How the Taliban crushed the CIA’s heroin bonanza in Afghanistan
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.
Majority of US Voters Believe Biden Involved in Son Hunter’s Foreign Business Deals – Poll
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.
Walensky Warns Public to Beware of ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Politicized Science’
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.
Ukrainian conflict an “opportunity” for the CIA – William Burns
By Lucas Leiroz | July 4, 2023
US authorities no longer hide their anti-Russian ambitions in Ukraine. In a recent statement, CIA Director William Burns said the Ukrainian conflict would be a “unique opportunity” for Washington. The case shows how Western strategists really want to destabilize and harm Russia as much as possible, with no intention of peace or diplomatic goodwill.
The head of American intelligence revealed in a lecture at the Ditchley Foundation in the UK on July 1 that his agency plans to explore the possible opportunities for infiltration that would arise from the weaknesses of a Russian society allegedly dissatisfied with the conflict in Ukraine. This would be, according to him, an appropriate occasion to advance anti-Russian plans in the intelligence sector.
“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression (…) That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste”, he said.
In this regard, Burns also made it clear that the CIA is already taking steps to advance its projects. According to the official, the agency launched a recruitment channel on Telegram in May, showing “business” proposals for Russian officers, military, government representatives and scientists who want to provide information from Moscow to American forces.
“We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business,” he added.
Two days later, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky went public to reveal that his regime is constantly in cooperation with the CIA, and there are no secrets between them. Recently, Zelensky and Burns met during a director’s visit to Kiev. On the occasion, the neo-Nazi leader talked to the US official about many “important things”, such as what Ukraine “needs” to keep the proxy war on Russia.
“My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes. We discuss important things – what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act (…) We don’t have any secrets from the CIA because we have good relations and our intelligence services talk with each other (…) The situation is pretty straightforward. We have good relations with the CIA chief, and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield that we need”, Zelensky said.
According to an anonymous source linked to the American government interviewed by CNN, Burns’ visits to Kiev are frequent, despite the fact that media outlets often do not pay attention to these events:
“Director Burns recently traveled to Ukraine, as he has done regularly since the beginning of Russia’s recent aggression more than a year ago (…) As with other trips, the director met with his Ukrainian intelligence counterparts and President Zelensky, reaffirming the US commitment to sharing intelligence to help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression”, source said.
Indeed, Burns’ words about the CIA seeing the conflict as an “opportunity” show that American intelligence wants to take advantage of events in Eurasia to generate instability in Russian society, fomenting frictions in the government, military and civil institutions. Burns exposes the plans very clearly and does not hide his intentions, which makes the US hostile stance towards Russia public.
The CIA director’s regular visits to Kiev are actually part of these anti-Russian plans. American intelligence actively interferes in the conflict, manages the activities of its proxy state directly from the battlefield, acting as a true belligerent party. This high level of information sharing and strategic integration shows that there is certainly American participation in all crimes committed by the neo-Nazi regime, including terrorist attacks and murders of civilians in the undisputed territory of the Russian Federation.
However, it remains to be seen whether the US anti-Russian plans will really be effective. The director is mistaken in his assessment of the Russian scenario when he says that there is “disaffection” and growing frictions in Russia as a result of the conflict. Vladimir Putin’s popularity and Russian national unity have been greatly strengthened by the progress of the special military operation, contradicting Burns’ claims.
Also, it is unlikely that any incursion attempt by American intelligence will be successful, considering that Russian security forces are on high alert for this type of threat, having occurred repeated operations focused on neutralizing infiltrated foreign agents and terrorist networks. Moscow is aware that the real enemy side in the current conflict is the US-led West, which is why it is acting cautiously to protect itself.
Furthermore, Burns’ words about an alleged public CIA recruitment of Russian citizens through Telegram sounded unconventional. This type of strategy sounds amateurish and ineffective in terms of security, since Telegram is an easily accessible network and Russian forces could act against citizens who search for the CIA there – in addition to infiltrating their own counterintelligence agents in the process of recruitment.
Either Burns made this announcement as a bluff to try to “scare” Russia by demonstrating that it was advancing intelligence operations, or in fact the CIA is desperate in its search for agents on the ground in Russia and is making basic strategic mistakes. In both cases, it is clear that American intelligence does not seem prepared to defeat Russia.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
Exposed, the multi-billion-dollar illusion of ‘HIV’: Part 1
Readers of TCW will be familiar with Neville Hodgkinson’s critical reporting of the ‘Covid crisis’ since December 2020, notably his expert, science-based informed alarm about the mass ‘vaccine’ rollout, so absent from mainstream coverage. What they may be less aware of is the international storm this former Sunday Times medical and science correspondent created in the 1990s by reporting a scientific challenge to the ‘HIV’ theory of Aids, presaging the hostile response to science critics of Covid today. In this series, written exclusively for TCW, he details findings that form the substance of his newly updated and expanded book, How HIV/Aids Set the Stage for the Covid Crisis, on the controversy. It is available here.
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | July 3, 2023
Three years into the Covid crisis, many are now aware of the disastrous advice on which so many governments blindly acted. False predictions of spread, fearmongering propaganda, lockdowns damaging young and old, suppression of cheap treatments to make way for a dangerous, experimental vaccine . . . so much of ‘the science’ turned out to be fiction, hugely profitable for a few but harmful for billions.
These failures have brought back into focus claims that the syndrome known as HIV/Aids was – and still is – being similarly mishandled and exploited by the worlds of medical science, public health and Big Pharma. Robert Kennedy Jr documents this in detail his best-selling 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
What few people know however is that for almost 40 years a small group of scientists has deconstructed almost every aspect of the theory that Aids is caused by a lethal, sexually transmitted virus known as HIV. Their critique goes beyond questioning HIV as the cause of Aids. They say ‘HIV’ has never even been proved to exist. And the reason you have probably never heard of their work is that, like the doctors and scientists who challenged Covid insanities, they have been silenced at every turn.
With Covid, pressure to conform came through government-directed appeals to our higher nature through slogans such as ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives’ and ‘Every vaccination gives us hope’. The implied claim was that anyone who thought differently was either an idiot or a murderer.
Similarly with Aids, advocates of the deadly virus theory sought to make those who questioned it sound as though they were lacking in compassion, irresponsible or stupid.
I was working as medical correspondent of the London Sunday Times in the 1980s when Aids suddenly became big news after American government scientists claimed to have identified a previously unknown virus as the cause of a mysterious cluster of symptoms related to severely depleted immunity. They included Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer affecting the skin and internal organs; severe candidiasis; and pneumonia caused by an out-of-control fungus. The symptoms proved resistant to treatment, and fatal in a number of cases.
The first victims were groups of gay men who were challenging long-standing homophobic attitudes in American society through what came to be known as the ‘fast-track’ gay lifestyle. This involved multiple sex partners and heavy drug use.
The partying was fun, I was later told, but it caused disease microbes to become pooled among participants such that almost every encounter carried a risk of infection. Prophylactic use of antibiotics staved off some illnesses but contributed to an underlying deterioration, and in some cases complete collapse, of the immune system.
The crisis at first met an unsympathetic response from the right-wing Reagan administration. The common histories of the victims led to dismissive descriptions of Aids as a ‘gay plague’. As numbers increased, however, outrage and anger grew. Those involved had often already suffered greatly from discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and their efforts to end this bigotry through the Gay Lib movement looked to be under threat.
That was the context in which US biomedical researcher Robert Gallo found immediate acceptance when in 1984 he claimed to have identified a deadly virus, new to humanity, as the cause of Aids. The theory took off like wildfire and by the end of 1984 had come to be accepted by virtually everyone. The microbe Gallo said he had found became known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.
It brought virologists, drug companies and public health experts to centre stage. Taxpayer dollars, eventually reaching hundreds of billions, were poured into Aids research and treatment through the US National Institutes of Health, in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the leadership of Dr Anthony Fauci. Well-funded NGOs and activist groups sprang up with the aim of contributing to the fight against the disease.
Religious leaders warmed to the theory because it discouraged sleeping around. Politicians liked it because it put in place a new ‘enemy within’ against which they could claim to offer protection with advertising campaigns such as the UK’s ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ – a precursor of the intense propaganda inflicted on us with the advent of Covid-19.
Media people – including me, I am ashamed to say – vigorously promulgated warnings that the virus put at risk everyone and anyone who had sex. It felt good to be not just selling newspapers, but helping to sound the alert.
Young people were less readily taken in. James Delingpole has recalled how the ad campaign put a dampener on his sex life, though after the initial shock it became increasingly clear to him that the government had been overstating the case.
In fact, as the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis and other scientists were to point out, there never was a body of scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of the ‘deadly new virus’ idea. That remains the case today, despite hundreds of thousands of papers having been published over the years predicated on the HIV belief system.
Henry Bauer, a retired professor of science studies who has drawn on numerous sources in documenting The Case Against HIV, says: ‘Anyone open to looking at the actual data . . . can find an enormous amount of evidence that the diagnosis of HIV as cause of AIDS is simply wrong.’
One lasting outcome of the theory was that by ‘democratising’ Aids, with the message that the disease did not discriminate and so everyone was at risk, it prevented the feared setbacks for the Gay Lib movement. Lesbian and gay rights became firmly established in American society, and in some other parts of the world.
In many other ways, however, the global hysteria to which the theory gave rise has had disastrous consequences, some of which continue to this day.
A failed cancer drug called AZT, pulled off the shelf by American government researchers because of an apparent anti-HIV effect, killed and injured thousands. It was administered in high doses not just to people with Aids but to gay men, haemophiliacs and others thought to be HIV-infected, earning hundreds of millions of pounds for the US drug company Burroughs Wellcome and its British parent, the Wellcome Foundation (later taken over by Glaxo). American and British government institutions promoted it vigorously as the ‘gold standard’ of Aids treatment. Doctors who stepped publicly out of line were hounded out of the profession.
Although later generations of drugs can genuinely help to support a failing immune system, 40 years of research has failed to bring either a vaccine or cure for the purported ‘HIV’ infection. Taken over long periods, the drugs themselves can kill, contributing significantly to the 800 or so deaths reported annually of ‘people living with HIV’ in the UK.
The most widespread and long-lasting harm, however, has been to the countless people around the world, especially in Africa and of African descent, terrorised with a false belief that they are victims of a sexually transmitted virus which only Western medicine has the means to hold at bay. The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that more than 80million people have been infected, and that about 40million have died from HIV. Three-fifths of purported new HIV infections are said by WHO to be in the African region. African Americans are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV infection compared with the white population.
American taxpayers in particular have been burdened with the huge expense of maintaining an industry that has grown up around HIV/Aids. The US government spends more than $28billion a year on the domestic response, and expenditure globally between 2000 and 2015 totalled more than half a trillion dollars ($562.6billion), according to a University of Washington study. Yet the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a never-ending plea for more money, says the pandemic continues to take a life every minute.
In this series of articles I am going to describe the fruits of years of painstaking work by scientists based in Perth, Western Australia, collating evidence challenging almost every aspect of the ‘HIV’ theory. The essence of their case is that there is no ‘HIV’ epidemic, and there never will be a vaccine or cure, because there is no ‘HIV’.
If you find this hard to believe, I am with you entirely in the sense that it took me years to accept fully how wrong I had been in my early reporting on Aids. I documented this painful journey of discovery in my book AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, published in 1996 by Fourth Estate.
If you ask how it could be possible that for 40 years the scientific and medical worlds have failed to correct a belief in a mythological virus, the answer is more sociological than scientific.
Solidarity with the suffering of the gay community played a part – although genuine kindness, such as Louise Hay demonstrated in her early healing work with people with Aids, strongly and successfully challenged the medical view that they were certain to die. An arrogant, but ill-informed, neocolonial drive by countless NGOs to ‘do good’ in poorer parts of the world also contributed. But probably the most powerful and detrimental element in maintaining the deception was the money and influence involved, as governments went into partnership with the hugely profitable pharmaceutical industry. The resources poured into HIV/Aids created thousands of jobs, buying loyal collaboration and stifling dissent.
Highly experienced scientists who spoke out against the theory were ridiculed, defunded, gaslighted, and accused of killing people by weakening the public health message.
I experienced this pressure myself when I began to examine alternative ways of looking at Aids in the early 1990s, when I was working as Sunday Times science correspondent. Joan Shenton of Meditel, producers of prize-winning but much criticised documentaries on the issue, alerted me to the fact that several distinguished scientists had challenged the idea that HIV could be doing all the damage attributed to it.
Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, which had serialised Michael Fumento’s 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids, supported my reports on an ever-deepening scientific challenge to the theory. Over a three-year period, condemnation came from just about every quarter. The deeper the critique went, the shriller the protests became.
In 1993, with the HIV/Aids industry still pointing to Africa as proof of how millions could become infected, Neil told me to go there to find out what was happening. Over six weeks, travelling through Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, it became increasingly plain to me that the entire pandemic was an illusion arising from diseases of poverty being reclassified as ‘HIV/Aids’.
My reports to this effect proved too much for the scientific establishment, and Nature – supposedly one of the top scientific journals in the world – declared that we must be stopped. Having decided that picketing our offices would be impractical, the magazine mounted a campaign of ridicule. The UK’s Health Education Authority started an Aids journalism award specifically in my dishonour. They said it was to counter the newspaper’s dangerously misleading coverage. There was incomprehension and abuse from all three main political parties, as well as from scientific and medical chiefs.
But we also heard from many doctors, health workers, gay men, and specialists on Africa, thanking the newspaper for its challenging coverage. An ‘HIV’ diagnosis at that time could still have the power of a witch-doctor’s hex, and people who had tested positive wrote to say that our reports were like a breath of fresh air.
Andrew Neil was undeterred by the hostile bluster, while insisting the paper was ready to publish any evidence that countered the dissident case we were presenting. In 1994 he left the paper for New York, and I left too after his successor John Witherow made it plain that he did not want me to continue this line of reporting. The literary agent David Godwin had been in touch, suggesting a book on the controversy, and this took shape over the following year.
When Fourth Estate published it in 1996, however, it became an early victim of ‘cancel culture’. The late American gay activist Larry Kramer, at first a bitter critic of Fauci but later his friend and ally, was in the UK at the time of publication to address a conference on Aids. He picked up a copy at a pre-conference gathering, tore several pages, and spat in it, telling his audience: ‘Do the same if you come across this book. They will soon stop stocking it.’ It quickly disappeared from view, subsequently topping a list of ‘Books You’re Not Supposed to Read’ in a work on political incorrectness in science.
(From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, Regnery, 2005)
I am republishing it now, with additional material including a summary of where the science of ‘HIV’ went wrong, because the story is so redolent of the misunderstandings, mishandling and downright lies surrounding Covid-19. As with Aids, huge grants from Big Pharma and ‘philanthropic’ foundations to researchers, medical associations, consumer groups, and civil rights organisations fuelled the Covid illusions.
There is one important difference. At first I thought the Covid fearmongering was as ill-conceived as that over ‘HIV’ and Aids. It soon became clear, however, that unlike ‘HIV’ this was a genuine pathogen. A disgracefully suppressed paper by the UK’s Professor Angus Dalgleish, working with Norwegian colleagues including a biowarfare expert, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the genetically-engineered nature of SARS-CoV-2 (see here and here).
Panic measures to try to hide its laboratory origin confirm that view. These were led by the Chinese, from whose Wuhan laboratory the virus almost certainly escaped, and by Fauci, whose NIAID had part-funded the work. Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, also played a leading role in the cover-up.
Many are now aware of the adverse social, economic and health consequences of the Covid hysteria into which Fauci and others led us. Billions of people meekly accepted and even welcomed unprecedented lockdowns and other fearmongering measures, along with mass administration of the mRNA gene products. TCW Defending Freedom has been one of few voices constantly critical of the mishandling of Covid over the past three years, despite high-level, far-reaching efforts to silence and defund the site.
Much less widely understood is the way Aids became subject to similar mismanagement 40 years ago, with adverse consequences lasting until today.
Heavy Lies the Crown: POTUS Biden Totally Loses the Plot As NATO’s Narrative Implodes
By Declan Hayes | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 3, 2023
First off, hats off to young Hafez Bashar Assad, who recently aced a Master’s degree in Pure Mathematics from Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University which has, in the course of its long and glorious history, produced several Fields Medals winners. May young Hafez go on to similarly great things.
Hafez was, some years back, the subject of oceans of ire when he represented Syria in the Math Olympics, a competition I have some familiarity with, as friends of mine represented Ireland in years gone by. And though those young Irishmen went on to be awarded PhDs from the world’s most prestigious universities and land jobs with mouth-watering salaries from the world’s most prestigious companies, like young Hafez, they got nowhere at the Math Olympics because they lacked the in-depth 24/7 tutoring the United States’ Ivy League Professors give the young (generally Chinese) charges, who compete under the Yankee flag.
So well done, young Hafez and congratulations, too, to your beautiful, urbane, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, great and gracious mother, Asma Assad, proudly hugging you after you were awarded your degree. I know of no current or former First Lady, who is in her league in terms of elegance, grace, brains or sheer good manners and your father, Syrian President Bashar Assad, certainly hit the jackpot when he landed that Damask Rose. He is a lucky and blessed man.
Moving from Moscow to Kiev, we see that former Irish President and serial grifter Mary Robinson and Swedish propagandist Greta Thunberg are on a jolly there to advise Clown Prince Zelensky on matters concerning the environment. As 20 year old Greta has only recently graduated High School, at an age when most others would be whistling through their undergraduate degrees, one wonders if this slow learner will stay as silent on NATO’s use of depleted uranium as she has been on the Nordstream terrorist attack, the greatest ecological crime of our era.
Not that I care as Greta, and Mary Robinson are, like Clown Prince Zelensky himself, media creations, all tinsel and no substance. NATO’s Zelensky regime must be really scraping the barrel if that is the best they can do.
But the bottom of the barrel is all NATO seems to have left. French dictator Macron spends his time attending Elton John 1970s’ retro concerts as France burns down around him. The best that Britain can do is to ban Nigel Farage from having a bank account and keep POW Julian Assange on ice for their American masters.
Stella Moris, Julian’s wife, was recently in Rome where, appropriately dressed, she met Pope Francis, who has also recently honoured British film-maker Ken Loach, who was recently expelled from the British Labour Party. Say what you like about Julian Assange and, irrespective as to whether the British will murder him or hand him over to the Yanks for further torture sessions, he is blessed to have such a woman standing foursquare beside him.
Although all of these singularities would have been noted in Washington, it is doubtful if they registered with Creepy Joe Biden, the Don Vittorio of the NATO organised crime gang. Don Vittorio, you may recall, is the senile Italian Mafia godfather, who appeared in The Sopranos a few seasons before fellow mafia mobster Junior also succumbed to dementia.
Although, as Biden claims Putin, in some parallel world, may be losing the war in Iraq, in this world Creepy Joe is most definitely losing the 2024 Presidential war to Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy. Although Oddslotter still has him favourite to be re-elected, Biden’s place is in the dock as a war criminal and then off to an old folks’ home to be heard from no more.
The threats that Trump and Kennedy pose are not so much personal threats to Creepy Joe as they are to the gangster system he presides over. Trump is a threat because he says what others will not say: that the United States is a predatory state that robs and loots at will. And Kennedy is a threat because he points out the threats Big Pharma’s greed pose to all Americans and Big Pharma’s spokespersons like notorious narcissist Dr. Peter Hotez, won’t even debate him on Joe Rogan’s show for over $1 million in cash.
Although neither of these challengers criticise Israel, such criticisms are inconceivable because of the nature of NATO’s gangsterism. Palestinians are little more than plastic ducks at a shooting arcade and heaven help any “anti-Semite” who might argue otherwise.
But even argument itself is now haram in NATOstan. Donald Trump, remember, was banned from social media when he was POTUS, supposedly the world’s most powerful position. Germany’s Greens, perhaps trying to reconnect to their Nazis past, have persecuted their own citizens for not being sufficiently Russophobic and Australia, Canada and Vichy Ireland are, as part of NATO’s plans of world conquest, introducing the most draconian hate speech laws that have drawn the ire of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
And there is the rub. Rogan, Carlson and Musk are forming the backbone of an opposition that believe in such things as free speech and free, open and honest debate and such things present an existential threat to Biden and his fellow-fraudsters.
In my earlier paeon to Asma Assad, I used an abundance of adjectives to try to give Syria’s First Lady her well-earned due. However, at days’ end, she is a wife, a mother and a woman, a wonderful adult female in other words and not a cisgender or a transgender, phrases that Biden’s handlers have shanghaied from the British and Roman Empires where Transjordan and Cisjordan were, still are and will always be divided by the Jordan River and Gaul and Cisgaul were, still are and will always be divided by the mighty Alps. You do not need Hafez Assad’s Master’s Degree in Pure Mathematics to know no such demarcations apply to sovereign womanhood and nor do you even need Greta Thunberg’s hard-earned High School diploma. What you need is a degree of honesty and common sense and, because they are attributes Creepy Joe and his whore-bonking son Hunter cashed in years ago, all of Creepy Joe’s dodgy deals are now coming home to roost.
And, just as the Alps and the Jordan divide for all time the Cis from the rest, so also in our own time do the mountains and rivers of honesty and truth divide the Creepy Joe Bidens and Mary Robinsons from the great and the good, from Stella Moris, Gonzalo Lira, Hafez and Asma Assad, all of whom affirm the words of Irish martyr Terence MacSwiney that “it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can endure the most, who will prevail”.
And, it is because of good, great and immortal people like Asma Assad that Damascus itself has prevailed against Biden’s Beast of the Apocalypse. Let us, as we conclude, recall Mark Twain’s recollections of that eternal city: “We shall remember… Damascus, the Pearl of the East, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten.”
And, as Eternal Damascus and her eternally gallant allies prepare to consign Biden, NATOstan’s faux Little Caesar, to the trash bin of history, let us salute not only Hafez and Asma Assad on their recent fortune but all of the great and good people of Syria, Palestine, Serbia, China and Russia who, at great cost, defied NATO and carried the banners of humanity not only for the Assange and Lira families but for all of us in the face of the butchers Biden, Macron and Zelensky sent against them. May God bless them and their protectors, the heroic men and women of the Syrian Arab Army, now and forever.
RFK Jr. Dismantles Doctor’s Pro-Vaccine Stance in Town Hall Meeting
By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | June 29, 2023
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. Epistemologists ask the foundational question, “How do we know what we know?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday appeared in a town hall meeting hosted by NewsNation and moderated by journalist Elizabeth Vargas.
The exchanges between Kennedy — chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense — Vargas and Dr. Tariq Butt, a family medicine doctor in the audience, demonstrated the real quagmire the scientific community finds itself in.
Doctors and journalists cannot see the difference between believing and knowing. If we were in a rational world, there wouldn’t be the need for censorship and shadowbanning.
Nor would many of the vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule, as presently formulated and tested, have found their way into the arms of young human beings.
In 13 short minutes, Kennedy deftly demonstrated to the audience that our problem isn’t just a failure of epidemiology — it’s one of epistemology:
Vargas first framed the topic this way:
“The biggest controversy surrounding your candidacy is your stance on childhood vaccines. Nearly every scientific and medical organization including the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], the AMA [American Medical Association], the American Academy of Pediatrics, all say you’re wrong on this issue.”
Vargas opened the door for Kennedy to not only clarify his position — which he said has been distorted and misrepresented no matter how many times he has tried to set the record straight — but she also revealed how little thought and research she has done into the controversy.
Kennedy pointed out the reality of the situation. These are not organizations that have independently arrived at their conclusions. The AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics and “nearly all scientific and medical organizations” take information coming from the CDC and FDA as gospel.
In other words, if the CDC and the FDA are wrong, the entire medical establishment is wrong.
There’s a difference between consensus and herd mentality — a fact that never seemed to register with Vargas.
Kennedy is immensely knowledgeable about vaccine science and the regulatory process, as well as its corruption by Pharma interests. Moreover, he is a seasoned litigator and is not careless in his delivery. He correctly asks Vargas for clarification: “On what issue?”
Vargas first alludes to the possibility that vaccines could be the cause of autism and harm.
Kennedy immediately asks the obvious, “So you are saying that these organizations claim that vaccines NEVER damage kids?”
Vargas is forced to backpedal:
“I don’t think anyone is saying they never have. There may be a child here [or there], but overall vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives.”
Vargas is demonstrating the lack of understanding the public has about the issue. How can anyone claim that vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives if proper prospective studies with matched unvaccinated controls have never been conducted?
Kennedy makes this abundantly clear in his response to Dr. Butt, who asks Kennedy this question:
“Eradication of chicken pox and polio in the U.S. and in many parts of the world is a result of regular vaccination. MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] and many diseases are preventable. There is little evidence of these diseases in the vaccinated population. Your vaccine stance is dangerous to the health and well-being of millions. Medical experts are deeply concerned about your message. How can we help you come to the side of science?”
Kennedy admits there is evidence that vaccines have reduced the risk of mortality and morbidity from the diseases they target. However, he argued, without long-term prospective studies around all-cause mortality/morbidity in vaccinated populations nobody — no matter how educated or how big an organization you represent, he said — can claim there is an overall benefit.
Kennedy’s answer to the question dismantles the issue to the very core, catching Dr. Butt off guard. His methodical response should have proven to the audience that the family medicine doctor has very little grasp of all the available evidence.
Dr. Butt clearly wasn’t aware of analyses like this one that concluded that a “Mass varicella vaccination is expected to cause a major epidemic of herpes zoster, affecting more than 50% of those aged 10-44 years at the introduction of vaccination.”
Should studies like this guide public policy in the U.S.? They certainly do in the U.K., where health officials do not recommend universal vaccinations against chickenpox for precisely the reason Kennedy states.
Of all the preventable diseases out there, why would Dr. Butt use chickenpox as an example of how Kennedy’s vaccine stance is dangerous to the health and well-being of millions? Could it be that a doctor with a microphone was unaware of the science?
Was Dr. Butt aware of the enormous tragedy caused by the DTP (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis) vaccine in Africa? After 30 years of observation, it was shown that children vaccinated with the DTP shot were dying of other causes at 10 times the rate of the unvaccinated. We would have never known about this if no one actually looked.
The devastation caused by the DTP vaccine is not limited to the continent of Africa. Kennedy informed the audience that the flurry of lawsuits against manufacturers of this vaccine led to the passing of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which has protected vaccine manufacturers from any liability.
As a concession to the public, this law also created the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, to “protect” and warn the public of potential vaccine danger; a system that has been shown to underreport injuries as commonly as it gets ignored.
Though Kennedy did not discuss the MMR and polio vaccines, his point was clear: Unless proper, long-term, prelicensure placebo-controlled safety studies are done we cannot determine if more harm than good is being done.
Dr. Butt’s response to the likely damage caused by the varicella and DTP vaccines was all too predictable: “A person can take a medicine and then get involved in a motor vehicle accident.” In other words, correlation does not prove causation!
Dr. Butt has good intentions. He is also particularly skilled at picking the weakest examples to prove his point.
The issue with the varicella vaccine was the resulting increased risk of herpes zoster infection (shingles). The issue with the DTP vaccine was the increased risk of death from other prevalent diseases that proved to be more deadly for the kids who received the vaccine.
We are not talking about random traumatic injuries that have nothing to do with immune modulation.
Furthermore, was Dr. Butt aware that the “correlation does not equal causation” argument can be used to dismiss vaccine benefits as well?
This double standard is mindlessly applied by vaccine proponents. Trials don’t prove causation, only correlation. That goes for efficacy too. On what grounds can one say that a vaccine caused a decrease in the disease it targets while assuring us that it was only correlated with an increase in side effects?
Trials just measure the incidence of things in two (or more) groups of participants. It’s a mathematical comparison. No causation is ever proven.
Vargas took issue with Kennedy’s claim that not one vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule has been subjected to a prelicensured placebo-controlled trial.
Vargas: “Yes they have.”
Kennedy: “No.”
Vargas: “Yeah, they have!”
And later …
Vargas: “The FDA says, and in fact, on its website, you can clearly see vaccines go through three stages of testing against double-blind placebo. They already DO that testing.”
Kennedy: “Elizabeth, you can say that.”
Vargas: “I’m not saying that. The FDA is saying that.”
Kennedy: “The FDA is not saying that.”
Vargas: “Yes they do! They say that on their website!”
Kennedy: “They will not tell you that there’s a vaccine that has ever undergone a long-term placebo-controlled trial prior to licensing because it’s not true.”
The reason why this embarrassing (and mildly entertaining) spectacle is important to dissect is because of what it reveals about the stubbornness we have about being right. Did Vargas actually scour the FDA website prior to this public exchange?
She couldn’t have for the obvious reason that no such statement from them exists on their website as she maintained.
Why is she so sure that she is right? I would venture to say it is because someone whom she trusts more than Kennedy told her that.
But was she really listening to what Kennedy was saying? Kennedy demanded a citation from Dr. Anthony Fauci in a face-to-face meeting with him in 2016. Fauci couldn’t produce one but promised he would.
He never did — so Kennedy (and attorney Aaron Siri) sued him and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). After a year of litigation, they finally obtained a written statement from the HHS which still does not cite a single study but assures us that inert placebos are not required to demonstrate safety in childhood vaccines.
Of course, there is no reason Vargas should trust Kennedy if she has not visited the Children’s Health Defense website where the letter from the HHS is made available.
But at what point should she have paused and honestly asked herself about what she really knew and not just what she thought she did?
In this case, the spectacle arose not because Vargas was wrong, but because she was so sure she was right.
It’s also worthwhile to consider what was on the line for her, personally. Was she able to face the possibility that the vaccines we have been injecting into our own bodies and our children have never been tested against a placebo?
Her argumentative responses to Kennedy’s views, which he defended with several key citations off the top of his head, reflected the real impediments the public has toward seeing reality for what it is. What would it mean if Kennedy has been right all along?
As a veteran journalist for NewsNation and previously for Fox and A&E Networks, Vargas should have come prepared. Kennedy has previously made himself very clear that he is willing to change his mind. “Show me where I got it wrong.”
Kennedy asks Vargas to cite a single prelicensure, placebo-controlled vaccine study. She couldn’t because no one can. There aren’t any.
Kennedy pointed out the real issue: “We have a corrupt federal agency [FDA] that is lying to the AMA and all those agencies and all those doctors. But those agencies are controlled by Pharma. That is the problem.”
Without any studies to cite or any way to refute Kennedy’s damning allegations, Vargas chose to confront Kennedy with the fact that some of his family members disagree with his stance on vaccines.
Kennedy: “Does your family agree with everything that you say?”
Vargas: “Definitely not. You got me on that one.”
Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.
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.
Rogan’s RFK interview is full of vitally-important taboo info
BY BILL RICE, JR. | JUNE 26, 2023
Yesterday, I spent several hours reading the transcript of the 3-hour interview RFK, Jr. recently did with Joe Rogan. The conversation was fascinating. Any U.S. citizen interested in more detailed information on Kennedy’s thoughts can simply watch this interview (a link to the Rogan episode and a transcript are included in this article which summarizes the interview).
I particularly recommend the final paragraphs of the CHD article, where Kennedy talks about the mothers of autistic children who finally convinced him to look into a possible connection between vaccines and autism.
Here are highlights that jumped out to me after reading transcripts of the entire interview:
- Kennedy said (again) that he’s NOT running on the “vaccine issue” and only talks about vaccines when specifically asked a question about them by an interviewer.
- However, he did say he’s not going to dodge a legitimate question when asked. He also said that he didn’t plan on doing any more in-depth interviews like this in the future, suggesting this conversation with Rogan should provide sufficient answers on why and how he got so interested in the vaccine issue … an intellectual quest which later informed his conviction that the entire public health establishment has become brazenly and shockingly corrupt and captured.
- Kennedy said alarms went off when he had a phone conversation with Dr. Paul Offit about mercury in vaccines and caught this extremely-influential vaccine booster in an obvious lie. Kennedy also noted that this man said he would get back to him with specific scientific studies that backed up his vaccine autism point (that there was bad “mercury” and “safe” mercury). Kennedy said this revered scientist never did provide the promised study(ies).
- Kennedy also recounts a similar conversation with Dr. Fauci, who told Kennedy that he would provide germane studies on some topic Kennedy had challenged Fauci on …. and Fauci never followed through.
One of Kennedy’s main points is that whenever he wanted to see the published peer-reviewed scientific studies backing different conclusions of the Science Establishment … the members of the Scientific Establishment couldn’t and didn’t do this.
Kennedy also notes he personally knows and had spoken to many leading authorities in the public health bureaucracies and he always got the impression these leaders had not read any of the scientific studies that Kennedy had read. They weren’t even familiar with these studies.
- Rogan talked a good bit about censorship and how he (Rogan) had been maligned and intentionally discredited for comments he’d made. Almost as an aside, Kennedy noted that he had been censored for “18 years” (!)
- … Kennedy also said that nobody has ever debated him on these topics, and cited examples of “debates” or events that were supposed to happen and never did.
- One such “debate” was supposed to be Kennedy vs. one of these alleged science authorities at a hearing in the Connecticut Senate (if memory serves, on the autism question).
- According to Kennedy, a Connecticut elected official asked Kennedy to participate in a hearing with this other authority. Later, Kennedy was told it would be him vs. two executives, then three, then four.
- Kennedy, as it turns out, would only get six minutes to make his points. Still, Kennedy said (paraphrasing): “This is not fair, but okay. I’ll be there.” The debate/testimony was later cancelled – after Kennedy had flown “on the red-eye” to Connecticut on his own dime to participate. Nobody told him why this hearing with him was cancelled. Kennedy just assumes someone told these people to NOT debate RFK, Jr. This scenario should sound very familiar today. (Think the “Hotez debate.”)
- I found Kennedy’s points about the explosion of autism to be very convincing. His main point is that nobody his age (or my age) grew up with anyone who had the severe autism that is common with many children today.Kennedy does note that observations such as this do NOT equal scientific “causation” or “correlation” … but when so many mothers of autistic children keep reaching the same conclusion, this should be enough anecdotal evidence to launch serious and real scientific studies and genuine scientific investigations, Kennedy argues.
- Kennedy’s points about VAERS picking up only a tiny fraction of vaccine injuries and deaths are very persuasive and important. (This is the topic of one of my next articles, which will highlight the fact Ed Dowd’s work on “all-cause excess” deaths is STILL being ignored by the mainstream media – 18 months after Dowd, among others, began to highlight this.)
- Regarding his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy notes that the book sold more than one million copies in its “first three months.” Oddly (to me), Kennedy said he doesn’t know how many copies this book sold after this because he hasn’t looked at the numbers.
- I’ve been curious about the book’s cumulative sales figure as every story I can find on the book says only that it “sold more than one million copies.”
- This is certainly a true statement, but I wonder if the book might have sold at least two million copies by now. Kennedy also points out that nobody at mainstream “news” organizations reviewed the book and very few “independent” book-sellers ever stocked the book in their stores (a point I made in a recent column.) Also, for some reason, lists of “best-selling” books often omitted The Real Anthony Fauci from these sales rankings.
- The above anecdotes should tell the public that most owners of book stores (and the “free press”) believe in banning certain books (more specifically, they don’t stock or mention books that question the prevailing orthodoxy).
- Question: How many copies of The Real Anthony Fauci would have been sold if this book had been available in bookstores all over the world (like other big best-sellers)? Would this have made a difference and perhaps saved lives?
Note: Joe Rogan said his entire thinking about vaccines, public health and Kennedy changed dramatically after he did read this book. Question: Think if Rogan had not read this book. He probably would have never had Kennedy on his show and Rogan probably would never have become one of the leading contrarian voices on the “authorized narrative.” This shows the power of the written word or of one book … and why such a book had to be censored.
- According to Kennedy, the vast majority of the book’s sales came from just one source – Amazon. (Authors like Naomi Wolf and many other skeptics of the official narratives have also published “taboo” Covid books. This question also occurs to me: How many additional copies of these books would have been sold if readers interested in these topics had seen them and been able to buy them if they had been available in local bookstore? (I guess this is another “unknown unknowable.”)
* Rogan made interesting points about how other podcasters are seemingly being bullied with the threat of “de-platforming” or “de-monetization” if the hosts of these shows invite contrarian Covid speakers onto their shows as guests (including Rogan himself).
* Rogan mentioned that he knows several comedian friends who think like he does, which he suggests helped him maintain his sanity in these New Normal Covid times. Kennedy later asked Rogan (paraphrasing), “Who are these people? I haven’t heard any stand-up comedians doing gigs where they poke fun of this Covid madness.” The Kimmels and Colberts of the world were (and still are) all singing from the same “authorized narrative” hymnal.
- Kennedy provides a good bit of detail about his life as an environmental lawyer and how he and his allies in his cause helped clean up the Hudson River waterways. It was his belief that mercury was getting into fish that later led him to believe that the same toxic mercury (far more dangerous than lead, according to Kennedy) was being injected into children with their mandatory vaccines.
- According to Kennedy, this was a point that mothers kept making to him at Kennedy’s speaking engagements. Finally, one of these mothers showed up at his house, dropped an 18-inch pile of documents on his door step and told Kennedy she wasn’t leaving until he read these documents.
- Kennedy read them … and the rest is … history … History that also explains why Robert Kennedy, Jr. is now the No. 1 threat to the Big Pharma/Medicine/Science establishment. It also explains how a once popular liberal environmental lawyer almost instantly became a pariah to the Establishment and a conspiracy-spreading, wacko kook.
- Kennedy notes that he has filed “hundreds” of lawsuits and every one of them deal with “science.” Regarding the narrative that everyone should “trust the science and the experts,” Kennedy makes a great point in his conversation with Rogan:
- Every lawsuit he has ever been a part of includes “experts” … from both sides. Kennedy gives an example of one big environmental lawsuit where the defendants called experts from prestigious academic institutions like Harvard, Stanford and Yale as witnesses. But the plaintiffs also called “expert” witnesses who were professors at the same colleges. So the obvious question is: What “experts” are more credible? This, Kennedy says, is for a jury to decide (and plenty of juries sided with Kennedy’s experts).
Kennedy also pointed out that almost all of the “new” vaccines since the late ’80s allegedly “protect” children from diseases that do not pose a real health risk to them. He gave the example of the Hepatitis B vaccine newborns get at the hospital. Kennedy pointed out this is a “vaccine” to allegedly provide “protection” against a disease that might affect only a few of these children 16 to 30 years later – if they became a prostitute or a needle drug user.
I thought Kennedy was also very persuasive, making his point that advancements in nutrition, sanitation and “engineering” almost completely explain the disappearance of most childhood or adult diseases in the last century or so (for example, refrigeration.)
This leads people like me to conclude that the Mother of All medical scams might be the one that tells us that “vaccines” are the wonder-drug of our times and have saved millions of lives. This is almost certainly a “false” or at least “dubious” narrative. (But a profitable one for Big Pharma).
Yet another fascinating segment was when Kennedy explains the “95 percent effective” canard. He points out that the best metric flowing from Pfizer’s limited safety trials should have been the conclusion that it takes 22,000 doses of Covid vaccine to (maybe) prevent one “Covid” death.
If this is the case (and it apparently is), “You better be sure that vaccine isn’t causing any deaths,” Kennedy states. As Kennedy points out, in the Pfizer trials only three people died from Covid in the ensuing six months – one person in the “vaccinated” group, and two in the “unvaccinated” group.
However, four or five more people in the “vaccinated” group later died from “all causes.” But identifying deaths from “any cause” was not a goal of the study. (It took a Freedom of Information request and a judge’s ruling to release this key information to the public … something Pfizer didn’t want to do for 75 years).
So trial participants had a much greater chance of dying (from any cause) if they’d received the Covid vaccine than if they had not been vaccinated. Question asked by Kennedy: Shouldn’t this data point/finding have been the big headline and enough to stop the vaccines?
Regarding the “vaccines-cause autism” theory, Kennedy does not definitively or categorically blame just vaccines. He seems to be saying many factors probably explain this – including vaccines.
Kennedy notes that when he was a child he received three childhood vaccines. Today, children MUST get 72 shots (from 16 vaccines). Kennedy also noted that five of his children suffer from food allergies, something that also was almost unheard of when Kennedy was growing up.
Kennedy also did a great job explaining how Big Pharma got immunity from vaccine lawsuits, per hugely-significant legislation passed in the Reagan administration in 1986. This gave Big Pharma a license to make “billions of dollars,” Kennedy argues.
All Pharma companies had to do was come up with a new “vaccine” and make sure this vaccine got placed on the childhood immunization schedule (which apparently was a sure-thing).
I also found it interesting that RFK, Jr. acknowledges that his own uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy – who was chairman of an important Senate Health Committee at the time – helped pass this world-changing legislation. That is, it wasn’t just President Reagan who made this possible; it was the Democrats in Congress too – including his own uncle.
Kennedy also debunks the accepted wisdom that vaccines are “safe” by pointing out the whole reason this legislation was passed into law was because vaccines are obviously not (always) safe. Vaccines are inherently unsafe – this is why the industry needed legal immunity from lawsuits to keep producing them, says Kennedy.
My main-take away from this in-depth interview is how well Kennedy knows this material. During this 3-hour interview, Kennedy didn’t refer to any notes. He cited study after study from memory. He had read these studies – critically – and quickly identified the holes and likely cover-ups in them.
I’m convinced this is the real reason no expert or authority will debate someone like Kennedy (or, for example, Steve Kirsch). They all know Kennedy knows this material better than they do. And they all know that they can’t answer Kennedy’s key questions.
Hopefully, more people will take the time to watch this 3-hour interview or read the transcripts. If they do, they’ll see that Kennedy is not some crazy “kook.” I also commend Joe Rogan for giving RFK, Jr. this 3-hour platform to express his views and more fully discuss these life-and-death public health issues.
Why More US Bradley Armored Vehicles Won’t Boost Ukraine’s Counteroffensive
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 28.06.2023
What Washington has delivered to Ukraine is a non-upgraded version of the Bradly armed vehicles with restricted combat capabilities, retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, told Sputnik.
The Biden administration has announced another $500 million military package to Kiev, which includes, among other weaponry, 30 US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.
At least 17 such vehicles were earlier damaged or destroyed by Russian troops amid the Ukrainian army’s unsuccessful counteroffensive attempt. Will an additional batch of the Bradley vehicles be of use to the Ukrainian military? Former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski has her doubts.
“Well, if you have ever watched the 1998 movie “The Pentagon Wars” you might wonder how we ever developed them in the first place! And of course, they are from 1980s technology and design, because of the lag time in the US military acquisition system of that era, and today as well,” she told Sputnik.
THE PENTAGON WARS – 1998 HBO MILITARY COMEDY FILM BASED ON A TRUE STORY OF THE BRADLEY TANK
The ex-Pentagon analyst said that with the mothballed Bradleys delivered to Ukraine, the US is now in the process of upgrading these infantry fighting vehicles.
“Its replacement program was actually initiated in 2010, and the production by the winning company (or a combination) won’t begin until 2027. In a comprehensive land-sea-air battlespace, the Bradley adds mobility and protection to other parts of the combined arms array, but without the ‘rest of the system’ its capabilities are limited, as we see in Ukraine today,” Kwiatkowski noted.
She made it clear that the Bradley supplies to Ukraine are something that American Rheinmetall and General Dynamics will benefit from, as “they refine and propose their best design” of the Bradleys.
When asked whether the development of a new vehicle could entail a US military budget increase, Kwiatkowski said that “part of the strategy of NATO expansion and relevance, that has been the story of Ukraine for over a decade, is how to upgrade older weapons systems with European support and cash along with maintaining the massive US military industrial complex into the foreseeable future.”
“The US defense budget has grown every year in my lifetime, and not a single war has been ‘won’. The upcoming Pentagon budget is $842 billion, and this does not count the entire intelligence budget, so we are well over a trillion dollars annually in 2024. Because of the influence and pervasiveness of the defense industry in every state, this budget will continue to grow until the United States is bankrupted,” she concluded.
Both Kiev and Washington have acknowledged that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is progressing slower than expected, with one Pentagon official citing an American military representative who conceded that the counteroffensive is “not meeting expectations on any front.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, stressed that Kiev had failed to reach any strategic objectives at the beginning of its counteroffensive, losing more than 180 tanks and over 400 armored vehicles.
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New Book
Breast Cancer: Before You Consent
A new Unbekoming paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | September 18, 2026
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
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