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Lebanon: ‘shocking’ details of torture in Israeli-run prison

MEMO | March 24, 2022

The details of torture in an Israeli-run prison in Lebanon, including the electrocution of a female detainee and denial of medical care, have been uncovered in newly declassified Israeli documents.

Arab prisoners were subjected to inhumane treatment at the Khiam Prison run by Israel in Southern Lebanon, which operated for fifteen years until the occupation state withdrew from its northern neighbour in 2000. Details of the torture and serious human rights violations were found within the archive documents released by Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet.

The documents were released following a petition to the High Court of Justice by human rights activists including lawyer Eitay Mack, who over recent years has uncovered Israel’s questionable ties to rogue human rights abusing regimes. The materials, the activists say, record “torture and cruel and inhumane punishments” in the prison.

“Together with the South Lebanon Army, the Israel Defence Forces and Shin Bet ran a detention and torture facility like those in the military dictatorships in Latin America,” Mack told Haaretz. The Israeli paper reported the gruesome details at length.

“The torture inflicted in Khiam Prison is a crime against humanity,” Mack said. “The documents that were revealed due to the petition are shocking, and constitute only a miniscule glimpse into the hell that they ran there. We will continue to fight until all the documents are made available to the public and those responsible for the horrors are brought to justice.”

Khiam Prison was opened in 1985 near the eponymous village, which is located in South Lebanon, a few kilometres north of the Israeli border. It was originally built as an army barracks in the 1930s.

Only a tiny fraction of the documents has been released. Legal proceedings are underway to obtain all of the material. The full scale of the torture is likely to be even more shocking.

Nevertheless, the small sample of declassified documents still paints a horrific picture. Between 250 and 300 detainees were said to have been held in the prison at any given time. They belonged to various organisations and political parties, including Amal, Hezbollah, the Communist Party, Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

According to one document, a female detainee being interrogated on suspicion of being “connected to Hezbollah” was electrocuted. The victim “received electricity in her fingers”, which is another way of saying that she was tortured during the interrogation.

A document dated 1988 testifies to the hunger from which the prisoners suffered in the jail. “This morning, the manager of the local prison reported that yesterday a hunger strike erupted in the prison due to a shortage of food,” it says.

Another document, from 1997, discussed medical problems from which the detainees suffered. In summary, the document says that there exists “a painful problem” and that the source who warned about it feels “that he has no support in the event that a detainee dies in prison due to medical problems or a failure to administer treatment recommended by the doctor.”

According to Amnesty International, during the prison’s fifteen years of operation, 11 detainees died. With the full scale of the torture still to be unveiled, the death toll may actually be much higher.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

British intelligence operative’s involvement in Ukraine crisis signals false flag attacks ahead

BY KIT KLARENBERG · THE GRAYZONE · MARCH 24, 2022

Shadowy UK intel figure Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was at the forefront of chemical weapons deceptions in Syria. Now in Ukraine, he’s up to his old tricks again.

With Washington and its NATO allies forced to watch from the sidelines as Russia’s military advances across Eastern Ukraine and encircles Kiev, US and British officials have resorted to a troubling tactic that could trigger a massive escalation. Following similar claims by his Secretary of State and ambassador the United Nations, US President Joseph Biden has declared that Russia will pay a “severe price” if it uses chemical weapons in Ukraine.

The warnings emanating from the Biden administration contain chilling echoes of those issued by the administration of President Barack Obama throughout the US-led dirty war on Syria.

Almost as soon as Obama implemented his ill-fated “red line” policy vowing an American military response if the Syrian army attacked the Western-backed opposition with chemical weapons, Al Qaeda-aligned opposition factions came forth with claims of mass casualty sarin and chlorine bombings of civilians. The result was a series of US-UK missile strikes on Damascus and a prolonged crisis that nearly triggered the kind of disastrous regime change war that had destabilized Iraq and Libya.

In each major chemical weapons event, signs of staging and deception by the armed Syrian opposition were present. As a former US ambassador in the Middle East told journalist Charles Glass, “The ‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-­flag operation.”

Elements of deception were especially clear in the April 7, 2018 incident in the city of Douma, when an anti-government militia on the brink of defeat claimed civilians had been massacred in a chlorine attack by the Syrian army.

Veteran inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no evidence that the Syrian army had carried out any such attack, however, suggesting the entire incident had been staged to trigger Western intervention. Their report was subsequently censored by organization management, and the inspectors were subjected to a campaign of smears and intimidation.

Throughout the Syrian conflict, a self-proclaimed “chemical warrior” named Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was intimately involved in numerous chemical weapons deceptions that sustained the war and ratcheted up pressure for Western military intervention.

This February 24, just moments after Russia’s military entered Ukraine, de Bretton-Gordon surfaced again in British media to claim that Russia was preparing a chemical attack on Ukrainian civilians. He has since demanded that Ukrainians be provided with a guide he wrote called, “How To Survive A Chemical Attack.”

So who is de Bretton-Gordon, and does his sudden reappearance as an expert voice on the Russia-Ukraine war signal a return to the dangerous US-UK red line policy?

Hours after war erupts, a “chemical warrior” demands Western escalation

Following months of fevered speculation about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, when it finally came to pass on the early morning of February 24th, most were caught entirely by surprise. Media outlets and pundits scrambled to get their stories straight, while Western leaders rushed to construct a cohesive ‘response’.

By contrast, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British army veteran identified by UK media as a “former spy,” was in no such muddle. Within just three hours, he had a fiery op-ed prepared for The Guardian, demanding the US and Europe “show their steel in the face of Putin’s aggression.” Warning that Vladimir Putin was “much more willing to face off with NATO” than before, de Bretton-Gordon charged that the West “stood back and watched in Syria,” and “it must not do the same in Ukraine.”

“Syria shows what happens when you turn a blind eye and are too heavily influenced by peaceniks,” de Bretton-Gordon fulminated. “Those of us involved in interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 30 years…we look at Syria and know we should have done better. That knowledge should inform our response to Putin’s aggression now.”

In reality, Washington and its allies did not stand back and watch in Syria; it waged a decade-long proxy war employing jihadist paramilitaries and airstrikes on Damascus, then occupied oil-producing portions of the country and subjected its citizens to crippling sanctions, which to this day deprive them of food, electricity and vital medical supplies.

Of all people, de Bretton-Gordon – whose Twitter profile once identified him as a member of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s official psychological warfare division – is uniquely placed to know of these horrors. After all, he played a pivotal role in promoting and extending the dirty war through the management of information surrounding chemical weapons incidents.

Manipulation, absurdities and obvious fraud

As The Grayzone has revealed, the involvement of de Bretton-Gordon in the Syrian conflict dates back to at least 2013, when by his own admission he was engaged in a covert effort to smuggle soil samples out of the opposition-occupied areas. This work would have inevitably placed him in extremely close quarters with jihadist elements raking in Western funding while benefiting from NATO training and weapons.

Contemporary media reports reveal the UK’s MI6 was engaged in a sample-gathering effort in the country at the very time time de Bretton-Gordon was inside Syria, strongly suggesting his linkage to the foreign intelligence agency. One article makes abundantly clear the purpose of the soil-sample exercise was to push the US into intervening by proving government culpability for alleged chemical weapons attacks.

Other forms of evidence were also collected on-the-ground by de Bretton-Gordon, and provided to a number of official investigations into chemical attacks. In at least one instance – an OPCW/UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) probe into a purported chemical strike in Talmenes, April 2014 – videos submitted by CBRN Taskforce, a shady organization he founded in Aleppo, were found to show clear signs of falsification.

De Bretton-Gordon threw his chemical weapons expertise into further doubt when he told British media that any common refrigerator could be transformed into a chemical weapon, falsely claiming that R22 refrigerant cylinders contained material for improvised chlorine bombs. “Somebody could go to a waste site where people chuck away fridges [in the UK] and get a whole bunch of those things and blow them up,” the supposed arms specialist claimed.

De Bretton Gordon has gone as far as claiming to a British tabloid that Russia could deploy missiles and hand grenades containing the highly deadly Soviet-era chemical agent Novichok “in any future war with the West.”

Such absurd commentary and subterfuge has done nothing to dent de Bretton-Gordon’s credibility, however. His mainstream profile has only grown over time, with outlets invariably presenting him as a courageous human rights defender risking his life to train local doctors and rescue workers.

On more than one occasion, however, de Bretton-Gordon has directly involved Western journalists in MI6’s soil gathering efforts. For instance, during a 2014 podcast interview with Wilton Park, an NGO funded by the UK Foreign Office, de Bretton-Gordon boasted of his responsibility for a story in the Times of London alleging a Syrian chemical attack in the town of Sheikh al-Maqsood.

“In March last year there was a reported sarin attack in Sheikh al-Maqsood and I helped the Times – chap called Anthony Lloyd who very sadly got shot two weeks ago – to cover this story and tried to get samples to the UK for analysis … I won’t go into the details of that,” he recalled.

Then-Prime Minister David Cameron invoked the Sheikh al-Maqsood incident to increase pressure on Damascus, citing “the picture as described to me by the Joint Intelligence Committee” as the basis for his assertion of a chemical attack against the town by the Syrian army.

Throughout the dirty war on Syria, de Bretton-Gordon routinely cropped up in the media attributing gas attacks and war crimes to Syrian and Russian forces, and fear-mongered about their implications for future conflicts with the West.

The latter role is one de Bretton-Gordon has enthusiastically resumed throughout the war in Ukraine, aggressively hyping the threat to Western countries. His messaging has tracked seamlessly with that of the US government, which initiated a program months before Russia’s military operation to prepare Ukraine’s security sector for an impending weapons of mass destruction attack.

Months before war, US trains Ukrainians in the threat of “targeted weapons of mass destruction attacks”

Back in May 2021, the State Department announced that Washington had conducted a “virtual training exercise” with “partners” in Kiev, including domestic security services, law enforcement, and first responders, to “identify, respond to, and investigate assassinations involving weapons of mass destruction,” due to “recent events in Europe” highlighting “the real threat of government-sanctioned, targeted weapons of mass destruction attacks.”

Along the way, Ukrainians were tutored in “[identifying] the medical symptoms that indicate WMD material use, the attack cycle involved in WMD assassination attempts, and the specific measures that enable safe and secure detection and response to WMD incidents.”

Quite why this instruction was given at this particular time is unclear, as was the “recent events in Europe” to which the press release referred. Perhaps the State Department was alluding to the alleged novichok poisoning of the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in August 2020. On what grounds that failed assassination necessitated a grand, multi-agency training exercise in dealing with “targeted WMD attacks” is anyone’s guess.

Whatever the purpose of the US training program was, Ukrainian security personnel can now claim they have the training to identify the precise “medical symptoms that indicate WMD material.”

This is significant, because ever since the conflict began, Kiev has exhibited an endless enthusiasm for lying, having distorted or even outright concocted events and facts whole-cloth to advance its objectives on countless occasions.

The most dangerous claims advanced by Ukrainian propagandists have been reinforced by the supposed authority of de Bretton-Gordon, who has argued that Russian chemical strikes were absolutely inevitable, based his prediction on his opinion that Moscow “has no morals or scruples.”

The self-styled chemical weapons expert has even cautioned that Putin could deploy nuclear weapons or create a pandemic “more deadly than Covid” with an Ebola weapon. He has further speculated that Russian forces may unleash a deadly virus seized from one of several Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine, then blame it on the US.

From Syria to Ukraine, it is happening again

In a typical media appearance, on March 10th, de Bretton Gordon told London’s LBC radio show that “nothing is off the table at this stage.” Among the horrors he forecast was the use of white phosphorous “to set towns and cities on fire.”

Justifying his certainty, de Bretton-Gordon forcefully asserted, “the only way to take a large city or town ultimately is to use chemical weapons.” He pointed to Syria to prove his point – but without referencing his own pivotal role in escalating that conflict through the manipulation of evidence and scientifically bereft fear-mongering in the media.

Now, de Bretton-Gordon has resurfaced at the center of the aggressive push for escalation with a nuclear armed Russia. If his role in Syria is any guide, a series of cynical deceptions could be on the way.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Hunter Biden did fund Ukraine biolabs, lap top emails suggest

Samizdat | March 25, 2022

Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop has reared its ugly head again, as it reportedly contains emails that appear to back up Russian military claims that the US president’s son was involved in financing military research into dangerous pathogens at biolabs in Ukraine.

Biden helped arrange millions of dollars in financing for Metabiota, a Pentagon contractor that specialized in researching pandemic-causing pathogens that could be used as bioweapons, the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper reported on Friday, citing newly obtained emails and letters from the laptop. President Joe Biden’s son and his partners in a firm called Rosemont Seneca also invested $500,000 in the contractor.

At least one of the documents suggested that Metabiota’s interest in Ukraine went beyond research and money-making. An executive with the contractor, Mary Guttieri, spoke in an April 2014 memo to Hunter Biden of “how we can potentially leverage our team, networks and concepts to assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society.”

Another memo showed that Biden had pitched a “science project” involving Metabiota and Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company where Biden made millions of dollars as a board member. His pay was cut in half after his father’s stint as US vice president ended in January 2017.

The revelations come one day after Russian military officials alleged that US agencies and high-level Democrats, including Hunter Biden, have been involved in backing bioweapons research in Ukraine. The officials cited documents that had been seized by Russian soldiers in the former Soviet republic.

However, some Western media outlets dismissed the claims as Russian propaganda meant to justify Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In many cases, the allegations were brushed off or ridiculed without even taking them seriously enough to include a US government response. For instance, the Daily Beast declared in a headline, “Russia ramps up the crazy,” while state-funded NPR and other outlets referred to the accusations as “false” or “propaganda” without any apparent probing of the facts. Even the Daily Mail itself, before obtaining the latest Biden emails, said Russia had ramped up its “wild propaganda campaign” by making its bioweapons claims.

The reaction echoed the response in October 2020, when the New York Post broke a story alleging overseas influence-peddling by the Biden family, citing emails obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Spreading of the report was blocked on social media, where the Post was censored, and legacy media outlets suggested that the scandal was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The original laptop scoop was essentially squashed just weeks before Biden was elected president. Just last week, the New York Times admitted that the laptop and its contents were authentic.

Government records show that Metabiota was awarded an $18.4 million contract by the Pentagon, the Daily Mail said. Emails showed that Hunter Biden claimed to help the contractor “get new customers,” including government agencies.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Don’t let the lockdown hawks re-write history

Certain commentators are claiming ZeroCovid was a purely pre-vaccine measure

By Toby Green | Unherd | March 25, 2022

The past two days have seen sorties from scientists desperate to shore up the lockdown version of history. Lockdowns were necessary, and anyone who disagrees does not care about society or equality. This version of history is so fraudulent that it cannot be allowed to triumph.

Writing in the Guardian yesterday, Devi Sridhar asks: ‘Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid?’ Why indeed? Sridhar notes that scientists have divided into opposing camps, taking ‘particular pandemic positions… eventually building a base of followers that organise around that position and defend it viciously.’ She just doesn’t seem to recognise that this neatly describes her own approach.

Sridhar’s piece is a craven attempt to rewrite history by claiming that the Zero Covid position was only ever intended for the pre-vaccine era. Can this be the same Sridhar who said in a New Statesman interview in January 2021 that ‘the better option is to eliminate the virus’ – even after vaccines had started to be rolled out? Or who tweeted in June 2020 that ‘the fastest way to get economy & normal life back is to push for a ZERO Covid Britain. Clear virus, build domestic economy’? Still, as far as Sridhar’s concerned, if anyone got anything wrong, it wasn’t her.

Sridhar’s efforts to rewrite history were joined by a prominent member of Independent SAGE, Kit Yates. Writing in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, Yates penned an op-ed on the theme “Was lockdown necessary?” Lockdowns, according to Yates, were necessary to protect the NHS and the vulnerable members of society — and yet at the same time ‘no one is in favour of lockdowns’. This sleight of hand followed his tweet in February that ‘everyone is lockdown sceptic’.

Have we all been dreaming about the vituperative onslaught on sceptical voices in the last two years? The answer becomes clearer in the last paragraph of the BMJ piece, where Yates concludes:

Whether you view [lockdowns] as necessary depends on your value system. Many people would place the lives of the most vulnerable high on their list of priorities. Many people would value a functioning NHS with equal access for all at the point of need. Many would place a high worth on the long term health of their population. But not everyone. – KIT YATES, BMJ

Sadly for Yates, his article was published on the very day that Sir Chris Whitty admitted that the long-term health of children had suffered and their life expectancies were lower through increasing obesity brought on by lockdowns. With NHS cancer backlogs projected to last for a decade, it doesn’t seem that this “long-term health of the population” and “protecting the NHS” works out very well for Yates and his ilk.

This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as Sridhar and Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.

Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Fauci Finally Admits Natural Immunity

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MARCH 25, 2022

Yes, Fauci has never worried about consistency or even contradicting himself one day to the next, often without explanation. Too often his doling out “the science” has felt like performance art. Still, the record is that Fauci and all his compatriots either downplayed or denied natural immunity for two years. That has been the source of vast confusion.

In fact, this might have been the most egregious science error of the entire pandemic. It amounted to giving the silent treatment to the most well-established point of cell biology that we have. It was taught to every generation from the 1920s until sometime in the new century when people stopped paying attention in 9th-grade biology class.

After the pandemic broke, Fauci said nothing on this topic for a year and a half. The John Snow Memorandum, written to counter the Great Barrington Declaration, claimed “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Mandates and passports have excluded it. Academic, medical, and corporate enforcers have generally refused to recognize it.

When CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him specifically, September 13, 2021, Fauci quickly demurred.

“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response,” Fauci said. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”

In other words, no one knows!

The HHS head refused to say either way, even when grilled by Rand Paul.

Earlier, the WHO even backed up this denialism, going so far as to change their own definition of immunity in the middle of a pandemic. They eliminated the old sentence on natural immunity and replaced it with a claim that immunity comes from “protecting people from the virus” and not “exposing them to it.” That’s some clever rhetoric right there!

There’s no question that this effort to deny natural immunity was systematic and pushed from the top.

How has this changed? In February 2022, the CDC finally published on the topic that they could not forever deny. And now, Fauci himself let the following slip in an interview on March 23, 2022:

“When you look at the cases they do not appear to be any more severe [than Omicron] and they do not appear to evade immune responses either from vaccine or prior infection.”

What’s critical here is not his debatable claim about vaccines but rather his offhand remark about prior infection. It was tossed off as if: “Everyone knows this.” If so, it is no thanks to him, the CDC, or WHO.

To be sure, everything we’ve known since two years ago – if not 2.5 thousand years – is that immunity from prior Covid infection is real. Vaccines have traditionally been a substitute version of exactly that. Brownstone has assembled fully 150 studies that demonstrate that immunity through infection is effective, broad, and lasting.

Had that messaging been around during lockdowns, the attitude toward the virus would have been very different. We would have clearly seen the present reality from the beginning, namely that endemicity generally arrives in the case of a new virus of this sort due to exposure-induced population immunity. This is how humankind evolved to live in the presence of pathogens.

If we had widespread public awareness of this, the public-health priority would not have been locking down people who can manage exposure but rather alerting those who cannot to be careful until herd immunity in one’s own circle of contacts has been realized via meeting the virus and recovering.

To those who say that is dangerous, consider that mass exposure is precisely what happened in any case, stretched out over two years rather than occurring in a single season. This delaying of the inevitable might be what allowed for variants to emerge and take hold in successive rounds, each new one hitting naive immune systems in ways that were difficult to predict. Flatten the curve amounted to “prolonging the pain,” exactly as Knut Wittkowski predicted in March 2020.

A widespread understanding of natural immunity would have changed the entire calculus of public perception of how to manage one’s life in the face of a new virus. Instead of just running and hiding, people might have considered tradeoffs, as they had always done in the past. What is my risk of infection and under what conditions? If I do get the thing, what happens then? It might also have changed the priorities from disease avoidance and vaccine subsidies and mandates to thinking about the crucial thing: what should people do if they get sick? What should doctors recommend and prescribe?

The neglect of therapeutics figures into this very highly. If people believe that locking down, staying away, masking up, stopping travel, and generally giving up all choices in life were the right way to make a pathogen magically disappear, plus they are under the impression that the risk of severe outcomes is equally distributed across the whole population, plus they believe that 3-4% of the population is going to die from Covid (as was suggested in the early days), you end up with a much more compliant people.

If natural immunity had been rightly seen as the most robust and broad form of immunity from the beginning, and we instead followed the idea of focused protection, the vaccine mandates would have been out of the question.

In other words, the silence of this topic was critical to scaring people all over the world into going along with an unprecedented attack on rights and liberties, thus losing up to two years of childhood education, closing millions of small businesses, and denying people basic religious liberties, in addition to the collapse of public health that resulted in record-breaking alcohol and opioid-related deaths, not to mention lost cancer screenings, childhood vaccinations, and general ill-health both physical and mental.

This stuff is not without consequence. One might expect some contrition. Instead we get a passing comment and nothing more. After all, frank talk about this subject might be risky: it would imply that their entire mitigation strategy was wrong from the beginning and should never be attempted again.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia wants US to comment on Hunter Biden’s alleged link with Ukrainian biolabs

Samizdat | March 25, 2022

Russia wants to hear comments from the US regime on the alleged involvement of Hunter Biden into financing a network of biolabs in Ukraine, which Moscow suspects of conducting bioweapons research, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. The embattled presidential son was financially linked to the Ukrainian labs by the Russian military this week.

“We will certainly demand explanations. And not us alone. You know that China has asked for explanations, demanded transparency over this program and this situation,” Peskov said.

He was commenting on a connection, which the Russian military claimed to have discovered between the embattled son of President Joe Biden and biolabs in Ukraine.

Hunter Biden used to head the now-defunct DC-based Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, a branch of the Rosemont Seneca investment fund. The Russian military claimed that the fund had close ties to the Pentagon and helped finance bioresearch in Ukraine.

The labs drew public attention after US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath this month that Washington didn’t want research materials from the facilities to fall into the hands of Russia.

Washington denied that facilities in Ukraine – and other parts of the world – which the Pentagon funds through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, had anything to do with germ research. Russia and China complained that the operation was shrouded in secrecy and called on the US to open the labs to international inspections.

Peskov dismissed statements coming from the White House, which alleged that Russia was talking about the biolabs to pave the ground for a false flag attack in Ukraine with weapons of mass destruction.

“The Americans are trying to switch attention … from the unfolding scandal,” the Russian official assessed.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Hunter Biden possibly involved in US biolabs scandal

By Lucas Leiroz | March 25, 2022

While Washington refuses to give answers about its scandals in biological weapons research in clandestine laboratories in Ukraine, other facts are revealed, which point not only to inappropriate conduct on the part of the American government, but also to the Biden family itself. Hunter Biden, son of the US president, who is proven to be involved in several corruption schemes in Ukraine, is now suspected of being one of the main financiers of US laboratories on Ukranian soil. The suspicion is already generating strong international repercussions, with Moscow demanding an immediate response from Washington. With this situation, once again the Biden administration is approaching a crisis of legitimacy.

Rosemont Seneca Partners has been accused of being a major financier of US laboratories in Ukraine. The company would sponsor the entire Pentagon’s biomilitary program, sending more than 2 billion dollars in resources for the maintenance of several laboratories abroad, including more than thirty facilities in Ukraine. The company would be acting in partnership with other key military companies, such as Metabiota, in addition to many NGOs and international foundations.

The head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, Igor Kirillov, commented on the report: “Incoming materials have allowed us to trace the scheme of interaction between US government bodies and Ukraine’s biolabs. The involvement in the financing of these activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the Rosemont Seneca investment fund managed by Hunter Biden, draws attention to itself (…) At the same time, a close relationship has been established between the fund and key contractors of the US military, including Metabiota, which alongside Black & Veatch is one of the main suppliers of equipment for Pentagon biolaboratories around the world”.

Hunter Biden, who has accumulated several crimes of corruption and financial scandals in Ukraine during his time working in Kiev, is the chairman of the Rosemont Seneca financial fund. This fund receives money from a wide range of companies, banks and philanthropic organizations around the world, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These connections reveal the real dimension of the Pentagon’s program, which involves many of the key names of the global elites.

“The scale of the [American biomilitary] program is impressive. Along with the Pentagon, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are directly involved in its implementation (…) Scientific supervision is carried out by leading research organizations, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Project. All of this activity has been carried out under the direct control of the Pentagon”, Kirillov adds.

It is important to note that the Russian allegations are made on the basis of official documents captured by Moscow intelligence on Ukrainian soil during the Special Operation, which guarantees credibility for the pronouncements of Russian officials. Several accusations on the existence of research on biological weapons had already been made previously, mainly by the US, which accuses China of having created the new coronavirus. However, none of these accusations were elaborated justified on scientific evidence and official documents, being just unsubstantiated narratives – which is not the case now.

According to data contained in documents captured by the Russians, about 16,000 biosamples have been exported from Ukraine in recent times, supposedly with the aim of reporting the results of military research in those laboratories to their funders in other countries. Kirillov reports that there are real risks of a new pandemic to start soon, considering that US forces are indeed in possession of advanced biological weapons, which include diverse pathogenic biomaterials, from coronavirus mutations to anthrax variants.

It is impossible to say in advance whether or not the West will use the biological weapons it currently possesses. The risks of a new pandemic are real, and this scenario would have negative impacts on the whole world. It is possible that the fact that research data have become public is reason enough to prevent the use of such weapons, as this would harm the international image of the US government and the private agencies that finance these laboratories. However, the very existence of this type of illegal and unethical activity must be reason for strong condemnations against the US and Ukraine on the international organizations and courts.

Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov demanded answers from the US government about Hunter Biden’s involvement in funding biomilitary research. China’s previous demands also remain. The White House’s stance is one of total silence – while, at the same time, other American officials give ambiguous and contradictory answers, either confirming or denying the existence of the biolabs.

In fact, this scenario also tends to have a major internal impact on the American electorate, intensifying the current legitimacy crisis of the Biden administration. In addition to several domestic and international management mistakes, Biden has to deal with family scandals due to his son’s criminal activities, which complicates his acceptance by the American people. Indeed, a strong wave of disapproval and protests is about to come soon in America.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Chinese Foreign Minister visits India to discuss Ukraine

Samizdat | March 25, 2022

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in New Delhi on Thursday night for a diplomatic visit, where he is expected to meet his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian foreign ministry announced. This is the first visit of a high-ranking Chinese official to India since border clashes in Ladakh in 2020.

Wang Yi previously held talks with India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, according to Reuters. Both China and India kept the visit secret until the Beijing diplomat touched down in New Delhi late on Thursday.

The talks, set for Friday, are likely to be focused on border tensions between India-China, as well as Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine. Both countries have, so far, abstained from condemning and sanctioning Russia for its actions, maintaining trade relations with the country despite pressure from the West.

While the two nations have called on Russia to cease hostilities and look for a diplomatic solution, India continues to buy Russian oil and is currently discussing means to switch to a rupee-rouble trade mechanism, allowing the two sides to avoid trading in the euro or the dollar. China has repeatedly denounced unilateral sanctions on Moscow, protesting against Russia’s exclusion from the G20.

The relations between China and India began to deteriorate after a clash in the Ladakh region on their Himalayan border in June 2020, where at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed.

“Few would have anticipated … the turn that India’s relations with China have taken in the last two years,” Indian Foreign Minister said on Thursday, stressing the importance of coordination on defense and foreign policies matters between the two countries. It is likely that India will push for complete disengagement of troops from the region during the Friday talks.

The Chinese foreign minister visited Pakistan and Afghanistan earlier this week, and is set to continue his tour across South Asia by traveling to Nepal. In Pakistan, Wang Yi said that “China shares the same hope” as its Islamic colleagues regarding the status of Indian Kashmir province, who advocate for the province’s “inalienable right to self-determination”. The remark drew anger from some Indian officials ahead of his visit, as the Muslim majority region, controlled by both India and Pakistan, is considered a disputed territory, where India has been fighting armed rebels for decades.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The great Aids scam – a dry run for Covid

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | March 25, 2022

IF YOU are British and of a certain age, you’ll remember the doomily portentous 1986/7 Aids warning campaign promoted by the UK government.

The slogan ran ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance.’

Here’s the most memorable ad. It featured the gravelly voice of John Hurt warning: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it has been confined to small groups. But it’s spreading  . . . so protect yourself.’

I remember it well because I was at exactly the right age – early twenties – for it to mess up my sex life. It didn’t kill sexual activity, quite. But it definitely put a dampener on it. You still did the deed, when you could find a willing partner. But you worried about it afterwards especially if, like me, you had hypochondriacal tendencies. Clearly there was a serious risk: there had to be! Why else would the government spend millions on this lavish, in-your-face campaign if Aids wasn’t a major problem?

But it wasn’t. Every word of that campaign was either a lie, an exaggeration or a misdirection. ‘Don’t die of ignorance!’ it declared. Yet ignorance was exactly what it was promoting.

How do I know this? Well, it has been a long, long journey.

The first stage was gentle cynicism. After the initial shock of those ads, it became increasingly clear that the government had been overstating the case. Yes, Aids did indeed appear to be taking a terrible toll among those ‘small groups’: haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and homosexual men, primarily. But there was no evidence that the disease was spreading significantly to the broader community.

At the time, those of us who realised this tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Yes, the government had, strictly speaking, been lying to us. But it was a good lie. A noble lie. It was pretending Aids affected everyone in order to spare the blushes of those it did affect. If you were gay or a haemophiliac or an intravenous drug user you wouldn’t feel isolated, marginalised. You could feel that the whole country was united with you, sharing some of your pain and anxiety.

I can’t remember how far I subscribed to this argument myself. Probably, knowing me, not greatly. I’ve never been a fan of ‘unless one of you owns up you’re all going to suffer’ collective punishments. And this felt very much like one of those: as if we were being treated like children who couldn’t be trusted to be told the whole truth lest we misuse that information for our own selfish ends. It was collectivism, communism basically, and I’ve never been into any of that, not even in my youthful idealism phase.

The second stage of my Aids awareness didn’t come till much later. It’s so recent, in fact, that if you had told me two years ago that Aids didn’t really exist and wasn’t caused by a virus called HIV, I would probably have rolled my eyes and changed the subject. What converted me was first my experience of the ‘pandemic’ and my recognition of the obvious parallels with the ‘Aids crisis’, which – from the Fauci connection to the suppression of effective drugs and the promotion of dodgy ones – was a dry run for Covid-19. And secondly, the informed wisdom of Robert F Kennedy Jr and of my most recent podcast guest Jon Rappoport.

Rappoport is the author of a 1988 book we all should have read (it would have spared us so much bother) called AIDS Inc. He began his researches in good faith, assuming – as any rational person would – that Aids was a genuine phenomenon. Little by little, though, he came to realise – as his subtitle put it – that this was the Scandal of the Century: a scam, effectively concocted by Big Pharma, the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, to push unnecessary, expensive and dangerous medical treatments on desperate, captive victim groups in the guise of ‘public health’.

Unless you’re very open-minded, impossibly cynical or irredeemably red-pilled, it’s a hard thesis to swallow. Among the obvious questions it raises are: ‘So what were all those people dying of?’ and ‘C’mon, if Aids was a fiction, surely we’d all know by now?’

The answer to the first question is it depends what victim category you are talking about. In Africa, for example, ‘Aids’ was – and still is – rebadged malnutrition. Its original nickname (as fans of Bob Mould and Sugar will know) was ‘The Slim’. With the diabolical genius we’ve since come to expect of Big Pharma, millions upon millions of starving Africans were turned into a problem the industry could lucratively solve simply by pretending that their emaciation was the result of a deadly new virus (probably spread from having sex with monkeys: nice dose of cheap racism there, Big Pharma liars!) rather than from not getting enough to eat.

With gay men, according to Rappoport (who was told this by front-line community workers) it was the bath houses. These were the orgiastic dens of iniquity, popular at the time, where you could take any number of drugs, have sex with any number of men, and stay up partying any number of hours till your immune system finally gave up the ghost and left you prey to all manner of fatal infections.

But what about the gay men who didn’t go to the bath houses? This is where the story gets truly shocking. Many of them were killed by the very drug that was supposed to save them, the much-lauded AZT. Designed as a cancer drug (but abandoned because it was so toxic, killing more people than it cured), AZT was heavily pushed by Anthony Fauci as the solution to the Aids crisis. In fact it made it much worse. As RFK Jr reports in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, once AZT was introduced the death rate ‘from Aids’ rose precipitously.

What’s particularly sad is that a lot of these victims were not even sick before they moved on to their fatal courses of AZT (the average survival time for those taking it was four months). They’d simply taken the test, been found to be ‘HIV-positive’ and had been frightened by the general hysteria into imagining that this would save their life. Among those who made this mistake were ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and tennis player Arthur Ashe.

A treatment more dangerous than the disease itself. Shrill public health campaigns dispensing misinformation. More effective, cheaper treatments being deliberately suppressed. An obsession with case numbers over fatality rates. Whistleblowing scientists, such as Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein, silenced and proscribed by a corrupt medical establishment. So much of what happened during the Aids crisis seems with hindsight so eerily familiar. And with good reason: it was organised by the same people.

What’s frustrating is that even when you lay out the information as clearly as RFK Jr and Rappoport have done, there will be those – and perhaps they are even the majority – who prefer to believe the fabricated narrative to the uncomfortable truth. This is understandable. To comprehend fully what happened during the Aids crisis you must inevitably abandon many of the cosy assumptions that make our world seem nicer and friendlier than it actually is. These assumptions include some of the following notions: that doctors are all in the healing business; that the regulatory authorities are there to protect you; that drugs are not released on to the market without rigorous testing. The idea that medical doctors and scientists, in collusion with government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, would make up a disease in order to push a cure which killed you but made them rich is such a hard thing for most of us to grasp that we find it easier to believe the reassuring lie than accept the reality.

There’s another reason too, why the inventors of Aids have never been properly found out, let alone brought to justice: gaslighting. We’re talking about an entire system – the media, Hollywood, publishing, TV, schools, academe, the scientific institutions, big business, the political class, finance etc – all pushing the same message. Try questioning the Aids/HIV narrative as a specialist science or health journalist and see how far you get: you’ll find that ‘experts’ will no longer wish to speak to you, institutions no longer prepared to co-operate with you. Or try to get funding for a movie blowing the whistle on what really happened . . .

No one likes to think that they’re the hapless dupe of a massive psy-op. But the evidence is all around us, if only you know where and how to look. For example, I suspect it’s probably not coincidental that, at the height of the ‘pandemic’, the BBC treated us to a period drama series about the UK experience of Aids, written by Doctor Who showrunner/reviver Russell T Davies, called It’s A Sin.

Now I happen to think Davies is a hugely talented and watchable screenwriter, brilliant at creating likeable, believable characters, snappy, memorable dialogue and entertaining story arcs. But this, where an issue such as Aids is concerned, is what makes his fiction so dangerous. Of course, as an Establishment figure, Davies is going to promote the Establishment narrative. It’s A Sin achieved various nefarious objectives: it reinforced the notion that Aids was a thing; it got audiences talking once more about their memories and experiences of that era; it enabled politicians and commentators to pontificate about the period, drape themselves in rainbow flags and so on; and it hinted at contemporary parallels – that Covid-19 too is a genuine health crisis that we would do well take seriously and which the government really should do more to address . . .

When you analyse how the system works it just sounds like yet more conspiracy theorising. But it’s precisely this level of attention to detail by the progenitors of the Aids scam which explains why so many of us still think, against all the evidence, that it wasn’t a scam.

March 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

China refutes NATO secretary general’s misinformation accusation

By Du Qiongfang | Global Times | March 24, 2022

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday that time will prove China stands on the right side of history and groundless accusations will collapse, refuting an allegation from NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that “China has provided Russia with political support by spreading lies and misinformation.”

When asked about Stoltenberg’s allegation at Thursday’s press briefing, Wang said the accusation against China itself is spreading disinformation.

With an objective and fair attitude, China has made active efforts to realize an immediate ceasefire, to avoid a humanitarian crisis and to restore peace and stability, Wang said, adding that Ukraine should be a bridge between the East and the West, not an outpost in major power rivalry.

“We need calm and rationality to defuse a crisis rather than ignite the fire and add more fuel to the fire; we need dialogue and communications to resume peace instead of using pressure and coercion; to achieve lasting peace and stability, we need to accommodate the legitimate security concerns of all parties, rather than promote collective confrontation and seek absolute security,” Wang said.

He added that China’s stance is in line with the wishes of most countries and it stands on the right side of history as time will tell. Any groundless accusations and suspicions against China are indefensible and will simply collapse.

The West thinks the war is about defending democracy and freedom but in reality it’s about security in the European geopolitical landscape, so the Ukraine crisis is not about differences in social systems or ideology, Yang Xiyu, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Wang said that European countries should uphold the principle of strategic autonomy and work with Russia and Ukraine and other relevant countries to build a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture through dialogue and negotiations. The US and NATO should also engage in dialogue with Russia to address the root cause of the Ukraine crisis.

Wang also said that there are many loopholes in the US’ responses to the international community, including China’s questions surrounding the US biological laboratories in Ukraine which Russian experts claimed to have revealed new facts pointing to the direct involvement of the US Department of Defense in the development of biological weapons components in Ukraine.

The best way for the US to prove its innocence is to open its doors and accept the test of the international community, Wang said.

March 24, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

The spectre that haunts Biden as he wings his way to the borderlands of Ukraine

The Russian special operation may after all be inching toward successful conclusion

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 24, 2022

By a queer coincidence, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright passed away while President Joe Biden was travelling in Air Force 1 en route to Europe on what is probably the most crucial diplomatic mission of his presidency. 

The general expectation is that 80-year old Biden is personally undertaking a mission to persuade the US’ European allies that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) should intervene in the Ukraine crisis in some way. And, ironically, Albright was the choreographer of the idea that in the post-cold war era, the NATO should reinvent itself and transform as a global security organisation. 

Albright, like most American diplomats of East European descent, was passionately devoted to the NATO. She supported the alliance’s brutal military intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 and would have supported an intervention in Ukraine. 

The White House spin is that Biden will discuss additional sanctions against Russia. But the possibility of new restrictions has waned following the EU foreign and defence ministers’ meeting on Monday where a decision was taken to put off further sanctions. 

The EU meeting instead assessed that the ongoing Ukraine-Russian talks should proceed further and even if upbeat predictions may not be entirely correct, since the talks are challenging, the good part is that neither party has complained of any deadlock in the negotiations so far. 

Conceivably, Biden is travelling to Europe not to discuss tougher sanctions  (something which he could as well have handled in a videoconference) but to explore NATO’s potential engagement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for which his participation becomes absolutely essential. 

As things stand, there is every possibility of a prolonged conflict in Ukraine and Russia eventually prevailing. Such a scenario is extremely damaging for Biden politically in the US. Biden is facing domestic criticism both for his failure to prevent the conflict as well as for being ineffectual in blocking the Russian advance.

While the US rhetoric pillories Russia for “war crimes” and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, et al, the world capitals view this as a geopolitical confrontation between America and Russia. Outside of the western camp, the world community refuses to impose sanctions against Russia or even to demonise that country. 

The world community steers clear of taking sides between the US and Russia. The Islamabad Declaration issued on Wednesday after the 45th meeting of the foreign ministers of the fifty-seven member Organisation of Islamic Conference refused to endorse sanctions against Russia and instead counselled cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, avoidance of loss of lives, enhancement of humanitarian assistance and a “surge in diplomacy” — almost ditto China and India’s stance.

Not a single country in the African continent and West Asian, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asian region has imposed sanctions against Russia. Following a visit to Hanoi, Malaysian PM Ismail Sabri Yaakob said, “We discussed the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and agreed that Malaysia and Vietnam will remain neutral on this issue. As for sanctions against Russia, we do not support them. The sides do not support unilateral sanctions; we recognise only restrictions that could be imposed by the UN Security Council.” This is the consensus within ASEAN too. 

Interestingly, Chinese Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the chief guest at the OIC meeting in Islamabad. In his remarks, Wang Yi said, “China supports Russia and Ukraine in continuing their peace talks, and hopes that the talks will lead to ceasefire, end the fighting, and bring about peace. Humanitarian disasters should be avoided, and spillover of the Ukrainian crisis should be prevented so as not to affect and harm the legitimate rights and interests of other regions and countries.” 

The Chinese foreign ministry press release on Wang Yi’s meeting with the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said, “As to the Ukraine issue, the two sides agreed that all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected and their reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously. It is imperative to prevent any humanitarian crisis, maintain the peace talk process and resolve conflicts through dialogue and negotiation. Both sides emphasised that all countries have the right to make independent judgements, withstand external pressure, and disagree with the simple logic of “black or white” and “friend or foe”.

Again, the Chinese press release on Wang Yi’s meeting with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry said, inter alia, “The two sides exchanged views on the Ukraine issue, and agreed to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries and stay committed to a comprehensive solution to the current crisis. Shoukry said, Egypt opposes some countries exerting pressure on China and stands for strengthening cooperation rather than escalating confrontation.” 

Curiously, four foreign ministers from West Asia travelled to Moscow last week to discuss the bilateral cooperation — from Qatar, Iran, Turkey and the UAE. 

Nonetheless, the outcome of Biden’s visit to Europe will have significant bearing on the conflict in Ukraine. If Biden succeeds in getting European backing for his proposal for a NATO intervention in Ukraine, the conflict may escalate dramatically into a world war involving nuclear weapons.   

 Will Biden push the envelope? It seems he’s unwilling to risk. Biden seems to have a Plan B as well. He has scheduled a separate visit to Warsaw. Poland indeed has its fair share of Russophbes and has been straining at the leash for some form of involvement in Ukraine. 

The heart of the matter is that Poland also has an axe to grind. Parts of Poland comprise today’s ethnically mixed western borderlands of Ukraine — oblasts of Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Lviv. If Ukraine fragments or collapses in defeat, Poland will most certainly seize the opportunity to reclaim its lost territories. Poland’s hyper-activism over Ukraine is self-evident. 

Incidentally, in recent days, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk have both accused Budapest of trying to lay its hands on Ukraine’s largely Hungarian-populated Transcarpathian region. On Tuesday, Sikorski alleged in a tweet that Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán and President Vladimir Putin reached a secret agreement on the partition of Ukraine! 

On the same day, Iryna Vereshchuk complained in a Facebook post: “The way the Hungarian leadership has been treating Ukraine lately is even worse than some of the Russian satellite states of the former Soviet Union. Hungary does not support the sanctions. They don’t provide weapons. They don’t allow transit of weapon supplies from other countries. They say ‘no’ to virtually everything.”   

Biden cannot but be exploring with the Polish leadership possibilities that fall short of an outright NATO intervention in Ukraine. The spectre that haunts the Biden administration, despite the swagger of its media bluster, is that the Russian special operation may after all be inching toward successful conclusion, creating a large buffer of regions on the eastern side of the Dnieper river, and gaining control of Black Sea coastline that denies access to NATO ships. 

Poland becomes a key stakeholder in such an outcome and Washington surely regards Warsaw as its number one interlocutor in the developing situation, as the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance. 

March 24, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

TRUDEAU’S EMERGENCIES ACT REAPPRAISED

By Alex Story | RECOVERY | March 22, 2022

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

THAT QUESTION troubled many of our greatest philosophers over generations. Last month, however, the question was finally answered. The sturdy and tough Canadian Maple tree fell in plain sight. The fall barely making a sound.

Democracy ended overnight – with little to no fuss, and some encouragement from neighbours and friends.

To deal with an old fashioned, “grease under your fingernails” workingman’s protest, Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, invoked the Emergencies Act on the 14th of February.

Barely a week later, his party, with the support of the New Democratic Party, ganged-up to pass the measure by 185 votes to 151. The Conservatives and Bloc Québécois voted against the use of the sweeping enforcement measures, accusing the prime minister of overreach. The Canadian government granted itself powers it did not have before.

These included the power to impose restrictions on public assembly and travel, to mobilize federal support for local and provincial police, impose fines on violations of the act, whatever that might mean in practice.

The police were given the ability to arrest without warrant those who were directly or indirectly “assisting others” in what it considered “criminal activities” – no justifications required. Added to physical restrictions, the Emergencies Act allowed banks and financial institutions to freeze accounts, again without court order, of those suspected of supporting the blockades – that is to say, directly or indirectly.

What the passing of the Act meant in practice was summed up by Steve Bell, Ottowa’s interim Police Chief, during a press conference on February 20th 2022. After seemingly imploring people to “go home”, Steve Bell revealed the reality behind the Emergencies Act: “if you are involved in this protest we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges”.

Living in fear of the state

To make sure the message was understood, he clarified – anybody involved in this protest, will live in fear from the State “for months to come”. From losing access to personal bank accounts, to professional licences, to criminal charges and municipal breaches of court order, those who protested against the government’s narrow vaccine mandate and broader Covid policy, joined the new caste of the damned.

The Emergencies Act, as written by the Canadian Department of Justice, was rather specific. It stated that a national emergency “is an urgent, temporary and critical situation that seriously endangers the health and safety of Canadians or that seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada”.

Importantly, it added that it must be “a situation that cannot be effectively dealt with by the provinces and territories, or by any other law of Canada”.

Over its first four weeks, none of these prerequisites for the act even to have been considered were met. The Freedom Convoy seemed at worse an inconvenience; at best a carnival. To some it was incommodious; to others emancipating. As it was, the embarrassment for an administration that too quickly resorted to slander and opprobrium, seems to have been that the truckers and their followers were too well behaved and reassuringly civilised.

It was, by any measure, very peaceful.

Had there been acts of violence, looting or property destruction of any kind, the entire world would have been told with alacrity. Honest Constable Steve Bell would have delighted in telling us who the thugs were, had there been any. But, thugs there were none – or too few to mention.

He knew it, so when asked about them and about protestors allegedly in possession of firearms, he waffled and swiftly moved on to generalities and threats. The contrast between the celebratory mood on the ground and the paranoid, Bourbon-type, response from Trudeau and his administration is and will remain the greatest of all mysteries.

The Truckers demands were clear and simple: an end to Covid restrictions, in particular vaccine mandates for Truckers who work the cross-border route between the United States and Canada.

The usual vaxxer, anti-vaxxer dichotomy, was tried for a short while until, early on in the protest, the Canadian Trucking Alliance reminded the world that “around 90% of Canada’s 120,000 cross-border truckers are vaccinated, in line with the country’s adult population”.

Then, having tried vilification, Trudeau escaped in fear before the great unwashed – in an Opera-Bouffe replay of Louix XVI’s 1791 flight from Paris.

However, the Freedom Convoy, with simple demands and cheery smiles witnessed in a short few weeks the majority of the country’s 10 provinces – including Ontario and Quebec – lifting much of COVID’s egregious restrictions.

“The world is done with (the pandemic), so let’s just move forward,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said on Tuesday February 15th.

Not to be left behind, on February 23rd, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney called Trudeau’s doubling down on repression and defamation “the biggest mistake of any modern Canadian Government”.

He added that the Emergencies Act was “introduced for no good reason”.

Trudeau panicked and overreacted “with this use of extreme powers”, Kenney continued. He ended his piece to camera by saying that “the chief enforcement officer of Canada has said that if he disagrees with your opinions”, he “might freeze and seize your bank account without going to court”.

Where lies Canada now?

How can Canada still be considered a democracy in such circumstances?

Protest, in particular when respectfully conducted, as the Freedom Convoy seems to have been, is the sine qua non of democratic governance – as are the twins of consent and compromise.

Trudeau never deigned to seek to understand the protesters. The ordinary world is too distant, quaint and old fashioned for him. To spend time trying to understand the yearning for normalcy and freedom would have required wasting it speaking to people, who are not included in the Progressive Programme.

Of note, and perhaps most worryingly of all though, is, when it happened, how silent the fall of Canada’s democracy was. No Western country bore witness to the euphemistically titled “overreach”. Perhaps, they were too distracted with troubles on the Ukraine-Russian border. Or perhaps not.

Be that as it may, the take-away is that in the UK, as in other Western countries, we really could well be just one election – or Act – away from a Trudeau-type coup against the people. And that should keep us up at nights.

March 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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