Two years ago the Syrian government was accused of a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb Douma. It has become clear now there never was such an attack. But still, people were found dead. Who were they? And how did they die?
On April 14th 2018, the US, France, and Great Britain launched missile strikes on Syria, in retribution for an alleged poison gas attack on the terrorist stronghold Douma for which they held the Syrian government responsible. Just before the attack, the Russian ambassador in Lebanon and the chief of Russia’s general staff warned Russia would respond to strikes on Syria if the lives of Russian servicemen were threatened, targeting any missiles and launchers involved. As Russian envoy to Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Alexander Shulgin, later put it: “There was a smell of gunpowder in the air“.
What could have led to World War III eventually ended with a hiss. No Russian targets were hit and for Syria, the damage from the attacks was limited, partly because Syria’s Soviet-era air defence systems intercepted many incoming missiles.
Rumours about a chemical attack had started with videos and photos disseminated on social media by Syrian Civil Defence, better known as The White Helmets, among others, of children being treated in a hospital with respiratory problems; of dead bodies in an apartment building; and of chlorine cylinders that looked as if they had been dropped from the sky, one laying on a roof terrace and the other on a bed under a hole in the roof.
On 16th April 2018, two days after the tripartite strike, British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk interviewed a doctor from the Douma hospital. He stated that although the video of the children being treated in the hospital was real, and that the portrayed patients had been struggling with breathing problems, this was not the result of a poison gas attack, but of dust clouds caused by bombardments that had occurred earlier in the day.
While the patients were being brought in, there was a member of the White Helmets calling out “gas!” – which caused people to throw water over each other in panic.
Other witnesses, who told their story in The Hague on April 28th 2018, at a press conference organised by the Russian delegation to OPCW, roughly confirmed the statement of the doctor interviewed by Fisk. None of them, including several people who were seen in the video, said they hadn’t noticed anything of a poison gas attack.
In May 2019 a revealing document was leaked from OPCW about the two cylinders. The author, Ian Henderson, who in April 2018 had been sent to Douma to investigate the cylinders on behalf of the chemical watchdog, concluded that there was a “higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft”. This seemed to be an understatement since the hole in the roof turned out to be smaller than the cylinder on the bed below.
Also “no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties”, the OPCW interim report on the Douma incident reads. The OPCW inspectors furthermore noted that the dead people in the photos and videos didn’t look like victims from “chlorine-containing choking or blood agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene or cyanogen chloride”.
And so, one important question remains unanswered: Who were the around 35 dead deceased, mostly women and children, that were filmed and photographed in the four-storey building in Douma, where one of the two cylinders was found on the roof? And how did they die?
Jaish al-Islam, the terrorist group that at that time occupied Douma, reportedly buried the bodies in an unmarked mass grave, before the OPCW inspectors had arrived at the scene. Raed Saleh, leader of the White Helmets, told Reuters he pinpointed the burial place to OPCW. Nevertheless, the chemical watchdog chose not to conduct exhumations.
And so I asked Al Saleh if he could tell me anything about the background of the victims and the location of their burial. Unfortunately, he left my questions unanswered. I also asked Dr. Ghassan Obeid of the mission of Syria to the OPCW if the Syrian authorities had made an effort to identify the deceased, but I received no reply from him either.
At a press conference of the Russian embassy in The Hague on July 12th 2019, that I attended, Maxim Grigoriev, director of the Russia-based Foundation for the Study of Democracy, showed interviews of people living in the apartment building and in its vicinity.
None of them recognised the deaths from the videos and photos, apart from one man who identified his brother, who had died, he said, from artillery shelling elsewhere. Some interviewees declared they had seen fighters bringing dead bodies into the building.
I invited the open-source and social media investigators of Bellingcat to debunk Grigoriev’s findings and to identify the ‘Douma victims’. I received no reply. Nevertheless, Bellingcat proved to be very quick in finding who was to blame: four days after the alleged chemical attack they concluded it was “highly likely the 34+ victims of the 19:30 attack on the apartment building near al-Shuhada Square were killed as a result of a gas cylinder filled with what is most likely chlorine gas being dropped from a Hip helicopter originating from Dumayr Airbase”.
And so here we are, two years after an attack that never happened, with around 35 dead people, still unidentified, and still buried in an unmarked grave.
Even more terrible: the management of OPCW, based in The Hague, The Netherlands, has suppressed the findings of its own inspectors who had conducted an investigation at the alleged crime scene in Douma, Syria.
The OPCW management is simply covering up for the criminal elements that have staged the Douma incident, and that could have triggered an all-out world war. For full information about this alarming fact, I recommend reading the presentation given by members of the Working Group on Syria, Media, and Propaganda among others in the House of Commons on January 22th 2020.
April 15, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Bellingcat, OPCW, Syria, White Helmets |
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Let’s hope the Neoconservatives and American presstitutes don’t add a conflict with China to the ongoing virus and economic threats.
First, is the virus a bioweapon? Second who is responsible?
Two sources concluded that the virus was a bioweapon. One is Francis Boyle, who drafted the US implementing legislation for the Biowarfare Convention that became US law in, I believe, 1989. Boyle says the US government violates the law and has 13,000 scientists working on biowarfare research. Boyle said in February that the aerosol gain-of-function of the virus was done at a UNC lab at which a Wuhan scientist was present, and the HIV features were done in Australia where a Wuhan scientist was present. He says the scientists took the work back with them and the result was Covid-19. Also in February or March a scientific paper by scientists in India concluded that the virus was man-made. Their paper was taken down without explanation.
A top virologist, whose statements to the Belgium government concerning the inadequacy of the government’s response to the virus I have posted on my website, tells me that the Indian scientists were mistaken, and that the virus is naturally evolved. As he is not involved in bioweapons work, I do not think he is covering up illegal activity by US and Chinese governments. He shows in his public concern every indication of being a highly principled person of unquestioned ability and character. Moreover, his position seems to be widely shared among experts.
As for responsibility, it seems both China and the US are responsible. It is clear from news reports that the US contributed millions of dollars to the Wuhan level 4 lab for research having to do with bats and coronavirus. What this research was, we don’t know. We only know what they say. But the US government was aware of the bat coronavirus research and helped to fund it. There was also a report that after the virus outbreak the president of China suddenly removed the top people at the Wuhan facility and put in charge a woman who was an expert virologist. Chinese president XI thought something had gone wrong at the lab and said it was the duty of the government to protect the people.
We also know that various Chinese officials and press said the Americans had brought the virus with them when they came to Wuhan to participate in the military games. The Chinese did not mean on purpose, but that someone among the US team was infected without having symptoms, often a feature of the virus. There was some discussion in which US health officials seemed to acknowledge that the virus might have been active in the US before it broke lose in a mass way.
We also know that Trump and now the neoconservative warmongers are blaming China for keeping quiet too long about the virus. This claim as far as I can tell is false. It seems to be mainly propaganda against China.
We also have had reports that a US military lab in Texas was suddenly closed out of pathogen concerns by the Obama regime.
How all this fits together or doesn’t I don’t know.
As the Democrats are blaming Trump for the virus, Trump blames China as that aligns the Democrats with the “enemy” China and is a way of showing that the Democrats are covering up for “Communist China” by shifting the blame to the president of the US.
The politics of the virus will make it difficult for the truth to emerge.
April 14, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | China, Covid-19, United States |
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The western world has gone into a phase of unprecedented lockdown. Major airlines have ceased international operations. It is an open question is to whether or not they will be able to resume operations when and if the current draconian restrictions are lifted. In Australia, the Federal government has ceased to sit and the government has announced that this parliamentary closure will extend until at least August.
Quite why such a lockdown is necessary is unclear. No convincing explanation has been offered by the government and it is an extreme step that comparable nations in North America, the United Kingdom and all of Europe have found unnecessary. One of the most alarming consequences of this fundamental attack on the notion of Parliamentary accountability is that the decision was met with acceptance by the official Opposition and muted negative comment, if at all, by the major mainstream media.
Media coverage of the pandemic has been extraordinary. At least half of the nightly main television news bulletins have been devoted to coverage of the pandemic, although whether it actually adds to our degree of knowledge is at best debatable.
The statistics as to those affected, dying and recovery are presented each night like some grizzly football score. How accurate or complete those statistics are is a very open question. They are presented however as some form of immutable truth with nary a question as to their accuracy or reliability.
There are serious questions being asked as to the real origins of the current pandemic. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that it originated in China, and that “fact” is presented as something beyond question. The more we learn however, the less reliable that complacent assertion appears to be.
It is true that the first mainstream media reports of the virus came out of China’s Wuhan City, and urban agglomeration of some 12 million inhabitants. That reporting betrayed a number of assumptions that are difficult to sustain.
Where a virus is first reported does not automatically equate with where it began. One reason for this is that people being infected or dying are not necessarily correctly defined as to the cause of death or illness. This is particularly the case here where multiple instances of the illness were initially defined as the current illustration of the annual influenza epidemic which inflict and kill millions of people each year.
A second factor is that a virus can be imported into a country, either by accident or deliberately, by those acting for or on behalf of another nation. This is not idle speculation in the present case. There is now very good evidence that the virus was imported into the city of Wuhan at a time contemporaneous with the holding in that city of the quadrennial Military Games.
Representatives of more than 100 nations attended and participated in those games. The United States contingent was of particular interest for a number of reasons.
The first is that its soldier participants had their worst medal performance since the games were first held a half century ago, not winning a single gold medal and finishing well down the medal table.
The second factor was that the hotel where the United States military participants stayed was itself a hotbed of infection, recording more than 40 cases of employees and guests infected by the virus. This is a remarkable coincidence that challenges the laws of probability theory.
A third clue is the way the western media have reported the Chinese experience. They have given prominence to United States President Donald Trump’s description of the pandemic as the “Chinese virus.” We know from 100+ years of experience with the Spanish flu of 1919 how a false label can be used to define an entire country on a wholly false basis.
The record clearly shows that the Chinese government alerted the World Health Organisation as soon as they had established the reality of the virus they were dealing with. This was before most western countries had even acknowledged that there was a problem.
This suspicion has been reinforced in recent weeks by the reporting of western media of the actions of the Russian and Chinese governments to provide assistance where it was asked for. The Italian government for example was refused assistance by its European Union “partners” and it was the Russians who flew in giant planes full of urgently needed medical supplies, taking a lengthy roundabout route because of obstructive flyover permission.
This assistance was greeted with a sneer by the western media who contrived to find some sort of Russian plot in a selfless humanitarian exercise. A similar result was seen in the media’s response to Chinese aid which was denounced as either medically inadequate or done with ulterior motives.
In neither case was that view shared by the governments involved, the medical staff of the overstretched and under resourced hospitals, or the citizens of those countries aided by the Russian and Chinese medical supplies.
The writer Dimitri Orlov, who recently returned to live in Russia after many years residence in the United States, had a cynical but arguably realistic view of the virus. On 8 April 2020 he had this comment to make on his Patreon:
“China has just taught the world a major masterclass in biowarfare defence. It doesn’t matter whether SARS-Covid-19 was concocted in a United States biowarfare laboratory or not. The point is, it could have been, because why else would the United States have bio- warfare laboratories scattered around the globe? And why were they collecting DNA samples from local populations except to target them using bioweapons? And so after some amount of uncertainty and vacillation China opted to treat the SARS-COV-19 outbreak as an act of war and won! Russia has followed suit, and although it is too early to declare victory it too is likely to score a win on the biowarfare front.”
I respectfully share Mr Orlov’s view. We also have the curiously unexplained events at the United States’ Fort Detrick biowarfare facility. In July 2019 the facility was forced to temporarily close, reopening at the end of the year. It is one of the literally hundreds of such United States facilities scattered around the globe.
What makes Fort Detrick of particular interest in the current context was that it was known to be working on a Covid-19 type biological weapon. That the United States had succeeded in developing such a weapon was publicly proclaimed by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019. The timing of this announcement, the problems at Fort Detrick and the outbreak of the coronavirus goes beyond mere coincidence.
The wall to wall media coverage of the outbreak in the western media nonetheless fails to raise these fundamental and clearly relevant points.
It is one of the grim ironies of the present pandemic that the United States may well turn out to be the principal victim, at least among western nations. Even there, some questions exist. We know from the published data thus far that 70% of the fatalities in the United States have been in the black population, that represent only 10% of the national population.
Television pictures showing mass graves being created in public parks will do little to assuage growing public concern that allegedly “the richest country in the world” cannot even properly treat or bury their own disadvantaged citizens.
The consequences of this pandemic are likely to be vastly greater than originally thought. The average citizen would do well to strap themselves in for what is going to be a very bumpy ride.
James O’Neill is an Australian-based Barrister at Law.
April 14, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering | China, Covid-19, United States |
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Although the redoubtable New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that the Covid-19 virus “has been ahead of us from Day One. We’ve underestimated the enemy, and that is always dangerous, my friends. We should not do that again” it is too much to expect of most political figures that they should ever admit they were wrong about something. President Trump, for example, flatly refuses to acknowledge that in January 2020 he declared that “we have [the virus outbreak] totally under control”, and there are countless similar instances of denial of realities by other leaders, not only about the pandemic, but about very many facets of international affairs. This reluctance extends to the media, although sometimes, it has to be said, some of the media are forced to recognise facts that to them are unpalatable, and to adjust their position accordingly.
One recent instance of non-adjustment, however, is the Western media’s continuing public relations and propaganda campaign against Russia.
On 9 April Al Jazeera carried a report that “A U.S.-Russian space crew blasted off Thursday to the International Space Station following tight quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos’ Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner lifted off as scheduled from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.” There was an excellent 400-word piece about the mission, just as one would expect from Al Jazeera.
On the other hand, the New York Times, as ascertained from a search of its website on 10 April, didn’t mention the mission at all. The Washington Post carried a twelve-word item that read in its entirety “By Associated Press April 9, 2020 — A U.S.-Russian space crew has blasted off to the International Space Station.” End.
The reason for reluctance on the part of the U.S. mainstream media to inform the world about such an important international event is that Russia played the major part in a successful space mission with the United States. Imagine the news cover if the spacecraft hadn’t been a Russian Soyuz, but a U.S.-produced SpaceX (still under vastly expensive development) launched from the Kennedy Space Centre. There would have been front-page headlines with “Keep America Great” exhortations from the space commander in Washington.
And so the propaganda of the third Cold War continues, involving all sorts of important international affairs, not least being Crimea which (whisper this) is doing very nicely, thank you, having been restored to Mother Russia.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the Washington Post marked the sixth anniversary of the restoration with a piece on 18 March that (albeit reluctantly) recognised Crimea’s accession to Russia. It noted, among other things, that “in Crimea itself, the annexation was popular, especially among Crimea’s large population of older ethnic Russians. More than five years later, and billions of roubles of investment later, it remains popular.” It is mandatory in the West to use the word “annexation” when referring to the accession of Crimea to Russia following a popular referendum, but even the Post can’t escape the facts, which are so distasteful to the propagandists.
In 1783 Crimea became part of Russia and remained so until, as recorded by the BBC, “In 1954 Crimea was handed to Ukraine as a gift by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who was himself half-Ukrainian.” The majority of citizens wanted to rejoin Russia rather than stay with crippled post-revolution Ukraine which would have victimized them because of their Russian heritage. One of its first actions “was to repeal a 2012 law recognising Russian as an official regional language” and governance from Kiev boded badly for minorities.
It was rarely stated that 90 percent of the inhabitants of Crimea are Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and Russian-educated, and they voted to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” (in the words of the Declaration of Independence of 1776) in order to rejoin Russia. It would be strange if they had not wanted to accede to a country that not only welcomed their kinship, empathy and loyalty but was economically benevolent concerning their future, as has now been amply demonstrated by ensuing growth and prosperity. As even the Washington Post had to acknowledge, “Crimea’s three largest ethnic groups are, by and in large, happy with the direction of events on the peninsula.”
At the time that these ethnic groups were voting to rejoin their mother country, five years ago, the West, and most notably the administration in Washington, decided to oppose any such move. It didn’t matter that it was a fair and free vote, because there are ways to defeat common sense and national aspirations while creating the impression that it is wrong for people to express their feelings and wishes if these favour a nation that is anathema to those who make the rules.
For example, the government in Crimea invited observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to witness and assess the conduct of the referendum held to determine whether the people of Crimea wished to remain under the Kiev government or rejoin Russia. There were no strings attached, and the invitation was sent to the HQ of the OSCE in Vienna. Then there was a pause during which the matter was considered in who knows what halls of power. And the OSCE conjured up an intriguing excuse for refusing to assess conduct of the plebiscite. As Reuters reported, “a spokeswoman said Crimea could not invite observers as the region was not a full-fledged state and therefore not a member of the 57-member organization. ‘As far as we know, Crimea is not a participating state of the OSCE, so it would be sort of hard for them to invite us,’ she said. She also said that Ukraine, which is an OSCE member, sent no invitation and that the organization ‘respects the full territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine’.” You couldn’t make it up.
The feelings and aspirations of Crimea’s citizens didn’t matter to the OSCE or to the West as a whole. The West wanted, and still wants, Ukraine to rule Crimea, and seems determined to pester and sanction Russia accordingly. But nobody can seriously imagine for one moment that Russia is going to hand over Crimea to the Kiev government. So what is the answer?
Nobody expects the Great and the Good of the West to openly admit they were wrong about Crimea, and that the region and its citizens are in fact immeasurably better-off than they would be had they been subjected to rule by Kiev. But there is usually a way out of such a dilemma, and one that can be gently implemented without embarrassment. All that the West needs to do is quietly accept the status of Crimea and remove anti-Russia sanctions without fanfare. There would be discontent among the ultra-nationalists in Kiev, of course, but the world would be a more secure and happier place. Surely that’s a worthy aim to be achieved?
April 14, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Crimea, New York Times, Washington Post |
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Late last year, Slate published an investigative report detailing how pharmaceutical giant, Merck, used “flawed” and “unreliable” pre-licensing safety studies to push through approval of its multi-billion-dollar bonanza, the HPV vaccine. For veteran safe vaccine advocates, like myself, the most shocking aspect of the expose was that Slate published it at all. Slate and other liberal online publications including Salon, Huffington Post and The Daily Beast customarily block articles that critique vaccine safety in order, they argue, to encourage vaccination and protect public health.
Motivated by this noble purpose, the liberal media—the supposed antidote to corporate and government power—has helped insulate from scrutiny the burgeoning vaccine industry and its two regulators, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both agencies have pervasive and potentially corrupting financial entanglements with the vaccine manufacturers, according to extensive congressional investigations.
Ironically, liberals routinely lambaste Pharma, and its FDA enablers for putting profits over people. Recent examples include Vioxx (100,000 injured—Merck paid more than $5 billion in fines and settlements), Abilify (Bristol Meyers Squibb paid $515 million for marketing the drug to nursing homes, knowing it can be fatal to seniors), Celebrex and Bextra (Pfizer paid $894 million for bribing public officials and false advertising about safety and effectiveness) and, of course, the opioid crisis, which in 2016 killed more Americans than the 20-year Vietnam War. What then, makes liberals think that these same companies are immune from similar temptations when it comes to vaccines? There is plenty of evidence that they are not. Merck, the world’s largest vaccine maker, is currently fighting multiple lawsuits, brought by its own scientists, claiming that the company forced them to falsify efficacy data for its MMR vaccine.
The Slate article nowhere discloses that FDA licenses virtually all vaccines using the same mawing safety science deficiencies that brought us Gardasil. FDA claims that “vaccines undergo rigorous safety testing to determine their safety.” But that’s not true. FDA’s choice to classify vaccine makers as “biologics” rather than “drugs” opened a regulatory loophole that allows vaccines to evade any meaningful safety testing. Instead of the multi-year double-blind inert placebo studies—the gold standard of safety science—that the FDA requires prior to licensing other medications, most vaccines now on the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule were safety tested for only a few days or weeks. For example, the manufacturer’s package insert discloses that Merck’s Hep B vaccine (almost every American infant receives a Hep B shot on the day of birth) underwent, not five years, but a mere five days of safety testing. If the babies in these studies had a seizure—or died—on day six, Merck was under no obligation to disclose those facts.
Furthermore, many vaccines contain dangerous amounts of known neurotoxins like mercury and aluminum and carcinogens like formaldehyde, that are associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune problems, food allergies and cancers that might not be diagnosed for many years. A five-day study has no way of spotting such associations. Equally shocking, FDA does not require vaccine manufacturers to measure proposed vaccines against true inert placebos, further obscuring researchers’ capacity to see adverse health effects and virtually guaranteeing that more subtle injuries, such as impaired immune response, loss of IQ or depression, will never be detected—no matter how widespread. Furthermore, the CDC has never studied the impacts on children’s health of combining 50 plus vaccines.
These lax testing requirements can save vaccine manufacturers tens of millions of dollars. That’s one of the reasons for the “gold rush” that has multiplied vaccines from three, when I was a boy, to the 50 plus vaccines that children typically receive today.
There are other compelling reasons why vaccines have become Pharma’s irresistible new profit and growth vehicle. For example, manufacturers of the 50 plus vaccines on CDC’s childhood schedule enjoy what has become a trapped audience of 74 million child consumers who are effectively compelled to purchase an expensive product, sparing vaccine makers additional millions in advertising and marketing costs.
But the biggest economic boon to vaccine makers has been the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). In 1986, Congress awash in pharmaceutical dollars—Big Pharma is, by far, the top Capitol Hill lobbying group—passed NCVIA giving pharmaceutical companies what amounts to blanket immunity from liability for any injury caused by vaccines. No matter how toxic the ingredients, how negligent the manufacturer or how grievous the harm, vaccine-injured children cannot sue a vaccine company. That extraordinary law eliminated a principal cost associated with making other drugs and left the industry with little economic incentive to make vaccines safe. It also removed lawyers, judges and courts from their traditional roles as guardians of vaccine safety. Since the law’s passage, industry revenues have sky-rocketed from $1 billion to $44 billion.
The absence of critical attention to this exploding industry by liberal online sites is particularly troubling since pharma, using strategic investments, has effectively sidelined, not just Congress, lawyers and courts, but virtually all of our democracy’s usual public health sentinels. Pervasive financial entanglements with vaccine makers and the other alchemies of agency capture have transformed the FDA and CDC into industry sock puppets.
Strong economic drivers—pharmaceutical companies are the biggest network advertisers—discourage mainstream media outlets from criticizing vaccine manufacturers. A network president once told me he would fire any of his news show hosts who allowed me to talk about vaccine safety on air. “Our news division,” he explained, “gets up to 70% of ad revenues from pharma in non-election years.” Furthermore, liberal activists including environmental, human rights, public health and children’s advocates also steer clear of vaccine safety discussions. On other core issues like toxics, guns and cigarettes, the CDC has a long record of friendly collaboration with these advocates who have thereby acquired a knee-jerk impulse to protect the agency from outside criticism.
In this vacuum, online liberal news sites are the last remaining barrier to protect children from corporate greed, yet they have become self-appointed arbiters against exposing the public to negative information about vaccine manufacturers and regulators. Liberal voices are not just sidelined, they are subsumed in the orthodoxy that all vaccines are always good for all people—and the more the better. Working with Pharma reps and their tame politicians, liberal news reporters and columnists across America are laboring in nearly every state to make the CDC vaccine schedule compulsory for children and to eliminate religious, philosophical and even medical exemptions.
As a result, the government/Big Pharma combination has gained unprecedented power to override parental consent and force otherwise healthy children, and other unwilling consumers, to undergo compulsory vaccinations, a shocking advance along the road to a corporate totalitarianism which seeks absolute control, even of our bodies. Keep in mind that there is no authentic dispute that vaccination is a risky medical intervention. It was the wave of lawsuits arising from injuries suffered from the Diphtheria/Tetanus/Pertussis (DTP) vaccine in the 1980s, that caused Congress to pass the NCVIA bestowing immunity on the pharmaceutical industry, which threatened, otherwise, to stop making vaccines. In upholding that law, the Supreme Court declared NCVIA justified because “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Since then, the Federal Vaccine Court, created by NCVIA, has paid out $3.8 billion to vaccine-injured individuals. That number dramatically understates the true gravity of the harm. A Department of Health and Human Services funded report acknowledges that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.”
Supporting a law that forces Americans to relinquish control of their bodies to a corporate/state behemoth is an odd posture for liberals, who once championed the precept of “informed consent,” as the mainstay of the Nuremberg Code and the declarations of Helsinki and Geneva which protect individuals against all coerced medical interventions.
Science suggests that we might have made a big mistake by not aggressively safety testing our mandatory vaccines. Chronic diseases like ADHD, asthma, autoimmune diseases and allergies now affect 54 percent of our children, up from 12.6 percent in 1988, the year NCVIA took effect. And those data measure only the injuries characterized in digital medical records. Health advocates warn that we may be missing subtler injuries like widespread losses in reading and IQ and in executive and behavioral functions.
The suspicion that the neurotoxins in vaccines may be negatively affecting a generation is not wild speculation. Numerous studies point to the once ubiquitous use of leaded gasoline as the cause of widespread IQ loss and violence that bedeviled the generations from the 1960s-1980s. Is it not possible that dramatically increased infant exposures to aluminum and ethyl mercury—a far more potent neurotoxin than lead—might be significantly debilitating the post NCVIA generation?
The CDC claims that the cause of the sudden explosion in neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune illnesses and food allergies that began in the late 1980s, is a mystery. However, vaccine court awards, manufacturers’ package inserts and reams of peer-reviewed science all recognize that many of the chronic diseases that suddenly became epidemic in our children following the passage of NCVIA can be caused by vaccines or their ingredients.
The Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), the ultimate arbiter of federal vaccine safety science, has listed 155 diseases potentially associated with vaccination and scolded the CDC for failing to study 134 of them. School nurses who have spent decades in their jobs say they are seeing the sickest generation in history. The epidemic has not proven a problem for the vaccine industry. On the back end of the chronic disease explosion, vaccine companies like Merck are making a killing on the EpiPens, antidepressants, stimulants, asthma inhalers and anti-seizure drugs.
Instead of demanding blue-ribbon safety science and encouraging honest, open and responsible debate on the science, liberal blogs shut down discussion on this key public health and civil rights issue, and silence critics, treating faith in vaccines as a religion; the heresy of questioning dogma meets with anathema and excommunication.
The core of liberalism is a healthy skepticism toward government and business. So why do vaccines get a mulligan?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a longtime environmental campaigner and author of American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family (HarperCollins) and Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy. Follow him on Twitter:
April 12, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States |
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OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) has determined that chemical weapons have been used or likely used in Syria. The first report of the OPCW was released April 8 and points a finger at the Syrian Arab Air Force concerning 3 attacks which occurred in Ltamenah, on March 24, 25, and 30, in 2017.
The report claims the investigation team conducts its activities in an impartial and objective manner. The only reason to believe the conclusion of such a report would be the belief that the team is honest, unbiased, and has no political agenda.
There is no proof presented and the 82-page report clearly states that they are not a legal body with the authority to assign criminal responsibility. The Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) Coordinator, Mr. Santiago Oñate-Laborde remarked that the investigative team has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe a chemical was used in the attacks. He further added, “In the end, the IIT was unable to identify any other plausible explanation.”
In the report, other plausible explanations were identified, but the report sticks with the personal opinion of one person who has some military experience, though is not identified. The report stated: “a military expert advising the IIT noted the use of chemical weapons in this area would not be inconsistent with a strategy aimed at inflicting terror on both civilians and combatants, at eliminating infrastructure such as the medical facilities required to continue fighting, and at ensuring that no one felt safe even behind the front lines proper. The IIT however also took into account that armed groups opposing the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic, on the other hand, might have had an incentive in “staging” a chemical attack against civilians and their own fighters, to blame the Syrian Arab Republic’s authorities.”
The report continued, that the alleged incidents in Ltamenah could potentially be explained through similar scenarios, including the ‘staging’ of an attack with sarin brought from elsewhere. Also notable in the report, is the fact that the team never visited the site, and only spoke with 20 witnesses.
The Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry released a statement on April 9. “The Syrian Arab Republic condemns, in the strongest terms, what has come in the report of the illegitimate so-called Investigation and Identification Team, and rejects what has been included in it, in form and content,” the statement said, and added that Syria, at the same time, categorically denies using toxic gases in Ltamenah town or in any city or village, and affirms that the Syrian army has never used such weapons in the most difficult battles carried out against armed terrorist organizations.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation released a statement on April 9. “The authors of the report, and consequently the leaders of the OPCW Technical Secretariat, have thus become accomplices in the consistent violation of the basic principles and procedures of objective and unbiased investigations stipulated in the CWC, which requires the mandatory dispatch of experts directly to the sites of alleged incidents. The information gathered by the IIT mostly came from anti-government armed groups and pseudo-humanitarian NGOs affiliated with them, including the notorious White Helmets.” The statement further adds, “We have also noted that the report contains references to certain secret services data – apparently from the same states obsessed with a change of power in Damascus. There is no other word for it but misinformation.”
In March 2011, the US-NATO attack on Syria began with the goal of ‘regime change’. The plan has cost billions, which was to remove the President Assad administration, which is part of the ‘axis-of-resistance’, and to replace it with a pro-US regime headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, such as was accomplished in Egypt. However, Syria proved to be stronger than the CIA backed terrorists, and finally, in 2017 President Trump cut off the funding, but the US-NATO plan has not died a natural death. It is being kept alive by artificial means: such as dubious reports of chemical use, which may illicit US-NATO military intervention, under the ruse of ‘humanitarian intervention’, such as was accomplished in Libya in 2011.
It was President Obama who handed the terrorists following Radical Islam with the scheme of using chemical use in Syria as the reason for a US military intervention. Obama delivered his famous “Red-Line” speech and the terrorists took the bait. In East Ghouta they staged a chemical attack and filmed a video which was shown around the globe. An un-verified video almost caused the US military to attack Syria in a massive planned intervention. Obama stopped short of ordering the attack when the UK military lab at Porton Down informed him the sarin used was not from Syrian military sources. There are still many Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress who are united in their blame of Obama’s inaction. They blame him for being weak, although his actions were based on facts, not opinions.
The OPCW sent a team of experts to investigate allegations that a chemical attack took place in Douma on April 7, 2018. However, the report was discredited after an email was leaked to the well-known journalist Peter Hitchens, who confirmed the email was sent by a member of the team to his superiors, in which he exposes the report was ‘tweaked’ to intentionally misrepresent the facts.
A shocking video purported to show victims being treated in the hospital after the attack went viral, with major western media still showing the video whenever Syrian chemical attacks are mentioned. However, the symptoms shown in the video are not consistent with what witnesses reported having seen and experienced that day. This glaring inconsistency was intentionally stricken from the OPCW report. Seemingly, once again, an unconfirmed video is believable. If a picture tells a thousand words, a video tells a million.
Ian Henderson, a veteran OPCW inspector and specialist chemical engineer with military experience, visited the Douma site. His investigation concluded there was a ‘higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed … rather than being delivered from aircraft’. Mr. Henderson stored a copy of his research findings in the ‘Documents Registry Archive (DRA) when it became apparent his work would be excluded from the final report. After a senior OPCW official became aware of Mr. Henderson’s actions, the official sent an email to his staff saying: ‘Please get this document out of DRA … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA’.
The OPCW has become a political tool for the US-NATO goal of ‘regime change’ in Syria. Instead of being an independent investigative body operating on a basis of integrity, it has delivered reports which could have been written before the investigation.
Steven Sahiounie is a Syrian-American award-winning journalist.
April 11, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | OPCW, Syria |
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The anti-China narrative is based on falsities, and serves to distract people from the failure of neoliberalism.
In early January, COVID-19 was largely limited to China. Now, just three months later, it has spread far beyond China’s border, and has effectively been halted domestically within the country.
There are currently around 1.36 million reported COVID-19 cases globally, with more than 76,000 deaths. China accounts for just 6 per cent of all cases, and 4.4 per cent of deaths. Yesterday, China reported no new deaths for the first time since January.
Countries in the West, meanwhile, have gone into lockdown, hospitals have been overwhelmed and markets are crashing. There appears to be no clear end in sight for us here.
Despite that, a group of ideologues already have their eyes on the post-pandemic world, and are concerned China may emerge as the new global superpower. As part of an effort to prevent this, these figures think other countries should hold China “accountable” for the pandemic, and are working to create popular demand among the public for this to happen.
In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, political scientist Michael Parenti wrote, “In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.”
We’re currently seeing that happen with China, from columnists, reporters and politicians alike.
When the Chinese government had yet to put millions of people into lockdown, it was because they cared about their image more than fighting a pandemic. When they did enforce a lockdown, it wasn’t about fighting a pandemic, but a totalitarian move for more power.
When China was reporting hundreds of deaths a day, it was proof their government was incompetent because of just how bad the numbers were. When death counts dwindled, it was proof they were lying about numbers.
When global health organizations say anything remotely critical about China’s handling of the pandemic, it’s proof the country should be punished. When they say anything positive, it’s proof they were bought off by China.
When China had yet to send aid to other countries, they were portrayed as cruel. When they did send aid, it was portrayed as a propaganda effort.
When Chinese citizens complain about the government, it’s a sign the entire state is on the verge of collapse. When Chinese citizens praise the government, it’s evidence they’re being forced or brainwashed.
COVID-19 does appear to have originated in China, and so it makes sense, to an extent, that the country will be part of most conversations about the pandemic. However, this isn’t the reason these ideologues have focused so intently on China. Instead, it’s because of the ideological function their attacks serve.
Those in power, or adjacent to power, in the West see their government failing to deal with COVID-19, but don’t want to shoulder any blame. So, instead of criticizing policies they adopted, or failed to adopt, they direct anger outward.
For example, on March 21 the Daily Beast reported they were given a leaked government cable that contained “guidelines for how [United States] officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.” Unsurprisingly, officials were told to blame China for the pandemic when giving statements or answering questions from the press.
Those who aren’t in power, such as rightwing journalists, realize their neoliberal ideology is unequipped to deal with the pandemic, and therefore is under attack. They won’t abandon their views, so they have to shift blame to an outside country with an ideology that is different in the right way. Attacking China clearly serves this purpose, and offers a chance for anti-communism, which, as Parenti notes, people have been primed to hate for more than a century.
For example, Postmedia’s executive editor Kevin Libin wrote in a March 23 National Post article, “We will likely persevere, but what the world can no longer afford is the threat to our collective health and well-being that is the Chinese communist regime.”
These attacks aren’t justified, and I will break down three of the more popular pieces of the anti-China narrative in the media to show the lies or half truths they’re built on. In order to ascertain what these pieces of the narrative are, I went through the pages of the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Sun and the Ottawa Citizen, and read through every opinion piece they published that focused on China and COVID-19, from January until early April.
China Imprisoned A Whistleblower
A main piece of the anti-China narrative is that the government arrested or imprisoned a COVID-19 whistleblower.
The story goes that a doctor found out about a new virus, tried to tell the world, was arrested and imprisoned, and then died from the virus. Commentators claim China did this because they wanted to cover up the existence of a deadly virus in the country, and that the result was COVID-19 spreading quicker and further than it otherwise would have.
Most of this narrative is false, or at least based on half-truths.
Doctor Li Wenliang was an ophthalmologist, not an epidemiologist. He initially misidentified the novel coronavirus as evidence of a SARS outbreak. He shared that claim, along with patients’ medical records, in a WeChat group on December 30 with a few colleagues, not to any hospitals or public health organizations. Li was not arrested or imprisoned. He was called in to a police station on January 3, after a screenshot from his WeChat group leaked and caused panic. At the station, he was reprimanded for falsely claiming there was a SARS outbreak, asked to sign a document pledging not to continue spreading the misinformation and then was free to leave. Unfortunately, it’s true that Li did die on February 7 from COVID-19, which he reportedly got from treating one of his patients who had been infected.
This narrative also serves to distract from another sequence of events.
On December 26, Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Hubei Provincial Hospital, noticed that four patients in her unit who sought treatment for suspected pneumonia — an elderly couple, their son and someone who had come in from a seafood market — all had similar and unusual CT images, which led her to believe they were suffering from something else. The next day, Zhang — who played a crucial role in combating the 2003 SARS outbreak — reported it to the head of her hospital. Within the next two days, the information was passed on to the provincial Centers for Disease Control, which then initiated full scale research into the hospital.
All of this took place before Li shared those screenshots in his WeChat group. Zhang wasn’t punished for her efforts — she was given an award by the regional government.
I used the ProQuest database to search through the entire print editions of the five publications I mentioned earlier in the article. Li was mentioned 44 times between them. Zhang wasn’t mentioned at all.
China Didn’t Act Fast Enough
Another core part of the narrative, mentioned in nearly every one of the opinion articles I looked at, was that China didn’t react to the outbreak quickly enough due to malicious intent.
Here are quotes from just a few of the many examples I examined: “Beijing’s authoritarian government hid information about its origins, spread and severity for weeks”; “It wasn’t until Jan. 20, 40 days after the virus was first detected, that Chinese President Xi Jinping first issued instructions to control the virus, but by then it was too late”; “We know they hid this for at least a month before they told the [World Health Organization]”; “It wrapped the communist cloak of silence around the then-unknown virus running wild in Wuhan and kept it a secret until word got out.”
What these articles fail to mention is the unique difficulties of dealing with a novel coronavirus, as going through the process of noticing something is happening, identifying what it is and confirming the extent of the danger it poses takes time. This effort should not be viewed as something China was doing for itself, but rather on behalf of the world. Any country the pandemic started in would have had to do the same thing, and there are several steps involved before widespread action can be taken.
Here is a timeline of China’s efforts, continuing from the one mentioned in the previous section.
On December 31, just a few days after Zhang noticed strange CT results, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a public notice about the disease. That same day, officials informed the WHO. On January 1, officials shut down the market where they believed the virus crossed over to humans, and a day later the WHO activated their incident management system. By January 7, China had isolated what was at this point believed to be a new coronavirus. All of this happened before the first confirmed COVID-19 death, which occurred on January 9.
On January 12, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for countries around the world to use in creating diagnostic kits. The next day, the first case of the novel coronavirus outside of China was reported, in Thailand.
As of January 14, the WHO was still noting that “there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” a crucial component of determining how dangerous a virus may be. The first confirmed case of human-to-human transmission came more than a week later. It wasn’t until January 30 that the WHO declared a global health emergency.
So, the idea that the disease was wreaking havoc within China and in neighbouring countries before the government did anything about it is false. This isn’t to say China’s response has been perfect, although it’s unclear what perfection would even look like.
Whether China reacted quickly enough to the outbreak is a matter of opinion, which I’m sure will be debated and investigated — including by the Chinese government — long after the pandemic is over and people are able to see everything in scale. For now, however, we can look at what the experts have said about China’s performance.
In a January 30 statement, the Emergency Committee convened by the WHO Director-General wrote, “The Committee welcomed the leadership and political commitment of the very highest levels of Chinese government, their commitment to transparency, and the efforts made to investigate and contain the current outbreak. China quickly identified the virus and shared its sequence, so that other countries could diagnose it quickly and protect themselves, which has resulted in the rapid development of diagnostic tools.”
In a series of tweets the same day, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, wrote, “In many ways, #China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”
A February report from the WHO noted, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.” The report added, “The remarkable speed with which Chinese scientists and public health experts isolated the causative virus, established diagnostic tools, and determined key transmission parameters, such as the route of spread and incubation period, provided the vital evidence base for China’s strategy, gaining invaluable time for the response.”
The examples go on, and beg the question: Why do columnists feel more qualified to assess China’s response than the WHO? Some would say the WHO is lying, but what’s more likely: a successful conspiracy to silence the global health organization or a columnist who wrote about cancel culture a week ago being wrong?
China Is Responsible For The Crisis Globally
Commentators accusing China of failing to act quick enough likely aren’t doing so out of a concern for Chinese citizens. Perhaps that was the case initially, but now that we see China, with a population of 1.3 billion, has thus far managed to keep their death count to around 3,300, these concerns seem motivated by something else.
The reason, sometimes stated explicitly and other times just implied, is that these commentators believe the carnage in other countries is because of China. Here are just a few examples of these sort of headlines or statements: “China’s lies allowed the coronavirus outbreak to spread”; “now the whole world is paying dearly for Beijing’s behaviour”; “The virus is no conspiracy, just a cataclysmic natural phenomenon tragically mismanaged by the puppeteers in Beijing.”
This is absolutely not the case, and, difficult as it may be to accept, the carnage COVID-19 has caused within our countries is almost entirely the fault of our governments. The clearest example of this is the stark difference in how South Korea and the U.S. have dealt with COVID-19.
Both countries reported their first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20. Since then, as of writing this article, South Korea has reported around 10,200 cases, and 192 deaths. The U.S., meanwhile, has reported more than 367,000 cases, and 10,900 deaths. Accounting for the population difference between the two countries, the U.S. has reported 5.6 times the cases, and 9.5 times the deaths.
President Donald Trump recently predicted a best-case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths within the country from COVID-19, although experts who put together the data the projection was based off of have said they’re unclear how the number was reached. South Korea, meanwhile, seems to have beat back the virus for now, with just six new deaths on April 7.
These stark differences are due entirely to the varying approaches the two countries have taken in combating COVID-19.
For example, as of mid-March, South Korea had tested more than 290,000 people for COVID-19, while the U.S. had done just 60,000 tests. Accounting for population differences, South Korea conducted 31 times more tests than the U.S. According to the Nation, “Many of the Korean tests were administered in drive-in centers around the country, where the procedure was available for free to any citizen who asked for one and results were available by text or e-mail within six to 12 hours.”
Moreover, South Koreans were encouraged to wear masks, and they were readily available. People were able to pick up two a week from their pharmacy, with the distribution of them based on the last number of one’s birth year. The U.S., meanwhile, has had a massive shortage of masks, even for frontline healthcare workers. In recent days, they’ve resorted to essentially hijacking shipments of masks intended for other countries, and asking manufacturers to stop sending them elsewhere, including Canada.
South Korea is not the only example of a nation that has performed far better than the U.S., or Italy, France, Spain and various other countries. Vietnam, for example, with a population of more than 95 million, has had zero reported COVID-19 deaths, and around 240 cases. Their success has had less to do with testing, due to a lack of resources, and instead has come from aggressive tracing measures, enforced quarantines and the conscription of medical students and retired doctors and nurses’ to fight the virus.
All of this is to say that China’s initial handling of COVID-19 didn’t doom other nations to the fates we’ve seen in the West. Instead, as journalist Ajit Singh argues in Monthly Review, China actually bought time for the rest of the world. As such, the countries in crisis are in that position due to their policies alone. Their governments should get the blame, not China.
April 10, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Covid-19 |
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MOSCOW – The Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday rejected allegations that the country is running a troll factory in the western African nation of Ghana to target US voters in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
On 12 March, CNN published a month-long journalism investigation accusing Russia-linked organizations of meddling in the US presidential election via troll factories in Ghana and Nigeria. The next day, five US Democratic Senators, in a letter on the European Union, called for tightening sanctions on Russia.
“Another ‘masterpiece’ has appeared, i.e. a CNN investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the US electoral process. As you see, we are all over just that at the moment. Now they say about some serious Russian structures allegedly using non-governmental organizations registered in a foreign country – this time it is the Republic of Ghana – to employ deep-cover trolls to sow discord among African-American voters in the United States,” stated Maria Zakharova, director of Russia’s Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
She added that it was not the first “pseudo-report” on the matter but one of the most catchy.
The spokeswoman described the reports as “provocative hoaxes” that have their purpose and are generously funded by those who order them.
April 10, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | CNN, United States |
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Russian diplomats called on their US counterparts to provide some actual evidence of allegations circulated by American media and officials that Moscow is waging a coronavirus-themed fake news campaign – but have received none.
The fail-proof ‘blame Russia’ approach persisting in the West in recent years remains baseless and without substance, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
“We are curiously watching the attempts by several American media, as well as by some high-ranking officials to blame Russia for conducting a certain pandemic-related disinformation campaign against the US,” Zakharova said during a press briefing.
Several US news outlets have run stories on an alleged fear-mongering campaign – waged by pro-Kremlin media and fearsome social media bots, no less. In addition, conspiracy theories that the coronavirus might have been artificially created by the Russians circulated on social media – and the effort appeared to be coordinated by US government agencies, Zakharova stated.
All the accusations remain unsupported by evidence, even after persistent attempts by Russian diplomats to try and get some actual proof of the alleged evil-doing.
“We’ve reached out to the State Department, requesting to provide us with some factual evidence of such statements,” Zakharova stated. “We have not received any coherent explanation of such allegations, not to mention any evidence.”
The whole course of the coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by allegations against Russia and – alternately – China and Iran of spreading lies and fear in the West. As if the deadly disease, which has already affected over 1.5 million people globally and killed more than 90,000, was not scary enough as it is.
One of the most high-profile anti-Russia pieces surfaced back in March, when a secret report by the European External Action Service (EEAS) – the bloc’s de facto foreign ministry – came to light. It blamed the Russian media for spreading “confusion and panic” in the West amid the epidemic.
Since the piece was produced by the EEAS’ propaganda branch – also known as the “strategic communications” division – it was composed almost entirely of ‘scary Russians’ tropes, but was notably lacking in facts. A detailed analysis of the report, conducted by British researchers – who are themselves no fans of the Russian media – showed that its claims did not have any basis.
April 9, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | United States |
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Russia has censured as “untrustworthy” a recent report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — tasked with probing a series of suspected “chemical attacks” on a Syrian town in 2017, saying the watchdog has violated the basic principle of its work by conducting a remote investigation without visiting the sites.
In its Wednesday’s 82-page report, the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) claimed Syrian government forces had been responsible for the alleged chemical attacks on the militant-held town of Lataminah in the northern Syrian province of Hama during the last week of March 2017.
It alleged that in the span of one week, Syrian fighter jets had twice dropped bombs containing sarin nerve agent on the village and a helicopter had targeted its hospital with a cylinder containing chlorine, affecting scores of people.
According to the report, the team had based its investigation on a range of evidence, including witness testimonies, videos, forensic reports on recovered munitions scraps, medical records and satellite imagery.
“The experts, who accused Syria of incidents that took place in 2017, have depended on judgments released by the Fact-Finding committee which included rough violations of the basic principle of the OPCW work that stipulates the need for a logic succession of events while collecting and keeping material evidence,” the press office of Russia’s permanent mission at the OPCW said on Wednesday..
It described the IIT’s report as unreliable, saying it depends on investigations that were conducted remotely without visiting the places of incidents based on statements of terrorist groups and the so-called civil defense group White Helmets
The Lataminah strikes came days before another alleged sarin assault in nearby town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib Province, which killed more than 80 people on April 4.
The Western countries rushed to blame the incident on Damascus — an allegation rejected by the Syrian government — with the US launching several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base, taking the lives of about 20 people including both Syrian soldiers and civilians.
The Syrian government surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the UN and the OPCW, which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry. However, Western governments and their allies have never stopped pointing the finger at Damascus whenever an apparent chemical attack has taken place.
April 9, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | OPCW |
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When Russian military planes and trucks arrived in Italy to provide relief for communities hit by the Covid-19 outbreak, the Italian government, elected into power by the Italian people, was thankful for the assistance offered by Moscow.
Named officials within the Italian government, including the foreign minister, the minister of defense and the governor of Apulia, Michele Emiliano, publically expressed thanks to Russia for the aid.
But finding any mention of this across the Western media is difficult, often buried deep within articles aimed entirely at smearing Russia for sending aid and depicting Italians as victims of a publicity stunt.
Reuters, in a smear piece published by the New York Times and aimed at vilifying Moscow, still had to admit regarding Russian aid that Italians were grateful, noting:
“There are no new geopolitical scenarios to trace, there is a country that needs help and other countries that are helping us,” Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio was quoted as saying by Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera newspaper on Thursday.
Despite Italy being capable of speaking for itself and bringing up any suspicions (if they had any), the West decided to step in and speak for Italy instead.
Sneering and Smearing
Western headlines are flooded with scorn for both Russia and the aid they sent, completely indifferent to how Italians themselves perceived the gesture.
Articles like Bloomberg’s “Italy Questions Russians Over Their Goodwill Virus Gestures,” admit several paragraphs in that officially, Italy was grateful for the aid, noting:
“Our country can only be grateful” for the solidarity of many countries, including Russia, the Italian defense and foreign ministries said in a joint statement Friday.
Yet claims that “Italy questions Russia” suggest the entire nation is suspicious of the aid. Upon reading Bloomberg’s article, the only source cited is a single article in the Italian newspaper La Stampa. It is hard to believe an article in La Stampa constitutes all of “Italy.”
According to the pro-Western Moscow Times in their article, “80% of Russia’s Coronavirus Aid to Italy ‘Useless’ – La Stampa,” also entirely based on the La Stampa article, its admits La Stampa’s information came from an “unnamed source.”
Other articles, like the BBC’s “Coronavirus: What does ‘from Russia with love’ really mean?,” Foreign Policy’s “Beware of Bad Samaritans,” and Forbes’ “From Russia With Love? Putin’s Medical Supplies Gift To Coronavirus-Hit Italy Raises Questions,” all used similarly disingenuous tactics to depict the Russian aid as somehow sinister and unwanted.
The Guardian in its article, “Coronavirus: Russia sends plane full of medical supplies to US,” explains:
Critics likely to claim Moscow will exploit goodwill gesture as public relations coup.
France 24 in headline alone makes Western criticism even clearer, claiming, “Flying aid to virus-hit Italy, Moscow flexes soft power.“
So by sending aid to Italy, Russia is somehow supposedly flexing its “soft power.”
So How is the West Using Its Soft Power?
The West faced a collective decision. They could have used their own, very substantial soft power to one-up Russia by sending even more aid to Italy and other regions of the globe impacted by the spread of Covid-19.
Instead, they mobilized the entirety of their soft power to sneer and smear Russia’s efforts with Western-funded media fronts writing entire articles doing just that.
The West’s attempts to depict the Russian media reporting on the aid as also somehow sinister rather than simply telling the world what Russia is doing is also particularly surreal.
The Western media itself spends the summation of its own time and energy promoting what their respective governments are doing abroad which usually involves illegal invasions, wars, occupations and interventions… not sending aid.
A Missed Opportunity
Because certain special interests in the West fear some Western governments growing closer to nations like Russia and China in the spirit of cooperation and mutual benefits and derailing the Washington-led “international order” that has prevailed post World War 2, resources have been committed to attacking any development that could spur this process further.
But because these resources have been invested into attacking, even when attacking is not the best option, that is all the West appears capable of doing.
The answer to Russian aid to Italy was Western aid to Italy. The benefit would have been a flood of resources sent to where it was needed and everyone involved enjoying the benefits of lending a helping hand to those who would be grateful in return.
Instead, the West appears to be throwing rocks at a time when others are coming together to help, and throwing those rocks at those who are helping.
Rather than teaching the Italians never to deal with Russia again, it is likely this process is going to remind Italians as to why they’ve diversified their foreign relations outside the West in the first place.
April 9, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Italy, New York Times |
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The OPCW’s newly-formed body in charge of identifying the perpetrators of chemical attacks said in its first report on Wednesday that the Syrian Arab Air Force’s aircraft had dropped bombs containing sarin and chlorine on the town of Ltamenah in Hama province in March 2017.
The Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) was established in 2018. Russia opposed the move, warning against expanding the OPCW’s competence from conducting probes to attributing blame and saying that only the UN Security Council is eligible to make such judgments.
“[T]he IIT has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the perpetrators of the use of sarin as a chemical weapon in Ltamenah on 24 and 30 March 2017, and the use of chlorine as a chemical weapon on 25 March 2017 were individuals belonging to the Syrian Arab Air Force”, IIT Coordinator Santiago Onate-Laborde said in a statement.
According to him, “attacks of such a strategic nature would have only taken place on the basis of orders from the higher authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic military command”.
“In the end, the IIT was unable to identify any other plausible explanation”, he added.
Commenting on the report, OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias said that the IIT is “not a judicial or quasi-judicial body with the authority to assign individual criminal responsibility, nor does the IIT have the authority to make final findings on non-compliance with the Convention.”
“It is now up to the Executive Council and the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, the United Nations Secretary-General, and the international community as a whole to take any further action they deem appropriate and necessary”, he stated.
The IIT explains its mission as identifying and reporting “on all information potentially relevant to the origin of those chemical weapons in those instances in which the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) determines or has determined that use or likely use occurred”.
The FFM concluded back in June 2018 that sarin and chlorine were “very likely used as a chemical weapon” in Ltamenah on 24 March 2017, and 25 March 2017, respectively.
Damascus has repeatedly refuted the allegations of the chemical weapons use, saying that the full destruction of its arsenal was confirmed by the OPCW in 2016.
April 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering | OPCW |
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