the federal death penalty, if convicted. Conviction?
One of the most significant expansions of federal power in the twenty-first century has been the executive’s elimination of the requirement of conviction in a court of law before state execution. This assault on the most basic principles of the republic came about in incremental steps, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and was made possible by the technological development of the ability to kill by remote control.
The U.S. government’s first publicly vaunted execution of suspects by lethal drone outside a war zone was carried out under the authorization of President George W. Bush, on November 3, 2002, in Yemen, when a group of men were incinerated while driving down a road. Nearly twenty years later, President Joe Biden claimed to have terminated the life of alleged al Qaeda mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 31, 2022. For his part, President Donald Trump openly bragged about having used a lethal drone to eliminate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleiman on January 3, 2020, at Baghdad International Airport, as though this brazen act of premeditated, intentional homicide were somehow noble or courageous.
Before Biden and Trump, it was President Barack Obama who in 2011 summarily executed not only Osama bin Laden, when he could have been taken prisoner, but also Anwar al-Awlaki, which places Obama in a league all his own, having intentionally denied even a U.S. citizen his right to stand trial for whatever crimes he was believed to have committed. (Note that an American, Kamal Derwish, was killed by the Bush administration in its publicly vaunted drone strike on November 3, 2002, but this fact appears to have been discovered after, not before, the strike.) Had Anwar al-Awlaki been found guilty of treason in a federal court, he might have been sentenced to death. Obama opted instead to streamline the process, in the manner of every tyrant since time immemorial, by imposing the death penalty on the basis of what the president, a fallible human being, had been persuaded by bureaucrats to believe was evidence of the suspect’s guilt. John Brennan, Obama’s drone killing czar at the time, was promoted in 2013 to the directorship of the CIA.
Obama also authorized the execution of U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, for which no official explanation was ever offered by his killers. Being a male and having recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday, the younger al-Awlaki did satisfy the Obama administration’s scrupulous standard for classifying a corpse as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA). Yes, the label EKIA was applied to all men who found themselves at the receiving end of missiles launched by U.S. drones, whether inside or outside areas of active hostility, provided only that they were of military age. We have Daniel Hale to thank for having revealed to U.S. citizens the unsavory truth about the drone program, that the burden of proof was inverted by the drone killers, who defined their victims as guilty until proven innocent. Note that Hale was rewarded for his courageous act of whistleblowing with a federal prison sentence.
The longstanding international proscription to political assassination has been flouted throughout the twenty-first century, and the string of intentional acts of homicide perpetrated and openly acknowledged by four successive administrations together illustrate that the U.S. executive is no longer constrained in any way by the letter of international law. Once someone has been labeled a “terrorist” by appropriately situated bureaucrats, the U.S. executive grants the drone assassins the license to take him out. Given this normalization of assassination, what precisely is the Black Budget being used for, if people deemed dangerous by the U.S. government may be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process whatsoever?
No one privy to the details, the line items shrouded in secrecy, is permitted to share them publicly without risking harsh sanctions. But logic suggests that the Black Budget and the ancillary Ultra Black Budget (the trillions of dollars “lost track of” by the Pentagon) are being either siphoned off by mercenary criminals, in yet another version of the lobbyist kick-back scheme, or else used to commit crimes which are even worse than the summary execution of suspected criminals without trial. Assuming for the sake of argument the latter to be true, if government officials are now permitted premeditatedly and intentionally to assassinate human beings, including U.S. citizens, perceived of as potentially dangerous, then what is it that the Ring of Gyges wearers are not permitted to do and which must, for allegedly strategic and tactical reasons, be done secretly and beyond the reach of any form of accountability?
There is no proof that the U.S. government perpetrated the Nord Stream attack and thereby increased the likelihood of nuclear war, in which millions of Americans could be expected to die. But undermining democratically elected foreign governments, through inciting mass unrest and plotting coups are enterprises in which the U.S. government is known to have engaged repeatedly. Again, a great deal of that sort of activity went on during the Cold War, on the grounds that the evil Communists could not be allowed to spread their ideology around the world. But communism is no longer a threat, so it is unclear what the rationale for undermining democratically elected governments is supposed to be today, beyond maintaining U.S. global military hegemony.
In this post-Communist world, examples of crimes worse than the summary execution of terrorist suspects (some of whom are in fact innocent) could be the summary execution (or attempted elimination) of persons whose outspoken opposition to the U.S. hegemon is perceived of as threatening to the defense apparatus itself. Such figures may have included Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, John McAfee, et al.—anyone who has dared to reject in an effective way the reigning narrative that “We are good, and they are evil,” which has been used to rationalize mass homicide and destruction wherever and whenever the current crop of U.S. elites happen to please.
Consider the plans reportedly drawn up to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is undeniable that this sort of initiative is both illegal and criminal, and yet it is, one gathers, fully funded by taxpayers. Less clear examples of the same phenomenon may or may not include the fate suffered by a long list of other “annoying” persons who came to tragic ends either by their own or someone else’s hand. The case of Julian Assange is especially troubling because he quite successfully exposed U.S. war crimes, and for his efforts he has been discredited and criminalized as though he were a mass murderer. It is true that Assange is still among the living, which cannot be said of the many other arguably less fortunate nonviolent dissidents eliminated by governments throughout history. But Assange has by now been incapacitated to the point where it can be said without hyperbole that he no longer is the person who he once was. His power to express dissent has been stripped entirely away. The Nord Stream sabotage “mystery” is in fact just the sort of event which Assange, if not shackled and muffled, might have been able to illuminate with the aid of whistleblowers.
Needless to say, this schema does not bode well for the future of free people, and least of all dissidents who criticize the government, pointing out its crimes and contradictions. President Biden recently announced that “domestic extremists” currently constitute the gravest danger to the republic, an allegation which he claims is based on reports from “our very own intelligence agencies,” presumably including the CIA and the FBI. Both of these organizations have evinced a morally unsavory “scorecard” mentality in recent years, attempting to rack up as many EKIA (in the case of the CIA) or federal convictions (in the case of the FBI) as possible—by all means necessary.
In the drone killing program run throughout the Middle East by the CIA in the twenty-first century, analysts have been generously remunerated for finding potential future terrorists to kill, with ever-lengthening hit lists of targets created through bribing informants on the ground while mining the cellphone data of persons previously suspected of terrorism. Meanwhile, in the homeland, FBI agents have gone to great lengths to identify potential future members of factional terrorist groups, and even to lure them into complicity in conspiracies to commit violent plots which were in fact masterminded by government officials and informants, who provided funding to hundreds of hapless losers who ended up being convicted and are now serving sentences in federal penitentiaries. It sounds preposterous, if not impossible, but such techniques of entrapment have been well-documented by Trevor Aaronson in his extremely disturbing exposé, Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (2013).
Given the ways in which suspected potential terrorists were targeted and ensnared by the CIA and the FBI throughout the “War on Terror,” we should be very wary of anyone who maintains that persons in the homeland who reject the current administration’s narratives are properly labeled “extremists”. “Extremism” is a concept by now wed to the notion of “terrorism,” and by calling dissenters at home “extremists,” the path is paved for bureaucrats to deploy the very same “tools” against them.
By stripping our civil liberties away and propelling the nation toward World War III, the bureaucrats currently protected by state secrets privilege are on track, and indeed seem determined, to destroy what remains of the republic. Nowhere is the danger before us more evident than in the shockingly reckless handling of the crisis in Ukraine by war propagandists posing as diplomats. It has become abundantly clear that the only way to rein in what has transmogrified into tyrannical rule by an unaccountable oligarchic bureaucracy is to abolish the Black Budget and cease funding any of the network of activities being perpetrated under cover of a spurious and obsolete need for secrecy.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
October 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, FBI, Obama, United States |
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With a deal that threatens non-proliferation, Australia is now yet another focal point of US-China tensions.
By Uriel Araujo | October 10, 2022
According to recent reports, an amendment proposed by AUKUS (Australia, UK and the US) countries to legitimize their nuclear submarine cooperation is being curbed by Chinese diplomatic efforts. The $122.4 billion dollars deal reached in September 2021 had been announced as the core component of this new strategic partnership.
AUKUS, the security pact between these three Anglo-Saxon countries to counter China, was announced in September 2021, and has been controversial from the very start. Together with the QUAD, it has certainly increased tensions in the Asia-Pacific region.
In this context, Australian authorities in Canberra plan to acquire at least eight nuclear submarines, thereby possibly making the Indo-Pacific state the first one in the Southern Hemisphere to possess such vessels, as well as the first country that is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to do so other than the five recognized weapon states, namely the US, Russia, China, UK, and France. According to the International Atomic Energy (IAE) Rafael Grossi, these submarines will be fuelled by “highly enriched uranium”, so they could be weapons-grade or close to it. Beijing’s Permanent Mission, in a position paper sent to the IAE last month, emphasized the fact that the “AUKUS partnership involves the illegal transfer of nuclear weapon materials, making it essentially an act of nuclear proliferation.”
The AUKUS countries in turn argue that the NPT allows marine nuclear propulsion as long as the proper arrangements are made with the Agency. However, in this case, nuclear material will be transferred to rather than produced by Australia itself. China disagrees with the AUKUS’ stance, arguing that the IAE is in fact overstepping its mandate. Beijing has called for an “inter-governmental” process to examine the issue at hand.
This is a complicated matter: when nuclear submarines are at sea, their fuel is not within the reach of the IAE’s inspectors and there is no way to keep track of the nuclear material. The agency’s director himself, Rafael Grossi, has told the BBC the AUKUS submarine deal would be “very tricky” for nuclear inspectors.
China’s mission to the UN in Vienna has also bluntly described AUKUS’ plans as nuclear proliferation under a naval nuclear propulsion “cover”. Ambassador Wang Qun, Chinese Permanent Representative to the UN accused the AUKUS states of “double standard” in a September 19 interview.
American-Chinese tensions are already too high over the issue of Taiwan and to add fuel to the fire, Beijing perceives the US-led AUKUS plans as the West pushing its sea frontiers against China by weaponizing its ally Australia with nuclear submarines. To make matters worse, under the current arrangements the fleet would be a US-controlled squadron. Given the ongoing American “dual containment” policy, Beijing’s concerns do make a lot of sense.
Chen Hong, president of the Chinese Association of Australian Studies and also a director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, has even warned that by playing a part in this, Canberra could be sacrificing its own national security for the sake of other countries’ national interests.
In July, two Chinese think-thanks (China Arms Control and Disarmament Association and China Institute of Nuclear Industry Strategy) had already warned that the AUKUS submarine project could set a “dangerous precedent” and thus threaten non-proliferation in a lengthy report called “A Dangerous Conspiracy: The Nuclear Proliferation Risk of the Nuclear-powered Submarines Collaboration in the Context of AUKUS.”
According to the document, if the US and the UK have their way, nuclear states will for the very first time be transferring weapons-grade nuclear material to a non-nuclear state (Australia). Such a precedent, it warns, “ferments potential risks and hazards in multiple aspects such as nuclear security, arms race in nuclear submarines and missile technology proliferation, with a profound negative impact on global strategic balance and stability.” The report also controversially evokes the possibility that Canberra might actually be intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, given its historical pursuit of the technology since the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Rob Wittman and Donald Norcross, two members of the US House Armed Services Committee, in a Wilson Center discussion on southeast Asia and the Pacific, have urged Australians to work closely with the US to master nuclear technology.
Anthony Moretti, a Department of Communication and Organizational Leadership Professor at the Robert Morris University argues that there is a loophole in the NPT which would allow Canberra to acknowledge to the IEA that it has acquired nuclear materials and then simply refuse to allow any inspections validating its procedures. This would be the only way for Australia to go ahead with the AUKUS deal under the current framework, but the problem is the dangerous precedent it would set, as mentioned above. It is quite hard to imagine how Beijing could possibly allow such development.
In his recent book titled “Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena”, retired Australian army intelligence officer, Clinton Fernandes makes the convincing point that Canberra’s defense strategy has been built around a “structural dependence” on the US, which leaves it unable to defend itself in any scenario other than “in the context of the US Alliance.”
Australia has been called the “coup capital” of the so-called democratic world and the American influence on the country over the years has a lot to do with this. Washington has also controlled Canberra’s foreign policy for decades, as exemplified by the infamous Anglo-American coup that “dismissed” Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Right now, the island-country has become yet another focal point of tensions between great powers.
Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
October 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Australia, China, NPT, UK, United States |
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“Putin is a legitimate military target… he needs to know that he’s on our target list at this point,” Bolton stated.
By Drago Bosnic | October 10, 2022
Just as the world thought that the lack of basic etiquette (diplomatic or any other) in the United States establishment couldn’t possibly get worse, that same establishment goes beyond anyone’s imagination (or worst nightmares in this particular case). On Friday, October 7, during an interview on CBS, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, infamous for his insistence on starting wars against Venezuela, Iran and North Korea or escalating the ongoing ones (such as Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc), said Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the US target list and threatened he might be assassinated.
“I think we should make it clear publicly so that not just Putin but that all the top Russian leadership… that if Putin authorizes the use of a nuclear weapon he’s signing his own suicide note,” the infamous neoconservative war-hawk said.
Bolton insisted that Putin is “a legitimate military target” since he heads the command and control structure of all Russian strategic forces. Bolton further stated that this should be official US policy.
“He’s a legitimate military target… he needs to know that he’s on our target list at this point,” he concluded.
Bolton’s comments effectively boil down to calls for the US to use any opportunity to assassinate the president of Russia. It cannot possibly be overstated just how dangerous, destabilizing and irresponsible such rhetoric is, especially coming from high-ranking officials, whether they currently hold office or not. However, Bolton’s statements are simply a continuation of a string of his recent provocative actions. He also discussed an op-ed he recently authored for the online military journal 1945, where he openly called for a coup in Russia.
“There is no long-term prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia. Russians are already discussing it, quietly, for obvious reasons. For the United States and others pretending that the issue is not before will do far more harm than good,” Bolton wrote in the aforementioned op-ed.
“To avoid the war simply grinding along indefinitely, we must alter today’s calculus. Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer,” he continued.
Bolton stated that a color revolution-style coup (or “regime change” as he calls it) was necessary, or at least an attempt to sabotage and cause division in the Russian establishment from the inside.
“Actually effecting regime change is doubtless the hardest problem, but it does not require foreign military forces. The key is for Russians themselves to exacerbate divisions among those with real authority, the siloviki, the ‘men of power.’ Disagreements and animosities already exist, as in all authoritarian regimes, exploitable as dissidents set their minds to it. Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank outside the Russian White House in 1991 evidenced the fracturing of the Soviet ruling class. Once regime coherence and solidarity shatter, change is possible,” Bolton wrote.
John Bolton is so infamously hawkish that he called former US Defense Secretary James Mattis (also a retired US Marine Corps general nicknamed “Mad Dog” and “Chaos”) too “soft”. One of the very first things Bolton did while serving as the US National Security Advisor was to make sure the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal (officially JCPOA). Immediately after, Bolton refocused on advocating for invasions and/or coups in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, etc. His warmongering became too much of a liability and a major point of contention between Bolton and the then president Trump, so much so that he was eventually fired after approximately a year and a half in office.
Although Bolton’s comments may be dismissed or ignored altogether, they will surely not go unnoticed in Moscow, as Russia is faced with increasingly aggressive actions and warlike rhetoric coming from the political West, particularly the US. Such statements come at a time when tensions are escalating by the day, especially as other US officials, both former and current, have been commenting in a similar fashion. This also includes US President Joe Biden himself, whose “nuclear apocalypse” remarks stunned the world in recent days.
It is also not the first time the US has called for a coup in Russia. In late March, President Biden stated the same during a speech in Warsaw, when he said that “Putin cannot remain in power“, which later prompted many White House spokespeople to try and distort the remarks. In contrast, Russia and its top brass have exercised restraint. There have been no reciprocal comments or actions in response to such blatant threats, but there have been warnings that Russia will defend itself by any means necessary. However, even these statements have been taken out of context and then turned into supposed “threats” by the mainstream propaganda machine of the political West.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
October 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States |
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Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.
When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?
European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.
So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.
European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad
Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.
The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell manufacturing processes is leading some operators to temporarily close or abandon production facilities as the cost of doing business escalates.
It’s not the only thing in jeopardy:
“Building a reliable domestic low-carbon supply chain is essential if the continent is going to stick to its goals, including the REPowerEU plan, but as things stand, that is in serious jeopardy,” [said Audun Martinsen, Rystad Energy’s head of energy service research].
Tell us what “affordable means:
The consultancy revealed that while power prices in Europe have retreated significantly since record highs in August, rates remain in the €300 – 400/MWh (US$297 – 396/MWh) range, many multiples above pre-energy crisis norms.
While Europeans have benefitted from reliable and affordable electricity, the research suggested that low-carbon manufacturers have based their build-up of production capacity on stable power prices of around €50/MWh.
And the country with the most fossil fuels wins:
The high costs of European PV manufacturing were revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which found China is the most cost-competitive location to manufacture all components of the solar PV supply chain, with costs in the country 35% lower than in Europe.
… Shortly after the above was published, a French solar module plant was closed;
Maxeon closes French solar module manufacturing plant
The obvious question, if renewables are so cheap, why don’t these plants relocate to a large plot of land, disconnect from the grid, and power their manufacturing facilities from their own low cost renewable energy products?
Seems an obvious solution – but for some reason renewable manufacturers seem to be choosing to shutter their plants, rather than switching to consuming their own product.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | European Union, France |
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Twitter has reversed its censorship of Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo after public backlash.
Ladapo was censored by the platform after he posted a tweet advising men between the ages of 18-39 to avoid the Covid vaccine as it had, he alleged based on a study, been found to cause an 84 percent increase in death rate for that group.
Ladapo’s statement and report were released on Friday, with the Surgeon General adding Florida “will not be silent on the truth.”
The published guidance “recommends against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males ages 18-39 years old.”
Ladapo said that “Studying the safety and efficacy of any medications, including vaccines, is an important component of public health. Far less attention has been paid to safety and the concerns of many individuals have been dismissed – these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.”
Twitter removed the post by the public official, claiming the tweet violated “Twitter rules.”
However, the post was reinstated on Sunday after backlash from the public.
“This is an unacceptable and Orwellian move for narrative over fact,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary, in a further tweet.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Twitter |
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With the stock prices of both Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank under pressure, many in the financial field are becoming concerned the world could be facing a renewed financial crisis. But this time around events could play out very differently. It might not even be banks that pose the greatest financial risk to consumers. It could be payment providers like PayPal.
The really big difference between 2007 and 2022 is that bank runs no longer look like the image above, they look like this:
That’s what I was faced with when I tried to transfer £500 from my PayPal account to a regular bank account. On Sunday morning the same message was still occurring. A quick scan of social media proved I was not alone.
“Boycott PayPal” was also trending on Twitter.
So what might the error message indicate about the business?
Here’s what we know so far.
In the last 48 hours a sneaky amendment to PayPal’s acceptable use policy widely captured the public’s attention. Free speech advocates had spotted that customers agreeing to the update would be allowing a sum of $2,500 to be lifted from their accounts if PayPal ever found them guilty of “sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation” or “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing”.
When word got out, those already concerned about the company’s draconian turn started shutting their accounts and urging others to do the same on social media.
For some, the action proved the final straw.
On Saturday evening U.K. time, PayPal’s former president David Marcus distanced himself very clearly from the action. Elon Musk, whose pathway to billionairehood started in 2000 when his company X.com was merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to create the PayPal of today, later tweeted that he agreed.
Readers of the Daily Sceptic and members of the Free Speech Union (such as myself) will already know that over the past few months PayPal has been on a whirlwind tour of shutting down the accounts of platforms and media sites it has deemed guilty of spreading misinformation. In many instances, those affected, such as the Daily Sceptic, were not even consulted ahead of the fact and had little idea of what specific text, post or media had violated PayPal terms.
So why exactly would PayPal descend to this level of reputational self-harm?
It’s hard to know for sure, but chances are the decision rests on pressures PayPal itself is facing with respect to its legal duty to enforce Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules. If I was to take an educated bet, it’s the counterterrorism section of the rulebook that is most relevant.
These days it’s hard to imagine that banks weren’t always responsible for screening transactions and making judgements about their legitimacy. But until the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was formed in 1989 with a view to combatting money laundering, banks only really cared about screening credit risk. It wasn’t until 2001 and the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers (and the introduction of the Patriot Act) that the scope of banks’ responsibilities in this field was expanded to include combatting the financing of terrorism too.
Tackling terrorist financing and criminality was easy enough when everyone was on the same page about what constituted terrorism or financial crime. But one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. And in an increasingly polarised world, it’s become harder for ordinary bank employees to differentiate free-speech critical of authority from radicalising terrorist content, such as that distributed by Isis on social media to recruit new members.
It wasn’t the job they were hired to do.
Three factors have muddied the waters further.
The first is the scale of penalties directed at banks found in breach of AML/KYC regulation. The fear of being slammed with fines has made banks and payment providers like PayPal hugely risk-averse and inclined to err on the side of caution when facing any ambiguity. If something even whiffs of misinformation, from their point of view it’s better to shut it down than to run the risk of getting a fine.
Second, is a lack of resources. Human arbitration is costly, and screening activities would be unaffordable if they were to be done by living, breathing individuals. This is why banks and payment providers like PayPal have invested huge sums of money in cost-saving screening technology to detect illegal transactions both actively and preemptively. The problem here is that most of these tools, known as suptech or regtech, are algorithmically applied with limited human oversight. That means it’s mostly artificial rather than human intelligence deciding who gets to stay on a platform and who gets frozen out. As yet, robots are not well known for their sense of nuance, empathy or capacity to process ambiguity. How they decide what they decide is a black-box interpretation of the inputs they’ve been programmed with.
The third issue is the structure of the KYC/AML policing system itself. Since the scale of the task is so enormous, it goes beyond the scope and capacity of any existing government agency. Knowing this, governments, very similar to how they managed the enforcement of lockdown policy, realised it would be more cost-efficient to outsource the policing of their own rules to the banks and payment companies directly. But this is a strategically coercive dynamic. If payment companies don’t fall in line, they risk having their licences removed and their businesses shut down. Non-compliance is therefore not an option. PayPal isn’t perfect, but the pressure it is facing is very similar to the pressure pubs, restaurants and supermarkets faced under Covid. The structural problem here, as with the retail sector during Covid, is those payment companies are not legislative specialists. They take for granted that the governments know what they are doing and that the rules they are setting are human rights compatible and in line with the laws of the land. Nor do the payment companies have the capacity to investigate the rights and wrongs of every case. This is a job for the legal system, which is already excessively costly to access for most ordinary individuals.
This in itself is a huge blind spot for the financial system. There’s a very strong case to be made that the way democratic governments have gone about enforcing AML legislation is not compatible with human rights at all. The enshrined right of habeas corpus might even be under threat. The FATF has itself belatedly realised this. Back in October 2021, it noted in a “stock-take on the unintended consequences of the FATF standards” that (my emphasis):
Situations have arisen in the course of FATF evaluations concerning the interaction between the FATF Recommendations on combating TF (particularly R.5 and R.6) and due process and procedural rights (e.g. to legal representation, fair trial, and to challenge designations, etc.), which have been considered on a case-by-case approach as they arise in specific country contexts. In addition, the FATF has also been made aware of instances of the misapplication of the FATF Standards, which are allegedly introduced by jurisdictions to address AML/CFT deficiencies identified through the FATF’s mutual evaluation or ICRG process, potentially as an excuse measures with another motivation. This information often comes as a result of stakeholder input or when the attention of the FATF or its members is drawn to a particular issue, such as when another international body is reviewing legislation or actions are taken by national authorities. Analysis in the stocktake has therefore focused on the due process and procedural rights issues most often arising in evaluations or feedback.
The stock-take identified the following factors as key examples of where misapplication of FATF standards had affected due process and procedural rights:
- excessively broad or vague offences in legal counterterrorism financing frameworks, which can lead to wrongful application of preventative and disruptive measures including sanctions that are not proportionate;
- issues relevant to investigation and prosecution of TF and ML offences, such as the presumption of innocence and a person’s right to effective protection by the courts;
- and, incorrect implementation of UNSCRs and FATF Standards on due process and procedural issues for asset freezing, including rights to review, to challenge designations, and to basic expenses.
Readers can hopefully see the issue.
The entire regulatory system since 2008 has focused on ensuring that the 24-hour payment banking infrastructure we have become used to will never face the risk of going down again.
Put bluntly, the style of service disruption currently being experienced at PayPal is something major banking and payment institutions are not supposed to be able to get away with. At least not for long. So yes, it does feel like a big deal.
For the most part, the practice of shuttering access through website maintenance, downtime or error messages is more commonly seen at cryptocurrency platforms during extreme bitcoin selloffs. Closing access to people’s accounts or pretending to do website maintenance often gives operators the time to raise the liquidity they need by slowing redemptions. But it’s far from a transparent or honourable policy.
For PayPal to have triggered a run on itself because it was merely following government orders is not just unfortunate, it is careless. But it also speaks of a deeper problem at the heart of the anti-money laundering regulatory structure. The entire system we have created may no longer be fit for purpose. Consider, for example, that despite many billions of dollars spent on FATF compliance, a company like Wirecard, whose business model in retrospect looks to have been based on fraud as a service (FAAS), could so easily rise to the top of the German stock market. Nor has any of the regulation been successful at combatting the type of electronic financial fraud (mostly based on phishing attacks or social engineering) that impacts users every day.
We need to seriously ask if the benefits outweigh the collateral damage also being incurred.
But while PayPal might not be entirely responsible for its own actions on the KYC/AML front, its business model may be more vulnerable to this sort of fallout than most people appreciate. The culpability for that lies with PayPal exclusively.
A key revenue generator for the group has always been the interest revenue it absorbs from all the customer balances it holds. (You may not have realised it, but if you have any significant sums in a PayPal account, you won’t be collecting interest on them.) A large outflow of deposits could easily inhibit the company’s ability to raise this income and harm its overall revenue-generating capability. (You don’t have to hold balances at PayPal to use it.)
More critical for PayPal at this juncture will be its inability as a payments company to access the central bank lender-of-last-resort backstop. That means if the group is genuinely facing challenges meeting transfer and redemption requests, it will only be able to turn to wholesale liquidity markets to make up the difference. The degree to which customer balances are locked up in harder-to-liquidate securities or bonds will largely determine its success here. Frustratingly for PayPal, in the current illiquid bond market, there’s a good chance that selling these quickly and without a loss could be challenging. The alternative path for PayPal will be to use these securities as collateral for temporary loans. But the expense here is potentially open-ended if there are no obliging counterparts. That may (or may not) be why the company is currently restricting transfers.
Before rushing to conclusions, it’s important to stress the company still has recourse to liquidity from fully-funded (in fact over-collateralised) entities. We may not know the makeup of that liquidity, but solvency is unlikely to be an issue over the longer term. The biggest problem facing users today will be uncertainty over how quickly they can transfer funds out of the PayPal ecosystem.
What I can say is that in the modern digital age, bank runs will be different. We may even long for the days when tellers transparently shut up shop when the vaults ran dry. At least it was clear what was going on. These days, on the other hand, it will become ever harder to differentiate a bank run from a maintenance issue on a website. Such matters will be shrouded in plausible deniability and uncertainty. Suffice it to say, corporate communication departments will always err towards disinformation of their own sort, that any such outage is nothing out of the ordinary.
Even more concerning is that in the event of a run, customers will no longer be able to tell if those with better connections aren’t unfairly cutting ahead of them in the redemption queue. Virtual queues may seem technologically efficient, but there’s no transparency to them at all.
That’s why if you’re caught out by any of these policies you already don’t stand a chance of getting your account back unless you have existing connections to the management or a platform of your own. None of this is progressive or encouraging.
Izabella Kaminska is the Editor of the Blind Spot, a financial news media service focused on the news everyone else is missing.
PayPal was not contacted for this piece, which is based on the opinions of the author.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights |
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Samizdat | October 9, 2022
The Transgender Health Clinic at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center has “paused” gender surgeries for patients under the age of 18, according to a letter sent by the institution’s chief health system officer, C. Wright Pinson, to a state representative on Friday.
In the letter, which Republican Rep. Jason Zachary posted to Twitter, Wright explains that the clinic is pausing “gender-affirmation surgeries on patients under 18” due to the publication of new standard-of-care guidelines last month by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), citing the need to conduct an internal clinical review and consult a wide array of experts. The review could take “several months,” he added.
While Wright pointed to the new guidelines as Vanderbilt’s reason for “pausing” the controversial procedures, his message was framed as a response to the letter Zachary and other state Republican leaders had written to the medical center last month demanding a moratorium on providing gender surgeries to minors. Zachary hailed it as a victory, tweeting his appreciation to Vanderbilt for addressing the party’s “deep concerns.”
The state politicians had decried the university’s pediatric gender clinic’s practices as “nothing less than abuse.” They also demanded all its affiliates honor so-called conscientious objectors – medical professionals who refuse to perform “certain medical procedures” because of their religious beliefs.
The university official addressed both issues in his response, reassuring Zachary that Vanderbilt was compliant with Tennessee law – including legislation banning hormone treatment for pre-pubertal children. Of an average of five gender-affirming surgeries per year on patients under 18 that Vanderbilt doctors had performed since opening the Transgender Health Clinic in 2018, none were genital procedures, and all patients were over 16 and had parental consent, he insisted. Additionally, none of the surgeries were paid for by government funds, and the revenue from gender surgeries constituted an “immaterial percentage” of the center’s profits.
Vanderbilt is not the only pediatric gender clinic to back away from some of its more controversial practices. The Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital has struggled to conceal its own history of performing gender surgeries on minors, claiming to only operate on patients over 18 despite a peer-reviewed paper revealing it has performed 65 gender-affirming surgeries on teens as young as 15 since January 2017.
Tennessee, which adopted the ban on pre-pubertal hormone treatment last year, is one of several states attempting to crack down on practitioners that offer irreversible medical procedures such as hormone treatment and “gender-affirming” surgery to minors, sometimes without parental knowledge or consent. Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Arizona have also adopted legal measures restricting such treatments.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | United States |
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A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements. The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail. Current estimates range from 0.5°C to around 6-7°C. Without knowing this vital figure, the so-called ‘settled’ science narrative around human-caused climate change remains a largely political invention, not a credible scientific proposition. Professor Scafetta has conducted extensive work into climate models and is a long-time critic of their results and forecasts. In a previous work, he said many of the climate models should be “dismissed and not used by policymakers”. Along with around 250 professors, he is a signatory to the World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency and also notes climate models are “not remotely plausible as global tools”.
Scafetta’s latest work grouped 38 major climate models into low, medium and high ECS values, ranging between 1.8°C and 5.7°C. He found that models in the medium and high category “ran hot” in over 95% and 97% of cases respectively. The lower models were said to have done better when compared to global warming calculated for the period by the major surface datasets of 0.52-0.58°C. But the UAH satellite data showed warming up to 30% less during this period, suggesting even the low warming models produced “excessive warming” from 1980-2021.
According to Scafetta, these results show that the ECS figure could be as low as 1.2-2°C. Particular concern is expressed about surface temperature records that “appear to be severely affected by non-climatic warming biases”. Scafetta concludes that surface-based temperature records are likely to be affected by warming biases, such as the urban heat island effect due to expanding urban development, and subject to natural oscillations that are not reproduced by climate models. He concludes: “The global warming expected for the next few decades may be even more moderate than predicted by the low ECS-GCMs [Global Circulation Models], and could easily fall within a safe temperature range where climate adaptation policies will suffice.”
Scafetta’s work is vital in providing a realistic insight into the dominant role played by climate models in promoting the command-and-control Net Zero political agenda. Many of the constantly promoted climate thermogeddon scares use forecasts based on high ECS values. The higher values are behind every statement from bureaucrats, politicians, green activists and journalists that we are heading for a 2-3°C increase in global temperature in the near future. In the absence of any definitive ECS figure, these predictions are guesses.
In fact, once the ECS figure falls to around 1°C, it is moving into margin of error territory. However, many scientists have more or less given up trying to calculate ECS, since measuring the non-linear atmosphere is proving as difficult as it ever was. The atmosphere is a chaotic system with many powerful influences reacting unpredictably with each other. The huge heat transfers that obviously have a considerable part to play in climate are far from completely understood. Recent suggestions that modellers can ‘attribute’ single event weather events to human-caused climate change are unprovable, and little more than figments of over-active, agenda-driven imaginations. Furthermore, it is possible that carbon dioxide becomes ‘saturated’ beyond certain levels and its effect as a warming gas rapidly declines.
What we do know is that over the last 20 years, global warming has started to run out of steam. The latest September UAH satellite data, considered in some scientific circles as the most accurate measurement we have, show the current standstill has been extended to eight years. But whereas satellite data are common and invaluable in many geographical fields, these temperature results are less welcome. It is not hard to see why. Scafetta calculates that the results since the start of recordings around 1980 are 30% below surface temperature datasets. As it happens, the two adjustments since 2013 by the U.K.’s Met Office to its HadCRUT global surface temperature record have increased recent warming by a similar amount. Similar upward adjustments are to be found in the other major global datasets. A previous temperature pause from about 1998-2010 is no longer visible in these records.
Claims of ‘record’ heat years and ever higher temperatures are taken exclusively from the surface records. The satellite record is largely ignored. There are even attempts to cancel the inconvenient figures, with Google AdSense recently ‘demonetising’ the site of Dr. Roy Spencer, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of the main compilers of the UAH satellite record. The record, of course, that is a vital part of Professor Scafetta’s work investigating the accuracy of climate models.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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From most loved, to most hated… audiences are drowning out Green Party speakers at campaign rallies.
The German Greens, who are partners with the SPD socialists in Germany’s government, are sinking dramatically in the public opinion polls as it becomes clear Green Party leader and Economics Minister Robert Habeck is driving the country’s economy into the ground at a dizzying speed.
Habeck, who currently also serves as Vice Chancellor, recently stunned millions of TV viewers when he appeared not to understand what bankruptcy is. Now as tomorrow’s state elections approach in Lower Saxony, the Green Party officials are scrambling to keep Habeck from doing more damage.
Blackout News reports that the Greens are “hiding” Habeck from the public in order to control the damage, and so far he has “had only one campaign appearance”. For that one particular appearance, “the audience had to stay outside, for security reasons” and “exclusively to selected members of his party.”
“In the polls, Robert Habeck has already experienced a significant plunge in the popularity of German politicians in recent days. So it’s no wonder that the Greens are literally hiding their once most popular politician ahead of the election in Lower Saxony,” reports Blackout News.
Desperate to find new sources of energy now that the Russian supply of natural gas has been halted, Habeck has angered his party base by extending the operating life for two nuclear power plants and putting lignite-fired power plants back on line.
In Göttingen, Habeck spoke at an election rally, but only in only in front of hand-picked audience after the police had completely sealed off the event.
Just a day earlier his party comrade Annalena Baerbock was “drowned out” by demonstrators. “Already at the beginning of her speech there was a deafening concert of whistles so that Baerbock could hardly be understood,” reports Blackout News. “In addition, there were shouts such as: ‘Baerbock must go’, ‘war-mongers’, ‘get lost’ and ‘impoverishment and war thanks to the Greens’, and ‘whoever votes Green, votes for war’.”
The mainstream media however, did not report on this.
Once the darlings of politics, the German Greens have seen their popularity plummet spectacularly over the recent weeks as Germany’s economy crashes due to excruciating energy shortages and price inflation.
“Therefore, on October 3, the Minister of Economics spoke only to a few dozen hand-picked party members and a few selected journalists,” according to Blackout News.
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Militarism | Germany |
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When considering war fatalities, we tend to construct a simple framework in our minds, of the form: “50,000 soldiers were sent into battle; 40,000 returned; fatalities 10,000. End of story.” But things are not so simple as this, for reasons both valid and fraudulent.
For one, the US government and military inevitably understate all the bad parts of their wars. It may be true that all governments and militaries do this, but here we are discussing the US. A few examples:
For the fire-bombing of Tokyo, any estimate of deaths less than one million is not even remotely plausible, yet I can recall that for many years the “official” US military estimate was 35,000. The generally-accepted death totals for the Vietnam war (including Laos and Cambodia) is around five million; the US adamantly states the totals at only one million on the grounds that “Vietnamese statistics are notoriously unreliable”. Bonnie Triyana, an Indonesian historian, has documented the death toll during the American “pacification” of her country, of at least three million, while the NYT ran an article headlined “U.S. Stood By as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show”, reducing the death total by 85% and blaming the deaths on Indonesians rather than the US CIA and military. It is more or less an axiom that the greater the atrocities and the more horrific the war crimes, the greater the understatement, and also the more extensive the media censorship on the topic.
It is also an axiom that whenever the US inflicts its military (and other) atrocities on other nations, the victim is almost inevitably blamed, in one way or another. The NYT article above is one example; there are many others. When the US released the swine flu in Cuba in 1971, necessitating the killing of Cuba’s 500,000 pigs, the tragedy was immediately engulfed in US media accusations of Cuba having a biological weapons program that was a threat to the world.
The topic of this essay is US casualties in Vietnam, but let’s first examine the landscape to see the kinds of troubles we have in making determinations with any semblance of accuracy. We will look at Iraq, since it is more current and we have more details readily at hand.
First, civilian deaths. The US military claims about 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. The US Senate clams 115,000, using numbers from the Brookings Institution. The Lancet claimed more than 650,000, with Fox News immediately challenging this “controversial new study” with its “disputed” results. According to Fox, “one respected group” made a “rough estimate at closer to 50,000”, and “one expert” was “skeptical” of the new findings. The Guardian, on the other hand, supported the study, stating that it had been “examined and validated by four separate independent experts”, stating also that the US military’s lower estimate was “was hugely controversial”. One UN estimate for Iraqi civilian casualties was over one million, and dozens of other “reports” and “studies” have been all over the map. Meanwhile, the US military remains silent and lets everyone speculate. If accurate figures are indeed available – and they may not be – those who have the data will never release it. Thus, we will never know the truth.
Then, US military casualties and casualty rate in Iraq. To determine this, we need to know the number of deployed soldiers and the number of fatalities. As to deployment, the US military says that about 775,000 troops “participated” in the Iraq war, while the Council on Foreign Relations says a total of 340,000 US troops were deployed to Iraq. On the other hand, the US Senate tells us, in a “definitive” study, that “More than 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq”. To make the picture even more clear, other sources state that these numbers do not include the “hundreds of thousands” of Blackwater and other mercenaries. To further increase the clarity, the US Military often either forgets or remembers (whichever is most convenient) to identify or differentiate between Army (active and reserve), National Guardsmen, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and other categories, sometimes including totals of all branches for deployment but casualties for the Army only. And so on.
Increasing the clarity yet further, the DOD tell us things like “there is a total of “260,000 US Troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria”, with no way to separate them by country. Another source tells us the US has deployed more than 2,000,000 troops to Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, again without separation. If the Afghanistan figure of about 750,000 is accurate, that leaves about 1.25 million for Iraq, but we can’t be sure. Then we enter a huge cloud with statements like “More than 775,000 U.S. service members have deployed to Afghanistan at least once”, with no way to know how many have been double- or triple-counted. The military claim some have been deployed five times. At one point, the Pentagon stated there were 132,000 US troops deployed in Iraq, while the Congressional Research Service (CRS) said it was double that number at 260,000.
Further, on close examination of the data, we discover that the time periods are by no means consistent from one claim to another, with dates like: March 2003 to April 2009, March 2003 to June 2006, July 2004 to February 2013. Then, US military deaths and other casualties in Iraq. The US Senate’s “definitive study”, and the number most often presented, tells us about 4,500 US soldiers died in Iraq. But then another report that appeared credible in its other data, stated that US casualties were in excess of 20,000 and climbing.
Then we have a report in the Huffington Post that “The death count is accurate but the figure for combat injuries (of 35,000) wildly understates the number,” claiming the total may well be over 500,000, and that the Pentagon reports nearly 230,000 cases of . . . traumatic brain injury alone.
Then we have some very strange reports, typified by an article in the WSWS, detailing a distinction between “combat deaths” and “non-combat deaths”, with very wide variations between the two, the latter category being ignored by the DOD and the media, with some observers claiming the military deliberately pushes all possible casualties into the “non-combat” category. And here we enter The Twilight Zone: Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military’s Transportation Command stated his outfit had evacuated around 3,000 battle-injured casualties and nearly 19,000 non-battle injuries (both dead and wounded). How is that even possible? For every soldier injured or killed in battle, another six were injured or killed in “non-battle” situations. And these injuries were apparently so severe they required emergency evacuation to Germany or elsewhere. Where did these “non-battle” injuries take place? In the mess tents? At the poker table? To add to the confusion, these deaths, injuries and evacuations apparently did not include “contractors” or Blackwater’s mercenaries.
There is the further problem of the apparently credible reports of the US military burying thousands of body bags in mass graves in the Iraq desert, with all those then listed as “Missing in Action” (MIA) and therefore excluded from the death toll. These were apparently bodies of American servicemen and Blackwater’s mercenaries, who would now not be listed as war dead. This was not a single event but appeared to be a continuing program of some considerable size. The reporter cataloguing this was told that by classifying all those men as MIA, the US military could avoid many family, media, and financial difficulties, and that recruiting for both the military and Blackwater’s mercenaries would be much eased with smaller death tolls. The man was killed by a military sniper before he could release his videos and photos, which disappeared after his death.
The LA Times joined this parade with an article written by a former Air Force Captain employed by the US State Department in Iraq, who said that “95% of injured soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were not reported as casualties due to what he refers to as the Pentagon’s ‘fudging the numbers’ in a bid to win funding from American lawmakers to finance the wars.”
And where does this leave us? Exactly no place. Given all the smoke, there is no way to know the real numbers for Iraq. According to the Guardian, “a bitter war of numbers is raging. Trying to cut one’s way through the statistical jungle quickly becomes a battle over methodology, and sometimes over motives. Critics even raise the specter of fraud . . .” To ensure this state of affairs, according to Lt. General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq: “We don’t do body counts.”
Lastly, Slate carried an article stating that “A comparative analysis of U.S. casualty statistics from Iraq tells a different story. After factoring in medical, doctrinal, and technological improvements, infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966 – and in some cases more lethal.” For your information, the “official” numbers for Vietnam were about 7 times higher than those for Iraq.
We would like to know the total deaths and the casualty rate for US servicemen in Iraq, but there seems no way to accurately determine either the actual number deployed to Iraq, nor the number of deaths and injuries. It seems reasonably clear that the official numbers are incorrect – some would say fraudulent – but the information necessary for firm knowledge isn’t available or accessible.
To return to the beginning, the US government and military inevitably understate all the bad parts of their wars. It isn’t a secret that they also lie about all portions of their military adventures. There were multiple media reports that George Bush told 900 separate lies about Iraq, leading up to and during the war. I don’t know if the statement was true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were, and the military, the State Department and the media told their share of hundreds of more lies about Iraq.
If we take the US Senate at their word for 1.5 million deployed in Iraq and a total of about 2 million for both Iraq and Afghanistan, with the “official” death toll at about 6,000 for both, we are left with 3 deaths per 1,000 or about 1/3 of 1%, a number that seems a bit implausible for about 20 years of war in both places. Given this, given the “95% are not reported”, given the “we don’t do body counts”, given the “injuries were not 35,000 but more than 500,000”, why would we choose to believe the “official” casualty statistics about Iraq?
Turning to Vietnam
The situation with Vietnam is not better than that in Iraq, but is actually much worse. This is true for no other reason than the powerful political constraints on Vietnam. For Iraq, the US population appeared to be more or less onside, with few street protests and other signs of strenuous objection. Vietnam was very different. You may recall the Kent State Massacre where protesting students were shot in the back on Nixon’s orders, and you may recall Daniel Ellsberg copying and releasing all the documents from the RAND corporation where he worked – the “Pentagon Papers”. The American public were so inflamed by the lies and the illegality, to say nothing of the brutality, of the Vietnam war that much of the nation was in anarchy and becoming ungovernable, with serious concerns of a nationwide public uprising that could easily have overthrown the government. It was in this climate that the US military rescinded the draft, primarily because almost no one was showing up for it.
No government wants to report bad news during a war, especially deaths and injuries, but Vietnam was a special case for the American military and for the government. Bear in mind that the US authorities lied about everything leading up to and during the war in Vietnam until the bad news escaped confinement. The false-flag Gulf of Tonkin incident was only the beginning. The US military lied about the existence of Project Phoenix, the massive torture-to-death program, about the use of Agent Orange – “The Vietnamese government asked us to spray some of their forests”. They lied about the false partition of Vietnam, about the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, about the total death tolls of Vietnamese, about the hideous deformed births, about the use of napalm on civilians, and scores of other items large and small. They also lied about the American POWs abandoned in Vietnam.
I have read through numerous files from that time and I cannot identify any item of consequence where the US military, government or media told the truth – essentially the same as Iraq.
Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000
Readers may recall my article on Robert McNamara’s Infamous “Project 100,000”, where around 500,000 severely-retarded young men, combed from the ghettos of America, were pushed into military service and sent to Vietnam. These were men who were unable and had to be taught how to tie their own shoelaces, whose reading comprehension was so low the military had to make little comic books to explain the most basic of military protocol and procedures.
Many researchers have claimed that an overwhelming majority of these men, especially blacks, received combat assignments, and “comprised an overwhelming majority of … battle deaths”, and were also generally posted to “what were considered dangerous military occupations”. These men were provided with special ‘dog tags’ that began with “US67…” so they could be quickly identified by other soldiers. By all accounts, the regular troops did not want to be associated with these men, certainly not in a battle situation, because their lack of intelligence and training simply jeopardised the lives of all around them. Many have reported that when battlefield decisions were being made, given that these men were unable to learn anything much more complicated than pulling a trigger, they were just sent to their deaths. One Vietnam veteran reported that a common order issued to these young men ‘salvaged from the blight of poverty’ was to “Go over there and see if there’s a sniper in that tree”. According to Colonel David Hackworth, who fought in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and became one of the most highly decorated warriors in American history,
”Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam. It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce.”
US casualty figures mushroomed after the introduction of this program, the victims of which were simply cannon-fodder and, for this and other reasons, I remain convinced there is a high probability that American deaths in Vietnam were grossly under-reported. The subject of war fatalities is always open to claims of manipulation by all sides, but more than a few people seem surprisingly eager to accept the US military’s Vietnam numbers, with what would appear to be unexamined opinions at best. Consider:
2.5 million US soldiers were sent to Vietnam. Officially, around 60,000 died, so a death rate of about 2.25%. “McNamara’s Morons” were reported to have been sent to Vietnam in total numbers ranging from 350,000 to about 500,000, depending on the source you choose. Their deaths are reported to be about 5,500. At the highest deployment numbers that would be a death rate of only 1%.
Yet all sources, including official US military reports, claim that these mentally-handicapped young men suffered fatalities at rates far higher than that of regular soldiers, many claiming death rates of “five to ten times” higher, most sources unanimous in claiming a death rate of around five times higher. I found only one original source claiming “three times higher”. But the mentally-retarded young men who were mostly infantry and confirmed as having been sent into combat at a rate “at least several times that” of regular soldiers, and who suffered death rates “at least several times higher’, apparently experienced a fatality rate only 40% or 50% that of regular soldiers. How does any of this make sense?
This is the problem that military researchers have in determining the truth of Vietnam even today, claiming that the US military provides only incomplete, contradictory, and confusing data, and stonewalls all attempts to ascertain the truth. In particular, researchers state the US military refuses to release any records on “McNamara’s Morons”, so there appears to be no way to know how many died. I do not know how many of these young men survived to return home. My estimate of “few returned” was gleaned from personal testimony of other soldiers who were in Vietnam and served with these men.
None of the official claimed numbers make any sense, either statistically or logically. The Vietnam war was one of the most bitterly-fought wars in recent history, one that the US lost and was in fact driven out of Vietnam, yet the total official death toll is a minuscule 2%+ for ordinary soldiers and a vanishingly-small 1% for hundreds of thousands of young men with an IQ as low as 60 and none above 80.
But perhaps a simpler question is this: The US government and military lied about almost every single element related to the war in Vietnam, and they did so – necessarily, I would suggest – in a political climate so incendiary that it might have sparked a popular revolution. Yet there appear to be many who inexplicably choose to believe that, out of literally hundreds of areas where the US government and military provably lied about US involvement in Vietnam, in this one single instance – the military death count – they magically are telling the truth. You are of course free to form whatever opinion you deem appropriate. For my part, I harbor grave doubts.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
Notes
Japan – Ending a War and Saving Lives?
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/460/
U.S. Stood By as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/asia/indonesia-cables-communist-massacres.html
New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/10/05/new-evidence-implicates-cia-in-1971-attack-on-cuba-with-african-swine-fever-virus/
Report: CIA Attacked Cuba with Swine Flu in 1971
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/10/30/report-cia-attacked-cuba-with-swine-flu-in1971/
Iraq by the Numbers
https://www.dpc.senate.gov/docs/fs-112-1-36.pdf
Disputed Study: Over 650,000 Civilians Killed in Iraq War
https://www.foxnews.com/story/disputed-study-over-650000-civilians-killed-in-iraq-war
‘655,000 Iraqis killed since invasion’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/11/iraq.iraq
How 775,000 U.S. troops fought in one war: Afghanistan military deployments by the numbers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/09/11/how-us-troops-fought-one-war-afghanistan-military-deployments-by-numbers/
Iraq by the Numbers
https://www.dpc.senate.gov/docs/fs-112-1-36.pdf
Number of Americans who served in Iraq throughout the course of the war – More than 1.5 million
United for Peace of Pierce County
https://www.ufppc.org/us-a-world-news-mainmenu-35/9235-background-us-has-deployed-more-than-2000000-troops-to-iraq-and-afghanistan-since-911.html
Iraq by the Numbers
https://www.dpc.senate.gov/docs/fs-112-1-36.pdf
Number of U.S. servicemembers who died while serving in Iraq – 4,474
IRAQ: US casualties top 20,000
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/iraq-us-casualties-top-20000
How Many U.S. Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq? Guess Again.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iraq-soldiers-wounded_b_1176276
Washington conceals US casualties in Iraq
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/02/woun-f04.html
Washington conceals US casualties in Iraq
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/02/woun-f04.html
Information Blockades – How and Why?
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/information-blockades-how-and-why/
IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN: American casualties total 500,000, counting injury and disease, writer claims
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/babylon-beyond/story/2010-06-24/iraq-afghanistan-american-casualties-total-500-000-counting-injury-and-disease-writer-claims
What is the real death toll in Iraq?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/19/iraq
Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam 1966
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/12/body-counts-in-iraq-and-vietnam.html
Robert McNamara’s Infamous “Project 100,000” and the Vietnam War. A Premeditated Crime Against Humanity
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/robert-mcnamaras-infamous-project-100000-and-the-vietnam-war-a-premeditated-crime-against-humanity/
McNamara’s Folly
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/McNamaras-Folly.pdf
October 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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In what pharmaceutical industry publication Fierce Pharma called “a troubling sign of the times,” the Biden administration this week purchased $290 million in anti-radiation drugs.
In an Oct. 4 press release, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) announced the purchase of Nplate, a drug used to treat acute radiation syndrome.
ASPR — the federal agency tasked with preparing for disasters and public health emergencies — said the purchase was made “as part of long-standing, ongoing efforts to be better prepared to save lives following radiological and nuclear emergencies.”
HHS did not clarify why it bolstered the government’s Nplate stockpile, other than describing it as “part of our ongoing work for preparedness and radiological security.”
Officials downplayed any connection to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, adding that the purchase “was not accelerated by the situation in Ukraine.”
However, two days after the announcement, amid growing tensions related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, President Biden said the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is at its highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The U.S. government in recent months has made several moves signaling a growing level of nuclear preparedness.
For instance, in late September, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity launched a new program, — Targeted Evaluation of Ionizing Radiation Exposure — which will investigate methods to detect low doses of ionizing radiation.
According to The Register, the investigation will work to “build a new understanding of the effects of low-dose radiation” through the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, biomarker discovery and analytical biography.
The Ohio State University, the University of Washington, Areté Associates and Signature Science received grants to conduct the research over a three-and-a-half year period. The research will occur at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute.
Earlier this summer, New York City authorities raised eyebrows with the release of a 90-second nuclear preparedness public service announcement (PSA), which the New York Times described as “bizarre” and as “well watched,” but “not well received.”
At the time, NPR reported that New York City’s emergency management department “wants residents to be prepared if [a nuclear attack] does occur,” but that the PSA left many of the city’s residents “confused.”
Outside the U.S., countries neighboring Ukraine, such as Poland, reportedly began distributing iodine tablets in response to the threat of nuclear fallout related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a result of shelling around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
Developed under Project BioShield, with funding from numerous government agencies
Nplate is the trade name for the drug romiplostim, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January 2021 for the treatment of blood cell injuries that result from acute radiation syndrome.
The drug is an artificial protein that promotes the production of platelets — or blood-clotting cells — in the human body.
The drug first received FDA approval in 2008, for the treatment of immune thrombocytopenia, an autoimmune disorder that causes serious bleeding.
Amgen, the drug’s manufacturer, developed Nplate in conjunction with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, under the auspices of Project BioShield, signed into law in July 2004 by then-president George W. Bush.
Project BioShield, which incentivizes private companies to develop vaccines and countermeasures for biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological threats, provided funding for the latest $290 million purchase by the HHS.
BARDA — another arm of HHS — garnered attention in recent years for its extensive deals with COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers and for its promotion of COVID-19 countermeasures.
In 2020, BARDA promised Moderna up to $483 million to “shepherd” its COVID-19 vaccine through the FDA approval process.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci — also contributed to the development of Nplate.
For instance, during an April 2018 oversight hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, Fauci described NIAID’s involvement in the development and promotion of “radiation/nuclear countermeasure candidates,” including Nplate, for FDA approval under the Animal Rule.
According to the FDA, Animal Rule regulations “allow for the approval of drugs and licensure of biological products when human efficacy studies are not ethical and field trials to study the effectiveness of drugs or biological products are not feasible.”
In the case of Nplate, drugs.com states that the effectiveness of the drug for the purposes of treating radiation exposure “was only studied in animals, because it could not be studied in people.”
Also according to drugs.com, Nplate also is associated with several serious potential side effects, including the increased risk of a blood clot or stroke, an increased risk of developing blood cancers and “harmful effects on your bone marrow that may result in serious blood cell disorders.”
The site states that it is “unknown” if Nplate will cause harm to unborn babies.
Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, California, describes itself as “A worldwide pioneer in biotechnology.”
The company’s board of directors includes members from The Aerospace Corporation, the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Northrop Grumman, Phillips 66, the University of California and Walmart.
The newly purchased stockpile will remain in vendor-controlled inventory, HHS said.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
October 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Nuclear Power | United States |
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