Cancer, George Monbiot and Nuclear Weapons Test Fallout
By Chris Busby | CounterPunch | March 20, 2018
George Monbiot, who has now been diagnosed with prostate cancer at the young age of 55, was therefore born in 1963, at the peak of the atmospheric test fallout. He is thus a peak exposed (at risk) member of a cohort of those exposed in the womb to the fallout (1959-63) and currently suffering the consequences of exposure to Strontium-90 in the milk, and (measured) in the childrens’ bones.
In his article in the Guardian, he says that he has always done all the healthy things, done lots of exercise, eaten vegetables, didn’t smoke or drink, all that stuff. He is clearly puzzled about being singled out by the three ladies. But the cause was something that he had no control over, and neither had anyone else who was born in the fallout period. George writes that he is happy. This insane response to his predicament, (which I personally am not happy about despite his intemperate attacks on me in his Guardian column and blogs) must go alongside his equally insane response about the Fukushima events where he publicised his road-to-Damascus conversion to nuclear power.
The effect of the genetic damage of the fallout on babies can be seen in the graph below, Fig 1, taken from a recent paper I published (Busby C (2017) Radiochemical Genotoxicity Risk and Absorbed Dose. Res Rep Toxi. Vol.1 No.1:1.). The babies that did not die were just those with insufficient genetic damage to kill, but this damage would have affected them in later life in various ways. The most measurable effect (apart from genetic defects and congenital diseases) is higher cancer risk which is presented as early cancer onset. The issue of the 1959-63 cancer cohort was discussed in my 1995 book Wings of Death, and a letter I published in 1994 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The issue is one of Absorbed Dose. If internal exposure to radionuclides like Strontium-90 and Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 bind to DNA, which is the target for genetic damage, then Dose, which is an average quantity over kilograms of tissue, is an unsafe way of quantifying genetic damage. The issue of genetic damage from radioactive pollution was first raised in 1950 by Herman Muller, the Nobel Prize winning geneticist who discovered the effects of radiation, but his warnings were ignored, though they are now found to be accurate.
The serious effects of internal radionuclide exposures on Prostate Cancer were revealed in a study of UK Atomic Energy Agency workers also published in 1993 in the BMJ (Fraser P, Carpenter L, Maconochie N, Higgins C, Booth M and Beral V (1993) Cancer mortality and morbidity in employees of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority 1946-86. Brit. J. Cancer 67 615-624.) This paper showed a 2-fold excess cancer risk in workers who had been monitored for internal radionuclides versus those who had not been. Prostate cancer mortality was significantly high. Although later cover-up studies by the nuclear industry, using a larger cohort reduced this effect for prostate cancer, the internal/ external exposure result for all cancers has not been satisfactorily followed up.
Fig 1. First day neonatal mortality USA shows the effects of the fallout. Because of advances in medicine and better social conditions, infant mortality was falling everywhere. But as soon as the atmospheric tests began, rates went up in time with the fallout. 1st day neonatal mortality is a measure of congenital damage: the baby survives in the mother by using the mothers’ oxygenation and other support but because the babies own organs are damaged and it cannot survive after birth. Strontium-90 was measured in bone where it built up to a peak in 1964. It will also have attached to chromosomes due to its affinity for DNA.
The fallout cohort is now entering the cancer bracket and these people are driving up the cancer rates in the Northern hemisphere, especially for breast cancer and prostate cancer. I have been studying this group since 1995, but now my predictions are appearing in the data.
But the true picture of the fallout effects is even more scary. Not only are the babies born over the peak fallout period, like George, at higher risk of more and earlier cancer, but it is now emerging that their children, born around 1980- 1990 are carrying the same genetic (or rather genomic) curse. I am in the process of putting together a scientific paper on this. There is a sudden increase in cancer rates in young people aged 25-35 which began after 2008. This is an extraordinary development. The finding was confirmed for colon cancer in the USA in a paper published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (Rebecca L. Siegel, Stacey A. Fedewa, William F. Anderson, Kimberly D. Miller, Jiemin Ma, Philip S. Rosenberg, Ahmedin Jemal Colorectal Cancer Incidence Patterns in the United States, 1974–2013 JNCI J Natl Cancer Inst (2017) 109(8): djw322). The authors were unable to explain their findings of increases in colon cancer in young people but decreasing colon cancer rates in older people. They were “puzzled”. The explanation is simple. These were children born to those who were themselves born during the fallout and genomically damaged at birth. The damage is passed to the children (and will be in turn passed to theirs and so on). The effect is clear also in the England and Wales data.
So, for the logical positivists, let’s have a look at the prostate cancer data in England and Wales.
In Table 1 below I show some data from the official ONS government annual reports on prostate cancer incidence in some selected years from 1974 to 2015.
No argument there then. The amazing thing is that there are huge amounts of money received and spent on cancer research: but no-one looks at the cause. Or rather that those who do look at the cause are attacked and marginalised and their work is not reported.
For example, and relevant here, are the serious genetic effects of small dose internal exposures in Europe after Chernobyl reviewed by Prof Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil and myself in a peer review publication in 2016 (Schmitz-Feuerhake, Busby C, Pflugbeil P Genetic Radiation Risks-A Neglected Topic in the Low Dose Debate. Environmental Health and Toxicology. 2016. 31Article ID e2016001. .) You would think that this evidence, which was reported in the peer review literature from 20 studies from countries all over Europe, might make it into one of the newspapers. But nothing.
My attempts to draw attention to these internal genetic damage issues have also been ignored or dismissed by the British establishment. This year, in September, I was to have presented this evidence to British Government Minister Richard Harrington at a meeting of the NGOs and the government at Church House Westminster. My flight from Sweden was sabotaged but I made it to the meeting nevertheless, to find that the Minister had made some excuse, and had not come. )
At the meeting, the government radiation expert committee members (COMARE) refused to consider anything I said.
This behaviour by the British can be compared with the Swedish Environmental Court in Stockholm to which I had been presenting the same findings the previous week. In January 2018, the 8 judges of the Swedish Court told the Swedish government that they must not permit the development of the nuclear waste facility at Forsmark. This landmark decision was also omitted from any newspapers in the UK, which itself is currently busy trying to find a local council they can bribe to allow them to bury nuclear waste somewhere in England and (more probably) Wales.
When I presented the same genetic damage evidence in the nuclear test veteran case in the Royal Courts of Justice in 2016, I submitted reports by 4 eminent radiation experts, including Prof Schmitz-Feuerhake/ All gave evidence under cross examination. We filed the evidence of genetic damage in the Test Veteran children: a 10-fold excess risk for congenital malformations and in the grandchildren 8-fold. The British Judge, Sir Nicholas Blake, refused to listen to any of this evidence and dismissed our experts. Blake found for the Ministry of Defence. I am taking a new Test Veteran case this summer. We shall see what happens.
But no surprise about judge Blake. In a recent survey of judges in Europe, it was found that Britain was only exceeded by Albania in the percentage of judges (45%) who reported that their decisions had been made at the direction of the establishment. The lowest rates of interference with judges was found (1%) in—guess where—Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
It seems that we live in a corrupt society here in Britain and I am ashamed to be part of this State which has poisoned its citizens consistently since 1945 and continues to do so, and to cover it all up, aided by dishonest scientists and celebrity reporters like George Monbiot. Those who have a magical view of events might delight in thinking that George has received his just due; for myself I just hope that this may make him look into the issue more deeply and change his mind about the effects of radioactive contamination.
Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Riskand the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org.
SWEDHR Board of Directors ref. misattributed statements on White Helmets and alleged gas attacks in Syria
Professor Emeritus, med. dr. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, chairman; Professor Emeritus, med. dr. Anders Romelsjö, vice-chairman; Chief physician, med. dr. Alberto Gutiérrez Mardones; Chief physician Ove Johansson, MD; Chief physician, specialist Dr Lena Oske, MD; Specialist Dr Leif Elinder, MD; Specialist Dr Martin Gelin, Dental Surgeon. On behalf of SWEDHR Board of Directors.
I
SWEDHR have performed several analyses around reports on alleged chemical attacks in Syria, which mostly have been originated from claims by the White Helmets and associates. In the main, our conclusions were that the alleged evidence appear clinically and epidemiological flawed. For instance, in regard to the Khan Shaykhun incident, as put forward in a document by the SWEDHR chair recently published by the United Nations Security Council. [1] We have also asked for independent, non-biased investigations done by meritorious scientists, instead of politically appointed investigators. In spite that was all we have centrally said on the ‘gas attacks’ issue, we have been unjustifiably attacked by some mainstream media in Sweden, led by Dagens Nyheter, [2] and elsewhere by Der Spiegel, [3] Le Figaro, [4] etc., and in social media –including deleterious references to our organization by Mr Kenneth Roth, [5] president of Human Rights Watch.
However, in recent weeks, the United States Defence Secretary, General (Ret.) Jim Mattis, announced in a press conference that they do not possess evidence of a sarin attack in Syria. [6] Days after, the French Defence Minister, Ms Florence Perly, declared that France has not confirmed evidence of chlorine attacks in Syria attributed to the government forces. [7] Both statements bring unequivocal support, and further credibility, to the conclusions on the very same issues we achieved at SWEDHR, published in April, May and November 2017, respectively (See Notes & References).
Concomitantly, our firm stance about the probe-issue regarding allegations on gas attacks in Syria, by no means contradicts our equally solid stance of considering the eventual perpetration of such attacks a hideous war crime. Neither our demand for a beyond-doubt evidence regarding the alleged responsibility of the Syrian government represents a per-default political endorsement. SWEDHR is by definition opposed to the notion of war. [8] Unlike HRW, we have not advocated for the bombing of Syrians, [9] or for a No-Fly Zone, such as the White Helmets and associates do [10] – which in practical terms would only enable the intensification of belligerent input from jihadists fighting for an Islamic State in Syria. [11] We have instead repeatedly advocated for a prompt settlement of the Syrian conflict via negotiations. We view the Sochi peace talks as positive and crucial in those regards, and we concur with UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, that the progress made in Sochi may be also seen as contributing to the Geneva process. [12]
SWEDHR stances are absolutely independent, [13] we are not bounded to any political or financial interest; we do not receive any support, financial or otherwise, from any government, company or institution –as is the case of ‘stream human rights organizations’ such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty. We demand respect for SWEDHR authentically independent commitment, and we will held in the future zero tolerance to libelous accusations in the mainstream media and social media which would contend otherwise. To this end, we are working for establishing the means for eventual legal actions.
As an example, the organization Reporters Without Borders, RSF, called the cancellation of the Swiss Press Club conference on the White Helmets of November 2017, referring SWEDHR as an “organization that, according with our information, acts as a tool of Russian propaganda.” [14] We openly challenged RSF to either publish the evidence for such an allegation they made in a public letter, or otherwise “to shame”. [15] RSF did not reply.
II
SWEDHR doctors analyzed in March-April 2017 video material posted by the organization White Helmets on alleged life-saving procedures of infants [16] [17]. The conclusions of these analyses or whereabouts of its authors have unfortunately been distorted, as in the case of an article in Codastory.com propagated by Kennet Roth, [5] or a publication by Veterans Today, which we have already refuted. [18]
In recent weeks further misquotes of the SWEDHR doctors’ conclusions on the above-mentioned videos recirculated in social media. This quote, wrongly attributed to SWEDHR says, “Quote: The implication is that the White Helmets may have actually killed children and/or were using already-dead children ‘as propaganda props’.” Which is something SWEDHR doctors never have affirmed.
Instead, the conclusion by the SWEDHR doctors was:
“Lifesaving procedures on the children showed in the White Helmets videos were found to be fake, and ultimately performed on dead children… Which is not the same than affirming that the personnel seen in the videos caused the dead of the infant. In forensic terms, the actual cause of death, as well as the mode and the issue of intent, refer to different items than those treated in our analysis.” [17]
We would like to detail our stance on the White Helmets issue, in order to avoid further misuse or misreading of our investigations:
Even if we have contributed to expose fake life-rescuing episodes as shown in materials posted by the White Helmets themselves, our criticism differs from other authors or news platforms. As the SWEDHR chairman conveyed expressly on behalf of this board of directors at the Swiss Press Club conference of November 2017:
“The point for us has not been to demonise the individual participation of some well-minded volunteers deploying natural solidarity with civilians, which in a given moment are –tragically as in all wars– victims of a collateral damage. Neither is the case to criticise the humanitarian rescue-activity per se, in those cases in which that activity has been real. Instead, our analyses on the White Helmets materials aim to focus on two mayor issues pertaining the White Helmets as institution: a) The geopolitical significance of the White Helmets as an international construction in the propaganda war, and b) The using of this organization as a main source of information by UN investigative commissions.” [20]
We mean that although we do not deny that its individual ranks may have occasionally performed rescue maneuvers, we consider the organization White Helmets as mainly a political organization, with self-declared political aims, and with a war-propaganda purpose which coincides with the geopolitical interests of the powers that finance its operations. We find highly demonstrative that the White Helmets operate solely in territories in the main under the governance of militant jihadists formations, fighting for replace a secular government for a Sharia fundamentalist rule. [11] Which makes even more incomprehensible the support given to this organization by democratic, secular European countries such as Sweden. [21]
We hope the above clarifications will help to a more objective analysis about SWEDHR participation in this principal human rights debate, done in the context of a war which have costed nearly half million lives, and further risks a tragic geopolitical enhancing.
Notes and References
- “To justify #Syria inaction, top US general trots out age-old ethnic animosities line. Heard that B4? Bosnia. Rwanda.”
- “Top general suggests US is more interested in a geopolitical partner in #Syria than saving civilians from slaughter. “
- “It took chemical attack to convince Obama/Kerry that Assad isn’t interested in negotiated solution!? No more excuses.”
- “If the appalling slaughter in #Syria won’t get Obama to act, maybe ridicule will:””
- “If Obama decides to strike #Syria, will he settle for symbolism or do something that will help protect civilians?”
Portonblimp Down – A Tale By Boris Johnson
By Craig Murray | March 19, 2018
“Comrade Putin, we have successfully stockpiled novichoks in secret for ten years, and kept them hidden from the OPCW inspectors. We have also trained our agents in secret novichok assassination techniques. The programme has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but now we are ready. Naturally, the first time we use it we will expose our secret and suffer massive international blowback. So who should be our first target? The head of a foreign intelligence agency? A leading jihadist rebel in Syria? A key nuclear scientist? Even a Head of State?”
“No, Tovarich. There is this old retired guy I know living in Salisbury. We released him from jail years ago…”
WARNING If you harbour any doubts at all about the plausibility of Mr Johnson’s story, you are a crazed conspiracy theorist and a traitor. Plus you will never, ever get employed in the BBC or corporate media.
Boris Johnson Issues Completely New Story on “Russian Novichoks”
By Craig Murray | March 18, 2018
Boris Johnson has attempted to renew the faltering case for blaming Russia ahead of the investigation into the Skripal attack, by issuing a fundamentally new story that completely changes – and very radically strengthens – the government line on what it knows. You can see the long Foreign and Commonwealth Office Statement here.
This is the sensational new claim which all the propaganda sheets are running with:
The Foreign Secretary revealed this morning that we have information indicating that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents likely for assassination. And part of this programme has involved producing and stockpiling quantities of novichok. This is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
This is an astonishing claim and requires close investigation. If this information comes from MI5 or MI6, there is a process of inter-departmental clearance that has to be gone through before it can be put in the public domain – even by a Minister – which is known as “Action-on”. I have been through the process personally many times when working as head of the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, monitoring Iraqi arms acquisitions. It is not, unless actually at war, a Saturday night process – it would have had to have been done on Friday.
So why is this essential information being released not to Parliament on Friday, but on Andrew Marr’s sofa early on a Sunday morning, backed up with a Sunday morning official statement? This is very unusual. Furthermore, it is absolutely incompatible with what I was told last week by FCO sources – they did not know this information, and one of them certainly would have if it was based on MI6 or GCHQ reporting.
I can see only two possible explanations. One – and the most likely – depends on looking yet again extremely carefully at what the statement says. It says “we have information indicating that within the last decade”. It does not say how long we have held that information. And “within the last decade” can mean any period of time between a second and ten years ago. Very tellingly it says “within the last decade”, it does not say “for the last decade”.
“Within the last decade” is in fact the exact same semantic trick as “sale price – up to 50% off”. That can mean no more than 0.1% off and its only actual meaning is “never better than half price”.
The most likely explanation of this sentence is therefore that they have – since last week when they didn’t know this – just been given this alleged information. And not from a regular ally with whom we have an intelligence sharing agreement. It could have come from another state, or from a private source of dodgy intelligence – Orbis, for example.
The FCO are again deliberately twisting words to convey the impression that we have known for a decade, whereas in fact the statement does not say this at all.
There is a second possible explanation. MI6 officers in the field get intelligence from agents who, by and large, they pay for it. In my experience of seeing thousands of MI6 intelligence reports, a fair proportion of this “Humint” is unreliable. Graham Greene, a former MI6 officer, was writing a true picture in the brilliant “our Man in Havana”, which I cannot strongly recommend enough to you.
The intelligence received arrives in Vauxhall Cross and there is a filter. A country desk officer will assess the intelligence and see if it is worth issuing as a Report; they judge accuracy against how good access the source has and how trustworthy they are deemed to be, and whether the content squares with known facts. If passed, the intelligence then becomes a Report and is given a serial number. This is not a very good filter, because it still lets through a lot of rubbish, but it does eliminate the complete dregs. One possible source of new information that has suddenly changed the government’s state of knowledge this weekend is a search of these dregs for anything that can be cobbled together. As I have written in Murder in Samarkand, it was the deliberate removal of filters which twisted the Iraqi WMD intelligence.
In short, we should be extremely sceptical of this sudden new information that Boris Johnson has produced out of a hat. If the UK was in possession of intelligence about a secret Russian chemical weapons programme, it was not under a legal obligation to tell Andrew Marr, but it was under a legal obligation to tell the OPCW. Not only did the UK fail to do that, the UK Ambassador Sir Geoffrey Adams was last year fulsomely congratulating the OPCW on the completion of the destruction of Russia’s chemical weapons stocks, without a single hint or reservation entered that Russia may have undeclared or secret stocks.
On the Andrew Marr programme, Boris Johnson appeared to say for the first time that the nerve agent in Salisbury was actually made in Russia. But this is a major divergence from the published FCO statement, which very markedly does not say this. Boris Johnson was therefore almost certainly reverting to his reflex lying. In fact the FCO statement gives an extremely strong hint the FCO is not at all confident it was made in Russia and is seeking to widen its bases. Look at this paragraph:
Russia is the official successor state to the USSR. As such, Russia legally took responsibility for ensuring the CWC applies to all former Soviet Chemical Weapons stocks and facilities.
It does not need me to point out, that if Porton Down had identified the nerve agent as made in Russia, the FCO would not have added that paragraph. Plainly they cannot say it was made in Russia.
The Soviet Chemical Weapons programme was based in Nukus in Uzbekistan. It was the Americans who dismantled and studied it and destroyed and removed the equipment. I visited it as Ambassador to Uzbekistan shortly after they had finished – I recall it as desolate, tiled and very cold, nothing to look at really. The above paragraph seeks to hold the Russians responsible for anything that came out of Nukus, when it was the Americans who actually took it.
Jane Mayer, the New Yorker, and the Art of the Big Russia Lie
David Remnick’s New Yorker, where Masha Gessen is always welcome, is Exhibit A in the Jewish media’s relentless lying about and demonizing of Russia, Putin, and Russiagate.
By Philip Giraldi | Russia Insider | March 15, 2018
The latest salvo in the Russiagate saga is a 15,000 word New Yorker article entitled “Christopher Steele the man behind the Trump dossier: how the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump’s ties to Russia” by veteran journalist Jane Mayer. The premise of the piece is clear from the tediously long title, namely that the Steele dossier, which implicated Donald Trump and his associates in a number of high crimes and misdemeanors, is basically accurate in exposing an existential threat posed to our nation by Russia. How does it come to that conclusion? By citing sources that it does not identify whose credibility is alleged to be unimpeachable as well as by including testimony from Steele friends and supporters.
In other words, the Mayer piece is an elaboration of the same “trust me” narrative that has driven the hounding of Russia and Trump from day one. Inevitably, the Trump haters both from the left and the right have jumped on the Mayer piece as confirmation of their own presumptions regarding what has allegedly occurred, when, in reality, Trump might just be more right than wrong when he claims that he has been the victim of a conspiracy by the Establishment to discredit and remove him.
Mayer is a progressive and a long-time critic of Donald Trump. She has written a book denouncing “the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics” and co-authored another book with Jill Abramson, formerly Executive Editor of the New York Times. Abramson reportedly carries a small plastic replica of Barack Obama in her purse which she can take out “to take comfort” whenever she is confronted by Donald Trump’s America. Mayer’s New Yorker bio-blurb describes her as a journalist who covers national security, together with politics and culture.
The problem with the type of neo-journalism as practiced by Mayer is that it first comes to a conclusion and then selects the necessary “facts” to support that narrative. When the government does that sort of thing to support, one might suggest, a war against Iraq or even hypothetically speaking Iran, it is called cherry picking. After the facts have been cherry picked they are “stovepiped” up to the policy maker, avoiding along the way any analysts who might demur regarding the product’s veracity. In journalistic terms, the equivalent would perhaps be sending the garbage up directly to a friendly editor, avoiding any fact check.
Mayer tries to take the high road by asserting that the Republicans are “trying to take down the intelligence community.” It is an odd assertion coming from her as she has written a book called “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” a development which was pretty much implemented by the intelligence community working hand-in-hand with Congress and the White House. But she is not the first liberal who has now become a friend of CIA, the FBI and the NSA as a response to the greater threat allegedly posed by Donald Trump.A Steele friend describes the man as a virtual Second Coming of Jesus, for whom “fairness, integrity and truth… trump any ideology.” Former head of MI-6 and Steele boss Sir John Dearlove, who once reported how the intelligence on Iraq had been “sexed-up” and “fixed around the policy” to make the false case for war, describes Steele as “superb.” Other commentary from former American CIA officers is similar in nature. Former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who himself was involved in lying to support America’s journey into Iraq, similarly sees Steele as honest and credible in his claims, while a former CIA Station Chief in Moscow is called upon to cast aspersions on the “Russian character” that impels them to engage in lies and deception.
My review of the Mayer rebuttal of criticism of Steele revealed a number of instances where she comes to certain conclusions without presenting any real supporting evidence or accepts “proof” that is essentially hearsay because it supports her overall narrative. She asserts that Russia and WikiLeaks were working together on the release of the Democratic National Committee/Hillary Clinton emails without providing any substantiation whatsoever. She surely came to that judgement based on something she was told, but by whom and when?
Another major blooper in the Mayer story relates to how one unnamed “senior Russian official” reported that the Kremlin had blocked the appointment of Mitt Romney, a noted critic of Russia, as secretary of state. How exactly that was implemented is not clear from the Steele reporting and there has been no other independent confirmation of the allegation, but Mayer finds it credible, asserting that “subsequent events could be said to support it.” What events? one might ask, though the national media did not hesitate and instead reported Mayer’s assertion as if it were itself a credible source in a forty-eight hour news cycle frenzy relating to Romney and Trump.
Steele’s work history also raises some questions. He served in Moscow as a first tour officer for MI-6 under diplomatic cover from 1990 to 1993. Russia was in tumult and Mayer describes how “Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the KGB -now called the FSB-reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge.” Not to go into too much detail, but Mayer’s description of Russia at that time is dead wrong. Yeltsin was a drunkard and a tool of American and European intervention and manipulation. He was no agent of “democratic promise” and only grew more corrupt as his time in office continued into the completely manipulated election of 1996, when the IMF and U.S. conspired to get him reelected so the looting, a.k.a. “democratization,” could go on. Mayer goes on to depict in negative terms a “shadowy” former “KGB operative” Vladimir Putin who emerged from the chaos.
Mayer also cites a Steele report of April 2016, a “secret investigation [that] involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union,” but she neither produces the report itself or the sources used to put it together. The report allegedly concluded that the “Kremlin’s long-term aim …was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to destroy the E.U…” The precis provided by Mayer is a bit of fantasy, it would seem, and is perhaps a reflection of an unhealthy obsession on the part of Steele, if he actually came to that conclusion. As it stands it is hearsay, possibly provided by Steele himself or a friend to Mayer to defend his reputation.Mayer also reports and calls potentially treasonous Steele’s claims that “Kremlin and Trump were politically colluding in the 2016 campaign…’to sow discord and disunity both with the U.S.’ and within the transatlantic alliance.” And also, “[Trump] and his top associates had repeatedly accepted intelligence from the Kremlin on Hillary Clinton and other political rivals.” As Robert Mueller apparently has not developed any information to support such wild claims, it would be interesting to know why Jane Mayer considers them to be credible.
Sweeping judgements by Mayer also include “[Steele’s] allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together…” As noted above, the WikiLeaks/Kremlin allegations have not been demonstrated, nor have the claims about Kremlin provision of information to discredit Hillary, who was doing a find job at the time discrediting herself.
The account of Donald Trump performing “perverted sexual acts” in a Moscow hotel is likewise a good example of what is wrong with the article. Four sources are cited as providing details of what took place, but it is conceded that none of them was actually a witness to it. It would be necessary to learn who the sources were beyond vague descriptions, what their actual access to the information was and what their motives were for coming forward might be. One was allegedly a “top-level Russian intelligence officer,” but the others were hotel employees and a Trump associate who had arranged for the travel.
Finally, from an ex-intelligence officer point of view I have some questions about Steele’s sources in Russia. Who are they? If they were MI-6 sources he would not be able to touch them once he left the service and would face severe sanctions under the Official Secrets Act should he even try to do so. There are in addition claims in the Mayer story that Steele did not pay his sources because it would encourage them to fabricate, an argument that could also be made about Steele who was being paid to produce dirt on Trump. So what was the quid pro quo? Intelligence agents work for money, particularly when dealing with a private security firm, and Steele’s claim, if he truly made it, that he has sources that gave him closely held, highly sensitive information in exchange for an occasional lunch in Mayfair rings hollow.
Jane Mayer’s account of the Steele dossier seems to accept quite a lot on faith. It would be interesting to know the extent to which Steele himself or his proxies were the source of much of what she has written. Until we know more about the actual Russian sources and also about Mayer’s own contacts interviewed for the article, her “man behind the Trump dossier” will continue to be something of a mystery and the entire Russiagate saga assumption that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. election must be regarded as still to be demonstrated.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Syria: The Horrible End Versus the Endless Horror
By Randy Shields • Unz Review • March 17, 2018
Neocon Max Boot now says it’s better for the Syrian people if Assad stays in power. But we still can’t get the American left to come to its senses about Syria.
Louis Proyect says in Counterpunch that the suffering coming out of East Ghouta is “on a massive scale reminiscent of Leningrad in 1941.”
According to Wiki, a million and a half people died during the Leningrad siege. According to the authoritative-sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — one anti-Assad guy in a Coventry flat, relying mostly on reports from anti-Assad fighters — 1,000 people have been killed in East Ghouta, horrible to be sure but not Leningrad. In Leningrad, people were reduced to cannibalism. There was cannibalism in Syria in 2013: a commander for the left’s beloved Free Syrian Army cut the lungs out of a Syrian Army soldier and ate them on camera. A “moderate” rebel eminently worthy of CIA dollars — and spicy recipes.
While bringing up Lou-dicrous comparisons to 1941 Leningrad, Proyect fails to mention the US-destroyed Raqqa and Mosul from which dead bodies are still being found and dragged out of the rubble. Rest assured that the Great Satan will not rebuild those cities as Assad is doing with Palmyra and Aleppo. To the colonized mind of the American left, the crimes of America’s enemies are always worse and more worth talking about than the crimes of America itself. US airstrikes were responsible for most of the 40,000 dead civilians in Mosul and over 3,000 in Raqqa.
By the way, two thirds of the casualties in Syria have been Syrian soldiers and anti-government fighters. The anti-Assad left and the mockingbird media would have us believe that all 345,000 Syrian deaths have been civilians who Assad and Putin deliberately, personally and exclusively killed. The pressitutes tell us how unpopular the Alawite Assad is while the entire world sees a Sunni majority army fighting to the death for him and the rest of Syria by killing off Wahhabist Sunni fanatics. Huh? (Syria has never been a “civil war” or a “sectarian conflict” — it’s been a pre-planned destruction led by the US, piggy-backing on legitimate grievances of the Syrian working class.)
Interestingly, the anti-Assad left never tells us the names of the armed opposition groups that it supports. Why? Is it because they are al-Qaeda offshoots? Is it because they are so tiny and few in number that they are inconsequential and/or the Syrian working class majority don’t support them? Is it because they collaborated with the most regressive fundamentalist groups and/or got wiped out by them? The anti-Assad left seems to live in an ivory tower that got destroyed somewhere around 2012 — they never say what should be done now.
Then Proyect makes a false equivalency between Israel bombing Gaza in response to Hamas’ largely ineffectual rockets and the Syrian government bombing terrorists in East Ghouta who have been shelling Damascus for years with howitzers, mortars and GRAD rockets, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. Gazans are occupied and have legitimate rights under international law to resist, including violently.
Proyect quotes Counterpunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair that aerial bombing of cities is a war crime. I couldn’t agree more and I’ll raise you an aerial bombing of jungles also. And I think shooting a barrage of GRAD rockets into downtown Damascus is a war crime too. (What parts of war aren’t a crime?) So, where does that put us? It puts “us” safely and snugly in the belly of the beast. It puts the Syrian working class majority wanting its government to protect them from a minority of al-Qaeda metastases, funded and armed by the most reactionary regimes on earth, trying to win violently what they can’t win intellectually, socially or politically. The left just won’t cut its intellectual (“moderate” rebels) or political (Russia-gate) losses. And isn’t it interesting how so much of what the left does is in harmony with what the Pentagon, the CIA and the empire wants.
And since Proyect brought up Gaza and the Palestinians… It was the Palestinian Liwaa al-Quds force who stormed the al-Shaaher roundabout in Aleppo on September 24, 2016 which liberated the Handaraat Camp which turned around the battle for Aleppo which turned around the fight for Syria which is turning the American empire upside down with indispensable help from Russia and Iran. On that memorable September day eastern Aleppo residents were cheering on Liwwa al-Quds, Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army as they hunted down and killed the members of the CIA-funded Nour al-Din al-Zenki who beheaded the 12-year-old Palestinian boy on film. The Syrian working class doesn’t actually like the 31 flavors of takfiri terrorists that some western leftists find so sweet.
In fact, during the December 2016 liberation of Aleppo, Syrians who lived for years under the rule of the fanatics were outraged that the Syrian army put the terrorists on buses to Idlib instead of killing them outright. A day later it was discovered that, just before they surrendered, the terrorists had summarily executed over 100 hostages and prisoners in basement prisons, including many Syrian soldiers.
Then Proyect attempts to make a case for the fanatics in East Ghouta by contrasting their poverty-stricken area with wealthier Damascus. A splendid insight. Now, how about you leading the charge of South Central against Beverly Hills? Oh, that’s right — the impotent defeated American left has been on the run for 40 years and can only mind the business of the Assads, Saddams, Gadaffis and the ayatollahs — all Israeli enemies and sitting atop large energy resources [allowing economically viable resistance] — while “our” own government remains the chief engine of destruction in the world. Blessedly, the brown working classes of the world don’t give a flying fuck about what white western leftists think because they know they aren’t going to get any help from us. We’re irrelevant. Ask a Yemeni, ask a Honduran, ask a Congolese.
Christmas and New Years have been celebrated for the last two years in Aleppo and some semblance of normalcy is returning. Right now, in liberated areas of East Ghouta, people are welcoming the return of the Syrian Arab Army and telling the media how they’ve been used as human shields. In non-liberated areas, civilians are demonstrating against the terrorists and negotiating with them to leave. As with Aleppo in 2016, people in East Ghouta have been telling the SAA the locations of terrorist commanders, ammo dumps, jails and headquarters. Also, as with Aleppo, terrorists are sniping and shelling humanitarian corridors so civilians have difficulty leaving. There are also now civilians rallying in Raqqa for the occupying American monster to GTFO.
The future of the world is being fought for in Syria — that’s why the propaganda of the mockingbird media has been unrelenting in its lies, hypocrisy, hysteria and demonization for seven years. Tel Aviv and Riyadh are going crazy and they are making sure Mordor-on-the-Potomac goes crazy with them. Putin is killing off America’s regime-changing terrorist mercenary army although, characteristically, he’s been too slow and cautious and Daesh has now set up shop in Afghanistan to harass, delay and destroy China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Assad and Putin are bringing a horrible end to the carnage in Syria as opposed to the Saudi, Israeli and US-preferred endless horror.
One last thing. People have not been paying proper attention to the written transcript of several lines toward the end of Putin’s March 1st address to the Russian Federal Assembly: “I should note that our military doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons solely in response to a nuclear attack, or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against the country or its allies, or an act of aggression against us with the use of conventional weapons that threatens the very existence of the state. This all is very clear and specific. As such, I see it as my duty to announce the following. Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.”
An attack with other weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its “allies.” Who does Russia consider allies? China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela? Turkey? The Donbass? Did Putin just tell the criminal neocon filth who rule America to never attack Iran and North Korea — or ever attack the Syrian government again? No sane person in the world should test that out. Perhaps the previously mentioned neocon Max Boot is one of the first to “listen.”
The last time no one paid careful attention to Putin was his September 28, 2015 address to the United Nations where he condemned the US use of terrorists to further its regime change operations throughout the world, saying “We can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world.” Two days later Russia began bombing hundreds of ISIS oil tankers in Syria that US satellite surveillance had been contentedly watching grow for years. Wake up, Americans. “Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences.” The three horses’ asses of the apocalypse — Trump, Satanyahoo and Saudi Clown Prince Mohammad bin Salman — are leading the world to disaster.
Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. His writings and art are collected at RandyShields.com.
Britain’s Insane Cold War Dramatics
Strategic Culture Foundation | 16.03.2018
Britain has now been joined by the United States, France and Germany in blaming Russia for an alleged murder plot on British soil. No verifiable evidence has been provided by the British authorities to support their shrill claim of Russian violation.
It is as insane as it is pathetic, as it is perfidious. A modern-day parody of William Shakespeare’s admonition “thou protest too much”.
In the unprecedented joint statement issued Thursday by the four NATO powers, it was stated, “The United Kingdom thoroughly briefed [sic] its allies that it was highly likely Russia was responsible for the attack”.
The “attack” refers to an apparent poisoning assault on a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal (66), and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, in the English town of Salisbury on March 4. How fitting a medieval town should feature in a medieval-like inquisition.
Skripal had been exiled to England eight years ago in a spy-swap with British MI6 for whom he had betrayed Russian state secrets a decade earlier. Both father and daughter have reportedly been hospitalized. But notably no photographs of the pair have been published to confirm their whereabouts or their condition.
Almost from the moment of the apparent attack on the Skripals, British politicians and media have hysterically speculated that Russian state agents carried out a “vendetta”. Within days, the British authorities claimed to have “evidence” that the nerve toxin allegedly used was a Soviet-era chemical weapon, known as “Novichok”.
This week, British Prime Minister Theresa May went even further to blame Russia for the attempted murder of the Skripals. She announced various sanctions in the British parliament, including the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats from Britain. All the world’s a stage, to quote Shakespeare again.
The British have quickly engaged in intense rallying of the United States and European allies to support their position of impugning Russia. The latest joint statement of “solidarity” demonstrates that the British have managed to muster an unprecedented line-up of inquisitors condemning Russia.
Moscow has lamented Britain’s “absolutely irresponsible conduct” in this tawdry affair. London has shown deplorable disregard for due process and normal diplomatic relations to recklessly orchestrate a crisis.
The recklessness is almost incredible. Britain has not presented any hard evidence to back up its claims of a Soviet-era nerve toxin, nor how this alleged chemical is provably connected to the Russian state.
It is clear from the joint statement that the US, France and Germany are relying on Britain’s “brief”, and yet all four jump to the conclusion that “the only plausible explanation” for the apparent poison attack is Russian responsibility.
That a supposed criminal investigation involving a seemingly sophisticated chemical weapon could be conclusively carried out in a matter of days beggars belief. More plausible is that the British official position was a foregone conclusion – to blame Russia – and now to instill this prejudice in other willful NATO allies.
For the British to argue that a Soviet-era chemical incriminates Russia is fatuous beyond words. There is every reason to believe that “Novichok” nerve agents are possessed by several states, including the US and Britain. The Americans were involved in the “clean-up” of chemical warfare laboratories in Uzbekistan as far back as 1999, as previously reported by the New York Times, where the Soviet Novichok agents were purportedly synthesized.
As for the British, their chemical weapons laboratory at Porton Down – eight miles from Salisbury where the Skripals fell ill on March 4 – must have its own stock of Novichok if indeed the British laboratory carried out a positive identification last week. “If” being the operative word here.
The point is that any number of state agencies could be in possession of the deadly nerve toxin. How the British attribute it solely to Russia is not verified. The claim relies entirely on the say-so of the British authorities. The same disreputable authorities who helped concoct lies about WMDs to wage a genocidal war on Iraq in 2003.
According to the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Russia destroyed 100 per cent of its declared arsenal of lethal chemicals at the end of 2017 in compliance with the Convention of Chemical Weapons ratified by 165 nations in 1997. The Americans have not yet fully complied, retaining a portion of their toxic stockpile.
Also according to the convention, Russia has a right to inspect the allegedly offending sample that Britain claims to have identified. But all legal requests from Moscow for confirmatory access have been refused by the British.
This is a travesty of due process. Britain is making grave accusations against Russia of violating its sovereignty and attempted murder. Yet the British are not presenting their supposed evidence. Instead, London has sought to escalate the crisis by imposing sanctions on Russia, and enlisting the support of the US, France and Germany to amplify its dubious charges against Moscow.
Russia has rejected all charges. Moscow says the hypothesis of a revenge assassination on a disgraced former spy who had been living an open and undisturbed life in England for nearly a decade is absurd. Especially given the timing of Russia’s presidential elections this weekend and the hosting of the forthcoming World Cup tournament. For Russia to carry out such an act defies logic and credibility.
Britain’s ridiculous 24-hour “deadline” this week on Russia to “provide answers” over the hypothetical, but undisclosed, “evidence” is so impossible it also indicates the unfolding of a propaganda script. When Russia “failed” to comply with the preposterous demand that was then cited as “more proof” of Russian guilt.
The litany of similar false and baseless charges against Russia over the past four years – from aggression in Ukraine to shooting down a Malaysian airliner, from Olympic doping to election meddling – all follow the same propaganda script. Allegations without evidence, repeated ad nauseam. Thanks to dutiful, supine Western so-called news media.
Britain and its allies are engaging in an appalling degradation of diplomacy and the rule of law. With utter arrogance, ironically they claim to be upholding law and order, while in reality they are pushing the world towards hell in a handcart.
Adding insult to injury, British premier Theresa May deprecated Russia’s “disdain for the gravity of the matter”; her Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson accused Russia of being “smug”; while the Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson sniped that Russia “should shut up and go away”.
Russia is being wronged, not for the first time. But her integrity and fortitude will be vindicated – again. The allure of British Cold War spy propaganda has long ago expired. The stale and impotent residue will eventually show just how bankrupt the British rulers and their NATO allies have become.
In their bankruptcy they are desperately trying to start a war. But their criminal insanity will be their own downfall. In the wise words of Abraham Lincoln, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Britain’s baying mob rejects skepticism for emotion in heat of ex-spy poisoning crisis
RT | March 15, 2018
One of the striking things about the furor over the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter is the lack of skepticism in Britain at the evidence presented, in what are still the very early stages of the investigation.
It may be a sign of the public mood, or at least the mood of the people in power and the commentariat, that not only have they rushed to judgment in mass groupthink, but they also turn viciously on anyone attempting to express skepticism.
It is of course understandable that the response to a nerve agent being used to poison two people in a small provincial city is an emotional one, but when the allegations being made are so serious, what is the value of one MP after another standing up in Parliament to deliver Churchillian declarations of defiance, before a suspect has even been identified?
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn stood in Parliament and posed a series of questions: “Has the prime minister taken necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from Russian government under Article 9.2? Has high-resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or identity of its perpetrators?” He went on: “And while suspending high-level contacts, does the prime minister agree it is essential to maintain a robust dialogue with Russia?”
Corbyn’s request for further details on the evidence united the British Parliament… against him. From the jeering Tories opposite, to his own angry backbenchers, there was uncontained anger at his request to clarify exactly what is currently known about events in Salisbury. If the consensus is such that the leader of the opposition’s attempt to propose some kind of opposing viewpoint is shouted down, shouldn’t that cause at least some pause for thought? The British Parliament has seen this kind of consensus before. The voices of dissent were drowned out. It didn’t end well. And the evidence was wrong.
On Thursday, writing in the Guardian, Corbyn warned against a “McCarthyite intolerance of dissent”. He warned Prime Minister Theresa May not to run ahead of the evidence.
If there was any doubt that cool heads are in short supply in British politics currently, the defense secretary has told Russia to “go away and shut up.” That’s the diplomacy of a petulant teenager.
If you dig down into the initial accusations over Russia’s involvement in the alleged deployment of the Novichok nerve agent, there was at least some skepticism. Theresa May offered two possible scenarios: that the Russian government ordered an attack, or that it lost control of its stock of nerve agents.
This suggests that on Monday the British government didn’t know what had happened, but because Russia didn’t use an arbitrary deadline to make an admission of guilt, that was taken as evidence of culpability. There was no material change in the publicly available facts, but there was a public consensus, simply ‘Putin did it’.
Any evidence of Russian guilt at this stage is circumstantial; the police still have no definite suspect, but there is 100 percent conviction in Britain that the Kremlin was to blame, no questions asked.
Britain’s allies have been more guarded, generally falling in behind the Corbyn view in suggesting more evidence is needed before conclusions are made. Even the joint statement on Thursday from the UK, France, Germany and the United States pointing the finger at Moscow couches its accusations in uncertain terms. It says “Britain believes” it was “highly likely Russia was responsible.” That’s skepticism. It’s small, but it’s there.
Reuters has even picked up a story showing that in the mid-90s, a similar nerve agent was used to kill a banker in Russia. The person found guilty then was a scientist who had sold the substance to supplement his wages. So, there are other possible explanations that deserve at least a little time to be considered.
In Britain though, politicians and the media have become a single mass of expertise on Russia, all with deep insights into the workings of the Kremlin. There’s little doubt among them. Among the theories being expressed with such certainty are that Putin did this to boost his election campaign, or it’s a warning to other spies, or perhaps even it’s an attempt to destabilize Britain during a period of political turmoil. Of course there’s no real proof of any of this, and the vast majority of these Kremlin experts will be experts on Brexit next week, and last week they were experts on North Korea.
When two world powers are heading towards a serious diplomatic crisis, a lack of skepticism is dangerous, and a baying mob driven by consensus could have serious consequences. The Times on Thursday ran an opinion piece calling for Russia to be punished through the targeting of Russian children in British schools. That’s where the level of discourse currently stands.
When Dealing with a Bear, Hubris Is Suicidal
The Saker • Unz Review • March 15, 2018
Assuming mankind finds a way not to destroy itself in the near future and assuming that there will still be historians in the 22nd or 23rd centuries, I bet you that they will look at the AngloZionist Empire and see the four following characteristics as some of its core features: lies, willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and hysterics. To illustrate my point I will use the recent “Skripal nerve-gas assassination” story as it really encompasses all of these characteristics.
I won’t even bother debunking the official nonsense here as others have done a very good job of pointing out the idiocy of that narrative. If you are truly capable of believing that “Putin” (that is the current collective designator for the Evil Empire of Mordor threatening all of western civilization) would order the murder of a man whom a Russian military court sentenced to only 13 years in jail (as opposed to life or death) and who was subsequently released as part of a swap with the USA, you can stop reading right now and go back to watching TV. I personally have neither the energy nor the inclination to even discuss such a self-evidently absurd theory. No, what I do want to do is use this story as a perfect illustration of the kind of society we now all live in looked at from a moral point of view. I realize that we live in a largely value-free society where moral norms have been replaced by ideological orthodoxy, but that is just one more reason for me to write about what is taking place precisely focusing on the moral dimensions of current events.
Lies and the unapologetic denial of reality:
In a 2015 article entitled “A society of sexually frustrated Pinocchios” I wrote the following:
I see a direct cause and effect relationship between the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can’t prove that, of course, but here is my thesis: Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With “principles” such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all “for the greater glory of God” the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10 centuries or so and we end up with the modern “Gayropa” (as Europe is now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared ‘dead’ and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as “cultural”, but even objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political expediency and ideological imperatives.
I went on to quote George Orwell by reminding how he defined “doublethink” in his book 1984:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality“
and I concluded by saying that “The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality”.
This is exactly what we are observing; not only in the silly Skripal nerve-gas assassination story but also in all the rest of the Russophobic nonsense produced by the AngloZionist propaganda machine including the “Litvinenko polonium murder” and the “Yushchenko dioxin poisoning“. The fact that neither nerve-gas, nor polonium nor dioxin are in any way effective murder weapons does not matter in the least: a simple drive-by shooting, street-stabbing or, better, any “accident” is both easier to arrange and impossible to trace. Fancy assassination methods are used when access to the target is very hard or impossible (as was the case with Ibn al-Khattab, whose assassination the Russians were more than happy to take credit for; this might also have been the case with the death of Yasser Arafat). But the best way of murdering somebody is to simply make the body disappear, making any subsequent investigation almost impossible. Finally, you can always subcontract the assassination to somebody else like, for example, when the CIA tried and failed, to murder Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah by subcontracting his bombing to its local “Christian” allies, killing over 80 innocent people in the process. There is plenty of common crime in the UK and to get somebody to rob and stab Skripal would have probably been the easiest version. That’s assuming that the Russians had any reason to want him dead, which they self-evidently didn’t.
But here is the important thing: every single criminal or intelligence specialist in the West understands all of the above. But that does not stop the Ziomedia from publishing articles like this one “A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison” which also lists people poisoned by Russians:
- Skripal by nerve gas
- Litvinenko by polonium
- Kara-Murza poisoned not once, but TWICE, by an unknown poison, he survived!
- Markov poisoned by ricin and the Bulgarians with “speculated KGB assistance”
- Khattab by sarin or a sarin-derivative
- Yushchenko by dioxin
- Perepilichny by “a rare, toxic flower, gelsemium” (I kid you not, check the article!)
- Moskalenko by mercury
- Politkovskaya who was shot, but who once felt “ill after drinking some tea that she believed contained poison”
The only possible conclusion from this list is this: there is some kind of secret lab in Russia where completely incompetent chemists try every poison known to man, not on rats or on mice, but on high profile AngloZionist-supported political activists, preferably before an important political event.
Right.
By the way, the gas allegedly used in the attack, “Novichok”, was manufactured in Uzbekistan and the cleanup of the factory producing it was made by, you guessed it, a US company. Just saying…
In any halfway honest and halfway educated society, those kind of articles should result in the idiot writing it being summarily fired for gross incompetence and the paper/journal posting it being discredited forever. But in our world, the clown who wrote that nonsense (Elias Groll, a Harvard graduate and – listen to this – a specialist of “cyberspace and its conflicts and controversies” (sic)) is a staff writer of the award-winning Foreign Policy magazine.
So what does it tell us, and future historians, when this kind of crap is written by a staff writer of an “award winning” media outlet? Does it not show that our society has now reached a stage in its decay (I can’t call that “development”) where lies become the norm? Not only are even grotesque and prima facie absurd lies accepted, they are expected (if only because they reinforce the current ideological Zeitgeist. The result? Our society is now packed with first, zombified ideological drones who actually believe any type of officially proclaimed of nonsense and, second, by cowards who lack the basic courage to denounce even that which they themselves know to be false.
Lies, however ridiculous and self-evidently stupid, have become the main ingredient of the modern political discourse. Everybody knows this and nobody cares. When challenged on this, the typical defense used is always the same: “you are the only person saying this – I sure never heard this before!”.
Willful ignorance as a universal cop-out
We all know the type. You tell somebody that his/her theory makes absolutely no sense or is not supported by facts and the reply you get is some vaguely worded refusal to engage in an disputation. Initially, you might be tempted to believe that, indeed, your interlocutor is not too bright and not too well read, but eventually you realize that there is something very different happening: the modern man actually makes a very determined effort not to be capable of logical thought and not to be informed of the basic facts of the case. And what is true for specific individuals is even more true of our society as a whole. Let’s take one simple example: Operation Gladio:
“Gladio” is really an open secret by now. Excellent books and videos have been written about this and even the BBC has made a two and a half hour long video about it. There is even an entire website dedicated to the story of this huge, continent-wide, terrorist organization specializing in false flag operations. That’s right: a NATO-run terrorist network in western Europe involved in false flag massacres like the infamous Bologna train station bombing. No, not the Soviet KGB backing the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades in Italy. No, the US and West European governments organizing, funding and operating a terrorist network directed at the people of Western, not Eastern, Europe. Yes, at their own people! In theory, everybody should know about this, the information is available everywhere, even on the hyper-politically correct Wikipedia. But, again, nobody cares.
The end of the Cold War was marked by a seemingly endless series of events which all provided a pretext for AngloZionist interventions (from the Markale massacres in Bosnia, to the Srebrenica “genocide”, to the Racak massacre in Kosovo, to the “best” and biggest one of them all, 9/11 of course). Yet almost nobody wondered if the same people or, at least, the same kind of people who committed all the Gladio crimes might be involved. Quite the opposite: each one of these events was accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign mindlessly endorsing and even promoting the official narrative, even when it self-evidently made no sense whatsoever (like 2 aircraft burning down 3 steel towers). As for Gladio, it was conveniently “forgotten”.
There is a simple principle in psychology, including, and especially in criminal psychology which I would like to prominently restate here:
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior
Every criminologist knows that and this is why criminal investigators place so much importance on the “modus operandi”, i.e. the particular way or method a suspect or a criminal chooses in the course of the execution of his/her crimes. That is also something which everybody knows. So let’s summarize this in a simple thesis:
Western regimes have a long and well-established track record of regularly executing bloody false-flag operations in pursuit of political objectives, especially those providing them with a pretext to justify an illegal military aggression.
Frankly, I submit that the thesis above is really established not only by a preponderance of evidence but beyond a reasonable doubt. Right?
Maybe. But that is also completely irrelevant because nobody gives a damn! Not the reporters who lie for a living nor, even less so, the brainwashed zombies who read their nonsense and take it seriously. The CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 600 times – who cares?! All we know is that the good folks at Langley would never, ever, kill a Russian in the UK, out of respect for international law, probably…
That willful ignorance easily defeats history, facts or logic.
Here is a simple question a journalist could ask: “would the type of people who had no problems blowing up an large train station, or bringing down three buildings in downtown New York, have any hesitation in using a goofy method to try kill a useless Russian ex-spy if that could justify further hostile actions against a country which they desperately need to demonize to justify and preserve the current AngloZionist world order?”. The answer I think is self-evident. The question shall therefore not be asked. Instead, soy-boys from Foreign Policy mag will tell us about how the Russians use exotic flowers to kill high visibility opponents whose death would serve no conceivable political goal.
Hypocrisy as a core attribute of the modern man
Willful ignorance is important, of course, but it is not enough. For one thing, being ignorant, while useful to dismiss a fact-based and/or logical argument, is not something useful to establish your moral superiority or the legality of your actions. Empire requires much more than just obedience from its subject: what is also absolutely indispensable is a very strong sense of superiority which can be relied upon when committing a hostile action against the other guy. And nothing is as solid a foundation for a sense of superiority than the unapologetic reliance on brazen hypocrisy. Let’s take a fresh example: the latest US threats to attack Syria (again).
Irrespective of the fact that the US themselves have certified Syria free of chemical weapons and irrespective of the fact that US officials are still saying that they have no evidence that the Syrian government was involved in any chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the US is now preparing to strike Syria again in “response” to future chemical attacks! Yes, you read that right. The AngloZionists are now announcing their false flags in advance! In fact, by the time this analysis is published the attack will probably already have occurred. The “best” part of this all is that Nikki Haley has now announced to the UN Security Council that the US will act without any UN Security Council approval. What the US is declaring is this: “we reserve the right to violate international law at any time and for any reason we deem sufficient”. In the very same statement, Nikki Haley also called the Syrian government an “outlaw regime”. This is not a joke, check it out for yourself. The reaction in “democratic” Europe: declaring that *Russia* (not the US) is a rogue state. QED.
This entire circus is only made possible by the fact that the western elites have all turned into “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (to use the wonderful words of Boris Johnson) and that absolutely nobody has the courage, or decency, to call all this what it really is: an obscene display of total hypocrisy and wholesale violation of all norms of international law. The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern “journalists are either unemployed or prostitutes” (he spoke about the French media – un journaliste français c’est soit une pute soit un chômeur – but this fully applies to all the western media). Except that I would extend it to the entire Western Establishment.
I would further argue that foreign aggression and hypocrisy have become the two essential pillars for the survival of the AngloZionist empire: the first one being an economic and political imperative, the 2nd one being the prerequisite for the public justification of the first one. But sometimes even that is not enough, especially when the lies are self-evidently absurd. Then the final, quasi-miraculous element is always brought in: hysterics.
Hysteria as the highest form of (pseudo-)liberalism
I don’t particularly care for the distinction usually made between liberals and conservatives, at least not unless the context and these terms is carefully and accurately defined. I certainly don’t place myself on that continuum nor do find it analytically helpful.
The theoretical meaning of these concepts is, however, quite different from what is mostly understood under these labels, especially when people use them to identify themselves. That is to say that while I am not at all sure that those who think of themselves as, say, liberals are in any way truly liberal, I do think that people who would identify themselves as “liberals” often (mostly?) share a number of characteristics, the foremost of which is a very strong propensity to function at, and engage in, an hysterical mode of discourse and action.
The Google definition of hysteria is “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people (…) whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization), selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior”. Is that not a perfect description of US politicians, especially the (putatively) “liberal” ones? Just think of the way US Democrats have capitalized on such (non-)issues as “Russian interference” (externally) or “gun control” (internally) and you will see that the so-called “liberals” never get off a high-emotional pitch. The best example of all, really, is their reaction to the election of Donald Trump instead of their cult-leader Hillary: it has been over a year since Trump has been elected and yet the liberal ziomedia and its consumers are still in full-blown hysteria mode (with “pussyhats”, “sky-screams” and all). In a conversation you can literally drown such a liberal with facts, statistics, expert testimonies, etc. and achieve absolutely no result whatsoever because the liberal lives in an ideological comfort zone which he/she is categorically unwilling and, in fact, unable, to abandon, even temporarily. This is what makes liberals such a *perfect* audience for false-flag operations: they simply won’t process the narrative presented to them in a logical manner but will immediately react to it in a strongly emotional manner, usually with the urge to immediately “do something”.
That “do something” is usually expressed in the application of violence (externally) and the imposition of bans/restrictions/regulations (internally). You can try to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Russians would ever want to do is to use a stupid method to try to kill a person who is of absolutely no interest to them, or to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Syrian government would ever do in the course of its successful liberation of its national territory from “good terrorists” would be to use chemical weapons of any kind – but you would never achieve anything: Trump must be impeached, the Russians sanctioned and the Syrians bombed, end of argument.
I am quite aware that there are a lot of self-described “conservatives” who have fully joined this chorus of hysterical liberals in all their demands, but these “conservatives” are not only acting out of character, they are simply caving in to the social pressure of the day, being the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” mentioned above. Again, I am not discussing real liberals or real conservatives here (regardless of what these terms really mean), I am talking about those who, for whatever reason, chose to place that label upon themselves even if they personally have only a very vague idea of what this label is supposed to mean.
So there we have it: an Empire built (and maintained) on lies, accepted on the basis ignorance, justified by hypocrisy and energized by hysterics. This is what the “Western world” stands for nowadays. And while there is definitely a vocal minority of “resisters” (from the Left and the Right – also two categories I don’t find analytically helpful – and from many other schools of political thought), the sad reality is that the vast majority of people around us accept this and see no reason to denounce it, never mind doing something about it. That is why “they” got away with 9/11 and why “they” will continue to get away with future false-flags because the people lied to, realize, at least on some level, that they are being lied to and yet they simply don’t care. Truly, the Orwellian slogans of 1984 “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” perfectly fit our world. However, when dealing with the proverbial Russian bear, there is one lesson of history which western leaders really should never forget and which they should also turn into a slogan: when dealing with a bear, hubris is suicidal.
Art and history paid for to shape opinions about military
By Yves Engler · March 15, 2018
Would it surprise you to learn the Canadian military spends millions on art and history?
Until April the Canadian War Museum is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” mission to support Ukraine’s armed forces.
Until April the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP) is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” mission to support Ukraine’s armed forces.
The purpose of CFAP is to “encourage artists to learn more about our men and women in uniform and to create works of art that document and explore Canada’s military history and experience.” The program pays for artists to spend 7-10 days in the field with troops to document their activities.
While CFAP began in 2001, there have been various iterations of the program over the past century. During World War I, for instance, Canada’s official war art program created almost 1,000 works of art. During WWII the head of the Army’s historical section, Colonel A. F. Duguid, initiated a war art program and over the years the Canadian forces have commissioned sketches of the Korean War, NATO missions, UN operations and the first Gulf War.
Today CFAP is run by the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and Heritage. With a 50-person staff, the Directorate also supports the Organization of Military Museums of Canada. The half-century old organization seeks “to preserve the military heritage of Canada by encouraging the establishment and operation of military museums.” Along with more than 60 Canadian Forces’ museums, the Directorate supports the Canadian War Museum.
DND’s Directorate of History and Heritage is “mandated to preserve and communicate Canada’s military history and foster pride in a Canadian military heritage.” They answer “1,000 questions of an historical nature” annually, helping high school students with assignments and academics navigate archival inquiries. The Directorate also works with the media. In the early 1990s, for instance, senior military historian Brereton Greenhous was a special advisor during production of the CBC film Dieppe 1942. Similarly, director of the historical section Charles Stacey vetted Canada At War, the first television miniseries to document Canada’s part in the Second World War, before the National Film Board produced program played on CBC.
The Directorate’s historians also help veterans exert political pressure. After a backlash to a Canadian War Museum exhibit that mentioned the WWII Allied Bomber Command targeting civilians, senior DND historian Serge Bernier was asked to write a report. Bernier concluded the exhibit was hurtful to the veterans.
The Directorate’s roots date back to the end of World War I when the Department of Militia and Defence established a historical section. In Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook writes, “it has been the official historians of the Department of National Defence who, for much of the 20th century, have controlled the academic writing on the two world wars.” But, official historians’ influence has extended far beyond the “Great Wars”. In 1919 the historical section published the first in a three-volume series titled “A history of the organization, development and services of the military and naval forces of Canada from the peace of Paris in 1763, to the present time.” Immediately after the Korean War official historians wrote two books on the subject and published another in 1966. (Academics all but failed to revisit Canada’s role in Korea until the late 1990s.)
The minister approves publication of Directorate books. On several occasions cabinet has discussed and recommended changes to their histories.
Official historians published a large share of the early books on Canadian militarism and greatly influenced academia. The Directorate was the “graduate school in military history”, notes DND historian William A. Douglas, until “university departments started producing postgraduates.” In the two decades after World War II individuals who worked in the military’s historical sections filled many academic posts in military history and associated fields. And they were often influential in their field. Head of the War Artist Program and deputy-director of the Historical Section at Canadian Army Headquarters in London, George Stanley led the history department at the Royal Military College after World War II. During his career Stanley was president of the Canadian Historical Association, a member of the Massey Commission Committee on Historic Sites and Monuments and chairman of the federal government’s Centennial Publications Committee.
At the military-run Royal Military College Stanley taught Jack Granatstein and Desmond Morton. These two individuals, who both worked in DND’s historical section, have published hundreds of books and articles on Canadian military history and foreign policy.
A military historian for two decades, Colonel Charles Stacey has had “more influence on how Canadians view their nation’s military history” than any other individual. Director of the army’s historical section for 14 years after WWII, he published a dozen books and in 2000 Granatstein wrote that Stacey’s “books continue to be read and to have great influence on military and foreign policy historians.”
Turns out the military wants to control what you think about them and are willing to spend your tax dollars to do it.
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From the Archives
The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)
By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015
The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis.
The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. … continue
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