Made in America: The ISIS conquest of Mosul
The Cradle | July 2, 2024
Ten years ago this month, the notorious terror group ISIS improbably conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. In only two days of fighting, a few hundred ISIS militants captured the city, forcing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police to flee in chaos and confusion.
The western media attributed the city’s fall to the sectarian policies of then-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, suggesting that local Sunnis welcomed the ISIS invasion. US officials claimed they were surprised by the rapid rise of the terror organization, prompting then-US president Barack Obama to vow to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group.
However, a close review of events surrounding the fall of Mosul and discussions with residents during The Cradle’s recent visit to the city shows the opposite.
The US and its regional allies used ISIS as a proxy to orchestrate the fall of Mosul, thereby terrorizing its Sunni Muslim inhabitants to achieve specific foreign policy goals. Says one Mosul resident speaking with The Cradle:
There was a plan to let Daesh [ISIS] take Mosul, and the USA was behind it. Everyone here knows this, but no one can say it publicly. It was a war against Sunnis.
‘Salafist principality’
As the war in Syria raged in August 2012, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) authored a now well-known memo providing the broad outlines of the plan that would lead to Mosul’s fall.
The memo stated that the insurgency backed by the US and its regional allies to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus was not led by “moderate rebels” but by extremists, including Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Islamic State of Iraq).
The DIA memo stated further that the US and its allies, “the western powers,” welcomed the establishment of a “Salafist principality” by these extremist forces in the Sunni majority areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq. The US goal was to isolate Syria territorially from its main regional supporter, Iran.
Two years later, in June 2014, ISIS conquered Mosul, declaring it the capital of the so-called “Caliphate.”
Though the terror group was portrayed as indigenous to Iraq, ISIS only made the “Salafist principality” predicted in the DIA memo a reality with the help of weapons, training, and funding from the US and its close allies.
US and Saudi weapons
In January 2014, Reuters reported that the US Congress “secretly” approved new weapons flows to “moderate Syrian rebels” from the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA).
In subsequent months, the US Army military and Saudi Ministry of Defense purchased large quantities of weapons from Eastern European countries, which were then flown to Amman, Jordan, for further distribution to the FSA.
After an exhaustive three-year investigation, EU-funded Conflict Armament Research (CAR) found that the weapons funneled to Syria by the US and Saudi Arabia in 2014 were quickly passed on to ISIS, at times within just “days or weeks” of their purchase.
“As far as our evidence shows, the diverters [Saudi and the US] knew what was going on in terms of the risk of supplying weapons to groups in the region,” Damien Spleeters of CAR explained.
The US-supplied weapons and equipment quickly reaching ISIS included the iconic Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, which became synonymous with the ISIS brand.
The Kurdish role
Another way US and Saudi-supplied weapons reached ISIS was through Washington’s main Kurdish ally in Iraq, Masoud Barzani. Discussing the secret funding for weapons approved by the US Congress in January 2014, Reuters noted that “Kurdish groups” had been providing weapons and other aid financed by donors in Qatar to “religious extremist rebel factions.”
In the following months, reports emerged that Kurdish officials from Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were providing weapons to ISIS, including Kornet anti-tank missiles imported from Bulgaria.
Further evidence of Barzani’s support for ISIS comes from a lawsuit currently being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Kurdistan Victim’s Fund.
The expansive lawsuit, led by former US Assistant Attorney James R Tate, cites testimonies from sources with “direct clandestine access” to senior ranking officials in the KDP, alleging that Barzani’s agents “purposefully made US dollar payments to terrorist intermediaries and others that were wired through the United States,” including through banks in Washington, DC. These payments “enabled ISIS to carry out terrorist attacks that killed US citizens in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.”
Further, the agents made use of “email accounts serviced by US-based email service providers to coordinate and carry out elements of their partnership with ISIS.”
It is unthinkable that Barzani regularly arranged payments to ISIS from the heart of the US capital without the knowledge and consent of US intelligence.
An explicit agreement
In the spring of 2014, reports emerged of a deal between Barzani and ISIS to divide the territory in Iraq between them.
French academic and Iraq expert Pierre-Jean Luizard of the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reported there was “an explicit agreement” between Barzani and ISIS, which “aims to share a number of territories.”
According to the agreement, ISIS would take Mosul, while Barzani’s security forces, the Peshmerga, would take oil-rich Kirkuk and other “disputed territories” he desired for a future independent Kurdish state.
According to Luizard, ISIS was given the role of “routing the Iraqi army, in exchange for which the Peshmerga would not prevent ISIS from entering Mosul or capturing Tikrit.”
In an unpublished interview with prominent Lebanese security journalist and The Cradle contributor Radwan Mortada, former Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki claimed that meetings were held to plan the Mosul operation in the Iraqi Kurdistan capital, Erbil, which were attended by US military officers.
When US officials denied any involvement, Maliki responded by telling them:
These are pictures of American officers sitting in this meeting … you are partners in this operation.
The UK pipeline
A resident from Mosul speaking with The Cradle states that many of the ISIS members he encountered during the group’s three-year occupation of the city were English-speaking foreigners, in particular the ISIS commanders.
But where did these English-speaking ISIS members come from?
In 2012, UK intelligence established a pipeline to send British and Belgian citizens to fight in Syria. Young men from London and Brussels were recruited by Salafist organizations, Shariah4UK and Shariah4Belgium, established by radical preacher and UK British intelligence asset Anjam Choudary.
These recruits were then sent to Syria, where they joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, which enjoyed support from UK intelligence. These British and Belgian fighters then joined ISIS after its official establishment in Syria in April 2013.
Among these fighters was a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi. Later known as the infamous Jihadi John, Emwazi kidnapped US journalist James Foley in October 2012 as a member of Katibat al-Muhajireen and allegedly executed him in August 2014 as a member of ISIS.
Made in America
The commander of Katibat al-Muhajireen, Abu Omar al-Shishani, also later joined ISIS and famously led the terror group’s assault on Mosul. Before fighting in Syria and Iraq, Shishani received US training as a member of the country of Georgia’s special forces.
In August 2014, the Washington Post reported that Libyan members of ISIS had received training from French, UK, and US military and intelligence personnel while fighting in the so-called “revolution” to topple the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011.
Many of these fighters were British but of Libyan origin and traveled to Libya with the encouragement of UK intelligence to topple Qaddafi. They then traveled to Syria and soon joined ISIS or the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front.
“Sometimes I joke around and say that I am a fighter made by America,” one of the fighters told the Post.
There is no indication that the relationship between these fighters and US and UK intelligence ended once they joined ISIS.
‘Maliki must go’
US support for the ISIS invasion of Mosul is evident through the actions Washington refused to take. US planners monitored the ISIS convoys traveling across the open desert from Syria to assault Mosul in June 2014 but took no action to bomb them.
As former US secretary of defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged, “It wasn’t that we were blind in that area. We had drones, we had satellites, we had intelligence monitoring these groups.”
Even after Mosul fell, and as ISIS was threatening Baghdad, Washington planners refused to help unless Maliki stepped down as prime minister.
Maliki claimed in his interview with Mortada that US officials had demanded he impose a siege on Syria to assist in toppling Assad. When Maliki refused, they accused him of sabotaging the Syria regime change operation and sought to use ISIS to topple Iraq’s government.
American sources all but confirm Maliki’s claim. The US military-funded Rand Corporation noted that the US–Iraqi relationship at this time had become strained “because of the willingness of the Maliki government to facilitate Iranian support to the Assad regime despite significant American opposition.”
As Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon explained:
The president was clear he didn’t want to launch that campaign [against ISIS] until there was something to defend, and that wasn’t Maliki.
New York Times journalist Michael Gordon reported that Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Baghdad two weeks after ISIS captured Mosul to meet with Maliki. Desperate for help, Maliki asked Kerry for airstrikes against ISIS to protect Baghdad, but the latter explained that the US would not help unless the former gave up power.
In July 2014, ISIS fighters were moving captured US artillery and armored vehicles back to Syria across the open desert. Gordon reports further that the ISIS convoys were “easy pickings for American airpower.”
However, when US Major General Dana Pittard requested authorization to conduct the airstrikes to destroy the convoys, the White House refused, saying the “political prerequisites” had not been met. In other words, Maliki was still prime minister.
Geopolitical gains
While claiming to be enemies of ISIS, the US planners and their allies deliberately facilitated the terror group’s rise, including its capture of Mosul.
ISIS relied on US and UK-trained fighters, US and Saudi-purchased weapons, and Kurdish-supplied US dollars – rather than popular support from the city’s Sunni residents – to conquer Mosul.
When self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of the so-called Caliphate at the city’s historic Nuri Mosque, he set up the very Salafist principality outlined in the DIA document by US intelligence heads.
This orchestrated rise of ISIS not only destabilized the region but also served the geopolitical interests of those who claim to be combating terrorism.
Is Joe Biden’s Brain Vaccine Injured?
A Midwestern Doctor | The Forgotten Side of Medicine | June 29, 2024
Story at a Glance:
• One of the most common side effects of the COVID-19 vaccination we’ve observed is cognitive impairment. This can range from brain fog to dementia, and frequently we see a rapid acceleration of pre-existing cognitive decline into Alzheimer’s disease.
• Recently large data sets have emerged which support our observations and indicate millions of people are being affected by the adverse neurological effects of the vaccines. Those datasets are summarized here.
• After Joe Biden became president, he had a rapid decline in cognitive function, leading many to say he is not the same man who assumed the presidency four years ago. Since that decline paralleled his vaccination uptake, the pertinent medical information about his case is provided here so you can assess if the two were indeed linked.
• Many other prominent Democrats have had significant vaccination injuries, including 8% of the Democratic Senators. Each of their brain injuries (3 strokes and encephalitis) and their link to vaccination are discussed here. This article particularly focuses on Dianne Feinstein’s case, because like Biden, she had pre-existing cognitive impairment which rapidly progressed after the COVID vaccines (which she forced on America) hit the market and rather than admit it, she did everything she could to cover it up until she died.
Throughout my life, I have had the experience of being able to clearly see something, and have everyone around me, including a lot of “experts,” insist that what I’m seeing does not exist, and then a few years later have my observation become generally accepted as true. This for example describes my experience with the COVID vaccines, as within a month of them being on the market, I had seen so many significant or severe injuries (and deaths) it was clear to me the shots were much more toxic than a typical pharmaceutical. Nonetheless, regardless of what I said, most of my colleagues (except those who were injured by the vaccines) would not listen to me, and it’s only now that mainstream doctors (or left-wing individuals) are beginning to accept that the vaccines were a mistake.
Similarly, throughout Biden’s presidency, it’s been very clear to me that Biden has progressively increasing cognitive impairment, yet with most of the left-wing individuals I am close to, every piece of evidence I’ve presented to substantiate this allegation is either written off as right-wing propaganda I am being hypnotized by or met with a bizarre excuse to account for Biden’s behavior. Likewise, many of my friends have had similar experiences when discussing this issue within their circle (e.g., to family members).
Yesterday, Biden shocked the world by having a debate performance which made it clear even to ardent Democrats that he was suffering from cognitive impairment. I, in turn, watched the entire left-wing media implicitly or overtly state that Biden was cognitively impaired and that there was panic throughout the Democrat party of him running in November, as it was both clear Biden could not win and that many other Democrats would also lose because many of their voters would not want to show up to vote for Biden and hence would not vote for the rest of the ticket.
This in turn suggests two distinct possibilities:
The first is that this debate was used to swap Biden out of the nomination after the primaries were completed (so an insider the public would never vote for could be appointed to the presidency).
The second is that most of the Democratic party (and much of the mass media) genuinely believed Biden’s cognitive issues were a “right wing conspiracy” and their responses last night were that of a state of genuine shock.
In this article, I am going to focus on the second possibility as I feel it also ties into the broader issue of vaccine injuries that has swept the Democrat party.
The Vaccine Mass Formation
Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges—which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about (e.g., I meet many people who claim to align with “the science” who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use but simultaneously don’t understand any of the scientific points they are discussing).
Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closest and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech, while in the New Age field, I’ve noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What’s remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide non-sensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group (e.g., I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends). Likewise, in academia, it’s been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication (and likewise I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator many take as being legitimate scholarly writings).
In turn, I’ve noticed that in some groups, this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify, and before long reinforce itself into cult-like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer—a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior (e.g., a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader).
Note: while modern marketing has become remarkably effective at inducing this hypnosis (especially since marketers have the ability to broadcast the hypnotic message throughout the mass media so everyone feels pressured to conform to it), the most powerful manipulation (which is still not possible to standardize) occurs from individuals who figured out how to spiritually manipulate others. In turn, since I’ve seen those people do horrible stuff throughout my lifetime, I previously wrote an article explaining how to recognize spiritual manipulation and not be susceptible to it or the dangerous spiritual practices which accompany it.
Recently, Matthias Desmet brought the world’s attention to the mass formation hypothesis, which is essentially what happens when the concept I just described (individuals wanting to belong to a group and copying its non-verbal behaviors) becomes magnified to the point that they do completely irrational things, hallucinate things at odds with reality (e.g., seeing a face on the moon), and become willing to engage in truly horrific behavior (e.g., genociding another race or sacrificing their children to the state).
Desmet’s hypothesis became popular as it provided a potential explanation for why our leaders chose to enact a series of horrific COVID-19 policies, and continued to double-down on them regardless of how much evidence emerged showing the policies were a terrible idea. Conversely, it attracted a lot of animosity as many interpreted it as removing the responsibility from those who were clearly at fault for inflicting all of these horrors upon us (which I believe to be a misinterpretation of what Desmet argued).
In turn with the COVID vaccines, like many, I noticed there was a hypnotic fixation on them which led to the believers wanting to vaccinate as many people as possible (regardless of the human rights violations that required) and no amount of evidence being sufficient to convince them the vaccines weren’t a good idea.
One of the things I believe was the strongest proof for this was the fact that as the Democrat leadership continued to promote vaccination mandates, they also repeatedly vaccinated themselves despite numerous severe vaccine injuries occurring within their party.
Note: I also observed this with many medical professionals who continued to zealously promote vaccination despite being confronted with injuries in their patients.
Senate Vaccine Injuries
Many large surveys have found that a continually increasing portion of the country believes the vaccines are causing widespread social harms (e.g., a recent poll found a third of Americans believe the vaccines are killing people) and that a large number of people were harmed by them (e.g., one poll found 7% of Americans believe they suffered a major side effect from the vaccines and 34% believe they suffered a minor one). Because of this, in theory, if a large sample of vaccinated individuals could be identified, there should have been a number of significant injuries in them.
As it so happened, the US Senate provided that sample, as we saw numerous unusual and severe diseases emerge in the Democrats there at a far higher rate than had ever happened in the past, and more importantly, those diseases were things strongly linked to the COVID vaccines. Furthermore, those injuries only occurred in Senators who had zealously promoted the vaccines.
Note: it is likely far more injuries than those I listed here occurred within the Senate as due to the political implications of acknowledging a vaccine injury, I would not expect the Senators to publicize them. Those I have listed are simply the ones which were too overt to cover up.
John Fetterman:
John Fetterman, a freshman Pennsylvania Democratic Senator (then aged 52) on May 17, 2022, less than a month after strongly endorsing the vaccine, suffered an ischemic stroke two days before the state primary for his Senate seat. Despite significant signs of cognitive impairment since his stroke, Fetterman somehow won the primary and then the general election. Since becoming elected, Fetterman has had prolonged periods of absence from the U.S. Senate due to needing specialized medical care:
Fetterman was hospitalized for syncope (lightheadedness) for two days beginning on February 10, 2023. Two days after his release he was hospitalized again, for a severe case of major depression. For about two months, Fetterman lived and worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As part of his daily schedule at the hospital, his chief of staff arrived at 10 a.m. on weekdays with newspaper clips, statements for Fetterman to approve, and legislation to review. During his hospitalization, Fetterman co-sponsored a bipartisan rail safety bill, introduced after the derailment of a chemical-carrying train in East Palestine, Ohio, close to the border with Pennsylvania; the regulation aimed to strengthen freight-rail safety regulations to prevent future derailments.
On April 17, 2023, Fetterman returned to the Senate to chair the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry subcommittee on food and nutrition, specialty crops, organics and research. The Washington Post said that Fetterman’s “voice stumbled at times while reading from prepared notes” during the subcommittee hearing, but “he appeared in good spirits” and communicated a message about the importance of fighting hunger.
Since that time, Fetterman has had a variety of unusual incidents suggestive of cognitive impairment (e.g., earlier this month he was speeding and crashed into someone).
Ben Luján
Ben Ray Luján is a freshman New Mexico Democratic Senator who repeatedly promoted the COVID-19 vaccines.
On January 27, 2022, Luján (then 49) was hospitalized in Santa Fe after feeling fatigued and dizzy. He was found to have had a hemorrhagic stroke from a torn vertebral artery affecting his cerebellum and was transferred to the University of New Mexico Hospital for treatment, which included a decompressive craniectomy. A statement from his office said that “he is expected to make a full recovery”. Luján returned to work at the Senate on March 3 and stated by April 21 that he was 90% recovered.
Chris Van Hollen
Chris Van Hollen is a freshmen Maryland Democrat Senator who repeatedly promoted the COVID vaccines and tackling COVID-19 “disinformation.”
On May 15, 2022, while giving a speech, he experienced a hemorrhagic stroke in the back of his head. After a hospitalization, he returned to the Senate. At the time of this injury, he was 64.
Note: while ischemic strokes are more common, we have seen cases of major blood vessels rupturing after COVID vaccinations (e.g., one of our vaccinated colleagues almost died from a ruptured aorta). We believe this is due to the the COVID vaccine damaging the lining of the blood vessels, as on autopsies, significant damage to the blood vessels is often observed (and likewise in our colleague’s case, the tissue changes observed in his aorta during the emergency repair were highly unusual). Furthermore, this damage appears to increase with time, which likely explains the roughly one year delay between vaccination and rupture in both the Senators and our colleague.
As there are 50 Democrats in the Senate, these 3 incidents represent a 6% rate of strokes occurring within roughly a year of vaccination (as the vaccines became available in early 2021). As you can see, that is much higher than the 0.083%-0.146% rate you would expect to see for these strokes but congruent with the observed vaccine injury rate.

Conversely, the only other Senator I know of who had a stroke while in office was Republican Mark Kirk, who in 2012, at the age of 54, a year after assuming office, had a stroke which required a year of rehabilitation.
Dianne Feinstein
Dianne Feinstein was another aggressive promoter of COVID vaccination (e.g., she introduced a ridiculous bill to require vaccination or a negative COVID test to fly on domestic airlines). In March of 2023, Feinstein was diagnosed with shingles and hospitalized. While her office initially insisted she would be fine, it was later revealed her shingles had progressed to Ramsey Hunt Syndrome (paralysis of the face) and encephalitis (brain inflammation). As as a result, it took 10 weeks for her to return to the Senate, at which point she was clearly disabled, and her office was gradually forced to admit Feinstein had experienced some disability.

Once there, it was evident she was both physically and cognitively impaired, but she nonetheless refused to resign. A few months later, in July she ceded her power of attorney to her daughter, then in August she was hospitalized after falling in her home, and finally at the end of September she died of “natural causes,” making her one of the only Senators (and the first female one) to die while in office.
Note: her death was immediately followed by California governor Newsom appointing a replacement for her in the Senate.
What is noteworthy about her experience was how rare her conditions were. Specifically, Ramsay Hunt syndrome is estimated to affect 1 in 20,000 people per year (with it typically being seen in immunocompromised individuals), while shingles encephalitis is typically seen in 1 out of every 33,000-50,000 cases of shingles (with it again being more frequently seen in immunocompromised individuals).
Note: for individuals over 65, between 3.9 to 11.8 per 1000 experience shingles each year (which means around 1 in 500,000 develop shingles encephalitis), while less than 100 Americans die each year from it.
Conversely, from the start, shingles was one of the most common injuries linked to COVID vaccination and likewise, its more severe complications have been strongly linked to vaccination (due to the immunosuppressive effects of the vaccine). The following table is from the most comprehensive article I was able to find on the subject:

Note: Justin Bieber also recently attracted widespread public attention after he developed Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, a condition which was extraordinarily rare for his age (he had approximately a 27/1,000,000 chance of developing this condition).
As you might expect, in the same way the COVID vaccines continually failed to work (which is why they kept on requiring more and more boosters) these injuries had no effect on the Democrats’ zeal for the vaccines. One of the saddest cases happened when Representative Castin’s 17 year old vaccinated daughter (who aggressively promoted the COVID vaccines) died suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep from a sudden cardiac arrhythmia on June 12, 2022.
In addition to this being a cause of death linked to the vaccines (sudden cardiac death almost never happens in children), a reader calculated that (prior to the vaccines), a US Representative would be expected to have a child under 18 die once every 200 years). However, while Casten repeatedly publicly expressed his grief over his daughter’s death, that did not shake his faith in the vaccines. For example, this is something he said a year after she died:

Cognitive Impairment
Since the vaccines hit the market, we have noticed one of the most common consequences of them has either been cognitive impairment, worsening of existing cognitive impairment, or an elderly patient with cognitive impairment rapidly progressing into dementia (which is typically labeled as Alzheimer’s disease). Additionally, when we’ve looked for it, we’ve found a variety of signs of subtle neurologic injury in a large number of vaccinated adults who do not believe they have suffered complications from the vaccination.
If we take Senator Feinstein for example, at the end of 2020, the New Yorker reported that Feinstein’s colleagues and staffers were concerned Feinstein was beginning to show signs of cognitive decline which were getting harder to cover up (although others who worked with her denied this). Two years later in 2022 (after the vaccines had come out), the New York Times also covered her cognitive decline but were more explicit in acknowledging it, presumably because it had become significantly worse:
At 88, Ms. Feinstein sometimes struggles to recall the names of colleagues, frequently has little recollection of meetings or telephone conversations, and at times walks around in a state of befuddlement — including about why she is increasingly dogged by questions about whether she is fit to serve in the Senate representing the 40 million residents of California, according to half a dozen lawmakers and aides who spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity.
On Capitol Hill, it is widely — though always privately — acknowledged that Ms. Feinstein suffers from acute short-term memory issues that on some days are ignorable, but on others raise concern among those who interact with her.
Ms. Feinstein is often engaged during meetings and phone conversations, usually coming prepared and taking notes. But hours later, she will often have forgotten those interactions, said the people familiar with the situation, who insisted that they not be named because they did not want to be quoted disparaging a figure they respect.
Some of them said they did not expect her to serve out her term ending in 2024 under the circumstances, even though she refuses to engage in conversations about stepping down.
This cognitive decline further worsened after her hospitalization. For example, shortly after she returned, when asked about her 3 month absence, she insisted she was completely fine, seemed to believe she had been working at the Senate the whole time (e.g., voting) and became confrontational when a reported suggested otherwise. To put this in context, two months later, she ceded power of attorney to her daughter, and after another two months, died.
Sadly, I do not believe Feinstein’s case is an outlier, and for that reason, I recently attempted to compile all the evidence showing vaccine cognitive decline is a very real thing. The key points I raised in that article were:
1. Friends have complained to me about cognitive impairment following vaccination, and in a few cases, shared that impairment worsened after subsequent vaccinations. Likewise, I’ve seen many signs (others have as well) that these effects are widespread in society (e.g., drivers became worse after the vaccination campaign).
2. Numerous friends reported to me that their relatives in nursing homes developed rapidly progressing dementia after vaccination and then died shortly later—something which many readers here have since shared with me also happened to their parents or spouses.
3. Both I and colleagues have noticed a variety of neurological deficits in the vaccinated. This is best demonstrated by the fact the most common symptom Pierre Kory’s vaccine injured patients come to him for is brain fog.
4. A variety of datasets support these contentions. Those include:
• The rate of motor vehicle accidents increased after the vaccination campaign.
• The Dutch detected a 18-40% increase (averaging out to 24%) in the number of adults seeing their primary doctor for memory and concentration problems following the vaccination rollout.
• A significant increase in disability has been seen throughout the Western world since the COVID vaccines came out, some of which is cognitive in nature.
• VAERS had a massive spike in cognitive disorders being reported after vaccination which was seen after the COVID vaccines hit the market.
• An Israeli survey found that 4.5% of those who received a booster developed anxiety or depression, and 26.4% who already had either then experienced an exacerbation of their condition.
• A study of 2,027,353 Koreans published three weeks ago in Nature found that vaccination resulted in a 68% increase in depression, a 44% increase in anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders.
• A more recent study of 558,017 Koreans over 65 found vaccination increased the risk of cognitive impairment by 138% and the risk of Alzheimer’s by 23%, and that this risk increased with time.

The key point with these datasets is that those increases are massive, to the point they cannot be explained by chance.
Joe Biden
During Biden’s presidency, he has aggressively promoted the mandates, and has done a variety of things which go far outside what the president typically does. These include:
• Accusing social media companies of “killing people” because they did not make a sufficiently aggressive effort to censor vaccine misinformation (which in turn his administration used to censor free speech and violate the First Amendment).
• (Erroneously) forecasting a winter of illness and death for the unvaccinated.
• Illegally mandating the vaccines on America’s workers.
• Pressuring the FDA to rapidly approve questionable COVID vaccinations, to the point its chief (and very pro-vaccine) vaccine scientists did not feel what the White House was requesting was appropriate to do—which ultimately resulted in those scientists being forced out of the approval process and the vaccines approved.
Given how strong the evidence against the COVID vaccinations actually is, I interpreted that to mean Biden genuinely believes in the vaccines, something demonstrated by the fact he’s repeatedly publicly shown himself receiving the vaccine and reported having at least three boosters.
As best as I can tell, like his colleague Feinstein, Biden’s successive vaccination appears to be correlated with a rapid cognitive decline which he nonetheless has refused to acknowledge.
To elaborate, at the time Biden ran in 2020, many including Donald Trump accused Biden of being cognitively impaired, and cited a variety of examples suggesting he may not be fit to be president (e.g., Biden rarely campaigned publicly, whenever asked aggressively refused to take a test assessing his cognitive function, and would make odd confrontational outbursts at voters who challenged him). Likewise, doctors identified reasons why Biden was potentially at higher risk for cognitive impairment (e.g., he had history of a brain aneurysm and repair in 1988, and had atrial fibrillation).
Note: one of the most common side effects of COVID vaccination is inflammation at the site of a pre-existing injury (e.g., a brain surgery). Likewise, the vaccines commonly damaged the heart and triggered conditions like atrial fibrillation.
Nonetheless, Biden was able to perform well enough during the campaign to effectively debate Trump during the 2020 presidential debate and earn a sizable portion of the vote. In contrast, one of the most common talking points I heard when I reviewed the post debate coverage was that “Biden was a very different person there and not the man who ran in 2020.”
Likewise, during Biden’s Presidency, as time has moved forward I have noticed an increasing number of gaffes. This include him mumbling words incoherently and nonsensically (something which again has worsened as time moved forward), Biden staring into space and being frozen in place while those around him move (also seen here and here), and him needing to be guided and led away by his assistants. Most importantly, when he was interviewed by a special counsel this year, they acknowledged Biden had repeated mental lapses during the interview.
Additionally, it has been my impression that his cognitive lucidity is highly variable, something demonstrated both by the fact he is sometimes relatively coherent in his speeches, but other times he is not, and that fact that he is continuously absent-minded, particularly later in the day or at night (when these sorts of issues are well known to be worse—with the medical term for it being sundowning).
Note: earlier in the Biden presidency a White House doctor shared with a close colleague that Biden had significant cognitive impairment and displayed overt dementia at night.
As a result of this, many individuals who work with the elderly and those with cognitive impairment have recognized many of the same things they’ve seen in their patients in Biden and hence feel the fact that Biden is being continually brought before the public and forced to give speeches to equate to elder abuse.
After the debates, I in turn spoke with a gifted neurologist who has a talent for diagnosing these types of conditions with limited information (e.g., no access to an MRI). They were of the opinion that Biden’s clinical picture was consistent with vascular dementia (which Biden was at risk for due to his existing medical conditions and likewise something the COVID vaccine worsens).
One point my colleague emphasized was that Biden had a stuttering disorder which has significantly worsened during his presidency and that one of the most common types of strokes frequently damage the part of the brain responsible for speech (which in turn can create a stuttering disorder) but that a progressive loss of cerebral blood flow (e.g., that seen in vascular dementia), can also cause this, especially if there is pre-existing brain damage (e.g., Biden’s existing stuttering disorder). Furthermore, in the same way that an increasing loss of blood flow can exacerbate existing brain damage, a loss of sleep (which is extremely common in a stressful job like the presidency) can as well.
Biden’s Debate
I believe Biden’s poor performance was due to him both having had his cognitive impairment continue to progress and the fact that the nighttime schedule of the debate made it impossible for his team to chose a period of high lucidity for Biden to speak to the public.
During the debate, the following jumped out at me (and many others).
1. Biden repeated overt falsehoods with certainty.

For example, early in the debate he asserted that Trump had told people to inject bleach into themselves, when Trump had in fact discussed ultraviolet light—and most of media has now acknowledged Trump never said this. In my eyes, the most important thing about this was that Biden appeared to sincerely believe most of what he said.
2. Biden repeatedly showed his disgust for both Trump and his supporters (e.g., those present on January 6th). I found this concerning because history is rife with cognitively impaired tyrants who treated their subjects unfairly due to their own (often petty) delusions.
3. Biden rarely blinked.
4. Biden’s face appeared to be mostly frozen. This is a classic symptom of Parkinson’s and also something which can resulted from a vaccine injury where a series of microstrokes can damage the facial nerve (which was corroborated by his face being asymmetrical and his smile being extremely asymmetrical).
5. Biden often seemed to stare into space for long periods of time, and in numerous cases struggled to come up with a coherent answer when it was his turn to speak (e.g., you could see on his face he was making an effort to think, or halfway through something he said he would close his eyes and pause for a while).
6. Biden missed many important points he needed to raise for his base (e.g., when talking about abortion, rather than hit the important points, he talked about the epidemic of sister-on-sister rape).
7. He had very limited mobility in his hands (e.g., he slowly raised them to make a point and then rarely moved them while he was doing so).
8. When the debate ended, he needed to have his wife help him walk off stage.
More than anything else however, he seemed to be in pain, unhealthy and really struggling through the debate. This seemed to be the primary takeaway people from both political parties took from the debate (e.g., Democrats panicked and felt demoralized, liberal pundits were in shock, and many moderates said this debate felt like elder abuse).
My own takeaway was that prior to the debates, many pundits had relentlessly promoted the message Biden was not cognitively impaired to the point that rather than them simply lying, it seemed as though they had developed a mass formation where they genuinely believed this. Because of this, there were many instances of individuals appearing to panic as their hypnosis broke and they realized that was all hogwash. In turn, the primary reason I watched the post-debate coverage is because it’s fairly rare to see a mass red-pill like this occur and the shock which coincides with it.
Note: because of how unhealthy our culture is, it’s fairly unusual for individuals over 70, let alone 80, to have normal cognitive function. In turn, since so much responsibility is placed on our leaders for positions (which require a high degree of cognitive aptitude) many have argued for putting age or term limits on our leaders—especially since people should not be making policies that will not affect them (as they will be dead once they go into effect).
Pfizer’s Fraud
Once people become strongly committed to an idea, it is remarkably difficult to get them to admit they are wrong — especially since as time progresses, they continually build upon the mental investment within their minds to their position and create mental construct after construct which is dependent upon the position being true.
In turn, I typically see one of the following break their hypnosis:
• Clear and unambiguous evidence that they were wrong being broadcast to everyone (e.g., what happened last night with the debate).
• Them directly being harmed by the lie (e.g., a pro-vax doctor getting vaccine injured). Curiously, in many cases I’ve seen people still hold onto their lie when their children are victimized by it (e.g., in addition to Representative Casten losing his daughter, I’ve seen pro-vax doctors who had multiple members of their family suffer severe vaccine injuries but still insist the COVID vaccines are necessary for their patients).
• Them realizing they were a victim of fraud. I believe the fraud angle is persuasive because it shifts the burden from them to the fraudster and hence protects their ego. Because of this, I’ve repeatedly focused on trying to prove that Pfizer committed overt fraud, as I believe once individuals become aware of it, it will make them willing to change their position (e.g., previously I discussed how Pfizer faked the data it sent to the drug regulators which indicated their vaccine was producing the proteins it was supposed to create within the body — which was a major challenge facing this experimental gene therapy).
Recently the Kansas Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Pfizer alleging that they repeatedly and systematically committed fraud with the vaccines. The key points from it were as follows:
1. Pfizer used its confidentiality agreements with the U.S. Government and others to conceal, suppress, and omit material facts relating to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, including the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
2. Pfizer used an extended study timeline to conceal critical data – the study was repeatedly delayed, including a delay from January 2023 to February 2024 because of a late vaccination of a single study participant (out of 44,000 participants). Likewise, Pfizer promised to make its data available to researchers but never did so.
3. The FDA did not immediately make the safety and efficacy data for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine available, claiming it would take 55 years, but a federal judge forced them to release 55,000 pages per month rather than 500.
4. Pfizer destroyed the vaccine control group once the FDA approved emergency use authorization in December 2020 (ultimately only 7% of the placebo group did not receive a vaccine).
Note: destroying the placebo group is a very common tactic used to conceal a high rate of injuries in a research trial.
5. In its press release announcing the emergency use authorization (EUA), Pfizer did not disclose that it had excluded immunocompromised individuals from its COVID-19 vaccine trials (whereas they later relentlessly pushed the vaccine on them).
6. Pfizer knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis.
7. By March 2021, the United States military and Israel’s Ministry of Health (which was working hand in hand with Pfizer) detected a safety signal for myocarditis the public was never notified about. Nonetheless, Pfizer’s CEO denied a link existed.
8. In August 2021, after Pfizer obtained FDA approval through an EUA to provide its COVID-19 vaccine to 12 to 15-year-olds, Pfizer decided to study “how often” its vaccine may cause myocarditis or pericarditis in children by testing 5-16-year-olds for troponin I. Once a safety signal was detected, Pfizer’s CEO nonetheless denied it.
9. Pfizer also detected a safety signal relating to strokes. The FDA’s and CDC’s “surveillance system flagged a possible link between the new Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent COVID-19 vaccine and strokes in people aged 65 and over,” while an FDA study found that individuals 85 years or older who received both a flu vaccine and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine “saw a 20% increase in the risk of ischemic stroke.”
Note: one of the original names for the vaccine was the “clot shot.”
10. Pfizer did not release the data within its adverse event database—which as of February 2021 included 158,893 adverse events and 1,223 deaths. Furthermore, Pfizer was so overwhelmed with the adverse events, they had to hire hundreds (if not thousands) of staffers to process logging those adverse events (and nonetheless had a massive backlog). Despite this, Pfizer determined no causality existed between the vaccine and any of those injuries.
11. Pfizer only tested the booster shot on 12 trial participants who were in the 65- to 85-year-old age range and did not test it on any participant older than 85.
Note: Biden is 81.
12. Pfizer did not publicly release adverse event data from its database. By February 28, 2021, Pfizer’s adverse events database contained 158,893 adverse events from 42,086 case reports, including 1,223 fatalities, although Pfizer again did not make causality findings. Pfizer was receiving so many adverse events reports that it had to hire 600 additional full-time staff and expected to hire more than 1,800 additional resources by June 2021. Pfizer had such a backlog of adverse events that it might take 90 days to code “nonserious cases” that pfizer did not know the magnitude of under-reporting.
13. Pfizer announced a study on pregnant women but omitted the fact that more than one in ten women (52) who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during their pregnancy reported a miscarriage, many within days of vaccination. Six women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during their pregnancy reported premature deliveries; several babies died.
14. Pfizer’s February 18th 2021, press release also did not disclose other adverse effects on the reproductive systems of women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. By April 2022, Pfizer knew of tens of thousands of adverse events connected to its COVID-19 vaccine, including heavy menstrual bleeding (27,685), menstrual disorders (22,145), irregular periods (15,083), delayed periods (13,989), absence of periods (11,363) and other reproductive system effects.
15. Pfizer failed to recruit 83% of the women they had sought to study for their 4000 woman pregnancy trial, then destroyed the placebo group for the study, and still has not completed the quality control review process for it.
16. Pfizer misrepresented and concealed material facts relating to the durability of protection provided by its COVID-19 vaccine (until it was time to sell boosters).
17. Pfizer repeatedly said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission even though Pfizer knew it had never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission. This point is important because Pfizer repeatedly gave very heavy-handed statements based on this lie (e.g., that you would kill your grandmother or endanger your community if you didn’t vaccinate) which in turn were used to justify Biden’s abhorrent mandates. Likewise, once clear evidence emerged the vaccine did not prevent transmission, Pfizer and the Biden administration continued to assert this lie to promote their product.
18. Pfizer aggressively utilized back channels to censor speech on social media that was critical of their vaccines—and likely did so in collusion with the Biden administration. The vast extent of this abhorrent conduct is contained within Alito’s dissent on the recent Supreme Court ruling relating to government censorship.
Note: the above summaries were sourced from Carl Henegahn and Kanekoa and then further modified by me.
Many learning of these points are understandably outraged. Sadly, as things like this are fairly common within the pharmaceutical industry, many of us assumed Pfizer’s talking points were lies from the start and hence are less shocked by these revelations.
Conclusion
Our country has been in an accelerating decline for decades, and I view the COVID-19 disaster as being a symptom of that decline rather than an isolated event. In turn, my hope is that as more and more shocking events happen, it can at last motivate the public and political class to begin taking things seriously and working together to fix the situation we are in rather than becoming even more polarized and simply doubling down on blaming the other side for everything that is going awry.
In the case of last night’s debate, the fact that we clearly had a cognitively impaired man struggling to lead the world’s greatest super power, beyond making waves within the United States, sends an even stronger message to the rest of the world that something is seriously wrong with America and it should no longer be treated as the sole superpower. My hope is thus that this sends a message to America’s political class that the current course we are going on is unacceptable and needs to change.
Likewise, my sincere hope is that members of the Democrat party will begin to be able to tie Biden’s “inexplicable” cognitive decline to the COVID vaccines, as many who have worked with him have noticed he is simply not the same person who assumed office four years ago, and more and more difficult to ignore signs are emerging that the Democrats made a huge mistake pushing the vaccines.
Because of this, if you have the ability to share this point within your social circle—particularly that the exact same thing happened to Dianne Feinstein (who liked Biden refused to acknowledge her impairment and instead had her staffers create a facade until she died), that would be greatly appreciated. The Democratic party is in a state of shock right now (which is when people are the most mutable), so I believe this is the best time to get that message to them.
Blinken Bets Big on AI to Combat “Misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 1, 2024
The current US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, has revealed that his department is testing AI-based tools as a way to fight “misinformation.”
In conversation with the State Department’s chief data and AI officer Matthew Graviss, he cited a number of initiatives – such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Washington’s Enterprise AI Strategy as the foundations for the ultimate goal – using AI to “advance our foreign policy.”
The second part of the push to equip the State Department with AI tools is to – “strengthen this institution.”
According to Blinken, his department is a leader within the government when it comes to testing and “harnessing” the technology. Some reports speak about this as combating whatever happens to be considered foreign disinformation.
And while on the subject of meddling, the Washington Times says AI tests are “part of an ambitious media monitoring and analysis project that spans the globe.”
As sinister as that may sound, packaging the message as the need to combat (only) “foreign disinformation” certainly makes the policy more palatable at home, where the department’s past activity features in congressional probes into government-orchestrated online censorship.
This scrutiny is presented as something hindering the Department of State’s “anti-disinformation” work – while the tools now in development are quite openly described as a possible different means “to pursue the same goals.”
Blinken’s remarks reveal how the technology is used seemingly innocuously as a (translation and summarization) tool “in multilateral organizations;” but then he praised the ability of AI-powered tools to make mass surveillance (“monitoring”) cover a much larger number of media, making its scope and scale “vast,” as the report put it.
And also – combat “disinformation” – which Blinken quite dramatically refers to as “one of the poisons in the international system today.”
“We have one program that we’re using that is able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world — to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over a hundred languages — and then immediately translate, synthesize and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space immediately,” the secretary is quoted as saying.
But given the scale of the operation, and the shortcomings of the current limitations of AI – those in the know might wish Blinken good luck with the accuracy and reliability of getting that “immediate, clear picture.”
However, when the “AI weapon” is pointed at online platforms as a means of identifying and censoring “disfavored” speech, it is objectively more likely to be efficient.
And the State Department is no stranger to such – strange given its mission – activities: after all, it is the home of the investigated-by-Congress and highly controversial Global Engagement Center.
This Energy Transition Thing Really Is Not Happening
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | June 25, 2024
From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.
For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”
Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.
That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.
Most of the Statistical Review consists of just spreadsheets of numbers. There are some charts, but relatively few. But the takeaways are too obvious to hide. The big one is this: there is no energy “transition” going on, at least not in the sense that “renewables” are actually supplanting fossil fuels. Yes there is some considerable amount of “renewable” wind and solar electricity generation getting built (with huge government subsidies). But it is not replacing fossil fuel generation. Rather, fossil fuel generation continues to increase, and its share of overall energy production has barely budged.
Here is EI’s June 20 Press Release, which summarizes the five “key stories” that it says emerge from the statistics. The first one is the big one — increasing energy consumption led by increased production and consumption of fossil fuels:
Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels. Global primary energy consumption overall was at a record absolute high, up 2% on the previous year to 620 Exajoules (EJ). Global fossil fuel consumption reached a record high, up 1.5% to 505 EJ (driven by coal up 1.6%, oil up 2% to above 100 million barrels for first time, while gas was flat). As a share of the overall mix they were at 81.5%, marginally down from 82% last year.
And of course, “emissions” continue to rise:
Emissions from energy increased by 2%, exceeding 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.
No matter how much the federal government or any state threatens to punish you for your sin of fossil fuel use, aggregate global emissions from such use are not going to go down within our lifetimes.
The second “key story” relates to the contribution, or lack thereof, of solar and wind. Here EI engages in some modest spinning to make things look less bad than they are for the solar and wind promoters; but there’s not much they can do:
Solar and wind push global renewable electricity generation to another record level. Renewable generation, excluding hydro, was up 13% to a record high of 4,748 TWh. This growth was driven almost entirely by wind and solar, and accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.
4,748 TWh of renewable generation — wow, that’s a lot! Or is it? Do you notice how they suddenly switched units from Exajoules to Terawatt hours when they changed from talking about fossil fuels to solar and wind. Does anybody around here know the conversion factor? Yes — it’s 277.778 TWh per EJ. That means that the 4,748 TWh of “almost entirely” solar and wind power generated in 2023 came to all of 17.1 EJ, which is just 2.7% of the 620 EJ of world primary energy consumption. Could you have imagined that it could be so little, after decades of over-the-top promotion and trillions of dollars of subsidies?
And pay attention to that line “wind and solar . . . accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.” Does that somehow sound like a transition is happening? It’s the opposite. If wind and solar were actually taking over, they would have to account for 100% of additional generation, plus large further amounts to replace fossil fuel generators. As long as wind and solar account for less than all of additional generation, then fossil fuels are continuing to increase, and there is no “transition” going on at all.
I mentioned that there were relatively few charts in the Review, but some of them are striking. Here is one of my favorites, showing global coal consumption from 1965 to 2023:

Over that period, North America and Europe have cut their consumption almost by half, from almost 40 EJ per year to around 20. But over the same period the consumption in the rest of the world has gone from about 20 EJ to around 140, multiplying by a factor of 7. And don’t be fooled by the apparent leveling off of increases in total consumption in the last several years. That reflects continuing decreases in North America and Europe, which are more than offset by larger increases in the Asia Pacific region.
Robert Bryce at his Substack has many more details from the EI Statistical Review, plus several charts that he has created from the EI data. He is much better at creating charts than I am. The title of Bryce’s article is “Numbers Don’t Lie.” Bryce also has a figure for the amount of government subsidies that have gone to wind and solar generation since 2004: $4.7 trillion. That much money to fund a supposed “transition” that isn’t occurring at all.
The story is going to be effectively the same every year until finally the promoters give up on the wind/solar scam.
‘Stunning admissions’: White House pressured FDA to cut corners on COVID vaccine approvals in order to push mandates
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 28, 2024
The Biden administration pressured the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “change its procedures, cut corners, and lower agency standards,” to approve Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines and authorize boosters, according to a congressional report released earlier this week.
The approval was key to facilitating the Biden administration’s rollout of the fall 2021 vaccine mandates, despite safety concerns about the shots, according to the report.
“During the pandemic, politics overruled science at the government institutions entrusted with protecting public health,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in a press release announcing the report.
“The FDA abandoned its congressional directive to protect citizens from false claims and undisclosed side effects, and instead ignored its own rules to pursue a policy of promoting the vaccine while downplaying potential harms,” he added.
As a result, according to the report, “countless Americans” suffer from vaccine side effects and the FDA has lost credibility with the public.
Following the report’s release a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday — “Follow the Science?: Oversight of the Biden Covid-19 Administrative State Response” — during which Dr. Philip Krause, former deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review (OVRR) vaccine products provided evidence to support the report’s conclusions.
Krause testified that both he and OVRR Director Marion Gruber were relieved of their responsibilities overseeing the COVID-19 vaccines review process because the administration wanted to rush FDA approval on a faster timeline than their office could deliver and push forward the fall mandates, Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH, reported.
The approval process was then pushed through by the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., and then-Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock.
Documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) through a Freedom of Information Act Request also showed that in early 2021, both Marks and Woodcock were aware of injuries linked to the vaccines.
Krause testified that the original timeline to complete the review process for Pfizer’s Biologics License Application (BLA) for its mRNA COVID-19 product was January 2022, but the team was already shooting to have the process completed earlier.
In early July 2021, “something had happened to completely change the opinion of Drs. Marks and Woodcock regarding the urgency of completing the BLA review,” Krause testified. “It was so important to them that they did not trust the experts who led the Office of Vaccines to do it, even with their help,” he said.
Krause told the committee that on July 19, he and Gruber were taken off the review process and Marks took it over himself.
He added:
“In this meeting, Drs. Woodcock and Marks expressed concern about the rising number of COVID cases in the US and globally, largely caused by the Delta variant and stated their opinion that, absent a license, states cannot require mandatory vaccination and that people hesitant to get an EUA authorized vaccine would be more inclined to get immunized if the product were licensed.”
Marks informed staff that the goal was to complete the review as rapidly as possible, Krause said. Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine was licensed on Aug. 23, 2021.
“As predicted by Drs. Woodcock and Marks, vaccine mandates followed immediately afterwards and were announced the same day for DoD [U.S. Department of Defense] and for New York State,” Krause said.
He said that the speed with which the mandates were implemented following authorization, “suggested that the rapid review of the vaccine was motivated more by a desire to mandate vaccines than by other public health considerations.”
Given that mandates are outside of the FDA’s purview, he added, the fact that Marks and Woodcock cited the need for mandates as a reason to speed the review “strongly implies that pressure to complete the review” more rapidly than planned came from outside of the FDA, he added.
When Krause and Gruber tried to implement a slower and more deliberative process, they were demoted, Prasad wrote.
As a result, they both left the agency at the end of 2021.
Prasad noted the mandates were issued only after the administration knew the vaccine couldn’t stop transmission and “as such, the mandates were unethical.”
“Krause’s testimony shows the Biden administration engaged in inappropriate political tampering with the FDA, and the FDA leaders — Woodcock and Marks — folded to political pressure,” he added.
Woodcock, now retired from the FDA, has since expressed regret about not doing more to respond to the concerns of the vaccine-injured, telling The New York Times she is “disappointed” in herself
Marks is still at the FDA, where Prasad said he “has been doing a bad job,” recently authorizing a product from Sarepta Therapeutics despite a failed study and a negative decision from reviewers.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., independent presidential candidate and CHD’s chairman on leave, tweeted that Marks also made commercials for the vaccine, claiming it was safe and effective in pregnancy and for children. “Had Pfizer said that, it would have been a crime,” Kennedy said.
In his testimony, Krause also made a series of comments confirming early knowledge of myocarditis — with rates as high as 1 in 5,000 for young men in early studies — and the protection conferred by natural immunity.
He also said that he did not take a booster shot.
Chief Nerd called Krause’s comments “stunning admissions” and posted a video clip on X.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Robert Hur Emerges as the Clear Winner in the Presidential Debate
By Jonathan Turley | June 28, 2024
The presidential debate last night was chilling to watch as President Joe Biden clearly struggled to retain his focus and, at points, seemed hopelessly confused. The winner was clear: Special Counsel Robert Hur. For months, Democrats in Congress and the media have attacked Hur for his report that the president came across as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur concluded that prosecuting Biden would be difficult because a jury would view him as a sympathetic figure of a man with declining mental capabilities. That was evident last night and the question is whether a man who was too diminished to be a criminal defendant can still be a president for four more years.
Hur laid out evidence that President Biden had unlawfully retained and mishandled classified evidence for decades. However, he also concluded that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He found that “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
What has followed is the usual pile-on in the media with legal analysts, press, and pundits denouncing Hur for his findings.
Hur likely does not anticipate any apologies even as commentators on CNN and MSNBC admit that there are now unavoidable questions of Biden’s ability to be the nominee.
Democrats have repeatedly insisted that Hur did not find Biden diminished and that he actually was impressed by his memory and mental acuity. Hur contradicted that in his own testimony before Congress.
Indeed, the denial campaign took on a bizarre character, particularly when Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) insisted that Hur “exonerated” Biden. Hur pushed back: “I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, ‘exoneration.’ That is not a word that is used in my report and that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor.”
Jayapal shot back, “You exonerated him.”
Hur responded, “I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in the report.”
The debate also further undermines the ridiculous effort of the Biden Administration to continue to withhold the audiotape of the Hur interview as privileged (despite saying that the transcript is not privileged).
The debate showed not only what Hur saw but why the Justice Department is making a clearly laughable privilege claim to delay any release of the audiotape until after the election.
‘Epic Waste of $500 Million’: Scientists Slam HHS Funding for ‘Next-Gen’ COVID Oral and Nasal Vaccine Trials
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | June 24, 2024
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced up to $500 million in funding for clinical trials of three next-generation COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including two nasal sprays and an oral pill.
The initiative, part of the $5 billion Project NextGen, aims to develop innovative vaccines that are easier to administer and provide improved protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The funding, awarded through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) under HHS’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), will support Phase 2b clinical trials for Vaxart‘s oral pill vaccine (up to $453 million) and CyanVac’s (up to $40 million) and Castlevax’s ($34 million) intranasal vaccines.
Each company’s phase 2b trials will recruit 10,000 volunteers to compare the safety and efficacy of the investigational vaccine against the existing mRNA vaccines.
ASPR Assistant Secretary Dawn O’Connell said in a news release that the new vaccines “may … be easier to administer through intranasal or oral delivery.” The announcement suggests the delivery methods have the “potential to improve vaccine access.”
However, the new delivery methods also raise unique concerns, especially the nasal vaccines, which use modified viruses as vectors.
Vaccine researcher Jessica Rose, Ph.D., told The Defender that she’s concerned about vaccine shedding and the possibility of pharmaceutical companies aerosolizing their products and administering them “without public knowledge as part of a ‘vaccination’ run.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer, echoed Rose’s concern about potential vaccine shedding, calling it a “nightmare like other live-virus vaccine formulations.”
Hooker told The Defender that because COVID-19 mutates rapidly, “immunity will still wane precipitously” for the new vaccine candidates, just as it did with the existing mRNA vaccines.
The new vaccines are “just more ‘me too’ technologies that are late to the party for COVID-19,” he said.
UGA spins off nasal vax biotech firm
University of Georgia (UGA) vaccine development spinoff CyanVac (an affiliate of Blue Lake Biotechnology) is set to begin phase 2b clinical trials for a new nasal COVID-19 vaccine, CVXGA. The study will be conducted through BARDA’s clinical studies network.
CyanVac founder Dr. Biao He, chair of veterinary medicine at UGA, leads the team behind CVXGA. He served on a White House panel in July 2022 advising on the future of COVID-19 vaccines, where he specifically promoted nasal vaccines.
CVXGA is a Parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5)-based vaccine that encodes the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.
Formally known as simian virus 5, PIV5 is often referred to as canine parainfluenza virus in the veterinary field, where it is a contributing factor to kennel cough in dogs. PIV5-based vaccines have been used to prevent kennel cough, reportedly without any safety concerns.
“PIV5 is a novel intranasal vaccine vector that has been shown to replicate safely in humans in clinical trials and stimulates all three pillars of immunity — cellular, mucosal, and humoral — with minimal uncomfortable side effects,” Dr. He said in the company’s press release.
Rose cautioned that some studies (here, here and here) have associated PIV5 with human diseases such as Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease and multiple sclerosis, but noted that later research was unable to confirm PIV5 as the cause. “More research needs to be done before this is used as a viral vector in humans,” she said.
Currently, there are no licensed vaccines for humans that contain PIV5. However, besides the CVGXA COVID-19 vaccine, PIV5 is under development for vaccines targeting various human and animal infectious diseases, including Lyme disease, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, rabies, tuberculosis and MERS-CoV.
Castlevax promises ‘game-changing’ spike protein vax
BARDA provided Castlevax, in collaboration with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, $34 million for its phase 2b trial of its intranasal vaccine candidate CVAX-01 beginning in Q4 2024.
The company is projected to receive as much as $338 million from BARDA for its COVID-19 “booster” vaccine.
Castlevax calls its vaccine “a next-generation COVID-19 vaccine with game-changing potential” with a design that “holds spike protein firmly in pre-fusion conformation, leading to more efficient induction of neutralizing antibodies.” It promises to “deliver reduced rates of breakthrough infections.”
Its vaccine, NDV-HXP-S, uses a recombinant Newcastle disease virus (NDV) that expresses the spike protein. The spike protein has been modified to contain six mutations by the HexaPro (HXP) technology developed at a University of Texas (UT), Austin laboratory.
HXP promises to make the spike protein more stable compared to older mRNA vaccines, which only contain two mutations. “Human antibodies recognize and respond to Hexapro better since the spike protein is less prone to shifting shapes,” according to a UT lab researcher.
The vaccine is grown in chicken eggs, a method commonly used to produce flu vaccines.
Castlevax boasts of having “multiple COVID-19 products in Phase 2 through Emergency Use Authorization, while we’re simultaneously developing a bivalent mucosal RSV+HMPV [human metapneumovirus] vaccine and a mucosal Norovirus vaccine.”
Promises and dangers of nasal vaccines
Hooker noted that nasal vaccines can be effective. “Mucosal immunity provides defenses at the mucous membrane level through a type of antibody called secretory IgA [immunoglobin A] along with humoral IgG and IgM antibodies,” he said.
But he cautioned that due to the observed rapid mutation in SARS-CoV-2 variants, “Long-term efficacy will be nil” for these vaccines.
Live virus nasal vaccines have been used for flu for years, he said, suggesting these latest entries are “looking for entry into the ‘annual’ COVID-19 vaccination market opportunity.”
Rose pointed out that EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) included a plan to aerosolize bat vaccines and deliver them at the mouths of caves in China.
“They hired an aerosol tech company to find the best way to administer their products,” she said.
When she saw this part of the proposal, Rose speculated the technique could readily be used to vaccinate people without their consent. “Given that everything they’ve done so far has been from questionable to illegal, I really have to wonder.”
Hooker added that the three BARDA-funded projects use live-virus vaccines that are “notoriously bad for pregnant women.”
Oral pill targets epithelial cells
Vaxart will receive up to $453 million from BARDA to develop an oral pill vaccine, which is also just entering phase 2b clinical trials.
“Vaccine delivery has relied primarily on injection for more than 150 years,” said Steven Lo, Vaxart’s CEO in the press release. “This funding from BARDA will assist us in determining whether we can bring a transformational, next-generation approach to global vaccination.”
Vaxart’s pill, VXA-CoV2-1, uses an adenovirus vector to infect epithelial cells in the lower small intestine. The vaccine delivers the genetic material to create the spike protein. The company boasts that a special coating allows the oral pill to survive the low pH in the stomach.
Adenovirus vaccines reportedly cannot make you sick, and cannot replicate or be integrated into the host body’s DNA.
Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines also used adenovirus vectors.
The use of J&J’s vaccine was paused in April 2021 due to reports of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a severe blood clotting disorder. In July 2021, the FDA warned about the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome with the J&J vaccine after approximately 100 cases were reported among 12.8 million vaccine recipients. With existing doses of the J&J vaccine having expired in May 2023, the vaccine is no longer in use.
AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine also caused blood clots, resulting in temporary pauses in its use in several countries. With declining demand, it was also removed from the market in May 2023.
Trials set ‘a horribly low bar’
The two nasal and one oral vaccine candidates are all entering phase 2b trials where their safety and efficacy will be compared to the available FDA-approved mRNA vaccines.
Hooker said that this sets “a horribly low bar for comparison given that the ‘control’ group is now subjected to the vaccine that has the worst safety profile in history.”
He underscored that the mRNA vaccines offer “extremely limited and sometimes negative efficacy, and no utility in terms of prevention of transmission,” and argued that using them as comparators for the candidate vaccines would be next to useless.
“Basically, almost anything short of a vial of arsenic would perform comparably,” he said.
“Given the low morbidity/mortality of the currently circulating COVID-19 strains, this is an epic waste of $500 million,” he said. “Their ROI [return on investment] will essentially be a bunch of sick people with vaccine injuries.”
Rose said that long-term efficacy cannot be guaranteed “based on failure of maintained efficacy in COVID-19 product prototypes. This is precisely why they keep pushing ‘boosters.’”
Hooker also questioned the review and approval process for the new vaccines. He said:
“As far as independence, safeguards and transparency, those are now gone. Not because of this particular clinical trial entry, but because of the shamfest that FDA was and still is with the EUA [emergency use authorization] and approvals granted during the plandemic.
“All the tricks that they (Dr. Peter Marks and company) pulled like trying to prevent the release of clinical trial documents, approving without human trials, the joke that is CICP [Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program], etc., really spell death for any integrity in the approvals process.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
If the war expands, will western facilities become the new target banks?
The Cradle | June 28, 2024
Israel’s brutal, nine-month military assault on Gaza has full support from several western-allied states, not only in supplying the occupation army’s war machine with a broad range of armaments and ammunition but also through direct military participation. The United States and Britain, for example, have provided vital reconnaissance and intelligence data and have sent their special forces to assist Israel in military operations.
An 8 June New York Times report revealed that US forces assisted the Israelis in retrieving four Israeli captives from Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 274 Palestinian civilians and three additional captives and leaving over 698 wounded. According to the paper’s Israeli sources, the US and UK provided intelligence from the air and cyberspace that Israel could not obtain on its own.
On 29 May, the Declassified UK media project reported that London authorized an unprecedented 60 Israel-bound flights using cargo planes that took off from the UK’s RAF Akrotiri air base in Cyprus, a facility covertly used by the US Air Force to move weapons to Israel.
The British government has not revealed the content of the air cargo transported – and maintains that no “lethal aid” is included. London instead claims that RAF flights to the occupation state are used to support its “diplomatic engagement” with Tel Aviv and repatriate British subjects – an odd use of military aircraft when Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport is still operational for regular passenger travel.
London has vigorously invoked its D-Notice since just after the war’s onset, a military and security directive aimed at preventing media outlets from publishing information that could harm national security, specifically relating to British airborne Special Forces (SAS) operations in Gaza. No further information has been revealed since the directive was issued on 28 October 2023.
How western intel penetrates West Asia
But all those concealment efforts were cracked open during Israel’s disproportionate military operation to secure the release of captives during the recent Nuseirat camp fiasco. Trending videos appeared of an Israeli helicopter landing next to the recently-installed $320 million US’ aid pier’ and of ‘aid trucks’ carrying special ops teams that were flanked by armored vehicles during the operation.
Media then reported that dozens of US and UK drones assisted in the Nuseirat camp assault, ostensibly by providing reconnaissance services to the Israeli military.
These incidents highlight not only direct western military participation in the war on Gaza but also the brazen exploitation of diplomatic cover or humanitarian work to prepare and carry out military actions that have led to mass civilian casualties and war crimes, as described by many United Nations institutions.
The question now is whether western facilities and troops will come under target as the war expands, potentially to Lebanon, given the evident collusion of western states in Israel’s aggressions – especially those in flagrant violation of international norms and law.
Although the use of embassies and civilian institutions – in the modern sense – as bases for intelligence gathering and launching special missions is not a new practice and dates back to at least the nineteenth century, current developments in technology and computing have enabled these facilities to act as spying and eavesdropping centers, monitoring and storing information for an entire country.
What was previously impossible has become reality through wireless communication and the Internet. Signal intelligence formerly gained by planting eavesdropping and listening devices can now be accessed via the common smartphone – with data funneled to these centers inside sovereign states.

Aerial view of the US embassy complex, northern Beirut.
‘Second-biggest US Embassy in the world’
Spawling approximately 174 thousand square meters, around 13 kilometers from the Lebanese capital of Beirut, lies the second largest embassy in West Asia – and the world. The new US Embassy in Beirut is surpassed in size only by its counterpart in Baghdad’s “Green Zone.”
Subtracting from the massive size of the embassy and its cost of nearly a billion dollars, there are many questions about the need for such facilities and what they contain.
The computer-generated images published by the embassy show a complex featuring multi-story buildings with tall glass windows, entertainment areas, a swimming pool surrounded by greenery, and views of the Lebanese capital. According to the project website, the complex includes an office, representative housing for employees, community facilities, and associated support facilities.
In May 2023, the Intelligence Online website reported that the massive billion-dollar complex will include a data collection facility, preparing the site as the new regional headquarters for US intelligence. The report says that because of its proximity to Syria, “Lebanon is considered a safe and strategic location for the deployment of intelligence agents already in the region as well as new personnel, who are selected directly from Washington-based agencies.”

Construction of the new US embassy, 13 kilometers north of the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Although it is not possible to obtain precise information about the design of this embassy, the excavations below surface level, the use of reinforced concrete in the structure, and its fortified location on top of a hill suggest that there is more to its operations, especially since several precedents of the US Beirut diplomatic mission being implicated in the work of intelligence services exist.
The 1983 bombing of the American Embassy revealed a high CIA death toll, with eight killed, including the CIA’s chief West Asia analyst and Near East director, Robert Ames, station chief Kenneth Haass, James Lewis, and most of the CIA’s Beirut employees.
The embassy was not only used as a CIA hub but also as a key regional intelligence base due to Lebanon’s proximity to both the sea and two British NATO bases in southern Cyprus, Dhekelia and Akrotiri, from which reinforcements or helicopter transfers can arrive rapidly onto Lebanese soil. A recent example, in 2020, is Washington’s smuggling of its agent Amer al-Fakhouri from the US embassy using an Osprey helicopter.
British Watchtowers on Lebanon’s borders
On 3 May, Lebanon announced the visit of an official delegation and a senior British intelligence officer the previous month to discuss the construction of new UK-built watchtowers. These are in addition to the more than three dozen watchtowers built by Britain during the Syrian war along the sensitive border between Lebanon and Syria.
According to leaks reported by Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper, the British delegation had asked the Lebanese army “to approve a plan to establish watchtowers along the border with occupied Palestine, similar to those existing on the eastern and northern borders with Syria.”
Following the low-profile visit, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati disclosed: “Establishing the towers and taking measures along the border are Israel’s conditions for stopping the war with Lebanon.”
Last February, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry received an official Syrian protest note classifying the British watchtowers as a threat to Syrian national security on several levels. The main threat is the tower systems’ sensitive intelligence and espionage equipment, which “shines deep into Syrian territory and collects information about the Syrian interior.”
According to Al-Akhbar’s report, “the information output from this equipment reaches the hands of the British, and the Israeli enemy benefits from the output to target Syrian territory and carry out strikes deep inside Syria.” The Syrian memorandum also refers to “the presence of some British officers at the towers.”

A 30-foot British watchtower near the Lebanese-Syrian border
Security cameras monitor the surrounding area at a border point on Lebanon’s border with Syria (Photo by the Lebanese Army Command, Orientation Directorate)
The 38 British watchtowers that claim to assist Lebanese authorities in “combating smuggling” raise many questions instead, among them the reasoning behind the erection of such a large number of these structures. Why, too, do the towers contain thermal monitoring, eavesdropping, signal intelligence, and communications equipment – especially in light of the close relationship between Tel Aviv and London and the periodic presence of British officers in these towers under the pretext of training the Lebanese army?
A commanding officer of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), interviewed at length by The Cradle in August 2021, contradicts London’s public claims about the towers, saying: “The aim of the towers today is to monitor the movements of Hezbollah and the Syrians.”
Dutch special forces in Dahiyeh
In March, Hezbollah captured several Dutch military forces operating covertly in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut, which hosts several offices of the Lebanese Resistance. The detainees claimed they were operating under cover of the Dutch Embassy in Lebanon and were found with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military equipment and advanced communications devices on their persons and in their vehicles.
During investigations, the Dutchmen claimed they had entered the southern suburb as part of a training exercise for evacuating Dutch citizens and diplomats in the event of a war. However, no Dutch nationals of the embassy resided in that area. It was also found that the servicemen had not communicated about their mission with the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Lebanese security services, or their country’s embassy.
That same month, a Spanish citizen was arrested for filming inside the same southern suburb of Beirut, only to discover later that he had a diplomatic passport and that his phone contained advanced software that prevented access to its data.
These events and a myriad of other examples show that some western governments continuously use western diplomatic and civilian facilities to gather intelligence or conduct special missions training in sovereign Lebanon.
These actions constitute a clear violation of the Vienna Convention on International Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which prohibit embassy diplomats from carrying out espionage activities. These actions don’t only place civilian populations in danger but also the thousands of professional diplomats in the country, all diplomatic missions, and the civilian facilities used as cover for illicit operations. They also drag otherwise immune diplomatic facilities into the legal framework of “hostilities,” intentionally or accidentally.
This danger is reinforced by Israel’s repeated violations of diplomatic and international norms, which are either ignored or protected by western allied states. Israel’s unprecedented military strikes against Iran’s consulate building in Damascus in April, for instance, did not receive the deserved condemnation from most western capitals, which helped it avoid the requisite UN Security Council censure.
Since the basic value of international norms is the precedent and event on which this law is built, the possibility increases that such western-supported attacks will backfire wildly and lead to the retaliatory targeting of western facilities and embassies – all in the context of new legal precedents and customs created that no longer prohibit strikes on suspect non-military facilities.
It is yet unknown to what extent western governments can expect to maintain their double standards in the application of international law and customs, especially if the Gaza war they are materially supporting expands to Lebanon or other West Asian regions.
The Resistance Axis, which has, in the past nine months, normalized military strikes on Israel, missile attacks on Israel-destined shipping vessels, and weekly strikes on US and UK naval fleets, are but one escalation away – as in, a declared war on Lebanon – to create a new set of target banks that surpass their last ones.
Does that then include the US embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the region – and the world – hosting 10 thousand American employees and troops, or, closer to home, the second largest embassy in West Asia, the US embassy in Beirut?
It is difficult to imagine that such facilities will remain immune if western involvement remains apparent, which we already know to be a constant, daily flow of armaments to fuel Israel’s war machinery and provide Tel Aviv with military intelligence and target banks.
It will be even harder to protect diplomatic missions if they reveal themselves to essentially act as military command centers or intelligence hubs during the conduct of war. Targeting these facilities – which are already in breach of the Vienna Convention – can easily fall within the framework of self-defense and reciprocity as long as western states and Israel continue to normalize these illicit activities.
If the Gaza war established entirely new rules of engagement throughout the region, do Israel’s western allies expect to escape unscathed in an expanded war? How do they think they can arm military aggression against a country and yet remain safely in its capital city?
Journalism under fire: Jailed for exposing Jordan

The Cradle | June 24, 2024
In Jordan, failing at self-censorship can land you in jail. Literally.
Freelance journalist Hiba Abu Taha, a passionate pro-resistance Jordanian of Palestinian origin, refused to self-censor. On 11 June, the Magistrate Court in Amman sentenced her to a harsh one-year prison term for violating the kingdom’s controversial Cybercrimes Law introduced last year.
This was due to an article she wrote for Lebanese news site, Annasher, criticizing “Jordan’s role in defending the enemy entity.” The article was published on 22 April, eight days after Jordanian, US, British, and French aircraft intercepted Iranian drones and rockets over Jordanian airspace heading towards Israeli targets.
However, Abu Taha was arrested on 13 May after Annasher published her investigative report on 28 April titled “Partners in extermination: Jordanian capital owners involved in Gaza genocide.” The timing of her arrest gave the impression that she was detained for exposing Jordanian companies transporting exports to Israel – a land corridor that government officials went out of their way to publicly deny amid growing popular outrage at Amman’s continued ties with Tel Aviv while it commits the Gaza genocide.
It is widely believed that her nearly 2,000-word investigative report, supported by a 15-minute video of evidence she gathered undercover, was the real reason for the journalist’s indictment.
Exposing government deception on Israeli trade routes
In her report, Abu Taha accused Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh and other officials of concealing the use of Jordan as a land route for UAE and Bahraini exports via Saudi Arabia to Israel to break the Yemeni Ansarallah blockade in the Red and Arabian Seas.
She cites transport and clearance company employees in Amman and Aqaba about their services to transport goods through the northern Sheikh Hussein Bridge or the southern Wadi Araba crossing. She went on to expose the names of the Jordanian companies and their influential owners, who have shown no qualms about doing business as usual with the occupation state as it commits unprecedented war crimes in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Abu Taha also identifies influential company owners acting as agents for Israeli or Israel-bound shipping companies. Resorting to official documents, she writes that Jordanian exports to Israel increased from $123 million in 2022 to $143 million in 2023, with a record monthly high of $17 million in December 2023, a month after Yemen began targeting Israeli-owned and Israel-bound cargo ships.
She notes that despite court evidence “recognizing the existence of the land bridge” as well as video footage and pictures of the movement of trucks at the Sheikh Hussein border crossing, Khasawneh insisted that:
The land bridge is a figment of imagination with no truth on the ground … The number of trucks entering and leaving Jordan for the entity has decreased, and what is being raised is nothing but self-flagellation.
Abu Taha details her exchange with government spokesman Muhannad Mubaidin, who fires back at “those accusing Jordan” of providing a land bridge for Israel as “shameful.”
She writes that he “initially tried to deny the government’s role” in this regard and “even tried to point the finger at West Bank merchants as deceiving their colleagues in Jordan by telling them that the exports are for the Arabs.”
When confronted with the facts she found, Mubaidin immediately referred to the 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel and stressed that the government would not ban trade with the Zionist state because “such a decision is a populist one that appeases a certain party or faction.”
Meanwhile, Trade Ministry Spokesman Yanal Barmawi told Abu Taha that he was unaware of the “export issue” and that “the private sector would know.” She writes that official denials and blaming the private sector, which cannot operate without government approval, “confirms that the authorities are trying to contain the Jordanian street.”
Opinion prosecution
Despite the rigor of her investigative report, Abu Taha was prosecuted for her 22 April opinion piece. Nidal Mansour, co-founder of the Center for Defending Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ), noted that Abu Taha was convicted under the restrictive Cybercrimes Law, which was enacted shortly before 7 October 2023.
The Media Commission, a government-controlled regulatory body, filed a complaint against her, accusing her of “inciting sedition and discord among members of the community,” “threatening community peace,” “inciting violence,” and “spreading false news” through electronic media.
Abu Taha’s article accused Jordan of “treason,” among other derogatory terms, for intercepting Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel and giving the US, British, and French military forces a free hand in the country to defend the occupation state.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) quotes Media Commissioner Bashir al-Momani as saying that Abu Taha’s article contained “serious insults against Jordanian state institutions, incitement to the state’s positions, and stirring up discord among the components of the people,” which he added “necessitated her prosecution.”
According to a CDFJ statement, Abu Taha was convicted under Articles 15 and 17 of the 40-article Cybercrime Law of August 2023. Article 15 stipulates:
Whoever intentionally sends, resends, or publishes data or information through an information network, information technology, information system, website, or social media platforms that includes fake news targeting the national security and community peace, or defames, slanders, or contempt [sic] any person shall be imprisoned for a period of not less than three months or a fine of not less than 5,000 dinars and no more than 20,000 dinars, or both penalties.
Article 15 also gives the prosecutor the right to take legal action “without the need to file a complaint or claim a personal right if it is directed at one of the authorities in the state, official bodies, or public administrations,” which means that Abu Taha could have still been punished even if the Media Commission had not filed a complaint.
The court also invoked Article 17 to hand her a one-year sentence. It states that:
Whoever intentionally uses an information network, information technology, information system, website, or social media platform to spread what is likely to stir up racism or sedition, targets social peace, incites hatred, calls for or justifies violence, or insults religions, shall be punished by imprisonment from one to three years or a fine of no less than 5,000 dinars and no more than 20,000 dinars, or both penalties.
Draconian laws and legal challenges
Abu Taha’s opinion piece in Annasher undoubtedly lacked the self-censorship that Amman has successfully induced by imposing a series of restrictive press and media laws over the decades.
Mansour tells The Cradle that the press and publication laws have become more draconian with the evolution of information technology, beginning with restrictive laws on the independent weekly press back in the 1990s, to online news sites in the early 2000s, and social media with the most recent “fluid” Cybercrime Law that could effectively stifle any form of free speech on these platforms.
He notes that Abu Taha’s lawyer, Rami Odatallah, appointed by the leftist Jordanian Popular Unity Party (an offshoot of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), is more experienced in defending political activists than journalists.
Abu Taha is not a member of the political party. Still, it stood by her ordeal and denounced her arrest and sentencing, demanding her release and other activists that had been “harassed and arrested” for supporting the resistance against Israel online or on the street.
Mansour reveals that the CDFJ plans to hire a lawyer specialized in the Cybercrime Law to appeal her sentence, which his organization described as “deeply concerning” and called for “abolishing imprisonment in cases related to publication and freedom of expression in accordance with international human rights standards.”
Abu Taha’s arrest and sentencing drew attention to Jordan’s crackdown on both journalists and rightfully enraged activists by using the Cybercrime Law. … Full article




