IF YOU are British and of a certain age, you’ll remember the doomily portentous 1986/7 Aids warning campaign promoted by the UK government.
The slogan ran ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance.’
Here’s the most memorable ad. It featured the gravelly voice of John Hurt warning: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it has been confined to small groups. But it’s spreading . . . so protect yourself.’
I remember it well because I was at exactly the right age – early twenties – for it to mess up my sex life. It didn’t kill sexual activity, quite. But it definitely put a dampener on it. You still did the deed, when you could find a willing partner. But you worried about it afterwards especially if, like me, you had hypochondriacal tendencies. Clearly there was a serious risk: there had to be! Why else would the government spend millions on this lavish, in-your-face campaign if Aids wasn’t a major problem?
But it wasn’t. Every word of that campaign was either a lie, an exaggeration or a misdirection. ‘Don’t die of ignorance!’ it declared. Yet ignorance was exactly what it was promoting.
How do I know this? Well, it has been a long, long journey.
The first stage was gentle cynicism. After the initial shock of those ads, it became increasingly clear that the government had been overstating the case. Yes, Aids did indeed appear to be taking a terrible toll among those ‘small groups’: haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and homosexual men, primarily. But there was no evidence that the disease was spreading significantly to the broader community.
At the time, those of us who realised this tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Yes, the government had, strictly speaking, been lying to us. But it was a good lie. A noble lie. It was pretending Aids affected everyone in order to spare the blushes of those it did affect. If you were gay or a haemophiliac or an intravenous drug user you wouldn’t feel isolated, marginalised. You could feel that the whole country was united with you, sharing some of your pain and anxiety.
I can’t remember how far I subscribed to this argument myself. Probably, knowing me, not greatly. I’ve never been a fan of ‘unless one of you owns up you’re all going to suffer’ collective punishments. And this felt very much like one of those: as if we were being treated like children who couldn’t be trusted to be told the whole truth lest we misuse that information for our own selfish ends. It was collectivism, communism basically, and I’ve never been into any of that, not even in my youthful idealism phase.
The second stage of my Aids awareness didn’t come till much later. It’s so recent, in fact, that if you had told me two years ago that Aids didn’t really exist and wasn’t caused by a virus called HIV, I would probably have rolled my eyes and changed the subject. What converted me was first my experience of the ‘pandemic’ and my recognition of the obvious parallels with the ‘Aids crisis’, which – from the Fauci connection to the suppression of effective drugs and the promotion of dodgy ones – was a dry run for Covid-19. And secondly, the informed wisdom of Robert F Kennedy Jr and of my most recent podcast guest Jon Rappoport.
Rappoport is the author of a 1988 book we all should have read (it would have spared us so much bother) called AIDS Inc. He began his researches in good faith, assuming – as any rational person would – that Aids was a genuine phenomenon. Little by little, though, he came to realise – as his subtitle put it – that this was the Scandal of the Century: a scam, effectively concocted by Big Pharma, the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, to push unnecessary, expensive and dangerous medical treatments on desperate, captive victim groups in the guise of ‘public health’.
Unless you’re very open-minded, impossibly cynical or irredeemably red-pilled, it’s a hard thesis to swallow. Among the obvious questions it raises are: ‘So what were all those people dying of?’ and ‘C’mon, if Aids was a fiction, surely we’d all know by now?’
The answer to the first question is it depends what victim category you are talking about. In Africa, for example, ‘Aids’ was – and still is – rebadged malnutrition. Its original nickname (as fans of Bob Mould and Sugar will know) was ‘The Slim’. With the diabolical genius we’ve since come to expect of Big Pharma, millions upon millions of starving Africans were turned into a problem the industry could lucratively solve simply by pretending that their emaciation was the result of a deadly new virus (probably spread from having sex with monkeys: nice dose of cheap racism there, Big Pharma liars!) rather than from not getting enough to eat.
With gay men, according to Rappoport (who was told this by front-line community workers) it was the bath houses. These were the orgiastic dens of iniquity, popular at the time, where you could take any number of drugs, have sex with any number of men, and stay up partying any number of hours till your immune system finally gave up the ghost and left you prey to all manner of fatal infections.
But what about the gay men who didn’t go to the bath houses? This is where the story gets truly shocking. Many of them were killed by the very drug that was supposed to save them, the much-lauded AZT. Designed as a cancer drug (but abandoned because it was so toxic, killing more people than it cured), AZT was heavily pushed by Anthony Fauci as the solution to the Aids crisis. In fact it made it much worse. As RFK Jr reports in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, once AZT was introduced the death rate ‘from Aids’ rose precipitously.
What’s particularly sad is that a lot of these victims were not even sick before they moved on to their fatal courses of AZT (the average survival time for those taking it was four months). They’d simply taken the test, been found to be ‘HIV-positive’ and had been frightened by the general hysteria into imagining that this would save their life. Among those who made this mistake were ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and tennis player Arthur Ashe.
A treatment more dangerous than the disease itself. Shrill public health campaigns dispensing misinformation. More effective, cheaper treatments being deliberately suppressed. An obsession with case numbers over fatality rates. Whistleblowing scientists, such as Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein, silenced and proscribed by a corrupt medical establishment. So much of what happened during the Aids crisis seems with hindsight so eerily familiar. And with good reason: it was organised by the same people.
What’s frustrating is that even when you lay out the information as clearly as RFK Jr and Rappoport have done, there will be those – and perhaps they are even the majority – who prefer to believe the fabricated narrative to the uncomfortable truth. This is understandable. To comprehend fully what happened during the Aids crisis you must inevitably abandon many of the cosy assumptions that make our world seem nicer and friendlier than it actually is. These assumptions include some of the following notions: that doctors are all in the healing business; that the regulatory authorities are there to protect you; that drugs are not released on to the market without rigorous testing. The idea that medical doctors and scientists, in collusion with government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, would make up a disease in order to push a cure which killed you but made them rich is such a hard thing for most of us to grasp that we find it easier to believe the reassuring lie than accept the reality.
There’s another reason too, why the inventors of Aids have never been properly found out, let alone brought to justice: gaslighting. We’re talking about an entire system – the media, Hollywood, publishing, TV, schools, academe, the scientific institutions, big business, the political class, finance etc – all pushing the same message. Try questioning the Aids/HIV narrative as a specialist science or health journalist and see how far you get: you’ll find that ‘experts’ will no longer wish to speak to you, institutions no longer prepared to co-operate with you. Or try to get funding for a movie blowing the whistle on what really happened . . .
No one likes to think that they’re the hapless dupe of a massive psy-op. But the evidence is all around us, if only you know where and how to look. For example, I suspect it’s probably not coincidental that, at the height of the ‘pandemic’, the BBC treated us to a period drama series about the UK experience of Aids, written by Doctor Who showrunner/reviver Russell T Davies, called It’s A Sin.
Now I happen to think Davies is a hugely talented and watchable screenwriter, brilliant at creating likeable, believable characters, snappy, memorable dialogue and entertaining story arcs. But this, where an issue such as Aids is concerned, is what makes his fiction so dangerous. Of course, as an Establishment figure, Davies is going to promote the Establishment narrative. It’s A Sin achieved various nefarious objectives: it reinforced the notion that Aids was a thing; it got audiences talking once more about their memories and experiences of that era; it enabled politicians and commentators to pontificate about the period, drape themselves in rainbow flags and so on; and it hinted at contemporary parallels – that Covid-19 too is a genuine health crisis that we would do well take seriously and which the government really should do more to address . . .
When you analyse how the system works it just sounds like yet more conspiracy theorising. But it’s precisely this level of attention to detail by the progenitors of the Aids scam which explains why so many of us still think, against all the evidence, that it wasn’t a scam.
A reader sent me this opinion piece published in the British Medical Journal last week. The authors argue that evidence based medicine (EBM) has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.
The article begins by discussing how EBM was meant to improve medicine but as pharmaceutical documents have been released we realise that this remains an illusion.
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
They then look at how large corporations have dominated the market and in doing so have slowed scientific progress by supressing information and data and failing to report adverse events.
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
Universities were once respected institutions but by seeking funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they have become corrupted.
The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.
Academics no longer succeed because of their achievements but because of what they can offer to the pharmaceutical industry.
The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians. KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”
Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers. This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication. The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.
They discuss how the regulators have been captured without any questions raised by governments.
Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
Their suggested reforms are probably what most naïve people already think happens but unfortunately doesn’t.
Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.
Overall, a scathing opinion piece which highlights some truths which many of us recognise but which the majority would call you crazy for suggesting. Whenever I have tried to discuss how the pharmaceutical companies “mark their own homework”, the common response I get is “rubbish, the regulators conduct their own trials to see how safe and effective the vaccines are”.
If more people understood how the system worked then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. However, that is easier said than done when governments and the media have also been captured along with the regulators and academia.
The Biden administration last week launched an advertising campaign urging parents to vaccinate their young children against COVID.
The campaign, funded by taxpayers through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, features emotional pleas from leaders of some of America’s largest professional healthcare associations.
The ads — a pair of 60-second spots titled “Oath” and “Trust” — were posted to social media March 18, and are scheduled to appear on TV screens beginning this week.
“You can trust us” is the underlying message of the campaign, which relies heavily on professional credibility and emotional appeal — rather than data — to make the case for childhood COVID vaccination.
The healthcare professionals offer heartfelt testimonials implying that because they trust the vaccines for their kids and grandkids, so should the viewer.
In one spot, the three doctors and one nurse state:
“COVID vaccines are safe and effective for kids … What’s not safe is getting COVID. So we want you to know we trust the COVID vaccine for ourselves, for our patients, for our kids. So should you.”
The ads also point out that some of the doctors are grandparents.
There is no mention in any of the ads of the potential risk of injuries or death associated with the vaccines.
Emotional claims versus factual data
One of the few factual claims used in the ads to support vaccination in pre-teens references raw case numbers:
“We know that millions of cases of COVID have been in kids … in kids … in kids,” says a chorus of three of the healthcare professionals.
While this statistical reference may technically be correct, it also may not give an accurate picture of the risks for children. That’s because the data on cases don’t differentiate between asymptomatic or mild cases and those that involved serious infection or hospitalization in children.
At the height of the Omicron surge, Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease expert at Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, Scotland, told The Guardian :
“This is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
Research shows many cases of COVID in pre-teen groups are asymptomatic and the vast majority of children experience nothing more than mild symptoms.
Perhaps because of this, many parents have chosen not to vaccinate their young children. More than four months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recommended the vaccine for children as young as 5, just upwards of a quarter of kids 5 to 11 have received both shots. Close to two-thirds of children 12 to 17 years old are “fully vaccinated.”
The latest data from CDC surveys show 33% of parents of children aged 5 to 11 said they would “probably [not] or definitely will not” vaccinate their children against COVID. Another 26% said they would probably get their children vaccinated or were still unsure.
Benefits don’t outweigh risks, data show
According to COVID-NET data, as of the end of 2021, the weekly rate of COVID-associated hospitalization in the 5 to 11 age group ranged from zero to a peak of 1.1 per 100,000.
However, as The Defender reported Monday, the CDC on March 14 removed from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of the deaths it had attributed to children.
In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said it made adjustments to the mortality data because its algorithm was “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”
“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error,” the CDC’s website states. “This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.”
At the time of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) December 2021 risk-benefit assessment, used to recommend the vaccine for children 5 to 11, the overall weekly average COVID-associated hospitalization rate for this age group was approximately 0.4 per 100,000 children.
Before the CDC made its adjustments to COVID mortality rates, the total number of COVID hospitalizations for children under 18 in 2021 was 2,100. The total number of COVID-related hospitalizations for children under 5 was 920.
By comparison, the CDC reports that on average 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized each year with respiratory syncytial virus.
The CDC also published a study on March 11 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report estimating that two shots of the Pfizer vaccine were only 31% effective against Omicron variant infections in children ages 5 to 11 in an analysis of data from July 2021 to February 2022.
This followed a study released February 28 that found the Pfizer vaccine was only 12% effective against Omicron in children 5 to 11 and adolescents 12 to 17 in an analysis of data from Dec. 13, 2021, to Jan. 30, 2022.
Despite the low numbers, there remains a strong push for the FDA to authorize COVID vaccines for the last remaining age group: infants and preschoolers.
Originally, Pfizer had expected to submit its authorization request for this group to the FDA as early as last month, but then delayed it until next month due to initial results showing no clear benefit for this group.
The lack of evidence proving the vaccines are of more benefit than risk was underscored by Pfizer’s latest trial for children 5 to 11, in which both the vaccinated and the placebo groups showed no incidents of hospitalization or death.
Last week, Florida followed Norway in recommending against COVID vaccines for young children.
Yes, this happened. That I would not call out Bourla again. Of course no one would put this in writing but of course this was to silence me. Of course if I worked for Pfizer I would be muted complete from that moment on. That is how they silence you, put you on payroll.
To me, the battle is so huge, so transformational, that a POTUS could be so mislead that decisions were made Feb/March 2020 that shaped the next 2 years in the US and world and negatively so. Of course I cannot be part of that nor would ever consider it. I am in the fight for my peoples, my family, my children and the world I will leave behind one day. I have lost enough that I cannot go back now. As they say “balls to the wall”!
And I will say again, Bourla and Bancel and all at FDA, all at NIH, Fauci et al., all who have acted in this COVID fraud, must be allowed to defend their decisions and policies as we live in good governance etc. and we function with laws (though many argue the judicial system is corrupted) but if we show in proper legal inquiring and public inquiries that their actions costed lives, that their decisions killed people, that people and children died as a result, then they must be held to account with jail time! Financial penalties and jail time.
I am hurt financially, personally, as are a core 12-15 of us globally who have stood up, but the fight we are in is beyond money. Those of us who have been cancelled have been hurt, name wise, career, slandered etc. But for each person there is a time in life that we chose to stand up or not… we rise or shrink away, and most scientists, universities, doctors, public health officials, technocrats, governments, COVID Task Forces etc, chose to sell the people out for money, their grants, their salary was more important, so their silence was bought…so yes, we are hurt as our careers and income were hurt, I being one of them and I was stunned at what I was told on the phone twice in the call with the ask on a trip to TO…would have changed my life, but I said no, shove it, and so be it… money can come again and we will survive. Money is not the key in life. There is something called a line of integrity that must not shift based on money etc.
I joined with the Canadian truckers and now the US truckers to help stop the unscientific mandates and emergency powers, and I will remain fighting… its that critical.
These vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna et al are criminal, because they were non-sterilizing, and they knew it like how Pfizer knew there were 1,223 deaths that they and FDA hid from the public (see recent tranche of released documents, and 1290 special adverse effects etc., all hidden and they hoped for 55 or 75 years) it would have only driven infectious variants and more likely more virulent, more lethal ones. This is happening now. We are at this point where not only is the sub-optimal non-neutralizing Abs driving increased infectiousness of the virus via new variants, but it is driving increased virulence.
London has asked YouTube on Wednesday to censor any videos of the call between pranksters Vovan and Lexus – pretending to be the Ukrainian PM – and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, claiming they are propaganda by the Russian state that was manipulated to show falsehoods and undermine British reputation and Kiev’s morale.
“We are calling on YouTube to help us support Ukraine by taking down videos doctored by the Russian state and disseminated to try and sap the morale of a people fighting for their freedom,” said the defense ministry (MoD) in London.
In the attached letter – which lacks the name of both the sender and the recipient – the ministry claims “the Russian State was responsible for the hoax call” and that “Russian disinformation presented in this video creates a substantial risk to UK national security” as well as “risk to international unity working to support Ukraine.”
The MoD claims the videos were “modified and edited” to show Wallace saying things that are not true, such as that the UK is “running out of our own” NLAW anti-tank missiles.
This is “factually incorrect,” the MoD said in the letter. “We have no supply shortages.” Another claim the MoD labeled false – presumably made by the pranksters – was that the NLAWS sent to Ukraine “often failed.”
“Any perceived failure of our lethal aid supplied to support Ukraine will provide an immediate detrimental effect upon the morale of Ukrainian forces,” the MoD letter said.
“I am confident you would not wish to be a conduit for Russian propaganda or be in any way associated with the potential consequences of this type of media manipulation,” the unnamed MoD official tells YouTube, demanding that the platform “remove (or at least block) access” to any videos of the call.
Wallace raised a stink over the call last Thursday, claiming he hung up on the person pretending to be Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmygal after getting suspicious about the “misleading” questions. It later emerged that the Microsoft Teams call lasted for almost 10 minutes, and came while Wallace was visiting Poland.
Blaming the government in Moscow, the minister denounced the call as an example of “Russian disinformation, distortion and dirty tricks” and launched an internal security investigation into how the pranksters were able to contact him in the first place.
On Tuesday, the notorious pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov – going by the monikers Vovan and Lexus – confirmed they had been behind the call and posted several teasers, saying the full video would be up soon. The duo has a long history of pranking celebrities and public figures, including Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They have denied being agents of the government.
Project Veritas, whose declared goal is to expose media and Big Tech bias and other irregularities happening behind the scenes at these corporations, says that the FBI spied on the organization’s email communications for close to a year.
This was reportedly done using gag orders, i.e., mandating that those whose communications were searched cannot be informed about it. An example of the gag orders can be found here.
The claim has come out in a letter (obtained here) Project Veritas sent on Tuesday to a federal judge in charge of a case involving a controversial FBI raid that took place last November of the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and two other employees, carried out as part of an investigation into a missing diary belonging to US President Biden’s daughter.
The FBI at the time had obtained warrants to take phones and computers from the three persons the agency targeted in the raids, but the court has since allowed a request filed by Project Veritas for a special master to look into whether protected information falling under the attorney-client privilege was violated by the prosecutors handling the investigation.
But in the letter to the judge, Project Veritas now says that for almost a year before the raids, gag orders were used by prosecutors to hide their activities around the diary investigation.
Among the information obtained in this way were three months’ worth of emails belonging to O’Keefe and several other employees, dating back to 2020, as well as grand jury subpoenas.
In one case, a Project Veritas journalist’s emails sent and received for over a year in 2020 and 2021 were secretly turned over to the FBI using the same tactic. Reports say that it appears the entity that received the bulk of the demands to turn over the emails was Microsoft.
The gag orders kept being renewed even as the special master was hearing from both sides in the probe into the lawfulness of the data the FBI seized in November. For this reason, stated Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, the government’s failure to disclose “other privilege invasions” it had carried out, “makes a mockery of the proceedings.”
Calli further stated in the letter that it was “impossible for us to understand how the government convinced multiple magistrate judges to extend non-disclosure orders for an investigation that was already public and widely-reported,” and added:
“Project Veritas had the right to know of these government infringements. The government’s clandestine invasions of journalist’s communications corrode the rule of law.”
The US Attorney’s Office in charge of the investigation is yet to comment on the letter.
While the mainstream media and American statists remain transfixed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s difficult not to notice their moral blindness with respect to the evil and hypocrisy of the Pentagon and the CIA, which have spent years ginning up this deadly and destructive crisis as part of their political gamesmanship against Russia.
After all, let’s face it: When it was the Pentagon and the CIA invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the reaction of the mainstream media and American statists was totally opposite to how they have responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During those deadly and destructive invasions, there was hardly ever any sympathy for the victims and instead accolades, praise, and glorification of the invaders. Don’t forget the daily mantra that everyone was exhorted to recite, “Support the troops!”
But let’s leave Iraq and Afghanistan aside and let’s go back to the early 1960s, when the CIA and the Pentagon were doing everything they could, including committing fraud, to induce President Kennedy to invade Cuba, which is every bit as sovereign and independent as Ukraine.
Let’s begin with a recent statement by U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, who was expressing the official position of the Pentagon and the CIA. Price stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to violate “core principles,” including “the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.”
Price was referring to Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO, the corrupt bureaucratic dinosaur that should have gone out of existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War. Price’s statement confirms, of course, the point I have long been making — that the war in Ukraine is not about freedom, it’s about NATO.
Keep Price’s statement in mind as we go back to the height of the Cold War and see how the Pentagon and the CIA were hell-bent on doing to Cuba what Russia is now doing to Ukraine.
That’s what the CIA’s invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba was all about — an effort to invade the island for the sake of ousting the Castro regime from power and replacing it with another corrupt and brutal U.S. puppet dictatorship, such as that of Fulgencio Batista, the brutal pro-U.S. dictatorial puppet that the Cuban revolution succeeded in ousting from power.
But that’s not all there is to the Bay of Pigs story. As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the Pentagon and the CIA were engaged in political gamesmanship against President Kennedy, who the CIA considered to be a neophyte president who could easily be manipulated into ordering an invasion of Cuba, one that would have been no different from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The CIA told Kennedy that its invasion would succeed without direct U.S. military air and ground support. It was a lie — a deliberate, knowing, intentional lie. The CIA was just playing and maneuvering what they considered was an easily manipulable president. The CIA figured that once the invasion began faltering, Kennedy would have no choice but to send in air support, followed by a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. The Pentagon played its part in the fraudulent scheme by falsely telling Kennedy that the invasion had a high chance of success, when, in fact, the Pentagon knew otherwise.
In other words, the Pentagon and the CIA, who are both pontificating in righteous tones about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were manipulating a U.S. president into doing to Cuba precisely what Russia is now doing to Ukraine.
Kennedy refused to fall for the scheme and the CIA’s invasion went down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the communists, which is one big reason why the Pentagon and the CIA still maintain their brutal economic embargo against the Cuban people to this day. They’ve never forgotten or forgiven their defeat at the hands of the Cuban Reds.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the story. After the CIA’s fraudulent fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon began exhorting Kennedy to undertake a full-scale military invasion of Cuba — yes, the same type of military invasion that Russia has undertaken against Ukraine.
This was when the Pentagon presented Kennedy with one of the most infamous plans in U.S. history, one based on falsehoods and fraud. It was called Operation Northwoods. The Pentagon succeeded in keeping it secret from the American people for some 30 years. It was uncovered in the 1990s by the Assassination Records Review Board, the entity that was charged with securing the release of JFK-assassination related records from the military, the CIA, the Secret Service, and the FBI, which had succeeded in encasing the assassination in “national security” rubric.
Operation Northwoods called for real terrorist attacks against American citizens, in which Americans would die. The attacks (and murders) would be carried out by Pentagon agents secretly posing as Cuban communists. The president would then use those attacks as a pretext for invading Cuba — an invasion no different from what Russia is now doing to Ukraine.
To his everlasting credit, and to the ire and rage of the military establishment, Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods.
His relationship with the military did not improve when he walked out of a meeting in which the military was endorsing a plan to initiate a surprise full-scale nuclear attack on Russia, similar to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but with carpet bombing using nuclear bombs. That was when JFK stated in disgust as he left the meeting, “And we call ourselves the human race.’’
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pentagon was doing everything it could to pressure Kennedy into ordering a full-scale bombing and military invasion of Cuba to retaliate for Cuba’s installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Pentagon and the CIA took the position that Cuba didn’t have the “right” to do that.
Let’s revisit State Department spokesman Ned Price’s pontifical words with respect to Ukraine: “the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.”
Whoops! Well, except for Cuba! To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he refused to succumb to the Pentagon’s pressure to invade Cuba. In fact, by this time he held the military-intelligence establishment in deep disdain, and, of course, the feeling was mutual. To the rage of the Pentagon and the CIA, Kennedy struck a deal with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev in which he vowed that there would be no more U.S. invasions of Cuba by either the Pentagon or the CIA.
Adding insult to injury, in a secret codicil to the agreement, Kennedy promised to remove the Pentagon’s nuclear missiles in Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union. Yes, you read that right: The Pentagon and the CIA claimed that Cuba had no “right” to install nuclear missiles in Cuba while maintaining that the Pentagon and the CIA had the “right” to install nuclear missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union.
That’s one reason why the Pentagon and the CIA knew that Russia would invade Ukraine when NATO threatened to absorb Ukraine. The absorption would enable the Pentagon and the CIA to install their nuclear missiles on Russia’s border. The Pentagon and the CIA knew that Russia’s reaction to that possibility would be no different from the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s reaction to the installation of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Needless to say, neither the Pentagon nor the CIA has ever apologized for their Cold War machinations against both Kennedy and Cuba. That, of course, is not surprising. The reaction of their Operation Mockingbird assets in the mainstream press is also not surprising.
What is disappointing, however, is how so many Americans refuse to acknowledge, criticize, and condemn this manifest evil and rank hypocrisy within their own country. As I point out in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, that’s because all too many Americans, unfortunately, have come to view the national-security establishment as their god.
March 3, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky answered questions in front of medical students at her alma mater, Washington University. This is an excerpt of the 45-minute presentation,1 during which Walensky made several statements about the public health response to COVID-19 in the past two years, admitting the CDC had relied heavily on vaccines, that she’d learned of the 95% efficacy from CNN and was not told the shots would lose effectiveness.
In fact, much of her presentation is riddled with statements that likely revealed more than she intended. She might not have realized the presentation was being taped or thought a taped presentation in front of medical students wouldn’t be found. Or maybe, the CDC simply doesn’t care that what they say in 2022 is the same information that caused many to be censored or maligned in 2020 and 2021.
It would be an interesting test to repeat her statements on social media today to see if the information would be tagged as misinformation or disinformation now that the CDC has publicly recognized what scientists have been saying for years.
Walensky Admits Her Source Was CNN
Walensky was invited to speak to the medical students at Washington University as the 2022 Gerald Medoff Visiting Professor in the Department of Medicine. During the interview conducted by Dr. William G. Powderly, co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, she was asked what the CDC got right and how that might affect the response to future pandemics. Three minutes into her answer, she said:2
“Where could we have improved? Well, you know, I think … I can tell you where I was when the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective, um, the vaccine. So many of us wanted it to be helpful. Many of us wanted to say, “OK, this is our ticket out.” Right? Now we’re done.”
This may be a mind-blowing admission — that the head of the CDC’s information came from a CNN news report and not from Pfizer. It turns out the CNN report was a regurgitated Pfizer press release. Investigative journalist Paul Thacker, writing in The Disinformation Chronicle, discusses the timeline of events that led to Walensky believing the Pfizer vaccine was 95% effective.3
It is likely the CNN report Walensky is referring to was published November 18, 20204 by Maggie Fox and Amanda Sealy, who it appears did little to augment the story after pulling information from a Pfizer press release published the same day.5 What is remarkable, and unfortunate, is that a story in CNN influenced Walensky’s thinking about the vaccine and future guidance from the CDC.
It turns out it is even more deplorable since it wasn’t a story but a republished press release. Also interesting is that it took two CNN reporters to present one republished press release/story. As Thacker writes, “The Pfizer press release became CNN headline, became CDC pandemic policy.” Walensky went on to say during the interview:6
“So I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I really do. I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said waning, when you know, oh this vaccine is going to work. Oh well, maybe it’ll work — (laughs) it’ll wear off. Nobody said what if the next variant doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s not as potent against the next variant.”
Thacker dug into the published transcript7 of a Pfizer earnings call held February 2, 2021, in which an analyst from global financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald asked four pointed questions.
If the COVID vaccine becomes routine, how do you think governments and physicians will choose among these vaccines that have received emergency use authorization?
And then how do you think about that 95% efficacy rate in light of mutations?
And the last question is on your PCV20, if it’s approved, what do you expect the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] recommendation to be your — what would you ideally like it to be?
And do you think there will be any upgrade for those 65-plus due to the additional serotypes?
It seems interesting that the analyst from Cantor Fitzgerald understood enough to ask about whether the vaccine would be effective against a virus nearly every scientist in the world expected to mutate. And yet, Walensky did not consider the possibility,8 despite having been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School with years of experience dealing with viruses.9
Where Does the COVID ‘Science’ Come From?
When asked about the ACIP recommendation, Pfizer responded, “And then to your question about ACIP. Of course, we’re working closely with the FDA for approval and with the CDC at the right moments in time to get the right recommendation.”10 Many believe that the “right recommendation” was not given, yet Pfizer likely got exactly what they wanted from the CDC.
Walensky has overruled or avoided asking the ACIP’s advice on COVID booster issues at least three times, according to a STAT News report.11 As Thacker writes, this sequence of events is:12
“… direct evidence of a corporation influencing federal policy by laundering their press release through media outlets like CNN. Further, republishing press releases seems a pervasive practice in how the media covers COVID-19 vaccines — meaning, they don’t do much reporting. This has been obvious since late 2020.”
Walensky’s presentation at Washington University was just days after it was revealed that Biden and the CDC are parroting talking points developed by the same firm that conducted polling for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.13 The memo sent February 24, 2022, closely matches statements Biden used in the State of the Union Address.
In other words, it appears that at least some of the “science” driving public health policy for COVID-19 and destroying the economy is coming directly from Impact Research,14 who are “the proud pollsters for President Joe Biden” and whose marketing includes “electing Democrats in the toughest districts,” “electing presidents” and “crafting the most authentic and persuasive language for your communications.”
Two days after Walensky spoke at Washington University, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, wrote,15 “She’s right. Nobody could possibly have known variants might be a problem.” Under this, he posted a tweet dated January 20, 2021, in which he had posted, “Spoiler alert: the vaccines probably don’t work against at least one new variant and they’re going to want you to get vaccinated again next fall.”
By August, Twitter banned Berenson permanently for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”16 The tweet that put Twitter over the edge compared the vaccine to a “therapeutic “with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile.” He also questioned vaccine mandates.”
Data supporting limited efficacy17 and terrible side effects18,19 are not difficult to find. In fact, Walensky admitted the vaccine has limited efficacy to Washington University — will Twitter ban her?
Walensky Knows She’s Wrong for Half the Country
Midway through the interview, Powderly asked how Walensky balances the risks of infectious disease against the mental health and economic risks from decisions the CDC has made. Her response was telling:20
“This is such an important question. The easy answer is I know I’m going to be wrong for half the country (laugh) so now that I’ve accepted that um … some fraction of people will be unhappy.
We are looking under the lamppost of all the cases and all the deaths and there have been so many other things that we’re counting that don’t make the headlines — opioid deaths, mental health challenges, cancer screening. I’ve heard from colleagues of people who came in whose elective surgeries were deferred who now come in with metastatic disease.”
Minutes before, she was asked what she thought the next couple of years would look like. She started by saying, “So this is a safe space because every piece of advice I’ve gotten is don’t predict what’s going to happen.”21 The implication appears to be that she didn’t think what she said would be made public. She went on to predict that in the months ahead she believes:
“… [O]verall immunity is going to hold us in good stead. I don’t know whether we’re going to need another boost and I don’t know when and I don’t know what that’s going to look like but I do think ultimately we will have a good level of population immunity for variants that come our way … Ultimately we will have a coronavirus that will lead to death in some people every season, that we will tolerate in some way.”
This coronavirus that will lead to death every season sounds amazingly like seasonal flu. The final estimates by the CDC22 of the 2017-2018 flu season showed 41 million people were symptomatic with an estimated 18.9 million who received medical care, 710,572 who were hospitalized and 51,646 who died.
She also hinted that mask-wearing may be here to stay, saying, “I haven’t had a cold in a really long time, and I suspect we don’t miss those.”23 Yet, Walensky has also admitted that the CDC’s mask policy for public schools to reopen was influenced by teachers’ unions who were against in-person learning.
In other words, the guidelines for children to wear masks throughout their school day were not developed based on science but, rather, on “hearing firsthand from parents and teachers directly about their experiences and concerns.” and “superintendents, principals, civil rights groups, and all sorts of other folks.”24
Despite History, CDC Is Calling for Transparency
Anyone who has held an opinion that differs from the mainstream narrative has been censored, questioned and fake “fact-checked” so the debate over science would never see the light of day. Mainstream media outlets took up the banner, quashing any information that didn’t neatly fit the story.
If data might demonstrate that the vaccine was not functioning the way it was promised, then the CDC25 withheld the information and Health and Human Services26 stopped tracking hospital deaths related to COVID-19. But they haven’t been able to stop the data coming from Israel,27 the U.K,28 Germany29 and insurance companies.30
During Walensky’s appearance, she said she was “proud of our ability to get data out,”31 in reference to the vaccine. She indicated that they used a “pedal-to-the-metal”32 system to analyze and assimilate data that was published, on average, every 48 hours. Yet, her comments are in direct contradiction to a recent investigative report published in The New York Times33 that shows the CDC was not transparently publishing “large portions” of vaccine data.
In fact, Walensky has also publicly discredited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-administered34 by the FDA and CDC. During her January 11, 2022, testimony before the Senate,35 Walensky clearly stated that any death after a vaccine could be reported to VAERS using the example of an individual who gets vaccinated, hit by a car and dies.
She implied without outright stating that this death would also be recorded in VAERS and logged as a death related to the vaccine. In other words, she skirted the issue without having to outright lie to the Senate.
Just days before she declared her pride in the CDC’s ability to publish accurate and informative data, The New York Times36 revealed that the FDA had been aware the COVID shots were only 12% effective in children under the age of 5. However, they withheld the information before a scheduled meeting on February 15, 2022, which was subsequently canceled. According to the Times :37
“Experts worried that the news would further dissuade hesitant parents from immunizing their children. Other studies have shown the vaccine was not powerfully protective against infection with the Omicron variant in adults, either.”
Will the Gaslighting Stop?
During the interview, Walensky alluded to people in the media who “reject evidence,” saying,38 “You know in the media now, there are a lot of people who are using their voice that may or may not be helpful for public health … then that decreases public health in general so our messaging I think we have to be clear about.”
The information that Walensky revealed during the interview makes you wonder about who’s making public health decisions and why. It’s difficult to imagine and scary to think that after two years, one of the largest and most powerful health care agencies in the U.S. is led by a director who is potentially uninformed, or worse, purposefully misleading the public.
In approximately 35 short minutes Walensky revealed much. While she characterizes those who reject her propaganda as “rejecting evidence” since scientific debate is no longer part of the scientific process according to the CDC, it’s interesting to note that she:
Admits learning about the Pfizer 95% efficacy — information which was then used to formulate CDC guidelines — from a CNN report,39 which was nothing more than a republished press release from Big Pharma.40
Believes the CDC is transparently publishing data in a “pedal-to-the-metal” scenario41 even though The New York Times uncovered evidence the CDC is withholding data.42
Believes that no one told her or the CDC that a virus may mutate and render the vaccine ineffective,43 yet a financial analyst was astute enough to ask the question.44
Isn’t sure if we will need another booster45 after Pfizer told the world last year that a fourth dose may be needed sooner than expected.46
Blames the “public” at large for believing “the science” is black and white despite her colleague, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as director of the NIAID, has been the face of COVID-19 for the White House, claiming HE was the science.47 Walensky now admits: “I think the public heard that science is black and white, science is immediate … and the truth is, science is gray.”48
Washington, DC – On March 18, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order granting a preliminary injunction to prohibit the mayor of the District of Columbia, the D.C. Department of Health and D.C. public schools from enforcing the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccination Act of 2020 until further order of the court.
“This is a major legal victory for children, parental rights, and informed consent,” said Rolf Hazlehurst, senior staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) who argued the case. “Government overreach such as this has dire implications for children’s health and the constitutional rights of citizens.”
The D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccination Act of 2020, allows children eleven years of age and older to consent to vaccinations without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The law specifically targets children whose parents have religious exemptions for their children. The D.C. Act contains several provisions designed to deceive parents and hide the fact that their children have been vaccinated against their parental judgment, authority or religious convictions.
The court order states that the parents “have shown they are likely to succeed on the merits because the District’s law requires providers to hide children’s vaccination status from parents who invoke their religious exemption rights…”
The D.C. Minor Consent Act requires health care providers to falsify records by leaving the child’s school vaccination records “blank.” The doctors may bill the parents’ insurance companies for the vaccines administered to the children against the parents’ written directive. However, to deceive the parents, insurance companies may not send the parents an Explanation of Benefits (EOB).
CHD and Parental Rights Foundation filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking a court order to declare the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccinations Amendment Act of 2020 unconstitutional. Plaintiffs, (Booth, et al.) are four parents of minor children who attend public school in Washington, D.C. Oral arguments were heard on March 3, 2022.
In the opinion issued on Friday, March 18, the court found the parents likely to succeed on the merits in their arguments that the D.C. Act is unconstitutional for two reasons. First, the D.C. Act is preempted by federal law because it directly contradicts the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The D.C. Act also violates the right to free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Hazlehurst argued that the District has created a “pressure-cooker environment, enticing and psychologically manipulating [minor children] to defy their parents and take vaccinations against their parents’ will.”
The Plaintiffs overcame a high legal hurdle that “threatened injury must be certainly impending” as established by the U.S. Supreme Court precedent Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l., in part by the use of a drawing entitled “Peer Pressure,” drawn by one of the plaintiff’s children. The drawing depicts the dilemma children face at school when they do not want to get the COVID vaccine or have been advised by their parents not to take the shot.
“This preliminary injunction is part of ongoing litigation in an extremely important national precedent-setting case,” said Hazlehurst. “The rights of parents to decide what is best for their children’s health is at stake. Government can’t be allowed to make such decisions for minor children.”
Two similar but separate lawsuits, Booth (argued by CHD/Parental Rights Foundation) and Mazer (supported by Informed Consent Action Network), were filed against the D.C. Minor Consent Act. In both Booth and Mazer, the court ruled the plaintiffs have “standing” based on preemption because the D.C. Minor Consent Act conflicts with Congress’ National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. In CHD’s Booth case, the court made the additional finding that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits that the D.C. Minor Consent Act violates the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden stated, “Removing the law would revert the District to the standard age of consent of 18.” Although the case is not yet final, the preliminary injunction reverts D.C. to the standard age of consent of 18.
###
Children’s Health Defense is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Its mission is to end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable, and establish safeguards to prevent future harm. For more information, visit ChildrensHealthDefense.org.
The Russians in attacking Ukraine are taking leaves out of their Syrian playbook, so we are being constantly told. But the American origin of this term gives us a clue as to what is really going on.
The chemical weapons play
One of the plays being used is apparently the brandishing of chemical weapons. It’s important to recall what actually happened in Syria in this regard.
The first alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria occurred in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus in 2013. After a vote in the British Parliament scuppered a Western plan to bomb Syria in retaliation, the Russians, not the West, took active steps to remove Syria’s stocks of chemical weapons, shepherding Syria through a process of dismantling all its stocks under international supervision and verification (compare and contrast US research collaboration with Ukraine in biolabs so sensitive that records had to be destroyed before the Russians arrived).
Claims nevertheless continued to be made, never verified in situ by independent parties, that Syria was using chemical weapons.
In April 2018 reports emerged from Douma on the outskirts of Damascus that Syria had used chlorine gas in a particularly egregious attack on civilians. Without waiting even the 48 hours needed for international inspectors to arrive, the US, UK and France launched punitive bombing raids on Syria. Subsequently, inspectors found evidence at the scene consistent with a false flag operation. That evidence was doctored at headquarters in The Hague under intense pressure from the US and UK. The real lesson from the incident – that fraudsters were at work – was thus never learned and a spurious version of the truth prevailed.
What really happened, many experts believe, was that jihadi groups affiliated with Al Qaida yet supported by Western powers fabricated the incident (it wasn’t difficult with Western intelligence agencies and gullible Western media eager to pin blame on Assad) in order to provide a pretext for the West to enter the war and turn back the tide against Assad.
These are but two among other similar incidences talking place over the course of the conflict.
Rewriting history
Scroll forward four years. Russia, we are being repeatedly told, is preparing to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine while pre-emptively covering itself by predicting use of a false flag.
In Syria, Assad was winning and had no need to use chemical weapons. It would have been crazy to do so, when it was the only thing that could make the West bomb him. In Ukraine, Putin similarly has no need to do the one thing which would likely lead to direct NATO intervention. No matter, the authorised version of the history of the Syrian conflict holds that abetted by Russia, Syria used chemical weapons, and so today Russia must be poised to do the same in Ukraine.
‘History is written by the victors’, Churchill is supposed to have said. With Syria, given the West’s control of the narrative via its monopoly hold over international media, history is written by the losers.
Constant parallels are being drawn with Syria in the Ukraine context. But they are the wrong parallels, and the wrong lessons are being drawn from the Syrian ordeal.
The Russian version of the playbook, according to the West
According to the Western narrative, enunciated by officials and echoed by reporters who seem to see it as their job to act like government press officers or cheerleaders, the Russian playbook in Syria is now being applied wholesale to Ukraine. Its chapters comprise of indiscriminate shelling, carpet bombing of cities, targeting of civilians in their homes, hospitals, schools and shelters, sieges of major towns, prevention of civilians from leaving through humanitarian corridors, commission of many other brutal war crimes, and using false flag accusations.
This indeed is how the Western media portrayed the Syrian conflict and are now doing the same for Ukrainian conflict. But the picture presented distorts some key facts and obscures others.
Airbrushing
It almost totally airbrushes out the jihadist opposition to Assad, just as the Ukrainian Nazis are being airbrushed out of the picture in Ukraine. The Syrian jihadists used human shields as a consistent strategy. ‘Collateral damage’, an Americanism we learnt to use in America’s war on Vietnam, becomes inevitable under such circumstances. Countless civilians died as US-led forces levelled most of Raqqa before driving ISIS out of it. Dead bodies were still being retrieved from the rubble of Raqqa two years later. Is this the playbook we are talking about here, the one the Coalition used against ISIS?
The same techniques of using human shields deployed by jihadists are now being used in Ukraine. How many people are aware that Mariupol, where this is happening most, is where the extreme nationalist Azov brigade have barracks, and that they have reportedly been firing from civilian buildings and preventing civilians from leaving?
Similarly, who knew that jihadists in East Aleppo were constantly shelling civilian areas in government-held Western Aleppo? Or that the amount of destruction in Aleppo was nothing like what was is being assumed, or that the ‘genocide’ (that other overworked term) of a quarter of a million foretold by the professional hysterics of the UN for East Aleppo turned into the bussing out of a few thousand fighters, who surrendered and were taken with their families to other jihadi-controlled areas?
If anything, the lesson from Syria was that the Russians sometimes showed more restraint than their hosts. Russia forced the Syrian government, eager to recover East Aleppo, to delay operations while abortive parleys took place and the jihadists won more time to entrench their positions. Russia also forced the Syrian government to accept indulgent terms for the surrender of jihadists in the South, allowing fighters to keep small arms and creating no-go areas for government forces. Those familiar with these facts will not be surprised to learn that according to the UN civilian deaths in Ukraine so far are numbered in hundreds rather than the many thousands claimed by propagandists.
The Western playbook
None of this is to condone all Russian actions, but in order to avoid repeating in Ukraine the mistakes the West made in Syria – it is important to see things as they really are. And in the Western playbook there were many mistakes.
The worst was to supply jihadist groups with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms and equipment, which only served to inflame the situation, abet terrorism and prolong Syria’s agony. How much of the arms now being funnelled into Ukraine will end up in the Nazi battalions and later in the Middle East? Will the arms really hasten the end of violence or prolong it?
A second leaf from the Western playbook for Syria now being used in spades a propos of Ukraine is sanctions. Cruel, far-reaching sanctions in Syria have totally failed in their stated aim of ‘changing Assad’s behaviour’ (our wicked adversaries have ‘behaviour’, our virtuous selves have ‘policies’) while immiserating the Syrian people. Sanctions on Russia are plainly doing more harm to the world economy than they are to Russia, and cannot possibly change Russia’s ‘behaviour’ in the short term. And is ‘crippling Russia’, with its echoes of German reparations post World War I, anyway really such a great idea?
That other favourite staple of the US playbook, regime change, as attempted with Syria – after stellar accomplishments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, was precisely what brought about today’s crisis in Ukraine, for it was the US-backed removal of an elected President of Ukraine in 2014 which precipitated the chain of events leading to the present conflict.
The Western playbook provides that foreign leaders who refuse to bend the knee should always be portrayed as crazed and brutal. They always need arraigning before an International Criminal Court, the jurisdiction of which the US denies for itself, to the extent of sanctioning a prosecutor who dares to pursue a US client state. This personalisation and demonisation obviates any risk that policy makers might have to face up to the reality that other countries have legitimate concerns too. In the court of Western public opinion the Great Powers have ensured a hanging jury for Assad, and now Putin.
The page in the US playbook to which administrations are most attached, however, the gift which keeps on giving, is the accusation against target nations that they are using or planning to use chemical weapons. Has the world forgotten the non-existent Iraqi WMD? The watertight intelligence? The 45 minutes for rockets to reach British bases in Cyprus? How the US can have recourse to a similar ploy today, claiming Russia is planning something nefarious, without being hooted at in derision is merely testimony to the extent to which mainstream media has prostrated itself before power. The most far-fetched claims can be made without a shred of media scrutiny.
That US Secretary of State Antony Blinken could repeatedly make the ‘chemical weapons’ claim is deeply disturbing.
If this is not the US laying the groundwork for a false flag incident involving chemical weapons, or perhaps the bioweapons the US is accused of developing in Ukraine, it certainly looks like it.
If that is the case it is no longer playbooks we may be dealing with, it’s the Book of Lamentations.
***
Author Peter Ford is a global affairs analyst, and the former British Ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) and Bahrain (1999-2002).
My new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story has now gone live on Amazon. I am confident that you all will enjoy reading this book. I have been working on it since last summer. I consider it the best work I’ve done in the 32-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
People sometimes ask me what relevance the Kennedy assassination has to our lives today. My new book answers that question completely. It shows how the assassination bears a direct relationship to the foreign-policy crises that confront our nation today and, equally important, what we need to do to extricate ourselves from these crises.
My book revolves around a book entitled Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which was written in 2016 by Alexandra Zapruder, the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the assassination of President Kennedy on his personal home movie camera.
As I state in the Introduction to my book, which you can read here, I figured that Alexandra’s book would be an interesting personal account of how Abraham Zapruder and his family dealt with the film. I quickly learned that her book was much more than that.
When I read that there was a 50-year-long taboo within the Zapruder family against discussing the film, I was hooked. That’s because I knew that almost always there are dark secrets behind family taboos. Violating such a taboo is not an easy thing to do, which is what Alexandra was doing by deciding to write her book. As I point out in my Introduction, in her book she herself acknowledged the danger that she might encounter things that she might not want to write about.
After embarking on her quest to discover the reasons for the family taboo, Alexandra came up with two explanations. The first one is that her grandfather was conflicted over having received so much money for his film, which in today’s dollars was about $1.3 million. The other one is that he was extremely grief-stricken over having witnessed and filmed the president’s assassination.
Neither of those two explanations involves a dark secret and, with all due respect, they are both nonsensical justifications for a decades-long family taboo. After all, throughout the weekend of the assassination, Abraham Zapruder was doing everything he could to get top-dollar for his film, something he would be unlikely to do if he was feeling so guilty about it. Moreover, if the guilt feelings arose after he struck the financial deal for the sale of his film, he could have waived the installments of money from the sale of his film, which were being sent to him annually, which he did not do.
Moreover, any trauma that Zapruder may have suffered from witnessing the assassination obviously did not interfere with his spending the entire weekend of the assassination doing everything he could to get as much money as he could for his film.
Zapruder died in 1970. If the two justifications for the family taboo (which Alexandra denies was a “taboo” but instead was what she calls a “code” or “culture” within the family) were valid, why would the family taboo against discussing the film extend for decades after Zapruder’s death?
After reading Alexandra Zapruder’s book, I decided to figure out the Zapruder film mystery. I spent last summer doing precisely that. Once I figured it out, I began writing my book. Since then, I’ve been working days, nights, and weekends to complete it. I even took a week-long vacation on a farm in southwestern Virginia over Labor Day to write the first eight chapters (the book ended up with 23 chapters).
Like I say, I believe you’re going to like this book and that you’re going to find that it is an important contribution toward understanding not just the Kennedy assassination but, more important, toward seeing where we are as a country today and what we need to do to get things back on the right track — toward restoring a society based on liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
Again, the book is An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. It’s $9.95 for the Kindle version and $14.95 for the print version. You can buy it here.
Recently, over the Ukraine crisis, Washington and the US media have been playing a “double act” again. After repeatedly failing to force China into their game, they have started talking up “exclusive reports,” quoting “anonymous US officials” and fabricating many scenarios related to the situation in Ukraine.
For example, they claimed that Beijing had some level of direct knowledge about Russia’s military operations against Ukraine but asked Russia to delay them until after the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. In addition, they alleged that Russia asked China for military and economic aid and further argued that China has “expressed some openness to providing such aid to Russia.”
The above lies are well concocted, but without any evidence. Certainly, the problem of no evidence may be a bit of overthinking, because when does Washington need to provide evidence to smear others? Isn’t it always following the logic of “if I say so, it has to be so?” If you must ask for any “evidence,” it will again hold up a tiny vial of white powder, or produce a video of the White Helmets being instructed to pose…
The Global Times has recently learned from multiple sources that the “anonymous US officials” quoted in the two New York Times reports that were throwing mud at China on Ukraine came from the National Security Council (NSC) of the White House. In the recent series of disinformation, the White House and the US media repeatedly staged a “double act” with obvious intentions. On the one hand, they must distort China’s just position and smear China internationally, creating momentum for its strategic suppression of China. On the other hand, they intend to drive a wedge between China and Russia in an attempt to “kill two birds with one stone” and ease the pressure of the US’ “two-front war.”
Of course, what’s behind it is Washington’s hegemony and ambition. Kurt Campbell, the NSC’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, “took the initiative” to say at the end of February that the US will keep its focus on the “Indo-Pacific region” despite the Ukraine crisis. In order to maintain the US’ hegemonic self-interests, fabricating lies has become a “necessary means” for Washington. In the words of Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, “The US, as usual, lies to try to achieve its political goals.”
Last year, several “anonymous US officials” have told the media either “the Chinese military has three times rejected requests for calls from the US defense secretary,” “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick and sought hospital care before COVID-19 outbreak disclosed,” or “China has no intention of engaging in serious or substantive talks with the US.” All of these have later been proven to be utter disinformation, which only serves as “cannonballs” for attacking China.
When looking back at his past as CIA director, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo once said publicly, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.” So how does the US lie and deceive people? It is easier for Washington and the US media to quote “anonymous officials” to spread lies as shocking “exclusive news.” The cooperation between US propaganda machines and diplomatic and intelligence services has greatly increased the deceptiveness of those lies. Moreover, the US’ alliance system and hegemony in public opinion can make sure that even though Washington is a habitual liar, it can obtain a certain amount of assentation and support. This has become the bases for the US to play politics as it wants.
While US media maliciously falsifies the truth, Washington deliberately pretends to know nothing. These two to some extent have even formed an integral production, supply and distribution chain of fake news. This is unprofessional, immoral, and irresponsible, and will only further discredit the US in front of the world. As some comments pointed out, whenever people see the news reports that include sentences like “anonymous officials revealed…” and “US intelligence agencies claimed…,” they should in their minds replace everything in those sentences with “They may be lying.”
Therefore, unsurprisingly, as Washington is changing its foreign strategy to “great power competition,” it will use its hegemony in public opinion and media to spread false information and launch a “public opinion warfare.” Of course, we can also be sure that such a “double act” will sooner or later fail to work as the deficit in the US’ account of credibility rises.
Right now, when the military conflict in Ukraine is getting increasingly serious under Washington’s provocation, and when the energy and refugee crises become more and more severe in Europe, the US’ smear campaign will only unmask it as the initiator. More and more people will see the true face of the US – an “empire of lies.”
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
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In the opinion issued on Friday, March 18, the court found the parents likely to succeed on the merits in their arguments that the D.C. Act is unconstitutional for two reasons. First, the D.C. Act is preempted by federal law because it directly contradicts the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The D.C. Act also violates the right to free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
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