We all know that torture is bad, but are we really aware of how much of the narrative of the past two decades was constructed on torture testimony? Do we know the CIA contractors who developed the torture program or the steps that the intelligence agencies took to cover up their illegal activities? And, when we connect the dots, are we prepared to face the parallels between the torture regime and the biosecurity regime? If you haven’t followed the twists and turns in the torture story since my 2008 podcast on the subject, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Documentation – Senate report: Torture didn’t lead to bin Laden
Time Reference:
06:41
Description:
Mostly an official story whitewash about the mythical courier that supposedly led them to Abbottabad where they totally killed bin Laden, guys. But it does admit that torture didn’t lead to OBL, so there’s that.
Hersh’s take on the OBL killing, sourcing to anonymous retired officials who couldn’t possibly know the details of that raid. Definitely worth taking with gigantic grains of salt, but does corroborate the fact that torture did not lead to the finding of Osama bin Bogeyman.
Back when the MSM had no compunction about reporting on the CIA threatening people’s children in order to extract false confessions. (But don’t worry, guys, the CIA has some child psychologists on hand to make sure those kids are tortured kindly!)
An archived MSNBC report on the fact that over a quarter of all of the 9/11 commission report’s footnotes derived from torture testimony and some of the terrorist’s “confessions” were signed without them even being allowed to read it.
The CIA brazenly broke the law again, this time hacking into the Senate’s computer system. Want to guess how many people were held accountable this time?
I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.
The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.
Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.
We may, if so inclined, most charitably explain the persistence of the Black Budget by appeal to bureaucratic habits (which do die hard…), even when the rational grounds for the secrecy no longer obtain. The strategic grounds originally used to justify the Black Budget disappeared with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but so did the tactical grounds, given that advanced nuclear weapons systems are already possessed by several governments, and the technology has been shared with others as well—whether by spies, defectors or simple mercenaries. The secrets, then, remain secrets, ironically enough, only to the very citizens who pay for the systems, including nearly all of their elected representatives.
Legislators continue nonetheless reflexively to approve every new defense budget, along with any requests for funding which anyone cares to cast as a matter of national defense. Indeed, embedding controversial, non-defense measures within National Defense Authorization Acts (NDA) has become a tried-and-true technique of passing new laws which would never have been ratified on their own, as stand-alone bills. A notable and relevant example is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which was rolled into the NDA of 2013. This tactic works because any congressperson who votes against “national defense” becomes an instantly denounced target by the political opposition and the media.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned in 1961 about the danger of perversely prioritizing state means of mass homicide over every other thing. How this ultimately came to fruition has been illuminated by Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), who shows how historical crises invariably expand the power of the state, the agents of which are loath to give any of it back. Even when the originating crisis is somehow mitigated or resolved, the government does not retract in size. Instead, it continues to “ratchet up” in response to each new crisis, with the previous expansion regarded as the new baseline.
Everyone is aware of this dynamic on some level, whether or not they spend much time reflecting on foreign affairs. We all know, to take a considerably less grave example than the summary execution of persons deemed “suspicious” by anonymous analysts, that when we prepare to fly anywhere in the world from the United States, we are not permitted to transport in our carry-on luggage any liquids or gels in volumes greater than 100ml (~3.3 ounces). Why do we still have to remove our footwear to get through airport security, more than two decades after September 11, 2001? Because some incompetent dude thought that he could use explosives hidden in his shoes to blow up a plane.
The post-9/11 travel security measures seem unlikely ever to change, and we can also expect the structural features of the sprawling homeland defense apparatus, including mass surveillance of citizens not suspected of any crimes, to continue to grow, given the conservative nature of belief conjoined with the bet-hedging behavior of lawmakers. Setting what is arguably bribery by lobbyists to one side, the primary driving factor in the minds of politicians who wish to be reelected is plausibly that they want not to be blamed, should anything untoward happen after they vote to reduce the defense budget or eliminate any of the security-related laws already in place. And God forbid that unelected bureaucrats who dispense unaccountable Black Budget funds at their caprice should be “hobbled” through oversight!
The reasoning of opportunistic politicians appears to be that adding even more restrictions, filling the (feckless) defense department’s already overflowing coffers, and allowing off-the-leash bureaucrats to do whatever they may deem necessary in the name of national defense, will all be seen in a positive light by citizens who are counting on the government to serve as their protector. This fictional image is maintained, against all empirical evidence of the actual outcomes of every military intervention since World War II, because the populace is constantly “tutored” by the government-coopted mainstream media to support anything whatsoever labeled by anyone as “defense”. Examples include the “War on Terror”; the “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of the Libyan people; the empowerment of Saddam Hussein; the arming of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and, later, in Syria; the bombing of Kosovo; and the goading of Russian President Putin in 2022 to the point where he may opt to use nukes. Despite the human misery which these undertakings have caused, all have been “worth it,” according to mainstream media pundits, and as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might say.
Now, given the tendency of government restrictions enacted in response to crises to expand, the power of government authorities in such circumstances to augment, and the natural resistance of human beings to relinquish any of that power, the persistence and expansion of the Black Budget may not seem puzzling in the least. Having been trained quite effectively to believe that “national defense” is always and everywhere good, few citizens would find it troubling even to learn that trillions of Pentagon dollars have been “lost track of”—creating what is in effect an enormous supplement to the Black Budget, which should perhaps be termed the Ultra Black Budget.
Albeit considerably less charitable than the “bureaucratic habit” explanation for the persistence and growth of the Black Budget, equally plausible is that it has created a class of people who now wear what is tantamount to the ring of Gyges (Plato’s Republic). They are capable of committing crimes invisibly, with no possible risk of being redressed, much less punished, for their morally dubious activities. Why would anyone in such a position ever renounce that privilege, the unassailable power to do anything at all to anyone at all for any reason at all and with complete impunity? To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature and the reality of corruption, it should be clear that the ongoing pretext of state secrets privilege has opened up the possibility of an entire criminal underworld operating under the aegis of the U.S. government and fully funded by taxpayers.
What it worse, far from serving either strategic or tactical roles in defending our waning republic, the Black Budget is arguably being used to undermine it. Let us take as a possible example the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines between Russia and Europe. If this intentional act of piracy was perpetrated by the United States, then it is equivalent to a declaration of war against Russia. As a Black Op, the secret need never be admitted to anyone, even if it leads to World War III and nuclear holocaust. And therein lies the irony: the means to destroy the United States in toto are now possessed by a few individuals with access to the Black Budget, even though all of what they do is paid for by citizens under the assumption that they are being protected. Such is the logic of the legislatively shielded Black Budget that, if in fact the Nord Stream sabotage was a U.S. operation, then anyone who knows what happened and who dares to go public with compelling evidence of the truth becomes guilty of espionage, if not treason, and subject to the federal death penalty, if convicted. Conviction?
One of the most significant expansions of federal power in the twenty-first century has been the executive’s elimination of the requirement of conviction in a court of law before state execution. This assault on the most basic principles of the republic came about in incremental steps, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and was made possible by the technological development of the ability to kill by remote control.
The U.S. government’s first publicly vaunted execution of suspects by lethal drone outside a war zone was carried out under the authorization of President George W. Bush, on November 3, 2002, in Yemen, when a group of men were incinerated while driving down a road. Nearly twenty years later, President Joe Biden claimed to have terminated the life of alleged al Qaeda mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Afghanistan, on July 31, 2022. For his part, President Donald Trump openly bragged about having used a lethal drone to eliminate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleiman on January 3, 2020, at Baghdad International Airport, as though this brazen act of premeditated, intentional homicide were somehow noble or courageous.
Before Biden and Trump, it was President Barack Obama who in 2011 summarily executed not only Osama bin Laden, when he could have been taken prisoner, but also Anwar al-Awlaki, which places Obama in a league all his own, having intentionally denied even a U.S. citizen his right to stand trial for whatever crimes he was believed to have committed. (Note that an American, Kamal Derwish, was killed by the Bush administration in its publicly vaunted drone strike on November 3, 2002, but this fact appears to have been discovered after, not before, the strike.) Had Anwar al-Awlaki been found guilty of treason in a federal court, he might have been sentenced to death. Obama opted instead to streamline the process, in the manner of every tyrant since time immemorial, by imposing the death penalty on the basis of what the president, a fallible human being, had been persuaded by bureaucrats to believe was evidence of the suspect’s guilt. John Brennan, Obama’s drone killing czar at the time, was promoted in 2013 to the directorship of the CIA.
Obama also authorized the execution of U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, for which no official explanation was ever offered by his killers. Being a male and having recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday, the younger al-Awlaki did satisfy the Obama administration’s scrupulous standard for classifying a corpse as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA). Yes, the label EKIA was applied to all men who found themselves at the receiving end of missiles launched by U.S. drones, whether inside or outside areas of active hostility, provided only that they were of military age. We have Daniel Hale to thank for having revealed to U.S. citizens the unsavory truth about the drone program, that the burden of proof was inverted by the drone killers, who defined their victims as guilty until proven innocent. Note that Hale was rewarded for his courageous act of whistleblowing with a federal prison sentence.
The longstanding international proscription to political assassination has been flouted throughout the twenty-first century, and the string of intentional acts of homicide perpetrated and openly acknowledged by four successive administrations together illustrate that the U.S. executive is no longer constrained in any way by the letter of international law. Once someone has been labeled a “terrorist” by appropriately situated bureaucrats, the U.S. executive grants the drone assassins the license to take him out. Given this normalization of assassination, what precisely is the Black Budget being used for, if people deemed dangerous by the U.S. government may be summarily executed without any sort of judicial process whatsoever?
No one privy to the details, the line items shrouded in secrecy, is permitted to share them publicly without risking harsh sanctions. But logic suggests that the Black Budget and the ancillary Ultra Black Budget (the trillions of dollars “lost track of” by the Pentagon) are being either siphoned off by mercenary criminals, in yet another version of the lobbyist kick-back scheme, or else used to commit crimes which are even worse than the summary execution of suspected criminals without trial. Assuming for the sake of argument the latter to be true, if government officials are now permitted premeditatedly and intentionally to assassinate human beings, including U.S. citizens, perceived of as potentially dangerous, then what is it that the Ring of Gyges wearers are not permitted to do and which must, for allegedly strategic and tactical reasons, be done secretly and beyond the reach of any form of accountability?
There is no proof that the U.S. government perpetrated the Nord Stream attack and thereby increased the likelihood of nuclear war, in which millions of Americans could be expected to die. But undermining democratically elected foreign governments, through inciting mass unrest and plotting coups are enterprises in which the U.S. government is known to have engaged repeatedly. Again, a great deal of that sort of activity went on during the Cold War, on the grounds that the evil Communists could not be allowed to spread their ideology around the world. But communism is no longer a threat, so it is unclear what the rationale for undermining democratically elected governments is supposed to be today, beyond maintaining U.S. global military hegemony.
In this post-Communist world, examples of crimes worse than the summary execution of terrorist suspects (some of whom are in fact innocent) could be the summary execution (or attempted elimination) of persons whose outspoken opposition to the U.S. hegemon is perceived of as threatening to the defense apparatus itself. Such figures may have included Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, John McAfee, et al.—anyone who has dared to reject in an effective way the reigning narrative that “We are good, and they are evil,” which has been used to rationalize mass homicide and destruction wherever and whenever the current crop of U.S. elites happen to please.
Consider the plans reportedly drawn up to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is undeniable that this sort of initiative is both illegal and criminal, and yet it is, one gathers, fully funded by taxpayers. Less clear examples of the same phenomenon may or may not include the fate suffered by a long list of other “annoying” persons who came to tragic ends either by their own or someone else’s hand. The case of Julian Assange is especially troubling because he quite successfully exposed U.S. war crimes, and for his efforts he has been discredited and criminalized as though he were a mass murderer. It is true that Assange is still among the living, which cannot be said of the many other arguably less fortunate nonviolent dissidents eliminated by governments throughout history. But Assange has by now been incapacitated to the point where it can be said without hyperbole that he no longer is the person who he once was. His power to express dissent has been stripped entirely away. The Nord Stream sabotage “mystery” is in fact just the sort of event which Assange, if not shackled and muffled, might have been able to illuminate with the aid of whistleblowers.
Needless to say, this schema does not bode well for the future of free people, and least of all dissidents who criticize the government, pointing out its crimes and contradictions. President Biden recently announced that “domestic extremists” currently constitute the gravest danger to the republic, an allegation which he claims is based on reports from “our very own intelligence agencies,” presumably including the CIA and the FBI. Both of these organizations have evinced a morally unsavory “scorecard” mentality in recent years, attempting to rack up as many EKIA (in the case of the CIA) or federal convictions (in the case of the FBI) as possible—by all means necessary.
In the drone killing program run throughout the Middle East by the CIA in the twenty-first century, analysts have been generously remunerated for finding potential future terrorists to kill, with ever-lengthening hit lists of targets created through bribing informants on the ground while mining the cellphone data of persons previously suspected of terrorism. Meanwhile, in the homeland, FBI agents have gone to great lengths to identify potential future members of factional terrorist groups, and even to lure them into complicity in conspiracies to commit violent plots which were in fact masterminded by government officials and informants, who provided funding to hundreds of hapless losers who ended up being convicted and are now serving sentences in federal penitentiaries. It sounds preposterous, if not impossible, but such techniques of entrapment have been well-documented by Trevor Aaronson in his extremely disturbing exposé, Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (2013).
Given the ways in which suspected potential terrorists were targeted and ensnared by the CIA and the FBI throughout the “War on Terror,” we should be very wary of anyone who maintains that persons in the homeland who reject the current administration’s narratives are properly labeled “extremists”. “Extremism” is a concept by now wed to the notion of “terrorism,” and by calling dissenters at home “extremists,” the path is paved for bureaucrats to deploy the very same “tools” against them.
By stripping our civil liberties away and propelling the nation toward World War III, the bureaucrats currently protected by state secrets privilege are on track, and indeed seem determined, to destroy what remains of the republic. Nowhere is the danger before us more evident than in the shockingly reckless handling of the crisis in Ukraine by war propagandists posing as diplomats. It has become abundantly clear that the only way to rein in what has transmogrified into tyrannical rule by an unaccountable oligarchic bureaucracy is to abolish the Black Budget and cease funding any of the network of activities being perpetrated under cover of a spurious and obsolete need for secrecy.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
When considering war fatalities, we tend to construct a simple framework in our minds, of the form: “50,000 soldiers were sent into battle; 40,000 returned; fatalities 10,000. End of story.” But things are not so simple as this, for reasons both valid and fraudulent.
For one, the US government and military inevitably understate all the bad parts of their wars. It may be true that all governments and militaries do this, but here we are discussing the US. A few examples:
For the fire-bombing of Tokyo, any estimate of deaths less than one million is not even remotely plausible, yet I can recall that for many years the “official” US military estimate was 35,000.[1] The generally-accepted death totals for the Vietnam war (including Laos and Cambodia) is around five million; the US adamantly states the totals at only one million on the grounds that “Vietnamese statistics are notoriously unreliable”. Bonnie Triyana, an Indonesian historian, has documented the death toll during the American “pacification” of her country, of at least three million, while the NYT ran an article headlined “U.S. Stood By as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show”,[2] reducing the death total by 85% and blaming the deaths on Indonesians rather than the US CIA and military. It is more or less an axiom that the greater the atrocities and the more horrific the war crimes, the greater the understatement, and also the more extensive the media censorship on the topic.
It is also an axiom that whenever the US inflicts its military (and other) atrocities on other nations, the victim is almost inevitably blamed, in one way or another. The NYT article above is one example; there are many others. When the US released the swine flu in Cuba in 1971, necessitating the killing of Cuba’s 500,000 pigs,[3] [4] the tragedy was immediately engulfed in US media accusations of Cuba having a biological weapons program that was a threat to the world.
The topic of this essay is US casualties in Vietnam, but let’s first examine the landscape to see the kinds of troubles we have in making determinations with any semblance of accuracy. We will look at Iraq, since it is more current and we have more details readily at hand.
First, civilian deaths. The US military claims about 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. The US Senate clams 115,000[5], using numbers from the Brookings Institution. The Lancet claimed more than 650,000, with Fox News immediately challenging this “controversial new study” with its “disputed” results.[6] According to Fox, “one respected group” made a “rough estimate at closer to 50,000”, and “one expert” was “skeptical” of the new findings. The Guardian,[7] on the other hand, supported the study, stating that it had been “examined and validated by four separate independent experts”, stating also that the US military’s lower estimate was “was hugely controversial”. One UN estimate for Iraqi civilian casualties was over one million, and dozens of other “reports” and “studies” have been all over the map. Meanwhile, the US military remains silent and lets everyone speculate. If accurate figures are indeed available – and they may not be – those who have the data will never release it. Thus, we will never know the truth.
Then, US military casualties and casualty rate in Iraq. To determine this, we need to know the number of deployed soldiers and the number of fatalities. As to deployment, the US military says that about 775,000 troops “participated” in the Iraq war,[8] while the Council on Foreign Relations says a total of 340,000 US troops were deployed to Iraq. On the other hand, the US Senate tells us, in a “definitive” study,[9] that “More than 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq”. To make the picture even more clear, other sources state that these numbers do not include the “hundreds of thousands” of Blackwater and other mercenaries. To further increase the clarity, the US Military often either forgets or remembers (whichever is most convenient) to identify or differentiate between Army (active and reserve), National Guardsmen, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and other categories, sometimes including totals of all branches for deployment but casualties for the Army only. And so on.
Increasing the clarity yet further, the DOD tell us things like “there is a total of “260,000 US Troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria”, with no way to separate them by country. Another source tells us the US has deployed more than 2,000,000 troops to Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, again without separation.[10] If the Afghanistan figure of about 750,000 is accurate, that leaves about 1.25 million for Iraq, but we can’t be sure. Then we enter a huge cloud with statements like “More than 775,000 U.S. service members have deployed to Afghanistan at least once”, with no way to know how many have been double- or triple-counted. The military claim some have been deployed five times. At one point, the Pentagon stated there were 132,000 US troops deployed in Iraq, while the Congressional Research Service (CRS) said it was double that number at 260,000.
Further, on close examination of the data, we discover that the time periods are by no means consistent from one claim to another, with dates like: March 2003 to April 2009, March 2003 to June 2006, July 2004 to February 2013. Then, US military deaths and other casualties in Iraq. The US Senate’s “definitive study”, and the number most often presented, tells us about 4,500 US soldiers died in Iraq.[11] But then another report that appeared credible in its other data, stated that US casualties were in excess of 20,000 and climbing.[12]
Then we have a report in the Huffington Post that “The death count is accurate but the figure for combat injuries (of 35,000) wildly understates the number,” claiming the total may well be over 500,000, and that the Pentagon reports nearly 230,000 cases of . . . traumatic brain injury alone.[13]
Then we have some very strange reports, typified by an article in the WSWS,[14] detailing a distinction between “combat deaths” and “non-combat deaths”, with very wide variations between the two, the latter category being ignored by the DOD and the media, with some observers claiming the military deliberately pushes all possible casualties into the “non-combat” category. And here we enter The Twilight Zone: Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military’s Transportation Command stated his outfit had evacuated around 3,000 battle-injured casualties and nearly 19,000 non-battle injuries (both dead and wounded).[15] How is that even possible? For every soldier injured or killed in battle, another six were injured or killed in “non-battle” situations. And these injuries were apparently so severe they required emergency evacuation to Germany or elsewhere. Where did these “non-battle” injuries take place? In the mess tents? At the poker table? To add to the confusion, these deaths, injuries and evacuations apparently did not include “contractors” or Blackwater’s mercenaries.
There is the further problem of the apparently credible reports of the US military burying thousands of body bags in mass graves in the Iraq desert, with all those then listed as “Missing in Action” (MIA) and therefore excluded from the death toll.[16] These were apparently bodies of American servicemen and Blackwater’s mercenaries, who would now not be listed as war dead. This was not a single event but appeared to be a continuing program of some considerable size. The reporter cataloguing this was told that by classifying all those men as MIA, the US military could avoid many family, media, and financial difficulties, and that recruiting for both the military and Blackwater’s mercenaries would be much eased with smaller death tolls. The man was killed by a military sniper before he could release his videos and photos, which disappeared after his death.
The LA Times joined this parade with an article written by a former Air Force Captain employed by the US State Department in Iraq, who said that “95% of injured soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were not reported as casualties due to what he refers to as the Pentagon’s ‘fudging the numbers’ in a bid to win funding from American lawmakers to finance the wars.”[17]
And where does this leave us? Exactly no place. Given all the smoke, there is no way to know the real numbers for Iraq. According to the Guardian,[18] “a bitter war of numbers is raging. Trying to cut one’s way through the statistical jungle quickly becomes a battle over methodology, and sometimes over motives. Critics even raise the specter of fraud . . .” To ensure this state of affairs, according to Lt. General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq: “We don’t do body counts.”
Lastly, Slate carried an article stating that “A comparative analysis of U.S. casualty statistics from Iraq tells a different story. After factoring in medical, doctrinal, and technological improvements, infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966 – and in some cases more lethal.”[19] For your information, the “official” numbers for Vietnam were about 7 times higher than those for Iraq.
We would like to know the total deaths and the casualty rate for US servicemen in Iraq, but there seems no way to accurately determine either the actual number deployed to Iraq, nor the number of deaths and injuries. It seems reasonably clear that the official numbers are incorrect – some would say fraudulent – but the information necessary for firm knowledge isn’t available or accessible.
To return to the beginning, the US government and military inevitably understate all the bad parts of their wars. It isn’t a secret that they also lie about all portions of their military adventures. There were multiple media reports that George Bush told 900 separate lies about Iraq, leading up to and during the war. I don’t know if the statement was true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were, and the military, the State Department and the media told their share of hundreds of more lies about Iraq.
If we take the US Senate at their word for 1.5 million deployed in Iraq and a total of about 2 million for both Iraq and Afghanistan, with the “official” death toll at about 6,000 for both, we are left with 3 deaths per 1,000 or about 1/3 of 1%, a number that seems a bit implausible for about 20 years of war in both places. Given this, given the “95% are not reported”, given the “we don’t do body counts”, given the “injuries were not 35,000 but more than 500,000”, why would we choose to believe the “official” casualty statistics about Iraq?
Turning to Vietnam
The situation with Vietnam is not better than that in Iraq, but is actually much worse. This is true for no other reason than the powerful political constraints on Vietnam. For Iraq, the US population appeared to be more or less onside, with few street protests and other signs of strenuous objection. Vietnam was very different. You may recall the Kent State Massacre where protesting students were shot in the back on Nixon’s orders, and you may recall Daniel Ellsberg copying and releasing all the documents from the RAND corporation where he worked – the “Pentagon Papers”. The American public were so inflamed by the lies and the illegality, to say nothing of the brutality, of the Vietnam war that much of the nation was in anarchy and becoming ungovernable, with serious concerns of a nationwide public uprising that could easily have overthrown the government. It was in this climate that the US military rescinded the draft, primarily because almost no one was showing up for it.
No government wants to report bad news during a war, especially deaths and injuries, but Vietnam was a special case for the American military and for the government. Bear in mind that the US authorities lied about everything leading up to and during the war in Vietnam until the bad news escaped confinement. The false-flag Gulf of Tonkin incident was only the beginning. The US military lied about the existence of Project Phoenix, the massive torture-to-death program, about the use of Agent Orange – “The Vietnamese government asked us to spray some of their forests”. They lied about the false partition of Vietnam, about the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, about the total death tolls of Vietnamese, about the hideous deformed births, about the use of napalm on civilians, and scores of other items large and small. They also lied about the American POWs abandoned in Vietnam.
I have read through numerous files from that time and I cannot identify any item of consequence where the US military, government or media told the truth – essentially the same as Iraq.
Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000
Readers may recall my article on Robert McNamara’s Infamous “Project 100,000”,[20] where around 500,000 severely-retarded young men, combed from the ghettos of America, were pushed into military service and sent to Vietnam. These were men who were unable and had to be taught how to tie their own shoelaces, whose reading comprehension was so low the military had to make little comic books to explain the most basic of military protocol and procedures.
Many researchers have claimed that an overwhelming majority of these men, especially blacks, received combat assignments, and “comprised an overwhelming majority of … battle deaths”, and were also generally posted to “what were considered dangerous military occupations”. These men were provided with special ‘dog tags’ that began with “US67…” so they could be quickly identified by other soldiers. By all accounts, the regular troops did not want to be associated with these men, certainly not in a battle situation, because their lack of intelligence and training simply jeopardised the lives of all around them. Many have reported that when battlefield decisions were being made, given that these men were unable to learn anything much more complicated than pulling a trigger, they were just sent to their deaths. One Vietnam veteran reported that a common order issued to these young men ‘salvaged from the blight of poverty’ was to “Go over there and see if there’s a sniper in that tree”. According to Colonel David Hackworth, who fought in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and became one of the most highly decorated warriors in American history,
”Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam. It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce.”[21]
US casualty figures mushroomed after the introduction of this program, the victims of which were simply cannon-fodder and, for this and other reasons, I remain convinced there is a high probability that American deaths in Vietnam were grossly under-reported. The subject of war fatalities is always open to claims of manipulation by all sides, but more than a few people seem surprisingly eager to accept the US military’s Vietnam numbers, with what would appear to be unexamined opinions at best. Consider:
2.5 million US soldiers were sent to Vietnam. Officially, around 60,000 died, so a death rate of about 2.25%. “McNamara’s Morons” were reported to have been sent to Vietnam in total numbers ranging from 350,000 to about 500,000, depending on the source you choose. Their deaths are reported to be about 5,500. At the highest deployment numbers that would be a death rate of only 1%.
Yet all sources, including official US military reports, claim that these mentally-handicapped young men suffered fatalities at rates far higher than that of regular soldiers, many claiming death rates of “five to ten times” higher, most sources unanimous in claiming a death rate of around five times higher. I found only one original source claiming “three times higher”. But the mentally-retarded young men who were mostly infantry and confirmed as having been sent into combat at a rate “at least several times that” of regular soldiers, and who suffered death rates “at least several times higher’, apparently experienced a fatality rate only 40% or 50% that of regular soldiers. How does any of this make sense?
This is the problem that military researchers have in determining the truth of Vietnam even today, claiming that the US military provides only incomplete, contradictory, and confusing data, and stonewalls all attempts to ascertain the truth. In particular, researchers state the US military refuses to release any records on “McNamara’s Morons”, so there appears to be no way to know how many died. I do not know how many of these young men survived to return home. My estimate of “few returned” was gleaned from personal testimony of other soldiers who were in Vietnam and served with these men.
None of the official claimed numbers make any sense, either statistically or logically. The Vietnam war was one of the most bitterly-fought wars in recent history, one that the US lost and was in fact driven out of Vietnam, yet the total official death toll is a minuscule 2%+ for ordinary soldiers and a vanishingly-small 1% for hundreds of thousands of young men with an IQ as low as 60 and none above 80.
But perhaps a simpler question is this: The US government and military lied about almost every single element related to the war in Vietnam, and they did so – necessarily, I would suggest – in a political climate so incendiary that it might have sparked a popular revolution. Yet there appear to be many who inexplicably choose to believe that, out of literally hundreds of areas where the US government and military provably lied about US involvement in Vietnam, in this one single instance – the military death count – they magically are telling the truth. You are of course free to form whatever opinion you deem appropriate. For my part, I harbor grave doubts.
Mr. Romanoff’s writinghas been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
The Guardian’s coverage of the recent Nord Stream sabotage highlights the increasingly absurd lengths to which Western media will go to promote the U.S. government’s hegemonic agenda.
Guardian coverage of this portentous event has included at least three, shameless exercises in propaganda-masquerading-as-journalism.
On September 28 – two days after natural gas began belching into the Baltic Sea due to multiple blasts targeting Nord Stream – the Guardian published an article by Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, entitled “Nord Stream blasts could herald new phase of hybrid war, say EU politicians”.
By focusing attention on the perspective of EU politicians, the title of Oltermann’s article left no doubt as to its bias: E.U. governments have flooded Ukraine with weapons and have imposed sanctions on Russia that were plainly designed to destroy its economy. None of the E.U. officials quoted in the article can plausibly claim to be independent, objective arbiters of the debate over who attacked the Nord Stream pipelines.
According to Oltermann:
Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the Guardian the pipeline attack had the hallmarks of the “hybrid warfare approach” Russia has pursued for the last decade, with the aim of “dividing the European Union not by military but through social and diplomatic means”.
“We have to ask who has an interest in destroying this infrastructure,” said Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag’s committee on foreign affairs. While it was in the interest of the US, states in central and eastern Europe and the Baltics that Nord Stream 2 would never be activated, he argued that an act of state-sponsored sabotage by a Nato ally would have come attached with too large a risk of a political backlash.
“Russia, on the other hand, has an interest in sending us a signal: to threaten it could cause similar damage to pipelines between Algeria and France, to our power lines or submarine fibre-optic cables […] I consider it likely that Russia was behind this attack.”
What does Keisewetter mean by “hybrid warfare approach”, and why is this approach uniquely that of Russia? For decades, the U.S. military has degraded and destroyed the civilian infrastructure of its official enemies – for example, in Iraq and Libya. Therefore, one could just as easily argue that this act of sabotage has all “the hallmarks” of U.S. aggression.
Keisewetter does acknowledge that the U.S. (as well as certain unnamed European states) had an interest in killing the Nord Stream pipelines (more on that later), but he claims that the political backlash from their sabotage of Nord Stream would constitute “too large a risk”.
Yet, if recent history teaches us anything about relations between the United States and the E.U., it’s that the U.S. can get away with just about any betrayal of the E.U.’s trust.
In 2014, the Guardian and other Western media outlets revealed, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the U.K. intelligence agency, GCHQ, had tapped into fibre-optic cables carrying global communications, and that GCHQ had shared vast amounts of data with its U.S. counterpart, the NSA. The targeted fibre-optic cables included three undersea cables with terminals in Italy.
The Snowden documents also disclosed that the U.S. had spied on E.U. internal computer networks in Washington and the E.U.’s United Nations office in New York, and that the NSA had conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the E.U. Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.
At the time, Western media outlets also reported that the U.S. had secretly intercepted and monitored cell phone conversations of Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s Chancellor.
What was the “backlash” resulting from U.S. spying on Merkel and other top E.U officials? What price did the U.S. government pay for undermining the integrity of telecommunications infrastructure in the E.U.?
Apart from a few theatrical, you-hurt-our-feelings protestations from E.U. leaders — for example, Merkel’s pathetic complaint to Obama that U.S. spying on her cell phone conversations was “completely unacceptable” — there was no meaningful “backlash”.
The E.U. imposed no sanctions on the U.S. It did not sever diplomatic relations with the U.S.. It did not close down a single U.S. military base. Indeed, since the Snowden revelations emerged, U.S.-E.U. relations have been conducted essentially on a business-as-usual basis.
Predictably, Oltermann mentions none of these facts in his article of September 28. In fact, Oltermann evinces no scepticism that the political backlash would be too great if, indeed, the U.S. and/or its proxies had sabotaged Nord Stream.
Oltermann continues:
Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.
Several paragraphs earlier, Oltermann had revealed that a member of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee had acknowledged that the U.S. and certain European states had an interest in preventing the activation of Nord Stream, yet it was “not immediately clear” to Oltermann who stands to benefit from the destruction of that infrastructure?
Oltermann then acknowledges that, in Germany, there had been calls recently “to open the pipeline as an energy crisis looms over Europe”, but he dismisses those calls as having come from “political parties on the far right and the far left.”
The reality is that, due to the inaccessibility of affordable Russian gas, Germany’s economy is now on the verge of collapse. That is why, immediately prior to the sabotage of Nord Stream, German protesters took to the streets to demand that Nord Stream be reopened and that a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine war be pursued.
Oltermann evidently believes that only Germans on the “far right” and “far left” are alarmed about the immense hardships that Germany’s economic collapse will inflict upon their families and millions of ordinary Germans.
On September 29, the day after the Guardian published Oltermann’s article, it published an editorial focused on the Russian Federation’s just-completed annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. In that editorial, the Guardian’s editors wrote:
The annexations come alongside the mobilisation order, and, many believe, the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines (while Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit, US intelligence has been notably cautious about ascribing blame).
Nowhere in the editorial, however, does the Guardian explain the basis for its claim that “Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit”. Its editors do not offer a scintilla of evidence or logic to support their eye-popping claim that Russia may have blown up its own pipelines. Nor do they explain why U.S. intelligence would hesitate to accuse Russia of sabotage if Russia “clearly” was “the most plausible culprit”. When has U.S. intelligence been reluctant to level evidence-free accusations of criminality at Russia’s government?
Finally, on September 30, the Guardian published an article by Kate Connolly, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, entitled “Size of Nord Stream blasts equal to large amount of explosive, UN told”. Connolly wrote:
Intelligence sources quoted in the news magazine Spiegel believe the pipelines were hit in four places by explosions using 500kg of TNT, the equivalent to the explosive power of a heavy aircraft bomb. German investigators have undertaken seismic readings to calculate the power of the blasts.
The first signs of explosions were registered on Monday morning by a Danish earthquake station after suspicious activity in the waters of the Baltic Sea. A monitoring station on the Danish island of Bornholm measured severe tremors.
A representative of the Swedish coastguard told AFP: “There are two leaks on Swedish territory and two on the Danish side.”
It remains a mystery as to how the explosives reached the pipeline. According to initial reports, the explosions happened at depths of between 70 and 90 metres.
There has been speculation that mini submarines might have been used to deliver the explosives. However, the amount of explosives that would have been necessary to cause such large blasts make this theory increasingly unlikely.
Instead, experts are suggesting that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline structure may have planted the bombs during repair works.
If this theory proves to be right, the sophisticated nature of the attack as well as the power of the blast would add weight to suspicions that the attacks were carried out by a state power, with fingers pointed at Russia.Moscow has repeatedly underlined its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
On Friday, Vladimir Putin blamed the US and its allies for blowing up the pipelines, raising the temperature in the crisis. Offering no evidence for his claim, the Russian president said in a speech to mark the annexation of four Ukrainian regions: “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved on to sabotage. It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines.”
Three elements of Connolly’s report merit commentary.
First, who are “the experts” who suggest that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline may have planted bombs during maintenance? Connolly doesn’t tell us, nor does she explain why she omitted to reveal their identities. Are they government “experts”? Were they not authorized to speak publicly? If they were government experts, to what governments do they belong? Without this information, Connolly’s readers are unable to assess whether her sources do indeed have relevant expertise and are truly objective.
Second, Connolly claims that Moscow has repeatedly “underlined” its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. Really? I have never seen a threat from the Russian government to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. If indeed the Russian government ever issued such a threat, then why doesn’t Connolly tell us when, how and by whom that threat was issued?
By contrast, the President of the United States explicitly threatened earlier this year to “bring an end” to Nord Stream if Russia invaded Ukraine. That threat was issued in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz:
What is most damning about Biden’s threat is his response to a reporter’s question about Germany. When the reporter points out to Biden that Germany – a supposedly key ally of the United States – is part-owner of Nord Stream, Biden doesn’t flinch. He simply disregards Germany’s stake in the project and declares (with the hapless, weak-kneed Scholz standing near him) “I promise you, we will be able” to bring Nord Stream to an end.
For the sake of appearances and diplomacy, Biden could have dissembled. He could have said something like “of course, we will consult with our German partners before taking any action to end Nord Stream” or “the decision about ending Nord Stream will be made jointly with the German government”. Yet Biden said no such thing, evidently believing that the whole world should know that Germany’s view of the matter was irrelevant to the U.S. government.
Connolly says nothing in her article about Biden’s recent, explicit threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream, but she does make an unsubstantiated claim that Moscow had “underlined” its capacity to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
Finally, Connolly reports that Putin blames “the Anglo-Saxons” – presumably, the British and Americans – for the Nord Stream sabotage.
Let us contemplate that fact for a moment.
If in fact Russia did not blow up its own pipelines, and if the Russian government is convinced that the British and Americans sabotaged Nord Stream, the world is likely heading toward a very dark place, both figuratively and literally. The Russian government is not likely to tolerate Western attacks on vitally important Russian energy infrastructure. Somehow, at some point, Russia is liable to retaliate against the West’s energy infrastructure. The disabling of key energy infrastructure may well have dire consequences for Western economies that are already reeling from a global energy crisis.
If one or more Western governments are behind the sabotage of Nord Stream, they have crossed a red line that will expose Western economies and citizens to heightened energy insecurity in the months and years ahead. They may well have hurt the West far more than they have hurt Russia.
The Case Against Russia
I am a lawyer. I was first called to the bar in the State of New York thirty years ago. For most of my career, I have specialized in class action litigation. Typically, on behalf of my clients, I’ve prosecuted claims of fraud and other forms of corporate wrongdoing. Often, the claims I advance involve potential criminality. The complex evidence underlying these claims must be assessed and interpreted with meticulous attention to detail, but also with a healthy dose of scepticism and common sense.
Like any case of potential criminality, I approach the question of who sabotaged Nord Stream like a lawyer. I bring to bear my experience litigating claims of wrongdoing. Among other things, I ask: who possessed a motive to commit the crime? Who had both the ability and the opportunity to carry it out? Are the protagonists and the witnesses marshalled for and against those protagonists credible? What do qualified experts say? Are those experts unbiased? Taking into account these and other considerations, what are the most rational inferences to be drawn from all available evidence?
Certainly, the Russian military possessed the capacity to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, but what possible motive would it have to do so?
Gazprom, a fossil fuels behemoth that is controlled by the Russian state, invested over US$5 billion in Nord Stream 2. Moreover, had Russia wanted to stop the flow of gas to Europe through Nord Stream, all it had to do was turn off the gas taps in Russia. There was no need for Russia to destroy those pipelines and jeopardize a state-owned entity’s multi-billion-dollar investment.
As long as Nord Stream remained functional, the Russian government was able to offer an enticement to Germany to remove sanctions on Russia. As long as Nord Stream remains non-functional, Russia’s leverage over Germany is diminished considerably.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the Russian military had the opportunity to commit this sabotage.
The explosions occurred near Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Bornholm is surrounded by states that are either members of NATO or have applied to join NATO (Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Poland). It is only 100 km from the Polish coastline.
NATO heavily monitors and effectively controls the western Baltic Sea, where the sabotage occurred. How could Russian saboteurs execute this challenging operation while escaping detection by NATO?
The Case Against the United States
Arguably, no government had a greater motivation to destroy Nord Stream than the United States government.
Joe Biden was by no means the first U.S. politician to express a desire to see Nord Stream terminated. For years, U.S. government officials have condemned Nord Stream 2 and have pressured Germany’s government to abandon the project.
Here are but a few examples.
In 2014, former U.S. Secretary of State and unrepentant war criminal Condoleeza Rice gave an interview in which she was asked whether Germany had been sufficiently “aggressive” with Russia. In response, Rice expressed her desire that Europe “depend more on the North American energy platform” and “the tremendous bounty of oil and gas we are finding in North America.” “You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia,” she added. “For years, we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It’s time to do that.”
In December 2021, as fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine intensified, Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, was questioned by Republican Senator Ron Johnson about the Biden administration’s plans for sanctioning Russia. Johnson prefaced his questions by noting that, despite their differences, Republicans and Democrats were united in their hostility to Russia. Johnson also stated that it was important to make Vladimir Putin understand how “harmful” U.S. sanctions would be to the “Russian people”. Then, after noting the Senate’s strong support for sanctions on Nord Stream, Johnson asked Nuland whether the Biden administration was contemplating sanctions that “would prevent Nord Stream 2 from ever being completed.” Nuland replied “absolutely”.
If Victoria Nuland is familiar to you, that might be due to her infamous 2014 conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. A leaked recording of that conversation revealed that the U.S. government had handpicked the next Prime Minister of Ukraine in advance of a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. In Nuland’s conversation with Pyatt, Pyatt noted that E.U. officials did not agree with Washington’s choice for Ukraine’s next PM. In response, Nuland said to Pyatt “fuck the E.U.”
One cannot overstate the U.S. government’s contempt for the priorities of its European allies vassals.
Despite the extensive and unambiguous record of U.S. government hostility to Nord Stream, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laughably claimed, on the day after the sabotage, that the destruction of Nord Stream was in “no one’s interest”. If that were true, why would anyone destroy it?
It took the dim-witted Blinken less than one week to publicly contradict himself. On October 2, he giddily declared in a press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly that the destruction of Nord Stream presented to the United States a “strategic” and “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.
Even in the absence of these and similar statements by U.S. officials, it would be obvious that the U.S. government has a motive to “bring an end” to Nord Stream.
The neocons who control U.S. government foreign policy covet, above all else, global hegemony. Maintaining U.S. global hegemony requires that the U.S. effect regime change in Russia and that it replace Russia’s nationalist government with a Yeltsin-like buffoon who will slavishly do the bidding of his American handlers. Only then will it be possible for the U.S. to isolate and ‘contain’ China, whose growing wealth and power is the primary impediment to U.S. hegemony. As long as the powerful German economy is closely intertwined with that of Russia, the U.S. government’s ability to undermine Russia’s economy will be limited.
Quite apart from that, the U.S. fossil fuels industry stands to gain enormously from the E.U.’s rejection of Russian fossil fuels. As Blinken acknowledged, U.S. gas producers are undoubtedly licking their chops at the “tremendous opportunity” created by Nord Stream’s destruction.
Not only did the U.S. have the motive to destroy Nord Stream, it had both the technological capability and the opportunity to do so.
The site of the sabotage lies in waters that are effectively controlled by NATO.
According to Flightradar24 data, U.S. military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream sabotage near Bornholm Island earlier in September.
Moreover, in June of this year, the U.S. military conducted the BALTOPS naval exercise off the coast of Bornholm to demonstrate NATO’s mine hunting capabilities. According to an official publication of the Navy League of the United States, this exercise was used as “an opportunity to test emerging technology”:
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.
Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68.
By contrast, I’m aware of no reports of the presence of Russian military assets at or near the site of sabotage in the months leading up to the incident. (If you have seen such reports, I encourage you to share them with me.)
Immediately before the explosions that disabled Nord Stream, German protesters had taken to the streets to call for the reopening of Nord Stream in the face of skyrocketing energy bills. What better way to prevent the German government from acceding to public pressure than making it impossible for Nord Stream to deliver gas to Germany?
Of course, this circumstantial evidence does not prove definitively that the U.S. military or a proxy acting with the consent and support of the U.S. government sabotaged Nord Stream, nor does it disprove definitively that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines.
Nonetheless, the totality of the circumstantial evidence makes a mockery of claims by the Guardian and other pro-NATO, Western media outlets that Russia is ‘the most plausible culprit’.
By any rational measure, the United States government is, by a wide margin, ‘the most plausible culprit’.
Another plausible culprit is Poland.
Not only is Poland closer to the site of the sabotage than Russia, Poland’s government is intensely hostile to Russia.
Poland’s government detests the Nord Stream pipelines. Using highly undiplomatic language against a fellow NATO and E.U. member, the Polish government has repeatedly castigated Germany’s government for the Nord Stream project. In 2021, for example, it accused Germany of forming a “brutal alliance” with Russia against the interests of other European states.
Shortly after the sabotage was revealed, Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, tweeted an image of natural gas spewing from the site of the Nord Stream sabotage, along with the words “Thank you, USA.” He quickly deleted the tweet after it went viral.
It may well be that Poland played a role in the attacks on Nord Stream, but it is difficult to imagine that it would commit a crime of this magnitude without the consent and support of the U.S. government, NATO’s dominant member.
Where do we go from here?
Danish and Swedish authorities are reportedly conducting an investigation into the Nord Stream attacks. The Kremlin claims that it has not been invited to participate in the investigation, while Nord Stream operators say that they were unable to inspect the damaged sections of the pipelines because of restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish authorities who had cordoned off the area.
Denmark is a member of NATO, while Sweden has applied for NATO membership.
If Germany was a truly sovereign state, its government would demand an independent, international investigation into the attacks on Nord Stream.
Moreover, no investigation supervised by a NATO or a wannabe-NATO government could be truly independent, especially if Russian authorities have been excluded from the investigation. All NATO states, and particularly NATO’s most powerful member (the U.S.), have a strong interest in pointing the finger at Russia.
The fact that Germany’s government has not demanded a truly independent investigation speaks volumes about Germany’s supposed sovereignty, but the German government’s feeble response should surprise no one. At the behest of their masters in Washington, German ‘leaders’ committed their country to economic suicide months ago.
Sooner or later, however, the truth about Nord Stream may well emerge. If it is ultimately demonstrated that the United States or a U.S. proxy attacked Nord Stream, and did so at a moment when Germany’s economy is collapsing under the weight of an energy crisis, the consequences will be enormous, not only for Russia’s relations with the West, but also for Germany’s (and the E.U.’s) relations with the United States and NATO.
Indeed, the Nord Stream sabotage may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential crimes of the twenty-first century. If the U.S. committed the crime, Western media will have played a key role in protecting the criminals who did it.
I leave you with this video clip of an October 3, 2022 interview of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. When Dr. Sachs has the temerity to suggest that the U.S. government is behind the Nord Stream sabotage, two Bloomberg reporters freak out and attempt, unsuccessfully, to shut him down. (Check out his priceless facial expression when the Bloomberg reporters lose it.)
A long WaPo nothing piece discusses how the intradermal injection of Jynneos leaves a nasty lesion for up to six weeks, marking gay men. The article fails to touch on the evidence that it does or does not actually work, nor why the shot causes this prolonged misery. TB tests given intradermally only left a lesion for about a day, so what is so noxious about the Jynneos vaccine, which was diluted to only 20% of the original strength, that it causes such a prolonged lesion of the upper arm?
CDC buried the graph below, but eventually I found it. New monkeypox cases are only one fifth what they were in August, a mere 8 weeks ago. Soon it will be gone.
Before that happens, however, NYC wants to inject as many people as possible. It has expanded eligibility to anyone who wants the vaccine, and has advertised 30,000 newly available doses.
After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of COVID-19 vaccines, blood clots were some of the earliest adverse events observed, and abnormal coagulation continues to be one of the most frequent and serious problems reported.
As of mid-September, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — notorious for capturing only a minuscule proportion of adverse events — had received notification of more than 43,000 blood clotting disorders, including acute-onset problems in young children.
Clotting disorders make the blood clot “too easily,” generating clots that can travel through the bloodstream and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, among other potential complications.
Funeral directors and embalmers in the U.S. and U.K. have gone public with shocking descriptions of highly unusual blood clots in up to 85% of the bodies coming under their care — a “massive increase” compared to pre-COVID-19 vaccine times when ordinary-looking clots might be found in 5% to 10% of the deceased.
“In all my years of embalming, we would run across clots from time to time,” said Richard Hirschman, an experienced funeral director in Alabama, “but since May last year [2021], something about the blood has changed. It’s not normal. It’s drastic.”
The rampant clotting and the clots’ disturbing sci-fi appearance — “long fibrous entities that can completely block a vein or artery,” which Hirschman likens to calamari, rubber bands, spaghetti, worms or parasites — are just some of the concerns prompting questions about blood supply safety.
No ‘safety risks?’
About 55% of blood is plasma — which, among other functions, supplies proteins “for blood clotting and immunity” — with the remaining 45% consisting of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets suspended in the plasma.
Depending on their blood type, individuals who give blood can choose to donate whole blood, plasma or platelets, or they can make a “Power Red” donation (a “concentrated dose” of red blood cells).
The American Red Cross says it will not accept blood from someone whose blood “does not clot normally,” but — following guidance from the same branch of the FDA that oversees vaccines — welcomes immediate donations from anyone who received one of the mRNA or other COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S., as long as the person says he is “symptom-free and feeling well.”
The Red Cross claims to be independent but openly celebrates its “special relationship” with the federal government — a relationship that includes periodic appropriations and contracts.
In a recent tweet directed at potential blood transfusion recipients, the Red Cross clarified:
We don’t label blood products as containing vaccinated or unvaccinated blood as the COVID-19 vaccine does not enter the bloodstream & poses no safety risks to the recipient. If you have safety concerns about potential blood transfusions, please speak with your medical care team.
The tweet generated numerous responses from the public accusing the Red Cross of disseminating “misinformation” and directing the organization’s attention to peer-reviewed publications contradicting its languid attitude.
In one of the most alarming studies, published in August in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, Italian surgeons described atypical clumping of red blood cells and the presence of “extraordinarily anomalous structures and substances” of “various shapes and sizes of unclear origin” in over 94% of symptomatic, COVID-19-vaccinated individuals whose blood they examined.
The 1,006 study participants, ranging in age from 15 to 85, received a first (14%), second (45%) or third (41%) dose of a Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine about a month before the analysis of their blood.
Pointing to other studies that found foreign materials in the blood of COVID-19 vaccine recipients and in COVID-19 vaccine vials — materials “that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the many promoters of the experimental injections claimed were not in them at all” — the Italian authors concluded the vaccine-induced blood alterations were “likely … to be involved in producing the coagulation disorders commonly reported after anti-COVID injections.”
Putting the matter even more plainly, they stated:
“[S]uch abrupt changes as we have documented in the peripheral blood profile of 948 patients have never been observed after inoculation by any vaccines in the past according to our clinical experience. The sudden transition … from a state of perfect normalcy to a pathological one … is unprecedented. …
“In our collective experience, and in our shared professional opinion, the large quantity of particles in the blood of mRNA injection recipients is incompatible with normal blood flow especially at the level of the capillaries.”
Another study by Romanian researchers, sent to the Red Cross by the tweeting public, not only reported that Pfizer’s “vaccine-associated synthetic mRNA persists in systemic circulation for at least 2 weeks” but also noted, “extended plasma clearance times compared to estimates presented by mRNA vaccine manufacturers.”
Meanwhile, a case report from Germany presenting autopsy results for a man who died after receiving three “gene-based” COVID-19 vaccine doses (one AstraZeneca, two Pfizer) over a seven-month period conclusively revealed the presence of COVID-19 vaccine spike protein in both brain and heart — and particularly in small blood vessel cells.
These and other studies may be why members of the public like “Mary” incredulously tweeted back to the Red Cross, “Are you kidding? There is proof it enters other body cells like the heart, causing myocarditis; how do you think it gets to the heart from the injection site???”
The FDA has refused to release autopsy results in its possession for people who died following COVID-19 vaccination.
Out, damned clot
As early as May 2021, vaccine researchers were disclosing the “unexpected” entry into the bloodstream of the vaccines’ synthetic spike protein, while other pharmaceutical industry consultants admitted, “Some of the vaccine dose is going to make it into the bloodstream, of course.”
Around the same time, figures like Canadian physician Dr. Charles Hoffe were warning that technologies like CT scans and MRIs, which can identify large blood clots, would not find the “microscopic” clots affecting many of the COVID-19-vaccinated, who might “have no idea they are even having these microscopic blood clots.”
Hoffe was able to ascertain the widespread presence of micro-blood clots in his mRNA-vaccinated patient population using D-dimer tests that look for protein fragments associated with clots.
The Canadian doctor also cautioned that when blood clots damage the brain, spinal cord, heart or lungs, “those tissues … are permanently damaged.”
A year after these admissions, in May 2022, the FDA finally acknowledged the risk of “potentially life-threatening blood clots” in recipients of the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) issued similar advisories about AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Other countries such as India and Denmark admitted to blood clot risks while trying to blame them on “faulty injection technique.”
Neither the FDA nor the EMA said a word about the clotting risks of the more widely used Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 shots, even though nearly 7 in 10 (69%) of the clotting disorders reported to VAERS as of mid-September were attributed to Pfizer’s shot, with another 22% linked to Moderna’s and only 9% to the J&J jab.
Although no VAERS reports thus far blame blood clots on the more recently authorized Novavax vaccine, the far-from-traditional nanoparticle concoction not only delivers premade spike proteins — “consistently shown to create clotting issues” — but also residual insect and viral proteins and DNA contaminants.
Large risks from nanoparticles?
Nanoparticle technology is a prominent feature of the two mRNA injections and the Novavax vaccine, and biodistribution of the injected nanoparticles has been a growing cause for concern.
Well before COVID-19, mainstream news outlets alerted the public to nanoparticles’ tendency to “get into the bloodstream and accumulate elsewhere in the body” following oral ingestion — with “unintended effects on cells and organs” — and described how inhaled nanoparticles “work their way through the lungs and into the bloodstream where they can raise the risk of heart attack and stroke.”
On a website for laypeople, the European Commission discloses that nanoparticles “will move with the circulation into all the organs and tissues of the body,” also noting animal model evidence showing “that very small nanoparticles can transfer from a pregnant rat to the fetus.”
In their analysis of vaccinated individuals’ blood, the Italian authors quoted earlier noted their suspicion that some of the foreign materials they detected are “graphene-family particles,” materials that “have been intensively studied by researchers for decades and increasingly so since COVID-19.”
A comprehensive and hardly reassuring 2016 study in Particle and Fibre Toxicology described “toxic side effects” of graphene-family nanomaterials in many biological applications, reporting that they “can induce acute and chronic injuries in tissues by penetrating through the blood-air barrier, blood-testis barrier, blood-brain barrier, and blood-placenta barrier etc.”
That study also noted that long-term toxicity data are lacking.
Many unanswered questions
Recently, a Washington State couple, Cornelia Hertzler and Ron Bly came forward to tell the tragic story of their hospitalized infant son’s death-by-blood-clot last February.
The death occurred two weeks after the hospital administered an unauthorized blood transfusion to the baby, despite claims that, “Patients are free to refuse transfusions for any reason.”
According to the parents, who had clearly articulated their wish to use blood from directed blood donors, the hospital pooh-poohed their concerns and used “random blood” instead.
The infant’s eventually fatal blood clot became evident the very next day, with the clot, by his mother’s account, getting “worse and worse and slowly … inching closer to his heart.”
Although there is no way to know the COVID-19 vaccination status of those who donated the blood used in the baby’s transfusion, the fact that “most of the nation’s blood supply is now coming from donors who have been inoculated [against COVID-19]” raises many questions.
Existing blood banks may prefer to dismiss those questions as the fevered imaginings of “COVID skeptics” — arguing that requests for blood from unvaccinated donors “would be an operational can of worms for a medically unjustifiable request” — but farsighted entrepreneurs interested in providing such a service might not have to worry about battling for clients.
“The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that,’” he said.
The FBI did not explicitly mention the laptop story but Facebook thought the story fit the pattern that the federal agency described and decided to limit the reach of the story.
Following Zuckerberg’s comments, the America First Legal (AFL), a legal nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, requested the FBI for the communications it had with Facebook between October 1, 2020, and November 15, 2020. The FBI refused to comply, claiming the request could not be done “with a reasonable amount of effort” because it was “overly broad.”
This week, the AFL filed a lawsuit to force the FBI to comply with its request.
The lawsuit states: “Barely a month before the 2022 midterm election, FBI officials continue to suppress information of great interest to American voters and stonewall AFL’s request for records relating to the FBI’s collusive scheme with Facebook to censor news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
The AFL is convinced there was “comprehensive collusion” between the FBI and Big Tech to put Joe Biden in the White House.
“The evidence is that during the 2020 Presidential election campaign, the FBI conspired and combined with large corporations, including Facebook, to censor and suppress the damning evidence of
Biden family corruption and influence peddling found on Hunter Biden’s laptop,” said AFL Senior Counselor Reed Rubinstein.
“This was done to help Joe Biden and the Democrats win the 2020 election.”
Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley wrote letters to FBI Director Chris Wray and Zuckerberg asking for the names of the employees involved in the communications about “Russian disinformation.”
“The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden,” the senators said in the letters.
But it remains silent about Western possible involvement in the crime
By Lucas Leiroz | October 7, 2022
In a recent article published by The New York Times, it was reported that US intelligence believes Kiev authorized the terrorist attack that murdered Russian journalist and activist Daria Dugina, daughter of the political scientist and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. With this, the prevailing narrative on the case in the US takes on an accusatory tone against Ukraine, but the silence remains on the connivance of Western countries, which refused to help the Russians to capture those responsible for the attack.
The article cites unidentified sources that confirm the Russian version that Dugina’s death was caused by an intelligence operation planned, authorized, and executed by Kiev’s agents. According to NYT’s sources, information confirming the Ukrainian authorship of the attack was shared among US officials recently, thus corroborating the suspicions previously showed not only by Moscow, but also by many experts around the world.
The article, however, emphasizes that the operation was conducted exclusively by Ukrainian officials, with no US agents participating. Apparently, American intelligence did not take note of any planned Ukrainian attack and only obtained confirmation about the plans of its Ukrainian partners much later, with the Americans even “admonishing” Kiev for having conducted such a bold operation.
“The United States took no part in the attack, either by providing intelligence or other assistance, officials said. American officials also said they were not aware of the operation ahead of time and would have opposed the killing had they been consulted. Afterward, American officials admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination, they said”, the article mentions.
It is curious to observe how the American media has suddenly changed its assertion, after months denying the veracity of the reports published by the Russian government on the case. Some Western journalists even spread conspiracy theories about the possible involvement of the Russian state itself in the attack, trying to create the story that Moscow had planned a false flag operation to justify a military escalation.
Over time, however, the veracity of the Russian explanation of the case became undeniable. Russia did not initiate any escalation in the conflict, which made the false flag plot lose credibility. And the very Ukrainian practice of murdering civilians became so well known that it could no longer be hidden. Thus, for the NYT disseminating this type of content precisely at this time serves American interests perfectly, as a large media vehicle is getting ahead in releasing an “official version” of the facts, preemptively taking control of the narrative.
It is important to emphasize that American intelligence does not act in defense of “press freedom” when it communicates data to the major newspapers. There are always well-defined strategies and clear objectives to be achieved. In this case, the objective is to isolate the blame for the attack in Kiev and to exempt Western countries from any co-responsibility before Russian investigations go even deeper and other data are revealed. Now, any eventual Western involvement could be called a “conspiracy theory”.
However, it is curious to think that there is such a lack of communication between the Ukrainian and American intelligences. The Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime not only serves as a proxy for American interests but is virtually guided by the US in all its decisions, with NATO agents acting among the strategists in Kiev. It is hard to believe that NATO was not even aware that an operation as complex as the one that killed Daria was being planned by its partners.
However, Western contribution to Daria’s assassination goes beyond that. Western countries refused to cooperate with Russia to capture Daria’s murderer even after Moscow published official data on the conclusion of its investigations. Daria’s assassin, the Ukrainian spy, member of the Azov Battalion Natalya Vovk, after committing the crime fled to Estonia and then to Austria. Russia asked for cooperation and asked European authorities to help find the killer but received no response. In fact, this can be interpreted as a form of “participation”, considering that Western countries deliberately prevented Russia from capturing a criminal responsible for the death of a civilian, even though there was sufficient evidence of Vovk’s involvement in the crime.
Now that the Americans have admitted that their proxies killed an innocent civilian – and assuming the narration that the Ukrainians acted alone to be true – the least the Europeans should do is a formal apology and start cooperating so that Ukrainian criminals do not freely cross their borders when they are wanted in other countries. And the US should commit to preventing Kiev from doing anything like that again.
It remains to be seen, however, if the West is really innocent in this case or if this NYT’s publication was just a strategic move to take control of the narrative before something more frightening is revealed in the near future.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas onTelegram.
With the mainstream crying Russia, which makes zero sense… (I have the keys to the taxi I’m driving, which pays my bills but to turn it off, I’ll blow it up also:
On 25 July 2022, Gazprom announced it will reduce gas flows to Germany to 20% of the maximum capacity, or 50% of the current throughput. The company shut down the pipeline for 10 days because of maintenance.
On 31 August 2022, Gazprom halted any gas delivery through Nord Stream 1 for three days, officially because of maintenance. On 2 September 2022, the company announced that natural gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would remain shut off indefinitely until the main gas turbine at the Portovaya compressor station near St Petersburg was fixed from an engine oil leak.
And the alternative mainstream crying USA, which makes more sense, but the plethora of memes and ease in which the ‘almost mainstream’ talks about this option… including the infamous ‘thank you USA’ tweet from the (Jewish) former Polish foreign minister, Sikorski, who then deleted it (after millions of views and re-tweets)… it all looks remarkably ‘black or white’; and this, as always, should be a red flag.
Who? How? Why? are the questions everyone is asking… but no one asked when?
Rosh Hashanah 2022 began in the evening of Sunday, September 25 and ended in the evening of Tuesday, September 27.
Ah… but what is Rosh Hashanah ?
Rosh HaShanah (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה, Rōʾš hašŠānā, lit. “head of the year”) is the JewishNew Year. The biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah (יוֹם תְּרוּעָה, Yōm Tərūʿā), literally “day of shouting or blasting.” It is thefirstof theJewishHigh Holy Days (יָמִים נוֹרָאִים, Yāmīm Nōrāʾīm; “Days of Awe”).
Literally day of shouting or BLASTING?
Who suffers most with Nordstream being blown up? Germany. Do a little google search for « germans to freeze this winter »… there are thousands of articles… most written even before september…
Nordstream was a way for Germany to get gas direct from Russia, without paying expensive transit costs through Eastern European middlemen… Eastern European middlemen.
The Biden administration and the media present Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in response to military setbacks as an unprecedented break with long-established and hitherto unquestioned rules of international statecraft. This narrative is a lie.
In fact, the United States and other imperialist powers have not only considered on several critical occasions using nuclear weapons to reverse military defeats. They have directly threatened to drop atom bombs in order to extract concessions from their enemies.
There are the well-documented demands of General Douglas MacArthur for the dropping of nuclear bombs on China, President Eisenhower’s weighing of France’s request for the detonation of nuclear devices at Dien Bien Phu, and President Kennedy’s threats during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Far less known and even more serious were the use of nuclear threats by President Nixon against the USSR and Vietnam. Operation Giant Lance was initiated on October 27, 1969, according to Wikipedia, to force a settlement of the Vietnam War on terms favorable to the US.
According to Wikipedia, Nixon “authorized a squadron of 18 B-52 bombers to patrol the Arctic polar ice caps and escalate the nuclear threat … to coerce both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam to agree on favorable terms with the US, and conclusively end the Vietnam War.”
Nixon made use of what was referred to as the “madman” tactic to convince the Soviet Union that he was capable of ordering a nuclear strike. Another operation, related to Giant Lance, was “Duck Hook.”
Its purpose was to force North Vietnam, using the threat of a massive nuclear strike, to accept US terms for ending the war. Wikipedia states that Duck Hook called for the nuclear bombing of military targets throughout North Vietnam. This included “the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the bombing of dikes to destroy the food supply of much of the population of North Vietnam, air strikes against North Vietnam’s northeast line of communications as well as passes and bridges at the Chinese border …”
Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s criminal accomplice, told the president that the US had to be prepared to use nuclear weapons. In a memo to Nixon, Kissinger wrote: “To achieve its full effect on Hanoi’s thinking, the action must be brutal.”
Eventually, because of doubts about its strategic effectiveness and fear of a violent popular reaction, Duck Hook was not implemented. But Nixon continued to threaten Vietnam and the Soviet Union with nuclear war.
This history proves that 1) the claims that Putin is breaking a previously unquestioned taboo on the use of nuclear weapons are fraudulent; and 2) that the US, if confronted with the prospect of military defeat, would certainly resort to nuclear warfare.
Knowing that the US would use nuclear weapons if confronted with a desperate military situation, the Biden administration’s relentless efforts to push Putin into a corner and force capitulation are totally reckless.
Dr. Emanuel Garcia, a New Zealand doctor who said he believes he lost his medical license for questioning and speaking out against the official COVID-19 narrative, also believes that the U.S.-based Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) played a role.
“We desperately need a real and deep investigation into this private entity that is pulling strings worldwide,” Garcia told The Defender.
Garcia — a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 — is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has lived in New Zealand since 2006.
Garcia reapplied for his license to keep it — but instead of receiving a successful renewal notice from the country’s medical council, Oct. 29, 2021, he received a letter stating that the council had “resolved” to suspend him from practicing because, “Dr. Garcia’s conduct raises one or more questions about the appropriateness of his conduct or the safety of his practice.”
In an interview with The Defender, Garcia said:
“Apparently, the chief psychiatrist of my hospital reported me to the medical council because I made these videos wherein I spoke about natural immunity, the early treatment, how ridiculous it was to try to eliminate a respiratory environment.”
Council Chair Dr. Curtis Walker said there was no place for “anti-vaccine messages” in a medical professional’s practice — or on their social media.
In its letter, the council listed complaints about Garcia’s behavior, including that he wrote an open letter to the prime minister titled, “Another Disastrous National Lockdown,” posted videos about COVID-19 on Voices For Freedom, YouTube and Odysee, and voiced opinions about the handling of COVID-19 on social media that did not align with the council’s statements.
Garcia called the letter “a farce.” He said none of the things he did were “great” or “revolutionary” — in his mind, he was pointing out “basic things” to the public as he witnessed the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic and the New Zealand government’s response to it.
Garcia didn’t fight the suspension because he was “sick of their duplicity” and “wanted out.”
“My lawyers were advising me to fight and to sign a so-called ‘voluntary undertaking’ which would have muzzled me,” he said.
If he had signed the voluntary undertaking, Garcia would have agreed to not say anything that ran counter to the council’s statements on COVID-19. The idea was, he said, that doctors who signed a voluntary undertaking were signaling to the council that they were willing to “play by their rules” and that the council, therefore, would “be more lenient with the punishment they dole out” — such as fines or suspension of the doctors’ license.
“I refused,” Garcia said. “I gave a lot of talks at parliament during the protests here in New Zealand, and I spoke freely — unfettered.”
Garcia said he chose to retain his freedom of speech and was able to “fully disengage” from the council through the use of common law, or equity law, to legally sever his professional ties to the council.
“According to the rules and principles of equity, I exercised my equitable right to annul, abrogate and cancel my registration with the Medical Council of New Zealand,” Garcia said.
Soon afterward, Garcia learned about the council’s connection with the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA), which is the international arm of the FSMB.
“The Chair-Elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, just happens to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand, and the Secretary of the IAMRA, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, just happens to be the President and CEO of the FSMB,” Garcia said.
Doctors worldwide who have “questioned things” have come under attack by their medical boards — and these medical boards “all come under the aegis of the FSMB,” Garcia said.
Garcia told The Defender :
“We have to do something different. We have to create an entirely new medical system that is out of the grip of these board-run matrices, one that honors basic medical precepts and practices rather than following algorithmic guideline-driven procedures engineered by bureaucrats.
“There is an opportunity for a magnificent renaissance of healthcare and it WON’T happen within the existing totalitarian system, it has to come from us.”
FSMB report targets practitioners of alternative medicine
Most doctors have not heard of the FSMB and are unaware of its influence, according to Garcia. He, himself, was unaware until his colleague, Dr. Bruce Dooley, a U.S.-trained medical practitioner who also lives in New Zealand, told him about it.
Dooley recently spoke out publicly about his knowledge of the FSMB.
In an “explosive” Sept. 24 interview with FreeNZ’s Liz Gunn, Dooley explained that the FSMB and IAMRA are private “registered charities with ‘hidden and anonymous’ donors who oversee disciplinary action of licensed medical doctors.”
Dooley — who trained at Jefferson Medical College (now called Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Philadelphia, has a master’s in immunology and virus research from Villanova University and is a medical practitioner licensed in Hawaii, Florida and New Zealand — said the FSMB and IAMRA particularly target clinicians working beyond the Big Pharma paradigm, whom they label as “fringe” or “quack.”
“Big money must not be allowed to beat integrity and experience,” said a New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science spokesperson in a Sept. 28 press release about Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, while he was the president of the Florida chapter of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Dooley witnessed first-hand the FSMB’s attack on doctors who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
ACAM is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating physicians and other healthcare professionals on the safe and effective application of integrative medicine.
At the rate ACAM was growing during the late 1990s, the “world’s medical scene” would have become a “totally different thing” if the FSMB had not attacked integrative doctors 25 years ago, Dooley told The Defender.
“We had 1,200 members,” Dooley said, as doctors from New Zealand, Australia and Europe who were exploring integrative medicine were joining ACAM in large numbers and bringing with them their financial resources.
During this time, Dooley also investigated the FSMB by attending its annual meetings as a paying conference participant. He noted how during conference sessions, FSMB leaders encouraged doctors to harass their fellow doctors who were offering natural health treatments.
Moreover, Dooley obtained a report produced by the Special Committee on Health Care Fraud (later renamed the Special Committee on Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices) showing that the FSMB perceived CAM and doctors who practiced it to be a “risk to public health.”
The FSMB’s governing body in April 1997 accepted the committee’s report as policy.
The report — which is no longer available on the FSMB website but which Dooley shared with The Defender — negatively labeled CAM as “questionable” practices that could constitute “health care fraud.”
The report said:
“In April 1995, Federation President Robert E. Porter, MD, established a special committee on health care fraud. The need for such a committee arose from the proliferation of unconventional and unproven medical practices and promotions in the United States, some of which may be questionable and thereby pose a risk to public health, safety and welfare.”
But according to Dooley, the committee’s motivation was not to ensure public well-being but to ensure that Big Pharma continued to get money. Natural and integrative medicine treatments, such as CAM, were getting in the way of profits for pharmaceutical companies.
The committee’s report said, “It has been estimated that up to $100 billion is lost to health care fraud in the United States annually.”
The committee members added:
“Medical interventions that do not conform to prevailing scientific standards are becoming increasingly popular.
“It is estimated that in 1990, Americans made 425 million visits to providers of ‘unconventional’ medicine, exceeding the number of visits to all U.S. primary care physicians, at a cost of approximately $13.7 billion.”
According to Dooley, the committee’s statements are essentially anti-competitive. “It’s such an anti-competitive piece,” he told The Defender, adding:
“Basically, the end says to the medical councils, ‘Look, we’ve got to stop this. This questionable medicine stuff is growing too fast. You need to get on board with us to pretty much slap down these doctors.’”
Now, 25 years later, Dooley said, the FSMB is employing a similar tactic against doctors who share what the FSMB calls “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19.
Some doctors, like Garcia, who questioned the pharma-driven global response to the COVID-19 pandemic had their licenses suspended.
Moreover, the FSMB actively seeks to influence federal and state legal policies, thus suggesting it may have played a direct role in generating California’s new law, signed last week, that punishes doctors who share “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.
The FSMB’s report obtained by Dooley openly stated:
“Through its Legislative Services Department and government relations firm, the Federation monitors federal legislative initiatives to identify proposals that could impact state medical boards.
“Upon the identification of such measures, the Federation develops strategies to intervene and oppose measures that could negatively affect state medical boards. The committee supports and encourages the Federation in its legislative efforts to protect the authority of state medical boards to regulate the practice of medicine, both conventional and unconventional.”
Indeed, the FSMB’s current website says it plays a “crucial role” in advocating for federal and state policies that “positively impact the health and safety of patients and the medical regulatory system.”
Could Sherman Anti-Trust Act be key to exposing FSMB?
Dooley agreed with Garcia that there needs to be a full and transparent investigation into who exactly funds the FSMB.
An effective way to accomplish that, he said, would be for a group of doctors who practice CAM or who have lost their licenses due to sharing COVID-19 “misinformation” to form a class-action lawsuit against FSMB for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Dooley said he voiced this idea in the late 1990s, to a class-action law firm. “After I went to two of their [FSMB’s] meetings, I actually took tapes and everything they had given out.”
“They’re quite arrogant, and they just tape everything. People are talking about ‘quack this’ and ‘how to get the quack’ in your area,’” he said.
Dooley said he told the law firm:
“Look at this. This is anti-competitive. I can get 100 doctors together who have all been ‘beaten up’ by their medical boards, all in the same way. Then we can, under discovery, find out who supports this ‘monster.’
“Because that’s the only way you’re going to get their books.”
Garcia and Dooley participate in New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science, a group that has written letters to the New Zealand government expressing concern about the Pfizer COVID-19 shot, “as well as the implication from our regulatory bodies that we would be considered incompetent in our duties if we provided fully informed consent about this procedure.”
Garcia told The Defender that New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science steering committee member, Dr. Matt Shelton — a primary care medical doctor since 1985 and a lecturer and examiner in integrative medicine — has had his license suspended twice.
The Defender contacted Shelton, but he was unable to give an interview by deadline.
In a Sept. 28 press release for Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn of FreeNZ, New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science said it “agrees with Ontario Supreme Court Judge Pazaratz,” who asked if “misinformation is even a real word … or has it become a crass, self-serving tool to pre-empt scrutiny and discredit your opponent?”
Watch Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn on FreeNZ here:
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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