Lethal Drones at the U.S.-Mexico Border?
By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 27, 2023
Fentanyl has caused many overdose deaths in recent years, and much of it has entered the United States through Mexico. A number of politicians have thrown their support behind a proposal to officially label narcotics traffickers based in Mexico as “terrorists.” Not all of the Republican lawmakers who support this idea have openly embraced the use of lethal drones to eliminate such persons, but that would be the inevitable policy implication of such labeling, given the wording of anti-terrorist legislation. At least one presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has said the quiet part out loud: lethal drones should be deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border. There can be little doubt that the many other politicians declaring “war” on the cartels are well aware that lethal force will be used once the fentanyl producers have been designated terrorists, and the current tool of choice among self-styled smart warriors is the unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) or lethal drone.
The superficially plausible assumption behind this proposal is that if the flow of fentanyl is stanched, then the overdose deaths will subside. But the prospect of deploying lethal drones at the U.S.-Mexico border is a simplistic plan for addressing a very complicated problem. There are dozens of reasons for opposing this approach, on moral, legal, cultural, and geopolitical grounds. Most of those arguments, however, will fall on deaf ears and certainly not deter politicians from plundering ahead, expanding the domain of the killing machine once again, having been, in at least some cases, sincerely persuaded that they are acting not to enrich death industry profiteers but to defend the people of the United States from foreign enemies. The only way to prevent the deployment of lethal drones at the border from happening will be persuasively to demonstrate that the plan could never succeed, on purely tactical grounds. Two fatal flaws virtually guarantee that, if implemented, the plan would not have the desired effect, as can be seen through a consideration of the origins of the opioid crisis and the cross-border use of lethal drones in the Middle East.
The tragic drug overdoses of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States in recent years have had many causal factors, but the prime mover, which initiated the whole ugly mess, was the promiscuous overprescription of narcotics by doctors. Led by Purdue Pharma, drug industry giants aggressively marketed their opioid products as safe to use by anyone for anything, all blessed by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), which permitted a package insert to be included in boxes of Oxycontin indicating that the time-release format made the product safe to use without concerns about addiction or abuse. This was a classic case of the commandeering by profiteers of a government agency established in order to protect citizens but used instead to promote the interests of those who come to enrich themselves through decisively shaping government policies. (An even more obvious case has been the capture of the Department of Defense by individuals beholden to companies in military industry, such as former Raytheon board member and current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin.) Because most members of the populace believe that the FDA is their protector (again, just as they believe in the basic goodness of the Pentagon), many of them were taken in by this pharmaceutical industry scheme.
Doctors, too, were remarkably persuaded to believe that they could and should prescribe narcotics liberally, and patients consequently came to believe that they could and should empty their large amber vials. Preposterous though it may seem in retrospect, the pharmaceutical industry undertook aggressive public media campaigns to persuade politicians and their constituents that the nation was in the throes of a “pain epidemic,” for which narcotics were the solution. When clinicians expressed concern that their patients might be turning into addicts, they were tutored by “experts” tethered to the industry that the observed condition was in fact “pseudo-addiction,” the remedy for which would be even higher doses of narcotic drugs.
Prescription narcotics were oversupplied to perfectly ordinary patients suffering from even minor bouts of acute pain, who eventually discovered that they had become dependent on and were unable to function without the drugs. The opiates to which they found themselves hopelessly addicted were prescribed legally to them by physicians whom they had trusted as having their best interests in mind. In this way, people from all walks of life, including injured high school athletes who had never even been recreational drug users, were transformed into junkies.
Some of the working people who were prescribed narcotics for their various, often minor, ailments lost their jobs and, with them, their health insurance. During the early years of what would become the opioid overdose epidemic, addicts and others supported themselves by selling pills they acquired through “doctor shopping”. As a direct consequence of the pharmaceutical industry-created demand for more and more narcotics, mercenary but board-certified doctors teamed up with unscrupulous business persons to open “pain clinics,” which swiftly became places where addicts convened and collected drugs to be diverted for illegal sales. Massive quantities of narcotics were distributed by the now notorious pain clinics. Many of those drugs were sold on the streets for recreational use, thereby creating even more addicts. (For a concise and compelling summary of the government’s indisputable role in this tragic story, see director Alex Gibney’s two-part HBO series, The Crime of the Century [2021].)
Once the pain clinics were shut down, more and more addicts turned to the streets for supplies of their needed fix of whatever was available: diverted prescription pills, heroin, morphine, and most notoriously of all, fentanyl. Because it is so potent (about fifty times more than comparable drugs) and also cheap to produce, fentanyl was mixed or even used to replace other narcotics by unscrupulous dealers. The increased demand by addicts for opioids and the use by dealers of fentanyl to cut or replace heroin and other less dangerous surrogates has resulted in the deaths of many drug users who simply did not know what they were ingesting. At least some of the fentanyl deaths reported have been of non-addicts whose supplies of other drugs, too, were tainted with the highly concentrated and toxic substance.
Can eliminating supplies of fentanyl coming over the border to the United States from Mexico solve this problem? Will summarily executing suspected producers and distributors of fentanyl help to stem the tide of overdose deaths? Even setting aside concerns about procedural justice, the proposal to assassinate suspected drug dealers fails to take into account the etiology of the opioid crisis and, most importantly of all, the nature of drug dependency and the desperation of junkies to acquire the substances to which they are not only psychologically but physically addicted.
The opioid addiction crisis was not caused but seized upon opportunistically by Mexican drug cartels. The very fact that the fentanyl business has become so lucrative for illicit drug purveyors itself illustrates that there is a strong market demand for narcotics, whether natural or synthetic. If addicts cannot acquire cheap black tar heroin and/or fentanyl from Mexican producers and their network of distributors throughout the United States, then they will seek out and locate other sources of the drugs which their bodies crave. No one denies that the opioid addiction crisis is grave. But whacking drug dealers at the U.S.-Mexico border will simply produce more drug dealers, in different places.
We’ve seen a version of this story before, mutatis mutandis. What, after all, happened when war resisters transformed into jihadists on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were targeted by missiles? First, there was the hydra problem: targeting suspected militants often resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, thus fueling the very anger requisite to the recruitment by Al Qaeda and other groups of new converts to violent retaliation. Other factors, beyond the illegal invasions themselves, contributed to the increased number of radical Islamist fighters as well, including the use of torture by the occupiers, along with a variety of other incompetent policies, which led to a general degradation in the quality of life for the inhabitants of occupied territories.
Second, and directly relevant to the proposed plan to execute suspects at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the ranks of the factional fighters increased, some of them fled to other parts of the Middle East to regroup and avoid being killed by occupying forces. The comportment of the dissidents who fled war zones was entirely rational. They believed that they were right, and they naturally wanted to succeed in their missions to eject the invaders from their lands, so they relocated and strategized about how to defeat what they had come to believe was “the evil enemy.” The lethal drones then followed the factional fighters to Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, and beyond. As a result of this lethal creep, civilians in several different countries are now under constant threat of death by missiles launched by drones.
The Mexican drug cartels are not at this point engaged in a war with the U.S. military, but recalling how and why the “Global War on Terror” spread throughout the Middle East, we must soberly consider what is likely to ensue, should lethal drones be unleashed at the border as a way of curtailing the flow of fentanyl. It is quite plausible, given what happened in the Global War on Terror, that the more missiles which are fired on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fewer people there will be who choose to continue to live there. This should be a matter of common sense even to people ignorant of the details of the disastrous Global War on Terror, and yet the politicians pushing for a new “War on Drugs” somehow have not thought through the likely consequences of their plan, preferring instead to follow their usual “act tough” approach to garner political support for superficially appealing policies. No matter that Plan Colombia, intended to reduce the flow of cocaine to the United States, had the opposite effect and led to the militarization of drug traffickers throughout region, not the renunciation of their business activities. Just as the Global War on Terror has been all but forgotten by politicians keen to “move on” rather than acknowledge their role in creating humanitarian catastrophe throughout the Middle East, Plan Colombia has been memory-holed for the very same reason. Both were abject policy failures. Mistakes were made. Stuff happens. Nothing to see here; time to move on—to Ukraine!
Following the same logic used by both the radical jihadists in Afghanistan, and the cocaine cartels in Colombia, targeted groups at the U.S.-Mexico border who wish to continue to ply their trade, producing and distributing fentanyl and other drugs to the people of the United States, may well set up shop somewhere else, in places where they will be safe from the specter of lethal drones hovering above their heads. If fentanyl is easy to produce in Mexico, it is no less easy to produce wherever the same raw materials can be found. We can expect, then, that if lethal drones are used at the border, fentanyl production and distribution will migrate as a result. Some of the producers will move south, some may relocate to Canada, but it seems far more likely that many of them will opt to use the distribution apparatus they already have in place in the United States to begin or increase synthetic drug production in the very country where fentanyl is being sold.
The illicit drug purveyors may well reason that they will be safer moving their businesses to the United States, rather than further south in Mexico or other parts of Latin America, or up north to Canada. They may find it difficult to believe that the U.S. government would deploy lethal drones in the homeland, thereby directly endangering U.S. citizens. That assumption, however, is false. We already have precedents for such deployments abroad, and even the use of robotic means of homicide within the homeland against U.S. citizens.
The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was summarily executed by the U.S. government in Yemen without ever having been indicted for a crime, on the basis of evidence never made public to his fellow citizens that he was a “terrorist,” illustrates that the drone killers are ready and willing to inflict capital punishment upon citizens at the executive’s decree. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the sixteen-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, was also destroyed, along with a group of his teenage friends, by a missile launched from a drone in Yemen, about two weeks after his father was eliminated, and shortly after the boy had turned sixteen, making him a “military-age male”. To this day, we do not know whether the son was killed because military analysts worried that he would be radicalized by his father’s assassination, for the U.S. government has never explained what happened on October 14, 2011.
It is possible, albeit implausible (given the government’s silence on the matter), that the drone strike which ended Abdulrahman’s life was a mistake, an incredible coincidence that the younger al-Awlaki happened to find himself at the receiving end of a missile intended for somebody else. But the case of U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein, who had been taken prisoner (along with an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto) by a group of suspected Al Qaeda members, and was also destroyed by a lethal drone, illustrates that, in pursuing their targets, the technokillers are ready and willing to risk harming U.S. citizens not even suspected of criminal activity.
Lest anyone suppose that the U.S. government would draw the line with citizen suspects located abroad, it is important to recognize that the presumption against the use of intentional homicide against citizens has been significantly weakened in the homeland as well, arguably as a result of the U.S. military’s “shoot first, suppress questions later” conduct abroad everywhere on display throughout the Global War on Terror. That homicide should be used to resolve conflict has been normalized in the minds of not only military and political elites but also every random mass shooter who emerges out of nowhere to annihilate a group of people as a way of expressing his discontent. When Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas cop killer, was blown up on July 8, 2016, using a robotic device at the behest of David O’Neal Brown, the chief of the Dallas police, nearly no one questioned the wisdom of the decision, though it would have been a simple matter to load the robot with incapacitating sedatives instead. Both of these African American men had been indoctrinated to believe that the way to resolve conflict is to obliterate human beings. Johnson, a military veteran apparently suffering from PTSD, claimed that he felt the need to kill Dallas cops as a way of protesting their killing of innocent black men.
Given these precedents, it seems likely that once lethal drones are deployed in the latest doomed-to-fail War on Drugs, the “War on Fentanyl,” they will be used not only in Mexico, but also in the United States as fentanyl production migrates to the homeland along with those fleeing the missiles being fired near the border. In the face of the overdose epidemic, politicians, goaded by both angry and mourning constituents, feel the need to act, and they will likely be supported by many in the populace in their quest to send out lethal drones—until, that is, innocent family members and neighbors begin to be incinerated in the homeland. At that point, perhaps the nation will finally have its long overdue debate about the policy of summarily executing suspects and the labeling as “collateral damage” of any innocent person unlucky enough to be located within the radius of a missile’s effects. But revisiting the immorality and illegality of killing thousands of unarmed brown-skinned young men in the prime of their lives abroad, on the basis of sketchy evidence which would never hold up in a court of law, while perhaps salubrious for future foreign policy, will have no effect whatsoever on the overdose epidemic.
The only truly effective solution to the opioid crisis, given the manifest failure of both the War on Drugs and the Prohibition, will be to legalize all drugs, making it possible for addicts and recreational drug users alike to buy what they need or want, and to know what they are actually getting. Anyone who wishes to liberate himself from the chains of addiction and return to a semblance of normal life should be assisted in that endeavor. Every addict has a story, and rather than criminalizing all of them, we would do well to take seriously the genesis of the opioid crisis in the United States. Many well-meaning patients, leading perfectly ordinary, noncriminal lives, ended up as junkies because they trusted their doctors who, in turn, trusted the pharma-coopted FDA. To those who worry that legalizing drugs will create even more junkies, there is a ready-made, highly visible anti-narcotics abuse campaign currently underway in every major city in the United States. No rational person would freely choose to wind up in the sorry state of the zombies currently haunting our streets. Rather than pinning up posters of fried eggs captioned “Your brain on drugs,” parents need only to take their children to such scenes to dissuade them from making the mistakes which led to the creation of what appear now to be mere vestiges of human beings.
Unfortunately, instead of viewing the opioid crisis as the humanitarian disaster that it is, some of the very politicians who culpably condoned industry malfeasance for years by refusing to acknowledge its root cause—pharmaceutical industry greed and our captured federal agencies—have decided that the suppliers of fentanyl from Mexico are the latest “bad guys” who must be eradicated from the face of the earth. Stigmatizing drug purveyors as “terrorists” not only will not effectively address the overdose epidemic, but it will further undermine our already crumbling republic. If the use of lethal force against suspected drug dealers is undertaken at the border, it will only be a matter of time before the presumption of innocence in the homeland is inverted into a presumption of guilt, just as occurred in the thousands of drone strikes targeting suspects on the basis of hearsay and circumstantial evidence throughout the Global War on Terror abroad.
Laurie Calhoun is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters. Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023.
Who Is National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Why He Should Debate RFK Jr.
By Rick Sterling | Global Research | June 27, 2023
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is one of the key people driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.
Background
Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:
“I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.”
Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.
Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.
Mentored by Hillary
Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, travelling with her to 112 countries.
The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly over-ruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”
Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.
When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.
Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks – who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by Wikileaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”
Biden’s adviser during the 2014 Ukraine Coup
After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).
In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.
Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.
In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.
Sullivan helped create Russiagate
Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.
Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”
Sullivan’s misinformation
Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya… He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission… Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”
Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline destruction
The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted
“I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”
Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.
Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,
“How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?”
Economic Plans devoid of reality
Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.
US exceptionalism 2.0
In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney. He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump. Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21st Century.”
Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”
Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.
Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.
Conclusion
Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very influential.
Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil,Russia, India, China, South Africa).
Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.
On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.
The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.
The Democratic Party constantly emphasizes “democracy” yet there is no debate or discussion over US foreign policy. What kind of “democracy” is this where crucial matters of life and death are not discussed?
Robert F Kennedy Jr is now running in the Democratic Party primary. He has a well informed and critical perspective on US foreign policy including the never ending wars, the intelligence agencies and the conflict in Ukraine.
Jake Sullivan is a skilled debater. Why doesn’t he debate Democratic Party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr over US foreign policy and national security?
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Rick Sterling can be contacted at RSterling1@gmail.com.
Republicans ‘Too Afraid’ to Remove Adam Schiff From Office Over Russiagate Hoax
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 25.06.2023
Despite being censured in the US Congress, Adam Schiff is in fact doing pretty well for himself and is likely going to “get a promotion for lying to the American people for four years,” says a former Colorado state senator.
The US House of Representatives voted to censure Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff this week for his role in promoting unsubstantiated claims that former US President Donald Trump colluded with Russia.
Former Colorado Senator Ted Harvey (Rep.), however, argued that Schiff deserves worse for essentially lying to the American people while in the capacity of the House Intelligence Committee head.
Despite basically knowing that there was no substance to allegations of Trump colluding with Russia, Schiff told the US public that there was “ample evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” Harvey told Sputnik.
“That is everything Schiff said to the American people for four years as the chairman of the intelligence community, he should not just be censured. He should be removed from office,” he said.
Alas, Harvey lamented, the US Republicans are simply “too afraid” to pursue this course of actions and instead managed to make a “martyr” out of Schiff.
“And he is raising money by the boatloads and he is now running for the United States Senate and will get a promotion for lying to the American people for four years,” Harvey mused about Schiff’s prospects. “And instead of being held accountable for that, he’s going to be promoted for that.”
During his tenure as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump was hounded by allegations of colluding with Russia in order to be elected in 2016, with said allegations being actively promoted by his political opponents.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations brought against him, an investigation into the alleged Russian election interference led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to produce conclusive evidence to back claims that Trump campaign members conspired with Russia.
Clinical Trial to License RotaTeq, Like Almost All Childhood Vaccines, Did Not Use a Placebo Control
Those attacking RFK are wrong
BY AARON SIRI | INJECTING FREEDOM | JUNE 25, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is on record stating that almost all childhood vaccines were licensed based on clinical trials that did not include a placebo control. He is correct.
Nonetheless, numerous news outlets, such as Stat News in its article titled “Correcting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine ‘facts’”, are stating Mr. Kennedy is wrong because they claim the clinical trial relied upon to license the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, did include a placebo control. They are wrong.
A placebo is defined by the CDC as a “substance or treatment that has no effect on living beings.” This means a saline injection or water drops in mouth.
RotaTeq is administered via oral drops. A “placebo” would have been water drops in the mouth. The control used in the trial, however, included bioactive ingredients including almost all the ingredients in the RotaTeq vaccine itself.
How do I know this? Because in 2018, on behalf of ICAN, we were investigating the control used in each clinical trial relied upon by the FDA to license each childhood vaccine.
In that review, we found that while the package insert for the RotaTeq vaccine says the control in its clinical trial was a “placebo,” when we read the FDA’s clinical trial review for RotaTeq, the ingredients of this so-called “placebo” were redacted:
So, on behalf of ICAN we submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request to the FDA for “Documents sufficient to identify the ingredients of the ‘placebo’ in the prelicensure clinical trials identified in Section 6.1 of the package insert for RotaTeq.”
In a response dated June 14, 2018, the FDA provided the requested documents which clearly show that the control was not a placebo. Rather, it included polysorbate-80, sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, and sucrose.
These same four ingredients are also contained in RotaTeq. The only difference between the vaccine and the control is that RotaTeq also included tissue culture medium and rotavirus reassortments. So, bottom line: the control used in the RotaTeq clinical trial was not a placebo since it included bioactive ingredients.
For example, here is what the NIH explains about sodium phosphate, one of the ingredients in the control:
Sodium Phosphate can cause serious kidney damage and possibly death. In some cases, this damage was permanent, and some people whose kidneys were damaged had to be treated with dialysis (treatment to remove waste from the blood when the kidneys are not working well). Some people developed kidney damage within a few days after their treatment, and others developed kidney damage up to several months after their treatment.
And as these studies and data sheet make clear, polysorbate-80 is far from an inert substance, is bioactive, and can have safety concerns, especially when given to infants.
Bottom line, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s claim that virtually all childhood vaccines were licensed based on clinical trials that did not include a control group that received a placebo is correct. The undisputable evidence for this claim, all from FDA or pharma sources, is detailed on pages 3 to 7 of a response we sent to HHS on December 31, 2018. (In sharp contrast to virtually all other childhood vaccines, the clinical trial relied on to license Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for teenagers 12 to 17 years of age appears to have had a placebo control group, though we are still reviewing that claim.)
Here are copies of the charts from that 2018 response to HHS which show what the control group received in each clinical trial for each childhood vaccine:
It is also why the following claim by Dr. Paul Offit in his article “Should Scientists Debate the Undebatable” is categorically false: “All vaccines are tested in placebo-controlled trials before licensure.”
I would more than welcome a public debate with Dr. Offit on this point and would welcome being proven wrong – would gladly prefer that products injected into babies not have this safety gap. Oh, but wait, Dr. Offit says it is undebatable, which again shows precisely why there must always be complete, uncoerced choice when it comes to any medical product.
What is really incredible about the attacks on Mr. Kennedy is that he has made clear he has no intention of changing anyone’s right to obtain vaccines. Everyone who wants to keep vaccinating will be free to do so. He just wants to assure freedom of choice and help those who are injured by these products.
The media and medical profession’s attack on this position is callous. Just as they care about those injured by infectious disease, as Mr. Kennedy certainly does, they should also care about those injured by vaccines. Mr. Kennedy is clear that we can and should do both. And to his amazing credit, no amount of insult or attack has moved him from his position that we must protect every American, including those injured by these pharma products.
Millions in Taxes & FARA Violations Left Out of Hunter Biden Plea Deal, Critics Say
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 24.06.2023
Despite President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, striking a plea deal with regard to a couple of misdemeanor charges of failing to pay taxes, the scandal haunting the Bidens is not over, according to US legal observers and conservative commentators.
The US’ first son reached a plea agreement with the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday concerning federal tax and weapon possession charges: Hunter Biden is expected to admit that he withheld $100,000 in taxes in 2017-2018.
However, it’s a far cry from what he really owed to the US government, explained Just the News, an independent media outlet founded by US investigative journalist John Solomon. Citing supervisory IRS agent-turned-whistleblower Gary Shapley, the media outlet pointed out that Hunter has failed to pay about $2.2 million in taxes since 2014.
Earlier this week, Shapley’s bombshell testimony alleging the first son’s tax crimes and the DoJ’s meddling to shield the younger Biden, was made public. The whistleblower insisted that the Hunter’s misdeeds included not only tax evasion but also filing false tax returns since at least 2014: “Altogether it was around $2.2 million,” he told US lawmakers.
However, most of these felonies had been swept under the rug by the DoJ, according to Shapley. The department’s apparent interference in Hunter’s case ranged from refusing to approve search warrants to allowing the statute of limitation to expire in some instances, as per the supervisory IRS agent and his subordinate.
For its part, Hunter’s legal team insists that he had belatedly paid over $2 million in back taxes and penalties, accusing the IRS whistleblowers of a biased approach.
Nonetheless, US legal observers believe that the DoJ’s apparent cover-up of Hunter’s tax affairs and other potential felonies is fraught with the risk of a bigger scandal in the making. In particular, legal scholar Jonathan Turley raised concerns about the “absence of certain charges in the plea deal given to Hunter Biden” in his blog on Saturday.
According to Turley, the DoJ somehow overlooked Hunter acting as a de facto unregistered foreign agent, something that former President Donald Trump’s associate Paul Manafort was promptly accused of. The first son likely violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) while striking business deals with foreign entities including in China, Romania and Ukraine during and after his father’s vice presidency, the lawyer pointed out.
What’s more disturbing is that the Justice Department never initiated an investigation into the Bidens’ purported influence-peddling despite allegations of millions of dollars generated from Hunter’s foreign partners, according to Turley. Indeed, the House Oversight Committee has recently unveiled evidence supposedly proving hefty transfers to Biden family members from foreign sources. Still, Attorney General Merrick Garland has so far refused to appoint a special counsel to look into the matter.
The DoJ also appears to be uninterested in investigating bribery allegations involving Hunter Biden and his father as well as a 2017 Whatsapp message with threats from Hunter Biden to one of his Chinese associates, following which the Chinese reportedly sent $5 million to Hunter’s account.
According to Turley, the DoJ, Congressional Democrats and US mainstream media want these stories to disappear. He quoted former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) as saying “Everybody needs to back off!” while addressing GOP investigators and conservative critics.
“Of course, it still remains a challenge to hide an elephant if even one audience member goes looking. Polls show that the public overwhelmingly wants to pull back the curtain and see the elephant,” Turley noted, adding that the simmering scandal will create certain obstacles in the way of Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
IRS Whistleblowers Release New Bombshell Evidence Against Bidens, DOJ & AG Garland
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 22, 2023
Several bombshells dropped by two IRS whistleblowers on Thursday reveal, among other things, that Joe Biden’s DOJ buried evidence of Hunter Biden’s tax crimes – and stopped US Attorney David Weiss from bringing charges against Hunter in two different jurisdictions last year.
According to Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), Weiss sought to be appointed as a special counsel in the case last year but was denied as well.
What’s more, the IRS sought felony charges against Hunter, send their recommendations to the Biden DOJ, and they ‘came out as two misdemeanors,’ Byron York tweets.
According to the whistleblowers, one of whom is Gary Shipley – who came forward weeks ago to reveal his identity, the IRS was notified of potential evidence “in the guest house of former Vice President Biden,” but were rebuffed by US Attorney Lesley Wolf, who said there was “no way,” as search warrant “would ever get approved.”
“Whistleblowers describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging, and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes,” said Smith in a statement. “The testimony shows tactics used by the Justice Department to delay the investigation long enough to reach the statute of limitations, evidence they divulged sensitive actions by the investigative team to Biden’s attorneys, and denied requests by the U.S. Attorney to bring charges against Biden.”
During seven hours of testimony before the Ways and Means Committee, Shipley and the other whistleblower’s testimony implicates both AG Merrick Garland and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel for lying to Congress about political interference in the Biden probe.
“Whistleblower One’s story was corroborated by Whistleblower Two,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK).
“One individual came forward and laid out the full case of what’s going on. The second individual, through his attorney, asked Ways and Means to contact him and ask for testimony. So we didn’t seek these, they sought us,” added Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC).
As Techno Fog notes via The Reactionary;
With the rejection from the DC US Attorney, the team sought the approval to bring tax charges for years 2016-2019 in the Central District of California. Shapley concluded that “the Central District of California declined to allow charges to be brought there.”
The rejection to bring charges in DC and California stands in stark contrast to the testimony of Attorney General Garland, who in March of 2023 stated that US Attorney Weiss had the full authority to “bring cases in other jurisdictions.” Garland also said that he personally would ensure that Weiss could “carry out his investigation and that he [would] be able to run it.” Both those statements now appear to be false. (Your humble author thinks the Republicans knew Garland was making misrepresentations at the time.)
…
Preferential treatment of Hunter Biden might be an understatement. In reality, it was sabotage, the affirmative effort to decline investigative steps and deny prosecutors the ability to bring charges. The DOJ’s conduct included:
“included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before elections.”
Prosecutors even wanted to remove Hunter Biden’s name from electronic search warrants and document requests, even though this could cause investigators to not get certain evidence.
Joe Biden was in the room
In another piece of evidence presented on Thursday, Hunter Biden can be seen in a message to Chinese business associate, Henry Zhao, demanding that they send money as promised.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” wrote Hunter via WhatsApp on July 30, 2017. “Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.“
Hunter then warned that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.“ … Full article
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Trans agenda is ‘normalization of sadism’ – US author
RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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