By Lucia Sinatra | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2023
College COVID vaccine mandates remain some of the most coercive mandates ever declared. While most colleges have now rescinded their mandates, some colleges refuse to let go, and Santa Clara University in California is one of the most oppressive.
In late April 2021, after most incoming freshmen had committed, SCU announced that all students were required to get COVID vaccines for fall enrollment or after full approval, whichever was later.
Then by mid-summer, SCU announced that students would be required to receive the vaccine even if it remained authorized only for emergency (EUA) and despite the fact that the CA Health and Safety Code codifies the Nuremberg Code. Section 24172 states
“(t)here is, and will continue to be, a growing need for protection for citizens of the state from unauthorized, needless, hazardous, or negligently performed medical experiments on human beings. It is, therefore, the intent of the Legislature, in the enacting of this chapter, to provide minimum statutory protection for the citizens of this state with regard to human experimentation and to provide penalties for those who violate such provisions.”
SCU (and many other CA colleges and universities) are in direct violation of this Code for removing informed consent by mandating EUA medical treatments.
Despite lack of efficacy or adequate safety data for this overwhelmingly healthy young adult population, in December 2021, SCU mandated the booster, midway through the academic year when students would have no choice but to comply or leave tens of thousands of dollars behind. SCU’s three-dose requirement remained through the 2022-23 school year.
In complete disregard for the end of the emergency declarations, in early April 2023, when most universities like nearby Stanford were announcing the end of their COVID vaccine mandates, SCU updated its requirement for incoming freshmen.
On May 8th, one week after the fall 2023 enrollment deadline, SCU quietly updated its COVID vaccine policy to require one bivalent dose for incoming freshmen (but not returning students) regardless of how many COVD vaccines they had previously taken. SCU backdated this announcement to May 1st thinking no one would take notice, but in private emails from incoming students we learned that some were furious. We encouraged them to withdraw and accept another offer.
On May 31st, SCU updated its policy again. They now require either three previously taken monovalent doses or one bivalent dose for all community members. As with the University’s previous mandates, SCU offers no religious exemptions and limited medical exemptions for students even in the most extreme of circumstances as explained below. Faculty and staff, however, are permitted to request exemptions.
SCU’s policy is determined by its opaque “COVID-19 team,” believed to be led by campus physician Dr. Lewis Osofsky, who also holds several positions at Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA). SCCMA partners with the Santa Clara County Public Health Department (SCCPH) to maximize COVID-19 vaccinations. Santa Clara County is one of the most vaccinated counties in the country, with more than a third having received the bivalent booster, twice the national average, and 88.5 percent having received the primary series.
Osofsky’s positions in the SCCMA include chair of the Professional Standards and Conduct committee, tasked with promoting high ethical standards for physicians and investigating disputes involving unethical conduct. This is ironic, as Osofsky is believed to be a driving force behind SCU’s ethically-indefensible mandate. Medical ethics would require, at a minimum, both transmission prevention and a proven benefit for students. An antibody increase from vaccines, with no established antibody level correlate of protection, wanes in mere weeks, and cannot support the ethics of a mandate. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that the “greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.”
It is alleged that Osofsky has improperly denied student medical exemptions. In a March 2022 lawsuit filed against SCU, Harlow Glenn, one of the student plaintiffs, claims that she had serious adverse reactions to her primary series COVID vaccines, including an emergency room visit due to leg paralysis and abnormal bleeding. According to the complaint, Osofsky refused to grant her a medical exemption for the required booster and actively interfered with her doctor-patient relationship by contacting her private doctors to persuade them to retract their medical exemption documentation.
Such aggressive tactics are nothing new for Osofsky, as he apparently employs them against patients in his private pediatric practice. Parents have complained in online reviews that Osofsky’s office forced vaccines and didn’t listen to their concerns. As it turns out, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians in private practice a $40,000 bonus for every 100 patients under the age of 2 that they fully vaccinate, if at least 63 percent of the patients are fully vaccinated (including the annual flu vaccine).
Osofsky’s roles with SCCMA, which is in partnership with the SCCPH whose goal is to maximize COVID vaccination, as well as his aggressive private practice approach to vaccination, have likely played a large role in SCU’s continued COVID vaccine mandates.
On June 14, 2023, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed their opening brief against SCU in the Sixth Appellate District in California. It is expected that SCU will oppose the appeal and insist on its right to demand that students submit to EUA boosters to “protect the campus community.” Protect the community? That justification went out the window long ago when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that the COVID vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission. Recently released documents confirmed that Walensky actually knew this information in January of 2021, well before colleges announced COVID vaccination requirements.
Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them.
In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.
Lucia is a recovering corporate securities attorney. After becoming a mother, Lucia turned her attention to fighting inequities in public schools in California for students with learning disabilities. She co-founded NoCollegeMandates.com to help fight college vaccine mandates.
The SIGUA office is opposed by President Biden but may be forced by a congressional vote
BY LEE FANG | JULY 12, 2023
The United States has allocated around $113 billion to Ukraine over the last seventeen months, soon to surpass the money spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and quickly approaching the cost of twenty years of war and reconstruction in Afghanistan.
Despite this unprecedented spending, there is no overarching Special Inspector General to oversee the Ukraine funds to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Change may be on the horizon. “There will also be a vote this week,” Rep. Tom Massey, R-Ky., tweeted this morning, on establishing the IG for Ukraine.
The push for a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance (SIGUA) has unfortunately become a partisan issue, another casualty of the negative polarization cycle in Washington, D.C. Last March, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., attempted to establish the audit office as an amendment. The bill splintered the Republican caucus in half, while every Democratic Senator, except Sens. Jon Tester, D-Montana, and Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, voted against it.
Surprisingly, notable opposition to establishing the office came from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Warren, before her rise to the Senate, became a national figure as an oversight official working alongside the SIGTARP, the auditor that oversaw the 2008 bank bailout funds. As Warren has touted in the past, SIGTARP, with relatively limited investigative resources, brought criminal charges against 144 individuals, obtained criminal convictions of 107 defendants, and obtained civil judgments and restitution totaling $4.3 billion.
The Afghanistan auditor, known as SIGAR, discovered even more breathtaking fraud and contractor abuse. The auditor found that U.S. Agency for International Development wasted $335 billion on a diesel power plant in the country that was over-budget and barely used, over $90 million on a program to place only 55 Afghan women in government jobs, and over $1 billion on “ghost schools” to build classrooms that were never utilized and left empty and dilapidated. The Pentagon reportedly “spent $6 million on a project that imported nine Italian goats to boost Afghanistan’s cashmere market” and $43 million on a single gas station.
The Afghanistan audit office was established by congressional Democrats after the 2006 midterm elections, during which the party gained power. Press releases from that era showcased the Democratic Party’s celebration of its efforts to create SIGAR. Progressive lawmakers like Sanders once championed SIGAR as a model for better oversight of the Defense Department.
Now, as President Joe Biden leads U.S. efforts to support Ukraine in its war and recovery against Russia, the tables have turned. Democrats have so far refused to cosponsor or propose a single bill in Congress to establish a similar SIGUA office to oversee Ukraine war money. The bills now before lawmakers include proposals from Rep. Wittman, R-Va.; Rep. Chip Roy, R-Tex.; Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.; and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
On Monday, the Biden administration directed lawmakers to vote against the creation of a SIGUA to oversee Ukraine money. The administration claims that new audit efforts are unnecessary, given that the government already has internal offices devoted to finding waste.
John Sopko, appointed by President Obama to head the SIGAR office for Afghanistan, has criticized the current administration’s position, noting that with such high levels of spending in Ukraine, a “whole of government” special audit office is vital. He also lashed out at officials who argue that new oversight might impede the flow of needed military or recovery assistance.
“Those are statements made by corrupt contractors, corrupt politicians, or politicians and contractors who don’t know anything about effective oversight,” said Sopko, speaking recently to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
The new effort to establish a SIGUA will likely be a recorded vote on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the military funding package now before Congress. Lawmakers are using the legislative proposal to tweak a number of Ukraine war issues, including an expected vote to block the Biden administration from supplying illegal cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military, as well as a push to force the Pentagon to disclose casualty figures for “both sides of the conflict” in Ukraine.
An updated list of amendments, released this morning from the House Armed Services Committee, suggests that the SIGUA amendment by Roy may be folded into a bloc vote.
I asked the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for comment, over whether they have reconsidered their position on the Ukraine war money audit, but did not get a response.
RT | July 11, 2023
President Joe Biden’s administration has objected to plans by US lawmakers to establish an independent inspector general who would scrutinize Washington’s massive military and economic aid packages for Ukraine.
At issue is a provision added to the $874 billion US defense budget for the government’s next fiscal year, calling for an additional oversight layer on Ukraine aid modeled after the inspector general established for reconstruction in Afghanistan. Conservative lawmakers, including Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, have argued that the White House lacks adequate controls to prevent fraud and other misuse of the $113 billion in aid approved by Congress to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
However, the administration argued on Monday that the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are already working with relevant congressional committees to “ensure accountability” for Ukraine aid. The Pentagon inspector general and the GAO are currently conducting investigations of “every aspect of this assistance,” the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a statement.
The White House also opposes an amendment to the defense bill that would expand the authority of the Afghanistan reconstruction inspector general. “This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented” because inspectors from both the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development already oversee the aid, the OMB said.
John Sopko, the independent inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, warned in February that strong safeguards were needed to prevent corruption from undermining Washington’s aid packages for Ukraine. Failure to learn from the US mistakes in Afghanistan, where much aid was “diverted or stolen,” could lead to a repeat in Ukraine.
“You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to steal the money,” Sopko told Fox News.
Last year, Congress blocked an initiative spearheaded by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, to audit the aid to Kiev.
Ukraine consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky fired a number of top officials earlier this year for profiteering. An August 2022 report by CBS News indicated that only about 30% of the Western weaponry sent to Kiev was actually making it to the front lines because of waste and corruption.
Sputnik – 10.07.2023
WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has reportedly maintained “extensive ties” with almost a dozen of current and former senior government officials since the time when his father served as vice president under the Obama administration.
A digital analysis carried out by Fox News detailed a list of officials with whom Hunter Biden was or continues to be in close contact, and includes US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, senior Biden adviser Michael Donilon, and a close aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, among several other people.
Hunter Biden and Sullivan were cooperating with each other during their joint work on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank. Sullivan worked there in 2017-2019, while Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The US is currently investigating those and his other foreign business activities.
The outlet noted that former White House official Mike McCormick accused Sullivan of being a “conspirator” in the Biden family’s “kickback scheme” in Ukraine at the time.
The report also cites an extensive email exchange between Hunter Biden, at the time when he was with Burisma, and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That correspondence shows the two men scheduled at least one meeting with each other.
Moreover, their communications go back at least a decade. For instance, Hunter contacted Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, in June 2010 asking for Blinken’s non-government email address, the report said. “Can I get Toni’s non-govt email? I wanted to send him something,” the message read.
Ryan is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary.
The report also mentioned email exchanges between Hunter Biden and several other cabinet members.
US House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into alleged criminal acts committed by the Biden family, including corruption and influence peddling. Earlier this month, panel chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) characterized the alleged actions as “organized crime.”
The committee’s probe is partially based on accusations from a confidential FBI informant, who alleges Joe and Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from a Ukrainian energy company. Lawmakers are also investigating deals tied to China.
In June, Hunter Biden’s attorneys and the US Justice Department announced an agreement under which he will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversionary agreement on a felony firearms offense in an effort to resolve the criminal probe against him and avoid prison time.
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | July 6, 2023
In a 2022 paper, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., Peter McCullough, M.D., MPH, and others discussed how the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines produce G-quadruplexes and microRNAs that can lead to prion disease.
The effect becomes significantly worse after the second dose of the Pfizer shot.
Prions are pathogenic agents that can induce the abnormal folding of cellular proteins, leading to diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and Alzheimer’s.
In his June 20 Substack post, researcher Adam Gaertner provides an accessible mini-tutorial on the complex and inspirational nature of cellular proteins. He addresses the structure and function of prions, the mechanisms by which they form, and how they can wreak havoc on any organ, especially the brain.
Prion disease can lead to a number of rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia, ataxia and spasticity before it becomes fatal, typically within just a few years of diagnosis.
Gaertner challenges the orthodoxy that there is no cure for prion disease by discussing several recent discoveries that offer “some unexpectedly good news.”
Further investigation into mRNA and CJD
Gaertner began his research work into potentially useful therapeutics for prion disease and has also funded the development of a non-invasive prion blood test.
He even undertook his own study of people who were diagnosed with or died of CJD-like symptoms (n=60) after receiving the (mostly Pfizer) mRNA jab.
Nevertheless, he readily admits that he has yet to establish absolute proof of causation.
In a European Union document related to the approval of the vaccine, Gaertner discovered what could be the smoking gun: The liquid nanoparticles used to encase the mRNA came primarily from cow fat. According to Gaertner, the document in question even admitted mRNA’s potential to cause prion protein contamination.
Nearly a year after Gaertner publicized his discovery — which convinced some but not all researchers — a paper by Jean-Claude Perez documented 26 cases of “a new form of CJD” observed within a few days of the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccinations.
Of these, 20 people died within less than five months of the injection. (At the time of the paper’s publication, only one of the 26 had survived.)
The ‘good news’
While admitting that “there is not, ordinarily, a whole lot of good news to be had concerning prion diseases,” Gaertner outlined a mechanism by which “residues on the spike [protein] bind to the many and varied amyloidogenic proteins,” thus resulting in the blood clots observed by more than a few embalmers since the introduction of the mRNA shots.
He explained how this process can “bind up” the prionic proteins:
“So, what we essentially have here is, instead of a silently cascading apocalypse, buried deep inside parts of the brain that we will never reach, we likely, instead, have these long, stringy, vein-shaped agglomerations of the various amyloid proteins, binding together wherever they meet, and apparently at least somewhat resistant to being broken down by the body’s natural processes for dealing with such eventualities.”
The “really good news” comes from the way ivermectin binds directly to the spike protein — which has itself been described as a “prion-like” protein — thus blocking the spike from connecting to the ACE-2 receptor and “preventing the key from ever entering the keyhole.”
According to Gaertner, ivermectin also prevents the “amyloidogenic aggregations to the spike protein,” thereby arresting the production and proliferation of the prionic proteins. He adds:
“Ivermectin is, without a shadow of a doubt at this point, a true miracle drug: With so many applications, from antiviral, to cancer treatment, to anti-inflammatory, and of course in its originally recognized anti-parasitic application, there should be little wonder why the powers that be have done their best to diminish it as ‘horse paste.’”
Gaertner also notes that in a “very unscientific poll” he conducted on Twitter, 80% of respondents reported that a single, low dose of ivermectin significantly improved “brain fog,” a common post-COVID-19 symptom.
He described a number of “relevant investigational therapeutics” for use against the spike protein and its effects, including serrapeptase, quercetin, methylene blue and resveratrol, some of which demonstrate a “very broad range of useful actions.”
Expressing his belief that the lack of progress on therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases is likely due to “your run-of-the-mill Pharma and charity corruption,” Gaertner nonetheless found cause for optimism.
“There’s been a lot of progress, on a lot of fronts, and more comes regularly as the world continues waking up,” he said.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
YourDestinationNow | July 8, 2023
The state of New York has quietly shut down its Excelsior Pass program that cost taxpayers $250 million. The now-defunct pass was the Empire State’s version of a Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine passport.
State officials announced on June 30 that the digital vaccine passport “will no longer be available” by July 28. They cited “reduced demand for access to digital COVID-19 test and vaccine records,” alongside “the official end of the COVID-19 public health emergency” last May 11, as reasons for the discontinuation.
Given this, the Empire State said it “will no longer recommend its use, provide technical support or release future versions” of the mobile app that holds the vaccine pass. “New users will be unable to log in and register for it.”
“Your data collected for [the Excelsior Pass] continues to be private and secure. [The state of] New York has gained knowledge on digital credentialing from this effort and remains interested in the potential this type of technology could bring in the future.”
Jordan Schachtel of the Dossier recounted that New York City (NYC) made use of the Excelsior Pass in its “Key to NYC” vaccine passport program for over two years. Former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and his successor, current Mayor Eric Adams, utilized the pass to prohibit entry to indoor facilities to those who refused to get injected with the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna injections and the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.
He continued: “The Excelsior Pass program began in early 2021 with an estimated cost burden of $2.5 million. It later ballooned to a sum approaching 100 times over the original budget, with an approximate amount of $250 million being handed out to IBM, Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group (BCG).”
Excelsior Pass now the subject of a probe by state inspector general
Citing state records, Schachtel wrote that Deloitte and BCG have billed taxpayers in the Empire State approximately $200 million for the pass’ “marketing” and “buildout” costs since 2021. Meanwhile, IBM has billed around $40 million plus $200,000 monthly since 2021 for “data storage” fees.
A May 14 piece by the Times Union‘s Joshua Solomon elaborated on the state’s expenditures in relation to the Excelsior Pass. Records obtained by the newspaper found that New York state has paid Deloitte and BCG almost $28 million to work on the app. IBM had also received an additional $36 million for its work on the pass, with $2.2 million in March for “application development” being the most recent payment.
Back in October 2021, Deloitte billed the state $3.6 million in Excelsior Pass costs. Two months later in December 2021, BCG billed the state for nearly $10 million in costs related to its work in reopening New York and on the Excelsior Pass.
“The money spent on the Excelsior Pass, and its accompanying ‘wallet,’ continued to flow to the consulting groups, even as the peak of the pandemic passed and the need for the app plummeted,” the Times Union piece noted. “The work by BCG and Deloitte was just one element of $200 million that flowed from New York to those firms that are now the subject of a state inspector general’s investigation. As the nation’s COVID-19 emergency fades from the front page, the spending renews the debate about New York’s ongoing use of contracts that were amended without public oversight during the pandemic.”
“While a handful of people in New York took action to protest against the authoritarian movement pass system, the vast majority of New Yorkers were happy to accommodate the bio-medical tyranny,” Schachtel pointed out. “In NYC, virtually every business complied with the program either out of sympathy or for fear of being shut down by the government.”
He ultimately remarked: “That’s $250 million down the drain, and on to the next ‘crisis.'”
The Taliban has not once, but twice eradicated Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation, the world’s largest source of heroin.
By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | July 7, 2023
In the aftermath of the chaotic US and UK withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir warned in the Washington Post of the dangers of “ignoring one important consequence of the Taliban takeover: the coming boom in Afghanistan’s narcotics trade.”
Mir then boldly predicted that, “in the next few years, a flood of drugs from Afghanistan may become a bigger threat than terrorism.”
This projection of an international drug trade boom seemed plausible, considering the longstanding accusations that the Taliban funded their two-decade insurgency against the occupying forces by controlling opium production. In fact, it was believed that 95 percent of heroin used in Britain originated from Afghan opium.
It comes as a surprise then, that a June 2023 report published by Alcis, a British-based geographic information services firm, revealed that the Taliban government had all but eliminated opium cultivation in the country, wiping out the base ingredient needed to produce heroin. This outcome mirrored a similar move by the Taliban in 2000 when they were in power the first time.
Ironically, instead of praising Kabul’s new leaders for quashing the source of illicit drugs, the international community responded to this development with criticism. Even the US Institute for Peace (USIP), which is funded by the US government, argued that “The Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.”
Such western displeasure towards the Taliban’s efforts to dismantle the global heroin trade may seem perplexing at first glance.
However, a closer examination of events in Afghanistan reveals a different perspective. Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” the 2001 US and UK invasion was driven in part by the desire to restore the heroin trade, which the Taliban had abruptly terminated just a year earlier.
The western powers sought to reestablish the lucrative flow of billions of dollars that the heroin trade provided to their financial systems. In fact, “For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.”
‘Dollar for Dollar’
To understand the origins of the Afghan heroin trade, a review of US involvement in the central Asian nation is necessary, beginning in 1979 when the CIA embarked on a covert program to undermine the pro-Soviet Afghan government in Kabul.
The US covertly supported an umbrella of Muslim guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen, with the hope that provoking an insurgency would entice the Soviet Army to intervene. This calculated move would force the Soviets into occupying Afghanistan and engaging in a protracted and costly counter-insurgency campaign, thereby weakening the Soviet Union over time.
To accomplish this, the CIA turned to its close allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for help. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan facilitated a meeting between CIA Director William Casey and Saudi King Fahd, in which the Saudis committed to matching “America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahedeen.”
The US and Saudi Arabia, with help from Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), set up training camps for the mujahideen in Pakistan, and supplied them with advisors, weapons, and cash to fight the Soviets.
Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hizb-i-Islami militia, was among the most prominent mujahideen leaders, receiving some $600 million in aid from the CIA and its allies.
Journalist Steve Coll writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars that Hekymatyar recruited from the most radical, anti-western, transnational Islamist networks to fight with him, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab volunteers. CIA officers “embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable and effective ally,” and “the most efficient at killing Soviets.”
Caravans of opium
Aid to Hekymatyar and other mujahideen leaders was not limited to cash and weapons. According to renowned historian Alfred McCoy:
“1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer.”
The process involved smuggling raw opium gum to Pakistan, where it was processed into heroin in laboratories run by the ISI. The finished product was then discreetly transported via Pakistani airports, ports, or overland routes.
By 1984, Afghan heroin supplied a staggering 60 percent of the US market and 80 percent of the European market, while devastatingly creating 1.3 million heroin addicts in Pakistan, a country previously untouched by the highly-addictive drug.
McCoy states further that, “caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium.” Reports from 2001 cited by the New York Times confirmed that this occurred “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.”
In May 1990, the Washington Post reported that the US government had for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by its allies, including “firsthand accounts of heroin smuggling by commanders under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”
Rise of the Taliban
When the Soviets did finally withdraw in 1989, the country fell into civil war as the major CIA-backed factions began fighting among themselves for control of the country. Mujahideen leaders became warlords and committed terrible atrocities against the local population while fighting amongst themselves.
It was during this anarchy that religious students from the madrassas (seminary schools), the Taliban, emerged with the help of Pakistani intelligence to take control of the country in 1996, subsequently inheriting the opium trade, which continued unhindered for several years.
In July 2000, however, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered a ban on all opium cultivation. Remarkably, the Taliban successfully slashed the opium harvest by 94 percent, reducing yearly production to only 185 metric tons.
Five months later, in December 2000, the US and Russia used the UN Security Council to impose harsh new sanctions on Afghanistan, citing the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 US sailors were killed. Bin Laden had taken refuge in the Islamic Emirate in 1996 after he was expelled from Sudan.
The New York Times reported that US officials sought to impose the new sanctions, despite warnings from the UN that “a million Afghans could face starvation in coming months because of a drought and continued civil war.”
Following the attacks on 11 September, 2001, Bush administration officials demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden once again. Mullah Omar insisted the US first provide evidence of Bin Laden’s guilt, but President Bush refused this request and ordered the US air force to begin bombing Afghanistan on 7 October.
In the wake of the bombing, Mullah Omar dropped the demand for evidence, and offered to hand over Bin Laden to US ally Pakistan for trial. Bush administration officials once again refused.
Journalist and author Scott Horton highlights in his book Fool’s Errand a peculiar aspect of the US campaign: the lack of a clear focus on capturing or eliminating Bin Laden. In fact, President Bush had already stated on 25 September that success or failure should not be defined solely by capturing Bin Laden.
Horton notes further that US planners made no initial effort to hunt down Bin Laden and the foreign Arab fighters supporting him. Instead, head of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks prioritized partnering with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum to take control of the north of the country, and establish a “land link” to Uzbekistan.
Turning to the warlords
To also capture the capital, Kabul, and other key cities in the south, Alfred McCoy notes the CIA:
“Turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords along the Pakistan border who had been active as drug smugglers in the south-eastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.”
Though US forces were too late to prevent Bin Laden’s escape to Pakistan, the US bombing campaign came just in time for the beginning of poppy planting season. Poppies are planted in the autumn so that the juice from the plant, from which opium is extracted, can be harvested in spring.
McCoy clarified further that, “the Agency (CIA) and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar.”
In December, one of these rising Pashtun warlords, Hamid Karzai, was appointed Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration and later president.
By the spring of 2002, large amounts of Afghan heroin were once again being transported to Britain via daily flights from Pakistani airports. The Guardian observed the case of a 13-year-old girl who was stopped after she stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Islamabad to London carrying 13kgs of heroin with a street value of £910,000.
Industrial scale
Thanks to the “land link” established by General Franks, heroin also immediately began flowing north from Mazar-e-Sharif, under CIA ally Rashid Dostum’s control, to Uzbekistan and then to to Russia and Europe.
The flow of heroin was witnessed by Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who explained that Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, facilitated the smuggling of heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it was then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to Moscow and then Riga. As Murray noted:
“Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker… The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”
‘A hands off approach’
In addition to Dostum, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, quickly secured a prominent role in the Afghan heroin trade.
Credible reports emerged that Wali Karzai was deeply involved in the heroin trade, however, according to the New York Times, the incidents were never investigated, “even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.”
Senior officials at the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) complained that the Bush “White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter.”
The Times later reported that according to a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official, a major source of Wali Karzai’s influence was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium-growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar. This allowed Karzai to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
Like Dostum and Hekmaytar, Wali Karzai built his heroin empire while on the CIA payroll. The agency began paying Karzai in 2001 to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operated at the agency’s direction in and around Kandahar and to rent a large compound for use as the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. The CIA also appreciated Karzai’s help in communicating and sometimes meeting with Afghans loyal to the Taliban.
Karzai also served as the head of Kandahar’s elected provincial council. According to a senior US military officer in Kabul quoted by the Times, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it.”
The blame game
In late 2004, as reports of Karzai’s involvement in the heroin trade were emerging, Alfred McCoy writes that “the White House was suddenly confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fueling a revival of the Taliban.”
A proposal from Secretary of State Colin Powell to fight the heroin trade was resisted by US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and then-Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani. As a compromise, the Bush administration used private contractors for poppy eradication, an effort that New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall later described as “something of a joke.”
Additionally, reports of a 2005 cable sent by the US embassy in Kabul to Powell’s successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, viewed Britain as being “substantially responsible” for the failure to eradicate poppy cultivation. British personnel chose where the eradication teams worked, but those areas were often not the main growing areas, and “the British had been unwilling to revise targets.”
The cable also faulted President Karzai, who “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.” The State Department nevertheless defended him, saying, “President Karzai is a strong partner, and we have confidence in him,” despite reports of his brother’s key role in the heroin trade.
But the problem went beyond Wali Karzai. A UN report for the World Bank published in February 2006 concluded the Afghan heroin trade was operating with the assistance of many top Afghan government officials and under the protection of the Afghan Ministry of Interior.
As evidence of CIA and Afghan government involvement in the heroin trade grew, the focus of the western media shifted towards blaming the Taliban for using drug profits to fund their insurgency against foreign forces.
However, historian Peter Dale Scott challenged this narrative, citing UN estimates that the Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy was a fraction compared to that of supporters of the Karzai government. Scott emphasized that the largest share of the drug trade was controlled by those aligned with the Afghan government.
The surge
In early 2010, the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 33,000 US troops to help pacify the country, with a particular focus on key districts known for poppy cultivation. One such district was Marja in Helmand province, which McCoy referred to as “the world’s heroin capital.”
Despite the surge’s mission, US commanders seemed unaware of Marja’s significance as a hub for heroin production, fueled by the surrounding opium fields that accounted for 40 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.
In September 2010, eight months after the start of the surge, “unsubstantiated” reports emerged that British soldiers were involved in trafficking heroin out of Afghanistan using military aircraft at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.
Camp Bastion, jointly operated by the UK and the US, was located near Lashkar Gah, another major center of poppy cultivation. In 2012, it was alleged that poppy cultivation was taking place just outside the base’s perimeter, with British soldiers providing protection to farmers against Afghan security forces.
By late 2014, British and US forces withdrew from Camp Bastion, handing it over to Afghan forces, who renamed it Camp Shorabak. However, according to a UN report, “the opium-growing area around Britain’s main base in Afghanistan nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2013.”
Despite the withdrawal, opium exports from Camp Shorabak apparently continued, and a small number of British military personnel returned in 2015 in what was described by the Ministry of Defense as an advisory role.
In 2016, Obaidullah Barakzai, a member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, claimed, “It’s impossible for a few local drug smugglers to transfer opium in thousands of kilos. This is the work of the Americans and British. They transport it by air from Camp Shorabak.”
After US forces chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban once again succeeded in eliminating poppy cultivation, showing it was far from a “dedicated drug cartel” after all.
Follow the money
In November 2021, an opium merchant claimed that “All the profits go to the foreign countries. Afghans are just supplying the labor.”
Peter Dale Scott noted that according to the UN, some $352 billion in drug profits had been absorbed into the western financial system, including through the US’ largest banks in 2009. As a result, Scott said the “United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.”
In 2012, the Daily Mail reported that HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, faced up to £640million in penalties for allowing “rogue states and drugs cartels to launder billions of pounds through its branches,” and for becoming “a conduit for criminal enterprises.”
The billions in profits flowing from the Afghan heroin trade into western banks have now been eliminated by the Taliban not once, but twice in the past two decades.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s pronouncement in July 2000 that poppy cultivation was “un-Islamic” was, therefore, a more likely cause of the US sanctions imposed in December of the same year, and of the US invasion of Afghanistan a year later, than was any US desire to apprehend Bin Laden and dismantle Al-Qaeda.
In March 2002, just six months after the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, a journalist asked President Bush, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Bush replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really think about him very much. I’m not that concerned.”
The Afghan drug trade serves as a stark reminder of the intricate connections between geopolitics, illicit economies, and global finance, and the need for greater transparency and accountability in addressing these complex issues.
The historical evidence also challenges the simplistic narrative that the Taliban largely controlled the Afghan drug trade, highlighting the dominant role played by the US-backed Afghan government and its allies in the CIA.
Sputnik – 06.07.2023
WASHINGTON – A majority of likely voters in the United States believe that US President Joe Biden was involved in his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which are under investigation by US House lawmakers, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed on Thursday.
More than half of respondents, 58%, said that it was likely that Biden was involved in his son’s foreign business deals, with 44% believing it “very likely,” the poll said.
One-third of respondents said it was unlikely Biden was involved in the foreign business deals, and 10% are unsure.
The poll comes amid an investigation by the US House Oversight Committee into alleged criminal acts committed by the Biden family, including corruption and influence peddling. Earlier this month, panel chairman James Comer characterized the alleged actions as “organized crime.”
The committee’s probe is partially based on accusations from a confidential FBI informant, who alleges that Joe and Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from a Ukrainian energy company. Lawmakers are also investigating deals tied to China.
However, Biden has denied ever speaking to his son about his business deals, contradicting testimony from an IRS whistleblower involved in matters related to Hunter Biden.
The survey polled 1,054 likely US voters on June 28-29 and July 2. The poll maintains a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points with a 95% confidence level.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 5, 2023
As she ended her tenure last week as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky warned the American public to be on guard against “misinformation” and the “politicization of science.”
Walensky told The Wall Street Journal she hopes Americans will make health decisions based on “their own risk assessment and their own personal risks, but not through politics,” emphasizing that public health recommendations also shouldn’t be politicized.
“Ironically, this comes after two-and-a-half years of Walensky misinforming the public and politicising the science,” investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., wrote on her Substack.
Demasi and many others took to Twitter to remind people of Walensky’s false statements and politicized decision-making.
Walensky last week published a farewell op-ed in The New York Times, in which she wrote that public health is critically important in the U.S., and yet she “fear[s] the despair from the pandemic is fading too quickly from our memories.”
She complained that “the agency [CDC] has been sidelined, chastened by early missteps with Covid and battered by persistent scrutiny.”
She also told the WSJ that public health shouldn’t fall along partisan lines.
Yet stark political partisanship defined her time at the CDC. The WSJ reported that a recent KFF poll showed political affiliation was the strongest demographic predictor of COVID-19 vaccination. And about one-quarter of Americans don’t trust the CDC’s health recommendations, according to a 2022 survey published in the journal Health Affairs.
Walensky acknowledged “missteps in communicating” by the CDC, which, she said, “could have done a better job” making it clear to the public that the agency’s message could change during the pandemic.
But, she told the WSJ, the CDC has a plan to regain public trust in the future — by working directly with media organizations to discuss how to best shape public opinion prior to releasing scientific information to the public.
She said the CDC plans to use a method called “prebunking,” where they will communicate directly with media organizations before they release information to let the media know which details about public health might be “misconstrued.”
According to The Associated Press (AP) “prebunking” by public health agencies allows the agencies to define something as “misinformation” before readers have an opportunity to encounter it elsewhere as possibly true.
Then search engines such as Google prioritize “credible websites” like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) or the CDC’s in its searches.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, the Virality Project and Google are among those who have promoted prebunking as a way to combat misinformation.
Journalist Kim Iversen proposed a different approach Walensky might take to restoring public trust in the CDC.
She said:
“Well, the way to do it is to apologize, to own up to your lies, to own up to the mistakes that you made and to discuss why you did that, why the agency followed such political partisanship when they should have been following science, why they ignored the science that was right in front of them.”
CDC broadcast a long list of ‘misinformation’ during Walensky’s tenure
Throughout her tenure at the CDC, which began when Biden took office in January 2021, Walensky made a series of public statements that have proven to be false.
Evidence has since emerged that Walensky knew many of these statements were false when she made them.
In March 2021, Walensky famously told Rachel Maddow, that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
The CDC was forced to walk back her statements a few days later. But that message was the basis for vaccine mandates imposed later that year by the Biden administration, businesses, universities and public venues throughout the country.
In a mid-June congressional hearing, Walensky defended her March statements, claiming they were true at the time.
But the Washington Examiner reported on June 20 that emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showed Walensky and Dr. Francis Collins were aware of and discussed “breakthrough cases” of COVID-19 in January 2021 — just before the vaccines became widely available — and yet continued to tell the public the vaccines would prevent transmission.
In that same congressional testimony, Walensky also defended the mask mandates, saying that the summary of Cochrane’s review — which found wearing masks in the community “probably makes little to no difference” in preventing viral transmission — had been “retracted.”
But it was neither retracted nor had the authors of the review changed the language in the summary, Demasi reported.
In June 2021, Walensky told “Good Morning America” that the risk of myocarditis was extremely rare, and there was overwhelming data the vaccines were safe for children — even after hundreds of cases of myocarditis had been reported and the CDC had been aware of a safety signal since February.
Under Walensky, the CDC also gave false information on vaccine safety monitoring, added the COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccine schedule despite known harms, withheld data on boosters from the agency’s own advisers and told pregnant women the vaccine was safe — just days after Pfizer reportedly finalized a report demonstrating it wasn’t.
In a March study by Krohnert and others, researchers compiled instances of errors in data presented by the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic in publications, press releases, interviews and Twitter. The authors reported 25 instances where the agency under Walensky promoted demonstrably false numbers.
In most (80%) cases, the CDC exaggerated the severity of the pandemic. For example, Walensky gave a briefing on June 23, 2022, during which she claimed COVID-19 was a “top 5 cause of death” in children, which was untrue.
Most recently, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic gave Walensky until July 12 to turn over phone records involving American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. The House is investigating potential political interference on the part of AFT with the CDC’s school reopening recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Defender reported.
Walensky warns of ‘future threats’
Walensky warned at the end of her Times op-ed:
“I want to remind America: The question is not if there will be another public health threat, but when. The C.D.C. needs public and congressional support if it is going to be prepared to protect you from future threats.”
To take on these “future threats” the Biden administration nominated Dr. Mandy Cohen, an internal medicine physician and former state health secretary of North Carolina, to replace Walensky.
But critics warn Cohen is “a public health COVID authoritarian” who is “fully entrenched in the ‘bio-pharmaceutical complex.’”
Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cohen failed to recognize therapeutics and natural immunity, and supported lockdowns, vaccine mandates and masking.
Cohen comes to the CDC from the private sector, where she is executive vice president of Aledade and CEO of Aledade Care Solutions, whose executive leadership and board of directors includes people with connections to the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Walensky congratulated Cohen on her nomination, describing her as “a respected public health leader who helped North Carolina successfully navigate” COVID-19, and whose “unique experience and accomplished tenure in North Carolina … make her perfectly suited to lead CDC as it moves forward by building on the lessons learned from COVID-19 to create an organization poised to meet public health challenges of the future.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 