Leading artificial intelligence models chose to deploy nuclear weapons in 95% of simulated geopolitical crises, according to a recent study published by King’s College London, raising concerns about the growing role of AI in military decision-making.
Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy, pitted OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, and Google’s Gemini 3 Flash against each other in 21 war games involving border disputes, competition for resources, and threats to regime survival. The models generated roughly 780,000 words explaining their decisions across 329 turns.
In 95% of games, at least one model employed tactical nuclear weapons against military targets. Strategic nuclear threats – demanding surrender under threat of attacks on cities – occurred in 76% of games. In 14% of games, models escalated to all-out strategic nuclear war, attacking population centers.
This included one deliberate choice by Gemini, while GPT-5.2 reached this level twice through simulated errors – meant to simulate real-world accidents or miscalculations – that pushed its already extreme escalations over the threshold.
“Nuclear use was near-universal,” Payne wrote. “Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”
None of the AI systems chose to surrender or concede to an opponent, regardless of how badly they were losing. The eight de-escalatory options – from “Minimal Concession” to “Complete Surrender” – went entirely unused across all 21 games.
James Johnson at the University of Aberdeen described the findings as “unsettling” from a nuclear-risk perspective. Tong Zhao at Princeton University noted that while countries are unlikely to hand nuclear decisions to machines, “under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines, military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI.”
The study comes as AI has been getting integrated into militaries across the world, including in the US, where the Pentagon reportedly used Anthropic’s Claude model in its January operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
While Anthropic has raised concerns over the use of its AI for such operations, other AI makers like OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI have reportedly agreed to remove or weaken restrictions on the military use of their models.
A woman had been confined to a wheelchair for six years with severe arthritis. Her joints were swollen, deformed. She could not walk. Her doctors had no answers.
Her dentist, Weston Price, suspected her root-canalled tooth. The X-rays showed nothing wrong with it. No visible infection. No symptoms in the tooth itself. He extracted it anyway.
Then he did something no one had tried before. He washed the tooth and surgically implanted it under the skin of a rabbit. Within two days, the rabbit developed the same crippling arthritis. In ten days, the rabbit was dead.¹
The woman recovered. She walked without a cane. She returned to fine needlework.²
Price repeated this experiment hundreds of times. He implanted root-canalled teeth from patients with heart disease into rabbits — the rabbits developed heart disease. Kidney patients — kidney disease in the rabbits. Eye infections, stomach ulcers, rheumatism, lung problems, bladder infections, ovarian diseases — the rabbits developed whatever the patient had.¹ ³
To rule out the possibility that any foreign object implanted under the skin would cause illness, Price also implanted healthy teeth extracted for orthodontic reasons, impacted wisdom teeth, and sterilized coins. Nothing happened. The rabbits remained perfectly healthy.¹ He ran these controls a hundred times.⁴
This research was not conducted in a garage. Price led a 60-person research team operating under the auspices of the American Dental Association’s Research Institute. His advisory board included Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Frank Billings (who coined the term “focal infection”), and Milton Rosenau, the Harvard professor of preventive medicine.⁵ The research produced 1,174 pages of data, published in two volumes in 1923, with photographs, charts, and the results of experiments on over 5,000 animals.⁵
Those 1,174 pages were then buried for seventy years.
How the Research Disappeared
The burial was not accidental. It was driven by two forces — a flawed counter-experiment and a professional overcorrection — and the result suited an industry that had no interest in the answer Price had found.
In the years following Price’s publications, a dentist named Percy Howe injected streptococcus bacteria taken from a normal, infection-free mouth into rabbits. None became sick. This study was seized upon by opponents of the focal infection theory to discredit Price’s work.⁸ The logic was circular: Howe used ordinary oral bacteria, not the mutated anaerobic organisms that Price had specifically demonstrated were trapped inside root-canalled teeth. Price had shown that bacteria sealed inside the oxygen-deprived environment of a dead tooth undergo polymorphic changes — becoming smaller, losing their need for oxygen, and producing toxins of far greater virulence than their original aerobic forms.⁶ ⁷ Howe tested something Price never claimed, then used the negative result to dismiss what Price had documented across thousands of experiments.
The second factor was collateral damage from Price’s own findings. Some dentists, reading the research too hastily, began extracting teeth indiscriminately, promising cures for every ailment. When wholesale tooth removal failed to produce miracles in every case, the entire focal infection theory was further discredited.⁸ The profession overcorrected. Rather than refine the understanding of which teeth were problematic, under what conditions, and why some patients recovered after extraction while others did not, dentistry rejected the premise altogether. Price himself had been careful to note that not all root canals produced illness — roughly 25–30% of patients appeared to tolerate them — and that outcomes depended heavily on the patient’s immune capacity.¹⁸ These nuances were discarded along with the research.
S. Hale Shakman’s doctoral dissertation, Medicine’s Grandest Fraud, documented the suppression in detail. The dismissal of Price’s work — and the parallel work of Edward Rosenow on elective localization of bacteria — was built on flawed calculations and professional politics, not sound science.³ Yet for decades, modern dentistry relied on this dismissal to assure dentists, dental students, and the public that root canals were safe.
By the mid-twentieth century, root canal therapy was established practice, the American Association of Endodontists was growing rapidly, and Price’s two volumes sat unread in the archives of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.
The Man Who Read the Books
George Meinig was one of 19 dentists who founded the American Association of Endodontists. He practiced root canal therapy at a time when few dentists performed the procedure and few dental schools taught it. He and his colleagues taught practicing dentists how to save infected teeth rather than extract them. Their pitch was effective: “How could you, as dentists, ever learn how to save teeth by taking them out?”⁹
Meinig went on to manage the Twentieth Century Fox Studio dental office. He received fellowships from the American College of Dentists and the International College of Applied Nutrition. He spent 17 years writing a weekly nutrition column for the Ojai Valley News. In May 1993, at the AAE’s 50th anniversary meeting, Meinig was honoured as one of only four surviving founding members of the organization.⁹ ¹⁰
That same year, he published a book telling people not to get root canals.
The path from founder to dissident began when Dr. Hal Huggins obtained Price’s two original research volumes and alerted the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation to their significance. The Foundation, recognizing the need for someone with both the technical background and the ability to translate research for a general audience, asked Meinig to review the material.¹⁰
Meinig read the table of contents and could not believe the magnitude of what Price had undertaken. He was, in his own words, “terribly disturbed and shaken” that he had never heard anything about these findings. He started reading immediately and could not put the books down. As he continued, he became “flabbergasted that our profession and the public had been cut off from learning about the basic and serious problems involved in this subject.”¹⁰
He was reading the evidence that the specialty he helped build was leaving dead, infected organs inside people’s bodies.
The weight of this was not lost on him. Meinig knew that publishing these findings would put him at odds with the profession he had served for 47 years. His dental colleagues — particularly those who knew him and were familiar with his background — would, as he predicted, think he had lost his mind. He asked himself whether his ability to translate technical material into readable language was enough, and whether making this information public would bring only unrest.¹⁰
But he kept returning to the numbers. Millions of people were ill with degenerative diseases for which the medical profession had no answers. The root canal research shed direct light on a potential cause. To Meinig, further delay was intolerable. If the profession would not investigate, the public needed the information to make their own decisions.¹⁰
He also knew that he was not easily dismissed. His credentials — founding member of the AAE, Fellow of the American College of Dentists, 47 years of practice, the Fox Studios appointment — made him precisely the kind of insider whose testimony carried weight. As he put it: who else but someone with this kind of background could appraise this serious research?⁵
What Happens Inside a Dead Tooth
A living tooth is not a static mineral peg. It is a complex organ with its own blood supply, nerve pathways, and immune function. The dentin — the hard tissue that makes up the bulk of each tooth — is not solid. It is laced with millions of microscopic tubules that radiate from the pulp chamber outward. If the dentinal tubules from a single tooth were placed end to end, they would extend approximately three miles.¹¹ ¹² ¹³
In a healthy tooth, nutrient-rich fluid flows outward through these tubules, from the pulp toward the surface. This pressurized flow is part of the tooth’s self-cleaning mechanism — an invisible toothbrush that keeps the internal structure clear of debris and bacterial invasion.¹⁴ The odontoblast cells lining the pulp chamber act as pumps, pushing microscopic droplets of this fluid through the tubule network.¹⁵
A root canal procedure kills this system. The dentist drills into the tooth, removes the pulp — the nerve, blood vessels, and connective tissue — and attempts to sterilize the hollow chamber. The canal is then packed with gutta-percha, a rubbery filling material, and sealed.¹²
The three miles of dentinal tubules remain untouched. No instrument can reach them. No disinfectant can penetrate their full length.¹¹ ¹³ Price tried soaking extracted infected teeth in powerful disinfectants, thoroughly killing all surface bacteria, then implanted them in animals. Infections still occurred.¹⁶ The bacteria inside the tubules survived every sterilization protocol available.
With the blood supply removed, the pressurized outward fluid flow that kept bacteria out of the tubules ceases. The environment inside the sealed tooth shifts from aerobic to anaerobic. Bacteria trapped in the tubules do not die. They mutate — becoming smaller, able to thrive without oxygen, and producing toxins of far greater potency than their original forms.⁶ ⁷ Price found that when he filtered out the bacteria from extracts of root-canalled teeth, leaving only the toxins, the remaining liquid was more lethal to rabbits than when the bacteria were present.¹⁷
The tooth is now a sealed container of necrotic tissue producing a continuous supply of toxic metabolic waste. The body attempts to wall off the threat. Sometimes this appears on an X-ray as a radiolucent area around the root tip.⁸ But the toxins produced inside the tooth migrate outward — through the dentinal tubules, through the cementum (the root’s outer covering), through lateral accessory canals, and into the surrounding jawbone and bloodstream.⁶ ¹²
Price demonstrated this directly. He cemented small steel tubes into root canals of extracted teeth and pumped dyed water through them under pressure. The coloured water traveled through the dentin tubules and seeped through the entire cementum — the root’s supposedly impervious outer layer.⁶
The filling material itself compounds the problem. Gutta-percha shrinks as it cools and sets. Price tested this with a packing device he invented that exerted several hundred pounds of pressure — far more than could be achieved in a patient’s mouth. After the material cooled, he submerged the exposed end in blue ink dye. In every single test, the gutta-percha leaked. The ink flowed into the gaps between the filling material and the canal walls.¹⁸ Modern research confirms the problem: one study found bacteria leaked out of 80% of teeth filled with gutta-percha regardless of which sealer was used, and another detected bacteria in 84% of gutta-percha-filled teeth after just 72 hours.¹⁹
There is no sealing material that solves this. The pastes used alongside gutta-percha contain their own toxic components: formaldehyde, ammonia, bismuth oxide, and compounds whose own safety data sheets warn against allowing them to reach sewage or ground water.²⁶ These materials are placed directly into the interior of a tooth that sits in the jawbone, millimetres from the bloodstream. And the filling materials themselves, whether gutta-percha, Resilon, or the calcium oxide-based Biocalex, all produce teeth that test highly toxic on enzyme inhibition assays upon extraction. The surrounding bone consistently shows chronic osteomyelitis — inflamed, infected bone.¹⁹
Dentistry is one of the only healing professions that routinely leaves a dead organ inside the body and assumes the body will tolerate it indefinitely.²⁰ Every surgeon knows what happens when dead biological tissue is left inside a surgical wound. It becomes infected. It spreads bacteria to other locations. The dental profession operates under an exemption from this principle that no other branch of medicine would accept.
The Thirty Rabbits
One of Price’s most striking experiments involved a single tooth from a patient who had died of a heart attack. Price extracted the tooth, crushed it into powder, and injected a minuscule amount — one millionth of a gram — into a rabbit. The rabbit developed heart disease and died.²¹
Price then retrieved the tooth from the first rabbit, cleaned and washed it, and implanted it in a second rabbit. That rabbit died too. He continued this process through 30 rabbits in succession. The expectation was that the toxic content of the tooth would gradually deplete with each implantation. Instead, all 30 rabbits died within approximately six days, except for one exceptionally large and aggressive male that survived to day ten.⁴
Even more remarkable: Price took infected teeth that had killed multiple rabbits, placed them in boiling water for one hour, then implanted them in new rabbits. The rabbits still became ill and died — in 22 days rather than six, but they died. He escalated to hospital autoclave temperatures at 30 pounds and 60 pounds of pressure for one hour, and even 300 pounds of pressure for two hours. The autoclaved teeth, when implanted, still caused weight loss, blood changes, and death in the rabbits — in 35 days.⁴
Whatever was inside those teeth was not ordinary infection. It was something that survived conditions that destroy all known pathogens. Under a terrain framework, this makes sense: the issue is not primarily the bacteria but the accumulated toxic metabolic waste products and breakdown compounds produced by anaerobic putrefaction within the sealed tubule network. These chemical toxins are not alive, and boiling or autoclaving does not neutralize them.
The 30-Billion-Dollar Industry
Each year in the United States alone, more than 30 million root canals are performed. That represents a 30-billion-dollar industry.¹⁷ The American Association of Endodontists — the organization Meinig helped found — now has thousands of members. The AAE’s official position is that there is no valid scientific evidence linking root canal-treated teeth to systemic disease.²² The AAE has no scientific article that effectively refutes the work of Weston Price and Edward Rosenow, though it claims otherwise.³
Cross-sectional studies from multiple countries paint a different picture. Periapical infection — infection at the root tip, indicating failure — was found in 50.8% of root canal-treated teeth in Scotland, 61% in Germany, nearly 68% in Turkey, 52% in Denmark, 64.5% in Spain, and 39–51% in Canada and the United States.²² These numbers are based on standard 2D X-rays, which means the actual infection rates are higher, since 2D imaging misses pathology that 3D imaging reveals. In the German study, only 14% of examined root canal-treated teeth met currently accepted standards for adequate filling.²²
The most recent long-term studies of root canal success rates over five- and ten-year periods report overall success rates of 30–40%.¹⁷ During Price’s era, the rate of root canals showing no observable side effects was 25%.¹⁷ The procedure works best for teeth that are minimally infected — the very teeth that would have been easiest to heal through nutritional intervention and that arguably did not need root canals in the first place. The badly decayed teeth that most need saving are the ones where the procedure most reliably fails.¹⁷
Root canals present a structural catch-22 that no amount of improved technique resolves. The problem is not inadequate disinfection protocols or inferior filling materials. The problem is the anatomy of the tooth itself: three miles of microscopic tubules that no instrument will ever reach, no chemical will ever sterilize, and no filling material will ever seal.
Modern Tools, Same Findings
Thomas Levy, a board-certified cardiologist, came to the root canal question through an unlikely path. While practicing cardiology in Colorado Springs, he met Dr. Hal Huggins — the same dentist who had first brought Price’s research back to light. At Huggins’ clinic, Levy saw patients with degenerative diseases improving and abnormal laboratory tests normalizing after programs of dental revision, to a degree he had not believed possible regardless of the treatment given.²³
Levy’s own research led him to conclude that focal infections from root canal-treated teeth reliably promote increased oxidative stress through the continuous release of pathogens and toxins into the body. The pathogens encounter the high-pressure arterial system first in the coronary arteries. Once seeded there, they consume local vitamin C, initiating focal scurvy and a chronic inflammatory response that never resolves until the infectious source is removed.²³
Levy himself became a case study. Despite good baseline health, his C-reactive protein levels — a strong indicator of chronic inflammation and a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease — remained stubbornly elevated for years. He could not determine the source. He even took 100 grams of intravenous vitamin C daily for a week, which barely moved the number. Then he experienced the sudden onset of chest tightness and shortness of breath while running after a dog. He was a cardiologist. He had seen this presentation countless times in his own patients. He had a root canal-treated tooth extracted and the infected bone around it cleaned. His health improved rapidly. A subsequent cardiac CT scan showed a 40–50% narrowing in his most important coronary artery — an area he suspected had been critically narrowed before the extraction.²³
One case from Levy’s clinical experience is particularly instructive. A friend with aggressive coronary artery disease had undergone seven angioplasties and stent placements in four years. Despite an extraordinary supplement regimen — including nine grams daily of liposome-encapsulated vitamin C — his disease continued to progress. Levy’s dentist found one root canal-treated tooth. He extracted it and cleaned the infected bone in the socket. The man never had another episode of chest pain. A cardiac CT scan years later showed that much of the arterial narrowing documented on earlier angiograms had resolved.²³
Levy’s work also brings a critical piece of modern evidence: 3D cone beam computed tomography. Standard two-dimensional dental X-rays — the kind used in every dental office — routinely fail to detect infection around root-canalled teeth. The periapical lesions hide in front of or behind the root, or sit a few millimetres from the radiographic apex, invisible on a flat image. When researchers compared the two technologies on the same set of 46 root canal-treated teeth, 2D X-rays detected infection in 70% of them. The 3D scans found infection in 91%.²²
That gap — the 21% of teeth that look clean on standard X-rays but show active pathology on 3D imaging — represents millions of people who have been told their root canals are fine.
Australian dentist Robert Gammal, who spent decades removing root canals and documenting the results, described a pattern that echoes Price’s findings from a century earlier: patients returning a week after extraction to report that symptoms they had suffered for years had disappeared within days. Breast lumps resolving — so frequently that Gammal lost count.²⁴ Multiple sclerosis symptoms vanishing after the removal of a single dead tooth. A 32-year-old man diagnosed with MS had one root-canalled tooth extracted and recovered completely.²⁴ A woman with two large brain lesions visible on MRI had a dead tooth and a bridge removed; three months later, a follow-up MRI was clear. Her neurologist declared her free of MS and did not want to know what she had done.²⁴
German cancer specialist Professor Max Daunderer reported that when MS patients had amalgam fillings removed but refused extraction of root-canalled teeth and treatment of infected jawbone, the cure rate was 16%. When patients accepted full treatment — amalgam removal, root canal extraction, and cleaning of the alveolar bone — the cure rate rose to 86%.²⁴
One published case study describes a 16-year remission of rheumatoid arthritis following extraction of root canal-treated teeth that appeared clinically healthy. The only clue was that the patient could reproducibly trigger severe arthritis attacks by applying heavy pressure to those specific teeth. After extraction, a layer of pus was found covering the root tips of teeth that looked perfectly normal. The rheumatoid factor became negative. The patient remained symptom-free for 16 years.²⁴
A Man Who Couldn’t Unknow
George Meinig published Root Canal Cover-Up in June 1993. The response, he reported, was immediate. His phone rang constantly with people recounting how illnesses had started shortly after root canal procedures, and how those illnesses resolved when the teeth were extracted.²⁵
The dental profession’s reaction was predictable. Meinig had anticipated it. He knew that most dentists and endodontists would reject his message — the same way the profession had rejected Price’s findings seventy years earlier. He noted that many important advances in medicine have come about only after public pressure was applied, and he was not optimistic that the profession would voluntarily re-examine its most profitable procedure.¹⁰
Meinig was no outsider throwing stones. He had taught root canal therapy to practicing dentists. He had helped build the professional organization that credentialed root canal specialists. He had been honoured by that organization for his contributions. His credentials were not just adequate — they were the very credentials the profession most respected.
He spent his remaining years trying to undo what he had helped build — lecturing, writing, appearing on radio and television, and urging the public to examine Price’s research and make their own decisions.¹⁰ He did this knowing that the procedure he was warning against was being performed 24 million times a year in the United States at the time he wrote, a number that has since grown to over 30 million.⁹ ¹⁷
The research is publicly available. It was never refuted — it was abandoned. When one of the founding members of the endodontic specialty finally read it, he reached the same conclusion that Weston Price had reached seventy years earlier.
The 1,174 pages are still there. They say what they say.
Price, W.A. Dental Infections Oral and Systemic, Volume I. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1923. As cited in Meinig, Chapter 1, and Fife, B. Oil Pulling Therapy.
Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth: How a Root Canal Could Be Making You Sick. MedFox Publishing, 2014. Chapter on Price’s research.
The label on a popular dry cat food lists its ingredients in this order: poultry by-product meal, ground yellow corn, wheat, corn gluten meal, soybean meal, brewers rice. Most people reading that label assume the poultry by-product meal is the primary ingredient — a protein source feeding their obligate carnivore. They’re wrong. Corn is the primary ingredient. The company split it into two categories — ground yellow corn and corn gluten meal — so that each individual corn listing falls below the poultry by-product meal on the label. Combined, the corn outweighs everything else in the bag.¹
This is not a labelling error. It is standard industry practice, known as “splitting,” and it is legal under the guidelines of the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO). It is also the first clue that the commercial pet food industry operates in a space between what owners believe they are buying and what they are actually feeding their animals. The gap between those two things is wide enough to make animals sick — and the evidence suggests it has been doing exactly that for decades.
What the Label Conceals
Pet food labels are required to list ingredients. They are not required to tell you what those ingredients actually are.
The term “meat by-products,” for instance, sounds like it involves meat. Under AAFCO guidelines, acceptable meat by-products include lungs, spleens, kidneys, brains, livers, blood, bones, low-temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. Livers infested with parasites qualify. Lungs filled with pneumonia qualify. If an animal is diseased and declared unfit for human consumption, the carcass is acceptable for pet food. Parts of animals where they have been injected with antibiotics, hormones, or other drugs — so-called “stick marks” — are cut from carcasses intended for human consumption and redirected to pet food.²
The term “meat meal” conceals even more. Meat meal is the dried product of a rendering plant, and rendering plants are the final destination for material that no other industry will touch. As investigative journalist Ann Martin documented over a seven-year investigation, rendering plants accept dead zoo animals, road kill too large for roadside burial, grocery store waste including the Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap, restaurant garbage, and condemned material from slaughterhouses. They also accept “4-D” animals — dead, diseased, dying, and disabled livestock — from factory farms. Before the slaughterhouse ships these condemned parts to the renderer, workers spray them with crude carbolic acid or cresylic disinfectant, both classified as poisons by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In Canada, the denaturing agent is called Birkolene B. When Martin asked the Ministry of Agriculture for its composition, she was told it was a “trade secret.”³
At the rendering plant, all of this material — including, in many cases, the flea collars, ID tags, and plastic bags — is ground together in massive vats, cooked at temperatures between 220°F and 270°F for twenty minutes to one hour, and centrifuged to separate the fat from the solids. The fat becomes the source of “animal fat” in pet food. The remaining solids are dried and ground into “meat meal.”⁴
The AAFCO ingredient definitions that govern these terms apply identically to pet food and livestock feed. When Martin contacted the chair of AAFCO to confirm this, the reply was unambiguous: “The feed ingredient definitions approved by AAFCO apply to all animal feeds, including pet foods, unless specific animal species restrictions are noted.”⁵ No species restrictions distinguish what goes into food for a family dog from what goes into feed for industrial poultry.
This is what the label means when it says “meat meal.”
The Fat Sprayed on Kibble
Open a new bag of dry pet food and you’ll notice a distinctive, pungent odour. That smell comes from rendered animal fat or, increasingly, discarded restaurant grease.
Restaurant grease has become a major component of feed-grade animal fat over the last fifteen years. The grease is typically stored in fifty-gallon drums kept outside for weeks, exposed to temperature extremes with no protocols for future use. Rendering companies collect this grease, blend different types together, stabilise the mixture with powerful chemical antioxidants to slow further spoilage, and sell the blended product to pet food manufacturers.⁶
The fat is sprayed directly onto dried kibbles or extruded pellets after manufacturing. Its primary purpose is not nutritional. The spray transforms an otherwise bland or distasteful product into something animals will eat. As a 1996 Animal Protection Institute report put it, pet food manufacturers are “masters at getting a dog or cat to eat something she would normally turn up her nose at.”⁷ Taste appeal, not nutritional quality, is paramount.
The pet food manufacturing process extends this principle across every stage. The raw material — already nutritionally questionable — is extruded through machines that subject it to steam, pressure, and high heat, puffing it into shapes like popcorn. Then it is sprayed with fat and chemical flavour enhancers. Whatever nutritional value the raw ingredients had is further degraded at each step.
As veterinarian Randy Wysong, a long-time critic of industry practices, observed: “Processing is the wild card in nutritional value that is, by and large, simply ignored. Heating, cooking, rendering, freezing, dehydrating, canning, extruding, pelleting, baking, and so forth, are so commonplace that they are simply thought of as synonymous with food itself.” To compensate for this destruction, manufacturers must “fortify” the finished product with synthetic vitamins and minerals — because the ingredients they started with are not wholesome, the quality is extremely variable, and the manufacturing practices have destroyed whatever nutrients the food contained.⁸
Chemical dyes then create the appearance of quality. Sodium nitrite prevents colour fading. Red Dye #40 gives kibble a meaty look. Both agents have been linked to cancer or birth defects in laboratory animals and are banned in some countries. The cosmetic effect is for the buyer, not the animal. Animals don’t care what colour their food is.⁹
Grains for Carnivores
Two of the top three ingredients in most dry pet foods are some form of grain product. Corn is the most common, but wheat, soy, and rice also feature heavily. The grains used in pet food are typically the cheap dregs of the human food chain — material that did not pass inspection for human use because of excessive levels of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, or mycotoxins. Little, if any, testing is undertaken to determine the levels of these toxic substances once they reach the pet food plant.¹⁰
The grain problem is especially severe for cats. Cats are obligate carnivores. Their physiology is designed for a high-protein, moisture-rich diet derived from prey. A diet built around corn makes no biological sense for a cat, but from the manufacturer’s perspective, corn provides a far cheaper protein source than meat. In one dry cat food Martin examined, corn appeared in four different forms — a staggering carbohydrate load for an animal that requires at least half its diet as protein. Grains cannot supply cats with sufficient arachidonic acid, vitamin A, or vitamin B-12. They also lack the natural form of taurine, an amino acid critical to feline survival, which is why manufacturers add synthetic taurine as a supplement.¹¹
The “high protein” labels splashed across packaging are another layer of deception. As veterinarian Alfred Plechner documented, manufacturers use excessive amounts of cheap, inferior-quality protein to reach a minimum percentage that animals can actually utilise. In California, the state’s FDA requires 18 percent protein in dog kibble, knowing that animals may absorb only 5 to 9 percent of it. For cats, which require twice the protein of dogs, the gap between labelled protein and usable protein is even wider. The rest — the indigestible fraction — becomes a burden on the kidneys and digestive tract.¹²
The Euthanised Animals in the Vat
The most disturbing ingredient in commercial pet food is one that never appears on any label.
In Los Angeles alone, more than 200 tons of dogs and cats were rendered each year as of the early 2000s. The National Animal Control Association reported that of approximately 13 million household pets euthanised annually in the United States, 30 percent were buried, 30 percent were cremated, and the remaining 40 percent — roughly 5.2 million animals — were sent to rendering facilities.¹³
The path is straightforward. When a pet is euthanised and the owner does not take the body home for burial or pay for cremation, the carcass is collected by a dead stock removal company and delivered to a rendering plant. There it joins the rest of the raw material — the condemned livestock, the road kill, the grocery store waste — in the same vat. The remains, including collars, tags, and flea collars, are ground and cooked together. The end product is meat meal.¹⁴
Pet food manufacturers deny this. The Pet Food Institute (PFI), which represents more than 90 percent of pet food produced in the United States, insists that none of its members use rendered companion animals. Martin pressed the PFI repeatedly on this point, asking a direct question: do any of the pet food companies actually test the raw material they purchase from rendering plants to determine if it contains rendered companion animals?
In 2004, the PFI admitted that pet food companies do not test the raw material for the sources of animals rendered. When Martin asked the same question again before the third edition of her book, the PFI chose not to respond.¹⁵
The industry’s “proof” that pets aren’t in the food rests on a single study. The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) tested dry dog food samples in 1998 and 2000 for dog and cat DNA. The results, which the FDA did not release until 2002 — and which Martin obtained only after filing Freedom of Information Act requests at least twice — showed no detectable dog or cat DNA. But the test was conducted on finished kibble, not raw material before rendering. The sample size was less than an eighth of a cup from a five-pound bag. And as multiple scientists confirmed to Martin, the rendering process itself — cooking at temperatures above 220°F — destroys DNA. Testing rendered product for DNA is, by design, incapable of finding what was there before the heat destroyed the evidence.¹⁶
The same FDA study did find something else: sodium pentobarbital, the drug used to euthanise companion animals.
The Euthanasia Drug in the Food
Sodium pentobarbital is a barbiturate administered intravenously to euthanise dogs and cats. Federal law restricts its use to administration under the direction of a veterinarian. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s own report states that in animals intended for human or animal food, “chemical agents that result in tissue residue cannot be used.”¹⁷
A 1995 study by three veterinarians at the University of Minnesota established that sodium pentobarbital “survived rendering without undergoing degradation.” Even boiling the liver of a calf euthanised with pentobarbital for twenty minutes did not reduce the drug levels.¹⁸
The FDA/CVM’s survey found pentobarbital in numerous brands of dry dog food. The first survey, in 1998, detected the drug in 30 of the sampled products — including brands sold by Heinz, Ol’ Roy (Walmart’s brand), and ProPlan. The second survey, in 2000, measured actual concentrations, finding levels ranging from 3.9 to 32.0 parts per billion across 10 positive samples.¹⁹
When asked to explain the source, the FDA initially claimed it was likely from rendered cattle or horses. But the FDA’s own published study subsequently revealed that none of the 31 dog food samples tested positive for equine-derived proteins, and acknowledged that cattle are “only occasionally euthanized with pentobarbital, and thus are not considered a likely source.” The study concluded that it “does not define the source (i.e. species) responsible for the contamination.”²⁰
The logic is not complicated. The drug is found in the food. The drug survives rendering. The drug is primarily used to euthanise dogs and cats. The FDA could not identify an alternative source. Yet no enforcement action was taken.
When Martin contacted the FDA/CVM and asked what steps were being taken to remove pentobarbital from pet food, she was told: “CVM is not planning to undertake any special enforcement efforts to detect pentobarbital in pet food.”²¹
No long-term studies have been conducted on the effects of daily pentobarbital ingestion by companion animals over years or decades. What is documented is that veterinarians began reporting dogs developing tolerance to pentobarbital — the drug becoming less effective when used for euthanasia — which is precisely what prompted the FDA study in the first place.²²
The Regulatory Illusion
Every pet owner Ann Martin spoke with during her years of investigation was convinced that a government agency closely regulated pet food manufacturers. A pet supply store owner became incensed when Martin told him the industry was essentially self-regulated. He was certain that inspectors examined every ingredient. Martin had believed the same thing once.²³
The reality is layered in the appearance of oversight without the substance of it. AAFCO, the organisation whose logo appears on pet food labels, is a non-government commercial enterprise. It has no regulatory authority, no inspectors, and no laboratories. It publishes model guidelines and encourages states to adopt them voluntarily. As Rodney Noel, former Chair of AAFCO, explained to Martin: “AAFCO on its own cannot enforce any of the models that it produces. It has no regulatory authority. It has no inspectors or laboratories. Any inspection of a pet-food plant is done by a state agency or the FDA.”²⁴
When Martin contacted state representatives to determine what testing actually occurs, the answers were revealing. New Jersey’s agriculture department: “We check the nutritive values for the product. We do not check the ingredients.” Utah: testing covers only “guaranteed analysis and product registration.” Georgia: “Drug screening is done in various livestock feed, but not pet food.” Only eight of fifty states that Martin contacted actually tested pet food at all — and that testing verified only whether the percentages of protein, fat, and fibre matched the label. The source of those nutrients was irrelevant. The required levels of protein, fat, and fibre could theoretically be achieved by combining old shoe leather, crankshaft oil, and sawdust.²⁵
AAFCO’s feeding trials — the basis for the “complete and balanced” claim on labels — use eight dogs, last six months, and measure four blood values. Two of the eight dogs are allowed to drop out and the trial remains valid. The dogs must simply not lose more than 15 percent of their body weight. These trials give no indication of how the food affects animals eating it for years. The taurine deficiency that killed cats went undetected for the same reason — a few months of observation cannot reveal what a lifetime of nutritional inadequacy produces.²⁶
The Pet Food Institute completes the picture. PFI is the industry’s self-described “public and media relations resource, representative before the U.S. Congress and state and federal agencies.” It is funded by the companies it claims to oversee. PFI’s Affiliate Members listed on its website include rendering companies such as Griffin Industries, Darling International, Valley Proteins, and Baker Commodities — and Baker Commodities is documented as picking up euthanised pets.²⁷
The pet food industry is, in every meaningful sense, self-regulated. And it is a $14.3 billion industry, according to Euromonitor’s 2005 figures, with no incentive to change what works.²⁸
From the Bag to the Body: How Commercial Food Creates Chronic Disease
If this were only a matter of aesthetics — unappetising ingredients processed into something edible — it would be a consumer issue and nothing more. But the evidence from veterinary practice connects commercial pet food directly to the epidemic of chronic disease now seen in dogs and cats.
A 2015 study by Banfield Veterinary Hospitals, examining 2.4 million dogs and 480,000 cats, documented what holistic veterinarians had been reporting for years: chronic disease in companion animals was rising at alarming rates. One in four dogs and one in three cats were overweight or obese — a condition rare when Richard Pitcairn began veterinary practice in 1965. Overweight and obesity in animals, Pitcairn argues, can actually be signs of malnutrition: the body keeps signalling hunger because it is not getting the nutrients it needs from the food, even as the calorie load pushes weight upward.²⁹
The specific disease pathways are traceable from ingredient to organ failure.
Kidney Failure in Young Cats
Cats evolved as desert animals. Their kidneys were designed to be extraordinarily efficient at conserving water. Historically, they ate a fresh food diet of prey containing roughly 70 percent body fluids. Kibble is 5 to 10 percent moisture. A cat fed exclusively on kibble operates in a state of chronic dehydration for its entire life.
Jean Hofve, DVM, puts it directly: “I have seen kidney failure in cats four or five years old, and that is really upsetting. It’s different if the cat is seventeen or eighteen years old. But there is no excuse for this in young cats. These animals must have a wet diet. It protects their kidneys.”³⁰
Many pet foods also contain excess levels of vitamin D, calcium, and phosphorus, which are directly toxic to the kidneys. Messonnier notes that while definitive proof is lacking, it is worth considering that years of feeding diets containing excess and potentially toxic levels of these nutrients could produce chronic damage and ultimately kidney failure.³¹ The commercial pet food industry has never funded a study to test this hypothesis.
Holistic veterinarians report seeing kidney problems in younger animals than they encountered in earlier decades. The quality of pet food, they say, no longer creates or maintains healthy organs.³²
Taurine Deficiency and Fatal Heart Disease
In the late 1980s, veterinary researchers discovered that an often-fatal heart disease in cats — dilated cardiomyopathy — was caused by a deficiency of the amino acid taurine. Cats who were not getting enough taurine from their food developed enlarged, weakened hearts. Some went blind. Many died.
The deficiency occurred because commercial cat food formulas contained inadequate amounts of taurine. The manufacturing process — rendering, extruding, and high-heat cooking — destroys this amino acid, and the formulas were not compensating for the loss. Cat foods are now supplemented with synthetic taurine, and dilated cardiomyopathy has become uncommon. But it took an unknown number of dead cats to force the correction. The AAFCO feeding trials, which last a few months and measure four blood values, were not designed to detect a nutritional deficiency that kills slowly over years.³³
As Messonnier observes: “We do not know what ingredients future researchers may discover that should have been supplemented in pet foods all along.”³⁴
Feline Hyperthyroidism: A New Disease
Hyperthyroidism in cats was first recognised in 1979. It did not exist before that — or at least, it was never diagnosed. Its emergence coincides precisely with the expansion of commercially manufactured canned cat food in the 1970s.
Researchers at UC Davis found that cats eating commercially prepared canned food had approximately twice the risk of developing hyperthyroidism compared to cats that did not eat canned food. A 2004 Purdue University study examining 169,576 cats over twenty years confirmed that hyperthyroidism increased significantly from 1978 to 1997, and that consumption of pop-top canned foods was associated with greater risk. In female cats, the increased risk was specifically associated with pop-top cans. The mechanism is not fully understood, but the temporal association, the dose-response relationship, and the biological plausibility — canned food lining compounds acting as endocrine disruptors — all point toward the commercial diet.³⁵
This is a serious and sometimes terminal disease, and treatment is expensive. It emerged from nowhere in the late 1970s, and its rise tracks precisely with the commercial pet food practices of the same era.
The Allergy Epidemic
Food allergies have become an everyday condition in veterinary practice. The market for “limited antigen and novel protein” diets is now a multi-million dollar business — a business that exists because animals are developing intolerances to the ingredients in the standard commercial food they’ve been eating.³⁶
Plechner, who spent decades treating allergic animals, identified kibble as a concentrated delivery system for the most allergenic ingredients. His “Allergic Hit List” — the foods most likely to trigger reactions — reads like a standard kibble ingredient panel: beef, milk, wheat, corn, yeast, fish meal, plus chemical additives. The dehydration of kibble concentrates these allergens further; water acts as a diluter, and when little moisture is present, the allergen load becomes more potent.³⁷
The pattern extends beyond food allergies. Many animals become hypersensitive to flea bites, pollens, soaps, sprays, and environmental contaminants — reactions that holistic veterinarians trace back to immune systems already overwhelmed by processing the daily insult of commercial food. The food doesn’t just fail to nourish. It actively destabilises the immune response.³⁸
There is a further dimension that receives almost no attention: bacterial contamination. Commercially manufactured meat meals and by-product meals are frequently contaminated with bacteria because the source material is not always freshly slaughtered. Animals that have died from disease, injury, or natural causes may not be rendered for days. Dangerous E. coli bacteria are estimated to contaminate more than 50 percent of meat meals. The cooking process during rendering kills bacteria, but it does not destroy endotoxins — toxic substances that bacteria produce in unrefrigerated tissue. One study of commercial pet foods found endotoxins present in all samples tested, some in very large amounts. These endotoxins persist through manufacturing and are carried into the finished product that ends up in the feeding bowl.³⁹
What Veterinarians See
Joseph Demers, DVM, who uses acupuncture and Chinese medicine in his Florida practice, treats animals suffering the consequences of kibble daily. His description is clinical: “The animal on a diet of dehydrated food becomes dehydrated. The body builds up a lot of heat, which needs to be eliminated. Eventually you see burping, throwing up of bile in the morning, and upset stomachs. You see thick saliva, dry stools, and an animal panting after its evening meal even though the surroundings are cool.”⁴⁰
Demers turns many of these animals around within a month, simply by adding moisture and broth to the diet. The intervention is not complex. The damage was caused by what the animal was eating, and it reverses when the diet changes.
This observation — that animals improve rapidly when commercial food is reduced or eliminated — is the most consistent finding across holistic veterinary practice. Richard Pitcairn describes it as one of the earliest and most reliable insights of his career: switching animals from highly processed pet foods to quality fresh foods produced visible results, repeatedly. Problems resolved, coats became shiny, and animals got what he calls “a new lease on life.”⁴¹
The improvement is not subtle, and it does not require months of treatment. It requires a different bag — or no bag at all.
A Way Out
The commercial pet food industry will not reform itself. It is built on the economics of rendering: cheap raw material, processed into products that animals can be made to eat through the application of sprayed fats and chemical flavour enhancers, sold under labels that obscure what is inside. The regulatory structure does not inspect ingredients, does not test for contaminants, and does not fund long-term feeding studies. The system is operating as designed.
But the solution is available to any pet owner willing to act on what the evidence shows.
The core principle is straightforward: feed fresh, whole food appropriate to the species. For cats, that means a diet built on animal protein — ideally raw or lightly cooked — with adequate moisture. For dogs, fresh meat combined with whole grains, vegetables, and appropriate supplementation. Even modest changes produce results. Adding broth to kibble addresses chronic dehydration. Replacing a portion of dry food with fresh meat improves protein quality. Rotating food sources prevents the allergen accumulation that comes from feeding the same formula for years.⁴²
If homemade preparation isn’t feasible, the label itself reveals the hierarchy of quality. Look for a food where a specific, named meat — not “meat meal,” not “meat by-products,” not “poultry by-products” — appears among the first two or three ingredients. Avoid foods preserved with BHA, BHT, or ethoxyquin. The absence of ethoxyquin on the label does not guarantee it is absent from the food, since suppliers can add it before shipping to the manufacturer — but its presence on the label is a clear signal to walk away. Natural preservatives like mixed tocopherols (vitamin E) and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) don’t extend shelf life as long, but they don’t carry the unanswered questions either.⁴³
Veterinarian Carolyn Blakey captures the consensus among holistic practitioners: “The best and most inexpensive food you can feed your pet is food you prepare yourself.”⁴⁴ For those who cannot prepare meals from scratch, a growing number of smaller manufacturers now produce foods using human-grade ingredients, whole grains, fresh proteins, and natural preservatives — without rendered material, chemical dyes, or mystery meals.
The label on the bag in your kitchen tells only half the story. The other half has been documented, investigated, and confirmed by veterinarians and journalists working independently across decades. The ingredients are a matter of public record. The disease patterns are visible in every veterinary clinic. The connection between the two is not speculative. It is the exposed wiring of a system that has been feeding animals the by-products of industrial waste and calling it nutrition.
The package insert lists what is inside. Most pet owners never see it — the marketing doesn’t mention it, the veterinarian doesn’t volunteer it, and the regulatory framework doesn’t require clarity. But the evidence exists, and it says what it says.
References
Martin, Ann N. Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food (New Sage Press, 3rd edition). Chapter 2: “The Deceptive Practice of ‘Splitting’ in Labeling.”
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 2: “Unravelling the Mystery Ingredients.” AAFCO ingredient definitions for “meat by-products.”
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 4: “The Rendering Process”; Chapter 2 on denaturing agents. OSHA classifications of crude carbolic acid and cresylic acid. Canadian Ministry of Agriculture correspondence on Birkolene B.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 2: “The Rendering Process.” National Renderers Association, Essential Rendering: All About the Animal By-Product Industry (Kirby Lithograph Company, Arlington, Virginia, 2006).
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 2: “Can This Really Be True?” Personal correspondence with AAFCO chair confirming ingredient definitions apply equally to pet food and livestock feed.
Messonnier, Shawn, DVM. Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats (Prima Publishing). Section on “Animal and Poultry Fat.” See also Animal Protection Institute Report, 1996.
Animal Protection Institute of America, investigative report, 1996. Cited in Zucker, Martin. The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Dogs and Cats.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Section on “What Happened to the Nutrients?” Wysong, Randy L., DVM, on processing and nutritional destruction.
Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Dogs and Cats. Section on chemical additives, colouring agents, and sodium nitrite in pet food. See also Messonnier, sections on additives in processed pet foods.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 2: “Toxic Substances in Grain.” See also vomitoxin recall affecting Nature’s Recipe (1995) and Doane Pet Care / Ol’ Roy (1999), killing 25 dogs.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 2, observations on corn in cat food, and AAFCO grain ingredient definitions. Taurine supplementation requirements.
Plechner, Alfred J., DVM, and Martin Zucker. Pet Allergies: Remedies for an Epidemic (Very Healthy). Chapter on “Kibble — A Sackful of Trouble.” California FDA protein requirement cited.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 4: “Meat Meal Product.” National Animal Control Association statistics on companion animal euthanasia and disposal, 2002.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 4. See also Quebec Ministry of Agriculture correspondence confirming rendering practices: “Dead animals are cooked together with viscera, bones and fats at 115°C for twenty minutes.” Also: “The fur is not removed from dogs and cats.”
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 4: “Testing for Cats and Dogs in Pet Food.” Personal correspondence between Martin and the Pet Food Institute, 2004 and subsequent. Nancy Cook, VP of Technical and Regulatory Affairs, PFI.
FDA/CVM, “Report on the risk from pentobarbital in dog food,” March 28, 2002. Martin’s FOIA requests, 1998–2003. Myers, Michael J., PhD, et al., “Development of a polymerase chain reaction-based method to identify species-specific components in dog food,” American Journal of Veterinary Research, Vol. 65, No. 1, January 2004. Joe Donnenhoffer, Roch Diagnostics, on PCR testing limitations.
“2000 Report of the American Veterinary Medical Association Panel on Euthanasia,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol. 218, No. 5, March 1, 2001, p. 685.
O’Connor, John J., DVM, MPH; Stowe, Clarence M., VMD, PhD; Robinson, Robert R., BVSc, MPH, PhD, “Fate of Sodium Pentobarbital in Rendered Material,” American Journal of Veterinary Research, Vol. 46, No. 8, August 1995, pp. 1721–1723.
FDA/CVM surveys of dry dog food for pentobarbital, 1998 and 2000. Published results, March 2002.
Myers et al., American Journal of Veterinary Research, January 2004. FDA/CVM’s contradictory statements on pentobarbital source.
Personal correspondence between Ann Martin and Stephen Sundlof, DVM, Center for Veterinary Medicine, May 18, 2005.
United States Animal Health Association, “Report of the USAHA Committee on Feed Safety,” 1998. Veterinary reports of pentobarbital tolerance in dogs cited in Martin, Food Pets Die For, Chapter 5.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 6: “Pet Food Regulations.”
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 6. Personal correspondence with Rodney Noel, DVM, former Chair of AAFCO, April 16, 2007.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 6. Correspondence with AAFCO state representatives: Robert Hougaard (Utah), David Shang (New Jersey), Arty Schronce (Georgia). Colorado Department of Agriculture testing criteria.
AAFCO feeding trial guidelines cited in Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 6.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 4: “Testing for Cats and Dogs in Pet Food.” PFI Affiliate Members listing, including Baker Commodities, Inc.
Euromonitor market data cited in Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 7.
Pitcairn, Richard H., DVM, PhD. Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats. Banfield Veterinary Hospital, State of Pet Health 2015 Report (study of 2.4 million dogs and 480,000 cats). http://www.banfield.com/state-of-pet-health.
Jean Hofve, DVM, cited in Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Cats.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Section on “Kidney Disease.”
Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Cats. Section on “Kidney Failure,” citing multiple holistic veterinarians.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Section on taurine deficiency and dilated cardiomyopathy. See also AAFCO trial limitations.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Commentary on unknown future supplement requirements.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 11 on hyperthyroidism. UC Davis case-control study; Purdue University study examining 169,576 cats over twenty years, published 2004.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Section on “The 100% Myth — Problems Caused by Inadequate Nutrition.”
Plechner and Zucker, Pet Allergies: Remedies for an Epidemic. “Kibble — A Sackful of Trouble.” Allergic Hit List.
Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Dogs and Cats. Section on food intolerances and immune hypersensitivity.
Messonnier, Natural Health Bible for Dogs & Cats. Section on “Contaminants.” E. coli contamination estimate. Pitcairn, Complete Guide, on endotoxins in commercial pet food.
Joseph Demers, DVM, cited in Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Cats. Section on kibble and Chinese medicine perspective.
Pitcairn, Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats. Chapter 3: “What’s Happening to All Our Food?”
Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies. Sections on “The Broth Plan” (Demers), “The Three-Minute Plan” (Goldstein), and easy diet upgrades.
Martin, Food Pets Die For. Chapter 3: “Preservatives and Additives in Pet Foods.” Ethoxyquin discussion. Messonnier, Natural Health Bible, on preservative labelling requirements.
Carolyn Blakey, DVM, cited in Zucker, The Veterinarians’ Guide to Natural Remedies for Cats. Section on homemade meals.
Maria Farmer provided the first criminal complaint to the New York City Police Department and to the FBI, about the conduct of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In this abridged version of a phone interview with journalist Whitney Webb, Maria Farmer exposes Les Wexner, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jerffrey Epstein, and Israel loyalists who were all involved in the trafficking and exploitation of children and young women.
Maria recounts how Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein had the dressing rooms at the Victoria’s Secret Flagship store in all bugged with cameras. Maria retells stories of their Jewish supremacy and racism against white and black people. These are parts of the story that the mainstream media leaves out when reporting on The Epstein Files.
On January 30, the US Department of Justice released what it called “3.5 million responsive pages” in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act spearheaded by Rep. Thomas Massie. Though more than a month late, redacted in bizarrely non-compliant ways, and representing only about half of the Epstein files (the other half are still being illegally withheld) the DOJ document dump provided abundant, irrefutable evidence that the “antisemitic conspiracy theorists” have been right all along: The United States of America is occupied by a Jewish supremacist crime ring based in Israel.
The documents show that when then-United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta gave convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2008 because Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” he was referring to Israeli intelligence. According to FBI files, Acosta’s source was Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer, who himself represented Israeli intelligence.
Epstein should have gone to prison for years or decades, as would any other criminal convicted of the same charges. But the notorious sex trafficker got a work-release wrist slap. Since when can a foreign intelligence agency tell a US Attorney not to do his job?
The latest document dump confirms that Epstein, who was groomed as a sexual blackmailer by Les Wexner’s MEGA group of billionaire Mossad spies, was “trained as a spy by (Israel’s former military intelligence chief and Prime Minister) Ehud Barak,” who visited Epstein’s New York mansion on dozens of occasions. Barak and Epstein teamed up not only to blackmail American political, economic, and cultural leaders, but also to funnel huge sums of money to politicians in various nations—bribes in return for those politicians following Israel’s orders.
The new document dump reveals that Epstein worked with Israel to support their Ukrainian asset Zelensky, and to try to overthrow Russia’s Vladimir Putin and replace him with an Israeli stooge named Ilya Ponomatov. Epstein, we also learn, was involved in the overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi. The Mossad blackmailer helped cultivate Israel’s relations with separatists in the imaginary nation of “Somaliland” (which only Israel recognizes). He brokered Israel’s ties with India’s Prime Minister Modi, and maintained close relationships with top UK leaders including Tony Blair and Peter “love the torture video” Mandelson.
These and other revelations prove that Epstein was not just a sexual blackmailer. Since his job was to establish compromising personal relationships with the world’s most powerful people, Epstein was also used by Israel as a high-level international power broker. “I represent the Rothschilds,” Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel, referring to the banking dynasty that created Israel.
The DOJ files show how Israeli/Rothschild agent Epstein lured his blackmail targets into a cesspool of depravity. The files contain many references to torturing, raping, and murdering children. FBI files cite testimony that Epstein’s crime ring would “birth babies for black market use.” Those who thought Pizzagate was an unproven conspiracy theory may be surprised to learn that the Epstein emails include more than 900 references to “pizza” as a likely code for child sex slaves. There are also 673 suspicious references to “ice cream” and countless uses of “grape soda” presumably referring to black prostitutes or sex slaves. Mainstream media are twisting themselves into contortions trying to insist that even though most of these food code words are obviously what they seem–code words for child sex slaves–though possibly a few could be interpreted as references to actual food! New York Magazine opines:
Admittedly, some of the pizza-related material seems pretty weird. An April 2018 message from a redacted sender says, “lets go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand. Go kno.” Cryptic! Some of it is scrutable: “Go kno” appears to be a rendering of go know, an English derivative of the Yiddish expression geh vays, which is roughly equivalent to “go figure.” The claim that “no one else can understand,” on the other hand, is a creepy element that echoes Donald Trump’s allusion to “wonderful secrets” in his infamous letter on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday…
“Pizza and grape soda” belongs to the latter category, and it appears frequently in Epstein’s emails and texts. In a 2018 exchange with his urologist, Harry Fisch (who erroneously appears in Epstein’s contacts as “Harry Fish”), the two seem to discuss refilling Epstein’s prescription for erectile-dysfunction medication. Fisch later texts, “After you use them, wash your hands and lets [sic] go get pizza and grape soda.” This proposal seems odd. There are many things you can do after your Viagra kicks in, and getting a slice with your doctor is not near the top of the list…
… Remember when only unreasonable people thought like this? The idea that pizza could be a code word for illicit sexual activities was laughable in 2016, when the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy captured the imaginations of what might charitably be called the internet’s most enthusiastic users…At the time, the assumption that pizza was code for sex with children seemed obviously arbitrary and extravagant, a violation of the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. This heuristic, Occam’s razor, is often a handy way to differentiate ideas and people we should take seriously from ones we can safely dismiss — people who are frustrated that they’ve misplaced their keys tend to be more credible than those who think their keys have been stolen. Except with this Epstein pizza thing, the somebody-stole-my-keys contingent seems to have been suddenly, disastrously vindicated…
…Occam’s razor has comparatively little to tell us about grape soda. Fisch and Epstein refer to “pizza and grape soda” so often, and so often together — seemingly never just grape soda and rarely just pizza — that the whole thing starts to look like a shibboleth… The mystery deepens when you notice that Fisch often follows references to pizza and grape soda with an emoji depicting an African American…
The sender’s name has been redacted, and the identity of “Brice” is unclear, but a former New Zealand Army chef named Brice Gordon co-managed Epstein’s New Mexico ranch and was interviewed by the FBI in 2007. Red Hook is an unincorporated town in the U.S. Virgin Islands — the least-populated such place, according to the 2020 census, consisting mostly of marinas. There is, as it turns out, a pizza restaurant there. But why would someone need Epstein’s permission to have a “quick pizza meal” to which the financier was not invited? It’s enough to drive a sensible person to speculation.
From the mainstream media’s perspective, the problem is not that we are ruled by genocidal Israeli-Mossad-empowered Jewish supremacist psychopathic billionaire perverts. It is that someone might notice that we are ruled by genocidal Israeli-Mossad-empowered Jewish supremacist psychopathic billionaire perverts. That would mean that the “antisemitic conspiracy theorists” were right all along. Oy vey! Double-plus ungood!
Though the mainstream media professes to hate racism, they are covering up Epstein’s virulent racism against non-Jews. The emails are full of disparaging references to “goys,” a term for non-Jews that roughly parallels other racial slurs including the N-word. Epstein and his supremacist cronies loved to degrade non-Jewish children and teens, but never targeted their fellow “chosen people.”
For many Americans, the most disturbing revelations in Epstein files involve President Donald J. Trump. Prior to the files’ release, we already knew that Trump flew on Epstein’s jet at least eight times, was referred to by Epstein as his “best friend,” sent a birthday drawing to Epstein depicting a barely pubescent naked girl alluding to their “secret,” and has been accused of raping 13-year-old “Katie Johnson” in 1994 at an Epstein party and then threatening to kill the girl and her family. The first Epstein dump also contained FBI witness reports that Trump was present when a baby was drowned in Lake Michigan, and was implicated in the rape and murder of a certain Dusty Rhea Duke in 2000.
The new Epstein files release includes FBI witness reports that Trump was involved in murdering three girls who were buried at Mar-a-Lago and threatening the witness with a similar fate. Witnesses also told the FBI that Trump auctioned underage girls from his swimsuit contests, measuring their vulvas and rating them for tightness. Trump is also accused of forcing oral sex and other abuses against 13 and 14 year old girls.
Meanwhile the mainstream media chant in unison: “President Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing.” Will they change their tune, and suddenly discover the FBI files, if and when Trump stops following Israel’s orders?
A shorter version of this article was published in last week’s American Free Press. -KB
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The resignation of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington in February 2026 revealed more than a scandal—it exposed the architecture of a parallel governance system operating through deniable channels. The Epstein files, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) censorship apparatus, and the Mandelson intelligence pipeline are not separate stories. They are component parts of a transatlantic mechanism that converts private access into public control, with enforcement mechanisms that now reach across sovereign borders to silence American citizens.
Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender with deep ties to political and financial elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Peter Mandelson is a former UK power‑broker and ambassador to Washington, now under investigation for secretly sharing government information with Epstein. This article shows how their relationship connects to a wider system of online censorship and private global‑health finance.
The Intelligence Pipeline: Real-Time Treasury Briefings to a Convicted Sex Offender
The Mandelson-Epstein correspondence reveals something far more systematic than indiscreet friendship. It documents a private intelligence channel operating at the highest levels of UK and US financial policy.
In December 2009, while serving as Business Secretary, Mandelson forwarded Treasury positions on the bankers’ bonus tax to Epstein within hours of receiving them, with Epstein requesting advance notice “before Jes” and Mandelson replying simply: “Treasury”. By March 2010, the pattern had escalated—Mandelson forwarded notes from a meeting between UK Chancellor Alistair Darling and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to Epstein within five minutes, followed by his own meeting with Summers the next day. Those notes were forwarded within two minutes.
The content was market-moving intelligence: Dodd-Frank implementation, hedge fund taxation, derivatives regulation, and Bank of England quantitative easing strategy during the credit crunch. Mandelson advised Epstein that JPMorgan’s CEO should “mildly threaten” Chancellor Darling over policy. This systematic extraction of live government intelligence for private financial advantage can hardly be construed as incidental corruption.
DOCUMENT: Peter Mandelson leaked No 10 documents to Epstein, who then helped him pursue multi-million dollar jobs (Source: Tax Policy Associates)
The Censorship Architecture: From Anti-Corbyn Operations to American Deplatforming
The same censorship machine that produced the Biden White House’s authoritarian campaign against the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” in 2021 had emerged from the notorious Room 216, Brixton, where Israeli loyalist and architect of Keir Starmer’s rise to power, Morgan McSweeney, along with Imran Ahmed, built the “Labour Together” operation to dismantle Jeremy Corbyn. It was a CCDH list of 12 named individuals, which the White House then pushed Facebook to censor. The March 2021 “Disinformation Dozen” report was not independent research—it was unequivocally the identical playbook redeployed. The Biden White House directly cited CCDH’s report to pressure Facebook into censoring American health publishers, with internal documents showing the platform’s “secretly demoted” users, including alleged “anti-vaxxers”, and Twitter accounts of targeted individuals. When Facebook pushed back that the “majority of the accounts in question were not spreading misinformation,” the White House persisted.
Among those branded the “Disinformation Dozen” by the CCDH in March 2021: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Children’s Health Defense), physician Joseph Mercola, and Sayer Ji—whose investigative work exposing the Mandelson intelligence pipeline appears later in this report.
The method was documented in internal strategy papers: cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative,” infiltrate opposition spaces to extract decontextualised content, and feed narratives to sympathetic media. The “antisemitism crisis” that destroyed UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was, as Labour Party files confirm, instrumentalised by this same faction.
Morgan McSweeney was CCDH’s founding director and subscriber for 18 months, operating from the same Brixton office that produced Labour’s anti-Corbyn operation. When he resigned in April 2020 to become Starmer’s chief of staff, Ahmed inherited an apparatus already proven effective at demonetising political opposition.
Morgan McSweeney, founding director of the CCDH, and former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff. (Source: The Edge | Business news)
The March 2021 “Disinformation Dozen” report was not independent research—it was unequivocally the identical playbook redeployed. The Biden White House directly cited CCDH’s report to pressure Facebook into censoring American health publishers, with internal documents showing the platform “secretly demoted” affiliated accounts and Twitter accounts of targeted individuals. When Facebook pushed back that the “majority of the accounts in question were not spreading misinformation,” the White House persisted.
Project Molecule: The Financial Infrastructure of Private Governance
The August 2011 JPMorgan “Project Molecule” blueprint reveals the financial architecture that made this system durable. The $150 million fund Epstein pitched to JPMorgan CEO Mary Erdoes was designed to operate “across sovereign borders, into specific countries, for specific biological interventions”—with no elected officials, no treaty obligations, and no public accountability beyond its own audit committee.
Epstein operated as Bill Gates’s representative under a written agreement, with the explicit purpose of securing “additional money for vaccines” while creating a “permanently governed, privately controlled, transnational system”. The budget allocated $40M for polio vaccines in Afghanistan, $40M in Pakistan, $20M specifically for “financing the surveillance network in Pakistan,” and $30M for rotavirus vaccines in Latin America.
This is the governance model: private intelligence (Mandelson-Epstein), private finance (Project Molecule’s offshore vaccination funds), and private enforcement (CCDH’s deplatforming operations) operating in substitutional parallel to democratic institutions.
The Enforcement Layer: Cross-Border Suppression of American Speech
What transforms influence operations into censorship is enforcement. The original investigation documents the apparatus reaching into foreign legal proceedings against American journalists—cross-border enforcement without due process, extradition treaties, or congressional oversight.
The pattern is now confirmed by US government action. In December 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio barred Imran Ahmed from entering the United States, citing his role in “leading organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose”. Ahmed was one of five Europeans sanctioned under a visa policy targeting foreigners responsible for censoring protected speech in America.
The CCDH is now reportedly under DOJ investigation for potential violations of foreign agent registration laws, given its coordination with UK Labour operatives while targeting US political speech. Labour’s deployment of approximately 100 operatives to US swing states during the 2024 election—conducted by McSweeney’s network—has generated formal FEC complaints alleging direct electoral interference.
After days of parliamentary theatre about “transparency,” Westminster has craftily moved to bury the Mandelson-Epstein papers—not in open sunlight, but inside the Intelligence and Security Committee, a body three of whose members have already stuffed with cash from pro-Israel lobbyists.
In Britain, Downing Street originally wanted veto power over anything “prejudicial to national security”, but the documents will now be reviewed by the Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). Critics argue that this allegedly independent oversight body could be compromised. In effect, three sitting members—Deputy Chair Sir Jeremy Wright, Sir John Hayes, and Labour’s Derek Twigg—have all taken money from the pro-Israel lobby, which by some estimates bankrolls roughly a quarter of British MPs. This can be verified in the excellent Declassified UK report published in June 2024.
🔴 EXPOSING THE ISRAELI LOBBY'S INFLUENCE ON UK POLITICS
Curious about how millions in funding might sway UK MPs and impact an investigation? Dive into this eye-opening clip revealing the powerful influence of the Israeli lobby on UK politics and the Epstein case.
The bottom line is that the Epstein file, which details how Mandelson piped classified Treasury intelligence to a convicted sex offender, and how British power brokers and Wall Street criminals traded backroom briefings, will now be “vetted” by politicians on the take from foreign influence networks. Forget transparency—it was never on the table.
The Architecture of Manufactured Consensus
The critical insight is structural: these networks exploit the gap between formal democratic institutions and actual governance. Mandelson’s Treasury briefings to Epstein occurred through informal channels. Project Molecule’s sovereign surveillance programs were designed to operate offshore. CCDH’s censorship operations, though effective at capturing White House policy, occurred through a nonprofit rather than state agencies. According to reports, George Soros is said to have donated $250,000 to the CCDH, which is working to censor conservative news outlets and to undermine Musk’s Twitter.
When the same personnel (McSweeney as CCDH founder, then Starmer’s chief of staff), the same infrastructure (Brixton operations), and the same methods (crisis amplification, media laundering, financial pressure) appear across Corbyn’s destruction, COVID censorship, and US electoral operations, we are not observing a coincidence. We are witnessing a system.
The switchboard is not the scandal. The switchboard is the system, and it is now being dismantled by the very government it sought to influence.
The Original Investigation
This synthesis builds upon the groundbreaking investigative work of Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo and author of the Switchboard series—including the first publication to connect the Mandelson-Epstein intelligence pipeline to the CCDH censorship apparatus. Ji’s research, conducted under direct legal and professional pressure from the very networks he was exposing, documented how British political operatives built a cross-border enforcement mechanism capable of weaponising foreign courts against American journalists.
His original reporting on Room 216, the Brixton operations, and the emergence of “disinformation” as a tool for political suppression predates mainstream coverage by years, and has now been validated by the Epstein disclosures, the Rubio sanctions against Ahmed, and the DOJ’s investigation into CCDH’s foreign agent activities.
Read the complete investigation series and supporting documentation at Sayer Ji Substack…
The Switchboard: From Epstein to Mandelson to McSweeney to Ahmed — How a British Machine Became America’s Censorship Engine
How the Epstein Files Reveal the Architecture Behind Censorship, Crisis Finance, and What Happened When I Investigated It – Part 3 in a Series
Peter Mandelson, “the Prince of Darkness,” Keir Starmer’s hand-picked ambassador to Washington, the most powerful unelected figure in British politics, resigned from Parliament this week, one step ahead of legislation to eject him. The Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation. The Prime Minister apologised to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims for believing Mandelson’s lies.
The press is treating this as a story about a politician’s downfall. It is not. It is a story about what he was connected to — and what was built to make sure you never found out.
Key Findings:
The censorship machine that targeted American speech during COVID was built inside a Labour Party factional operation. Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed created the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) from the same office, using the same staff, and the same dark-money infrastructure they used to destroy Jeremy Corbyn — then redeployed the identical playbook against U.S.-based health publishers and independent media.
CCDH’s founder and political patron is a protégé of Peter Mandelson, who wassimultaneously routing confidential UK and U.S. government intelligence to Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson forwarded Treasury readouts on the Volcker Rule, Dodd-Frank, and derivatives regulation to Epstein within minutes of receiving them — intelligence worth billions to Epstein’s Wall Street clients. The same political culture of deniable backroom operations that made the Epstein network functional also produced CCDH.
Epstein’s network was not just criminal — it was architectural. Project Molecule, a $150M JPMorgan blueprint produced the same month Epstein sketched a private global health fund, reveals the institutional machinery: offshore vaccination funds, sovereign biological surveillance programs, and governance structures designed to bypass elected oversight entirely.
The enforcement layer is not theoretical — it has already been deployed against named individuals. CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” list led directly to platform deplatforming. In at least one documented case, CCDH-originated material was entered into foreign legal proceedings to seek an ex parte arrest warrant against a U.S.-based journalist for lawful American speech — cross-border enforcement with no due process, no extradition treaty, and no congressional oversight.
The same network is now the subject of a formal FEC complaint alleging direct electoral interference. McSweeney — Mandelson’s protégé, CCDH’s political architect, and now Starmer’s chief of staff — was named in a formal FEC complaint for dispatching approximately 100 Labour operatives to U.S. swing states during the 2024 presidential election. The censorship pipeline and the electoral interference pipeline share the same personnel, the same infrastructure, and the same assumption: that British political operatives can shape American outcomes without accountability.
Four days before A. H. Robins signed the contract to purchase the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, the company’s own director of pharmaceutical research reported that no one knew how long the device’s tail string would remain chemically stable inside a woman’s body. “The device has not been subjected to any formal stability testing,” Oscar Klioze wrote in his memo on June 8, 1970. He also noted that the plastic used in the Shield had been cleared by the FDA for packaging meat — not for implantation in humans.
Seventeen days after the purchase, on June 29, a company orientation report circulated to thirty-nine executives — including the chairman, the president, and multiple vice-presidents — carried a more specific warning: the tail string had a “wicking” tendency, meaning it could draw bacteria from the vagina into the sterile uterus. The report recommended “a careful review.”
A. H. Robins began selling the Dalkon Shield nationally six months later. It never conducted wicking studies on the string. Over the next four years, the company distributed 4.5 million Shields in eighty countries. By the company’s own conservative estimate, roughly 88,000 women in the United States alone were injured. At least eighteen died. Hundreds of thousands suffered pelvic infections, septic abortions, perforated uteri, and permanent sterility.
The Dalkon Shield is sometimes treated as a historical curiosity — a cautionary tale from an era of looser regulation. That framing obscures what actually happened. The record, built from internal company memos, sworn depositions, congressional testimony, and court documents, reveals something more instructive: a template. A sequence of decisions, repeated across every phase of the product’s life, that follows a pattern so consistent it functions as a blueprint.
That pattern is worth studying in detail. Not because the Dalkon Shield is unique, but because it is not.
The Founding Fraud
The Dalkon Shield’s commercial life rested on a single published study. In February 1970, Dr. Hugh J. Davis of Johns Hopkins University reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that, of 640 women fitted with the Shield over twelve months, only five became pregnant — a rate of 1.1 percent. This made the Shield competitive with oral contraceptives and dramatically superior to every other IUD on the market.
The study had foundational problems that A. H. Robins knew about before it bought the device.
The average duration of use per patient was 5.54 months — barely half the twelve-month study period. Biostatistical researchers at Johns Hopkins estimated that a minimum of 1,200 patients would have been needed to establish a pregnancy rate of one or two percent with confidence. Davis used 640. He sent his data to the university’s statisticians within three days of the study’s closing date — far too quickly to capture pregnancies that had occurred but not yet been detected. When participants dropped out of the study, they vanished from the data, and these were the women most likely to have become pregnant or experienced complications. Davis testified vaguely that “less than 5 percent” were lost to follow-up. If one or two of them had conceived, the 1.1 percent rate would have dissolved.
Davis had a financial stake in the outcome. He held 35 percent of the Dalkon Corporation, the entity that sold the Shield to A. H. Robins for $750,000 plus a 10 percent royalty. He was also retained as a paid consultant. None of this was disclosed in his published study. When asked at a Senate hearing whether he had “recently patented such a device,” Davis gave testimony that was technically accurate and deliberately misleading: “I hold no recent patent on any intrauterine device.” He held something more valuable — equity.
A. H. Robins knew the published figures were wrong before finalizing the purchase. When Dr. Fred Clark visited Davis in Baltimore on June 8, 1970, to review the data, he found that over fourteen months, 832 insertions had produced 26 pregnancies — a rate of 3.1 percent, nearly three times what Davis had published. Clark recorded these numbers in a confidential memo that circulated to senior officials. A. H. Robins later claimed the discrepancy resulted from Clark’s secretary misreading his handwriting.
That explanation sits uneasily beside a second memo, written three days later by senior vice-president Jack Freund, which stated that Davis’s one-year follow-up period was not long enough “to project [pregnancy figures] with confidence to the population as a whole.” The company’s own biostatistician, Lester Preston, was never asked to review the fourteen-month data.
A. H. Robins purchased 199,000 reprints of the Davis article and distributed them to physicians. By August 1973, the company had printed more than five million pieces of Shield promotional literature. The 1.1 percent pregnancy rate remained the centerpiece. An internal memo from Shield project coordinator Allen Polon, dated October 31, 1973, finally stated what the company had long known: “A pregnancy rate of 1.1 percent is stated which is not valid.” Polon recommended destroying the literature. By then, A. H. Robins had captured 56 to 59 percent of the American IUD market.
The promotion machine extended beyond reprints. In September 1972, Robins published “A Progress Report,” reportedly the largest and costliest advertisement in the history of the IUD business — an eight-page, multicolor spread proclaiming “The IUD That’s Changing Current Thinking About Contraceptives.” It cited four published studies to substantiate low pregnancy rates. The highest rate cited was four times the lowest, a statistical oddity the ad did not address. Two of the four studies were authored by men with undisclosed financial ties to the company: Davis, and Dr. Thad Earl, a Defiance, Ohio physician who held 7.5 percent of the Dalkon Corporation stock and received royalties on every Shield sold. Earl reported a 0.5 percent pregnancy rate — a figure that matched a prediction Davis had made at an international conference months before Earl’s study was completed. A. H. Robins helped Earl draft his article and performed the statistical calculations. Neither Earl’s financial stake nor his consultancy was disclosed in the publication.
A company telegram to its northern sales division captured the ethos: “Northern Division will not be humiliated by a lack of Dalkon sales. If you have not sold at least 25 packages of 8 then you are instructed to call me. Be prepared to give me your callback figures. No excuses or hedging will be tolerated, or look for another occupation.”
Independent studies told a different story. The Kaiser-Permanente Medical Center in Sacramento reported a 5.6 percent pregnancy rate and a 28.7 percent removal rate. Beth Israel Hospital in Boston reported 10.1 percent. Dr. William Floyd of Wayne State University reviewed the Davis study’s internal evidence, concluded it was biased, and suggested the true rate was around 5 percent. A. H. Robins ignored him. In July 1973, the FDA wrote directly to Chairman E. Claiborne Robins asking him to reconcile the very low pregnancy rates in the company’s advertisements with the much higher rates reported by independent researchers. Robins testified that he had received the letter but could not recall it.
The String
The tail string is where the story becomes a matter of life and death.
Every IUD has a string that runs from the device inside the uterus, through the cervix, into the vagina. It allows the woman to check the device’s position and the doctor to remove it. The string passes through the cervical canal, where mucus acts as the body’s barrier against bacterial invasion. On every other IUD of that era, the string was an impervious monofilament — bacteria could not get into it.
The Dalkon Shield string was different. To the naked eye, it appeared to be a monofilament. Under magnification, it was a cylindrical sheath encasing 200 to 450 separate round filaments, separated by spaces. Neither end was sealed. Any bacteria that entered the spaces between the filaments would be insulated from the body’s immune defenses while being drawn upward into the uterus by capillary action — the same phenomenon that draws melting wax up a candle wick.
Irwin Lerner, the Shield’s listed inventor, warned A. H. Robins about the wicking tendency on or before June 29, 1970. This warning reached thirty-nine executives. No one acted on it.
Wayne Crowder discovered the danger independently. Crowder was a quality control supervisor at Chap Stick Company, a Robins subsidiary in Lynchburg, Virginia, assigned to oversee Shield production when assembly moved there in 1971. In March of that year — less than two weeks after he first learned of the Shield’s existence — Crowder noticed tiny holes in the string’s sheath below the attachment knot, caused by the tying process. He rejected an entire shipment of 10,000 to 12,000 Shields. His superiors at Chap Stick asked A. H. Robins for permission to override the rejection. Permission was granted. The Shields were shipped.
Crowder conducted his own wicking experiment. He stood clipped sections of the string in beakers of water. Hours later, he could squeeze water from the dry ends. The strings wicked through the knots. He demonstrated the results to his supervisor, Julian Ross. Ross told him the string was not his responsibility and to leave it alone.
Crowder then demonstrated a solution. He applied the flame of a cigarette lighter to the open end of a string and watched it shrivel into a small, solid bead. Heat-sealing. Simple, effective, and cheap. He showed this to Ross, then to Chap Stick president Daniel French. French acknowledged the logic, called Crowder’s concern about infection “reasonable,” and predicted that “Robins wouldn’t go for” the fix. “He said that they had too much time and money invested in the present configuration,” Crowder testified. French estimated the cost of heat-sealing at five to ten cents per Shield. A. H. Robins sold each Shield for up to $4.35.
Crowder tried to escalate. French passed the concern to A. H. Robins. Dr. Fred Clark called French and sharply rebuffed him for worrying about testing. Chap Stick should focus on getting the device assembled and packaged. French backed down. “It is not the intention of the Chap Stick Company to attempt any unauthorized improvements in the Dalkon Shield,” French wrote. “My only interest in the Dalkon Shield is to produce it at the lowest possible price and, therefore, increase Robins’ gross profit level.”
Ross told Crowder he hoped he had finally gotten the string business out of his system. “I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience not say something about something that I felt could cause infections,” Crowder later testified. “And he said that my conscience didn’t pay my salary.”
A. H. Robins did not attempt to duplicate Crowder’s wicking studies until 1974, after the Shield was already off the market. The heat-sealing idea was revived around the same time — and then dismissed. “It is too late to ‘heat seal’ now,” wrote Ellen Preston in a December 1974 memo. “We need to abandon the ‘multifilament’ string. Heat-sealing would have been a good thing to have done 4 years ago.”
Meanwhile, Kenneth Moore, the Shield project coordinator, spent three years “desperately searching,” as he later put it, for a new tail string. Company officials swore under oath that the search was unrelated to any concern about bacteria or infection. “There was no safety reason behind my search,” testified microbiological research director Robert Tankersley. The company found a superior alternative — Gore-Tex, which would not wick, was soft, strong, and nearly indestructible. The estimated cost was 6.1 cents per string, compared with 0.63 cents for the existing Supramid string. For one million Shields, the difference was approximately $54,000. Robins’s average net earnings at the time were nearly $70,000 per day.
The company chose not to switch.
In January 1975, Tankersley outlined four experiments to determine whether the string wicked bacteria. He estimated they would take two and a half weeks, use four rabbits, and cost $90. The experiments were not funded.
Wayne Crowder was forced out of Chap Stick during a company reorganization in 1978. He had worked there for fifteen years and was earning $13,500 a year. He filed a wrongful termination suit, but a judge ruled he had missed the one-year statute of limitations. As of 1985, he had been unable to find regular employment. “No exceptional genius was required to understand the hazards of that design,” he said.
The Bodies
On March 30, 1973, a thirty-one-year-old Arizona mother of two died after her uterus spontaneously aborted the baby she had been carrying for more than four months. The infection had spread rapidly, essentially poisoning her. Antibiotics could not save her. She had become pregnant while wearing a Dalkon Shield.
Spontaneous septic abortions in the middle trimester of pregnancy were extremely rare in 1973. Until then, the only septic abortions doctors encountered were in women who had undergone illegal or self-induced procedures. This woman had not tried to abort. Her Shield was still in place when the infection took hold.
A. H. Robins learned of the death two months later through the medical grapevine. Dr. Donald Christian, head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Arizona Medical Center, was struck by the case. He later learned of two additional deaths — including a twenty-four-year-old mother of two who developed flu-like symptoms during her fourth month of pregnancy. Three days later, she was dead.
Christian contacted A. H. Robins, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control. He says the agencies ignored him. The company’s response, through Ellen Preston, was to treat the reports as isolated incidents. “I would estimate that I have been advised of a dozen, at the very most, cases of septic abortion associated with the Dalkon Shield,” Preston wrote. The company’s own complaint file, withheld from FDA inspectors until congressional pressure forced its release, indicated an 8.8 percent pregnancy rate — eight times the advertised figure.
By June 1974, Christian’s paper linking the Shield to fatal sepsis appeared in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology — the same journal that had published Davis’s original study four years earlier. “The greatest concern is the rather insidious yet rapid manner in which these patients become ill,” Christian wrote. In three of the five deaths he documented, the first symptoms — disarmingly innocuous in themselves — occurred within thirty-one to seventy-two hours of death.
The toll mounted. By August 1974, the FDA had reports of eleven deaths and 209 serious illnesses from septic abortions in Shield wearers. The Centers for Disease Control surveyed 34,544 physicians and found that fatal septic abortions occurred twice as frequently among Shield users as among women wearing other IUDs. The Planned Parenthood Federation instructed its 183 clinics to stop prescribing the Shield.
A. H. Robins did not recall the device. It suspended marketing on June 28, 1974, after FDA Commissioner Alexander Schmidt requested a halt until the Shield’s “questionable safety” could be reviewed. But company chairman E. Claiborne Robins, Sr., privately celebrated that the FDA had not demanded a full recall. “We had all felt that the decision would be political,” he wrote in an internal memo. The FDA’s press release announcing the suspension — which company officials had helped draft — “helped reinforce our image as an ethical pharmaceutical company.”
The company continued to insist the Shield was safe and effective. It formally abandoned plans to remarket the device in August 1975, but took no action to remove the estimated 600,000 Shields still inside American women. That recommendation did not come until September 1980, when a “Dear Doctor” letter suggested removal. The October 1984 recall — the company’s first direct communication to women themselves — came more than a decade after the deaths began.
In the meantime, Dr. Howard Tatum, inventor of the rival Copper-T IUD, had independently confirmed what Crowder and Lerner had warned about years earlier. Tatum suspended Shield tail strings in dye solution. Within twenty-four hours, dye rose through the entire length, past both knots. He repeated the experiment with live E. coli bacteria. After forty-eight hours, bacteria had risen to the base of the final knot — which would sit inside the uterus. He found no wicking in any other IUD. Tatum then examined used Shield strings returned from clinics across the country and successfully cultured bacteria from their interiors. He found breaks in the nylon sheath, especially just below the attachment knot — exactly where Crowder had found them.
The string’s nylon 6 sheath deteriorated inside the body, as the medical literature since 1956 had warned nylon would do in body cavities. Professor Paula Fives-Taylor of the University of Vermont found that the number of bacteria adhering to strings increased 40 percent after twenty-five to thirty-six months of use — and tripled after thirty-seven to forty-eight months. A woman wearing a Shield for thirty-six months was 9.2 times more likely to suffer pelvic inflammatory disease than a woman using no contraception. For other IUDs, the risk was 1.2 times greater.
The Dalkon Corporation had recommended replacement of the Shield after two years — a recommendation that could have averted infections in countless women. A. H. Robins dropped this guidance because its leading competitor’s labeling made no such recommendation.
The Regulatory Void
The Dalkon Shield entered the market through a gap in federal law that seems almost designed for exploitation. In 1970, the FDA regulated drugs but not medical devices. An IUD was classified as a device. This meant that A. H. Robins was not required to demonstrate safety, conduct clinical trials, submit data to the FDA, or secure approval before selling the Shield to millions of women.
Hugh Davis had exploited this gap from the start. On January 14, 1970 — eight days before his study appeared in print — he testified as the lead witness before Senator Gaylord Nelson’s subcommittee hearing on birth-control drugs. Before television cameras and a press corps covering a guaranteed story, Davis built the market for his own undisclosed product by stoking fears about the Pill. “Shall we have millions of Americans on the pill for twenty years and then discover it was all a great mistake?” he asked. Within minutes, he pushed the Shield’s purported efficacy ever closer to perfection: “some modern intrauterine devices provide a 99 percent protection against pregnancy… The intrauterine devices that are available now can give you a 99 percent or better protection.” Viewers assumed they were watching a scientist from a distinguished academic institution motivated by concern for women’s health. They were watching a 35-percent shareholder.
A. H. Robins understood the value of the device classification and worked to protect it. The Shield contained copper sulfate, which the company initially believed might have a contraceptive effect — which would have made the device a drug, triggering FDA oversight and testing requirements. Internal discussions established that the copper served no purpose. “Does copper in Shield accomplish anything? No!” was the consensus at a February 1972 meeting of five Robins doctors and scientists. But the company continued marketing the copper-containing Shield rather than reformulating it, because the copper’s ineffectiveness was precisely what kept the device out of the FDA’s drug-regulation framework. When the FDA asked, Robins supplied data supporting the conclusion that the copper was pharmacologically insignificant. The FDA agreed: the Shield was a device.
The Medical Device Amendments — which would have required demonstration of safety and efficacy before marketing — did not become law until May 1976, six years after the Shield entered the market and two years after it was pulled.
The regulatory void extended beyond classification. The FDA had no authority to require adverse event reporting for devices, no power to compel recalls, and no systematic mechanism for collecting safety data. When reports of deaths and infections accumulated, the FDA could request information, hold hearings, and ask the company to stop selling. It could not order any of these things. Every consequential action depended on A. H. Robins’s voluntary cooperation.
At the 1973 congressional hearings, Dr. Russel Thomsen — an army obstetrician-gynecologist who had been publicly criticizing the Shield — dissected the company’s advertising claims with systematic precision. He demonstrated how the “life table” statistical method, originally developed as a legitimate research tool, had been co-opted for advertising. He showed that the four studies cited in the “Progress Report” covered averages of only 5 to 6 months of use, projected outward to create the appearance of twelve-month data. He walked the committee through Davis’s textbook, which featured a chart comparing ten IUDs in which the Dalkon Shield — modestly listed last — was superior in every category. The chart compared the Shield’s short, inadequate study against much larger and longer studies of its competitors. “The deception is amazing,” Thomsen said. Representative Clarence Brown asked if Davis was “party to fraud.” Thomsen paused. “Yes, I do after going from the beginning to the end of this.”
Thomsen characterized the “Progress Report” as “a calculated effort to mislead the doctors.” The FDA’s director of medical devices dismissed the ad’s problems as “mild puffery.”
The Suppression
The company’s behavior during litigation added a dimension that the founding fraud and the regulatory gap cannot fully explain.
A. H. Robins hired the law firm McGuire, Woods, and Battle to handle Shield lawsuits in mid-1975. The firm commissioned its own studies on the tail string. These became known as the “secret studies” because their results were never made public. Whenever a judge ordered their production, the company offered settlements that plaintiff attorneys found impossible to refuse.
The concealment extended to regulatory proceedings. In April 1975, Dr. Fred Clark appeared before the FDA’s Ad Hoc Committee and was asked whether private studies had been conducted on the Shield. The answer was no. In fact, eight months after national marketing began, Robins had initiated a two-year safety study in baboons. It produced a 30 percent perforation and migration rate and killed one animal in eight from perforation or infection. This information was available when Clark testified. It was not brought to the committee’s attention.
Roger Tuttle, a Robins attorney from 1971 to 1976 who later taught law at Oral Roberts University, revealed during a 1984 deposition that Dalkon Shield documents had been destroyed. The destruction had taken place in early February 1975, while a jury was deliberating in one of the first Shield trials. Tuttle said he had been prompted to come forward by Judge Miles Lord’s speech to Robins executives the previous month.
Judge Lord, a U.S. District Judge in Minneapolis assigned twenty-three Shield cases in December 1983, had personally traveled to Richmond to supervise document production after months of obstruction. He found depositions conducted in cramped, overheated rooms at the company’s own headquarters, with defense attorneys sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with their clients — positioned so that “a nudge by an attorney could, and did, silence the deponent.” The company rotated its legal team so frequently that “the court must start up from ground level over and over.” When Lord examined the discovery record, he concluded that documents relevant to the Shield had been withheld during years of prior litigation.
On February 29, 1984, Lord delivered a statement to three senior Robins officers summoned to his courtroom. He had originally intended to have them read it silently, but after their attorneys instructed them not to respond to his questions, he read it aloud:
“When the time came for these women to make their claims against your company, you attacked their characters. You inquired into their sexual practices and into the identity of their sex partners. You exposed these women — and ruined families and reputations and careers — in order to intimidate those who would raise their voices against you.”
A. H. Robins filed two complaints against Lord for judicial misconduct. The company retained former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell to lead the counterattack. Lord was cleared of misconduct, but his speech was expunged from the record. His legal bills totaled $110,000.
The company’s courtroom strategy against plaintiffs was systematic. In the case of Linda Harre of Tampa, Florida, who had suffered pelvic inflammatory disease and was left unable to bear children, Robins’s sole expert witness on wicking was Dr. Louis Keith, a paid consultant who had received $277,092 from the company by April 1985. Keith testified that his own laboratory experiments showed the string did not wick bacteria, and the jury believed him. An FBI investigation of possible perjury followed. Harre lost her case.
Even A. H. Robins’s own general counsel, William Forrest, was not spared the Shield’s consequences. In a 1984 deposition, Forrest disclosed that his wife had undergone a hysterectomy shortly after her own Shield was removed in 1975. Asked whether her doctor had indicated any connection to the device, Forrest replied: “Not that I know of.” Had he asked her? “I don’t recall.” He was promoted to vice-president.
Overseas
While the company fought to contain the crisis domestically, the Shield’s reach extended far beyond American borders.
The Agency for International Development began shipping Shields to developing countries in April 1971, initially at the request of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. By mid-1974, AID had distributed nearly 700,000 Shields to approximately seventy countries. The relationship between Robins and AID was close; as AID’s own later report noted, “Especially close was the working relationship developed by Robert W. Nickless, Director of International Marketing for A. H. Robins, with A.I.D.”
After Robins suspended domestic marketing in June 1974, AID issued warnings to its field offices — but did not recommend that Shields already inside women be removed. This was, as AID later explained, “in line with FDA and manufacturer pronouncements on the subject.” The recommendation for removal did not come until September 1980, six years after the suspension of sales. By then, the damage had long been compounding inside women across the developing world.
AID later accounted for 47 percent of the Shields it had distributed — 328,997 devices returned or destroyed. The remaining 53 percent — 368,295 Shields — were unaccounted for. AID’s report concluded that “few Dalkon Shields are likely still in use.”
Attorney Martina Langley, who spent years working with the poor in Central American clinics, called this conclusion “a hypocritical joke.” She had seen Shields being inserted in women as late as 1980 in El Salvador. Record-keeping in the country’s medical clinics was, in her words, “atrocious, if it exists at all.” There was no way to know how many Shields had been inserted or removed. Neither A. H. Robins nor AID conducted publicity campaigns to inform women in developing countries about the danger. Robins operated a plant in San Salvador. “If they would give five cents apiece for Shields, they would have gotten every one of them,” Langley said.
Inexpensive radio campaigns would probably have been adequate to reach most of these women. Langley’s requests to A. H. Robins to fund such campaigns went unanswered. In Australia, an estimated 100,000 Shields were sold, with no way to verify how many had been inserted. Across seventy-nine countries, the recall effort depended on cables to field offices and letters to ambassadors — not on any direct communication with the women who were actually wearing the device.
The Reckoning That Wasn’t
A. H. Robins filed for bankruptcy in August 1985. Through June of that year, 14,330 lawsuits had been filed, with new claims arriving at fifteen per day. The company and its insurer had paid out $378.3 million to dispose of cases, plus $107.3 million in legal expenses. Juries awarded $24.8 million in punitive damages. The company established a $615 million reserve fund, generating $126 million in tax benefits — meaning American taxpayers subsidized a portion of the cost of compensating the company’s victims.
No A. H. Robins executive faced criminal prosecution. Most of the officials who played key roles in the Shield’s history were promoted. E. Claiborne Robins, Sr., remained chairman of the board. The company continued to insist that the Shield was safe and effective, “no worse and perhaps better in design than other IUDs still on the market.” The Shield had simply been the victim of a biased press and greedy plaintiffs’ attorneys, according to former president William Zimmer and other officials.
Some victims who stood to win substantial damages chose not to sue — either because they wanted to put a horrifying experience behind them, or because they valued avoiding public disclosure of a matter as private as the destruction of their ability to bear children. Others were deterred by the company’s courtroom strategy, which included invasive interrogation of women’s sexual histories and the exposure of their private lives — calculated, as Judge Lord charged, “in order to intimidate those who would raise their voices against you.” Still others did not know or had forgotten the make of their IUD. By January 1985, nearly 4,000 calls had come in on the company’s phone lines from women wearing an IUD “of unknown type.”
The family remained prominent philanthropists in Richmond, Virginia, where, as one newspaper reported, “there is scant talk about the cloud that hangs over Robins.”
The company’s position, maintained through fourteen years of litigation, never shifted: “Robins believes that serious scientific questions exist about whether the Dalkon Shield poses a significantly different risk of infection than other IUDs.”
The Template
The Dalkon Shield story follows a sequence that has repeated across industries and decades. Each element of the sequence is documented here not by inference or speculation, but by the company’s own internal memos, sworn testimony of its own officers, and the rulings of federal judges who reviewed the evidence.
The sequence:
A founding study with fatal methodological flaws, authored by a researcher with an undisclosed financial stake, published in a prestigious journal and distributed to hundreds of thousands of physicians as though it were independent science.
A known defect — identified before national marketing began, confirmed by a quality control supervisor within weeks of encountering the product, fixable for pennies — suppressed because addressing it would slow production, increase costs, and implicitly acknowledge a problem.
A regulatory void, understood and actively maintained by the company, that allowed a device implanted in millions of women to reach the market without a single required safety test.
Warnings from inside and outside the company — from its own quality control supervisor, from independent physicians, from a congressional witness — met not with investigation but with dismissal, retaliation, and bureaucratic absorption.
A body count that accumulated for years while the company treated each death as an isolated incident, challenged the methodology of every unfavorable study, and funded its own research to generate favorable data.
A delayed recall, driven not by concern for women’s safety but by the calculus of litigation — delayed explicitly because, as the company’s own attorney argued, a recall would be “a confession of liability.”
Legal warfare against victims, including invasive interrogation of their sexual histories, calculated to deter future plaintiffs from coming forward.
Document destruction during active litigation. Secret studies whose results were suppressed by settling cases before judges could compel their disclosure.
And throughout, the promotion and retention of every executive involved, the absence of criminal accountability, and the company’s unwavering public insistence that nothing was wrong.
Wayne Crowder sealed the end of a string with a cigarette lighter in March 1971 and showed his bosses how to prevent infections. The fix would have cost pennies. He was told his conscience didn’t pay his salary, and eventually he was pushed out. Fourteen years later, he couldn’t find work.
The women — in Baltimore, in Tucson, in Defiance, Ohio, in El Salvador — were never asked whether they’d like to participate in this experiment. The document exists. The signatures are on it. The dates precede the marketing. Whatever word you choose for the distance between what was known and what was done, the record is not ambiguous about what it contains.
References
Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
Susan Perry and Jim Dawson, Nightmare: Women and the Dalkon Shield (New York: Macmillan, 1985).
Key documentary sources cited in these books and referenced in this essay include:
Oscar Klioze memo to Jack Freund on Shield stability testing, June 8, 1970
R. W. Nickless, “Orientation Report” on the Dalkon Shield (circulated to 39 executives), June 29, 1970
Fred Clark confidential memo on visit to Hugh Davis, June 8, 1970
Jack Freund memo on inadequacy of Davis follow-up period, June 11, 1970
Hugh J. Davis, “The Shield Intrauterine Device: A Superior Modern Contraceptive Device,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 106, no. 3 (February 1, 1970)
Thad J. Earl, “The Shield Intrauterine Device,” American Family Physician (September 1971)
Allen J. Polon memo re: “Destruction of Dalkon Shield Literature,” October 31, 1973
Ellen Preston memo on telephone conversation with Dr. Donald Christian, November 21, 1973
C. Donald Christian, “Maternal Deaths Associated with an Intrauterine Device,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 119, no. 4 (June 15, 1974)
E. Claiborne Robins, Sr., internal memo on FDA actions, July 2, 1974
Ellen Preston memo on heat-sealing, December 1974
Roger Tuttle deposition testimony, July 30, 1984 (U.S. District Court, Minneapolis)
Judge Miles W. Lord, remarks to A. H. Robins officers, February 29, 1984 (U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota)
Wayne Crowder deposition testimony, March 27, 1981
Russel J. Thomsen, testimony before House Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee, May 31, 1973
Russel J. Thomsen, report on AID actions regarding the Dalkon Shield overseas, March 1985
Centers for Disease Control, re-analysis of Women’s Health Study data, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (July 1983)
Senate Subcommittee on Monopoly hearing on birth-control drugs (testimony of Hugh J. Davis), January 14, 1970
Tales of the American Empire produces short historical videos about the American empire, like the “Sordid History of the CIA”, which is linked below. Most viewers are interested in the American CIA, so this is another episode about videos detailing the evils of the CIA. Some CIA officers work with murderous dictators and criminal organizations involved in the drug trade, arms dealing, and government contract fraud. These evil deeds are sometimes uncovered by the media but receive little attention.
There are YouTube videos that provide insight into covert CIA operations. This is far too much material to condense into a short video. Here is a quick review of more great YouTube videos about the CIA with a link to them below. If the link no longer works, the content has been removed. Two videos from the first part of this series have since disappeared. They may be found on smaller video hosting websites like Rumble, Bitchute, or Odyssey.
“Hector Berrellez (Unreleased Full Interview)”; a career DEA agent; djvald; December 24, 2023; this is set to start when he talks about the CIA murder of a DEA agent; • Hector Berrellez (Unreleased Full Interview)
From Washington to Jerusalem: A Chronicle of the Deliberate Destruction of a People Under the Guise of “Democracy” and “Security”.
The Gaza Strip today is not just a territory; it is an open wound on the body of humanity, a laboratory where the West, led by the United States and its puppet Israel, tests new forms of colonial violence. Under the pretext of “fighting terrorism” and “ensuring security,” a systematic destruction of an entire people is taking place—methodical, cynical, paid for by American taxpayers, and approved by the silent consent of European allies.
Trump’s plan for “managing” Gaza is not a solution but a refined form of neocolonial control. It is an attempt to replace open military occupation with a sophisticated system of neocolonial governance, where Palestinians are relegated to the role of perpetual wards, stripped of sovereignty, dignity, and a future.
The Architecture of Apartheid: How the US and Israel Jointly Engineered a Humanitarian Catastrophe
Annually, the United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid—money that transforms into bombs falling on homes in Gaza, into sniper bullets killing children at the border, into bulldozers uprooting ancient olive groves. This aid is not support for an ally; it is an investment in maintaining a colonial order. American weaponry is field-tested on Palestinians before being supplied to other dictatorial regimes.
The US Congress, that “great defender of democracy,” unanimously supports every Israeli military operation, every settlement expansion, every violation of international law. Democrats and Republicans compete over who can more zealously back Israeli militarism, as if Palestinian lives were merely bargaining chips in their dirty political game.
How many UN Security Council resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation have been vetoed by the United States? Over 45! Each time the international community attempts to condemn Israel’s war crimes, the US sides with the aggressor, demonstrating to the world that for them, international law is merely a tool to be ignored when it suits their geopolitical interests.
Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan is a cynical parody of diplomacy. Creating alternative structures to compete with the UN is not a search for peace but an attempt to destroy the last remnants of multilateral diplomacy where small nations still have a voice. It is an endeavor to replace international law with the law of the jungle, where the strong are always right and the weak are doomed to suffer.
Technologies of Enslavement: Innovations in the Service of Neocolonialism
Israel is today a world leader in surveillance and control technologies, and Palestinians have become the guinea pigs in this laboratory of digital totalitarianism. Facial recognition systems, spy drones, cyber-attacks on infrastructure—all are first tested in Palestine, then exported as “battle-tested” technologies.
The permit system, electronic bracelets, biometric data—Palestinians live in a world where their every move is controlled, every trip requires a humiliating permit, every attempt at a normal life runs into a digital wall. This is not security—this is a scientific-technical apartheid, where technology serves not the advancement of humanity but its enslavement.
The blockade of Gaza is not merely a restriction on the movement of goods. It is a calculated strategy of economic strangulation, designed to make life in the Strip unbearable. The ban on importing construction materials, medical equipment, even baby formula—all are part of a plan to create a humanitarian catastrophe that will force Palestinians either to submit or to flee.
Israel controls Palestinian water, land, airspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. The Palestinian economy is deliberately made unviable to create perpetual dependence on international aid, which can then be used as a lever for political pressure.
The Mythology of Exceptionalism: From “A Land Without a People” to “The Only Democracy in the Middle East”
Zionist colonization was built from the start on a lie—the lie of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” This initial falsehood spawned an entire ideology of denial: denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, their history, their connection to the land, their right to self-determination.
Today, this ideology has evolved into the rhetoric of a “Jewish state,” which by definition cannot be a state for all its citizens, and “the only democracy in the Middle East,” which rules over millions of people without any political rights. This hypocritical rhetoric finds fertile ground in the West, where Islamophobia and Orientalism render Palestinians as “the other,” whose suffering can be ignored.
Occupation is not only control over territory but also over history, memory, and identity. The destruction of Palestinian archives, the bombing of museums and libraries, the prohibition on teaching Palestinian history in schools—all are part of a strategy of cultural genocide aimed at erasing Palestinians not only from the map but from history itself.
Renaming cities and villages, replacing Arabic names with Hebrew ones, creating “archaeological parks” on the sites of destroyed Palestinian villages—this is an attempt to forge a new reality in which Palestinians are merely temporary guests on “Jewish land.”
International Complicity: The Silent Collusion of the “Free World”
European countries generously fund humanitarian programs in Palestine while simultaneously continuing profitable business with Israeli companies operating in settlements. They condemn “violence on both sides,” equating victim and executioner, the occupied and the occupier. Their “concern” is expressed in mild statements that Israel easily ignores.
The EU continues to grant Israel trade preferences despite the fact that Israeli goods produced in settlements clearly violate international law. This is not mere hypocrisy—it is complicity in crimes, cloaked in the rhetoric of “complexity” and “balancing interests.”
Some Arab regimes, tempted by American promises and intimidated by Israeli might, have betrayed the Palestinian cause. Normalization agreements with Israel, signed by the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, are not a step toward peace but a capitulation to the colonial project. They have given Israel what it always wanted: recognition without the need to grant Palestinians their legitimate rights.
These regimes, many of which are themselves dictatorships, fear not Israel but their own peoples, for whom the Palestinian cause remains a symbol of justice and dignity. Their betrayal is temporary; popular memory and solidarity will outlive these shameful agreements.
Resistance as an Existential Imperative: Why Palestinians Do Not Surrender
Palestinians have endured the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, the occupation of 1967, intifadas, blockades, countless military operations—and they still stand. Their resistance is not merely a political position but an existential necessity. When attempts are made to erase you from the face of the earth, when your very existence is declared a “demographic threat,” the struggle for survival becomes a struggle for human dignity.
Every olive grove that Israeli settlers try to uproot, every family refusing to leave their home in East Jerusalem, every child walking to school under the muzzles of rifles—is an act of resistance. Palestinian steadfastness shatters the Israeli mythology of the “temporary nature of the occupation”; they remind the world that injustice, no matter how prolonged, remains injustice.
BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions)—a movement that Western governments are so afraid of they try to criminalize—is growing stronger. From university campuses in the US to trade unions in South Africa, from municipalities in Europe to church groups in Latin America, understanding is growing that the Palestinian cause is the cause of all who believe in justice.
The younger generation in the West, unburdened by Holocaust guilt and not bought off by Zionist propaganda, sees Israeli apartheid for what it is. Their solidarity is not just a fashionable trend but a moral imperative based on the universal values of equality and human rights.
Neocolonialism is Doomed, Even When It Seems Omnipotent
History is relentless: colonial projects, no matter how powerful they may seem, are doomed to fail. French Algeria, apartheid South Africa, the Portuguese colonies—they all collapsed because a people’s yearning for freedom cannot be suppressed forever. The American-Israeli colonial project in Palestine will be no exception.
The West, led by the US, is today on the wrong side of history, not on the side of justice. It supports occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing—and believes it can do so with impunity. But the moral erosion caused by this complicity in crimes is already undermining the foundations of Western moral authority.
Palestinians will survive because their cause is just, because the land remembers them, because injustice cannot last forever. And when the last wall of apartheid falls, when freedom finally comes to Palestine, history will deliver a harsh verdict not only upon the direct occupiers but also upon their Western patrons, who for seven decades have funded, armed, and justified one of the most brutal colonial projects of our time.
And that day will come—because no people will accept eternal servitude, and no empire, not even an empire of lies, can rule forever.
Muhammad Hamid ad-Din, a well-known Palestinian journalist
Half a century after the public learned that boys at a Belfast group home were sexually assaulted by senior staff, a key question remains unanswered: was British intelligence implicated in the abuse conspiracy, and did Kincora serve as a ‘honeypot’ to entrap and blackmail powerful figures?
A vast trove of declassified files on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual, political, and intelligence escapades released by the US Department of Justice has once again thrust disgraced former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor into the spotlight. With British police reportedly reviewing Andrew’s past sexual activities and links to Epstein, questions are growing about whether Britain’s spy agencies were aware of Andrew’s alleged escapades with minors.
If the darkest rumors turn out to be true, it will not be the first time a British royal had been embroiled in a child rape conspiracy with spy agency involvement. Back in 1980, a scandal erupted when the Kincora Boys’ Home in occupied Ireland was exposed as a secret brothel run by powerful pedophiles. Chief among the alleged perpetrators was Lord Mountbatten — Andrew’s great-uncle.
From the very beginning, hints began to appear that MI5/MI6 knew of the child abuse taking place Kincora, and could have even been running the group home as part of a dastardly intelligence plot. With Britain’s domestic and foreign spies engaged in a savage dirty war in Ireland, and both services running operatives in Republican and Unionist paramilitaries, Kincora would have provided an ideal means of recruiting and compromising potential assets. Official investigations have strongly insinuated British intelligence chiefs had a close bond with many individuals who ran the Boys’ Home.
In May 2025, veteran BBC journalist Chris Moore published a forensic account of the case titled Kincora: Britain’s Shame. Featuring four and a half decades of firsthand research by the author, its groundbreaking contents have been met with general silence by British mainstream media.
In the book, Moore argues persuasively that the Boys’ Home was just one component of a more extensive child abuse network extending across British-occupied Ireland and beyond — in which London’s spying apparatus was not only aware, but likely complicit.
In 2023, Moore met personally with Kincora victim Arthur Smyth in Australia. Smyth’s stay at the Home was brief, but the horrors he endured there left him scarred forever.
“Having interviewed a number of Kincora survivors, I found Arthur’s story familiar. Sent to the Boys’ Home by a Belfast divorce court judge aged 11, he was continually preyed upon by the pedophiles who ran it, and intimidated into silence,” Moore told The Grayzone. “Arthur was also brutally abused repeatedly by a man he knew only as ‘Dickie’, who raped him while bending him over a desk.”
In August 1979, two years after Smyth escaped Kincora, he learned the true identity of ‘Dickie’ was none other than Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, a member of the royal family and Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin. Mountbatten had just been murdered in an apparent IRA bombing attack on his fishing boat off the coast of Ireland. Though the British government appears to remain committed to concealing his crimes from the public, Mountbatten’s pedophilia was common knowledge among both British and US intelligence for decades.
As early as World War II, the FBI had identified Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for young boys.” A Bureau file detailing this was later identified by historian Andrew Lownie. After requesting other files the Bureau maintained on the royal, Lownie was informed by US authorities they had been destroyed.
Lownie says he was told by an FBI official that the files were only disposed of “after [he] asked for them” — indicating they were “clearly” shredded at the request of the British government.
Kincora conspiracy begins to unravel
Within months of Kincora’s opening in 1958, boys at the facility began coming forward to inform the adults around them that they were being routinely sexually abused. The Boys’ Home was repeatedly visited by police throughout the decades that followed in response to reports of rape and other mistreatment. Despite repeated investigations, time and time again, complaints were ultimately dismissed by the police.
Reports of sexual abuse spiked dramatically in 1971, when a prominent loyalist named William McGrath became the group home’s housefather, and was placed directly in charge of the boys’ day-to-to lives. Moore documented numerous harrowing accounts in which victims described being sadistically raped by McGrath to the point of internal bleeding, with the boys’ silence ensured by threats of violence.
Moore attributes police inaction to the “skillful manipulation” of Kincora’s director, Joe Mains, who successfully convinced officers that accusers were simply lying as revenge for perceived slights by the staff.
As an extremely well-networked figure in British-occupied Ireland, with deep links to prominent Unionist politicians and Protestant paramilitary groups, McGrath enjoyed virtual impunity. He also headed Tara, an armed Masonic loyalist faction covertly run by the British Army, which effectively functioned as an intelligence operation.
In conversations with colleagues, McGrath was known to boast about his work with British intelligence, and the regular trips to London which it entailed. A police source confirmed to Moore that MI6 had an interest in McGrath since the late 1950s, and that “everything McGrath did from this point on was known” to British intelligence. Small wonder campaigners firmly believe Kincora was exploited to compromise and control Unionists, who committed pedophilic offenses at the Home.
The horrifying abuse at Kincora finally surfaced in January 1980 when the Irish Times published an explosive report that triggered a police investigation, which was led by a veteran detective named George Caskey. According to Moore, it took Caskey just three days to decide that Kincora’s leadership were likely guilty.
Within weeks, Caskey’s team had identified dozens of victims of McGrath and others at Kincora, who each gave detailed statements about the abuse they suffered there. Based on their testimony, Mains, McGrath and fellow high-ranking staffer Raymond Semple were suspended from the group home, and arrested a month later. Curiously, Mains and Semple readily admitted their offenses to police, but McGrath aggressively protested his innocence. Resisting interrogation with such skill that investigating officers believed he had rehearsed for their questioning in advance, he made a number of bizarre, cryptic comments.
For one, McGrath declared he was the victim of political intrigue and the accusations against him were bogusly cooked up by the pro-British Ulster Volunteer Force paramilitary faction, among other people “out to destroy me.” He refused to elaborate on who they were, or why he believed he was being maliciously targeted in this manner. McGrath furthermore promised “other stories” and a “rebuttal to these allegations” would “come out in court,” but again declined to expand any further.
In December 1981, Mains, McGrath, Semple and three other individuals found to have abused young boys at two other state-run group homes in occupied Ireland finally stood trial. McGrath was the only defendant to plead not guilty. Present in court at the time, Moore recalls widespread anticipation McGrath’s testimony would “open a Pandora’s Box, laying bare the truth about Kincora and exposing an uncomfortable – some might say unholy – alliance between the British government and unionism, and perhaps even details of a secret MI5 operation.”
However, at the last minute, McGrath’s lawyer made a shock announcement – his client had changed his plea to guilty. McGrath’s volte face elicited a ripple of exasperated sighs across the courtroom, where over 30 Kincora victims had gathered, preparing to testify. Though all six men were convicted of sexual abuse of boys across three Belfast children’s homes, their relatively light sentences drew outrage. In the end, Mains was jailed for six years, while Semple received five years and McGrath, just four.
MI5 proposes creating ‘false files’ to sabotage investigations
For Moore, McGrath’s change of heart raises obvious suspicions that someone persuaded him to keep his mouth shut about “what had been said to him and by whom.” The police investigation established the six men knew each other and shared information about abused children in state-run boys’ homes, but did not explore the possibility they were part of a wider pedophile ring. The most significant official probe into Kincora since, the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), initially raised hopes such information might emerge when it was launched in 2013.
That probe, which centered around allegations by British intelligence whistleblowers Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd that the UK security state was complicit in systematic child rape at Kincora, appeared to leave MI5 extremely uneasy about the potential for British spies’ darkest secrets coming to light in occupied Ireland.
The HIA, however, appears to have been set up to fail. With no ability to compel MI5 or MI6 to produce records, the commission was forced to accept only whatever heavily redacted files the agencies voluntarily provided.
The decision to limit the scope of the HIA’s oversight came despite appeals by prominent figures including victims of sex abuse at Kincora, parliament’s home affairs committee, and former military officials, who claimed British intelligence was complicit in abuses at Kincora, and demanded the Inquiry be granted the ability to subpoena sensitive documents and witnesses.
As anonymous security and intelligence operatives spoke via videolink in the HIA hearings, Inquiry chair Judge Anthony Hart appeared to take their testimony at face value.
The Inquiry’s handling is all the more shocking given the contents of a June 1982 document provided by MI5 to the HIA showing how the agency’s higherups planned to counteract the inquiry itself.
Anxious to distance themselves from the horrors of Kincora, the British spy agency discussed creating “false files” to counteract “lines of enquiry which it was anticipated” that Caskey might pursue. In other words, MI5 was actively seeking to deceive police investigators through forgery.
But the HIA later declared it was “satisfied” that “the suggestion was not pursued,” concluding that the “false files” were not produced for the purposes of misdirecting the inquiry.
Kincora coverup continues
In 2020, it was revealed that extensive police records on investigations into Kincora from 1980 to 1983 had conveniently been destroyed roughly around the time the Inquiry was established.
The files which survived show the HIA received a number of tips suggesting MI5/6 were indeed entangled in pedophilic abuse at Kincora, only to consistently understate their significance.
For example, MI5 told HIA it had no records of William McGrath working for the agency. Conversely, documents produced by the intelligence service indicate how in April 1972, McGrath, who was “commanding officer of the Tara Brigade,” had not only been plausibly “accused of assaulting small boys,” but “could not account for any cash that had been handed to him over a period of a year.”
The HIA accepted MI5’s risible explanation that this information was not passed on to local police because it was unclear McGrath’s attacks on the boys were pedophilic in nature, rather than simply physical. “We ought not to assume that ‘assault’ would have been interpreted at the time by… [MI5] as being of a sexual type,” an internal document presented to the Inquiry declared.
Responding to a separate MI5 document from November 1973 noting McGrath was implicated in “assaulting small boys,” the HIA noted British intelligence was legally obligated to report such an “arrestable offence” to the police, and that by not doing so, it could be argued “the MI5 officers who had this information were in breach of that duty.” But the Inquiry concluded that “to take that view would be unjustified for several reasons,” primarily that “an unidentified member of Tara” was the source of this “unsubstantiated allegation.”
Similar mental gymnastics were employed to downplay the contents of an October 1989 MI6 file detailing “various allegations surrounding the Kincora Boys’ Home,” which revealed the spy agency “certainly ran at least one agent who was aware of sexual malpractice at the home and who may have mentioned this” to his handler. Judge Hart stultifyingly concluded, “it is quite possible the [MI6] officer misinterpreted what was discussed at the meeting.”
The HIA also insisted MI5 was unaware McGrath worked at Kincora until 1977. But that claim was effectively contradicted by the Inquiry itself, which unveiled MI5 documents from January 1976 clearly stating, “McGrath was reported in March 1975 to be warden of Kincora Boys’ Hostel.” A police memo from November 1973 dispatched to MI5’s director similarly noted McGrath was a “social worker” at Kincora.
Whitewash inquiry implicates MI6 chief in Kincora
As part of its probe, the HIA ordered “searches of documents and records” held by MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and the Metropolitan Police on allegations of child sex abuse by public figures and servants. In response, MI5 released files listing 10 powerful individuals, including diplomats, government ministers, and lawmakers, who Britain’s domestic spying agency had evidence to suggest may have been involved in pedophilic abuse.
Chief among them was veteran spy and dark arts specialist Maurice Oldfield, who oversaw MI6 operations in occupied Ireland throughout the 1970s, first as its deputy then chief. Shortly before his April 1981 death, Oldfield was outed as gay, which precluded him from serving with the agency under contemporary recruitment rules. Resultantly, “MI5 conducted a lengthy investigation to determine whether” Oldfield’s sexual proclivities “posed a risk to national security by making him vulnerable to blackmail or other pressure.”
Over the course of “many interviews,” he “provided information about homosexual encounters with male domestic staff, referred to as ‘houseboys’, whilst serving in the Middle East in the 1940s and hotel stewards in Asia in the 1950s.” Media reporting prior to Oldfield’s death suggested he was “a compulsive” user of “rent boys and young down-and-outs,” which was well-known to his security detail. However, the HIA repeatedly exonerated Oldfield of any wrongdoing, despite receiving bombshell evidence implicating him in the horrendous pedophilic acts perpetrated at Kincora.
Unbelievably, its report concluded “there is insufficient information in the records to deduce whether the term ‘houseboys’” was “used simply to describe domestic staff or to denote youth, leaving ambiguity over the ages of the other parties.” This is despite an anonymous MI6 officer telling the Inquiry the agency possessed four separate “ring binders” documenting Oldfield’s “relationship” with Kincora, his “friendship” with its chief Joe Mains, and potential personal connection to “alleged crimes at the boys’ home.”
Heavily redacted files published by the HIA also indicate MI5 was “aware of allegations” that occupied Ireland’s police knew Oldfield was intimately embroiled in the scandal. An internal agency telegram noted well-grounded suspicions the MI6 chief “was involved in the Kincora boys home affair in the course of occasional visits to Northern Ireland (associated with his job) between 1974 and 1979.” Still, the Inquiry dismissed this as proof of MI5/6 involvement in the child abuse conspiracy, on the grounds these excerpts referred purely to “allegations.”
The Kincora coverup continues today. In April 2021, the BBC announced “a new season of landmark documentaries… set to shine a new light on remarkable stories from Northern Ireland’s recent history.” Among the scheduled films was Lost Boys, which told the hideous tale of how numerous children inexplicably vanished in Belfast during the Troubles. It concluded the cases were all linked to pedophilic abuses at Kincora. Interviewees included several former police officers, who believed their inquiries into the disappearances had been systematically sabotaged by British intelligence.
On the eve of transmission, Lost Boys was pulled from broadcast. BBC managers were reportedly “shocked by its content, particularly evidence of MI5’s involvement in covering up the Kincora saga.” Moore, who consulted on the film, told The Grayzone there are strong insinuations British intelligence took a keen interest in the documentary’s producers, AlleyCats. “The home of one staffer involved in editing Lost Boys was burgled,” he says. “Another Alleycats member suspected a break-in, but could not be entirely certain.”
Having investigated Kincora since it first came to public attention, Moore concludes “MI5 and its cohorts in the police believe they can do what they want with little or no regard for the truth, the law or democracy,” noting British intelligence “somehow persuaded the government to bury Kincora files until 2065 and 2085.” The veteran muckraker also recently learned his private communications with journalists investigating other cases of criminal activity by MI5/6-sponsored loyalist paramilitaries – including murder – have been heavily surveilled.
“The British state has illegally spied on people trying to expose the truth in Northern Ireland for many years, in what they call a ‘defensive operation’. Senior local police chiefs have admitted surveillance tactics were deployed against 320 journalists and 500 lawyers over a decade, including me,” Moore concluded. “My telephone was monitored due to probing government-funded loyalist killers. Like many police officers who’ve looked into these matters, I’m all too aware of how authorities frustrate criminal investigations.”
As argued in last week’s article, economic coercion is never an end in itself, it is the prelude. When sanctions fail, when financial pressure cannot bend reality to the satisfaction of Washington’s Israel-first demands, the next instrument is always the same: war. The US has fallen into this trap repeatedly, ignoring the lesson every time, especially when Israel’s interest sits at the core.
Promoted as counterterrorism and the export of democracy, US interventions in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Yemen, and beyond were nothing but proxy wars waged to secure Israel’s regional military supremacy, cement its occupation of Palestine, and preserve and expand a system of Jewish apartheid. The result was predictable and perverse: mushrooming terrorism, new dictators, pulverized states, endless wars, and a region locked into engineered chaos and permanent instability.
These were not failures of execution but successes of design. It was the precise prescription of the Israel-first ideologues in Washington. Wars that were marketed by an Israeli-managed media and paid for in American life and money. Israel-first Zionists, in coordination with Israeli operatives, manufactured the “Weapons of Mass Deception,” transforming the US military into Israel’s hired muscle, leaving US soldiers marooned in Israel-made-swamps for more than twenty years, and still counting.
The Israeli leader who testified to Congress in 2002, claiming that a US invasion of Iraq will have “enormous positive reverberation,” is hard at work. Benjamin Netanyahu’s prediction was partially correct; it was “enormous (negative) reverberation.” His intentional deception came at a massive cost to US taxpayers, $3.9 trillion, and the lives of American soldiers. Notwithstanding, Israel succeeded in destroying its supposed enemy, and got what it wanted without losing the life of one single Israeli soldier, or one cent.
Israel-first loyalists in Washington weren’t done, yet. Iran was always on Netanyahu’s list for America’s saber. Today, the parading US armada near or around Iran, follows the same trajectory of the Israel-first strategy to drag America into another Iraq-style war. As with Iraq, Netanyahu’s objective is not to prevent weapons of mass destruction—but along with Israel-first Zionists in the US to deploy “Weapons of Mass Deception” to drive the US into a new foreign war against Iran.
For this scheme to advance, however, American opposition to foreign wars would have to be neutralised, particularly on the right, where scepticism toward yet another foreign adventure had been gaining traction. According to Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk received a threatening text just 48 hours before his murder. Kirk had actively lobbied Trump against getting entangled into yet another overseas war.
The American Israel-firsters’ strategy is parasitic genius. It latches onto American power, drains it to destroy rivals, fracture neighboring states, and sow permanent chaos. The weaker the region becomes, the fatter the parasite grows, while the U.S. continues to bleed.
What America paid in Iraq may one day be remembered as a mere down payment compared to the devastation an Iran war would inflict on the region, the global order, and cost at home.
Here, American leaders would do well to revisit the sages of the founding father. In his Farewell Address, George Washington—as if he was contemporaneously addressing the ills of Israel-first and AIPAC—warned against “unnatural connections” with foreign powers, cautioning that excessive attachment could cloud judgment, corrupt independence, and subordinate the republic’s interests to those of another state. He urged against foreign entanglements and warned explicitly of outside influence that would “mislead public opinion” or “influence the public councils.”
Alas, foreign influence now shapes U.S. policy and what Americans hear and read in the media. Jewish billionaires, and lobby organizations such as AIPAC discipline political influencers, US lawmakers through funding threats and primary challenges. Political careers rise or fall on donor loyalty. Criticizing Israel is labeled anti-sematic, and dissent is criminalized as disloyalty. Journalists like Candece Own and Tucker Carlson, or even Megyn Kelly who rightly question the irrational Israeli influence, are labeled as haters and anti-Jews. In the Israel-first managed media, moral clarity is treated as treason.
America is possibly the only country in the world that borrows close to $5 billion every year, not counting special military appropriations, to give it away to a foreign state. Along with that, in the last two years, the US gave Israel more than $25 billion (annual aid + additional military aid). These are funds that could have been used to avoid healthcare cuts, or repair aging infrastructures across the United States.
The above is a living example of the “unnatural connection with any foreign Power…” George Washington warned against. Today, that forewarning reads like a prophecy.
In 2025, interest payments on the national debt alone consumed 1/5 of all federal revenue, $970 billion, or 13.8 per cent of the total US budget. Yet both parties continue to borrow more, not to rebuild the American economy, but to fund Israel and to wage wars against Israel’s enemies.
These are not abstract numbers. They are resources diverted from making America healthier, and productive investment like financial aid for college education where the money would circulate back into the economy by raising the incomes, productivity, and tax contributions of future US workers. Tariffs will not retire the debt. Trade barriers shield corporations, not consumers. Sanctions and wars weaken the economy, strain the dollar, and leave ordinary Americans footing the bill through higher taxes and inflated prices at the checkout counter for years to come.
Empires fall when they overspend, overextend, and allow corruption to auction their sovereignty to foreign powers, corporations, and oligarchs. Palestine has exposed the fatal flaw at the heart of this corruption. A government that claims to uphold international law punishes judges who apply it.
A state that lectures on human rights criminalizes those who document the crimes. A nation that boasts its humanitarian virtue enables the starvation of 2.3 million people; a state that allows rich foreign loyalists to dominate its political structure loses its sovereignty.
America’s moral redemption lies in heeding George Washington’s farewell speech, relearning the lessons of history, restoring American moral values, and reclaiming a foreign policy anchored in US interest, not outsourced to Israel-first American Zionists who are ready to drag America into a new Made-for-Israel War.
The Epstein files are still rocking Western and European elite. While much is being made by Western press about Russian women victims, one should also take a look at Ukraine: the files include documents belonging to women from many countries, but Ukraine is mentioned a lot. This imbalance in coverage is itself telling.
In a previous piece, I examined how the Epstein files point to experimental research of an ethically extreme nature, tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-documented obsessions with eugenics, genetics, and human engineering. One may recall the allegations about the “baby ranch” in New Mexico. Some of the (underreported) released emailsinclude references to “mouse testing” in a Ukraine lab and even to plans for a “designer baby” or a human clone within five years (files EFTA01003966 and EFTA02625486). The implications are disturbing enough.
Ukraine’s connections to Epstein’s world, however, do not end with potentially clandestine laboratories and futuristic plans about human cloning. The human trafficking dimension is equally strong. The Epstein files contain copies of passports, visas, and personal documents belonging to women from Italy, Morocco, South Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Czechia – all seized from Epstein’s estate. Ukraine stands out repeatedly. The correspondence highlights at least two Kyiv-based modeling agencies, Linea 12 Models and L-Models, singled out by Epstein himself as “the best.”
The Linea 12 Models agency, repeatedly cited in the Epstein files, also appears in correspondence linked to Jean-Luc Brunel (file EFTA00753670), the French model agent and convicted sexual abuser long associated with Epstein. In 2022 Brunel was found dead in his cell (in Paris) just like Epstein was in 2019.
Bridal agencies and even the Hyatt Regency Kyiv are also mentioned in this context. In the exchanges, Epstein is provided with the contact of Yulia Kyselova, described as someone who “has about 400 girls for modeling and bridal agencies in Kyiv.”
In 2012 the billionaire’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff coordinated room bookings via Thomas Pritzker, owner of Hyatt, allegedly for individuals connected to the modeling industry. Another curious conversation concerns the purchase of an old house at 24 Borys Romanetsky Street in Lviv, Ukraine, supposedly to be repurposed as a “Pilates studio.”
Ukraine has consistently ranked among Europe’s most corrupt countries, a context that matters. It is also a major source and transit hub for human trafficking: an IOM-commissioned report estimates over 120,000 Ukrainians have been trafficked since 1991, making Ukraine one of the largest sources of trafficked labor in Europe – with earlier figures pointing to hundreds of thousands of women trafficked abroad for sexual exploitation. US State Department reports repeatedly cite allegations of official complicity, including orphanage staff accused of involvement or negligence (2015–2016) and police and judicial officials covering up brothels for bribes (2020–2021). More recent assessments note investigations but few convictions, indicating persistent impunity.
Add to this Ukraine’s role as a CIA hub, documented even by the New York Times. One may recall that US intelligence agencies, in their clandestine endeavors, have historically intersected with organized crime in various theaters, including human trafficking. We now know that Jeffrey Epstein himself was CIA-connected. In such an ecosystem, it is no wonder Ukraine would attract Epstein’s interests, whether in illicit modeling pipelines, trafficking networks, or even illegal human cloning.
The political connections should not be missing from this picture. The files reveal Davos “networking” and “private dealings” with Ukrainian elite figures. In an email dated June 10, 2019, a redacted sender casually states, “I will be with Zelensky this Thursday.” In the same period, Epstein discussed Ukraine with former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, remarking that “Zelensky [is] seeking help” (file FTA00517525). Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is also mentioned in the wider correspondence. These are not trivial name-drops; they situate Epstein within elite political circles at a decisive moment in Ukraine’s post-Maidan trajectory.
This should surprise no one. Back in March 2014, amid the chaos of the Maidan upheaval, Epstein wrote to Swiss banking executive Ariane de Rothschild that the US-supported coup in Ukraine would provide “many opportunities”, a point I discussed elsewhere. Opportunities for whom, exactly? Later correspondence sheds light.
In May 2019, Epstein advised a redacted interlocutor, presumably a Ukrainian woman, to start following Ukrainian politics, including Zelensky, parliament, and corruption, implying this would contribute to her future “success”. She answers: “Now it will be so interesting to watch the politics in Ukraine: all politics as a comedy”, to which Epstein says: “Yes, it is funny, but sophisticated corruption. Huge amounts of money will be made. Huge. I’d like to see you as a female oligarch.”
To sum it up, Ukraine was an important hub in the Epstein network, financially, politically, and as a source of human “assets” (women and girls potentially recruitable and exploitable). And there is no reason to assume it has ceased to be, considering that Epstein did not operate alone and his ring was not the only one. There is an ongoing narrative war; but the question is whether Western journalists are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, or whether geopolitical loyalties will continue to dictate what is seen, and what remains conveniently unseen in the New Cold War.
Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.
Staggering Health Consequences of Sugar on Health of Americans
By Dr. Gary Null | Global Research | February 3, 2014
In September 2013, a bombshell report from Credit Suisse’s Research Institute brought into sharp focus the staggering health consequences of sugar on the health of Americans. The group revealed that approximately “30%–40% of healthcare expenditures in the USA go to help address issues that are closely tied to the excess consumption of sugar.”[1]The figures suggest that our national addiction to sugar runs us an incredible $1 trillion in healthcare costs each year. The Credit Suisse report highlighted several health conditions including coronary heart diseases, type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome, which numerous studies have linked to excessive sugar intake.[2]
Just a year earlier in 2012, a report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta appearing on 60 Minutes featured the work of Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist from California who gained national attention after a lecture he gave titled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” went viral in 2009. Lustig’s research has investigated the connection between sugar consumption and the poor health of the American people. He has published twelve articles in peer-reviewed journals identifying sugar as a major factor in the epidemic of degenerative disease that now afflicts our country. The data compiled by Lustig clearly show how excessive sugar consumption plays a key role in the development of many types of cancer, obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. His research has led him to conclude that 75% of all diseases in America today are brought on by the American lifestyle and are entirely preventable.[3]
Until the airing of this program, no one in the “official” world acknowledged anything wrong with sugar, here is a sampling of some the latest research available to them if they chose to look… continue
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